I have been crafting my reply for months, quested for its answer long before my tutor posed the question. Language is important in crafting a narrative -- a story that a nation, or a person, uses to express, define, and explain the events around them.
I sat in the library classroom, ears buzzing with the constant ping pong passing of conversation from speaker to speaker, and although I did my best to follow along, I was feeling a bit fatigued. We were at least an hour into the class, and I was scribbling restlessly on my notepad, when our lecturer posed a question which paused my thoughts and provoked the room: should the German people still feel guilty for the Holocaust? Hands went up all across the room, and I dropped everything, completely at attention, while students swiftly and passionately described their feelings. The right to speak soon passed to the girl beside me, who quickly launched into a story comparing the German perception versus the Ausländer perspective, specially the American one, and I felt eyes slide over me. "I was in the Holocaust Museum in DC and this American lady asked me how I as a German felt about this." As not only the Ausländer in the room but also the American, I immediately felt the pull to respond, to fill the token spot with my voice, my insight... And yet I couldn't find the words, and not just because they were in German. How do you answer such a widespread, incredibly complex question, as the voice of an entire people, an entire other population of the globe? Initially I wanted to react; I wanted to say "don't worry, I don't blame you for the Holocaust." But then I paused, because I was unsure if this was honest. Don't get me wrong, I very much understand that the Holocaust is history, and that Germans today aren't Nazis, and that Germany has made many many efforts to understand this dark aspect of its past. However, to decide if I could say that they shouldn't feel guilty, I would need to truly understand the root of the word Schuld, and all the implications that went along with it. And I don’t think I do, so I don't know. I know Schuld means “guilt”, but what does “guilt” entail? I also wasn't sure how to convey in my own clumsy cobbling together of words, my own guilt instead -- because instead of trying to speak for every bit of the rest of the world, I knew I could at least speak authentically for what it entails for me. At the time, I could not find the words to subvert the narrative of the quiet American in the corner, but I’ll try now to do so, to answer your demand, even if it leads only to more questions. You know me as an American, but my father is from South Africa, and I too understand a thing or two about historical guilt, as I bear the weight of the sins of two nations. I anguish over the transgressions of a land I've never even truly lived in, and I know not how you felt in the Holocaust Museum, but I have stood rooted in the Apartheid Museum in South Africa, shaking to my bones, I weeping, overcome by the fact that people who were probably my kin and from whose legacy I stem could commit such atrocities, could fathom and implement such a structured system of hatred. I’m not sure where I start to find the words that explain guilt in America, guilt for lands torn from proper owners and people torn from their homes. How, in a few clipped, erroneous sentences, could I convey the immense weight chained to me from the land of the free? Many of my own countrymen don't get that, so why should foreigners follow these nuances? How could I convey that, no, in my immense heart wrenching sorrow, I didn't feel responsible for the past -- but I do feel an incredible, vulnerable, responsibility for the future, for how the next page in this legacy transpires. That’s what guilt mean to me -- but was that Schuld? I could not be sure, so I stayed quiet, I listened, and I tried to build for myself an understanding, a foundation for this word which troubles and confounds us all.
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