A Germany That Won't Let Itself Forget

In the New York Times today, it reported that Germany's minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments: one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust. Of course there is already an enormous Holocaust memorial in central Berlin.
Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany said, "Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame? Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility."

Nowhere else in the world as far as I know. The Japanese still will not acknowledge their atrocrities from World War II. The US has swept "Agent Orange" under the rug, as well as conveniently having national amnesia about backing some of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known.

History does repeat itself if we are not diligent about learning from our past. I congratulate the Germans for their courage to have monuments that remind them of their shame. The article states that the younger Germans, who weren't even born during Nazi Germany, has tackled keeping the theme of rememberance as a source not of guilt, but of responsibility on the world stage for social justice and pacifcism, including opposition to the war in Iraq.