Tuesday MOT: When is it time to forgive the Germans?

So I've been watching the new TV series, Pan Am. It's actually not bad. It's a great period piece - really a wonderful take on the very early 60s. The actors are quite good as well. Sure, storyline is a bit fanciful - they made one of the stewardesses a secret agent - but still, it's quite enjoyable, surprisingly. And even more surprising, it even got a bit poignant during the latest episode, and no one was more surprised than I when it actually opened my eyes to an experience I had in Paris almost 30 years ago during my junior year abroad.

In the latest episode, a French flight attendant makes her first trip to Germany, Berlin, along with the rest of the crew. You see her increasingly uncomfortable during the trip, having flashbacks to the Nazi occupation of France, when her parents died, until she loses it at the end and admits that she still hates the Germans and is happy she hates them.

What's weird is that I sort of realized something I hadn't before. When I was studying in France, back in 1983-84, I watched some young German friends (we were 19 at the time) berated by random French people on the street, usually somewhat older French people, and the implication was clear: You are not forgiven for WWII.

I remember that it happened often enough that I started to make an effort to explain to locals that I was NOT German since, for some reason, when I first started learning French I apparently spoke the language with a German accent.  The French would tell me "tu haches les mots" - you chop your words (which I took to mean, you speak haltingly - like a German.  And it was made very clear to me early on that you really didn't want to be a German.

At the time, I thought it odd. As a young American, WWII was a good two generations before my time. Even my dad was too young to serve in WWII. How could these Frenchmen hold a grudge against young Germans who had nothing to do with Hitler, so many decades after the war? I never truly fully understood it.

Tonight I did.

I was in Paris in 1983. WWII ended in 1945. That's a difference of 38 years. 38 years ago I was in the fifth grade back in Chicago. I remember the time pretty clearly. Had I been under Nazi occupation, rather than working my summer job at the park district that summer of 1973 (i.e., 38 years ago for me) - had I lost family members to the Nazis (and plenty of Frenchmen did) - I'm not entirely sure I'd be over it today. And imagine if you were 20, and fought in the war. Now you're 58. How long does it take to forgive an entire nation for something horrible that you witnessed personally? Would you ever really forgive them, trust them?

It just never struck me at the time that 38 years was that recent. Probably because I was only half that age; it was double my lifetime. Now that I passed 38 nearly a decade ago, the years seem fewer. And I finally, thanks to a goofy TV show, and a surprisingly good actress, understand what I witnessed on the streets of Paris nearly 4 decades ago.

There are still monuments to those who died along certain sidewalks in Paris. Some of them you come upon quite unexpectedly. One to an 18 year old ambulance worker killed by the Nazis near the Place de la Concorde in 1944 during the liberation of Paris. People still put flowers there every year on the day he died. Another on the outside wall of the local lycée (high school), honoring the French Jewish children from that school who were rounded up and sent to die in the concentration camps. I'm always quite touched, and still a bit shocked, when I stumble upon yet another memorial while walking through Paris. I wonder whether French kids today even notice the plaques. And whether it's all together bad if only the oldest of Frenchmen now think of WWII as anything more than ancient history.