For most of my life, I didn't see a problem with America's relationship with the Civil War. Sure, there were parts of the country that still had monuments to the Confederacy standing, and I knew the way it was taught in schools varied considerably depending on what state you learned about it in. But it didn't feel like people were actively yearning for Civil War times again or that any of these monuments were inappropriately glorifying our country's history with slavery. All of the monuments just felt like relics of a time that was long gone. There was just a general aura of indifference toward the Civil War era in the country. It ended over 130 years ago by the time I was born, so why should anyone care about it now?
I generally felt this way until I visited Berlin during my junior year of college. The German capital also obviously has a pretty dark period staining its recent history that it could have chosen to be indifferent toward. The people could have lobbied to keep Nazi relics standing in the city streets as a preservation of history. But that's not how the city treats the Holocaust. The city makes an extremely obvious effort to distance itself from its past and put itself firmly on the right side of history today. It felt like there were memorials to Holocaust victims and educational materials and condemnations of Hitler's actions everywhere I looked. You didn't see any Nazi flags up in an effort to "preserve history." The history was still preserved, but preserved in prayers for the dead and hopes for the future rather than in old statues of Hitler.
I'm not here to fight about whether slavery or the Holocaust was worse. But as I've watched Germany step up to help Ukraine these last few days, I can't help but feel like we have a lot to learn from that country when it comes to correcting our mistakes.
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