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You've already got about a million replies, so I suspect there's nothing substantial I can still add to it all. If you even want to read any more!
So here goes. I'm a half-jewish German who strongly identifies as German and effectively not at all as Jewish beyond having some family members who do strongly identify as Jewish. By what German public schooling has taught me was Nazi Racial Science, I fully qualify as a Jew to be reomved, though. My Jewish ancestors managed to flee the Nazis as well as the Soviets unharmed, so I can't claim any tragic family history on that end, though it's entirely possible that they lost many friends that I never heard of. From the German side, I know of many who died in the war, much to the family's detriment.
Politically I'm somewhat all over the place, but cluster strongly with the right-wingers. And my position on WW2, the entire Nazi era and the Holocaust is - it doesn't matter. The epistemic wells have been poisoned. There are no more productive discussions to be had. Anyone except the most autistic historians, the most unfettered reparation-seekers and the most combative wokists will gain more by burying the entire period of history than by rooting around in it. "Never forget" is a terrible approach, in my opinion, and the opposite of what should be done. The consequence of forgetting it will be dropping a ton of poisonous baggage and become a lot more agile, for everyone involved. The consequence will not be the second coming of the NSDAP. And if Jews want to prevent future attempts at Jewish genocide, then IMO they should keep a weather eye on the Muslim world, as I suppose Israel already does, rather than alienate their actual or potential allies by constantly insisting on their historical guilt. I do admit it seems to have worked well enough for a time, and I cannot fault the realpolitik here, but as far as Jewish-German relations go it'll be an own-goal when teaching the Germans to hate themselves results in the islamification of Germany.
And I'll also sing along with the chorus of "please don't go, we want you here, we need people like you!".
This place is, to me, like a martial arts club. You go in, you find someone to spar with, and by the end of the day you learned something about your weaknesses and bad habits. And that just plain does not work when there's nobody around who's willing to expose and exploit those actual weaknesses. "One crow will not claw out another's eye", goes the German saying. When everyone here more or less agrees on their respective world views, there's just not much of value going on. One Witch will not knock out the other even when they're wide open, either because we subconciously don't want that weakness to be exploited (mirror neurons being a bitch) or because we genuinely aren't even aware of it.
The reverse of this is, of course, that any one contrarian to the consensus here will get pummelled. It's like going from boxing to BJJ and all of a sudden everyone's sweating all over you on the ground. It's admittedly disgusting, but if you endure it you will come out a much better-rounded fighter than you were before. Refuse to engage in grappling, and you'll never make it in MMA. I'm probably overstretching this metaphor. But on the other hand, if we here are a BJJ gym...then you can teach us a thing or two about striking. But either way, it requires that we get down and dirty with each other, and there will be complaints about faces getting punched and joints getting locked either way. To de-metaphor it: There will be downvotes and false reports and specious arguments and trolling and all that you might complain of.
So when people here advocate for tossing the jews into the ocean and blame them for all their country's failings - I'd exaggerate if I said I can emphasize; there are too many people here who are on "my side", as it were, and who go too easy on me. Maybe they just recognize that I'm just a midwit and not worth going 100% on. But that's exactly what ought to happen. I want you to stand up to me and tell me why I'm wrong. I most likely am. Who isn't? But I'd rather have that pointed out to me in an online textual sparring setting than by embarassing myself IRL. The alternative to that is simply going with the IRL consensus, but who comes to The Motte with that intention? Who here would not rather learn to be more effective as a contrarian?
I hope you stay.
Fascinating, I never knew you were Jewish. Were your Jewish ancestors Germans before 1939 (or 1933, I suppose)? Did they spend the war in Switzerland, Russia or elsewhere (Spain, America etc)? Did they return immediately after the war or many years later? If they were ur-German Jews, how did they feel (if you know) about the fact that the modern German Jewish community is 80-90%+ ex-Soviets / Eastern Bloc who fled after 1955 (and often after 1980)? I am familiar with some cultural tension. Do you know (locally) any other Germans of immediate (ie. parental) Jewish descent?
As said, it doesn't really play a role in my life or factor into my views. Besides, "Jewish" is a thoroughgoing exaggeration. "Half-Jewish" is already overselling it by far. I'm German in pretty much every way except for half my genes and some family members. Born in Germany, raised by Germans, lived among Germans ever since, never spent significant time abroad and only ever visit my Jewish relatives for a few days every few years, maybe have a brief phone call every few months and have difficulties relating to them at all on account of them living in different countries (even though I like them and both sides make an effort to stay in contact). I'm an extremely rare statistical anomaly and best filed under "eccentric German" for all practical purposes.
I'm honestly a little hazy on the details, but AFAIK they were all over the place, clustering around Austria-Hungary and Romania. It's not impossible that they might trace back to German Jews, but I wouldn't know. I don't know much about my distant relatives, and my close ones actually migrated to Paris rather than Germany. It's complicated and I only have very superficial knowledge of it. They don't have any connections to the Jewish community here. I know a small handful of Jews in my region, but that's purely by coincidence and since I am judaism-illiterate I wouldn't even be able to tell you what kinds of Jews those are.
I've heard some of my family half-joke that it's not jewish heritage at all, and that the origin traces back to Khazars converting to judaism for political reasons. But that doesn't really explain why they do look distinctly jewish.
Also, unlike my somewhat-stereotypically secular Jewish family, the Jews I got to know in Germany are largely pretty screwed up by the tension between their practicing families and their own dissolute lifestyles. They don't really see me as a Jew at all, and expressed exasperation at my ignorance.
It all doesn't go anywhere, is not relevant to anything I am, think or do. HBD-wise it might inform some of my personality traits, but I'm no expert on that.
I really only brought up my jewish non-heritage to illustrate the point that you can absolutely be on The Motte even when some mottizens would, by some metric and in some extended thought experiments, call for your marginalization or for violence against you. You can in fact just shrug that off. It's just talk on the internet.
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Huh, colour me surprised, this is really not quite who I headcanoned you as. I have this one German friend who is a pretty brilliant mathematician, but has surely the rock bottom lowest agreeableness of all people I have encountered, and improbably hails from a family of Bavarian alpha farmers (the sort that has owned a farmstead covering a hill overlooking some tiny village in the general area of Regensburg for generations, used to employ the local teens as farmhands and sponsors the local Schützengemeinschaft). His interactions with his father (witnessed when they were on the phone and also once the father came to help him move) always amounted to 30-minute screaming matches in straight dialect (about anything ranging from "clean your room and get a real job" to "your car is trash and you were never there for the family"), while to me the father would basically only communicate in grunts and pregnant glances that say "thanks for putting up with my loser son". Maybe I went too far free-associating on your handle, but I imagined those would be approximately your people :p
Nah. As you noticed, in spite of taking it upon myself to scream "Deutschland Deutschland über alles!" at everyone on the internet and at some people IRL, I'm neither a pureblood nor otherwise archetypical. I suppose I put on the German extra hard to compensate. I do take to Teutonic autism, though, and very much like punctuality, order and hard work. How good I am at those is another matter. I really like the Germany I grew up with. I'm Swabian, not Bavarian, so there's a massive cultural difference between me and your picture. But OTOH, my German family were no-nonsense subsistence farmers up until two generations ago, and I was partially raised by exactly those former farmers, so it's not a complete mismatch.
As far as your friend goes - with a father like that, low agreeableness seems like no wonder!
Well then, don't mind if I henceforth associate you with the "Nice here, but have you been to Baden-Württemberg yet" stickers that I've been seeing on things ranging from Italian statues to Japanese vending machines instead ;)
(Honestly, it's a brilliant ad campaign that I'd never have expected a German institution would come up with. I've caught myself idly fantasizing like "this would be a great place to put one of those stickers" looking at inappropriate landmarks like concentration camps, public toilets and industrial ruins, which is quite the feat in terms of living rent-free in my head)
It's a campaign that's clever, but also kinda weird for someone who lives here.
Because Baden-Württemberg isn't really a place. It's a state, sure. An administrative division of Germany. An amalgamation of two (maybe three depending on who's counting) slightly older states, each based in turn on territories collected by different noble dynasties. Culturally broadly related, but not actually one coherent culture. You might find modern people who seriously call themselves "Baden-Württemberger", but it's a meaningless synthetic term.
If you tell someone from abroad to fly the B-W, he'll take a plane to Stuttgart and wonder about why ever anyone would come here. Terrible place, by regional standards. As far as large cities go, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Freiburg and Ulm (in no particular order) each have something unique going on. But Stuttgart, almost certainly the first port of call for anyone, can only claim to be the biggest or the most generically urban. There's not much good to say about it. Oh, and then there's Mannheim. The Mannheimers are full of themselves, but but I don't see the point of them.
But the cities are irrelevant.
The majority of the population lives in or near smaller towns, and there's a sizable number of rural village dwellers as well. The latter are probably not meaningfully interactive for foreigners, but the former are! Most small towns take great pains to be accessible to tourists. A potential visitor could pick a few at random, exclude the ones that have been bombed to shit in WW2 because the architecture sucks now, and visit places that are visually unique and valid representants of various local southwest-German cultures. Swabian, Franconian, Badenser, and the many subcategories and overlaps of each.
If I saw a sticker telling a foreigner to visit, say the Allgäu, the Bodensee, the Schwarzwald or the Nördlinger Ries, then sure, those are distinct geographical areas worth visiting if you like hiking. If I saw stickers telling a foreigner to visit, for example, the aforementioned Heidelberg, or Rothenburg, or Dinkelsbühl or any other of the hundreds of lesser-known towns with well-maintained medieval and early modern architecture, then that's a sight to see for those with a taste for it.
But Baden-Württemberg? What's that? Where are you supposed to go to be able to solidly claim that you have gone there? For someone right here, it's incoherent.
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