An American Who Has Fond Memories of Germans

This blog has this sensational discussion thread about Germany (and the Germans) from an American point of view.

Here is a comment (posted February 18, 2004) which is particularly moving. I would like to thank "Cousin Dave" (that's his internet name) for the time and effort he spent on writing this piece. We surely appreciate it.

This whole situtation with Germany has been particularly distressing to me. I am from a town called Huntsville in the state of Alabama in the USA. The town owes its present-day existence to a group of German expats who escaped the Nazis and came to the USA in 1945. Specifically, this was the famous Wehner von Braun rocket team which went on to design America's early space launchers up to and including the mighty Saturn 5. (Click "Continue reading...")

Now let me take you back, in the imagination, to the memories of a young child in the mid-1960s. My father is an engineer employed in the aerospace industry, in one of the companies that sprang up around the Army (now NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center) space center established by the von Braun group in 1950. So are the fathers of most of my playmates. We all live in a suburb of neat little ranch houses that appeared on the northern edge of town, practically overnight, in 1955 to accommodate all the aerospace workers moving to the area. Of said fathers (and mothers too), a considerable proportion are German immigrants, who escaped from Germany and came over either with von Braun's group or before. Many of these talk of friends who are no longer with them, either killed during the war (some for committing the crime of not being zealously Nazi enough, in the eyes of the SS) or trapped behind the Iron Curtain at the end of the war and never heard from again. Some are U.S. Army officers and soldiers who participated in Project Paperclip (the operation that found and sheltered von Braun's group, and then went back into Germany to rescue V-2 parts and engineering drawings). Some are engineers from the Northeast or California, who have moved here to participate in the effort. (Many of these were more or less forcibly transferred by their companies and freely admit that they didn't like it at first.) A considerable portion are Southern boys and girls who were encouraged by their parents to get away from the farms and mill towns and make something of themselves in the modern world. Many of these fought in either WWII or Korea, came back (in some cases leaving significant chunks of themselves in far-flung corners of the world), and then went on to higher education with their tuition paid for by the GI bill. My father is one of these; his generation is the first in his family to attend college.

Now, kids being kids, some who were "different" got picked on, but the problem here is that almost every kid is different. So cliques can't form, because no one knows who should be in them. Furthermore, our parents are setting a lousy example for us in the clique-forming department. At MSFC, Southerners work alongside Northerners and Californian surfer dudes. After 1964, even blacks are allowed into the act; admittedly there are a few grunbles, but no significant problems. Who is setting the example for this? The Germans, who make it a point to be, as they say in Atlanta, "too busy to hate"; among other things they happily work alongside the area's not-inconsiderable population of Jews. (The Jews, incidentally, return the favor by inviting the Germans to synagogue. Some of the Germans convert.)

One of my classmates in the fourth grade is a somewhat pudgy blond-headed guy named Peter. His last name is von Braun. Being kids, it matters not to us that his father is one of the most famous engineers that ever lived. He's just a kid whose father works at the space center, just like all the rest of us. One day his rather influential dad arranges for our class to get a field trip of the space center. In the morning our teachers troop all 35 of us into his tenth-floor office in the MSFC headquarters building. He welcomes us all by name. He knows the names and a few things about all of our parents, ranging from one girl's father who is head of one of the labs, to my father the engineer, to one other kid's father who works in a machine shop. He tells us how proud he is of all of them and how all the work is important.

Then he sends us off with a guide to see the sights. We get to see everything: the big assembly hangars where the Saturn stages are being built, to the test stands where we get to see a live engine test (at a noise level that has most of us covering our ears), to the computer centers that crunch the numbers to design said engines, even to the barge that carries the biggest stages down to the Gulf of Mexico and around the Florida peninsula to Cape Canaveral. Periodically during the tour, von Braun pops in to see how we are doing and offer a bit more detail on what it is that we are looking at.

At the end of the tour we return to his office. He gives each of us a few souveniers and tells us jokes about his "Southern accent", clumsy astronauts, and other inside humor. Then, he tells us a little bit, just a bit, about the war. He tells us how his family became trapped behind the Iron Curtain at the end of the war, and how he has no contact with them in two decades. He tells us just a bit about the Nazis and the terrible things they did. He talks about arriving in Huntsville, and how this town of Americans in a region not particularly noted for tolerance welcomed a group of Germans, fresh off of WWII, with open arms. He even mentions how much nothern Alabama reminds him of the Black Forest region of Germany where he grew up. (Although, he says, it is just a little bit hotter in the summer...)

And that was always my impression of the Germans: people who are serious and rather quiet, yet with social grace and an easy sense of humor. People who are focused and practical, yet willing to dream big dreams. One of those big dreams was space flight, and they made it come true. But I think another of those big dreams was to live in a world where, as a black preacher named after a German church reformer said, people would be judged by the content of their character.

I'm now in the space business myself, writing computer software for flight systems and ground support. Huntsville, AL, is a lot bigger than it was in 1965, and the economy is much more diversified. Even so, NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center, along with its Army-side sister rocket agencies, is still the thing that defines the town's image and perception of itself. In 1950, before von Braun arrived here, Huntsville was a dying mill town, losing population as the cotton mills closed, and probably on its way to becoming a ghost town. I am aware every day that I walk in the footsteps of a group of immigrants who had to flee one form of tyranny, and most of whom never saw their homelands again due to another form of tyranny; and that they (along with people like my father and the Northerners and surfer dudes and "Shalom y'all" Jews and courageous blacks) didn't waste any time sitting around whining about their lot but went on to make a substantial contribution to one of humankind's greatest accomplishments.

That, then, is my impression of the German people. Now I know that one shouldn't generalize about a whole nation based on one group, but you have to admit it's a good generalization. And this is what stings me so about the current situation: it's just so opposite to what I've always thought of Germans. I always thought of them as a dedicated and practical people, above such levels of pettiness and office-politicking and slackness. What did I miss? How long has it been this way? Or is the current impression just another faulty generalization? German culture left its mark here, in our homes (many Bavarian-style houses remain in this area), our cuisine (restraunts with names like Ol' Heidelberg and Cafe Berlin and the Biergarten are revered around town), and most of all, our thought patterns. This stuff that I see in the papers these days, of pacifism and collaberating with evil dictators and the PM playing to the lowest elements of society as a campaign tactic, to me that just isn't German.

Dave: this is very honest and very moving. Thank you so much!

Comments

[Mike H.]

This is the way that I think of Germany also. His story captures the way that I've felt all my life, and I'm 57. So what happened?

[Gabi]

I grew up with a great love for the USA - and for Israel - at school, in the newspapers and later in TV. It changed with the Vietnam war a little and totally with the red/green Government and their influence in the media. Now it is mainstream to hate the USA. Read forums in the internet. It is the power of the mob with better professions like journalists, teachers, professors, moderators in TV and radio. They created this new atmosphere in Germany. The same in UK and in other Europeen countries. Look at the BBC. What happened to her? Half educated people on the hunt for sensations.

[Stacy]

Gabi,

For a wonderful understanding of the damage "half educated people on the hunt for sensation" can do to our civilization check out "Civilization and its Enemies" by Lee Harris. This is an amazing analyis of our current situation, for both America and Germany.

[Jens Schmidt]

However, to claim the Werher von Braun "escaped the Nazis" is not quite accurate. As long as they were in power he did not give the impression to be too upset.

[Ted S.]

Werner von Braun was a true to form hypocrite and a SOB who served Hitler faithfully and to the best of his ability. Instead of him being installed by idiotic bureaucrats to head the US rocketry effort he should have been shot.
The soviets managed to build much more powerful rocket launchers than the US without the help of Herr von Braun. It is in space electronics that the US had the edge and without the Nazis' help probably would have achieved same in rockets.