A harsh critique of the new Judisches Museum Berlin has several notable statements that reveal the difficulty Germans have confronting their atrocious past.
"The museum tends to be sanguine about the knotty relationships between Jews and Germans...by making the German past seem more enlightened, and the Jewish past last particular, it has created an assimilated blandness in which antipodes unite in ersatz tolerance."
Perhaps the problem lies in what the museum curator describes as one of the museum's mission - to apply the lessons of the Holocaust "to societal problems of today and tomorrow" and to increase "tolerance toward minorities in a globalized world."
Too often, the people of Europe readily embrace the conclusions about the Holocaust rather than engage the horror in its own terms. If they did, the conclusions would not come so easily, quickly becoming bored dogmas instead of living truths and warnings.
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