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Perhaps the issue is simply that you are making some peculiar use of "irony". I was lucky enough to attend a speech given during the primary elections by Obama at the Texas state capitol. A huge multi-racial crowd gathered to cheer Obama - and the stage obscured a statue placed on the front of the capitol building in the early 1900s that has on it the legend "in memory of the Confederate soldiers who died to protect the rights of states given in the constitution." That is, in my mind, an enormous irony although a very pleasant one.

The bitterness of the irony in Germany is maybe not apparent to you, but to me, when I travel in germany and see muslim women in headscarves, I think of photographs of my great grandmother in her headscarf in her village in Lithuania before the Germans arrived with guns and shovels. When I pass the empty synagogue in Koln, I think of the people who worshipped there for many generations. When I talk to Turkish Germans and find them "more german than the germans" it reminds me of the reputation of German Jews among the ostjuden. And yes, it's a bitter irony. And the fact that the Nazis would have found it a defeat doesn't lessen the irony or the bitterness.

by rootless2 on Sat Jun 27th, 2009 at 01:45:29 PM EST
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