But for the grace?

                                                              
Note: This is fourth and final in a series about my trip to Europe last summer, part of which I spent exploring religious and family roots.

I began my Summer of 2009 European tour getting in touch with my Anabaptist heritage of religious persecution in Canton Berne, Switzerland. I ended it in Nuremberg, Germany, exploring another and even more extreme example of human inhumanity that is very much a part of the shared history of most of the modern world.

Nuremberg was the home of the Nazi Party and the site of massive annual Nazi Party rallies, one of which was immortalized by Leni Riefenstahl in the film Triumph of the Will. I particularly wanted to go to Nuremberg because of the film. It is one of the finest examples of pure propaganda ever put on film, and I have long used excerpts of it in the classroom to teach critical thinking and viewing.

The sites represented in the film still exist in Nuremberg, and seeing them firsthand was a special lesson even for me, the teacher, in the gap between cinematic reality and physical reality. Of course, the sites have also changed. Gone are the flags and banners and gigantic swastikas, and the stadium seating of the rally ground is mostly overgrown.

Hitler made speeches at Nazi Party rallies from the platform behind the rail high on the façade of the Zeppelin Field Grandstand. A gigantic swastika once stood on the top of the Grandstand. Wikipedia has a brief clip of it being blown up.

           
But the monstrous edifice that dwarfs human figures and presented Hitler at a god-like height above the crowds to make his speeches is still an awesome sight. The Grosse Strasse, or Great Street, for parading military might is a road-building marvel: 1.25 miles by 44 yards of precisely cut black and gray granite squares laid on a road bed able to support war machinery and ranks of marching men.

However, it was not these impressive monuments that gave me new insight into how so horrendous an event as the Holocaust could happen. Rather, it was the careful, historical reconstruction of the rise of Nazism out of patriotism and human desire for community, the creation of the “Fuhrer” myth out of a charismatic leader, the birth of a military juggernaut out of an army of proud workers, and the consequent horrors of death camps and world war—all presented in unflinching detail inside the Documentation Centre museum on the site—that prodded me to a new level of understanding of how we humans can be seduced into inhumane treatment of those we deem less worthy.

My response in the Summer of 2009 was, "There but for the grace of God..." I was remembering the surge of patriotism and anger in the U.S. after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that led us to invade one country and manufacture a war with another. But in the summer of 2009, with those wars seemingly winding down, I thought we were moving on.

Today, in the face of our own U.S. version of homegrown terrorism against Muslims--burning mosques under construction, threatening to burn Korans, and more--over an Islamic community center with a prayer space* at 51 Park Place in Lower Manhattan, I'm not so sure.

*Note: I will not call it a mosque because I have heard and read arguments both ways and consider that to be an open question. And I will not say it is "at Ground Zero" because it isn't. It can't even be seen from Ground Zero.