Anne Frank wasn’t diverse enough
Oh, good idea, Germany.
A German kindergarten has said it will drop Anne Frank from its name in favour of a “more diverse” alternative, adding fuel to the national debate over anti-Semitism amid the Israel-Hamas war.
More “diverse” than Anne Frank. (I have no idea what the German for the buzzword “diverse” is, or even if it’s comparable to the Anglo buzzword.) More “diverse” how? Adding anti-Semites? Nazis? Neo-Nazis? Fans of genocide?
In what way is there a need for more “diversity” than a name that symbolizes the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazi regime? To put it another way, why is it a good idea to change the subject when the subject is Anne Frank/the Holocaust?
“We wanted a name without a political background,” Linda Schichor, the kindergarten’s director, told a local newspaper.
Ms Schichor said that the story of Anne Frank was difficult to explain to small children, while immigrant families had “often never heard of her” or her diary about her family’s attempt to remain hidden from the Nazis in occupied Amsterdam.
Well yes, which is why it’s quite a good idea to teach about her/memorialize her. That’s not to say schools shouldn’t also teach about other persecuted groups, but once you have an Anne Frank kindergarten it’s kind of a bad look to erase her name.
…coming at a time when Germany is engaged in soul searching over whether the lessons of the Nazi era are being forgotten, the name change has caused a national scandal.
Christoph Heubner, the deputy head of the International Auschwitz Committee, appealed for the name change decision to be reversed in a letter sent to the local council.
“If one is prepared to forget one’s own history so easily, especially in these times of renewed anti-Semitism and Right-wing extremism, one can only feel fear and anxiety about the culture of remembrance in our country,” he said.
Quite so. Expand the history, but don’t hide or downplay the bit between 1933 and 1945.
Jewish organisations have raised concerns in recent months about growing anti-Semitism from both the far-Right and immigrant communities from the Middle East.
Germany’s Central Council of Jews has warned that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is polling at over 20 per cent, “embodies Nazi ideals”.
Senior figures in the AfD have played down the crimes of the Nazi era, with one leader calling it “a bird sh-t” on German history, while others have questioned why there is a memorial to the Holocaust in the centre of Berlin.
Not a good moment to take down Anne Frank’s name.
The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is particularly extreme, and hold about a quarter of all seats. I suspect the motivation is not ‘diversity’ but to keep a lower profile.
At the same time aren’t they suppressing pro-Palestine demonstrations (which often verge into antisemitism)? GG Deutschland…
I can understand there being some difficulty in teaching kindy-age kids about Anne Frank, what with the horror surrounding her (though I’ll note it was the horror that surrounded her that makes her diary and aspirations especially poignant). That might have been something to discuss way back when the name was being considered. But now that the kindy was named so, this is certainly a bad time to change it.
The reasoning I don’t understand is that newcomers to Germany don’t know of her. Yes, and? The same is true of travellers to every nation, yet I wonder what the response would be if we suggested renaming other nations’ schools etc. on that basis. Everyone that doesn’t know of her and asks is a teaching opportunity.
This is the second time this specific article has crossed my radar in the last twenty-four hours, whereas none of my normal German sources have even mentioned it, which I think is somewhat telling. Let me trawl for an actual German article…ahh, yes, a bunch of highly-motivated right-of-centre rags…some respectable publications…no highly-motivated left-of-centre rags…
Ahh, there we are, something actually readable and vaguely objective and isn't publicly-financed (which is nearly unnecessary to qualify, as publicly-financed media in Germany are often barely readable and quite rarely objective).
Firstly, let's clarify a few points of confusion or misconceptions. "Kindergarten", though it is a German word, means something different in Germany than it does to Anglophones — namely, it is a daycare centre for young children (from three years on) which can (but not must) serve as a sort of pre-school for its older wards, and is usually only open to lunchtime or early afternoon. This story doesn't involve a Kindergarten, however, but rather a Kita (short for Kinderstätte), which takes children for the whole day and theoretically has no lower age limit and is even less likely to have a heavy emphasis on pedagogy (though it also can for its older wards). In East Germany there are relatively few Kindergärten and many more Kinderstätten, and while the difference may seem academic and opaque to foreigners, they are not the same thing. In short, the institution in question is much more like a daycare than a pre-school or the first cohort of a public school.
And the AfD, while admittedly stronger in East Germany and undeniably a right-wing nationalist party, are neither Nazis nor at all relevant to this discussion; the mayor of the town is an independent, and while he doubtless does not wish to anger AfD voters (or at least not attract their attention away from their anger at the Federal Republic), there is absolutely no evidence that he or his council have based their decisions with respect to the daycare upon the AfD or its voters in any way. And the new proposed name, Weltentdecker, translates to “world explorer”; this is hardly a name designed to appease a right-wing nationalist. In point of fact, according to Wikipedia, the AfD received just under 12 percent of the vote and only got 3 out of the 28 seats in the council. We can effectively rule out pleasing the AfD as a motivation for this change.
In further point of fact, in the quote about anti-Semitism growing “among the Far Right” and the implication that the AfD is dangerously antisemitic are doing a lot of work here; the AfD has Jewish wings in its federal and several state parties, though of course these are not uncontroversial in the broader Jewish community in Germany. But, as this is entirely a red herring to the current discussion, it bears no further investigation or exposition here.
To the point of the article, the proposed name change is just one of several progressive reforms to supposedly “modernise” the daycare, which has apparently been in progress for the last 14 months. Other reforms include no longer grouping the children by age and allowing children to follow their own interests and desires rather than having a more uniform, strictly-regimented day.
The mayor writes in an address to the town (probably as a result of the outcry):
which translates to
which is a fine example of a German politician covering his arse, but does put paid to the idea that the name change is in response to the recent flare-up of the interminable Levantine brawl. In fact, the Hamas attack has likely drawn far more attention and enhanced the outcry, including getting national reporters in England to sensationalise local news in East Germany.
It is unlikely the name will be changed at this point, but I am not sure what difference that will make in the long run. There is a narrative worth exploring here, of Germany’s continuing evolution and its reconstitution through migration, and what the ethnic Germans of yesterday and today owe the increasingly-non-ethnic-Germans of today and tomorrow (and vice-versa). In some of these Kitas in the major cities, the share of non-ethnic-German children can exceed 80 percent, and there are precious few where this proportion is far below 50; if this continues, there will be a demographic shift in this country within our lifetimes that is essentially unprecedented in the history of the world.
That cannot but have consequences. If the only parties anticipating and discussing those consequences get called Nazis for doing so, then either only Nazis will do the discussing or the term “Nazi” will so lose its meaning and potency that nobody will care when actual neo-Nazis do actual neo-Nazi shit.
In particular, what do these new peoples who have come to Germany owe to Anne Frank? These peoples, who have virtually no connection to the Holocaust or any other part of German history, who bear no collective guilt for the industrial massacre of European Jews in the middle part of the 20th Century? These peoples who tend to see Germany not so much as a land of opportunity but as a rich lifeboat whose byzantine bureaucracy they must navigate in order to get free accommodations and an allowance without having to (or in many cases even being legally allowed to) work?
These are very important questions with very important answers. And as Germany sacrifices its economy in order to punish Russia’s malfeasance, we are only going to see more and more ethnic Germans asking them, and, should those answers prove unsatisfactory, the next round of questions may be even less to our liking.
God damn it all to Satan’s own latrine, I knew I shouldn’t have clicked submit on an empty stomach.
Ok now?
And thank you for the informed correction/explanation/background.
Good to have a look from the inside.
[…] a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Anne Frank wasn’t diverse […]
Yes, all fixed, thank you.
It is still a bit bizarre that a council proposal over a daycare’s name in a town of little more than ten thousand residents made international headlines, especially as it doesn’t appear to be part of a broader movement to erase the Holocaust (reminders of which are quite unavoidable in most cities and towns of any reasonable size). My anti-woke friends are laying it at the feet of woke antisemitism, which I find a bit hyperbolic (though there is not a little of that sort of thing to be found in various ‘pro-Palestinian’ demonstrations, here and the world over), while more mainstream commentators seem eager to catastrophise it into a new Beer Hall Putsch.
It is neither. It’s just a local council doing something a little boneheaded.
Viral things can snowball for no reason. I suspect in this case it’s because of the sacred status of Anne Frank. Touched a nerve. I fell into the trap!
The late sociologist Rolf Peter Sieferle, who took his own life in 2016 by walking into the sea during what his wife reported as a terminal illness (and what may well have been a bout of depression at what he saw as the political and social trajectory of Germany in particular and Europe in general), left behind a series of essays which were posthumously collected into a booklet entitled Finis Germania, an English translation of which I dearly hope, with all humbleness, to be able to eventually publish. It has run into some controversy because a few of the essays discuss the Holocaust and the Nazis as a matter of history and sociology and culture rather than a sacred divine revelation. One of the essays even predicts this, as it casts these topics as the major part of a postwar German civil religion, which may be preached about but never actually critically discussed.
He does not specifically mention Anne Frank by name, but it is…fitting, perhaps, or at least parsimonious, that she in this instance serve as an avatar to test some of his points — that Germany may never be allowed to outlive its recent crimes, that any deviation from German collective guilt over the Holocaust is to be taken as a sort of civil blasphemy as long as there is a national-political entity which it still makes sense to call “Germany”, that Germans in the modern day serve a similar function to Jews in bygone eras as the boogeymen whose motives were ever suspect and whose deeds were always exaggerated to the maximal degree.
But Sieferle predicted, or perhaps lamented, that the German people were more or less a spent force, destined evermore to be spectators to human development rather than instigators and agitators. I fear that he was wrong in this, and that we, in the words of those great philosophers the Bachman Turner Overdrive, ain’t seen nothin’ yet.