June 19, 2008
Leave it to the Germans to lay bare their ugly racist proclivities. “Uncle Barack’s Cabin” was the headline on the front page of Die Tageszeitung, a leading Berlin newspaper, over a large photograph of the White House. Nice. The reference, of course, is to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
According to one of the rag’s editors, “the headline is intended to be satirical. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a book that all Germans know and which they associate with issues of racism. The headline is supposed to make people think about these stereotypes. It works on many levels.”
It certainly does work on many levels. It exposes the racist undercurrent that still exists in the land of Richard Wagner and Herman Goering more than six decades after the collapse of the Third Reich. And perhaps it illustrates the resentment of some Germans that Barack Obama takes great pride in the fact that one of his uncles helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp of Ohrdurf, near Buchenwald.
The offensive Tageszeitung headline is a warning to us here in the United States. Between now and November, the bigots and reactionaries among us are certain to exploit every slimy racist undercurrent they can discover in a desperate effort to keep Obama out of the White House. They must not be allowed to get away with it.
For months now, American bigots have tried to use Senator Obama’s name as a way to insinuate that he is somehow not one of “us.” Only a few weeks ago, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta apologized for her offensive on-the-air wish that “somebody knock off Osama, uh, Obama. Well, both, if we could.” It was only a joke, she chuckled.
The idiots among us who consider someone’s given name to be an indication of anything, let alone political ideology, should bear in mind that there are no more American, patriotic, motherhood, and apple pie names than George (Washington), (Abraham) Lincoln, and (Norman) Rockwell. Put them together, however, and you get George Lincoln Rockwell, the notorious longtime leader of the American Nazi party.
As a nation, we have an opportunity to either embrace what is best about us, or to succumb to our most reprehensible instincts.
We all know that this country has come a long way. Before the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington, DC, 15 years ago, skeptics questioned both its relevance and its legitimacy, arguing that there is no need for a federally backed American memorial to a crime, however heinous, committed elsewhere by others. The critics have been proven wrong. The museum speaks to Americans of all faiths, ages, and backgrounds because it is not a shrine to victimhood. Its core message, transcending memorialization of the dead, is that raw, absolute evil can permeate, corrode, and ultimately destroy civilized society whenever average men and women look the other way.
Silence in the face of anti-Semitism, racism, and all other forms of bigotry is in itself a moral crime against humanity. The museum commands us to know a fate our nation was spared. Images of the May 1933 Berlin book burnings bring to mind those who want to purge our own libraries. The same highly educated Germans who lit the Nazis’ cultural bonfires also ignited the flames that consumed my grandparents and my brother, my mother’s son, at Auschwitz. And African Americans and Southern whites alike can relate to a German hotel notice from the mid-1930s prominently displayed in the museum: “Jewish guests are politely asked not to use the hotel restaurants, but to eat their meals in their rooms.”
Remember the Jim Crow laws in this country, the museum warns us. Remember segregation. We learn about the Third Reich laws prohibiting sexual relations between Jews and Aryans, and we are forced to recall that it was not until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court declared laws banning interracial marriages to be unconstitutional.
Back in February, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said that “there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate.” Well, it’s now his job to prove himself wrong. The offensive Tageszeitung headline should be a wake-up call for all of us. By uniting behind Barack Obama for all the right reasons, we can prove to the world what we and our country truly represent.
Menachem Rosensaft is a lawyer in New York and the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. A version of this article appeared at the Huffington Post.
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