The N Word

People who worry about American Nazis I imagine are as paranoid as the Nazis they are hunting down. Yet to my surprise I ran across several postings from white supremacists about a particularly large, well-known German department at a very large Midwest university. It shocked me to see colleagues with whom I had spoken just weeks before at the MLA listed on these pages.

Now after a deep breath, it was obvious to me that the complaints were really run of the mill undergraduate, right-wing griping, but they had were truly disturbing at the same time.

The first time someone suggested to me that I should identify with the Nazis, I remember, we were standing in the South Bronx at West Farms Square waiting for a bus. This was 1978 at 7:30 in the morning on the way to high school. Having already spent a decade of my life denying I was a Nazi to all of New York, I couldn't believe that there was a kook who would advocate becoming one. I couldn't imagine a more insane thing to do.

Thinking back on that guy, I remember his pitch was something like" You're German, you should get into the Nazis."

The websites complaining about the big Midwestern German department make a similar argument: a large percentage of Americans are descendent from Germans, therefore they should learn about…." This where the argument veered off. Heritage speakers have filled German departments for most of the twentieth century. That does not make them white supremacists.

The Nazi web pages ran pretty much along the same lines as the kid back in 1978. Every ethnic group has its advocacy group, its parade, its national holiday. The shocking difference was the way in which German history was ignored. The undergraduates' complaints were about the classes offered in German departments, their grumbling was curricular. It was very similar to the complaints my colleagues in the English department get from David Horowitz, except that in the case of this German department, the arguments had the extra twist of being racist and anti-Semitic.