When you are a German-speaking kid growing up in New York, innocent you never get to be. The moment you say your mother is German, or that you were born there, or went there last summer or that you speak the language, you get treated as a Nazi. It's an automatic formula, an instant reaction in the eyes of whom ever is listening.
So you beat around the bush, you learn to not mention having anything German until further into the conversation, after you have convinced the other person that you are a reasonable person. Then, maybe after they have told you something personal, you gently let slip a reference to your family. Most everyone has a family.
Of course, these rules of caution you learn slowly and painfully. Only after years of having people freak out on you, sometimes screaming, "You’re a Nazi?" Later it comes in the form of polite sophisticated Jewish ladies who move away from you at a party, once they hear exactly what you are a professor of. For them it is acceptable to have an unchecked loathing for all things German, and you get to feel it in the turn of their shoulder, the swift conclusion of what seemed like a fruitful conversation.
So after a time, you learn to joke, to spin, to not mention anything personal, to simply become charming and evasive. If you did not care too much about intellectual topics, you could just carry on that way, but alas the weight pulls at you, makes you want to earnestly ponder the question of guilt, responsibility, history, makes you want to explain that you are not a Nazi. There is no finer way to end a conversation than through a sincere attempt to convince the other person that you are not a Nazi.
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