IT WAS 1963. I was living in an apartment in New York City. A lovely young couple who lived downstairs invited my roommates and me for a visit. Suddenly, during the conversation our hostess said angrily, "I hate Germans!—but not you, Anni." I was so surprised I couldn't think of anything to say.
My roommates told me later that this couple was Jewish. There it was again! I had had a similar experience in my late teens in England. One night at the theater when the elderly woman next to me discovered I was German, she said, "You are not going to start another war, are you?" I said, "No." But how did I know what the governments were planning? At that time, in the late '50s, the memory of World War II was still vivid, the Cold War intensifying, and the Iron Curtain getting tighter daily. Nobody knew what would happen next. And I realized for the first time that some people considered me personally responsible for the evil that my country's government had done not so long ago. A feeling of shame and a big question mark about the whole political situation and how to react to what people were saying and thinking about Germans stayed with me.
Then in 1961, the Wall was built through Berlin and the entire country. I felt so ashamed. I went to see a Christian Science friend and asked her in tears, "Why is it always the Germans? Why do we do this to our own people? I can't imagine the French or the English doing anything like this in their country." Her answer was: "It is never the Germans or the Americans, the Russians, the English, or whoever. It is impersonal evil in the human mind that attempts to separate us from good, from our Father-Mother God." At the time, I didn't fully understand what she meant.
