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@tartarusorbust I thought about just answering your tweet or making it an own thread.
What I'm going to share with you now are some very personal thoughts about how my country's and family's past affects my love for Fantastic Beasts. I can't separate the two from each other. https://twitter.com/tartarusorbust/status/1289246455295696897
What I'm going to share with you now are some very personal thoughts about how my country's and family's past affects my love for Fantastic Beasts. I can't separate the two from each other. https://twitter.com/tartarusorbust/status/1289246455295696897
It's a fine line between creating empathy for the Holocaust and trivialising it and I really don't want to hurt survivors even more.
Before I talk about FB, let me tell you something about how I was educated on the Holocaust.
Before I talk about FB, let me tell you something about how I was educated on the Holocaust.
The aftermath of WW2 was still a part of daily life before I went to school. There were three bunkers in walking distance from my parents' house (two are still there - one is a museum today). There was a siren installed on my primary school's roof.
It was there since the war and was never removed. My grandparents had an air photo from their residential area from 1945 - you saw many many bricks. My grandfather showed us the place where their house was. We were told the bombs did it.
My mother taught me ice-skating on a bomb crater, which was filled with water. The woods are still full of bomb craters. They shape the landscape.
When I was in primary school we regularly had a day off from school whenever an old bomb from WW2 was found.
When I was in primary school we regularly had a day off from school whenever an old bomb from WW2 was found.
There were so many bomb disposals. I'm used to it. If you can't disarm a bomb, the bomb disposal team will do a controlled detonation. You don't forgot a controlled detonation and you get an impression of what bombings were like in WW2.
Why do I tell you this? It's important for the end of the book I read in German class.
We were 12/13 when we read the book "Damals war es Friedrich" in German class. This book introduced us to seven years of education about the Holocaust in different classes.
We were 12/13 when we read the book "Damals war es Friedrich" in German class. This book introduced us to seven years of education about the Holocaust in different classes.
You can translate "Damals war es Friedrich" to "Back then it happened to Friedrich". It is a fictional story.
An Aryan German boy is the first-person narrator of the story. His family was poor unlike his best friend's Friedrich's family.
An Aryan German boy is the first-person narrator of the story. His family was poor unlike his best friend's Friedrich's family.
Friedrich was a Jewish boy, but it didn't affect their friendship. Before we started to read the book our teacher asked us about our own family's backgrounds. Who of us had a migration background. Who was a Muslim. We talked about our own stories.
I didn't know about my great-grandfather back then. Our teacher told us about her own family and how her father and her sister had supported Hitler. She asked us to keep in mind everyone with a migration background could have been Friedrich...
