We live in different times now…

I recently watched "Der Untergang" (The Downfall), a movie by Oliver Hirschbiegel about Adolf Hitlers final days in his Berlin bunker. What made me think were the last lines of the movie by Traudl Junge, a secretary of Adolf Hitler and eye witness of the downfall of the Nazi regime.

"All these horrors I've heard of during the Nuernberg process, these six million Jews, other thinking people or people of another race, who perished. That shocked me deeply. But I hadn't made the connection with my past. I assured myself with the thought of not being personally guilty. And that I didn't know anything about the enormous scale of it. But one day I walked by a memorial plate of Sophie Scholl in the Franz-Joseph-Strasse. I saw that she was about my age and she was executed in the same year I came to Hitler. And at that moment I actually realized that a young age isn't an excuse. And that it might have been possible to get to know things."

I am fortunate to be born in the late 70ties, long after those horrible times. The only way for me to know about these days is through media, history classes and people around me who where born and raised during the Nazi regime in either Germany or Austria. Some of these people still can't let know of the old days . "Didn’t know about it", it was not all that bad, it wasn’t Hitler but his advisors etc.

I thought that we live in complete different times now, that we have changed, don’t close our eyes anymore, that something like WWII can’t happen again. But then I put myself into the future, around 40 years from now. Current problems like global warming came to my mind, atomic waste, pollution of the oceans and how badly our environment is treated this days. Problems that will affect our future big time. Completely different to what happened between 1938 and 1945? Maybe, but millions of people suffer and die right now while I live a happy life.

I asked myself how I would respond to my children or grandchildren if they wanted to know why I did not do anything about the problems of my time. Why did I drive a car which used fossil fuels, why I did not vote for a party that was against the use of nuclear power, why wasn’t I speaking out loud against the deforestation of the rainforest. Would I say that I "didn't know anything about the enormous scale of it" like Traudl Junge? But I do know about the problems, its on the news every day!

Well, I haven’t found a good excuse yet, maybe I should start doing something about the problems around me, I don’t want to end up on a trial for misstreating the planet.