from: https://thebaffler.com/latest/how-german-isnt-it-cocotas

  • BoxedFenders [any, comrade/them]
    ·
    8 months ago

    The German version of Americans expressing superficial appreciation for the aesthetics and customs of Native Americans.

    • CliffordBigRedDog [he/him]
      ·
      8 months ago

      Nah, The German version of Americans expressing superficial appreciation for the aesthetics and customs of Native Americans is Germans expressing superficial appreciation for the aesthetics and customs of Native Americans

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_German_popular_culture

      • BoxedFenders [any, comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        In the late 19th century, a recurring complaint in Germany was that the Reich had a relatively small colonial empire compared to other nations, especially the United Kingdom.[34] As a result, "Indianthusiasm" served as a sort of Handlungsersatz-an untranslatable term meaning a surrogate for an action that substitutes for real power.[34] Many of the colonial adventure stories in 19th century Germany had as their theme "stories of sexual conquest and surrender, love and blissful domestic relations between colonizer and colonized, set in colonial territory, stories that made the strange familiar and the familiar 'familial'".[35] A recurring theme of "Indianthusiasm" suggested that German immigrants would be act in a morally superior manner towards the indigenous population of North America than the "Anglo-Saxon" powers of Great Britain, Canada, and the United States; this theme also promoted the idea that Germans held a genuine interest in Native American culture that other Europeans lacked.[34]

        lol Germans disappointed that they missed out on r*ping their way across the New World and fantasizing that they would be gentler than the Anglos.

        • newerAccountWhoDis [they/them]
          ·
          7 months ago

          fantasizing that they would be gentler than the Anglos

          while committing a genocide on Herero and Nama

        • jack [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          7 months ago

          Handlungsersatz-an untranslatable term meaning a surrogate for an action that substitutes for real power.

          Seems like you translated it just fine

  • SSJ2Marx
    ·
    8 months ago

    Wolff’s maternal grandmother’s grandmother was supposedly Jewish, a silver bullet of matrilineal descent across the upheavals of European Jewish history.

    It's the German pickle-liz

    • itappearsthat
      ·
      8 months ago

      you just know he has a "pow-wow chow" equivalent recipe with a title so uncreatively racist that it could be adopted without modification by /pol/ users as a synonym for the holocaust

    • ComradeEchidna
      ·
      8 months ago

      I'm reminded about how here in Australia one of my grandparents grandparents was supposedly very dark in both skin and hair colouring and they weren't talked about by the rest of the family, in my parent's generation speculation ran rampant from them being Jewish to First Nations. Someone did the research and it turns out they were Sicilian.

  • duderium [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    I'm half-Jewish (father's side, not religious, wore a yarmulke once at Passover and hated it, free Palestine) and this article is completely fascinating to me. Like...if you guys love acting Jewish so much...why not convert to Judaism? I saw that one guy did, and then he became a prominent Jewish leader in Germany! Odd echoes here too of euro-amerikans maintaining with only anecdotal evidence that they have indigenous ancestry, even as they themselves have no connection at all to any existing Native American tribes. There is also something postmodern going on here, just a complete contempt for reality, a very strong "we had to destroy Judaism in order to save it" kind of vibe.

    Then there are the literal costume Jews. I have twice witnessed large groups of Germans wearing kippot. Once at a rally against antisemitism and once marching with a large police escort down Sonnenallee, the hub of Arab life in Berlin, chanting pro-Israel slogans. To hold a sign that said “Stop Genocide” or “From the River to the Sea” on that same street today would invite certain arrest and potentially criminal prosecution. The police violently suppressed demonstrations and even basic symbols of Palestinian identity on Sonnenallee in the weeks following October 7; I had to extricate a friend, a prominent (Jewish) journalist, from one such demonstration after he was pepper-sprayed for filming the brutal arrest of a man whose crime was to hold a Palestinian flag.

    germany-cool

    One German Jewish historian, Barbara Steiner, has written a book about the phenomenon and history of Germans converting to Judaism. She finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the primary motivations for most converts are manifestations of guilt in one guise or another.

    I can see this maybe happening in the USA with white folks trying to join Native American tribes out of guilt...and then just making the Native American tribes white.

    Germanness as such has no aspirational, positive content.

    Has anyone in history ever actually liked Germany, aside from the fucking Nazis, who only liked a certain side of Germany, let us say? Even the ancient Romans fucking hated the Germans. Nietzsche himself, the Karl Marx of Nazism, despised Germany. I guess Wagner liked it—but, again, only a certain side of Germany?

    When the pandemic started I was actually super into Babylon Berlin. A reactionary acquaintance recommended I watch a show called Generation War, which is a German show about the experiences of a bunch of fucking Nazis. I shit you not, it starts with a literal token Jewish friend saying "shalom" to his grownup Nazi friends from school who are wearing Nazi uniforms as he says this and mere hours from being shipped out to commit mass murder in Eastern Europe. That's as far as I got in that show. It was apparently a huge hit. Thankfully I've been able to avoid the guy who recommended it to me for years.

    • 7bicycles [he/him]
      ·
      8 months ago

      Jewish so much...why not convert to Judaism?

      That would actually be dangerous considering for all the whole shebang about being the worlds leading force for anti-antisemitism there sure are a lot of jews getting beat up by nazis, still.

    • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      8 months ago

      Has anyone in history ever actually liked Germany, aside from the fucking Nazis, who only liked a certain side of Germany, let us say?

      There were a bunch of pre-unification nationalists who had extremely romantic notions about the German people. Guys like Fichte and Hölderlin

    • newerAccountWhoDis [they/them]
      ·
      7 months ago

      Has anyone in history ever actually liked Germany,

      according to Peter Weiss, Russians before 1917 ironically did. Even though they fought Germans in WWI they admired the revolutionary ideas and advanced industry coming from Germany. After the revolution they'd invite German communists to help advance their own industry. Only then they got to know the German superiority complex

    • REEEEvolution@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      Germany always had the fortune of getting stomped by world events before it could settle into itself.

      1871-1914: "Being unified is kinda neat"

      1914: "Let's aid Austria, it will be a short war!"

      1918-1933: Socdems backstabbing.

      1933-1945: "You know what would be cool? The things the bourgoisie wanted to to the last time, which even the nobility deemed to be fucked up."

      1945-today: Vassal of the US, with near zero independence post cold war

    • itappearsthat
      ·
      8 months ago

      In the article it talks about how huge numbers of Germans do this. And then essays are written about how converts figure too large in shaping Jewish culture in Germany. And the people who write these essays are, too, converts.

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]
    ·
    8 months ago

    Saddest part is that only one of these fakers offed herself after being exposed sicko-wistful