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Third and last example for German non-understanding: sometime during the second lockdown, me and my friend decided, half out of curiosity, half out of desperation, to discover Brandenburg. During one of these trips we went to Oranienburg, a typical destination of Old Berlin situated north of the city, with ostentatious houses, touristy restaurants, sparkling lake and an old concentration camp. Since it was spring and a weekend however, we decided to take a walk on the other side of the shore, half hoping to avoid the memorial for the KZ Sachsenhausen, half to get a better look at the architecture of the camp itself.

But before we knew it, we encountered behind the mansions, the bathing areas and the nature trail, a former satellite camp: an old bakery, a brick factory (Klinkerwerk) and a harbour, which the inmates had to build under horrendous conditions. Instead of distancing ourselves from Sachsenhausen, we walked right into a different part of the camp's area; the containment of the memorial architecture lead us astray. "Built for the production of necessary resources for the rebuilding of Berlin as Germania by Albert Speer" we read on an orphaned memorial plaque by the canal of the harbour, where nowadays new resource depots are located. The description concluded with the brief note that the SS dumped eight tonnes of human ash into the canal before the end of the war, to destroy evidence of any extermination. Eight thousand kilograms. I looked at my friend, then we looked at the canal, mentally retracing our steps to the nature trail, bathing areas, new and old mansions only a kilometre downstream. On the other side of the shore, we saw a couple men letting their fishing rods dangle in the water.

In this scene is concentrated the localisation of forgetting in the theatre of German reconcilitation. On one side the places of remembrance, the KZ memorials and Stolpersteine and plaques, on the other side the remaining social space, equally contaminated by violence but somehow simultaneously seeming untainted by this history, so that one can let their fishing rods dangle in the canal again. Eight thousand kilograms. In the remembrance architecture, violence is not only preserved, but people are safe of it. So when a Stolperstein refers to jews having lived in this house, they didn't do so on the other side of the street. When jews were deported from an abandoned train track, then the train will just roll on the other tracks. When the KZ memorial site is on the other side of the shore, I'm free to bathe on this side of the lake and so on.

by Dennis Baron

[...] The war on language was fought on two fronts, one legal, the other, in the schools. Its impact was immediate and long-lasting. German was the target, but the other “foreign” tongues suffered collateral damage. Immigrant languages in America went into decline, and there was a precipitous drop in the study of foreign languages in US schools as well.

Speak English, it’s the law

Boycotting German was the first step in the campaign, but legislating against the language quickly followed. Scribner’s was urged to publish no German titles during the war. Sheet music dealers refused to handle German songs. At least one American Berlin was renamed Liberty. Even German foods were rebranded. Just as later, during the Iraq War, French fries would become freedom fries, in the America of World War I, German fried potatoes became American fries, sauerkraut morphed into liberty cabbage, and superpatriots even caught the liberty measles.

In addition, new laws regulated the use of foreign languages. Responding to a growing sentiment that using anything but English gave aid and comfort to the enemy, the Trading with the Enemy Act (50 USC Appendix), passed in June, 1917, suppressed the American foreign-language press and declared non-English printed matter unmailable without a certified English translation.

Across the country, state and local ordinances forbade the use of foreign languages, urged immigrants to switch to English immediately, and punished those who failed to comply. On May 23, 1918, Iowa Gov. William Harding banned the use of any foreign language in public: in schools, on the streets, in trains, even over the telephone, a more public instrument then than it is today. For Harding, the First Amendment “is not a guaranty of the right to use a language other than the language of this country—the English language.”

[...]

At the federal level, Congress responded to a new wave of isolationism that was sweeping the country with the Immigration Act of 1924. The law slowed immigration from the nonanglophone countries of Europe to a trickle and denied admission to anyone from just about everywhere else (Asians were banned completely, and in the debate over the bill, Jews were singled out as particularly unassimilable). When immigration re-opened again in 1965, Americans who, after more than 40 years of “reform” simply assumed that their country had always been monolingual, reacted to the new, unfamiliar immigrant languages by declaring English endangered, attacking bilingual education, and passing new laws making English the official language of government, the workplace, and the schools. 

Speak the language of your flag

The schools opened up a second front in the Great War on foreign languages in World War I America. In 1918, the New York Times reported that as many as 25 states had already removed German from the curriculum, an action the newspaper applauded as “a matter of polity, of patriotism, of Americanism,” and “good hard common sense.”