Schuld Spiel

So yeah, I haven't been her in a while. Sorry about that. Anyway, I was doing some thinking and you know, I really feel sorry for Germany.
I know the nation itself has a suspect past, but think about it from the point of view of the Germans. They have to live with guilt. If they stop feeling guilty, the guilt is beaten back into them. They feel guilt on a very personal level for something they did not personally do. They are not Hans and Fritz and Johann. No, they are other people's past.
The bigger issue is that they won't be able to keep peaceful for long. After being so repressed and told not to be happy and proud for so long...after only ever being able to be ashamed for something they didn't do for generations...after being so angry at themselves for so long, they will one day revert to antisemitism. Some day in the future, they will be very angry at the Jews and the rest of the world. "Why do we have to be made to feel guilty for something we didn't do?" Well, that's a very good question. Why? Why do they have to be held accountable for something they did not do?
I'll tell you why. It's because we cannot get it through our thick skulls that Germany does not exist. It's an idea that spans from Mitterwald to Flensburg and from Saarbrücken to Görlitz. It's something people have just agreed upon. It's not like countries are naturally occurring phenomenons. No. It's not like there are herds of schools of Japan fish swimming about next to the massive Chinas that roam the planes of Asia.
No, people kind of got together roughly around the time of Emperor Otto I. There is no physical thing. Just people, and at best, land, infrastructure and ink marks on some papers; but the main issue is that that is what a country really is. It's ink marks on a paper.
At the same time, we feel the need to label an entire nation of people responsible for the decisions of very few people.
The really fucked up thing is that we usually ascribe this to the nation as a whole. Not even the citizens that were simply there by an accident of their own birth and actually suffer are free from the guilt.
So let's go further back. Back to 1918. The world went into an armistice and Germany was asked most decidedly to pay reparations. But here's the problem. Germany doesn't have money because it doesn't exist. Germans, however, do exist. Germans with whatever money they have...Germans who did not want the war...Germans who did nothing but be born.
But no, they were punished into poverty. They printed out Deutschmarks like there was no tomorrow. Their economy was tanked and a certain someone with a toothbrush mustache came along and took advantage of that. And we all know how that ended.
So now, they can't hang their own flag proudly just because we're too busy chasing shadows.