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On behalf of Germans, thanks for telling your story

My heartfelt thanks to John Rothmann for his Dec. 20 op-ed (“Seeking closure on an emotional family trip to Germany”). I am very touched by the honesty and sincerity with which he describes his traveling to Germany — feelings I can understand so well, given how his father had been treated after Hitler’s ascent to power. I can imagine how difficult it must have been for him to go to the university where his father had worked and which, all of sudden, turned against him.

But luckily John Rothmann did overcome his reluctance to go to that “haunted land,” spoke at the memorial service and found such perfectly pertinent and balanced words to describe what it was about — standing together to ensure “never again” and “never forget.” Although he did it primarily for his sons, it is at least as important to us, the Germans of today, to listen to people like John Rothmann, people we don’t have in Germany to tell us their stories.

Although we know what happened, we need to hear it time and again from real people with personal stories. Only such testimonials from survivors or descendants of survivors enable us to grasp emotionally, beyond what we learn in history class and read in books, what unbelievable injustice was done to the Jews under the Nazi regime — first to our own German countrymen, then to all the Jews under that regime’s control. I am very glad that the University of Halle-Wittenberg came up with the idea to honor its former colleagues with a memorial service, and I hope that other universities will follow their example.

Peter Rothen

German Consul General

San Francisco

Two unequal narratives

Ryan Simon, an active member of SFSU Hillel, appears to support a moral equivalency between the Jewish and Palestinian narratives that thus allows him to assume a position of neutrality between the Jewish and Palestinian positions (“SFSU student’s call for civility starts with ‘I feel your pain,’” Dec. 20). I feel this is wrong on two levels.

During World War II, the editor of the New York Times was urged to give more coverage to the Holocaust. The editor, Arthur Sulzberger, replied that if he gave more coverage to the Jewish persecution, he would also have to give equal coverage to the Nazi viewpoint. Sulzberger was not horrified about gas chambers, mass killings in forests or medical experiments on humans. Sulzberger’s biggest fear was that the New York Times would be perceived as a Jewish newspaper.

The Jewish narrative for the creation of the Jewish state is based upon the Divine promise of the land of Israel to the Jewish people. The Palestinian narrative is that the Jews stole Palestine. Thus, the Jewish narrative is not dependent on conflict with the Palestinians, but the Palestinian narrative depends on conflict with the Jews. For the Palestinians to acknowledge a Jewish state would be to negate their own identity. The converse is not true.

Herbert Kaine   |   Berkeley