German here. My country made up for it’s gruesome past only in a performative sense, the painful look in the mirror within families never took place. Very few ever confronted their grandparents, touched the real pain from which learning comes. Too “delicate”. Most importantly: we have no concept of colonialism. There is awareness of our own bloody colonial history in our populace, like the genocide of the Herero and Nama, and the bloody crackdown during the Maji-Maji uprising (death toll 300’000 people). For the latter, there’s a tiny remembrance place in Berlin, while the perpetrator who ordered the crackdown on the East Africans has a big statue on his grave and is not being remembered critically in public (if at all: positively). As a consequence Nazism is never seen as a form of colonialism (in the East), nor is Israel seen as a colonial endeavor. It’s a giant blind spot. A blind spot that is deadly. True learning from our sins never happened, even though we took it quite far, yet not far enough. There are hundreds of tv-documentaries about the nazi perpetrators, while the stories of the victims is hardly being told. Eastern Germany did a better job there. But now they’re all Neo-Nazis or staunch Israel supporters. (The fuck went wrong there?) Or both. What we Germans have done (are doing!) to Palestinians and to Judaism is shameful.
This piece sums it up perfectly: https://mondoweiss.net/2026/05/how-gaza-is-exposing-germanys-never-again-myth/
Great analysis