Published on Medium.com on May 6, 2025
Living with the consequences
When a person struggles with some mistreatment by society, they react or they endure. If they react, the reaction imprints on them a label that comes to identify them. Sometimes the label comes with a sheen and results in a glowing obituary. Like with Martin Luther King or Gandhi. Or, sometimes it comes with a smudge and the disapproval of history. Like with Hitler and Stalin. It doesn’t so much matter if the reaction was to a legitimate grievance. It matters whether what stemmed from the reaction produced good or bad outcomes.
Time to be less vague and admit to what I’m writing about here. This is about people, who in good faith and clear conscience, hold positions that society later comes to regard as wrong. It’s about people who are themselves not perpetrators of wrongs, but just wrongly believe. Society can judge these people, even if innocent of any personal atrocity, as still having been unwise and even immoral.
The guilty person had not looked into the future consequences of their beliefs and anticipated the ugliness they would lead to. Society blames them for having been bad visionaries. It even judges them as complicit in the wrongs done. Many of these stigmatized people will disavow their past positions or deny they every had them or claim they were just following orders. But the stain is not easy to scrub off.
Among these misguided people, for instance, were the Germans who enthusiastically supported the Nazi cause. In Hitler’s ascendency to political power, these Germans were enthralled with his rhetoric, hearing in it the sounds of the cultural grandeur of earlier Germany — Bach and Beethoven and even Wagner — sweetened with the promise of a return to economic prosperity.
Germany pre-Hitler suffered for the devastation it caused during the first World War and the reparations demanded by the winning side, which brought on a crippling inflation. People came by the thousands to Hitler’s rallies and listened rapt, applauding, maybe even brought to tears for the pride they felt. He freed them from the denunciations and revenge of their European neighbors. Deutschland uber alles. These believers became Nazi supporters or sympathizers, until years later when the truth of Germany’s ruthless invasions of neighboring territories, the Anschluss, ultimately revealed the atrocity of the Holocaust.
My paternal grandmother, though she had emigrated decades earlier to the States, was a Nazi sympathizer. I didn’t know that until my own adulthood, when I learned it from my mother. She was herself the daughter of two Polish immigrants. Both of my father’s parents were German speaking immigrants from Austria. Neither set of grandparents would have had any occasion to interact before my father met my mother and they started dating.
My parents were married in September 1940, a year after the German Anschluss into Poland, which launched World War II. It was an unlikely intersection of incompatible cultures, but it was the right one for my parents and it lasted with enduring affection for the 56 years of their marriage.
The cultural identification of my Polish mother, in fact the whole Polish side of my family, was much stronger than that of my father and his side with their German heritage. My mother spoke Polish as her first language, not learning much English until she started school. She spoke with my grandmother only in Polish. My father, on the other hand, only spoke English with his parents. In fact, I only ever heard my grandmother speak German to her siblings. I never heard my grandfather use the language, though his accent left no doubt of his origins.
1939 was an inauspicious time for a second generation German to be marrying a second generation Pole, since European Germans had long held Poles to be cultural inferiors, worthy only to be servants or worse. My German grandmother, stayed true to her old world cultural prejudices, and aimed them, albeit in a low-key microaggressive way, at my mother. She was, on the other hand, appropriately grandmotherly for my mother’s children, at least the boys.
The three boys my parents raised were treated with the closest thing my grandmother could come to showing love — wonderful German cooking, arms-length affection with a smile — but always accompanied by the lessons of discipline and hard work. The two girls, my sisters, got much less concern. For them grandma’s German cooking didn’t compare to the Polish food my mother made. They were too young to ever know their Polish grandmother, so they absorbed their Polish influences through my mother’s family’s attention to tradition. My older brother and I, though, did know our grandmother and cherished her. We still do.
But back to the theme. My German grandparents never talked about their pasts and, after birthing four children, they divorced when the youngest boy was still in elementary school. He and his older sister stayed with my grandmother and they moved in with us into the upstairs half of the duplex where we lived. It was the second time my mother and grandmother had resided in the same house, the first time being immediately after my parents married. My mother always felt quiet resentment about the treatment her mother-in-law dished out in those first years of her marriage. But mom rarely voiced her feelings other than to say that grandma was demanding. You just noticed it in how my mom’s body would tense up and how her natural warmth went into retreat when her mother-in-law was in the room.
After my father left for the army during the war, my mother took her two sons and moved in with her own mother. That’s where we, still very young boys, learned to love our Polish grandmother and where we got embedded into the culture of the Polish ghetto on Chene Street in mid-century Detroit.
So now some speculation. Did my German grandmother’s pro-Nazi sympathies brand her? Did the reality of her son joining the American army against Germany, and later yet Germany’s defeat and the atrocity of the concentration camps darken her personality and mute her? Did her cultural views clash with her outgoing, buoyant husband’s, he being a loving, indulgent grandfather, and lead to their divorce? Did the history of the war make her queasy about the admiration she had earlier felt for the Nazi cause? That actually is less speculative. It did happen that on occasions decades later, she expressed a certain admiration for Roosevelt.
But, a final, summing up speculation. Did her earlier sympathies toward Germany make her distrustful of giving or receiving affection, essentially for the rest of her life? No one, including her children or grandchildren, ever posed these questions to her and she was content after her divorce to live her life coolly distant and friendless. She eventually lost her hearing and refused hearing aids, maybe to keep the questions at bay.
We’re in a period now in the United States where there is a populist spark inflaming the right wing of the population. They feel aggrieved by the affrontery of liberal factions to assert, much too aggressively in their minds, their Constitutional rights and their demands for cultural recognition. Much too “in your face” those people. Too much DEI directed to them.
This half of the population with conservative bents have retaliated by elevating into the presidency a person who inspires them. They’re glowing with a promised return to the former national glory they associate with patriotic white males brought up with traditional Christian values. Their president is now intent on making all of this happen through retribution, punishing the left wing and the people and institutions that enable it. It’s too sad for me to go into the details, and not really unnecessary since the depredations are aired daily in the news and twenty years from now will be documented in the history books.
But there are also signs that at least a portion of the population that voted this president in are having second thoughts about their judgment call. They are themselves not immune from the damage he primarily directs at his opponents. Everyone gets caught in the crossfire and everyone is being hurt, or will be hurt, in some fashion. This president’s approval, while he still allows it to be measured, is dropping. Fake news, he says.
So extrapolating from my grandmother story and the personal consequences of her misjudging who were the good guys, what are the long term consequences of the president’s MAGA adherents voting to upend our democracy? Will history show this to have been undeniably a misjudgment on their part? Will it imprint onto their conscience and incline them to denial and silence about their complicity in trying to upend our Constitution? Will it scar them? Or will some of them never repudiate the brand and stay loyal to it? Will they defend and even continue the depredations of their Fuhrer, like the resurgent Neo-Nazis do today in Germany?
Of course, it’s still early in this president’s own cultural Anschluss and it’s not clear how it will end. Sometimes the bad guys do win, after all. Under that unhappy scenario it would mean that MAGA has rewritten the Constitutional gospels of this country. In that case I would be among the people having come down on the wrong side of our future history and I could see myself forced into the self-preservation of silence. Or, if silence wasn’t enough for the overlords, I wonder if, Brave New World style, I would claim to have been a supporter all along? I seriously don’t think so. The very fact of this article means that I won’t get away with lying or evasion.