Growing up in Germany, we were taught to believe we had done better. Better than our grandparents’ generation, who swept their complicity under a thick rug of silence. Better even than our parents, whose revolts in the late 1960s rarely led to any serious reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust.
Born in the late 1980s, my generation learned about Auschwitz early on. We visited former concentration camps and studied the Nazi regime not as an alien aberration, but as a warning: this is how democracies die. Today, with the far-right AfD and ethno-chauvinism on the rise, that warning has never felt more urgent.
