Rather than making music and poetry my focus here like I should have earlier on, I mistakenly made political activism my intial focus in Germany and ran into the same German guilt problem. As a US-american citizen living here was alone enough reason to have run-ins with the German guilt complex. I have some Jewish relatives but am not Jewish myself. However, I am from a country where people here defend as the “savior from Nazism” (see Bomber Harris, etc.) which is only partially true. And I always say the World War Two was the only war that I can think of off the top of my head where the US should have been involved in and should have been involved with early, hell 1933 might have been a good date to start it! But when I criticize the country I’m from, I am met with accusations of being “anti-American” (what my anti-US sentiments have to do with the rest of America, I don’t know-I have spent enough time in Latin America to learn to differentiate.) I have even been accused of being “anti-Semitic” for opposing capitalism and being against corporate globalisation! What that has to do with Jews, I don’t know, but shows that there is still a lot of anti-Jewish sentiments implicitly in a lot of Germans’ minds (leads me to believe that many Germans still have associations in their minds with Jews and capital, money, banking, etc). So they jump to the conclusion that because I am against the G8, IMF, and company, that I must be against Jews!

Anyway, to make a long story short, being a left person from the US is very hard here on many fronts. Most of the people I work with here politically now are non-Germans, Latin Americans mostly, and I have very few associations with Germans politically.