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With different eyes

Europeans for Peace helps young people from Germany and Israel face up to history – and look to the future.

13.08.2012
© Frederik Preuschoft - Youth

The Masada fortress in Hasan Dastekin’s photograph rises like a wall in front of the small groups of travellers walking up the mountain along a desert path in the glaring sun. “For me, this symbolizes German-Israeli relations: there is still a long way to go,” says the 21-year-old. He is one of 15 German participants in an Israeli-German youth project supported by the Europeans for Peace programme. Ten of them have gathered in the conference room of the International Youth Community Service in Magdeburg to talk about their memories of the journey. The youngest is 16, the others are between 19 and 21. Each was asked to bring along his “stand-up photo”, stand-up because the youth exchange programme is entitled “Stand up for minority rights confronting fear, hatred and social exclusion in German and Israel”. Christof Wittmaack’s stand-up was taken in autumn 2011, when the young Israelis visited Germany. The photograph shows a “pinky shake”, the friendly-casual linking of two hands by means of the little fingers. The lighter hand is Christof’s, the darker one belongs to Mor, a girl from the Israeli group. “The photograph was taken the day we visited the house in Berlin where the Wannsee Conference was held, says 20-year-old Christof. “While there, we talked about our attitudes to the Shoah, we, the Germans who maybe have a great-grandfather who was a Nazi, and the Israelis with their family histories marked by the Holocaust. Afterwards, Mor and I walked around like that. For me it was a sign that history no longer stands between us.”

Just how close that history actually still is, however, was something the young people experienced in Yad Vashem. While standing in front of the Auschwitz photographs, Lina Berg heard other tourists say: “Look! You Germans!” She has not fully absorbed that experience to this very day, she says. There are many open questions to which no answers are to be expected. The trip brought home to them the complexity of Israeli problems. “Is Jerusalem too holy?” is how Christof subtitles his photograph of masses of people in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, while 19-year-old Johannes Neumann, impressed by the omnipresent Israeli patriotism, considers whether the Germans should not perhaps be a bit more patriotic. To what extent does patriotism make you impervious to critical self-reflection? Where does criticism of Israel stop and anti-Semitism begin? Can their generation really find another emotional relationship to Israel than the generations before them? These young people can ponder these questions relatively candidly, but the possible answers always lead back to history. In one photograph on the notice board a cheerful face smiles out from under a woollen hat: it is Nadav, 17 years old, one of the Israeli participants, whose ancestors lived in Magdeburg. A young girl at the table says something which probably all of them were feeling: the best thing about the trip was the encounter with young Israelis.

Franziska Ihle, director of the International Youth Community Service Magdeburg, who chaired the meeting, initiated the project with the Coordination Centre German-Israeli Youth Exchange. She applied for support from Europeans for Peace, a programme organized by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”. Although the foundation was set up primarily to compensate former forced labourers, it also supports youth exchange between Germany and the countries of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe and Israel. So far, 400 international projects have been funded with 5.7 million euros from the Europeans for Peace programme. Each year, Europeans for Peace stipulates a theme for the projects. This year it was Human Rights Past and Present. A hip-hop opera addressing the theme of the right of asylum is being produced in Tel Aviv and Mannheim. One group is dealing with the right to education, another with everyday discrimination and how it can be opposed.

Just how important these programmes are is made clear by a project called Stand Up for Your Rights!, which is being carried out by students of the Integrated Secondary School in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Many of the young students are from Arab families. The school is the first and so far only one to be sponsored by the Jewish Museum. The teachers have drawn up an exemplary programme against anti-Semitism. One Arab boy says how he only realized the extent of the Holocaust after visiting Yad Vashem and listening to a contemporary witness, Vera Dotan, talk about her life. Since then he sees Israel with different eyes.