Ex got his ass fired on Valentine's Day...what a loser

I watched videos on YouTube today concerning misconceptions about German and the German language and found myself nodding along with them. Why? Because, even though I live in Canada, I've come up against many of these misconceptions myself due to my last name.

My legal last name is German. My dad was born in Germany during WWII. My Opa fought on the side of Germany during that same war. I was born here. I was not taught German growing up. My dad never spoke much about his life before coming to Canada. Ditto for my Opa.

Now, I'd heard Opa speak German so I knew that the language wasn't as harsh and guttural as a lot of non-Germal people seemed to believe. I understood where people got the impression that the language was harsh, filled with over-pronunciation, rolled Rs, and sounded angry. Listen to Nazi propaganda speeches and you'll understand. But what folks don't understand is that this particular pronunciation was an affectation and not common in most German dialects spoken on a regular basis.

I didn't make the decision to learn German until I was much older. I took a semester of German language when I was at university but, admittedly, nothing really stuck. I wanted to learn it so that I could better read primary historical documents when doing research for my history papers on German history, focused on the lead up the Nazi Germany, life in Germany under the Third Reich, and life immediately after. Sadly, I didn't continue with learning the German classes after that first semester. I recall it had a lot to do with not having the metaphorical spoons to focus on learning a new language as well as trying to maintain a friendship with a rather needy individual and still get all my other school assignments done.

A couple months ago I decided that I wanted to start learning German again. This time it's not for educational or research reasons. I'll be honest when I say it's got a lot to do with my current obsession with the band Rammstein - a band who sings primarily in German. But I am also - finally - delving into my dad's cultural identity, and, therefore, how I identify.

Sure, I'm 50 years old and only now doing this. Why so late in my life? Well...let me tell you.

Canada. People think that Canadians are nice and open-minded, but I'm here to tell you that it's a nice fairytale.

My first real encounter with racism was when I was six. Grade One. We had moved from the city of Vancouver to the city of Langley, and I was put into a class with a person who I referred to as my cousin. This person was of indigenous descent, and I never had any exposure to people being biased against native Canadians until this point. Our teacher, once she learned that D was my 'cousin', started treating me horribly. If I wore my hair in braids, single or double, she would grab my hair and pull hard enough that my head was jerked backward. I was brutally teased BY THE TEACHER, who also encouraged the other students to bully and tease me. This same teacher would also lay her hands on me, smack me, and worse. I was called a squaw, a wagon burner, and much worse. I was a child - I cried at the abuse, causing the teacher to treat me even worse. The final straw was the day that this teacher wrapped her hands around my throat tight enough to leave visible marks - I recall leaving class and running all the way home to my mother. Once my mother heard what I had to say and realized that all my complaints about this teacher were true she went to the school - after warning the principal to have the cops there before she arrived because she was likely to attack the teacher for what she did to me. I was pulled from that teacher's class and put into another class with a teacher who took the time to get to know me. I wasn't the 'retard' that the previous teacher made me out to be - I read at a higher reading level than anybody else in Grade One as both my vocabulary and comprehension was higher than even most kids in even Grade Three. Sure, I struggled with math but I had not yet been diagnosed with dyscalculia (google it - it's a learning disability that centers on math, among other things), but that didn't automatically mean I was somehow 'retarded'. My cousin was left in that racist teacher's class...and failed Grade One through no fault of his own. And it came out through the grapevine that this teacher was highly prejudiced against native Canadians, more of which I found out about as I got older.

And this racism still exists in Canada. It's not often spoke about but it's there. I don't know any native family that has not had this racism touch their lives in some way. And I'm not referring to the pervasive general trauma caused by residential schools either. Depending on where you live in Canada, you may hear stories about natives being taken on 'drives' by police and left beaten half to death far away from home, and some dying as a result of these 'drives'. Or natives who are denied health care under that assumption that they're somehow not a 'good' candidate for medical treatment. Or they're accused of theft simply based on the colour of their skin.

Oh, and similar happens to POC here in Canada. It's not as obvious as it is in the US, but it's there. Ugh.

You're probably reading this and wondering where the whole German identity issue thing comes in. Germans are white, blah blah blah.

In high school I was using my father's last name - it was my legal last name at the time. But my mother was in a relationship with the man I have called Dad for a majority of my life. She knew where Dad was born but it was not a topic she really allowed to be discussed, even after they married. I'll get into this later.

Grade Twelve. I was taking a creative writing class with a teacher who himself was born in Germany. He was older than Dad. And he went off on my mother for marrying a German man. At the time I felt he was being hypocritical because he was German too. Now that I'm much older and have done more than a bit of research I have a feeling that it had more to do with the idea of racial purity. My mother had very dark hair and green eyes...definitely not the picture of Aryanism. Me, I was born blonde-haired and blue-eyed - my hair darkened up as I got older (it's currently black with bright red framing my face, but none of it is natural).

I graduated in 1990, the same year where Germany was reunified...two days before my 18th birthday. I knew a lot of folks who thought this was great but they admitted that they had a hard time trusting Germans. At this time I was still using my birth father's last name so I didn't necessarily get side-eyed.

At some point during all this I had made the observation that in my experience that Dad was a typically stubborn German. By this time in my life I'd met several Germans - including Opa and my uncles, and knew several from school. Including a handful who had German language classes after regular school because they were allowed to know about their cultural identity. They were all confused that despite my mother wouldn't allow any of this in our home, despite being married to a man who was German and quietly proud of it. Oh, she had no issues with German food...but talking about Germany, German history, and German language in the house was verbotten. Hell, when Schindler's List was released she wouldn't even hear about any of us watching it. And, at the time, Dad went along with it. When I verbalized a particular observation about Dad being stubborn like all other Germans I'd had any contact with, she twisted it around to tell people that I apparently hated my dad because he was German and I thought that all Germans were Nazis. When that isn't at all what I said - she made this statement in a phone call to another family member...while I was standing right there. Yes, I screamed at her about this, calling her out for her lie. Her response? "Well, I know that's what you meant by it." Fuck you, you lying cunt. Seriously. But, as I learned over the years it was my mother who actually felt this way, but she stayed with my dad because he was financially stable and put up with her continued bullshit until she passed away in 2021. I am convinced that she never actually loved him - she loved the fact that he owned his own house, two cars (one was a custom Corvette), and worked at the same place for over 20 years at that point. It was all about the money for her.

Dad and I grew close during my remaining high school years, despite my mother's best attempt to sabotage the relationship. No, nothing romantic - he was Dad. The first man in my life who actually filled the role of Dad. We bonded partially over our love of technology, especially computers - when he first came into my life I was taking computer science classes and was into programming. He's also the one that introduced me to finding porn on satellite - he had one of those giant satellite disks in the backyard, and he figured he'd show me how to find various channels properly so that I wouldn't fuck up the settings already programmed into the satellite receiver. He even set it up for me the one time I had a boyfriend spend the night, something that shocked the shit out of the guy! My mother never knew about this - she was total prude but Dad really wasn't. He was a kinkster in hiding for a lot of years. How do I know? I found his secret porn stash on his computers, and even helped him move a good chunk of it between at least two new computers over the year...before I told him that if he wasn't going to listen to me when I told him how to avoid constantly getting computer viruses that I wasn't going to help him fix his computer anymore.

My mother did manage to put some really big dents into the relationship between me and my dad over the years. But he was still fiercely protective of me. 

When I discovered I was pregnant at 18 he wasn't happy, but when I told him that my ex had threatened to kick me in the stomach my dad lost his shit. 6'5" worth of pissed off German is not something you want aimed at you - he was ready to beat the shit out of my ex, but I talked him down. The asshole wasn't worth the potential jail time. Sure, Dad wanted me to give up my baby for adoption because he felt I was too young to be a parent, regardless of the fact that I'd be 19 by the time my baby was due. But when he visited me and my baby in the hospital in the afternoon of the day I gave birth (I gave birth at 4:54am that day), as he held his first (and only) grandchild for the first time he bawled his face off. He apologized profusely for being an ass during my pregnancy, and was absolutely taken by my baby. And when I told him that my baby was going to have his Anglicized name as one of their middle names, and Opa's as well, Dad was absolutely beside himself. My dad's first name at birth was Johann, but in Canada he changed it to John, partially out of backlash against him being German.

Now, this part is my dad's story from when he moved to Canada and the family settled into a small town in the interior of BC. At that time it was my Opa Leo, Oma Johanna, Uncle Peter, and my dad Johann. Opa spoke enough English to help get them settled, but the rest of the family only spoke German. Thankfully there were other Germans who had settled there before and during WWII so Opa and Oma had a built-in community...but the kids had to deal with trying to get by in regular schools. Which meant they had to learn English, and in a hurry. But due to the atmosphere directly after WWII there was a huge mistrust of anything to do with Germany. My dad was bullied horribly, called a Nazi, had his locker vandalized with swatsikas contstantly being drawn on it at school. The house had been vandalized several times as well, but Opa and Oma didn't make a production out of it as they painted over the spray-painted swastikas and lightening SS symbols on the house.

My dad did his level best to lose his German accent, and never used the language unless Opa refused to speak to him in English. He said once he hid his accent that he got bullied a lot less because it seemed to indicate that he was denouncing where he came from. He started using John instead of Johann, but he wasn't going to change his last name out of familial pride. The only time his German accent came out was when he was pissed off about something, or after he was recovering from grand mal seizures where he could barely speak a work of English for several minutes after. Oh, and he would swear in German, something my Uncle Peter confirmed as he found it hilarious. Uncle Peter did his best to retain his mother tongue, but didn't give a rat's ass about his accent - he was his own person, was a hippy until the day he died, and was one of the biggest pot dealers in the same city they had settled into back in the 50s.

Dad felt that he couldn't show any pride in his German heritage. He was born during WWII in Germany, and I suppose he felt a great deal of guilt simply for being born German. None of us know a great deal about Opa's role in any of what happened, but considering that the only reason Opa was able to be present at the birth of Dad was due to having a letter personally signed by Hitler that gave him leave to return to his home village for his child's birth...the train he'd been on had been stopped and everybody was removed, never to be seen again - including some of his friends from his home village - yet he was allowed back on. That was pretty much all Opa had been willing to talk about for the longest time. Until he was on his deathbed and revealed that Uncle Peter wasn't his, that Oma had been a part of the Lebensborn program and Uncle Peter was the result. Really makes you wonder what other secrets Opa took to his grave.

But yeah, I grew up in an environment where being German was tolerated but it wasn't spoken about or really acknowledged. My mother would lose her mind if Dad's ethnicity was mentioned and Dad tolerated it for a lot of years. Until he finally made a point of us watching Schindler's list, and told my mother that not all Germans are secretly evil so she really needed to get over her prejudices. It was the little ways he quietly showed his pride for years.

I remember when I told my mother that I was taking German in university. She couldn't understand why I'd want to learn the language, and when I explained to her my reasons at the time, I was on the receiving end of a lecture about how bad Germans were blah blah blah. Obviously she never gave up her prejudices, but by that time in my life I already knew she was fucked in the head so I didn't pay much attention to her ranting.

Now, for a good chunk of my life I was exposed to some measure of German culture via Dad, Opa, and Uncle Peter, and Opa's group of friends who all accepted me as part of the extended family. None of them cared for my mother - they saw through her bullshit from the very start, and decided to learn who I was as a person without her input. Considering I was supposed to get Opa's VW minibus (complete with a Westafalia camper conversion) in the will, yeah, I'd say that I was accepted much more than my mother....if my mother hadn't literally rented a U-Haul and cleared out Opa's house of everything she thought was of some sort of major value, I'd have actually received said VW. But her actions caused my Uncle Bob to contest the will, and he won because the courts felt that I had somehow been in receipt of a chunk of what my mother stole from Opa's house. I'm STILL salty about that. Can you tell?

There are a lot of folks I've met over the years who when they learn my last name - I legally took my Dad's last name after I gave birth - say that the way I am makes so much more sense. One of my favourite university professors pointed out several times that I was very German in how I did things, from how forthright I was to how I planned out so much, even with my ADHD and mental breakdown throwing a wrench into everything. She understood that I came from a familial background where you just didn't walk about mental health issues, that you shoved your issues down tightly and suffered silently. And I think she knew more about my family than she let on, and considering her own background, including a LOT of historical research into Germany during the same periods of time I was interested in...she was the only history professor that went into any depth into that era of German history. She'd also been given direct access to plenty of primary documentation that isn't easily accessible to just anybody. Why do I think this? We had an in-depth conversation about how I'm of the generation where there are still a lot of buried secrets, and that not just anybody would have been given a letter personally signed by Hitler for any reason. As for my own research, I haven't found much about the family, other than an entire branch ended up in Russia and the town my father was born in was a particular favourite of Hitler's and not wiped off the face of the planet like I'd been told for many years. I kind of wish that I had opted to go further in my studies because she would have been awesome as an advisor, and she might have let me in on what she may have known about my Opa's involvement in the Third Reich. But such is life.

Either way, I know that my experience is different than people my age who lived in Germany or their family was able to be much more open about everything. I was also of the opinion that being at all proud of where my dad came from was a bad idea. Secondary guilt by association? That certainly wasn't helped by that teacher back in Grade Twelve, but at that time I didn't even think of the idea of racial purity - my high school never really went into any depth about the Holocaust or the policies of the Third Reich so I had no clue.

And I've discovered that there is a generation of Canadians who assume that Germans, or people raised by Germans (even partially), are angry-sounding and unfriendly, and that the German language sounds harsh and mean. This includes my boss! I've explained to him that Hollywood has done Germany and Germans a great disservice because normal every-day German doesn't sound quite as phlegmy as he thought, and that Germans CAN be friendly if you approach them the right way and throw out a lot of stupid stereotypes. I've even spoken some of my really rudimentary German around him just to get him used to the idea that it is NOT an ugly language.

But yeah, I've met a lot of people, mostly younger, who still have this idea that Germans are secretly Nazis or at least lean that way, and that spoken German is harsh and strident. But because I wasn't born into a German family I don't think I'm the right one to correct all the idiots who make these assinine assumptions based entirely on my last name. No, I don't go into a lot of background into why I've got the last name that I do - some assumptions are just easier to let people fly with. But other assumptions? I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.