THE UNITED States is the only country I have, and the only country
            most German Americans have, since the homeland of our ancestors was
            so loathsome and finally our enemy in two world wars.
            Irish-Americans and Anglo-Americans and Chinese-Americans and
            Norwegian Americans and Italian Americans and Filipino Americans and
            so on have the option, should this country do something which really
            stinks to high heaven, of feeling that they, after all, are only
            visitors among crazy people, no matter how long their families may
            have lived here.
            Afro Americans are also stuck with the United States of America and
            nothing else for countless tragic reasons, not the least of which is
            that native black Africans do not acknowledge them as even distant
            relatives. So an Afro American, like a German American, would be
            stating no more than a simple fact should he echo the American
            patriot Stephen Decatur's famous toast in Norfolk, Virginia, in
            1816, when enslaving Afro Americans was still perfectly legal: "Our
            country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be
            in the right; but our country, right or wrong." Decatur would
            eventually be killed in a formal pistol duel with a fellow Anglo
            American.
            German Americans are by and large OK in 1992, maintaining a non-
            existent profile as such, and when in the news, as was our General
            Norman Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War, exemplifying Americana as
            unadulterated as a bottle of Pepsi-Cola with the cap still on. Ask
            the general who Goethe and Schiller and Heine were. He may know, but
            he would be well advised to answer, if he wants to go on addressing
            chambers of commerce and trade associations at $ 50,000 a pop, "Were
            they the outfield of the Saint Louis Cardinals in 1939?"
            But the mass of Afro Americans is in one hell of a shape. Because
            they are as distinctively color-coded as the wires in a time bomb,
            and because they are one-tenth as numerous here as persons with much
            lighter skins, including orientals, I cannot daydream of good times
            of any duration for most of them. They are simply too tempting, too
            convenient as scapegoats, in these hard times, for Americans of all
            shades, for politicians seeking re-election not to suggest, as
            George Bush did in his first campaign for the White House, that the
            rest of us are right to be afraid of them.
            I had better say for the benefit of the lady in Medicine Hat,
            Alberta, those who may not have heard of that campaign, that it
            featured a convicted black rapist named Willy Horton, who was
            paroled from a Massachusetts prison while Michael Dukakis, Bush's
            rival candidate, was governor of that state. And what did the black
            monster do as soon as he got out? He raped again. Yes, and the coded
            message in the enthusiasm of so many politicians, including the
            president and vice-president, for the availability of fully
            automatic weapons to one and all, surely, is that the time may come
            when, in order to protect our wives and daughters, we may have to
            mow down wave after wave of Willie Hortons.
            It is all so nitwit primitive, as was the Nazi thing. And as a
            German American I may be, although not necessarily, more sensitive
            to similarities between some of the attitudes and enterprises of my
            own government and the Nazi thing than are some of the other
            hyphens.
            Born in 1922, I have wondered how my family and I would have
            responded to Hitler had we lived in Frankfurt am Main, say, instead
            of Indianapolis, Indiana, am Fall Creek.
            It is my educated guess that we could have had misgivings about much
            that was going on, but would not have been certain that our
            misgivings were justified, and so would have kept them private. My
            father's sister, an American citizen, married a German citizen and
            lived through the war in Hamburg, and they had a son about my age.
            My cousin wound up as a radio operator on the Russian front, where
            he was taken prisoner.
            That is about what would have happened to me, too, I guess. If his
            parents said boo about anything the Nazis were doing or seemed to
            believe, I have not heard of it. Nor were they overtly complicitous
            in war crimes or crimes against humanity or whatever you want to
            call them. To their credit, I have to say, once the war was over, it
            did not occur to them to inflate small acts of compassion or
            reluctance on their part into hair-raising tales of anti-Nazi
            derring-do.
            They were simply whipped. That was about the size of it.
            I asked Heinrich Boll at the very end of his life how much ordinary
            German citizens had known about the Nazis' ''Final Solution'' to the
            problems that the Jews of Europe were thought to present. He said
            that they knew about the killing going on in the relatively modest
            genocidal institutions in their own neighborhoods, about which they
            spoke as little as possible, for fear that they themselves might be
            put inside one. But news of the high-tech, state-of-the-art corpse
            factories like Auschwitz, Poland, Auschwitz and its satellite
            nightmares, he said, came as a surprise to most of them.
            I think that is true. Heinrich Himmler, the unspeakable ex-chicken
            farmer whose underlings kept the Polish crematoria running at
            capacity around the clock, said to some of those underlings in a
            speech that they were especially heroic, since they would never be
            able to tell what they had done for their country once the war was
            won.
            Nichts sagen.
            But we over here would need no bureaucracy of ultra-patriotic
            tormentors to shorten the lives of millions of Afro Americans,
            should we elect more and more politicians who teach us, as did
            George Bush with the Willie Horton parable, that Afro Americans, and
            especially the males, are a cancer in the body of an otherwise
            wholesome society.
            We aready know that the consequences of hopelessness can do the job.
            They worked like a charm with the Indians. So be it. Whatever
            happens to the mass of Afro Americans next, and never mind their few
            multimillionaire superstars, it cannot be as bad as the slow-motion
            Auschwitz of slavery must have been back when Stephen Decatur said
            what he said in Norfolk, back when Thomas Jefferson, author of the
            Declaration of Independence (''When in the course of human events it
            becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands
            which have connected them with another ...'') and James Madison,
            author of the first amendment to our constitution (''Congress shall
            make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting
            the free exercise thereof ...'') both owned slaves.
            There may have been a few German Americans back then who also owned
            slaves. My own ancestors simply got here too late to buy some.
            © 1992 Southam Inc., The Gazette (Montreal)