Saluting the Flag of a Nation that Hates You

Ever since the reelection of Donald Trump, I have been obsessed with the diaries of a German Jew named Victor Klemperer.

Victor survived the Nazi Years, writing down everything that happened to him. He wrote from the day Hitler took power, and outlived him. He was one of a handful of Jewish survivors who openly lived among the wider German population from the rise of the regime to its fall. He saw the changes in the Germans who once saw him as his countrymen, and the German nation he felt he belonged to.

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Crucially, he wrote down everything he saw and felt, hoping to bear witness to the change. Because of this, his diary is one of the most important accounts of Nazi treatment of Jews ever written.

Given his incredible story, you might imagine that his treatment would lead him to hate Germany and the Germans. On the contrary, Victor was a staunch German patriot in every sense of the word.

As a young adult, he converted from Judaism to Protestantism, against the wishes of his rabbi father. In the First World War, he fought loyally and with distinction. He stayed put in Nazi Germany, despite having numerous opportunities to flee. He did all this not because he followed orders, but because he did what he felt was expected of him as a patriot. Victor insisted that he was first and foremost a German in a time and place where he was considered nothing more than a Jew.

His Germanness and German identity was tied to an age that, by the time of these diaries, was long past. He wrote as much, but never truly worked out what this meant. "I am German and I'm waiting for the Germans to return, " he wrote as the trains were filled with Jews like him. "[The Germans] have gone into hiding somewhere ". He refused to accept that the Germany he longed for was the same country he now detested.

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His faith that the society he loved and once belonged to would one day return could only be maintained by not acknowledging the Nazi society he now lived in, or when that could not be done, insisting that Hitler and his regime would fall at any moment, and that all would return to normal. His story is tragic, not only because of the suffering he faced, but because he failed to adapt to the new Germany around him.

Although he was persecuted by history’s greatest villain, Victor’s hatred of him and his followers was motivated first and foremost by a desire to return to the Germany he grew up in, an age where he was not defined by his being a Jew, but treated as a fellow German. Like all conservatives, he dreamt of returning to the bygone age of his youth, where people like him belonged. To use a modern phrase, he dreamt of going ‘back to brunch’.

Victor Klemperer around 1930 (Ursula Richter), public domain

I think of him every time I hear a trans person calling themselves American.

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We now live in a country whose rulers have made it their mission to remove trans people from public life. We live among a cis population that, if not enthusiastic for this project, mostly doesn’t care either way. The crime they are committing against the trans population of this country is not some abstract evil; it is a crime for which the whole of American society bears a collective responsibility.

He refused to accept that the Germany he longed for was the same country he now detested.

If the architects of our suffering get their way, the phrase ‘Trans American’ will evoke the same historical horrors as the phrase ‘German Jew’. For as much as we like to say that “ trans people have always existed ”, we don’t like admitting that we, the individual trans people, will not always exist. We are mortal beings with finite lifespans that can be cut short.

The architects of our suffering are not conquerors, they are people we once stood alongside as countrymen. The ordinary people enacting their plan are not foreign occupiers, they are our neighbors. They salute the same flag we saluted as children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Those who wish us harm the most are also the most patriotic. Our oppression is at its most popular in the places America calls its Heartland. As far as most people are concerned, they are more American than us.

We can either accept this reality, or we can lie to ourselves like Victor Klemperer.

You may still live in the same country, but do you live in the same society? You live among people of the same nation, but do they hold the same values as before? Your country waves the Stars and Stripes as its flag, but is that flag yours?

If the answer to any of this is yes, then why?

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Think about the experiences that connect you to America, its people, and its flag. Are these experiences recent, or are you holding onto old memories of a less bigoted past?

If you are attached to the American Flag, are you attached to those who wave it the most? If you are attached to the American people, have you asked an average American what they think of trans people lately? This Independence Day, are you celebrating the idealized America you remember from better days, or America as it exists today?

Over time, that old America will become an ever more distant memory. With the United States in its sixth year of Trumpian rule, I can no longer tell myself that the old America has gone into hiding, waiting to return. That world is dead, and there is nothing you or I can do to revive it.

"I am German and I'm waiting for the Germans to return," he wrote as the trains were filled with Jews like him.

You can react to this however you want. But whatever you do, don’t be like Victor Klemperer. Do not attach yourself to a nation that hates you. Do not pretend that the nation that taught itself that people like you need to be removed from society will treat you as an equal when their leader dies. The American people have shown you who they are. Believe them.

You and I are no longer American in any way that matters.

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