14 DAY TRIAL // Katina Schubert, a deputy leader of the Left Party, came out to the press and said that she had filed charges against Wikipedia, on the grounds that the world's most famous UGC site had been promoting Nazism and more exactly that the German site had been containing too much Nazi symbolism with a particular fetish towards the Hitler Youth movement, as Duncan Riley of TechCrunch.com reports.
While I myself am not a German speaker, I'll have to believe those who are and who have checked things out. I guess I should have paid a little more attention in the German classes and perhaps I wouldn't be forced to say that "Ich sprache Deutsch sehr schlecht" and I would be able to input some personal feedback on the matter.
Antje Wilsch commented on the article that "I just read about this and had taken a look earlier and I would say I have to rather agree. German is a very nuanced language, as is English, where depending on the exact word used in a particular way and the context all together can lend itself to different meanings- all shades of grey. [?]That being said, the language about the history is almost obsessive. It strikes me as being written by Nazi lover(s) bursting at the seams to obey the rules but literally walking the lines to see how far they can push. It almost sounds barely concealed pride vs. a tone of scholastic approach, let alone critical."
Schubert also claims that "there are signs neo-Nazis are trying to take advantage of such structures, and this needs to be stopped." Be that as it may, you can't claim to teach history without emerging into it, just as a series of facts that have absolutely no connection to the real world. I remember that, back in the days when I was studying about Nazism, my head teacher came with a vinyl album of songs that were being played to the Hitler Jungend, and I can tell you that it made my blood stir. And that wasn't Nazi propaganda, it was a means of explaining why among other things it had caught on so big.