Consider my cringe inducing use of clichee in the post title. Sorry. Truly. Particularly because I'm not sure if I am in fact overreacting simply because I'm German. If so, sorry again. I have a feeling, though, that I'm not, and that what I'm about to say is actually not about nationality, but about the traps of assigning nationality.

I watched TV last night. Not a frequent occurrence it has to be said. After a delightful episode of the Apprentice, somewhere on British TV, a badly made documentary was shown (please leave a comment if you know the title or channel). I didn't quite manage to get to the core of the point of the programme, but there was a highly irritating, marching presenter, with a know it all, seen it all attitude, destined to enlighten us about hideous architectural outburst of German national socialism and how they reflect Nazi ideology. Let's not get into the utter pointlessness of the programme, or the worrying notion that it did no more than stating the obvious and showing us disgusting buildings which must have resulted in viewers' numbers going rapidly downhill by the minute.

Rather, let us consider his lingering on the term "German", his continuous attempt to relate fascism to the German mentality, and to suggest that fascism came natural to Germans and would continue to fall on fertile grounds in the German psyche. Now, I'm the first to expose xenophobia, racism and all that in Germany, don't get me wrong. But to insist with such fervour that fascism and national socialism are almost interchangeable with the adjective "German", and to claim that  Germans welcome(d) an ideology which  promotes "compulsion" and "communality" because Germans love compulsion and doing things in masses, and that they get a real kick out of it, well no. Get lost.

Fascism was an international movement based on nationality, ideas of superiority, belief in progress and a new order for a changing society. It misled people through ideological indoctrination and brainwash. It almost destroyed the world as we know it. It's not just a German phenomenon, even though in Germany it reached its most horrific incarnation. However, ideological indoctrination, genocide, death and labour camps, torture and the simple and horrific disregard for anyone considered to be different is by no means a localised or historical incident. We should spend more time spotting the Hitlers of today and exposing them, rather than waste time reiterating that the Germans were the "best" Nazis, while making the terms "German" and "Nazi" so conveniently easy bedfellows.