Europe Unites: Successes and Struggles - Travel as a Political Act - page 95

These days, virtually every country in Western Europe has its own Gastarbeiter contin-
gent. Berlin—with over 200,000 Turks—could be considered a sizable “Turkish city.”
France's population includes millions of poor North Africans. And even Ireland—after its
recent “Celtic Tiger” boom time—now has 120,000 Polish people taking out its trash. It's
striking to hear my Irish friends speak about their new Polish worker as if he or she were
a new appliance.
The Tyranny of the Majority
Once, while riding the bus from Munich out to Dachau, I learned a lesson about
the tyranny of the majority. En route to the infamous concentration camp memorial,
I sat next to an old German woman. I smiled at her weakly as if to say, “I don't
hold your people's genocidal atrocities against you.” She glanced at me and sneered
down at my camera. Suddenly, surprising me with her crusty but fluent English, she
ripped into me. “You tourists come here not to learn, but to hate,” she seethed.
Pulling the loose skin down from a long-ago-strong upper arm, she showed me
a two-sided scar. “When I was a girl, a bullet cut straight through my arm,” she
said. “Another bullet killed my father. The war took many good people. My father
ran a Grüss Gott shop.”
I was stunned by her rage. But I sensed desperation on her part to simply unload
her story on one of the hordes of tourists who tramp daily through her hometown to
ogle at an icon of the Holocaust.
I asked, “What do you mean, a Grüss Gott shop?” She explained that in Bav-
aria, shopkeepers greet customers with a “ Grüss Gott ” (“May God greet you”).
During the Third Reich, it was safer to change to the Nazi greeting, “ Sieg Heil .”
It was a hard choice. Each shopkeeper had to make it. Everyone in Dachau knew
which shops were Grüss Gott shops and which were Sieg Heil shops. Over time
there were fewer and fewer Grüss Gott shops. Pausing, as if mustering the energy
for one last sentence, she stood up and said, “My father's shop was a Grüss Gott
shop to the end,” then stepped off the bus.
Conflicts between the majority and the minority persist in today's Europe. Con-
sider Northern Ireland, where the population is divided between Protestants (sup-
porters of British rule) and Catholics (who identify with the Irish). While the famil-
iar Union Jack of the UK is the “official” flag of Northern Ireland, minority Cathol-
ics who'd like to see Ireland united see it as a symbol of oppression. Unfortunately,
they no longer consider it their flag, and call it “the Butcher's Apron” instead.