"Your daughter will burn in Hell"

At a parent-teacher conference when I was in first grade, my teacher told my mother that I would burn in Hell since I didn't believe in Jesus Christ. 

At least, that's what my mother told me years later, when I was in high school or junior high.

That explained a lot. Such as why it had seemed as if my first grade teacher hated most of the class.

When I was in first grade, I hadn't even heard of Jesus Christ. I'm sure I never discussed him with the teacher. She must have been making assumptions about me based on my last name.

What did my mother do about it at the time? 

Nothing. She felt powerless. She was afraid I'd be retaliated against if she complained. She didn't see any path that would make things better.

My mother waited to tell me so as not to traumatize me. I was already traumatized enough by that teacher. When I complained to my mother back then, my mother told me that the teacher was mean because she was a frustrated spinster. I thought that was an odd and uncharacteristically bitter comment, but it makes more sense now in light of what the teacher said at the parent-teacher conference.

By the time I was in high school, my mother began to push back when she saw injustices against me. It's possible she felt more comfortable with the high school's powers-that-be than with my grade school's principal, whom she didn't trust.

After I graduated from Ivy League schools and became a professor, I noticed that my colleagues refused to put up with bad behavior from their kids' teachers. They raised a fuss and got things changed. My parents' striving for upward mobility paid off, moving me into a socioeconomic class with higher expectations. 

Nowadays, anyone can complain about anything on social media and get teachers in trouble, whether or not they deserve it.

To this day, thinking of my first grade teacher still conjures up visions of Satan and me amidst crackling flames.

The Statue of Jakob Herz

It looked a bit like a large tombstone. Each time I passed it as I biked down a side street during my stay in Erlangen, Germany, I wondered why it was there. One day, I stopped to find out.

I propped my bike against a nearby fence and walked around the obelisk, looking for clues. One side had German text that translates to "We remember Jakob Herz, to whom citizens of this city erected and destroyed a monument." Another side seemed undecided as to whether it was the curriculum vitae of a person or of a monument.

According to German Wikipedia, the stele was erected in 1983 "to represent `a monument to a monument' and to commemorate the original statue."

The original statue of Jakob Herz (1816-1871) was erected in his honor in Erlangen's main town square on May 5, 1875, and was a larger-than-life statue depicting the man himself. It was torn down on September 15, 1933, the day after a decision to do so was unanimously passed by the Erlangen city council.

Herz was a much-loved surgeon and teacher who was named an Ehrenbürger of the city of Erlangen in 1867 and became the first Jewish professor in Bavaria in 1869, two years before he died of sequela from health problems incurred from his service as a physician in the Franco-Prussian War. The 1875 statue was funded by public subscription, and seems to have been the first monument in Germany to honor someone Jewish.

The 1875 statue of course had a face and a body (presumably an accurate depiction of Herz). The much smaller 1983 obelisk contained no images.

From what I saw during my stays in Erlangen between 1988 and 2000, I thought that Germany generally did an impressive job of trying to come to terms with the Nazi period. Much better than what I would expect from the U.S., which seems more susceptible to historical amnesia. But the contrast between the statue of Jakob Herz and the "monument to a monument" stuck in my head.

Thanks to Jakob Herz, I'm now much more likely to notice the many reminders of the anonymity of the "other", faceless and often nameless, perhaps relegated to a number (as in "six million Jews"), while members of one's own "tribe" are humanized and treated as individuals with faces and bodies. Once one learns to see such disparities, one sees them everywhere.