I'm not much into Thanksgiving anymore. It used to be a nice thing when my close friends would come over and it wasn't as much about the food as about the company -- like how Thanksgiving is supposed to be.

But now lots of my close friends have moved away (or were on vacation) and suddenly I was calling anyone who might want to stop by for turkey and mashed potatoes. Since this ultimately is pretty pedestrian fare, Thanksgiving gets dull when it's about the food. But this year it was more than that. It also leaves an odd taste in my mouth celebrating the prelude to genocide, direct or indirect. I guess it's semantics but maybe we could go back to a harvest fest. I don't know.

Living where I do I well know that I can do little about the past. Beyond Thanksgiving, I sometimes find myself struggling with Germany's past. Simple logic seems to say that living here is a kind of endorsement of days gone by. I find myself considering this each time I bump into one of these gold plaques. They list the name of Nazi victims who used to live in an adjacent building. Leo Goldstein lived in Sredzkistrasse when it was still named Franseckystrasse. It's not just the names and dates and visualizing these people being torn from their lives that gets me. It's also the fact that they say where the people died. This almost brings me to tears, which is the point, I suppose.

Sabine and I are open with the kids about what these plaques mean. They have a vague idea of the war and now even The Wall.

It's a cliche that you can't escape the wars here (real and cold) but it ends up in places you don't expect. Like child-rearing. Or even when buying an apartment -- we had to look at our title for some reason recently and discovered the Nazis took it from a Jew who lived in Kassel (Sabine's hometown). You could then see when East Germany got ahold of it.

Do I add a "genocide" keyword to this?