I was still a small child during the years of the Second World War. At some point, a heavy book
appeared on our coffee table comprised mainly of pictures taken in concentration camps of dead and
dying Jewish prisoners. It did not require much prompting for me to develop a well justified fear and
hatred of all things German including the country's entire population. Those feelings remained intact
well into adulthood.
In 1992 I finally accepted an invitation to appear at a Star Trek Convention in the city of Augsburg
near Munich. Once there, I made it a point to announce my heritage. If there was going to be a
problem I wanted to confront it immediately. No one blinked. The people who came to the con were
very enthusiastic, extremely supportive and, if I may indulge a weakness for sentimentality, really quite
loving.
I've been back six times since then to conventions in Bonn, Berlin, Bremen, Darmstadt, Fulda and
most recently Munster.
Each time the experience was overwhelmingly positive. The twenty five years of appearing in a country
before a people I had despised for the first forty five years of my life has taught me two very important
truths: If there is such a thing as a genetic predilection for evil then it is a heritage all of us, all
mankind, must carry. History shows us that genocidal atrocities are not the province of one nation, one
culture but are a burden that we must live with. China, Russia, The Sudan, Burma, South America,
Great Britain, the United States - you could go on and on listing the guilty pasts (and presents) of
societies throughout the ages. In fact, blaming one group of people as being inherently bad as
opposed to the rest of us, is simply deflecting the responsibility we all must share.
The other thing I learned was that human beings, along with a predisposition to destroy each other,
have inherited the gift of doing good. It is not always about survival of the individual and the
concomitant aggression that leads to the devastation we have known but it's also about the survival of
the species and the humanitarian efforts that have been performed on its behalf. As much blame as
we shoulder for what has gone wrong during our stay on this planet there is also much to rejoice in.
There is an amazing number of good people performing acts of kindness and philanthropy everywhere
in the world.
My most recent experience involving pride in the human race came while I was in Germany and asked
to attend a ceremony heralding the opening of a new building on a school campus. The town was
Bottrop and the institution was the Hauptschule Welheim. I met students from the ages of about twelve
to seventeen in the auditorium. There was a Q&A period during which I was asked questions that
ranged from my Star Trek experiences to what I had encountered at the Thailand - Burmese border
two summers before.
After that we were all escorted to the newly erected lunch room building. The staff and the
administration of the school had determined that it would be called "Cafe Terra". It was not hard to see
why. The student body is composed of the children of immigrants from more than fifty countries. Over
time, these families had come to Bottrop from the Middle East and the Far East, from Africa, from
Eastern Europe, from almost every conceivable point on the globe. This truth was evident in the
distinctively different faces of the youngsters I met. After the ceremony I signed autographs. I stood
there scribbling my name and reflecting on both the terrible history this nation had endured during the
first half of the twentieth century but also on the grace and beauty with which it's people now appear to
have been imbued. Yeah, there are skinheads in Germany just as there are skinheads in the U.S.
That will probably never change. But there is also an African American president in Washington and
there is a multinational, multicultural, multiracial Hauptschule Welheim in a small city in the country of
Germany. Star Trek foretold a time when we could all live together. I'm betting that we're on our way
there.
-Walter Koenig