"I CAN'T EXPLAIN IT, IT'S JUST SICK!"
Last week the chief homie from my class asked me what I thought about Farid Bang und Kollegah (the name of that rap crew) during recess. So I told him: "Xenophobic, homophobic, mysoginistic and antisemitic shit." Then he wanted to know what "antisemitic" means [sic!] and I explained. His next question was what text passages by Farid Bang und Kollegah I thought were antisemitic, but I couldn't answer because recess was over. So I promised him to pick up the topic in class next week.
So, at the beginning of our next lesson, I wrote "My body is more defined than that of Auschwitz inmates..." [lit. translated] on the blackboard and waited if someone would pipe up. One girl did and asked "Should we write this down?" "No, you don't need to. I just want to know what you think about this one line." The response was: "That's from 0815 [one of their songs]", "Yeah man, Farid und Kollegah, they're extreme!", "They're machines!", "What is a defined body?" and finally "What are Auschwitz inmates?" [sic!]; After that, confused silence. To anwer the question about Auschwitz inmates, I read the students a few passages from Primo Levi's "Is that a human?", described the scope of the mass murder of the Jewish population by nazis in the Third Reich and projected two pictures to the wall; commented as thus: "To the left you see a bodybuilder with a perfectly defined body (
https://goo.gl/images/dyJh8Z). His body fat is extremely low, each muscle clearly stands out. On the right photo you see an Auschwitz inmate (
https://goo.gl/images/g3bbjD). When you read the words on the blackboard again, do you have any thoughts about that now?"
After one or two minutes of embarassed silence, a girl said the line "My body is more defined than that of Auschwitz inmates..." was disgusting. When asked what exactly she thought disgusted her, she said "I can't explain it, it's just sick!" And one of the boys: "The bodybuilder is torturing himself, because he wants to. The man from Auschwitz looks like that, because he was tortured by someone else. And he doesn't have any muscles anymore. He's surely going to die soon!" Another boy: "That's right. That's abnormal to write something like that. The Kollegah doesn't have any feelings for these humans!"
I'll let this speak for itself.