Kimberly was the complete opposite. At the age of 19, she had started to live in a leftist commune, study Marx and wait for the world revolution. How the two of them collided is a story too long to tell.
“So, you are making your money with automobile racing?” Kimberly asked her and Anita answered: “Yes, one can say so, even though I don’t race myself.”
Kimberly critically questioned that profession: “And are you aware of the fact that automobile racing is the most fascist sport on earth?”
If there was one thing that Anita had learned about university politics, it was that leftist people often mixed up fascism with capitalism and that was why they didn’t know their enemy. So, she answered critically: “I agree, if you say that automobile racing is the most capitalist sport of the world, but what is fascistic about it?”
“Then, why for example, are there no black or Jewish racers?”
Anita said: “First of all, I know a black driver and secondly, I think it's more of a social thing than a racial problem. Most people from minorities don’t have the money to buy their sons a go-kart and if they have some, they worked harder for it and don’t want their children to waste their money on those things.”
Kimberly ignored that answer kept shooting holes in Anita’s conscience: “I assume you talked about National Socialism in school.”
“Yes, that was always a topic, “Anita answered her
“But you only learned about the crimes of the Nazis, not about the structures which still continue.”
“What kind of structures do you mean?” Anita wasn’t sure if Kimberly was offending her, implying that all Germans are still Nazis.
“Well, for example, automobile racing. Are you aware that the Nazis supported that sport because it displays the New Man. Male, powerful, fearless and controlling technology? The New Arian. The automobile racers were the first to ban Jews. What do you think about that?”
“But you can say that about every sport,” Anita’s defence was a bit weak. But then Kimberly just got started: “Have you heard of those?” She asked and named race tracks, cars and drivers. Anita had to admit that she knew the race track and one of the drivers was the father of one pilot in her team.
For Anita, it was a strange feeling to know somebody, at least by sight, who had collaborated with the Nazis. (Her grandparents had told her that they had hidden Jews in their basement.) For the first time in her life she started to doubt whether she had taken the right choices in her life. The Nazi accusations had really caused a stir in her mind. Because of her 1990s German socialization she knew that there was nothing worse than being fascist. And now her working environment had been declared as such. But it was not only that. She also had the feeling that she had missed something essential, something meaningful in her life. When she was young she had always imagined that she would join a group like Greenpeace or Attac to save the world at least a little bit. And what had happened to that dream? Today, she was organising press conferences for people who objectively were not even unimportant but harmful for the environment.
That conversation gave her many sleepless night and desperate hours of self-doubt. Should she quit her job and work as an anti-globalization activists in the rain forest? But, on the other hand, what was Kimberly doing to change the world? Reading Marx over and over again, would that alone be enough? In the end, Anita concluded that she would continue to recycle her garbage and donate money to a feminist education centre in her street and thus help change the world at least a little bit.
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