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.