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A German believed to have been the country's last World War I veteran has died at the age of 107, a death that almost went unnoticed in a nation that lost both world wars and doesn't track its remaining veterans.
The news did not even trickle out into the German press until this week, and the stories were more about how Germans remember than about Kaestner's death itself.
"The losers hide themselves in a state of self-pity and self-denial that they happily try to mitigate by forgetting," the daily Die Welt wrote Friday in its obituary for Kaestner.
Der Spiegel magazine noted that "the German public was within a hair's breadth of never learning of the end of an era" until someone who had read Kaestner's death notice in a newspaper figured out who he was and updated a Wikipedia entry on the Internet.
A German believed to have been the country's last World War I veteran has died at the age of 107, a death that almost went unnoticed in a nation that lost both world wars and doesn't track its remaining veterans.
The news did not even trickle out into the German press until this week, and the stories were more about how Germans remember than about Kaestner's death itself.
"The losers hide themselves in a state of self-pity and self-denial that they happily try to mitigate by forgetting," the daily Die Welt wrote Friday in its obituary for Kaestner.
Der Spiegel magazine noted that "the German public was within a hair's breadth of never learning of the end of an era" until someone who had read Kaestner's death notice in a newspaper figured out who he was and updated a Wikipedia entry on the Internet.
