As Berlin and Tel Aviv mark a diplomatic milestone, the relationship born out of pragmatism, guilt and survival faces its toughest questions yet — especially amid war, protest and growing calls for criticism.
Tag: holocaust
The upcoming International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem will include leaders from the European far right, revealing a disturbing shift in the meaning of solidarity, memory and the political use of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was based on the same ultranationalist ideas that the New Right refers to today. Even if Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Germany’s AfD leader Alice Weidel try to distance themselves from the words associated with Nazism, their politics cannot fool us.
In the German city of Mannheim, the museum of modern and contemporary art is re-staging its iconic 1925 exhibition on the art movement. One hundred years on, it resonates strongly with our current era. Does our restless present demand a New Objectivity? Or does it serve as a warning?
Some 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, there are fewer and fewer survivors to bear witness to their experiences. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial in Poland is developing an exhibition of works of art created by prisoners as a way of sharing their voices and emotions with future generations.
German history teachers talk about teaching their subject during a resurgence of the far-right AfD party and rising antisemitism in the country.
The memory of the Holocaust remains a painful and ever-present stain on Polish history. While the trauma continues to affect the living survivors and their families today, many survivors’ descendants are facing it head-on, and returning to Poland to learn about their family history and transform it into artistic works.
The release of the film Bucha by Ukrainian director Stanislav Tiunov, based on true events during the Russian invasion in spring 2022, raises questions about the ethics and exploitation of war on film. While this is not the first time a director has been accused of trying to make a blockbuster out of a tragedy, the film demonstrates the importance of taking time to reflect on such events.
A video in the summer of 2023 showed Julia Alli playing the piano in her home southern Lebanon. In the fall of 2024, a new video emerges of Israeli soldiers in the ruble of that home and piano. For writer Badia Fahs, the contrast also links to the story of Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning Holocaust drama The Pianist.
“Then the white man found the Middle East: a distant place, rich in nature and humanity, with a beautiful climate. He invaded it, then divided it, then separated the sections accordingly.”
An increasingly positive era of post-Holocaust Jewish life in Germany ended one year ago — the sense of progress and confidence gave way to a new, age-old fear, writes Sascha Chaimowicz in Die Zeit.
Updated June 25, 2024 at 1:10 pm Anne Frank’s diary, titled “The Diary of a Young Girl” was first published on this day in 1947. Who published Anne Frank’s diary? Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, published her diary. He survived the Holocaust and was given Anne’s diary after the war. Recognizing the importance of her […]
Just north of Berlin, a luxurious villa that used to belong to top Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels has become a real estate headache. What should become of it?
Political battle lines are becoming increasingly entrenched, and opposing views are being pushed towards ever greater extremes. Language has become a battlefield. If morality pushes us apart, and religion does not help in the process, we may find a solution in our sense of humanity, writes German psychiatrist Manfred Lütz in Die Welt.
Oscar-nominated ‘The Zone of Interest, tells the’ story of the Auschwitz commander in surprising ways, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt’s film critic.
South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice attempts to turn longstanding international law on its head, writes Kai Ambos, a top expert on international law, for German daily Die Welt.
This wasn’t supposed to be about politics or identity or anti-Semitism, about war or peace. It’s a story about a name. What’s in a name? Nothing at all, says Mr. Shakespeare. Or maybe all of the above when the name is Israely and the year was 2023.
The debate over the war in Israel is raging on social media. In this divisive atmosphere, it is impossible to call out anti-Semitism in Muslim communities or on the right wing without being applauded by all the wrong people. What Germans are failing to acknowledge is how much the country’s own history has to do with this.
The post-War generation in Germany was shaped politically by one question: Why didn’t our parents prevent the Holocaust? Nowadays, as baby boomers are retiring, the inner political wrestling seems to have fallen out of time, because anti-fascism has long changed sides.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials have referred to Hamas militants as “the new Nazis.” But as horrific as the Oct. 7 massacre was, what does it really mean to make such a comparison 80 years after the Holocaust? And how can we rightly describe what’s happening in Gaza?
Sectors of the political Left around the world have practically lauded the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel — finally barely bothering to hide their good ol’ fashioned hatred of the Jews, rather than hiding behind anti-Zionist rhetoric. Something evil has been re-released.
It took decades to transform Hiroshima and Auschwitz into authorized destinations that welcomed visitors to explain the sites of unspeakable horrors. Ukraine is encouraging people to see such places as Bucha and Irpin, where Russia is accused of war crimes. Exploring the line between the morbidity of dark tourism and the value of historical memory.
In a deep-rooted divide that has plagued Poland for years, the role of non-Jewish citizens in the Holocaust remains a much debated issue. But now the increasingly popular far-right party Konfederacja is toeing the line of blatant Holocaust denial.
Perpetuating the silence around sex and body issues can lead to misinterpreting historical events, and prevent us from taking action to right wrongs.
A group of pro-peace German intellectuals published a letter asking the country not to deliver heavy weapons to Ukraine, but they’re missing the point completely. Germany needs to reinvent itself in order to face today’s challenges — and threats.
Recovered in 2006 off the Uruguayan coast, the the Swastika-laden crest of the warship Admiral Graf Spee risked becoming a prized collection item in the growing market of Nazi artifacts.
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Why Sweden Has An Antisemitism Problem
In October 1943, nearly the entire Jewish population of Denmark made a perilous crossing from their Nazi-occupied country to neighboring Sweden. Setting out from ports and beaches along the coast, some 7,000 people arrived in rowboats and canoes to the safe shores of the port city of Malmö. Now, 78 years later, in the same […]
Ephroim “Johnny” Jablon’s entire family was gassed to death. At 94, he can’t forget the smells and so many other details of the camps. Such memories are dying away.
It was 3 p.m. on January 27, 1945, when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Soviet Army. The full scope of the Nazi barbarities, which included the extermination of six million Jews, was about to be exposed to the world. That January afternoon 75 years ago also marks the beginning of the documenting process, the painful but necessary gathering of evidence, accounts, photographs and film that would later be used in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and stand as the historical record of the Holocaust. About 1.3 million people (mostly Jews) had been deported to the Polish camp […]
-OpEd- PARIS — A people brings glory upon itself up when it is able to confront the complexity of its history. On the contrary, it dishonors itself when it takes on a defensive posture with its past. In Poland, both houses of the legislature have now voted in favor of a law criminalizing any reference […]
SpongeBOZZ’s new album quickly shot up the German hip-hop charts, but his irreverence is telling, part of a growing trend to treat World War II as distant history.
-Analysis- Today Donald Trump will deliver a speech at the Holocaust Memorial Museum for the National Day of Remembrance. Safe to say, there will be prepared remarks, which neither Trump nor his top spokesman will write. This is no occasion for Trump’s verbal freestyling. Meanwhile, it was Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who two weeks ago […]
-Analysis- PR disasters can happen anywhere to anyone. While United Airlines is (not) doing its best to recover from the instantly infamous “re-accommodating” of a bumped passenger on an overbooked flight in Chicago, another somewhat smaller drama was playing out on the Italian island of Sicily. Ahead of next month’s G7 summit in the Sicilian […]
Whether killing with their own hands, orchestrating or quietly aiding and abetting, a disturbingly high number of people in voluntarily fell in line with the Nazi killing machine.
More than 70 years after the end of World War II, Uwe Steinz wants to bring the Nazis’ “lower clergy” to justice.
In a never-before-published interview shortly before his suicide, the Jewish-Italian author opens up about his adolescent angst and traumas beyond Auschwitz.
A visit on the eve of the 500th anniversary of the neighborhood where Jews were forced to live, giving the world the culture, confinement and indignity of the ghetto.
-Essay- PARIS — There are times when it is necessary to compare things that are not comparable. There’s a chance at least that it will wake up some anesthetized minds. Between 1933 and 1940, several million refugees who had escaped from Germany, Poland, the Baltic countries and elsewhere, fleeing Nazism, were met with closed borders. […]
Jerusalem and Berlin have strong ties in no small part because German officials virtually never criticize Israel. But that may be the seed of creeping estrangement.
The French son of an Auschwitz victim and German daughter of a Hitler supporter spent their lives confronting Nazi crimes, from capturing Klaus Barbie to a symbolic slap of a German Chancellor.