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Holocaust Remembrance Day: You shouldn't get used to it

2021-01-27T18:02:00.729Z


Today is a particularly important day to see the stumbling blocks, to tell the story of the victims - but also to remember the diversity of murder. That brings no salvation, but it is necessary.


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Holocaust memorial in Berlin

Photo: Maja Hitij / Getty Images

Today there was much to be heard and read again, this evocative, so well-intentioned formula of the "civilization breach of the Shoah".

In an earlier context it was an important word: it invalidated those contemporaries who referred to other countries, because the British and the Americans too had camps, because Stalin and Mao also murdered millions.

What Germany did there was simply not comparable, it was a break in a historical development from barbarism to civilization, from the law of the strong to the rule of law.

The Germans got out and there are explanations in the sense of descriptions, but no excuse.

Today the context of the discussion is again different, and a break in civilization, that sounds as if the problem of the Nazis and the other perpetrators is that they could not eat with knife and fork.

They could do it, often right after they had practiced the craft of murder.

The genesis of the terms with which we talk about crime is part of German psychological history.

They refer to earlier terms, refer to each other and only for the initiated to the matter.

We just can't be sure

Which is overwhelmed, still, and always will be.

In this context there always comes the point at which terms conceal more than reveal, at which their use serves to protect the audience, and who wanted to seriously criticize this impulse?

But one must not get used to getting used to it because the extreme right is still in the process of trivializing the talk of the "fly shit of German history" or mocking the "guilt cult" because the case of the sect QAnon shows how quickly insane ideologies can turn into violence, and because we simply cannot be sure that such crimes will not repeat themselves.

And above all because we owe it to the memory of these victims: to tell about them.

About what happened to them and who is to blame.

And who they were before.

The last thing we can do in the helplessness of those born after is little enough.

What needs to be talked about and written about is the mass murder of the citizens of Europe, of people who were murdered both systematically and cruelly.

With poison gas, but also with firearms, through beatings, through the deprivation of food, water and care, on forced marches and in action for slave labor.

In every imaginable way, without mercy and as a motive only hatred and an ideology that is itself a crime.

And the more we know, the more intense this overwhelming sense of despair becomes at what our ancestors did.

Enlightenment makes it even darker.

Variety of Murder

The idea of ​​inhuman, industrial murder in the gas chambers of the extermination camps shaped the memory for a long time.

But the research zoomed in, described the variety of murder, the spontaneity of the acts, showed the proximity of perpetrators and victims, and thus made it even more unbearable.

As violent as the shock of the television series »Holocaust« and the film »Schindler's List« was, and as much as one has to appreciate this enlightenment: Even the clearest fictional representation of the mass murder is completely glossed over and shows the user interface, which is pleasant for a postmodern audience.

Precision is the only remaining way to approach crime.

It is not inviting, hardly manageable.

There is, for example, this book, The Lost, by Daniel Mendelsohn, published ten years ago.

In it, the American literary scholar embarks on an incredibly complicated search for distant relatives, his great-uncle Schmiel, his wife Frydka and their four daughters.

Mendelsohn reconstructs the fate of this family over hundreds of pages.

They were not in Auschwitz when they died, but in their Ukrainian hometown of Boleschow, where they were respected people.

When the Germans approached, they hid.

They were betrayed, pulled out of a cellar, and shot in front of an apple tree.

And if you were to undertake a search in Germany like Daniel Mendelsohn, an archeology of families and secret crimes, you would at some point end up at a point where concepts and terms no longer help.

You would find something like that too, you would end up in the garden of a house, and where Mendelsohn found the victims of the murder you would find a distant relative who pulled the trigger at the time.

Why?

This is the path of a memory that brings no redemption, but which is necessary: ​​to turn the mass murder of the Jews of Europe back into the murder of this person.

In front of many residential buildings, the stumbling blocks provide information about the people who once lived here and who were picked up.

Today is a good day to look at them in peace, to think about the story they tell - and those who don't tell it, namely who it was who took them, who thought it was good, and who saw it, but never said anything again.

Icon: The mirror

Source: spiegel

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