In advance of another anniversary on Monday – the 90th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power – pandemic radicalisation has repurposed anti-Jewish conspiracies. “With our remembrance culture we have achieved quite a bit, but personal remembrance – people looking at their own family history – is still in its infancy.” “We are experiencing a victim-perpetrator reversal,” he said. Meanwhile the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has declared war on Germany’s “guilt cult”, hoping to tap into the 38 per cent of Germans who, according a 2020 poll, would like to draw a line under the Nazi period and feelings of collective guilt.įor Felix Klein, federal commissioner for anti-Semitism, such polls are a worrying reminder that many Germans misunderstand postwar efforts to take ownership for the past as a perpetual guilt trip. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has complained about a 'guilt cult' in a bid to appeal to Germans who say it is time to draw a line under the past. Some German Jewish critics dismiss it as wreath-speech “memorial theatre”, a virtue-signalling demand for a forgiveness that can never come. This annual Bundestag ceremony on January 27th, when the Auschwitz death camp was liberated in 1945, has been part of Germany’s political calendar since 1996. To a visibly moved audience – including President Frank Walter Steinmeier, chancellor Olaf Scholz and leading judges and ministers – Schirdewahn said Friday’s ceremony “makes visible the injustice that did not end in 1945 and, for those affected, gives them back some of their dignity”. On Friday Schirdewahn told the Bundestag how his life was marked by deep shame and a criminal record struck out only through a 2017 rehabilitation law. As a 17-year-old he was convicted in 1964 under the Nazi era paragraph 175 and avoided prison only by submitting to therapy to “heal” him of his homosexuality. That change came too late for Klaus Schirdewahn. The Nazi law remained, unchanged, on East Germany’s statute books until 1957, and West Germany’s for a further 12 years. Around 10,000 convicted men ended up in Nazi camps wearing the pink triangle, the lowest rung of the prisoner hierarchy, and many were murdered. Some 50,000 men were convicted in the 12-year Nazi era under a revised criminal code – paragraph 175 – that made illegal not just sex between men but any “lewd act”. Three decades of memorial work, she said, had made her aware of the selective nature of European remembrance.Įxcluding Sinti and Roma and those persecuted because of their political and religious beliefs or sexual identity was “wrong”, she said: “If people are divided into categories of more or less valued, it means that the Nazi ideology lives on and remains effective.” “I lived a double life and this double life made me sick,” she said. She told the Bundestag audience that she was so terrified and confused by her family’s fate – and what it meant for her – that she was 50 before she had her “coming out” as a Jewish woman with a Shoah shadow. Renamed Rita, she was six when she learned her true identity – and that her parents and newborn baby brother had been murdered in Auschwitz.Ī rose is placed on the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. In February 1943, when she was aged just nine months, her pregnant mother placed her in the care of a friendly couple in Amsterdam.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |