Monatsarchive: Mai 2018

Schlieben-Berga was the third-largest of Buchenwald’s satellite camps. Residences now coexist with the buildings of the concentration camp weapons plants. „Hey, want to have a drink at my place after work? Just turn left at the munitions dump, I’m the … Weiterlesen →

Stalag IV B was where Kurt Vonnegut was imprisoned. The guide at Ehrenhain Zeithain had said that at Mühlberg the camp had been demolished and the site was returning to the woods, and he wasn’t joking. The foundations of the … Weiterlesen →

Regionale Besonderheiten? Tablets listing names of the known dead stand silent witness on the neatly trimmed lawn. As one walks more become visible beneath the trees.

When I was a kid my dad and I had read exciting stories about English airmen escaping from Colditz Castle. Though the day was warm and sunny up above, these chambers were cold. Lifesize cardboard cutouts made from black and … Weiterlesen →

The phrasing of articles over the past weeks from the BBC, Guardian, Spiegel, Die Zeit, is all of intelligent rational actors – Macron, Merkel, Johnson – engaging with a twit. Emmanuel Macron’s thesis for his master’s level degree was on … Weiterlesen →

Their new Secretary for War was a barrister with a passion for German philosophy, Richard Haldane, who, when asked by the soldiers in Council what kind of army he had in mind, replied, “A Hegelian army.” “The conversation then fell … Weiterlesen →

The cathedral really is magnificent. The Monday Demonstrations here started at Barlach’s Ehrenmal, one of the few places in a church where it made sense to me to light a candle.

Memory, forgetting, the manner in which people and states remember a past which never was, greatly interest me. I’ve read before about how the word ‚holocaust‘ became appropriated for the usage it has in the US today. I found this … Weiterlesen →