Antisemitism and Holocaust Remembrance
Juliane Wetzel examines the relationship between antisemitism and Holocaust remembrance. She offers an explanation for the persistence of antisemitism after 1945. Wetzel discusses that despite a taboo against open antisemitism, precisely because of Auschwitz, feelings of guilt led to the phenomenon of antisemitism – so called secondary antisemitism – exposing a failure to come to terms with the past and resulting in Holocaust denial and the minimisation of the Holocaust. The trivialisation of the Holocaust by comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and antisemitic tropes such as “Jews talk too much about the Holocaust”, as well as the reversal of perpetrators and victims in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have become a widespread phenomenon across Europe. The Middle East conflict has become a backdrop for the projection of antisemitic sentiments, often related to the Holocaust. These feelings can be expressed even by those who present themselves as anti-antisemites and anti-racists. This leads to challenges in Holocaust education, even more so in classrooms with a significant number of students with migrant backgrounds whose parents came to Europe after 1945. Myths about the Holocaust are prominent not only in Arab media but also in the Internet. Wetzel highlights the difficulty of respecting the singularity of the Holocaust with regard to other atrocities and totalitarian regimes.
Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany
After the defeat of Germany in World War II, 140,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were transported to camps maintained by the Allies for displaced persons (DPs). In this study, historians Angelika Konigseder and Juliane Wetzel offer an administrative, social and cultural history of the DP camps. Starting with the discovery of Nazi death camps by Allied forces, the authors describe the inadequate preparations that had been made for the starving and sick camp survivors. The Allied soldiers were ill equipped to deal with the physical wreckage and mental anguish of their charges, but American rabbis soon arrived to perform invaluable work helping the survivors cope with grief and frustration. The book devotes attention to autonomous Jewish life in the DP camps. Theatre groups and orchestras prospered in and around the camps; Jewish newspapers began to publish; kindergartens and schools were founded; and a tuberculosis hospital and clinic for DPs were established in Bergen-Belsen. In many places there was a last flowering of shtetl life before the DPs began to scatter to Israel and other countries. Using original documents and the work of other historians, this volume seeks to shed light on a largely unknown period in Jewish history and shows that the suffering of the survivors did not end with the war.
Religion and school
The report presents and argues in favor of the thesis that the secular school offers no alternative in modern society. Simultaneously, the author displays the basic contours of spiritual physiognomy of such a modern school which in many ways differs from the, school we know in this country. The school the author pleads for does not decide among various contents that influence forming of the young, within which the line is established between theism - atheism, but, on the contrary, pleads for the principle of humanistic education. The predominant here is the notion of methodological skepticism which marks the principle by which the process of education should be realized as though there were no God, or - which is on the same level - as though there were God. Out of this basic principle any others upon which the concept of modern secular school the author pleads for is established can be drawn. It ought not to neglect the rich, scientifically confirmed knowledge on the phenomenon of religion and atheism, which should be, presented in all school subjects where the contents allow for it as well as the Religious Culture should be introduced as a compulsory subject. By introducing this subject as a collection of knowledge on the phenomenon of the, religious, we would avoid imposing a particular religious culture as an attitude, behavior, belief and evaluation.