Tomorrow will be the 80th anniversary of the anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria on 9 to 10 November 1938, also known as "Novemberpogrome","Reichskristallnacht", "Reichspogromnacht" or "Pogromnacht" in German.
In the 1920s, most German Jews were fully integrated into German society as German citizens. They served in the German army and navy and contributed to every field of German science, business and culture. Conditions began to change after the election of the Nazi party on January 30, 1933 and the assumption of power by Adolf Hitler after the Reichstag fire. From its inception, Hitler's regime moved quickly to introduce anti-Jewish policies. The 500,000 Jews in Germany, who accounted for only 0.76% of the overall population, were singled out by the Nazi propaganda machine as an enemy within who were responsible for Germany's defeat in the First World War, and for her subsequent economic difficulties, such as the 1920s hyperinflation and Great Depression. Beginning in 1933, the German government enacted a series of anti-Jewish laws restricting the rights of German Jews to earn a living, to enjoy full citizenship and to educate themselves, including the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which forbade Jews from working in the civil service. The subsequent 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and forbade Jews from marrying non-Jewish Germans.
The result of these laws was the exclusion of Jews from German social and political life. Many sought asylum abroad; thousands did manage to leave, but as Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1936, "The world seemed to be divided into two parts — those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter." In an attempt to provide help an international conference was held on July 6, 1938 to address the issue of Jewish and Gypsy immigration to other countries. By the time the conference was held, more than 250,000 Jews had fled Germany and Austria, which had been annexed by Germany in March 1938. However, more than 300,000 German and Austrian Jews were still seeking shelter from oppression. As the number of Jews and Gypsies wanting to leave grew, the restrictions against them also grew with many countries tightening their rules for admission.
By 1938, Germany had entered a new radical phase in anti-Semitic activity. Some historians believe that the Nazi government had been contemplating a planned outbreak of violence against the Jews and were waiting for an appropriate provocation; there is evidence of this planning dating to 1937. The Zionist leadership in Palestine wrote in February 1938 that according to "a very reliable private source – one which can be traced back to the highest echelons of the SS leadership" there was "an intention to carry out a genuine and dramatic pogrom in Germany on a large scale in the near future."
During the "Progromnacht" on 9 to 10 November 1938, in a coordinated attack on Jewish people and their property, 99 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and placed in concentration camps. 267 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. This was done by the Hitler Youth, Gestapo, SS and SA.
At the time of Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Jewish musicians were perhaps Germany's and Austria's most important living cultural assets. There was hardly a note of popular music that did not rely on Jewish artists for either the tunes or the words, and often both. Jewish musicians were equally active in the established and avant garde music scenes.
»Loved, chased away and murdered« is a CD with popular hits by Jewish artists that was brought out by the "Foundation Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe" (www.stiftung-denkmal.de). It features well-known german interpreters from the 1920s and 30s, including the Comedian Harmonists with their rendition of "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt" and Richard Tauber singing "Dein ist mein ganzes Herz". It recalls the memory of 20 Jewish artists murdered or forced to emigrate after the National Socialist takeover of power.
Geliebt - Verjagt - Ermordet
(192 kbps, front cover included)
5 Kommentare:
Zero, ginge ein re-up?
Of course. Best wishes!
Thanks. Danke. Merci.
My daughter was exacerbated when she returned home from work last night. One of her friends had informed her that the friend' daughter's school was having it's annual Pocahontas day on which children dress up as indigenous Americans. The friend was profoundly upset. It reminded me of the Thanksgiving folk-tale of harmony between colonists and indigenous durng the 1600s in my home state of Massachusetts and the annual holiday e hold to celebrate it. Childhood memories about such moments as part of the sanitization and propagandization or our own history vividly come to mind when I listen to such stories from my children. At the same time another casual friend recently remarked that there was no such thing as white privelege and why don't "they" a.k.a. "the others" just get over it. I reponded to my daughter that, as a third-generation Irish Amerian, I grew up listening to my grandfather and older relatives discuss the memories their parents had of growing up in the aftermath of the Great Famine and experiencing discrimination here during a time when they had notyet achieved "whiteness", that elusive alleged racial identity that confers so much here. I informed her that every day of their live my black and Hispanic friends are preoccuoied with being the other and acting "properly" to avoid confrontation, conflict or worse when immersed in whte society. If one doesn't have such worries and can walk around stores without being watched, not be stopped by cops and treated differently, etc. then one enjoys white privelege which is a combination of race and privilege here. We in the United States still contend with or avoid discussion about the impact, the legacies if you will, of genocide, slavery, racist immigration policies, etc. Especially now, when we have an alleged leader who thrives on promoting racist stereotypes of the other and oozes white privelege from every pore of his body. I told my daughter that, in fact, history never really dies. We either learn from it or we don't and it eventually re-emerges in slightly different but all too recognizable ways. As a boy, I vividly recall the bigotry John F. Kennedy suffered because of his religion and I lived long enough to see it again when Barack Obama ran and presided over our country. I informed her that today I feel as if I am living in the early twentieth century with it's growing frustration and disdain for democatic rule and desire for authoritarian nationalists. Consequently, I am reading Fromm's "Escape From Freedom" and other books in an effort to understand. Here pundits discuss ad nauseum the frustration and losses of the working class as the basis for Trunp's victory, yet they envision a white working class that excludes other races and ethnicities, that is, those whom Trump did not appeal to and who did not vote for him. .
The point of these comments is simply to say that we must never forget and repeat the grave or horrific events of another era or prattle on about how the good old days were so much better and we simply need to make America, France, Germany better again by turning the clock backwards. Through recordings such as this, you never cease reminding us of the past and its connection with the present and I am profoundly grateful that you make the effort to do so and, in doing so, compel thought. I was born in the early 1950s and vividly remember Jewish friends and classmates recalling the fates of their relatives who chose not to emigrate. In most cases, they had to recount what happened because those relatives were no longer alive to do so. Thank you so much for remembering, Zero!
Thanks a lot for sharing your experiences with us. It is a great pleasure having blog visitors like you! All the best!
Kommentar veröffentlichen