Language:
English
Year of publication:
2006
Titel der Quelle:
Telos; a Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought
Angaben zur Quelle:
135 (2006) 127-154
Keywords:
Goebbels, Joseph,
;
Klemperer, Victor,
;
Baum, Herbert,
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Abstract:
In May 1942 a communist resistance group, mainly Jewish and led by Herbert Baum, firebombed the Nazi anti-Soviet exhibit "The Workers' Paradise" in the Lustgarten Park in Berlin. Immediately afterward members of the Baum Group were arrested by the Nazis and, as a reprisal, 500 Jewish hostages were rounded up, 250 of whom were shot. This action was followed by a Nazi decision to speed up the deportation of Jews from Berlin. After the war this action was memorialized in East Germany, but authorities tried to suppress the fact that the group was mainly Jewish. The communist group was memorialized much less in West Germany. Reflects on whether the firebombing of the anti-Soviet exhibit was a heroic or a foolish act. On the one hand, the Baum Group's goal to inspire a popular anti-Nazi uprising with this act failed. Some members of the group had had police protection before the act, but afterward they were arrested and executed. On the other hand, the Lustgarten bombing created a romanticized narrative for the GDR and for Jewish memory. Like many other acts of resistance, this act allows for a range of interpretations between "heroic" and "foolish".
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