Language:
English
Year of publication:
2008
Titel der Quelle:
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
Angaben zur Quelle:
47,3 (2008) 485-498
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
;
Kristallnacht, 1938
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Commemoration
Abstract:
From the 1950s surviving Jewish populations in Germany commemorated "Kristallnacht" each year on 9 November. By the late 1970s "Kristallnacht" commemoration began to expand beyond the borders of the Jewish community and into the national arena. Germany has produced a plethora of "Kristallnacht" memorials at sites of violence where Jewish property was destroyed. Based on fieldwork at 50 memorial sites that commemorate "Kristallnacht" in Germany, explores how violence against synagogues and Jewish sacred objects has become the symbol of the Holocaust in German remembrance. Notes that the prevalent form of commemoration is that of missing synagogues, rather than atrocities and death. Such memorials tend to represent the Holocaust as an attack on Jewish religion, rather than as the murder of numerous Jewish citizens; therefore, they distance the memory of genocide from the German national consciousness. This visual trope as a representation of the sacred is complicated by other attempts of humanizing, and thus implicitly Christianizing, the Holocaust.
DOI:
10.1111/j.1468-5906.2008.00422.x
URL:
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