Abstract
Today, the German and global narrative of the Holocaust refers to the genocide of approximately 6 million Jewish people by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. This history and memory are reflected in the sheer number of books written about these events in addition to different memorials, exhibitions, TV documentaries and school textbooks. I will contribute to the ongoing discussion of remembrance and reflection, drawing from my extensive ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2017 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.
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Notes
- 1.
The Stolpersteine memorial project is the brainchild of Gunter Demnig, a West German political artist born in 1947. His father was a member of the Condor Legion, the German military unit responsible for the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish civil war (Debus 2007).
- 2.
For more info on his biography see Meckel 2006, p. 109 ff.
- 3.
I was greatly unprepared and sickened by what I saw in Oświęcim, Auschwitz. Never in my life have I seen such unbelievable horror.
- 4.
The brutal genetic experiments by Dr. Mengele included blood transfusion, injecting diseases, castration, mutilation and organ removal. Some 3000 twins were subject to his gruesome medical experiments. In 1945, Mengele escaped to South America and never faced trial. In his study in 1993, Paul Weindling reported that the terms like ‘euthanasia’ and ‘incurable’ were euphemistic medicalized camouflage carrying connotations of the relief of the individual suffering from terminal illness while the procedures were in fact painful and violent (1993, p. 543).
- 5.
This question is inspired by Sally Rogow 1999, p. 80 ff.
- 6.
See Ikhwan et al. 2019 for other (un) making of social memory of a dark past in Asia.
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Acknowledgement
This research was hosted by the Department of Socio-Cultural Anthropology, University of Freiburg, and supported by the DAAD’s re-invitation program in 2017. I am grateful to them both. I also thank my three anonymous research assistants for their valuable help. I dedicate this work to all of my research participants and to those whom the world has forgotten.
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Yulianto, V.I. (2023). Whom to Remember? An Outsider Perspective on the (Un)Making of Social Memory of the Holocaust through Stolpersteine in Freiburg, Germany. In: Lücking, M., Meiser, A., Rohrer, I. (eds) In Tandem – Pathways towards a Postcolonial Anthropology | Im Tandem – Wege zu einer postkolonialen Ethnologie . Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38673-3_16
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