Word: hitlered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...politics of memory is complicated. Never remember? Or never forget? Or simply, Never again? Now the parents' generation, the survivors of the Hitler years, are in their 70s and 80s and are dying off. The generation's memory -- along with whatever objects and images and cautionary knowledge may be salvaged -- needs to find permanent residence. Or else it will be lost. This week, a powerful -- and controversial -- fortress against forgetting is being dedicated in Washington...
That is what most of the argument is about. At Washington dinner parties, you hear the questions: Why put it in Washington? Why not in Berlin, say? Or else: Why should the Germans suffer this kind of permanently installed American rebuke, as if the years of Hitler were all of German history? And why would Americans build a memorial and museum to the European Holocaust before installing a remembrance, say, of slavery and the black American struggle, or of the devastation of American Indian life? The premise is that America's sacred statuary memory belongs to things that happened...
Americans refused to take in the "Ship of Fools" in 1939, the liner St. Louis, even though it sailed as close as Havana with its 1,128 refugees fleeing Hitler. The American military in 1944 declined to bomb the death camps or the rail lines leading to them. These decisions (documented in the museum) have a contemporary resonance: bureaucratic cowardice and fecklessness, indifference, appeasement, denial, tribal intolerance and fanaticism, racial hatred. This is the way these things happen. The Holocaust is a densely compacted drama of warning that needs to be remembered repeatedly. In the world...
...supporters -- in that fourth dimension of tribal passion where heroic patriotism and great atrocity become equally possible. This is the dimension of tribal memory, drifting in time, across centuries. Grievances float through the dimension like ghosts, crying out for justice -- for the Serbs whom the Croats massacred during the Hitler years, say, or for those Serbs who died at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, when they stood against the Muslims' westward tide toward Vienna and tried to save ungrateful Europe. The fourth dimension is the blood dimension, the great tribal justifier...
Those concerned about a nascent Hitler cult could easily find depictions of him throughout the city. A bare-assed rubber Hitler--smiling and saluting, of course--graced a few of the tacky souvenir shops along The Rambles, and the Nazi dictator's visage appeared in many other bodegas. Another store offered ID cards bearing the names of war criminals. No marginality here. The thought that some people have particularly sick senses of humor crossed my mind, but I found myself wondering. "Do people really think this shit is funny?" This is not the type of question, though, that...