Ratlines, the latest novel by North Irish author Stuart Neville, is not only about the former Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Charles J Haughey, but also on the prominent Austrian SS-veteran Otto Skorzeny who lived in Ireland from the late 1950s (and was buried at the Döbling cemetery in Vienna after his death in 1975) > text (c) THE IRISH TIMES, 2013
Today it is 72 years ago that Walter Benjamin committed suicide at the French-Spanish border. Stephan Wackwitz dissevers literature from science, holiness from genius in the legends of this literary critic who has served as pillar saint for many.
Text (c) DIE WELT / signandsight.com, 2010
Image: the monument Passages by Israeli artist Dani Karavan in Portbou, Spain, commemorating Walter Benjamin. Photo (c) picture-alliance / akg-images
“HHhH is Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘butcher of Prague’, a man who physically and ideologically embodied the Nazi regime. His immediate superior was Heinrich Himmler, and rumours were whispered in the shadows of the Third Reich that ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich’ – in German, Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich, or HHhH.
The book traces the planning, execution and aftermath of Operation Anthropoid, the resistance’s successful plot to assassinate Heydrich in Prague, the city he commanded as Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. The two heroes of the novel are Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, the almost unbearably brave assassins, but Heydrich, in all his horror, is the central character. “All the characters are real. All the events depicted are true,” asserts the book’s cover. And hence Binet’s dilemma.” Read the full review in THE IRISH TIMES, 2012
PS. Heydrich was assassinated exactly 70 years ago.
>Another review (guardian.co.uk)
“The aftermath of the so-called ‘death match’ between the Kiev football team ‘Start’ and a team of Nazi soldiers during World War Two has been hotly debated for decades. Continue reading
“The slogan Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu! was a Yugoslav Partisan motto, afterward accepted as the official slogan of the entire resistance movement, and was often quoted in post-war Yugoslavia. It was also used as a greeting formula among the movement members both in official and unofficial correspondence during the war and for a few subsequent years, often abbreviated as “SFSN!”. (…) Continue reading
“German historian Moritz Pfeiffer asked his granddad what he did in World War II, and then fact-checked the testimony. His findings in a new book shed light on a dying generation that remains outwardly unrepentant, but is increasingly willing to break decades of silence on how, and why, it followed Hitler.”
> Article & photo abum (c) DER SPIEGEL, 2012
> The notion of cultural memory (c) Goethe Institut
PS. On the problematic function of family memroy, also see
> Harald Welzer, Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi (c) AJC
The brutal March 1943 massacre in the Belorussian village of Khatyn, commemorated in a 1969 memorial, has come to symbolize the horrors of the German occupation. Given the continuing centrality of the massacre to Belarusian memory politics, the details of the event remain under-studied. For political reasons, Soviet authorities and Ukrainian diaspora nationalists alike had an interest in de-emphasizing the central role of collaborators in carrying out the massacre. Using German military records, Soviet partisan diaries, and materials from Belorussian and Canadian legal cases, the author of this article revisits one of the most infamous, yet least understood war crimes committed on Soviet territory. > Article by Per Anders Rudling. Photo: statue of Iosif Kaminskii at Khatyn memorial site, Belorussia, ca. 1981. (c) Michael Gelb.
“In the new documentary by Simon Wieland Heil Hitler – Die Russen kommen (‘Heil Hitler – The Russians Are Coming’) eyewitnesses recount their individual stories under the swastika and Soviet star. Following a successful road tour through the Weinviertel in Lower Austria, the film will be on general release in Austria from 27 January.” Article (c) wieninternational.at, 2012
Places like Theresienstadt (above) or Auschwitz show how connected the Habsburg heritage and the Nazi era are in Central Europe. In some cases, like in Western Ukraine (Galicia), the Austro-Hungarian past even seems to be the prehistory of genocide.
Photos (c) Ruthner, 2011
delirium clemens 