Holocaust remembrance day quotes movie#
Holocaust remembrance day quotes series#
Holocaust remembrance day quotes tv#

In 1998, German author Martin Walser lamented what he called the 'instrumentalization of Auschwitz' and said that the constant use of the Holocaust as a 'moral cudgel' had the opposite effect. Others complained of an excess of remembrance culture.

Holocaust remembrance day quotes series#

The US television series 'Holocaust,' starring Meryl Streep, had a significant impact on Germany's remembrance culture

Holocaust remembrance day quotes tv#

Right-wing critics called the TV series an incitement the left derided it as a 'commercial Hollywood melodrama.'

Holocaust remembrance day quotes movie#

Günter Rohrbach, then the head of public broadcaster WDR's TV movie division, received death threats, and bomb attacks were carried out on two transmission masts.

Read more: German students give Holocaust victims a voice onlineĪ few months after the original air date, Germany's parliament, the Bundestag, decided by a narrow majority that the mass murders committed during the Nazi era shouldn't fall under a statute of limitations.īut there was resistance back then as well. 'It was this film that created something like a culture of remembrance in Germany,' says Werner Jung, director of the National Socialism Documentation Center in Cologne. The word 'holocaust' was still unknown to most Germans in 1979.

Things began to change when the country's younger generation started questioning - and accusing - their elders.įorty years ago, the American television series Holocaust was viewed by millions of people in West Germany. People didn't want to know anything about their own crimes or lack of action. Until the 1960s there was a general silence. Remembrance itself has a checkered history in Germany. Too much, too little or wrong remembrance? In an interview with DW, he denied that the situation was getting worse: 'We are just more sensitive to this rage yelling that's coming from the AfD, for example.' Last year, its leader Alexander Gauland said that 'Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over a thousand years of successful German history.' And two years ago Thuringian state AfD leader Björn Höcke called for a '180 degree change' in Germany's culture of Holocaust remembrance.Īccording to historian Wolfgang Benz, incidents such as these do not necessarily mean that anti-Semitism is once again socially acceptable in Germany, considering the 'outrage' that Gauland and Höcke have caused. What particularly worries Jews in Germany are statements made by politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Read more: German teacher fights schoolyard anti-Semitism Some 41 percent of Jews in Germany said they were victims of anti-Semitic hostility, compared to an average of 28 percent in the other surveyed countries. It found that over the last year, Jews in Germany haven't just faced more hostility than in previous years, but also more than in other countries. That concern is backed by a recent survey from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in 12 European countries. Remarks such as those from the AfD's Höcke have sparked fears of rising anti-Semitism in Germany