Johler / Bonah / Teboul We remember - the 86

A Franco-German Gathering in Alsace with Descendents of Nazi Victims
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-8197-1801-4
Verlag: epubli
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 271 Seiten

This book is the result of a Franco-German encounter between teachers, students and the descendants of victims of Nazi scientific crimes who traveled from the United States, Israel, Switzerland and the south of France especially for the event. The event took place in Alsace in June 2023. In mid-August 1943 86 Jewish men and women from several European countries had been murdered in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp for the purpose of adding their skeletons to the anthropological collection of the then Reich University of Strasbourg. With numerous images and reports, this book documents and tells a special story: for one, the changing, private and also institutional memory of this crime, then the related, changing transnational cultures of memory of the present, and finally the didactic-pedagogical communication of remembrance in memorial sites. From the outset, the descendants of the victims, the teachers and students in Strasbourg were in agreement: We Remember.

Meine Forschung und Lehre ist ganz wesentlich geprägt von den vielen Umbrüchen, die unser Fach in den letzten Jahrzehnten erlebt hat. Dies zeigt sich schon in seinen Namen: Ich habe in Wien eine mitteleuropäisch geprägte Volkskunde studiert, habe gleichzeitig durch Stipendien in England Kurse in Social Anthropology und in Italien in Demologia/Antropologia Culturale absolviert. Nach dem Studienabschluss habe ich ein paar Jahre am inzwischen umbenannten Institut für Europäische Ethnologie gearbeitet. 2002 bin ich nach Tübingen gekommen und vertrete hier mit voller Überzeugung die Empirische Kulturwissenschaft.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Johler, Reinhard

Bonah, Christian

Teboul, Jeanne

Lang, Hans-Joachim

Leseproben

Introduction

The Publishers

Jerusalem, April 17, 2023. At the Valley of the Communities in the International Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem, Israeli President Jitzchak Herzog speaks before invited guests about a “museum of horrors that a Nazi beast planned at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg in France.” In his televised speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah, Herzog recalls the murder of 86 Jewish men and women, commissioned by the German anatomy professor August Hirt, to expand the anatomical collection of his institute based on racist criteria: “Eighty-six worlds, worlds of love, joy, and dreams, reduced to dismembered limbs.” Meanwhile, on a large screen in the background, Siegbert Rosenthal, born July 11, 1899, in Berlin, murdered on August 18, 1943, in the gas chamber of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, is prominently displayed as a representative of all 86 victims. A photo shows him turned towards his small son, whom he holds in his arms. Herzog is visibly moved: “One can truly see, hear, feel the gentle face of the father. The laughter of the infant.”

Only the photo ‘survived.’ An employee of the Israeli president discovered it during her research on the website 86names.com. On this site, Hans-Joachim Lang extensively documented and presented the biographies of the murdered victims he identified by name—often with the help of the families of the 86. Siegbert Rosenthal was one of them. His grandniece, Magnea Henný Pétursdóttir, who lives in Iceland, supported Lang’s research with documents from members of her family who managed to flee Berlin in time. It was therefore no coincidence that she and her husband stopped over in Tübingen during their vacation, two days after Jitzchak Herzog’s speech in Jerusalem. Although they were subsequently unable to attend the meeting in Strasbourg in mid-June, Hans-Joachim Lang was still able to show them places in Tübingen connected to their tragic family history: They saw the east tower of the castle, where Hans Fleischhacker worked in the early 1940s—he was one of the two anthropologists who, in Auschwitz, in June 1943, selected the 86 Jewish men and women who were later taken to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace and murdered. From the castle, the couple could look down towards Neckarhalde, where August Hirt lived in an attic room for two months during his stay in Tübingen in 1944/45.

Moments like these—both grand and official, as in Jerusalem, and small and personal, as in Tübingen—keep the past alive. They serve as reminders of the Shoah, not in a general sense, but very specifically, bringing individuals and their worlds to the forefront. However, finding the right words that adequately honor the lives, suffering, and deaths of Jewish people during that time is not easy. The temptation to rely on worn-out phrases or overused emotional expressions is strong. Communicating the almost unimaginable scale of these crimes to people today requires continual effort, new approaches, and fresh perspectives. At the heart of this book are three key themes: first, the remembrance of a Nazi crime committed “in the name of science;” second, the transnational and rapidly evolving cultures of memory associated with it; and third, the educational and pedagogical methods of conveying this history, particularly at memorial sites.

With these questions in mind, we—teachers and students from the universities of Strasbourg and Tübingen—aimed to explore them together in this remembrance project, and we deliberately approached it as a closely intertwined effort between France and Germany. After all, the crime committed by a university professor and several scientific and non-scientific assistants was transnational in nature: The deportation of the 86 people occurred via Auschwitz to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace; and most of them came from numerous European countries that the Nazis had occupied during the war. This brought a transnational perspective to the forefront for us, especially since the relatives of the victims who now traveled to Strasbourg also came from various countries.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog referenced this point in his speech, repeatedly emphasizing his aim to see, in the 86 Jewish men and women, more than just victims rescued from anonymity. He spoke specifically about Sara Bomberg, whose daughter Hadassah only learned of her mother’s fate in the Holocaust 60 years later. Hadassah had survived, hidden in a Belgian orphanage, and emigrated to Israel in 1949, where she married. Herzog explained, “She named her eldest daughter after her mother, who was murdered alongside the victims of this horrific museum: Sara.” That same Sara Bell was sitting in the audience with her family at that very moment. Six weeks later, she and her son, Shai, were among the 15 family members who traveled to Strasbourg to participate in the gathering from which this book emerged.

This gathering, held in Alsace from June 12 to 15, 2023, was preceded by several important initiatives by individuals and associations during the first decade of the 21st century. For example, on September 21, 2003, after painstaking research, Hans-Joachim Lang—one of the editors of this volume—was able to publicly reveal the names of the victims in a lecture in Strasbourg. His detailed book Die Namen der Nummern (The Names of the Numbers) followed in 2004. On December 11, 2005, the Jewish community of Strasbourg unveiled a memorial stone on the grave of the 86, with the names of all the murdered engraved on it. The solemn ceremony was attended by relatives from Belgium, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, and Switzerland, as well as by a representative of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki. In the following years, more relatives—including some who returned in 2023—traveled to Strasbourg to commemorate their murdered family members at the crime sites, such as the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and the university, and to mourn at the gravesite in the Jewish cemetery in Strasbourg-Cronenbourg.

Neither in Germany nor in France was there a lasting desire to remember the Reichsuniversität Straßburg, albeit for different reasons. It was only after much hesitation that the University of Strasbourg decided to confront the crimes committed within its walls by Nazi doctors. In 2016, the university established the independently working, internationally composed Commission historique pour l’histoire de la Reichsuniversität Straßburg (Historical Commission for the History of the Reichsuniversität Straßburg), with the goal of thoroughly analyzing the research conducted by the then Faculty of Medicine and the Civil Hospital. Six years later, on May 2, 2022, the commission presented its report—Christian Bonah, the second editor of this volume, was one of the commission’s initiators—detailing the crimes of anatomist August Hirt and others, across 500 pages.4 Following the biographical research of Hans-Joachim Lang on the 86 murdered Jewish men and women, the commission emphasized the individuality and humanity of the victims and acknowledged the obligation to “honor their memory and recognize the injustice done to them.”5 The report even concludes with a chapter under the heading “Memory Politics, Recommendations for Memorial Services, Handling Collections with Human Remains,” advocating for a committed and sustained remembrance policy aimed at keeping the memory of the victims of Nazi medical crimes alive.

The remembrance demanded of the University of Strasbourg aligns with a growing sensitivity to questions of memory culture. On both sides of the Rhine, the Shoah is invoked with reference to its universal significance as part of a “European memory.” In France, this is also visibly reflected by the fact that, in April 2015, François Hollande became the first French President to specifically visit the gas chamber building during his visit to the Natzweiler-Struthof memorial—deliberately accompanied by leading European politicians.6 During the ceremony marking 75 years of the Council of Europe on May 17, 2024, in Strasbourg, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock began her speech by reflecting on “the small village of Natzwiller,” stating that “we cannot celebrate together” without remembering this place, only 50 kilometers away, where, in 19437, 86 Jewish men and women were brought from Auschwitz, “from one hell to the next.” And where they were killed “because the Nazis wanted to prove their cruel ‘racial theories.’”8 Yet, while the “duty to remember” is undisputed in these societies, the modalities of concrete memorial practices in the present are only just beginning to be updated. How should remembrance be passed on today? By whom? Which memories exactly (and which not)? Through which institutions? To whom and why?

These questions—memorial politics and memory culture on the one hand, didactics and communication on the other—occupied teachers and students at two university institutes in diverse ways in the spring of 2023. Under the direction of Jeanne Teboul at the Institut d’Ethnologie (Institute of Ethnology) of the University of Strasbourg and Reinhard Johler at the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (Historical and Cultural Anthropology) at the University of...