The Entertainer: Mark Newton’s Raison d’être
When the door opens at Mark Newton’s condominium in Yardley, Pennsylvania, it is as if a curtain has been drawn back from the stage. One is immediately met with movie …
What is Angela Merkel’s Legacy for German Memory Culture?
AGI Asks: How has Angela Merkel contributed to Germany’s culture of remembrance and influenced memory politics? Lily Gardner Feldman AGI Senior Fellow All German post-war chancellors have been committed to …
Auschwitz is a Warning: Comments on the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Arrival of the Red Army at Auschwitz-Birkenau
I want to discuss three points regarding Auschwitz and Holocaust Memory Today. First, despite a massive scholarship on the subject, knowledge in the public and in the world of policy …
Auschwitz: History and Icon
Auschwitz has become an icon of other-worldly evil, rightly signifying a crime like no other. That monstrous camp of gas chambers and crematoria, however, is also a distinctly human creation …
The Federal Republic’s Political and Societal Responses to Auschwitz
To stand here today and address you as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany is far from easy. I am filled with a deep shame at the barbaric crimes …
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Keeping History Alive: 75 Years after the Liberation of Auschwitz
One of the negative icons of the twentieth century was the Holocaust—the Nazi German persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jewish people in Europe during World War II from …
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Life and Message of Raymonde Fiol
A Call from the Past It was a Saturday in 2007. Raymonde Fiol was sitting on a sofa in her home in Las Vegas. The phone rang. She answered. The …
The Unbroken Past: From Germany to Shanghai to San Francisco
Kurt and Jeannette Nothenberg lived comfortably in the middle class in Germany raising their only child, Rudy. Following Kristallnacht, Kurt was arrested and sent to Buchenwald, but was later released …
The Dealer’s Cards: How Gary Sternberg Has Made the Best of Them
Gerd “Gary” Sternberg was dealt a tricky hand. Born the son of a Protestant mother and a Jewish father in Cuxhaven, Germany on August 25, 1931, he experienced discrimination firsthand …
A Doctor’s Mission: The Life and Work of Ernst Kisch
Read the stories of other Shanghai Jews Dr. Ernst Kisch was an opera-loving Viennese physician who was imprisoned in Dachau and Buchenwald for being Jewish. Upon his release from Buchenwald, …
Mothers: Remembering Three Women on the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht
Ida was terrified. She figured she would never see either her husband or brother ever again. For several days she fretted, not knowing what to do. While desperately trying to …
The Story of Bert Reiner, the Toy Maker, or: An Appreciation of the Individual Experiences of Former Shanghai Jewish Refugees
During the 1983 Christmas season, Coleco Industries, Inc. took the world by storm with a novel concept for a doll: Each doll was unique and would be adopted by a …
A New Strategy for How the History of Nazism and the Holocaust Can Be Remembered by German, Israeli, and American Youth
Four factors make urgent the necessity of German, Israeli, and American youth actively remembering Germany’s history of Nazism and the Holocaust. First, in both Germany and the U.S., there have …
A Survivor’s Luck: Reflections on Berlin and Shanghai
Harry Katz is lucky.[1] As a man who has had a life-long love of numbers, he knows the odds were stacked against him from the beginning: He was born a Jew …
