Reflections

Two events clashed in the past few days: January 27, International Holocaust Memorial Day, in 2025 witnessed the commemoration of the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration and Extermination Camp. Many of the few remaining survivors came to the site of their suffering, together with many heads of state, to remember. From Germany, the President, the Chancellor, and the President of the Bundestag (the lower chamber of parliament), were present. German news magazines devoted more than half of their reporting time to covering the events directly from the murder site, where one million out of six million Jewish lives had been extinguished by an industrialized murder machine, together with some 100,000 others, many of them Poles who had dared to confront the German occupiers.

January 25, 2025: Elon Musk, high tech innovator, multi-billionaire, controller of a massive social media empire, and close confidant and advisor to the new US president Donald Trump sent a supportive video to a pre-election party gathering of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a right-wing populist party. Parts of the AfD have been categorized as radical right and anti-democratic by the German Intelligence Agencies, and a party leader was recently sentenced in criminal court for the use of Nazi language and symbols. Musk (himself with at least the appearance of a Hitler salute) expressed strong support when he told those gathered that their country placed “too much of a focus on past guilt.” Earlier, Musk had expressed praise for the AfD, and he recently engaged in a supportive conversation with its leader Alice Weidel on his platform X. 

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“Now the depression of the reactionary government.… It is a disgrace, which gets worse with every day that passes…. Everyone’s keeping their heads down, Jewry most of all and the democratic press.… What is strangest of all is how one is blind in the face of events, how no one has a clue to the real balance of power.… Will the terror be tolerated and for how long? The uncertainty of the situation affects every single thing.” So wrote Victor Klemperer in his private diary on 21 February 1933, scarcely three weeks following Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany the previous month. A literary scholar and war veteran, Klemperer watched firsthand as the pillars of free society crashed down around him. 

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Numerous projects in the recent past have recounted the lives of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Minnesota after World War II, with many of which telling the stories of dozens of survivors and their postwar lives in the Twin Cities. Not all survivor projects are as sweeping as these, however they are just as important.

I was able to work on one such project this summer with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives (UMJA) in the Libraries: Jeanette Frank, born Eugenia Lewin, is a survivor of the Holocaust whose materials reside in the archives. Jeanette’s records contain extensive materials related to her time as a displaced person in the Landsberg am Lech Displaced Persons (DP) camp after the war. The collection includes vaccination records, records of employment, and, most interestingly, a scrapbook of the Yiddish theater troupe “Hazomir,” that Jeanette, (then Eugenia) was a member of during her time in the camp. Included in the records as well are later documents, including Jeanette’s United States passport and naturalization certificate.

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Over the course of the last year, I have had the privilege of working with the CHGS to design and implement a new study abroad course. In May 2024, I taught Genocide, Justice, and Memory, in which I led a group of 8 undergraduate students to Rwanda. While at the University of Minnesota, students first explored the case of Rwanda within a broader theoretical context. They discovered the analytical and definitional challenges of classifying an episode of mass violence as genocide; explored the conditions under which the genocide occurred; examined how and why civilians were mobilized into killing militias; and finally, considered how the genocide shaped justice, reconciliation, and memory construction processes in Rwanda.

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The first month of the calendar year happens to include the first of many events to remember the victims of genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Various events occur around the world, in numerous languages, and have their origins in different geographies, political ideologies, and cultural-linguistic milieus. 

But like every year—for personal and professional reasons—deciding what to say for International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27th) or the more Zionist-laden Yom Hashoah (April 18th), while avoiding what hasn’t already been said, is a challenge. Personally, and as a Jew, I certainly “remember” in a diverse set of ways, and I openly talk about these practices. From regular write-ups for the Center in my professional capacity, to the reading group I run with former students—as we read Yiddish literature in the original on a weekly basis—individual and collective memory acts take place. 

But every year, coterminous events and life experiences inevitably end up shaping the direction of these memory acts, too. This year was no exception. 

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Today, we remember those who lost their lives 29 years ago during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. 

Lasting only 100 days, April 7th, 1994, marked the beginning of the Rwandan Genocide in which over 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed as the international community and UN peacekeepers stood by. Emboldened by state-sponsored propaganda and armed with rudimentary weapons, ordinary Rwandans of Hutu ethnicity were mobilized into killing militias. Scholars have estimated that the rate of killing was four times that of Nazi Germany and carried out by 175,000 to 230,000 Hutus. Much has been written about the causes and courses of this tragic event, as well as commemoration practices in Rwanda. But today, in honor of the lives lost, I would like to share with you how some Rwandans work to prevent future genocide in the land of a thousand hills.

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There are some odd places in Germany’s Deep South that are strangely attractive to American tourists. For one, there is the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s Alpine refuge, which, not too long ago, one of my university colleagues cheerfully described as the high point of his German sightseeing tour; on TripAdvisor the Eagle’s Nest gets just as many thumbs-up as Austria’s Sound of Music tour. Growing up in 1970s Germany, I don’t remember anyone using the term “Eagle’s Nest” or Adlerhorst, probably because political winds were steadily blowing left and pilgrimage to Nazi remnants wasn’t a thing. Another southern tourist attraction—less creepy but still weird enough—is Bavaria’s fairy tale castle Neuschwanstein. A kitsch monster from the 19^th century, it was designed by Mad King Ludwig who never, even in his wildest hallucinations, imagined that one day it would be lifted into the corporate logo of the Walt Disney company and become the go-to castle for Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

It was only recently that northern Germany came up with an answer to these architectural challenges from the south, which is no less Disneyesque than Neuschwanstein and historically at least as unappetizing as the Eagle’s Nest. It’s a replica of the Royal Prussian Palace planted in the middle of Berlin, home to Germany’s last kaiser whose madness was far more consequential for world politics than Ludwig’s. Kaiser Wilhelm’s passion was world domination, not building fairy tale castles, and WWI was a direct result of his imperial hubris. In the end the Kaiser’s empire collapsed, but his palace didn’t. It even remained more or less intact through the next world war and another failed attempt at world domination, this time by the owner of the Eagle’s Nest. And yes, this all sounds like the typical plot for 007 movies: supervillains living in fancy hideouts trying to bring the planet under their control. Even the grand finale could have been taken from a James Bond novel: the Kaiser’s palace was spectacularly blown to bits with dynamite like Auric Goldfinger’s volcano lair in You Only Live Twice. The palace’s lucky streak was over when it ended up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, in Berlin’s Soviet Sector, where feudal architecture didn’t have many fans. Later, the communists would proudly claim responsibility for the Big Bang that finished off Prussia’s history and its most visible symbol. Once and for all, so they thought.

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This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Luxembourg Agreement, the resulting agreements from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, commonly known as the Claims Conference. The meeting, held just six years after the Holocaust, negotiated tens of billions of dollars in compensation for survivors of the Holocaust, implemented the following year. Each year, the Claims Conference continues to support survivors in dozens of countries around the world. Just last month, the German government pledged another $1.2 billion in funding, including funds explicitly for Holocaust education for the first time. 

The staggering level of support from the German government is in line with the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi government between 1933 and 1945. The Claims Conference, while clearly unable to atone for the past, is an attempt by the German government to answer to crimes committed against European Jews under the Nazi regime. On a recent trip to Berlin, I was reminded that signs of this culpability extend all the way down to the streets, where memorials, placards, and other public history displays make clear the role of the National Socialist government in perpetrating the Holocaust.

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*Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in the Oral History Journal.

Gelinada Grinchenko, Professor of History at Kharkiv National University, Ukraine, President of the Oral History Association, Ukraine, and Scholar at Risk at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, reflects on her forthcoming book and series of accompanying short films On Kharkiv and ourselves: the city’s fates and experiences in its inhabitants’ oral histories. Gelinada also discusses her experience and role in the context of the current conflict in Ukraine as an oral historian, survivor, and potential storyteller in the future.

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Community engagement is vital—now more than ever—for fostering a more inclusive understanding of the liberal arts and sciences in this current world. Following a brief hiatus during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the CLA Engagement Hub (located in Pillsbury Hall) began hosting residencies in 2021-2022. Scholars from the university have since partnered with community members to promote shared interests within the public spaces of both Pillsbury Hall and the larger Twin Cities metro.

In this piece, we are highlighting a recent public art exhibition that features one of the current Engagement Hub residents, Voice to Vision. Professor Feinberg also holds a CLA Engagement Hub residency for the 2022-2023 academic year, and is continuing his collaborative project with various storytellers with connections to the Twin Cities. 

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