{"id":3790,"date":"2022-06-28T16:01:12","date_gmt":"2022-06-28T16:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/?p=3790"},"modified":"2022-07-06T19:33:17","modified_gmt":"2022-07-06T19:33:17","slug":"hatred-carved-in-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/hatred-carved-in-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Hatred Carved in Stone: Working Through the Past in East Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There are several towns named Wittenberg in the US, but there is only one in Germany. Growing up in West Germany I didn\u2019t hear much about it because Wittenberg was in the East, on the other side of the Iron Curtain. We learned at school that Martin Luther taught there and kicked off the Protestant Reformation. However, that he personally nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg\u2014as the story goes\u2014is just as likely as Walt Disney having drawn the first Mickey Mouse draft himself. After the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain went away in 1989, Wittenberg awoke from its Dornr\u00f6schenschlaf<\/em> (Sleeping Beauty slumber), dusted itself off and emerged as a major tourist destination. Today it is the city with the highest density of UNESCO World Heritage sites, four in total and all connected to Luther\u2019s life and the Reformation\u2014must-visits in a Mecca for evangelical globetrotters. One of those sites received a lot of press coverage earlier this month that once again exposed the ugly underbelly of Luther\u2019s teachings and the callousness of Germany\u2019s highest court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Judensau<\/em> on display at an outside wall of the Stadtkirche<\/em> (city church) in Wittenberg, Germany, February 4, 2020. (Image via Hendrik Schmidt\/picture alliance via Getty Images\/ via JTA<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The medieval Judensau <\/em>sculpture placed on one of Wittenberg\u2019s churches shows people identifiable as Jews suckling from a pig\u2019s teats and a rabbi peering into its anus. It\u2019s not the only antisemitic carving from ancient times still visible on German churches, but the importance of the Wittenberg relief lies in its direct ties to Luther. An inscription that was added to the sculpture in the 16th century quotes from one of several anti-Jewish tracts by Luther\u2014which today sound like blueprints for Kristallnacht<\/em>, the 1938 November pogroms in Nazi Germany. No wonder the Nazis had a sweet spot for the great reformer and even displayed Luther\u2019s notorious pamphlet \u201cOn the Jews and Their Lies\u201d during their Nuremberg rallies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In response to a call by a local Jewish man to remove the sculpture, Germany\u2019s federal court of justice agreed that the sculpture is deeply offensive and \u201cantisemitism carved in stone,\u201d but denied his call for removal<\/a> since the existing memorial and information board enabled \u201cclarification\u201d to help \u201ccounter exclusion, hatred and defamation.\u201d So far, so good. One could argue that the inside of a public museum provides a better space for contextualization than the outside wall of a Christian church, but even there, one would think, placing explanations on an information board might put things in perspective. When I first read the supposedly clarifying text, however, I couldn\u2019t help but feel that sometime in the 1930s a spaceship must have landed in Germany, with Nazi aliens who brought the country and its well-meaning people under control (im nationalsozialistisch beherrschten Deutschland<\/a><\/em>). Not exactly what you\u2019d want tourists to read during their tour through Wittenberg, or would you? The memorial was installed in 1988 when East Germany was still under communist rule. Communists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) felt they had nothing to be sorry for. In their view, all the Nazis had fled to West Germany and East Germany was an enchanted garden full of righteous anti-fascists. Which, by the way, strikes me as an early version of the fairy tale Vladimir Putin likes to tell about the anti-Nazi mission of modern Russia. But I digress. The fact that the Wittenberg memorial dates from the late GDR might explain its weirdly detached language, which the court, as a compromise and for the sake of true \u201cclarification,\u201d could have asked to revise and make more explicit, but didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are more unpleasant historical facts in and around Wittenberg that have been successfully kept under wraps for decades. It\u2019s no surprise that the university in Wittenberg where Martin Luther taught is named after him. In the 1990s, when I had my first tenured appointment at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, I always assumed that it had carried his name for centuries. Later I learned that Luther didn\u2019t become its namesake until November 1933\u2014with the enthusiastic approval of Hermann G\u00f6ring, Prussia\u2019s freshly minted prime minister. That the second-highest ranking Nazi in the Third Reich acted, for obvious reasons, as the proud godfather at MLU\u2019s christening wasn\u2019t much talked about at the university. Scientists don\u2019t like to publish negative results, but neither do Hallense<\/em>r historians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wittenberg proudly presents itself to the outside world, online and in print, as\u00a0Lutherstadt\u00a0<\/em>Wittenberg (Luther City) and Halle markets itself as\u00a0H\u00e4ndelstadt<\/em>\u00a0because the Baroque composer Georg Friedrich H\u00e4ndel was born there. Although he left Halle at an early age and rose to fame in England, Halle makes enormous efforts to put the H\u00e4ndel brand on pretty much everything you can think of: music festivals, food, merchandise\u2014you name it. Not even Salzburg does that with its very own Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. One reason why Halle tries to numb your senses with the constant H\u00e4ndel bombardment may be to distract from its other (in)famous son: Reinhard Heydrich. In contrast to H\u00e4ndel, Heydrich was born into a well-to-do family from the upper echelons of Halle society, and, ironically, with equally high musical ambitions as the H\u00e4ndel family. Heydrich\u2019s father owned and ran the local music conservatory and young Reinhard was supposed to become an opera singer. While the English Wikipedia entry for\u00a0Halle (Saale)<\/a>\u00a0lists him under \u201cnotable people\u201d as \u201cReinhard Heydrich\u00a0(1904\u20131942), one of the leading\u00a0Nazis\u00a0in\u00a0World War II\u00a0and main architects of the\u00a0Holocaust,\u201d you don\u2019t find him at all in the German version, which in fact looks like it was written by the Halle tourist bureau. Heydrich is mentioned on a separate, German-language-only Wikipedia page titled \u201cSons and daughters of Halle (Saale)<\/a>\u201d with all his fancy Nazi titles\u2014without comment or reference to the Holocaust. Given its ruling on the\u00a0Judensau<\/em>, would Germany\u2019s federal court of justice settle for that level of \u201cclarification” too?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henning Schroeder is a professor at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is <\/em>schro601@umn.edu<\/em><\/a> and his Twitter handle is <\/em>@HenningSchroed1<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are several towns named Wittenberg in the US, but there is only one in Germany. Growing up in West Germany I didn\u2019t hear much about it because Wittenberg was in the East, on the other side of the Iron Curtain. We learned at school that Martin Luther taught there and kicked off the Protestant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2081,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96814],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2081"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3790"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3813,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790\/revisions\/3813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}