The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold. It consists of a 1.9-hectare (4.7-acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The original plan was to place nearly 4,000 slabs, but after the recalculation, the number of slabs that could legally fit into the designated areas was 2,711. The stelae are 2.38 m long, 0.95 m wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.7 metres. They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a German compound noun describing processes that since the later 20th century have become key in the study of post-1945 German literature, society, and culture.
Ruth Klüger was Professor Emerita of German Studies at the University of California, Irvine and a Holocaust survivor. She was the author of the bestseller Weiter leben: Eine Jugend about her childhood in Vienna and in Nazi concentration camps.
Cultural memory is a form of collective memory shared by a group of people who share a culture. The theory posits that memory is not just an individual, private experience but also part of the collective domain, which both shapes the future and our understanding of the past. It has become a topic in both historiography, which emphasizes the process of forming cultural memory, and cultural studies, which emphasizes the implications and objects of cultural memory.
The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial also known as the Nameless Library stands in Judenplatz in the first district of Vienna. It is the central memorial for the Austrian victims of the Holocaust and was designed by British artist Rachel Whiteread.
J. A. Topf and Sons was an engineering company, founded in 1878 in Erfurt, Germany by Johannes Andreas Topf (1816–1891). Originally, it made heating systems and brewing and malting equipment. Later, the company diversified into silos, chimneys, incinerators for burning municipal waste, and crematoria. During World War I it made weapons shells, limbers and other military vehicles. In World War II it also made weapons shells and aircraft parts for the Luftwaffe.
Reconstruction in architectural conservation is the returning of a place to a known earlier state by the introduction of new materials. It is related to the architectural concepts of restoration and preservation, wherein the most extensive form of reconstruction is creating a replica of a destroyed building.
Politics of memory is the organisation of collective memory by political agents; the political means by which events are remembered and recorded, or discarded. Eventually, politics of memory may determine the way history is written and passed on, hence the terms history politics or politics of history. The politics of history is the effects of political influence on the representation or study of historical topics, commonly associated with the totalitarian state which use propaganda and other means to impose a specific version of history with the goal of eliminating competing perspectives about the past. In order to achieve this goal, memory regimes resort to different means such as narrating, strategic silencing, performing or renaming/remapping.
Wolfgang Benz is a German historian and anti-semitism researcher from Ellwangen. He was the director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism of the Technische Universität Berlin between 1990 and 2011, and is also a member of the advisory board for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and was involved in the memorial's design. He has written or published over 200 works. He is considered to be one of the most renowned and well-known historians in modern Germany, and one of the foremost scholars on anti-semitism studies. He has been referred to as the "doyen" of anti-semitism research.
Johann Christoph "Jan" Assmann was a German Egyptologist, cultural historian, and religion scholar.
Aleida Assmann is a German professor of English and Literary Studies, who studied Egyptology and whose work has focused on Cultural Anthropology and Cultural and Communicative Memory.
Gilad Margalit was an Israeli historian, writer, and professor in the Department of General History at the University of Haifa.
The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism is a memorial in Berlin, Germany. The monument is dedicated to the memory of the 220,000 – 500,000 people murdered in the Porajmos – the Nazi genocide of the European Sinti and Roma peoples. It was designed by Dani Karavan and was officially opened on 24 October 2012 by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the presence of President Joachim Gauck.
The Memorial and Information Point for the Victims of National Socialist Euthanasia Killings is a memorial in Berlin, Germany to the victims of Nazi Germany's state-sponsored involuntarily euthanasia program. Over 70,000 people were murdered between 1940–41 under official order of Aktion T4. Despite the program's technical cessation in August 1941, the killings continued in state-run institutions and care facilities until Germany's surrender in 1945. This amounted to a death toll of approximately 300,000.
The Kulturpalast Dresden is a modernist building built by Wolfgang Hänsch during the era of the German Democratic Republic. It was the largest multi-purpose hall in Dresden when it opened in 1969, and was used for concerts, dances, conferences and other events. The building underwent several years of reconstruction beginning in 2012 and opened with a new concert hall in April 2017.
The Roma Holocaust Memorial Day is a memorial day that commemorates the victims of the Romani genocide (Porajmos), which resulted in the murder of an estimated 220,000–500,000 Romani people by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The date of 2 August was chosen for the memorial because on the night of 2–3 August 1944, 2,897 Roma, mostly women, children and elderly people, were killed in the Gypsy family camp (Zigeunerfamilienlager) at Auschwitz concentration camp. Some countries have chosen to commemorate the genocide on different dates.
Géraldine Schwarz is a German–French journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. In her publications, she pleads for a rethinking of memory politics and remembrance practice to help the past make our present better.
Sigrid Jacobeit is a German ethnographer and ethnologist and agricultural scientist. She was director of the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp Memorial of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation from 1992 to 2005.
Charlotte Wiedemann is a German prize-winning journalist and author. She is mainly known for her reports and essays as freelance journalist for German and Swiss-German news media. Based on her frequent travels to African and Middle Eastern countries, she also authored several non-fiction books. In these, she discussed the perception of political events such as the Holocaust and the Nakba, changes in the political situation in Mali, Iran and North Africa, as well as Western domination and White journalists' views on non-White societies.
