A Dark Date & New Chapters and Photos

Hello subscribers!

After a whole string of celebrations and milestones over the past few weeks (my book coming out, the 1000th website chapter, the 100th blog post, etc.), this time there isn’t anything so momentous to report from this past week.

On the DT Blog, one new post went up on 9 November, to mark a historically significant date. Last year I concentrated mostly on the Fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. This time I focused on another, darker chapter in history shortly before the outbreak of WWII, namely the November Pogrom (aka “Kristallnacht”, or ‘Night of Broken Glass’) in the Third Reich, when on 9 November 1938 Jews were publicly harassed, humiliated and attacked, Jewish businesses destroyed and synagogues burned down by Nazi mobs. So for the post I decided on a Jewish theme.

The photos in the post showed mostly synagogues, or places where they used to stand, including in the city where I was born and grew up, Hamburg. I lived just round the corner from Bornplatz where the largest synagogue used to be. And just recently I learned that Hamburg plans to rebuild the Bornplatz Synagogue! The other synagogues featured in the post are/were in Berlin, Budapest, Bucharest, Prague, Kaunas, Riga, Suriname and Chișinău.

I also added a photo of part of the Memorial against War and Fascism in Vienna by Alfred Hrdlicka. It shows the central sculpture of the “Street-Washing Jew”, a depiction of one of the humiliations of Jews on 9 November 1938 in Vienna, when the Nazi mobs made Jews scrub the pavements and roads. The sculpture shows an old bearded Jew in a long coat and wearing a kippa (yarmulke). This sculpture also caused controversy. Criticisms included that the clichéd depiction of an Orthodox Jew echoed that in Nazi propaganda, the fact that you had to look down on the sculpture as a visitor today, and also that only a victim was depicted while the perpetrators got away with it in this memorial too. The fact that some unthinking visitors used the sculpture to sit down on while having a snack was seen as adding renewed humiliation to this bronze Jew. To counter this, some barbed-wire-like metal spikes were installed on the sculpture’s back. So you can no longer sit on it, but it’s an interference and brings with it allusions to concentration camp fences or even Jesus’s crown of thorns. Some of this may be over-interpretations but it goes to show how difficult “heritage culture” can be.
  

On my main website, an all-new chapter went up (No. 1001), namely one about the TV Tower (Teletorn) in Estonia’s capital Tallinn. The day after Estonia declared its independence from the USSR on 20 August 1991 while the coup against Gorbachev in Moscow was ongoing, Soviet troops tried to seize the tower to cut off transmissions, but a courageous crowd of protesters came to its defence, and the technicians up on the tower cleverly blocked the lifts. The next day the putsch in Moscow had failed and the troops left Tallinn.
  

Finally, the photo above is from a new photo gallery for an existing chapter on my website, namely for the former Soviet submarine U-434 that is moored as a museum vessel in the harbour of Hamburg. When I was in Hamburg in August this year I revisited U-434 and this time was able to take loads more photos than on my first visit many years ago. Back then I was on a guided group tour, so it was scarcely possible to get any shots without other people in the frame. This time I went independently and there were hardly any other visitors about so it was a photographic field day. The only noticeable change this time compared to my first visit was that now the dummies placed in the bunks or by the torpedoes all wore face masks! A sign of these Covid times!

… times that are currently getting even harder, what with those exploding case and mortality figures in many countries with too low vaccination rates, including Germany and where I live now, Austria. It’s depressing. I just hope we will still be able to visit my wife’s family over Christmas as planned. But I wouldn’t be too surprised if tougher rules came in that might mean we’ll have to postpone … again. When will this saga ever end?
  

But that’s it for this time.

Have a good week, and as always, stay safe.

Best

Peter