Dark Year, Dark Anniversaries

Hello Subscribers!

At the end of the first month of this year, we can’t really say that 2021 has so far been so much better than 2020. In some ways it’s worse, certainly with regard to this protracted pandemic, which in some places is spiralling out of control, especially in Portugal at the moment. And the UK overtook Russia in the “league table” of the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus webpage to become the fourth worst-hit country worldwide after the USA, India and Brazil (but now Russia is narrowly ahead again). Here in Austria the situation is a bit better, with a re-flattened curve. But what is annoying is that the so anticipated vaccinations are so slow to come along, what with vaccine shortages and increasing bickering about who gets how much from where and when. The light at the end of the tunnel is, if anything, dimmer than it was a month ago.

On the DT Blog, two dark anniversaries were marked with new posts. On Wednesday it was International Holocaust Day on the date that Auschwitz was liberated 76 years ago on 27 January 1945. I had marked that date regularly on my former Facebook DT page, so I dug into my archives and compiled a combination post, slightly adapted, from all those FB posts over the past five years. It featured one newly posted lead photo of that infamous gate of Auschwitz I (Stammlager) with that cynical line “Arbeit macht frei” on a sign above it, plus a few photos from Auschwitz II Birkenau, as well as a couple of links to online articles related to the topic of Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

Then the following Thursday a proper new post went up to mark the 35th anniversary of the “Challenger” disaster of 28 January 1986. The featured photo at the top was a fluffy soft toy space shuttle that was the most surprising exhibit I saw at the Onizuka Space Center in Kona, Hawaii, in 2015. This could also go in a themed post “dark tourism & toys” one day. I’ll put that in a poll at some point. The post also contained various other photos taken at the same place (which is named after Ellison S. Onizuka, a Hawaii-born astronaut who perished in the disaster along with the rest of the crew), plus one photo of an actual space shuttle, namely the prototype shuttle, which had been christened “Enterprise” by popular demand (and yes, after that other, fictional “Enterprise” of Star Trek fame). That photo was taken at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, a branch of the Smithsonian, which I had visited in 2010. Meanwhile the “Enterprise “ has been moved to New York, while the Smithsonian inherited the shuttle “Discovery” after its retirement in 2011.

For Wednesday’s Auschwitz post I also added a rather long comment expressing my annoyance with a dismissive sideswipe at dark tourism made on German TV news by the head of a project for digitalizing commemorative content for concentration camp memorials (namely Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen). It came with the hallmark “so-called dark tourism” (the other is “the phenomenon of ...”), which is often used by people who vilify DT in a moral panic fashion while clearly not understanding what they are talking about (this woman couldn’t even pronounce the term properly, putting the main stress of “tourism” on the second syllable, like in German). Unfortunately this kind of negativity with regard to DT is quite common, and, as I’ve found on several occasions, it’s hard to argue with such people. They hold on to their value judgements, and rational, logical arguments just don’t get through. Hence I quickly abandoned the idea of maybe writing to that person. I thought it better not to open that can of worms.

I’m not sure if I will be able to add any new posts this coming week, as I’ve just received the finalized proofs for my book, which I now have to check thoroughly, all 345 pages, against my original comments on the first set of proofs and my requests for changes. I only have one week for this, so it will mean long working hours until Friday. So I guess next Sunday’s newsletter will be a rather short one.

Have a reasonably good week – and keep yourself and others safe.

Best regards,

Peter