Spurensuche an einem vergessenen Ort. Ein Abend in der ehemaligen Synagoge Kaschlgasse 9. November 2010

S:I.M.O.N. Issues

S:I.M.O.N. Sections

Editorial

S:I.M.O.N. is an e-journal of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI). It appears twice a year in English and German language. S:I.M.O.N. aims at both a transnational and comparative history of the Holocaust and Jewish Studies in Central and Eastern Europe within the broader contexts of the European history of the 20th and 21st century, including its prehistory, consequences and legacies as well as the history of memory.

S:I.M.O.N. serves as a forum for discussion of various methodological approaches. The journal especially wishes to strengthen the exchange between researchers from different scientific communities and to integrate both the Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust into the different “national” narratives. It also lays a special emphasis on memory studies and the analysis of politics of memory. S:I.M.O.N. uses a double-blind review system, which means that both the reviewer’s and the author’s identities are concealed from each other hroughout the review process.

Shoah: The journal deals with the history of the Shoah from multidisciplinary, transnational and comparative perspectives. It seeks to integrate studies on Jews as well as on other groups of victims of the Holocaust, especially on Roma, and of so far less researched regions of (East) Central and (South) Eastern Europe.

Intervention. The journal reports on research projects and their transmission into public events. It also informs about current educational and remembrance programs.

Methods. The journal serves as a forum for the discussion of methodological approaches as, for instance, the everyday history, oral history, gender history, the history of violence, anti-Semitism and racism and the theory of memory and memory politics.

DocumentatiON. The journal contributes to critical approaches on using and interpreting archival materials in the 21st century.

Download the current issue S:I.M.O.N. 2017/2.

Articles

Sławomir Kapralski

The Genocide of Roma and Sinti and Their Political Movement from the Perspective of Social Trauma Theory

It is argued in this paper that Roma and Sinti memories of the genocide during the Second World War did not form a coherent picture of the past that would be widely shared among them. Therefore, the recent spread of memorialization and commemoration of the genocide of Roma and Sinti shall be interpreted as a process of the social construction of trauma in which memory increasingly becomes a marker of identity, not just the recollection of the past. The article presents the consequences of the genocide of Roma and Sinti for their post-war situation and the emergence of the memory of the genocide within their political movement, both on the local and transnational levels. Drawing on Jeffrey Alexander’s social theory of trauma, I argue that Roma and Sinti do remember the Nazi persecution, that these memories are fragmented and incoherent largely because of the nature of the crimes committed on them by National Socialism, and that their self-definition as victims of genocide is a social construction embedded in their struggle for empowerment.

SWL-Reader

Karola Fings

Opferkonkurrenzen. Debatten um den Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma und neue Forschungsperspektiven

In 1992, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany decided to dedicate a memorial to the victims of the genocide of Sinti and Roma. The Memorial for the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under National Socialism by the artist Dani Karavan was inaugurated in October 2012 in the centre of Berlin, near the former Reichstag building. The planning and construction phase spanned two decades, during which many discussions addressed the significance awarded to the Nazi persecution of “gypsies” next to the Holocaust. These discussions reached an apex in a controversy enacted via media between Yehuda Bauer (then the director of the International School for Holocaust Studies in Yad Vashem) and Romani Rose (the head of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma). This paper critically reflects the debates in light of new research results on the genocide of Sinti and Roma.

Events

Zoltán Halasi

Duschehubka

This text is the penultimate chapter of Zoltán Halasi's book Út az üres éghez (Road to an Empty Sky). With this work, which was first published in Hungarian, the author created a singular memorial to Polish-Jewish culture and its destruction. Setting out from the Yiddish Holocaust poem Dos lid funm ojsgehargetn jidischen folk by Itzhak Katzenelson, Halasi records what was lost in the Shoah in the course of nineteen compelling chapters. He takes on the grab of an art historian, a literary critic and a travel guide when he reports about a wooden synagogue and the Jewish quarter in Warsaw. In the role of a German banker, he illuminates the aims of the Nazi monetary policies, as a writer of SS brochures he highlights the absurdity of racism. Depicting a Selektion in the Warsaw ghetto, he shows the grim logic of compulsive acts in catastrophic situations, draws an image of the running of the extermination camp Treblinka. The cynical words of two German policemen provide an insight into the rituals of mass executions and introduce us to the craft of murder. The final chapter is an interplay of slithers of narrative by Jewish children on the run and by those who helped and hid them that borders on the unbearable.
The chapter reproduced on the following pages has three parts: Part one is a Treblinka railway station master's report to the Polish Home Army. In the second part, a former Jewish detainee who managed to escape from the extermination camp Treblinka gives a literary treatment of his arrival at the camp. The final part consists of an inner monologue by the Treblinka extermination camp's director of administration.

The book will shortly be published in Polish at the Nisza publishing company in Warsaw. The German-speaking public was first presented with the work on December 1, 2015 at the Simon Wiesenthal Conference 2015. The German translation by Éva Zádor and Heinrich Eisterer is in progress.

An inhospitable place: now void and empty, long-buried layers are surfacing again. The former office of the Communist Party can only be adumbrated; a monumental bar is all that remains of the former dance hall, the later installation of a supermarket disrupted the original spatial arrangement and the elaborate floor plan, leaving behind the scent of flesh, dusty heater fans and open fuse boxes. What could not be used was sealed off, producing dead spaces, vacant areas. Only traces on the walls, cracks and defects on the ceilings, rusty handrails and swinging doors speak from the deepest, original layer of the edifice. The synagogue, dedicated in 1932, accommodated 600 believers. Embedded in a residential building, the construction thus escaped complete destruction in the Viennese November Pogrom of 1938. But its extinction is nevertheless obvious and undeniable: less than a century later, quasi-archaeological methods and complex simulations are necessary to identify the former sacral building. With the removal of each layer – of the former supermarket, of the chemist’s shop, of the dance hall or the party office – a deeper layer come’s to the fore, exposing the monstrous desecration of the original function of this place. The great fire that destroyed the original installation in the November Pogrom was on the beginning: its desecration was continued thereafter through forgetting, ignoring, neglecting what was once here, because nobody remained after 1945 for whom this original layer was of any importance, who could give back this space its unique sacredness.