As a bevy of new films shows, Holocaust still on the German mind

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 30 (JTA) — Sixty-seven years ago, on Nov. 9, 1938, Nazi-organized mobs burned and looted thousands of German synagogues and Jewish stores during Kristallnacht, the opening salvo of the Holocaust.

How are the grandchildren of the perpetrators dealing with this legacy? Four new German movies show that far from forgetting its nation’s past, today’s generation is still wrestling with it, at times obsessively.

The Germans have a word, of course multi-syllabic, for this internal struggle. It’s Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, literally mastering the past, but better understood as “coming to terms with the past.”

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Source:

By Tom Tugend
October 30, 2005
www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=15980&intcategoryid=5

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Webmaster note: Isn’t it amazing how the Germans keep thinking about the Holocaust with no prompting from anyone?