The German blogger Marie Sophie Hingst invented story of a Jewish family. The historian Micha Brumlik thinks that her desire to be a victim, was stronger than the impulse to face up to the responsibility.
Deutsche Welle: Professor Brumlik. What went through your head when you heard this story?
Micha Brumlik: I found this very sad. The woman Hingst, who has a false family history, has done me really sorry. I wondered, however, whether such a thing can happen in the context of the fact that the question of the Holocaust, its victims and its perpetrators, a key issue in Germany. And so, I can imagine that one or the other bewildered soul – wife is not Hingst Yes, the first case gets in the wrong throat and for yourself updated incorrectly.
What do you think is behind it – brazen cynicism, pathological egotism or just plain stupidity? You have just expressed understanding….
Maybe stupidity or lack of empathy and lack of historical clear – perhaps it is also such a thing as an unconscious desire not to identify with the Victims only, but to include them.
Micha Brumlik
You have once headed the Fritz Bauer-Institute in Frankfurt, a study and documentation center on the history and impact of the Holocaust. Would you say, the imposture, if we refer to the now times, at the expense of Holocaust Victims?
Not directly. The few Holocaust victims, I know, mostly older people, I would suspect that you do also rather bad. This is a sad side-effect of the fact that overall, this is a stressful matter that has at least a portion of the reading public in Germany for decades.
If an award-winning blogger, such as Marie Sophie Hingst, a studied historian, for all the world, visible on the side of the victim leaves the camp of the perpetrators, it deprives itself of a collective guilt?
To debt, it can go anyway at your age. It comes to the question of whether this Generation is willing to take political and historical responsibility. And I would answer in the affirmative then. Under these circumstances, a woman has tried Hingst, to escape the collective responsibility of the citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. But I believe that the desire to be a victim, was stronger than the impulse to face up to the responsibility.
Holocaust memory in the former German concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Even the archivists of the Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, Marie Sophie went Hingst on the glue. Files are checked less, if you tell the story of a social Trauma such as the persecution and murder of millions of people ?
I don’t know exactly. I don’t know the procedures of verification carried out in Yad Vashem. I would guess that there’s also no one on the idea that because someone has crept in the stacker table.
In Germany wakes up, so one has the impression that the new hostility to Jews. Recently, anti – Semitism Officer of the Federal government, Felix Klein called on, to wear as a sign of solidarity with Jews, the yarmulke, the Jewish head covering. Such behavior is detrimental to how of woman in the matter of the Jews Hingst?
I don’t think so. And I did, by the way, is expected since we are at it, Mr Klein, that he’d be more talked about state intervention and not so much on the civil society turned. Provides anyway for yourself. For example, I am of the opinion that it belongs to the compulsory education, compulsory notification of all teachers in schools to be about the history of Germany under national socialism and the Holocaust during the study informed.
Marie Sophie Hingst in honor as the “blogger of the year” by 2018.
If so the thing with Marie Sophie Hingst has something Good, then that is a kind of Wake-up call?
So you can say that. This leads all of us to once again reflect on how we deal with the Holocaust, when, as the holder of the peace prize of the German book trade, Aleida and Jan Assmann, to tell the story of the Holocaust from communicative to cultural memory is transferred, so there are no longer any witnesses there.
Micha Brumlik is an educational researcher, and publicist. He was born as the child of German Jewish parents in Switzerland and lives since 1952 in Germany. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of educational Sciences at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University of Frankfurt am Main. From 2000 to 2005, he was the head of the Fritz Bauer Institute, study and documentation centre for the history and impact of the Holocaust. As a journalist and guest author for various Newspapers, he has published books, Essays and articles on the history of Judaism and contemporary Jewish issues.
With Micha Brumlik Stefan Dege language.