People in Hamburg, Germany, protest against right-wing extremism and the AfD party on Feb. 25, 2024.
Hami Roshan/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
Hundreds of thousands of people in Germany are taking to the streets to push back against the far-right, nationalist policies of the AfD, which currently holds 11% of the seats in parliament.
Berliners giving the Nazi salute following the announcement of the German invasion of Poland on September 1 1939.
Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo|Alamy
The German population was transformed under Nazism into a “bystander society” – even before the conditions of wartime normalised acts of excessive violence.
Walter Benjamin’s membership card for the Bibliothèque nationale de France (1940).
Wikimedia Commons
In his essays, Walter Benjamin sought to understand the nature of modernity. He drew on Marxism but was not contained by it, ranging across literature, art, popular culture, even Jewish mysticism.
On Oct. 12, a sign in Tel Aviv says in Hebrew, ‘No more words,’ near candles lit both in memory of those killed in the Hamas massacres and for the hostages taken to the Gaza Strip.
Amir Levy/Getty Images
The Holocaust is not just a memory in Israel. It’s part of how Israelis understand themselves and their country − and it’s playing a part in how the country responds to the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7.
A woman at a Holocaust Memorial Centre in Macedonia looks at portraits of Jewish people killed in the Treblinka Nazi concentration camp.
Georgi Licovkski/AAP
Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was anything but banal. His case is an apt reminder of how evil agents can deflect accountability, denying victims even the thin consolation of the moral high ground.
Lizi Rosenfeld, a Jewish woman, sits on a park bench bearing a sign that reads, ‘Only for Aryans,’ in August 1938 in Vienna.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum /Provenance: Leo Spitzer
Wolf Gruner, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Finding the stories of individual Jews who fought the Nazis publicly and at great peril helped a scholar see history differently: that Jews were not passive. Instead, they actively fought the Nazis.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger was one of the 20th century’s most feted thinkers. A new book examining his Nazism in light of the now-available evidence, is a troubling, timely read.
Spain has long avoided addressing the fact that tens of thousands of Spaniards were victims of Nazis, who collaborated with Spain’s former dictator, Francisco Franco.
Soviet-era monument in Riga, Latvia, which was splashed with the colours of the Ukraine flag the day after Russia invaded in February 2022.
Kārlis Dambrāns/ Flickr.
In much of eastern Europe historical memory of communist rule has been brought into sharp focus by the war in Ukraine.
‘Peace for our time’: British prime minister Neville Chamberlain displaying the Anglo-German declaration, known as the Munich Agreement, in September 1938.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images
Ukraine war: Vladimir Putin is struggling to convince people why history is on his side – both internationally and at home.
Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as people try to storm the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 61.
Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
The US faces many of the same problems Germans faced after World War II: how to reject, punish and delegitimize the enemies of democracy. There are lessons in how Germany handled that challenge.
A QAnon supporter waiting to see Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Rick Loomis/Getty Images
Donald Trump said followers of conspiracy theory ‘are very much against pedophilia.’ What he didn’t mention was the demonic imagery and language that peppers QAnon posts.
Protesters in Berlin demand that the 1904-1908 mass killings in Namibia be recognised as the first genocide committed by Germany.
Supplied/Courtesy of Joachim Zeller
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, or ‘Yom HaShoah,’ a music scholar recollects how composer Istvan Anhalt’s experiences in Nazi-occupied Hungary informed his later life and music in Canada.
Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Lecturer on Bioethics & Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University; and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine; Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Psychiatric Times., Tufts University