Category: History

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Nazis bipolar

Thanks to the exhibition « How Nazis photographed their crimes in Auschwitz 1944 » in the Mémorial(Link) of the Shoa in Paris, the biased photographer’s view of what happened in Auschwitz is evident. The inhuman, factory-like organization of these concentration camps were constructed and managed with the primary aim of humiliation of Jewish people and other inmates. Careful reading and interpretation of these images is necessary to spot the sometimes small signs of resistance to be taken on photo by a Nazi photographer.

The revelation of a kind of bipolar disorder of the Nazi murderers shows up in the seemingly normal family meal of officers in their nearby homes. You might be surprised that many of these family members even decades later report on normal and comfortable lives despite their pitiless exercise of mass killings by the Nazi officials and their hired staff. Bipolar disorder is maybe the result of such split personalities, although we already have ample evidence that doing drugs was quite common at the time as well.

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Shoa Memorial

In the neighborhood of the Paris City Town Hall you find the Mémorial de la Shoa. There is a constant flux of visitors and pupils with their teachers passing through the rooms. They all continue to be really moved by the shocking images and their efforts to try to understand the full extent of the Shoa and the terrible effects it had even on survivors of the concentration camps. The continuation of the memory of the memories of those survivors by young people is one of the strong points of this exhibition. The transmission of memories finds many new ambassadors against the tendency to forget or downplay the horrors committed by the Nazis. 

Of course it is overwhelming as an experience, but it all the more necessary to keep memories alive and guard against each tendency of denial. In the age of fake news and historical deep fakes, it will be all the more important to immunize people against any attempts of manipulation of historic truths. The availability of the information online and through youtube-videos is an indispensable next step in the preservation and dissemination of the documentaries. The Mémorial of the Shoa in Paris is an essential part of this commemoration as 76.000 Jewish persons were deported to concentration camps from France as well.(Image: Mémorial de la Shoa, Paris 2025)

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Text to Image

Long before everybody started to discuss Artificial Intelligence, which in many applications takes the form of transformation of a textual prompt into an Image, Photographers have had literature or quotations in their mind that shaped their images. This was a kind of poetic imagery not always easy to recognize. The exhibition in the „Institut de France“, Bibliothèques Mazarine (LINK), with photographs by Nicolas Fève (LINK) offfers a great insight into this way to conceive of an image and its realization through photography. Exposing the sources of inspiration as well as the photo is like adding textual citations to an image in a much more inspirational and transforming manner than AI is doing these days in 2025. 

Text to image is only one out of the many ways texts might guide imagination, but it is a powerful and gripping one. The history of literature is full of other forms like videos based on novels, comic strips to make classic texts in Latin more accessible. As we shall ask AI products like texts and images to cite their sources and honor authorship, photography as art and science might enhance the literary experience by adding citations to an image. This has the additional advantage that more people will follow up on the sources of inspiration.

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Apocalyptic Collection

As long as humanity exists we had to deal with the experience of apocalyptic horrors. First, mankind could not make sense of natural disasters. Second, after we understood many of the disastrous events on earth and even most cosmological events, we proceeded to create our own apocalyptic disasters. 

One thousand years of unimaginable suffering and destruction are the subject of a unique exhibition at the BNF entitled Apocalypse. The documents start with biblical representations of it and continues throughout the centuries. The artists‘ attempts to depict and characterize the Shoa is part of the exhibition. The atomic bomb is another issue of the 20th century. In the 21st century artists try to move beyond the different forms of the apocalypse. The collection of various kinds of dealing with apocalypses constitutes itself an apocalyptic experience. We still have to go a long way to come close to understanding what drives disasters and what the role of mankind is on this way to seemingly endless destruction. The apocalyptic experiences remind us to keep asking some fundamental questions.  (Image: Exhibition Apocalypse at BNF Paris, Center Piece by Otobong Nkanga, Unearthed)

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AI Images

The creation of images using any AI system is fast and easy. Many people have tested the systems and experimented with the more or less explicit prompting needed for LLMs to come up with several suggestions. Through the use of AI in the creation of images you are indirectly become your own curator of these creations as you choose among many suggestions of AI for the same prompt. The next step in the process of these artifacts it to assemble several ones and submit your selection of images to a gallery for an exhibition. If you have a coherent approach or a specifically interesting creative idea you might get selected in a competition to show your AI assisted images in a gallery with a reputation to  exhibit photography.  The Brussels Photo Festival (2025) presented the submissions to a call for AI images with a broad range of AI assisted imagery. The focus of this project was on „historical events and figures“. In situations where images are absent such a newly created imagery might be helpful in re-creating narratives about undocumented wars or conflicts. Speculative fiction about other historical options or „roads not taken “ have found their way into museums of history even. Decolonizing imagery is an interesting aspect to get a grip on another way to view historical evolutions. Projecting biological growth processes into the future with pervasive bio-engineering allows is to imagine potential future scenarios. As AI in biology, pharmacy and nutrition is only about to rake off, the AI artists play an interesting role of new avantgarde in the 21st century before we shall be submerged by AI images on all social media platforms. (Image taken at Hangar.art 2025)

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Korean Uprisings

With the recent Korean uprising against the imposition of martial law the world has witnessed a successful defense of democratic rule in South Korea. International politics has quickly moved on to other areas of the world where people’s struggle to obtain or sustain the freedom to vote and the freedom of expression.
However, the Korean history of uprisings goes back a least as far as the beginning of the Cold War period with the separation in 2 Koreas. The 1980 uprising of student protests in South Korea was extinguished with brutal force and mass killings. Can literature heal the wounds of uprisings? Only the best of literature can. The Korean female author and poet Han Kang (Nobel laureate 2024) has accomplished this. In the novel 소년이 온다 “Human acts” (English title), “Celui qui revient” (French), ”Menschenwerk” (German) the Gwangju Uprising 1980 is the historic backdrop against which the loss of human dignity during dictatorships is narrated. Han Kang manages to depict the empathy of family members who are confronted with the brutality of the military forces. It is tough on readers as they become the witnesses of the violence described as such and the sorrow of the whole social environment of the victims.
The Nobel Prize for literature 2024 honors the “world literature” aspect of Han Kang’s writings over many years. Many prizes have been allocated for representative writers (80+ % were men) of a country. The different titles of professional translators chosen for this novel reveal the potential to link to very different national narratives and connections to national memory of uprisings. Translating literature from different cultures can be challenging as readers frequently want the narratives somehow to relate to their own “endured” experiences. World literature, just like world history, goes beyond this and takes the reader by the hand and broadens emotional and human horizons.
(Image: Gallery Lee Bouwens, Brussels, exposed Jungjin Lee Voice #02, Voice #26 in 2025, inkjet pigment prints, Jungjin Lee)

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Victims and Perpetrators

In addition to the annually proclaimed “We shall never forget the concentration camps and the murder of 6.000.000 Jews”, we should add: “We shall not be silent”. Silence about a crime can be interpreted as the “latent” continuation of hatred. Silence might just be a pretended ignorance of the genocide and the holocaust. We have to keep very alert amidst the spreading falsification and numerous falsification attempts of historical facts surrounding the ideation about the Nazi-time and Nazi-terror from the 1930s onwards culminating in the Shoa and systematic mass killings of civilians and any actual and deemed opposition.
Particularly in Germany there is a renewed need to go beyond the “Stolperstein-Initiative” and continue also sometimes own personal research of family histories in order to understand the logic and power of perpetrators. Some spectacular legal cases like “Klaus Barbie” or “Rudolf Eichmann” or the Nuremberg trials became historic events, but the crimes of many Nazis during these times remained below the radar of wider public attention.
In view of many disrespectful utterances of some politicians and even some business men the old and new perpetrators of antisemitic propaganda and acts should have to face more fierce opposition. This needs the commitment of the silent and sometimes shamefully indifferent people across the world. (Image: list of concentration camps, sign in Berlin Schöneberg, Richard von Weizäcker Platz).

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Holocaust Remembrance

The 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau marks a very special kind of remembrance. As the number of survivors of Nazi-terror and genocide is shrinking the testimony of survivors is becoming more rare and more precious. According to the “Jerusalem Post” on 2025-1-28 (p. 9) the number of survivors that came back to the site of horrific crime has shrunk from 300 ten years ago to 50 in 2025. The strength and courage to continue to testify amidst having reached 90+ or even 100+ years of age is a “living memorial” of its own kind.
Many television stations across Europe have followed the example set by this special Holocaust remembrance day and focused equally on recorded testimonies or additional live interviews of survivors. Please keep repeating these testimonies to confront people with the outcome of Nazi-terror in Europe. The choice this year was a courageous one. Instead of speeches of sorrow and lip service to fight antisemitism by acting politicians, the focus on the testimony of survivors in public, on TV and to large audiences will encourage others to continue to give testimonial of these horrors.
(Image: extract of Pressreader newspaper titles 2025-1-27)

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Synthetic opioids

Across the globe there are many tough lessons to be learned about synthetic opioids. These psychoactive substances fall under special legislation and can only be used with medical prescriptions. The strength of these substances is usually compared to heroin and the risk of addiction to these substances is very high.
A recent paper in International Review of the Armed Forces Medical Services (2024) has highlighted also “the abuse of the synthetic opioid U-47700” at times of military conflict. The power of these drugs to suppress the feeling of pain is helpful for medical operations. The abuse, however, may consist in the use of the drug to “keep fighting whilst pain is suppressed”. Such use of synthetic opioids increases the risk for addition and the fatal consequences of overdoses. The reporting of such occurrences in a specialized medical journal is an important warning against the conscious and willingness to abuse the drugs for war purposes.
The finding reminds us of the abuse that was already widely spread during the Nazi led 2nd World War (“Der totale Rausch“). The addictive potential was experiences even after the war time in terms of active combat was over. The costs to society of such abuse as well as use of supply chains of provision of opioids during peace times remain a problem for many years after the war. After a war, the war on drug abuse continues. Fighting addiction is a lengthy and painful process.

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Ukraine Chanson

The Russian war in Ukraine is not limited to the military killings. From the earliest period in 2014 already Russia initiated a war on Ukraine culture and Ukrainian cultural heritage. Therefore, it is great to witness the efforts by Ukrainian musicians not only to retrieve their rich heritage for example in the field of chansons, but to develop traditional songs with new formats. Jazzy versions of children’s songs have been sung with an admirable soft voice by singer and composer Viktoria Leléka and her band.
Most people might think of children’s songs as an insignificant niche of music. The importance of singing songs for children and babies is a scientifically well documented finding. Early bonds are created and a sense of belonging and comfort, particularly during difficult times of life. Comforting music is also an intergenerational issue. Transmission of emotions and values across generations is the very fabric of societies. The recent album “Kolysanky” and the song “Ne Zhal” is a great reminder that it is the children that count not the, maybe, broken cradle.
During the war time with many absent fathers, chansons can bridge the emotional hardships. The movie “The Chorist” had demonstrated the power of children songs for children, their parents and all generations involved. Chansons have a much longer “half-time of life” than war.
From an unknown French composer the cradle song “Fais dodo Colin …” and Brahm’s Wiegenlied are classics many people in Europe will remember from their childhood and still transmit them today. Great news that Ukraine continues this tradition with new, innovative adaptations of their own lively cultural heritage.
(Image: extract of lyrics Ne Zhal’, from webpage)