'Never Again!': Holocaust remembrance under pressure

Young people pose inside a crematorium oven at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial , laughing while they give the Nazi salute and take pictures of each other. "In a sense, they're trophies to post on social media for them to boast about — breaking the ultimate taboo," Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation , told DW.

"Incidents like this have become more frequent in recent years. We have seen memorial trees planted in honor of concentration camp victims cut down. When something like this happens — and it happens regularly — I find it particularly despicable because, because it ultimately kills these people a second time," added Wagner.

Wagner is part of the curatorial team behind the exhibition " Never Again! Against Forgetting the Crimes of the Nazi Regime " in Bonn's Bundeskunsthalle, or the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany. Wagner said Holocaust remembrance is under pressure, and the subject of intensifying attacks.

Critics have dismissed remembrance as a "cult of guilt" or "national masochism." With right-wing populism on the rise and historical revisionism becoming more common, Wagner worries about how Germany will remember the victims murdered by the Nazi regime . He is also concerned about the future of democracy. And soon, there will be no Holocaust survivors left to tell the true story of what happened.

本文の著作権はDeutsche Welleにあります。