Posts matching tags 'holocaust'
2008/3/10
A French artist is working on a Nintendo DS game about the Holocaust. Titled Imagination is the Only Escape, the game will place players in the role of a young boy in Eastern France who uses his imagination to escape the horrors of war during the German occupation of World War II. (Sounds like a real barrel of laughs, doesn't it?) That is assuming that Nintendo sign off on this; the New York Times reported that they had refused to release it in the US, though this report has since been denied.
(via Wired News) ¶ [no comments]
2006/5/31
Pope Benedict XVI, the first German-born pope, recently visited Auschwitz. However, his remarks there have left a bad taste:
He stood in the extermination camp where millions died, but he did not utter the word "anti-Semitism", he did not offer an apology on behalf of Germany or the Church, he said nothing about the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi years, nor did he, the former member of the Hitler Youth, offer any sort of account of his own dawning awareness of the horror created by the people democratically elected to rule his country.
The Holocaust, then, according to Benedict, was only incidentally the extermination of the Jews. The true goal was the extermination of God and Christianity. So the German people were the Nazis' victims, used and abused by them, and Christians and Christianity even more so. In Ratzinger's Christo-centric vision, the Jews find themselves bit players - bystanders at their own extermination. The true victim was a metaphysical one.
2006/3/14
Santiago Sierra, the Mexican conceptual artist who, in the past, hired labourers to masturbate, created casts of prostitutes' genitals and invited patrons to an art opening which was blocked off (thus demonstrating that they were more concerned with free champagne than aesthetic experiences), is back. His latest project involved turning a former synagogue in Germany into a gas chamber:
The Mexico-based artist has parked six cars outside the synagogue and attached their exhaust pipes to the building using plastic tubes. It is then filled with deadly gas. Visitors are invited to go inside one by one wearing a gas mask, escorted by a firefighter. Before being allowed in, they have to sign a disclaimer stating they realise the room is full of carbon monoxide.Sierra claims that the installation, titled 245 Cubic Metres with chilling blandness, is a protest against the "banalisation of the Holocaust". Germany's Jewish groups, however, don't see it that way and have denounced the exhibit as "scandalous". Visitors' reactions have been mixed. The exhibit has since been suspended until Sierra meets his critics to discuss the project.
The comments in the Guardian's blog raise some interesting points, with some claiming a second subtext, equating personal automobiles with genocide, and others comparing it to a notional installation spraying the inside of a mosque with pigs' blood.
2006/2/14
Right-wing hoaxers are believed to have submitted a maliciously modified Michael Leunig cartoon to an Iranian competition to find cartoons poking fun at the Holocaust. The cartoon in question was believed to have been one contrasting the Holocaust with Israeli military actions against Palestinians, which The Age refused to print in 2002; the version submitted apparently had the words changed to something appropriately rabid and mean-spirited to stand a chance against the fierce competition from the Middle Eastern press's finest. Leunig, a renowned humanist and anti-war campaigner, is considering legal action.
(via RRR) ¶ [2 comments]
2006/1/16
The hard-line government of Iran has announced that it will be holding a conference to question whether the Holocaust really happened. The announcement comes shortly after Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadine-Jihad called for the annihilation of Israel and stated that the extermination of Jews by the Nazis was "a myth".
I bet Holocaust denier David Irving's kicking himself that he got arrested in Austria; were he a free man, he'd probably have a university chair waiting for him in Tehran or something.
2003/4/1
This evening, I went to see The Pianist. It's a great film; starkly realistic and profoundly moving (the acts of bestial sadism committed by the Nazi troops, for one); it's one thing reading about these things, and another seeing them in front of you. The sets, effects and photography were also very good, and the acting was superb. Highly recommended.
1999/9/23
Sarah Kane: a theatrical Ian Curtis?
Her last work ``4:48 Psychosis'' -- was completed only a week before Kane took an overdose and then hanged herself in hospital with her own shoelaces.
She wrote at night in intense bursts, confessing: ``I hate it. I get no pleasure from writing. It kills me.''
``Being in love was like being in Auschwitz,'' she said of the play's theme.