Yad Vashem and Marburg an der Lahn

The Press and Public Relations department of Marburg provided Yad Vashem with invaluable photographs for Marburg an der Lahn or Landkreis Marburg-Biedenkopf during the 1930's.

A student humiliated (passing over the 1892 Weidenhäuser Brücke on the Lahn linking Marburg old-town centre and Weidenhausen; incident dated 1933-08-24.) There is no note at the site as to the date when Marburg provided Yad Vashem with the photograph.

Today's missing synagogue.

Antisemitic parade in Marburg (photograph dated February 1936.).

The synagogue burning, Kristallnacht in Marburg.

My incidental notes:

Other references to KZ and Lager in the Marburg area.

Marburg Synagogue Rededicated, 1946 (not noted: tiny and not in old quarter; members are DP's and local war-time Allied military and others; note flags.)

Note: Marburg-Uni had been home to Otto Böckel and the rise of 19th Century antisemitism as a German political movement at a time when the great synagogue of 1897 was being built.

For the Marburg Uni's Center for Conflict Studies, see this English start-page.

The fate of forced labour in the area, the handicapped in the town hospital and others (the mentally ill, the retarded) is documented at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere.

For an Allied decision to bomb an asylum for the mentally-ill, see histories of Operation Market Garden and "The Great Mistake".  Allied failures to take prisoners among child troops is also reported during this military debacle to "end a war by Christmas".

Philipps-Universität Marburg und Erich Frank

 
The Institut für Philosophie of Philipps-Universität Marburg an der Lahn has a curious flaw: their history page lacks a photo of Erich Frank, who replaced Heidegger.

A PDF of a Frank relative restitution claim can be found here.

Frank died in Amsterdam in 1949 on his way to reclaim his chair of philosophy in Marburg.

A book by Frank in English:

Philosophical Understanding and Religious Truth, Oxford University Press, New York, 1966. Pp. xii + 182 + index. 9s (other ed: 1949, 1963)

You need not search for an Erich-Frank Strasse or Weg or Platz in Marburg.  But is there now a plaque at the old University in the tourist core of Marburg?  I spent many delightful hours in the philosophy library of the old Uni in 1985.

Vol 18 of Social Research should have the Karl Löwith memorium to Erich Frank.

Currently there is no Erich Frank article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I will add an Aule page on Frank to phil.aule-browser.com

Martin Niemöller speaking at Uni-Marburg, 1946

In 1946 Martin Niemöller spoke before Uni-Marburg students.
Harold Marcuse offers this citation:

Die politische Verantwortung des Christen im akademischen Stand : Vortrag gehalten auf Einladung der evangelischen Studentengemeinde vor Studierenden der Philipps-Universität zu Marburg an der Lahn am 4. Mai 1946 / Martin Niemöller. Giessen : W. Schmitz, 1946. 23 p. [RLIN: Yale, Harvard] Also in Reden 45-54, 87ff.

This was one occasion for his famous lament, which he preached, now repeated as verse which I choose to render as:

First they arrested the X, but I was not an X, so I did not speak up.
Then they crudely rounded up the Y, but I was not a Y, so I did nothing.
Then we heard they were murdering transported Z's, but we were not Z's, so we kept quiet.

It is my understanding that Niemöller was heckled by the students - but was it only when he spoke of collective guilt?

Sehe: Martin Niemoeller Stiftung as referenced by Harold Marcuse.

Frage: Who were these students of 1946?  How many had been SA?  How many had been in youth troops or knew of the slaughter of youth troops by Allied forces at various sites (or had survived the incidents where Allied forced failed to take prisoners - crimes soon to be repeated in Korea a few years after) ?  Were any from fire-bombed Wuerzburg or other fire-bombed cities north and south of Marburg?  It is essential to know who these students were and that informations should be in the Uni archives.

Banality of Evil, or Banalität des Bösen

 

The banality of the torture of Irena Sendler?

The film did not dare reveal what was done to her, nor the truth of how she happened to survive: shoddy, without a bullet to the head.

Basic reference: Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich, Frankfurt 2007.

The execution of Zuzzana Ginzburg  may have been simpler.

   see: Zuzanna Ginczanka or Zuzanna Polina Gincburg or Susanna Ginzburg

The notion of banality was well-established with Heidegger long before his SA enthusiasms and his reunion with Arendt.

Compare: Hannah Arendt on Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig, the suicides.

   A suicide of a less than banal psychopath: Theodor Dannecker (Camp de Drancy and other.)

  Never interviewed by Arendt as "journalist": Alois Brunner.

  Never trained as social scientist: Hannah Arendt.  Never trained as philosopher: her second husband, the buffoon of Bard.  The end of the tradition of philosopher Hermann Cohen's Marburg: Heidegger mocking philosopher Ernst Cassirer* at Davos.

For a Heidegger, what could be more banal than the death met by Afra Geiger?

Was the world reading the words of Heidegger as a phrase "coined" by Arendt?

See Dresden HAIT.

* whose work gave us Susanne Langer
Note: there is a Paul-Natorp-Strasse in Marburg an der Lahn, but no Hermann-Cohen-Weg.
Sehe: Landkreis Marburg-Biedenkopf
Sehe: Marburg marks the location of the Synagogue of the Middle Ages.
Sehe: the 19th Century Synagogue in Marburg burning on Kristallnacht.

My testimony: 1985, one plaque for Hermann Cohen at the old University; one plaque for "fellow citizens who FELL in the war"; no sign of the great synagogue or the missing Jews or any indication on any home that it had been the home of a Jew in during the 1938 pogrom.
Compare:  mezuzah found on the doorposts of peasant houses in Poland in filming "Shoah".
Missing: Judengasse, Marburg, Hessen.
Present: a great many American tourists for Grimm Brothers and the Elizabeth Church.

Facts: one bomb fell in the railyards of Marburg causing one death, but all handicapped and mentally ill murdered; no data on citizen or boys lost among troops, youth troops or SA members or other.  But note activity to deny wrong-doing in 1949 at the Uni-Marburg on visit by Niemoeller.

Story of note: Erich Frank, a death in Amsterdam, 1945.

Today:
Jüdische Gemeinde Marburg
Liebigstr. 21A, 35037 Marburg, Germany
+49 6421/407430 ‎
http://gcjz-marburg.de
http://www.jg-marburg.de/eng/cooperation.htm
http://www.landsynagoge-roth.de/
http://www.alemannia-judaica.de/marburg_synagoge.htm

Heideggers Lunettes

Heidegger without spectacles might not have noted that it was high thin cirrus obscuring the quartered moon as it neared meridian at sunset this evening.

From spectacles came the spyglass of Galileo - but this was not the inverting telescope of Kepler.

Leibniz was called upon for pumping aqua from mines, but the well at Todtnauberg had no need of Archimedes.

Heidegger on Richard Feynman's 1965 Nobel ?

Man sagt, die moderne Technik sei eine unvergleichbar andere genenüber aller früheren, weil sie auf der neuzeitlichen exakten Naturwissenschaft beruhe. Inzwischen hat man deutlicher erkannt, daß auch das Umgekehrte gilt: die neuzeitliche Physik ist als experimentelle auf technische Apparaturen und auf den Fortschritt des Apparatebaues angewiesen.

Arendt (who may have had no science other than Heidegger's smattering)

"[...] that we deal only with the patterns of our own mind, the mind which designed the instruments and put nature under its conditions in the experiment — prescribed its laws to nature [...]" 

But the rising and setting star is displaced by the same refraction as the canoe paddle in the stream, Herr Doktor Professor ... ah, yes, but we spoilt it by making a measurement with sticks and notches in wanting to mark the seasons, the floods, the great squalls at sea ... that arising from the activity of mind within nature with culture, with language, with social tasks (objectives.)