REGENT’S NOW FEATURES
Sandra Franz
The Memorial to the 39th Fusilier Regiment at Reeser Platz in Düsseldorf, Germany, completed in 1939 in a typical Nazi architectural style.
Remembrance in the Land of the Perpetrators Historical monuments from a German perspective Sandra Franz
During the troubled years of 1933-1945 the former homeowner, Richard Merländer, was systematically deprived of his legal rights, his possessions, his dignity and, in the end, his life, by the local government, his peers and his neighbours. However, this tragic story is juxtaposed with an earlier life
REGENT’S PARK COLLEGE
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OXFORD
of belonging, and the success of a young man who built a business and a home in a thriving German city. It is foremost the history of assimilated Jewry, a segment of the population which saw itself as primarily German – rightfully so. The narrative of the Holocaust in Germany is often told as starting almost ‘out of the blue’ in January 1933 and developing in a vacuum with no obvious prehistory or continuation after the complete capitulation of the Third Reich. Through the Villa Merländer, Sandra Franz we have the opportunity to illustrate the life of German Jewish history before the terror, which I feel is essential in painting a coherent and honest picture. In an already eventful year, 2020 witnessed the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter movement, arguably the most profound global debate on race and racism since the 1960s, which has triggered renewed debate on the value of historical statues and the potential insult they
Simon Erath
T
he Villa Merländer NS-Documentation Centre in Krefeld, western Germany, is a research facility located in the former home of a Jewish silk merchant. This is unusual as, more often than not, local memorial places (of which we have twenty-seven professional institutes in the state of North Rhine Westphalia alone) are housed in former places of persecution. Villa Merländer therefore enables us to tell a broader, more complex story.
