Holocaust horror can yield deeper insight into dealing with other dilemmas of history

Posted on October 31, 2022 by Alexandra Senfft

Sympathy for victims and survivors of atrocity only goes so far: we must empathise with people who need help now

Derek Scally, The Irish Times, October 31, 2022

“Through her pioneering work, Senfft explores questions of identity and trauma among perpetrator descendants. That work has brought her into contact with survivors and their families and she has appeared in two documentaries with Tomi Reichental…

“I bear no guilt but have taken on the responsibility to face the past,” she says. “We must break the silence in order to restore the victim and survivors’ dignity and to break the spell of the victimisers.”
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John Boyne: ‘Would The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas be published today?

Posted on September 20, 2022 by Alexandra Senfft

“Only in the last years have grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators begun to break the silence on their family history in a way their parents could not. Leading the way is Alexandra Senfft – a close friend of this reporter’s – whose grandfather Hanns Ludin was Nazi governor in occupied Slovakia”
by Derek Scally, The Irish Times, September 20, 2022
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White Debt

Posted on March 6, 2022 by Alexandra Senfft

Thomas Harding tells the story of the Demerara rebellion, and explores the legacy of Britain’s role in slavery and questions of personal and national responsibility.
BBC, Radio 4, March 6, 2022
Thomas Harding interviewing Alexandra Senfft, starting 29:00 minutes
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Germans push back against anti-mask Nazi resistance comparisons

Posted on November 25, 2020 by Alexandra Senfft

Opponents of Covid-19 restrictions embrace idea of fighting totalitarian German state
Derek Scally, The Irish Times, 23/11/2020
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The German model for America

Posted on November 22, 2020 by Alexandra Senfft

The long and public reckoning that followed the Holocaust shows a path forward for a United States that desperately needs to confront its racist past.

“In her [Senfft’s] estimation, even now, the Nazis have been “othered,” as if the evil hadn’t taken root in Germans’ own families and neighborhoods. Those who did confront the crimes of their ancestors could not have been prepared for what that realization would feel like…
In American textbooks and schools and families, the same phenomenon that Senfft described of Nazism is true.”
By Mattie Khan, Vox.com
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Negacionismo

Posted on February 3, 2020 by Alexandra Senfft

“Alexandra Senfft from Germany says to “The Clinic”: “Human Rights are universal and should be globally recognized. If we don’t acknowledge the crimes of the past and remain silent or worse, deny what has happened, new injustice will be done. Denial makes us accomplices of crime. It is our duty to stop denial in order to protect people and to safeguard moral and legal standards.”
In: De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de negacionismo?, Catalina Llantén The Clinic, Chile, 31.1.2020
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