Comedy Books On Sale At The Dachau Concentration Camp Museum Teach Germans About Those Funny Jews
EXIT via the gift shop. Goldblog spotted one at the German”s Dachau concentration camp. Rachel Salamander’s bookshop “Literaturhandlung”, in the visitors’ center of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, “specialises in the history of Dachau Concentration Camp and those persecuted by the Nazi regime, but books on related topics are also available. There are also a number of books on Jewish culture and literature.”
Why are there books on Jewish culture? And check out the books:
I admire the country’s willingness to memorialize its atrocious past and to make sites like Dachau accessible to tourists, especially when compared with Austria’s unwillingness to do the same. But I’m not sure I’ll ever warm up to the idea of concentration camp gift shops, particularly those that sell Woody Allen biographies. (The last time I visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, the gift shop was selling key chains, so this isn’t just about Germany.) In the absence of dispositive answers but knowing a bit about how modern-day German culture objectifies Jews in odd and somewhat disconcerting ways, my best guess is that these biographies are meant to suggest to visitors, especially German ones, that Jews are, in fact, really quite excellent — for one thing, they’re funny! — and therefore the Nazis were idiots for trying to annihilate them.
It reminds me of the old Jewish Joke:
Two Jews are in front of a firing squad awaiting their execution. As they stand there, the leader of the firing squad asks them:
“Do either of you have any last requests?”
The first Jew says:
“Could I have a blindfold please?”
The second Jew turns to him and whispers:
“Don’t make trouble.”
Posted: 21st, February 2014 | In: Reviews, The Consumer Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
