Peter Hanenberg: "We must give the victims of the Holocaust a dignified place in our memory"
78 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, the world commemorates the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust.
The International Day of Remembrance for Holocaust Victims, celebrated on 27 January, is intended to remember this period of human history and to honour all those who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazi.
On this day, we recall the words of the Vice-Rector of the Universidade Católica, Peter Hanenberg, regarding the Holocaust and the impact it had on his academic career.
1.3 million prisoners were taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp between 1942 and 1945, but only 200 thousand survived. So that no one would be forgotten, the United Nations established the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, which is celebrated today.
For the Vice-Rector of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa and German culture researcher, Peter Hanenberg, "keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust is a job that can have no end."
A legacy of history that Peter Hanenberg says marked his entire childhood, adolescence and adult life. "Nothing was hidden" says the researcher, recalling his first religion teacher, a concentration camp prisoner, who provided him with "a very present testimony of that time of suffering."
The vice-rector of the University, who has dedicated many of his research works to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, recalls that from a very young age he felt "revolt over what happened, but also the need to understand and contribute to the search for a dynamic relationship with this memory. So that it will never be lost."
"My professors made us aware of the court cases against those responsible for the crimes committed in the concentration camps, which we also visited, and this was important for us to be aware, from an early age, of the horror that took place," he stresses.
Admitting that the interest in this part of History "was biographically motivated", Peter Hanenberg also highlights the influence that some post-war authors had on his research work.
"One of them was Wolfgang Hildesheimer. An author who escaped the concentration camps, because he went into exile in time, and whose work responds to this moment in a satirical and even comic, but very intense way," says Hanenberg.
"The other writer was Peter Weiss, who was very important for German society, because with his play "The Investigation" he brought to the stage not the victims of the concentration camps but the court against those responsible for Auschwitz. It was very important for public reflection on the responsibility for the crimes, because it always reflected two aspects
the responsibility and the quest to know how to talk about it," adds the researcher.
A work that Hanenberg, considers "very important, because respect for the victims includes a certain limitation in the representation, given the difficulty in imagining the suffering, the despair and the cruelty of that act."
"There is a whole history of reflection on the Holocaust, of representation and attempts to 'come to terms with'. But it's a story that never ends," the lecturer adds.
And it is precisely the awareness of this difficulty of understanding that leads Peter Hanenberg to address, in his doctoral thesis, "the role of history in the literary construction of a present that understands itself as heir to the past."
"I tried to show how History impacts and what are its forms of thought, action and memory that can be applied to the present. Not to forget what happened, but to do in a different way, what was done wrong in the past."
In essence, Hanenberg says, "it was an attempt to understand how one can talk about the Holocaust, about the victims, perpetuating their memory and ensuring that future generations do not forget what happened."
A purpose that Hanenberg says he seeks to maintain in his German Culture classes, in his PhD in Cultural Studies, at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, recognising, however, that the teaching of this subject leaves him "sometimes worried and uncomfortable, as he sees in the students, a certain fascination with the violence of that time."
An example of this, he mentions, "is the interest that the famous book, Mein Kampf - My Struggle, by Adolf Hitler, arouses in young people, and which in Germany was even banned and considered a public danger".
"I don't know how anyone wastes time reading a book like that," says Peter Hanenberg, recalling that "despite the passing of the years, and the need to be creative, we cannot consider the process of memory to be complete."
"This is the best we can do for the victims of the Holocaust. To give them a worthy place in memory, depending on the time in which we live. But it is a work that does not have and cannot have an end," adds the lecturer.