Germans atone for Holocaust with “stumble stones”
The metal plaques, called Stolpersteine, or “stumble stones,” are set into the ground at my father’s ancestral home in this picturesque village south of Frankfurt.
The squares, 10 cm by 10 cm (4 inches by 4 inches), are barely conspicuous, but the words etched in brass seem to cry out for memory of the home’s last five Jewish inhabitants.
As autumn sunlight bounces off the plaques, I recall a time nearly 75 years ago when the five, all relatives including my father, were driven from here by Nazi anti-Semitism. Four fled Germany; the fifth died in a concentration camp.
The creation of Cologne artist Gunter Demnig, the Stolpersteine are set at homes of victims of Nazi prejudice. They aim to trip the memories of passers-by of long-gone targets of discrimination, mainly Jews but also homosexuals, the disabled, dissidents and Gypsies.
By tying a victim’s fate to a capsule biography, told in a kind of Haiku, the “stumble stones” seek to reduce the epic scale of the Holocaust to a more comprehensible human story.
The perils of eating fire in Saudi Arabia when religious police disapprove
Saudi artist Maher al-Luqman is always nervous when he goes on stage to eat glass and fire or to walk on nails, for fear the country’s religious police will disrupt his show.
The leader of a troupe of 12 strongmen, Luqman struggles for acceptance in a country whose austere version of Sunni Islam means that many forms of entertainment and unusual feats of strength are sometimes seen as sorcery.
“They have stopped us for two years, branding us as sorcerers, and calling for people to fight us and report us,” Luqman, 35, told Reuters.
Bearded religious policemen roam the streets of the Gulf Arab kingdom of 25 million people to enforce gender segregation, search for drugs and alcohol and to stop behaviour they consider immoral. Luqman’s group had permission to perform last week in a desert town 200 km north of the capital Riyadh but was abruptly stopped from going on stage by an order from the religious police.
“I am fed up. I want to leave. It is so sad to see these talents go to waste,” Luqman said.
from India Insight:
Are there too many sacred topics in India?
Protests and television debates on the apex court's decision to OK the publication of a book on Maratha ruler Shivaji, banned in 2004 by the Maharashtra government, has put India back in the spotlight on the question of freedom of expression.
India is secular and a democracy but a country with a billon-plus population -- consisting of hundreds of tribes, clans and castes following myriad beliefs -- can be pretty fickle when it comes to defining 'sensitive' topics and easily susceptible to parochial politics.
The list of subjects considered "sacred" in the country include the extended Gandhi family, Ambedkar, Periyar, Subhash Chandra Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, Veer Savarkar and maybe a few thousand more people, said an editorial in the 'Mint' daily.
"Shivaji - The Hindu King in Muslim India" by American James Laine was banned after a little known rightwing group ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, which Laine had mentioned in his acknowledgement. The group alleged the book was derogatory to the Maratha leader.
India has always been accommodative of interest groups with political parties quick in trying to score political points over sensitive topics. Any literary or artistic work on religious, political and historical figures has always endured intense public scrutiny.
Reams of newsprint and television debates have focused on the clash between censoring works deemed objectionable by some and the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and expression.
In Sistine Chapel, pope tells artists beauty can lead to God
Pope Benedict met artists from around the world in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday and urged them to inject spirituality into their work, saying contemporary beauty was often “illusory and deceitful.”
“Beauty … can become a path toward the transcendent, toward the ultimate Mystery, toward God,” he told the artists meeting beneath the vaulted ceiling of the chapel painted by Michelangelo. “Too often … the beauty thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful … it imprisons man within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy.”
The Vatican said it invited some 500 artists to the event, regardless of religious, political or stylistic allegiances. More than 250 accepted, mostly from Italy, including singer Andrea Bocelli and award-winning film composer Ennio Morricone. Amongst the other guests were Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid, whose Maxxi modern art museum has just opened in Rome, and F. Murray Abraham, the American actor who won an Oscar for his role as Salieri in the Mozart film, Amadeus, in 1985.
Read the whole story here and the full text of the pope’s address here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNXKFYe8U OgPlease comment – the clip has relevanceIn Judaism we find beauty in creativity as well, but this has not been developed in many ultra religious circles because of the value of study in our faith.
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