In Niendorf

 

Today I visited the old cemetery in Niendorf and the fallow deer enclosure.

Pictures to follow

Gegen das Vergessen • Lest we forget

Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November Pogrom(s) was a pogrom against Jews carried out by SA paramilitary forces and civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”) comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris. Wikipedia

Today I visited several Stolpersteine in my neighbourhood. There are more than 5,100 in Hamburg. They can be found with the help of an app which also informs about the life of the victims where possible. My favourite city map map.me also lists them.

A Stolperstein (pronounced [ˈʃtɔlpɐˌʃtaɪn]; plural Stolpersteine; literally “stumbling stone”, metaphorically a “stumbling block”) is a sett-size, ten-centimetre (3.9 in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution.

The Stolpersteine project, initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, aims to commemorate individuals at exactly the last place of residency—or, sometimes, work—which was freely chosen by the person before he or she fell victim to Nazi terror, euthanasia, eugenics, deportation to a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. As of December 2019, 75,000 Stolpersteine have been laid, making the Stolpersteine project the world's largest decentralized memorial.

The majority of Stolpersteine commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Others have been placed for Sinti and Romani people (then also called “gypsies”), homosexuals, the physically or mentally disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, black people, members of the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the anti-Nazi Resistance, the Christian opposition (both Protestants and Catholics), and Freemasons, along with International Brigade soldiers in the Spanish Civil War, military deserters, conscientious objectors, escape helpers, capitulators, “habitual criminals”, looters, and others charged with treason, military disobedience, or undermining the Nazi military, as well as Allied soldiers. WIKIPEDIA 

In my neigbourhood

The app for Hamburg

2459158 JDN

Today I am 26,000 days old. Why do I count the days? A day is the unit in which we experience our lives. Counting the days makes them more precious to me and reminds me how little time is left.

How did I compute? Obviously, multiplying my years by 365 doesn’t work, because it ignores the leap years of my life. So I use the Julian Day Number (JDN). 

“The Julian Day Number (JDN) is the integer assigned to a whole solar day in the Julian day count starting from noon Universal time, with Julian day number 0 assigned to the day starting at noon on Monday, January 1, 4713 BC, proleptic Julian calendar (November 24, 4714 BC, in the proleptic Gregorian calendar), a date at which three multi-year cycles started (which are: Indiction, Solar, and Lunar cycles) and which preceded any dates in recorded history. For example, the Julian day number for the day starting at 12:00 UT (noon) on January 1, 2000, was 2 451 545.” WIKIPEDIA 

There are various tools to calculate the JDN. This is the one I use:

http://www.warumwieso.de/Kalender-Berechnung.html

But enough of numbers and computing. Here are some lines from one of my favourite poems:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! 

As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life 

Were all too little, and of one to me 

Little remains: but every hour is saved 

From that eternal silence, something more, 

A bringer of new things; and vile it were 

For some three suns to store and hoard myself, 

And this grey spirit yearning in desire 

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson