Monthly Archives: November 2018

Kristallnacht: What Does It Mean?

As twilight descends, some hours later here in EST than in Germany, it is the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of [Broken] Glass, in Nazi Germany, or what older Germans still call the Hitlerzeit–the Time of Hitler. In Louisville, Kentucky we also commemorated “Veterans’ Day”–which was and should still be Armistice Day–which has its origins at the end of what we now know as the First World War. In 1918, however, it was known as The Great War, or more optimistically, the War to End All Wars. The two events, Kristallnacht and Armistice Day, by a perverse irony. Veterans, especially British veterans, marched in the first commemoration of the day behind a banner that said Never Again.

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