Businesses and properties owned by Jews were the target of vicious Nazi mobs during a night of vandalism that is known as “Kristallnacht”. (Bettmann\/CORBIS\/Bettmann Archive)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cI said, \u2018Look at all those people throwing shoeboxes from the shop windows!\u2019 There was a happy mood. I remember that very well,\u201d said Antp\u00f6hler, who is not Jewish. \u201cThey were trying all the shoes on.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy grandmother said to me, \u2018We don\u2019t look at that. This is hell, this is the devil at work.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
This week, Antp\u00f6hler will share her memories in conversation with moderator Frank Lauk\u00f6tter at an event recalling the burning of the Aumunder Synagogue in Bremen, where she lived after the war with her late husband, Hajo Antp\u00f6hler.<\/p>\n
It is one of hundreds of events planned across Germany marking the 84th anniversary of the pogrom. Few will use the name by which it is known around the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cKristallnacht is a much too pretty word for something so terrible, and I don\u2019t use it anymore,\u201d said Jessica Ohletz, vice principal of the Julius-Leber High School in Breisach, a town in southwest Germany. Ohletz is taking students for the first time to participate in a program on \u201cThe Days of Terror\u201d at the Blue House, an educational establishment located in the town\u2019s former Jewish religious school and community house.<\/p>\n
\u201cI personally believe that all the terms create false associations,\u201d said Christiane Walesch-Schneller, who chairs the board of the Blue House. \u201cFor me, there is no term yet which I feel is adequate.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Breisach, \u201cthe terror went on for three to four days,\u201d she said. \u201cThey were looting Jewish stores, attacking Jews in the street.\u201d Sixty Jewish men were transported to the Dachau concentration camp. And \u201cthe Jewish community received the bill for the gasoline that was used to burn the synagogue.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Germany, the terms \u201cNovember Pogrom,\u201d \u201cPogromnacht\u201d or \u201cReichspogromnacht\u201d were slowly introduced in the late 1970s, when Germany\u2019s postwar generations began challenging their parents\u2019 sanitized version of history.<\/p>\n
The history of the Kristallnacht name is unclear. In their 1988 lexicon, \u201cNS-Deutsch\u201d (\u201cNational Socialist German\u201d), authors Karl-Heinz Brackmann and Renate Birkenhauer say \u201cthe harmless-sounding name was also used officially to refer to the mountains of broken glass lying on the streets.\u201d But in 1998, German linguist Cornelia Schmitz-Berning decided not to include it in her \u201cVocabulary of National Socialism,\u201d as she found \u201cno contemporary documentary evidence of the term being used.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was never used in official talks or papers of the time; it was popular jargon,\u201d said Heine, whose 2019 book \u201cBurnt Words: When we still talk like the Nazis \u2014 and when we don\u2019t\u201d also explores the etymology of loaded words.<\/p>\n
Whatever its source, \u201cthere are good reasons to reject the term,\u201d Heine said. For one thing, it might distract from a speaker\u2019s point: \u201cYou can interrupt any serious conversation in Germany by saying your counterpart used a Nazi word.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was even a 1982 hit by the German rock group BAP called \u201cKristallnaach\u201d: In the Cologne dialect, the group rants about right-wing populism, materialism and other ills of modern Germany, with the refrain, \u201cIt smells like Kristallnacht.\u201d<\/p>\n
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