Reinhard Johler – författare

This book is the result of a Franco-German encounter between teachers, students and the descendants of victims of Nazi scientific crimes who traveled from the United States, Israel, Switzerland and the south of France especially for the event. The event took place in Alsace in June 2023. In mid-August 194386 Jewish men and women from several European countries had been murdered in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp for the purpose of adding their skeletons to the anthropological collection of the then Reich University of Strasbourg. With numerous images and reports, this book documents and tells a special story: for one, the changing, private and also institutional memory of this crime, then the related, changing transnational cultures of memory of the present, and finally the didactic-pedagogical communication of remembrance in memorial sites.From the outset, the descendants of the victims, the teachers and students in Strasbourg were in agreement: We Remember.

World War I marks a well-known turning point in anthropology, and this volume is the first to examine the variety of forms it took in Europe. Distinct national traditions emerged and institutes were founded, partly due to collaborations with the military. Researchers in the cultural sciences used war zones to gain access to »informants«: prisoner-of-war and refugee camps, occupied territories, even the front lines. Anthropologists tailored their inquiries to aid the war effort, contributed to interpretations of the war as a »struggle« between »races«, and assessed the »warlike« nature of the Balkan region, whose crises were key to the outbreak of the Great War.