Adam Tooze, who (it says here) is a senior lecturer at Jesus College, Cambridge, has a book out; The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. It is getting some very good reviews, and this one will be no different. Tooze’s thesis is that the Nazi German economy was a more [...]

Germany has tossed a Holocaust denier into prison, and the American Christianist right is all outraged about it. Or so PZ Myers tells me; it’s telling that I had to learn about this from him, as this hasn’t been a big story here at all.
As you probably know, it is illegal in Germany to deny [...]

On the day following Israel’s national holocaust memorial day, writing in Haaretz, Fania Oz-Salzberger reminds both Israelis and Europeans that, for centuries, Jewish history has been an enriching element of European history. Concerned about the effect of class trips of “roudy groups” of Israeli teenagers to Auschwitz, she recommends trips to Spain instead -
Take the [...]

Iran newspaper Hamshahri came up with an original plan to counter the release of Danish cartoons making fun of the prophet Muhammad and decided to hold a little cartoon contest to test the limits of free speech:
The daily paper Hamshahri said the contest was designed to test the boundaries of free speech — the reason [...]

“I can’t really say that I’m myself,” he thinks. “I don’t know who I am. . . . I am the late Mattia Pascal.” So speaks the anti-hero of one of Italian writer Luigi Pirandello’s better known novels “Il fu Mattia Pascal” (The Late Mattia Pascal).
Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a [...]

Two days ago, Brad DeLong published an unfortunate post with an even more unfortunate title - “G?nter Grass minimizes the Holocaust” - in which he harshly criticised the German Nobel laureate G?nter Grass and even called him “Nazi scum”, an accusation he retracted later following intense criticism on his own blog as well as on [...]