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01.02.2025

The first day of February was frosty and sunny, both of which we haven't had for some time.

I think it's incredible and so funny that I wished to get a second-hand Teach yourself Icelandic textbook for my birthday around 8 years ago, got it from my cousins, and after letting it sit on my bookshelf for so many years, I finally get to use it. I wished for it back when I wanted to learn Icelandic for the first time, before I fell madly in love with Swedish. For the first couple of years I kept thinking I'd get to Icelandic later, but eventually lost interest in it. Funny how things turn out. Now I have the opportunity to go to Iceland for a couple of days in April, which I never counted on, and I thought it would be good to learn some Icelandic basics. And I have to say I'm enjoying it enormously! I can't say almost anything, I feel like my memory has got so bad over the last couple of years, but I enjoy learning about the grammar and listening to the language. For some reason it feels refreshing and not at all frustrating, but maybe the frustration will come later on.

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guy who has ibuprofen: I have ibuprofen if you need it btw

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02.02 // sometimes you look at a place of work and you just think WHY? For example I have so many questions for the guy who designed the Suhrkamp Verlag building, there was a range of decisions made and I cannot for the life of me understand them.

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02.02 // sometimes you look at a place of work and you just think WHY? For example I have so many questions for the guy who designed the Suhrkamp Verlag building, there was a range of decisions made and I cannot for the life of me understand them.

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마눌님께서는 좀 진하다고 하실라나..

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Der Wahlomat gibt mir als Auswertung Grüne, Sarah Wagenknecht und aus irgendeinem Grund AfD wtf 😭😭

Ich versteh aber auch einen gewissen Teil der Fragen leider nicht ganz.

Was soll ich denn nun tun? Beide Stimmen grün oder was?

am 6. februar wird soweit ich weiß der wahlomat für die bundestagswahl veröffentlicht, dann kannst du's nochmal machen. aber beide stimmen grün ist auch nicht verkehrt

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the cruel choice between pdf (free) vs physical copy (annotatable)

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31.01 // I really missed like. A Good House. or A Landscape. So this was very nice. And I had extremely good cake!

I have so many things coming up, appointments, social commitments, deadlines, I need to schedule like two days just to lie in bed and recover in the near future... But I did see trees today, I count that as a win!

currently reading: Der Gesang der Fledermäuse - Olga Tokarczuk (this old woman is an astrology girlie help)

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the need to talk about the characters vs the fear that all of my analysis is just empty prose and surface level understanding

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Wednesday, the 22nd of January 2025

Finish last few exam questions of 1E.1

1E2 + brainstorm exam questions

Bunčíć 9 + brainstorm exam questions

Groceries

Research quotes for final exhibit title

Excel sheets for picture rights

Bunčíć 10 + brainstorm exam questions (?)

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‘Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.’

—Watership Down by Richard Adams (1972)

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HOLY SHIT IT'S HAPPENED WE HAVE A LIVE LINK AND CLEARANCE TO SHARE THE COVER ART

THIS IS THE COOLEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME. LOOK AT HER.

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A sweet surprise from @the-forest-library today. I even poked my head outside in the -19°F weather to get it.

🦊 The Wood in Winter by John Lewis-Stempel

A quick read, this is a simple and thoughtful booklet about our values and traditions in winter. May you go forward with love in your hearts.

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scared to ask the librarian about this poster...

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This week, I got into a Twitter war with Auschwitz. Yes, really. I sparred with @AuschwitzMuseum, the official Twitter account for the memorial at the concentration camp in which my grandmother was once an inmate, which ended in them blocking me.

For months now, Auschwitz Museum’s Twitter account has promoted a narrative that Polish non-Jews were in no way complicit in the Holocaust.

It frequently challenges tweets that note that Polish anti-Semitism predated and contributed to the atrocities, and pushes the line that indigenous Polish anti-Semitism has no relevance to Auschwitz: “Talking about complicity between the occupiers and local civilian population in the history of Auschwitz is false.”

This behavior is in accordance with a law passed early last year in Poland, and amended (with the Israeli government’s blessing) in June 2018 that made it illegal to claim Poland was complicit in the Holocaust. It is an attempt, in particular, to prevent people saying that the Nazi death camps located in then-Nazi occupied Poland were Polish concentration camps.

I reached my boiling point when the account criticized an article from The Jewish Voice entitled “Auschwitz-Birkenau & Its Polish Roots.” The piece examines how the new law is part of a wider attempt by the Polish government to relinquish any responsibility for how local anti-Semitism contributed to the murder of 90% of Poland’s Jews.

Auschwitz did not happen in a vacuum. The persecution of Polish Jews by their non-Jewish peers predated and outlives Nazi Germany. After WWI, Poland became a hub for nationalism, pogroms, and discriminatory laws against Jews. It was fertile ground for the Nazi slaughter.

Yes, many Poles acted incredibly heroically to save Jewish lives; I’m still mad that Irene Sendler didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize.

However, Polish-Jewish historian Szymon Datner estimated Polish people directly caused the murder of 200,000 Jews during the Holocaust by handing them over to Nazis, informing authorities where they were hiding, and straight up murdering them. Datner, who himself survived the Holocaust, published the study in 1970. In 2019, doing so could be an offense.

“The people running the @AuschwitzMuseum are promoting a narrative that Polish anti-Semitism did not contribute to the Holocaust, erasing the reality that denying Polish complicity in violence against Jews contributes to anti-Semitism today,” I declared to my meager 1,600 followers. Then, I was blocked.

This experience – of the naked politicization of Holocaust memory at the ground zero of Jewish extermination – has led me to fear the current political situation in Poland could compromise Auschwitz’s historical preservation. Could the Auschwitz Museum regress back to the spirit of the times of its founding by Polish parliamentary decree in 1947, when it was established as a “Monument to the Martyrology of the Polish Nation and other Nations,” with Jews out of sight and mind?

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki is a right-wing nationalist who has stated that Jews were also “perpetrators” of the Holocaust  and has been accused of being a Holocaust denier.) He also has an unfortunate habit of complaining about “greedy Jews.”

By refusing to critically reflect on their role in the Holocaust and instead clinging solely to the fact they were victims of Nazis, most Poles have never confronted their anti-Semitic past. Now, it’s no surprise Jew-hatred has reemerged in their present. 

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21.01.2025 [☺️]

📑: 1월 계획 중간점검/ The day I checked my January plans