page_title: Kristallnacht
section_title: Modern references
hierarchical_section_title: Kristallnacht / Modern references
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Gerhard Roese przedstawia rzeźbę synagogi w Muzeum Ziemi Kłodzkiej 8 listopada 2018 r.
context_page_description: Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November Pogrom, was a pogrom against Jews carried out by SA paramilitary forces and civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.
  Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from foreign journalists working in Germany sent shockwaves around the world.
context_section_description: Many decades later, association with the Kristallnacht anniversary was cited as the main reason against choosing 9 November (Schicksalstag), the day the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, as the new German national holiday; a different day was chosen (3 October 1990, German reunification).
  The avant-garde guitarist Gary Lucas's 1988 composition "Verklärte Kristallnacht", which juxtaposes what would become the Israeli national anthem ten years after Kristallnacht, "Hatikvah", with phrases from the German national anthem "Deutschland Über Alles" amid wild electronic shrieks and noise, is intended to be a sonic representation of the horrors of Kristallnacht. It was premiered at the 1988 Berlin Jazz Festival and received rave reviews. (The title is a reference to Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 work "Verklärte Nacht" that presaged his pioneering work on atonal music; Schoenberg was an Austrian Jew who would move to the United States to escape the Nazis).
  In 1989, Al Gore, then a senator from Tennessee and later Vice President of the United States, wrote of an "ecological Kristallnacht" in the New York Times. He opined that events then taking place, such as deforestation and ozone depletion, prefigured a greater environmental catastrophe in the way Kristallnacht prefigured the Holocaust.
  Kristallnacht was the inspiration for the 1993 album Kristallnacht by the composer John Zorn. The German power metal band Masterplan's debut album, Masterplan (2003), features an anti-Nazi song entitled "Crystal Night" as the fourth track. The German band BAP published a song titled "Kristallnaach" in their Cologne dialect, dealing with the emotions engendered by the Kristallnacht.
  Kristallnacht was the inspiration for the 1988 composition Mayn Yngele by the composer Frederic Rzewski, of which he says: "I began writing this piece in November 1988, on the 50th anniversary of the Kristallnacht ... My piece is a reflection on that vanished part of Jewish tradition which so strongly colors, by its absence, the culture of our time".
  In 2014, the Wall Street Journal published a letter from billionaire Thomas Perkins that compared the "progressive war on the American one percent" of wealthiest Americans and the Occupy movement's "demonization of the rich" to the Kristallnacht and anti-semitism in Nazi Germany. The letter was widely criticized and condemned in The Atlantic, The Independent, among bloggers, Twitter users, and "his own colleagues in Silicon Valley". Perkins subsequently apologized for making the comparisons with Nazi Germany, but otherwise stood by his letter, saying, "In the Nazi era it was racial demonization, now it's class demonization."
  Kristallnacht was invoked as a reference point on 16 July 2018 by a former Watergate Prosecutor, Jill Wine-Banks, during an MSNBC segment. Her argument was that President Trump's joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin was a performance that would live in infamy much like the attack on Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht.
  Kristallnacht has been referenced both explicitly and implicitly in countless cases of vandalism of Jewish property including the toppling of gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, and the two 2017 vandalisms of the New England Holocaust Memorial, as the memorial's founder Steve Ross discusses in his book, From Broken Glass: My Story of Finding Hope in Hitler's Death Camps to Inspire a New Generation. The Sri Lankan Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera also used the term to describe the violence in 2019 against Muslims by Sinhalese nationalists.
caption: Sculptor Gerhard Roese with a replica of Kłodzko/Glatz Synagogue in Silesia, destroyed on Kristallnacht.
exif: {"Image Make": "SONY", "Image Model": "ILCE-7", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2020:01:16 14:25:31", "Image ExifOffset": "200", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "930", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6840", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/160", "EXIF FNumber": "7/2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "4000", "EXIF SensitivityType": "Recommended Exposure Index", "EXIF RecommendedExposureIndex": "4000", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2018:11:08 18:57:24", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2018:11:08 18:57:24", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "915241/125000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "361471/100000", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "527/1280", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "463/128", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "28", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "958", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "751", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "27447417/16384", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "27447417/16384", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "3", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "28", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF LensSpecification": "[28, 70, 7/2, 28/5]", "EXIF LensModel": "FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS"}