UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM (WASHINGTON, D.C.)

The article is aimed at examining how the United States Memori- al Museum in Washington, D.C., preserves the memory of the Holocaust, what educational technologies are recommended for teachers. Transmission of the Holocaust memory is still very important, as even nowadays attempts are made to deny the fact of systematic persecution and destruction of Jews or underrate its scale. The museum communicates, in the historical context, traditional nar- rative – Hitler’s rise to power, Nazi Jewish policy. Emphasis is put on German ideology and propaganda. Great attention is paid to the historical sources, not only official ones, – to the diaries, letters, memoirs, photographs, interviews with the camp prisoners who have survived, as well as to the artifacts, audio- and video materials. The online exhibition “Americans and the Holocaust” reveals events in Germany as seen through the lens of different U.S. periodi- cals. Concrete recommendations are made to the educators – to avoid simple answers to complex questions and the comparison of suffering, to show that the Holocaust was not inevitable, to take into consideration an age-appropriate approach, etc. The author shares the views of the researchers who come to the conclusion: the reconstruction of the Holocaust in the museum determines our perception of the past and, therefore, deepens our understanding of the present.

The Theses on Feuerbach and Decolonising Methodology: A Parallel Walking

This article aims to reflect upon the relevance of Decolonization methodologies with the Theses on Feuerbach. Somehow, all the Indigenous scholars started from new Marxist like Paulo Freire, Frantz Fanon, but not from classic Marx. To us, the German Ideology of young Marx only resembles the pioneering sources of Indigenous methodology. This discussion is thus a reflection of our studies and a philosophic endeavor to talk about the marginal people of the world, and the scholars who engaged in and with the oppressed. However, we are not prepared to turn our attention away from all the vastness of Marx to a collection of potentially equally relevant to Indigenous methodology. This article concludes that the Theses on Feuerbach is the core of Marxist archaeology of knowledge or philosophy as a whole and has been wading in the Indigenous paradigm.

Historical materialism as mediation between the physical and the meaningful

The article argues that historical materialism is not only a theory of historical change but more generally a mediation between the natural foundations of human life and its meaningful symbolic expressions. The article begins with an interpretation of the general philosophical significance of the basic premises of historical materialism as they are sketched in the German Ideology. I argue that these premises point us in two different directions: down, towards a scientific understanding of the natural world, and up, towards interpretations of meaningful human expressions. Reductionist scientific models are appropriate for the understanding of natural forces, but these reveal their own limitations when applied to social life. Social life cannot be understood outside its symbolic expressions, but these are not free floating ideal abstractions, but remain connected to fundamental human purposes and must be understood as such.