CLCS 301-51 Journal

10.3.2008

Standing on the steps of the Reichstag is strange…I want to swell and overflow with pride for the deutsche Volk but I know that few respectable Germans feel comfortable enough in their positions to do so.  Since I’m so disconnected from D’s past I feel a really bizarre sort of immunity from the Nazis and all their associated beliefs.  The rest of the non-German world feels this too, with all the people getting Viking tattoos and openly loving Norse mythology.  SO many don’t recognize the implications of such Nord-worship.  Especially in metal circles which I frequent.  They’re so disconnected from the ties between Nazism and Nordic pride. 

Neue Wache makes me a little sad…a little sorry for this über-Christian world in which we live where one religion can completely dominate commemoration of those of an entirely different faith.  If there is anything the Holocaust was not, it was certainly far from a Christian event.  I did like the hole in the ceiling though…despite its open evocation of someone else’s god in the sky, I couldn’t help but feel the suggested glimmer of hope we are supposed to feel.  Seems a bit strange to hold the memorial in such a classically grand outer structure.  The juxtaposition of the dark room and bustling Mitte outside feels bizarre.

Jewish Museum

-Love the ceiling.  The void effect with ceiling windows creates emptiness.

-Liebeskind intended for a great deal of empty, unfillable spaces stuffed with emptiness and aching of loss and destruction.

-The lack of right angles and flat floors feels disorienting – it would be so easy to lose someone – or yourself – in here.  The space is not welcoming in the least.  Reminds me more of an art gallery than a traditional museum space.

-WTF everyone is playing in the Garden of Exile.  But maybe I feel unjustified or unnecessary pressure to be solemn.  My solemnity and reverence could be a forced product of my Americanness.  Felt dizzying and tippy, was hard to walk, frustrating to see and hear all the outside sights and sounds.

-Why does it bother them more to hear people giggling auf deutsch than in Italian?

-Axis of the Holocaust: ceiling lowers, could eat us if it wanted to

-Holocaust Tower – I immediately felt uneasy in this extremely oppressive space, like I am the only human remaining on earth.  If there are others it hardly matters because there feels to be no way out.  It feels like I’ve been abandoned and the way is shut.

-Crosses are not Christian – but the rest of the world makes that association

-Shalechet: Walking on those faces felt like walking on top of ___’s dead relatives and all the Jews I know.  The sound was so grating and chilling.  An interesting exercise in guilt creation and counter-intuition.  My favorite thus far.

-The window cutouts look cheap as hell

-Revisited the Holocaust Tower.  It's so different with people talking loudly.  Even an animated conversation feels like the loneliest place on earth.  I enjoyed it in the sickest way because I knew that I could leave whenever I wanted.

11.03.2008

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

I feel surprisingly nothing, perhaps due to all the giggling German high schoolers running about.  This memorial seems to offer hope and promise, peaceful, shows a way out.  These pillars remind me of the lack of Jewish presence in the world yet everywhere I feel their presence and know that they’ll be okay.  On this nice day, die Sonne scheint in der Himmel and I feel really tranquil.  I would characterize this experience as peaceful and almost pleasant.  On sunny days it seems to me that this memorial’s cause is easily forgotten.  But coming and going it is just like a cemetery

Memorial – Downstairs (Museum)

The victim search engine is highly effective.  For me at least it really turns the Holocaust from abstract historical event into personal stories.  Even just knowing a name and what he or she did for a living takes memorialization to a whole new level.  I searched for “___” which is one of my best friend’s mother’s surnames.  ___ ___ whose parents narrowly escaped death at a concentration camp.  The name generator instantly provided over 1000 people of the family name ___ who were killed off like vermin and remembered only by the select few who are either relatives or who bothered to search for the name on the name databases in Berlin or Yad Vashem.

It is enough to break even the toughest hearts to think about the Holocaust on such a personal, individual level.  Which is why, I think, so few do.  Currently choking back tears, despite the fact that I specifically dislike the Jewish faith (among many others).  People are people.  I’d probably even be crying if these were Fred Phelps’ godhatesfags.com minions.

The audio survivor recollections are gory and shocking, brutal accounts of horrors I thought only possibly in Cannibal Corpse lyrics.  I find this dangerous because it could end up like the videos at the Holocaust Museum in DC – people looking pruriently for sensationalist thrills, desiring to hear gory details of the dark potential of human nature.  Absolutely nauseating, these accounts.  Close to tears.

Totally fucking lost it in the room with illuminated victim scribblings on the floor.  It was too much.  I observed parents and their children, a father with his daughter about 12 years old, a young mother and her tiny blond son, a very somber looking young German uni student.  Saw no emotional outbursts or tears from anyone but me – felt self-conscious and embarrassed but why?  It’s only one of the most horrible things to have ever happened…I need a cigarette.

12.03.2008

Grunewald Train Memorial

It’s amazing what a difference it makes to see numbers and dates of deported Juden.  I’m sitting comfortably on a train now.  Lucky birth.  I suppose I could have been deported like cattle or worse to the slaughterhouses of Auschwitz or Belzec, but I was born too late and on the far other side of the Eurasian continent.  The train memorial was a most somber experience, with rain lightly soaking us and dozens and dozens of dates and numbers of deported Jews in rusty brown metal.  The run-down state of the train station and its immediate surroundings served to more or less enhance the entire experience in a way which we could not control.  And here we go to a college town (Potsdam) full of overwhelmingly non-Jewish German students who will study the Jews as though they are a lost civilization. 

13.03.2008

Halberstadt

What a cute little town – rather than thinking about its Jewish history I was completely distracted by the adorable buildings and just how profoundly German it seemed.  When most people think about Germany, I think they think about places like Halberstadt, and like me neglect to consider these cute small towns’ rich history of Jewish exclusion.  Visiting the two Jewish cemeteries and spending a few minutes inside the Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum was really the only reminder of Jewish life in this peaceful town.  Evidence of National Socialism and the Holocaust past were readily apparent with all the “NO NAZIS” graffiti and X-ed out swastikas plastered on walls. 

14.03.2008

Ravensbrück concentration camp

The welcome center is juxtapositioned ironically with a pleasant lake view.  Walking here was an unsettling experience; I heard children screaming as they were being gassed and the ravens’ croaks reminded me that here I am surrounded by death and the mark it has left on this otherwise quiet and unexciting little town.  My hangover only increases the volume of the screams in my head and the reality of the Holocaust as something other than a textbook history reference.  The pounding in my head and my shortness of breath from far too many cigarettes the night before echo the significance and ultimate darkness of this place, whose grounds I have not yet even begun to explore.

But then the sun came out and I felt almost immediate detachment from all the events of the past.  Memory and emotional response are strange, strange birds.

The indentations of the stones in the ground represented where barracks once stood.  Inside those barracks squeezed a thousand women, presumably disheveled, covered in their own shit and that of strangers, crying and starving and dying en masse.  How can I possibly feel for these victims of the ultimate human atrocity when all that remains are some long rectangular ditches in the ground?  I even spotted flowers growing in the ditches – signs of life where so much death lived 60 years ago.  I walked around the old abandoned buildings, looking inside at all the broken glass and cobwebs and dusty planks strewn about, and felt nothing but frustrating disconnect.  I talked with other people in the class whose sentiments echoed mine.  It is not a contest to see who is moved the most, but admittedly I was hoping to feel something during my time here. 

I did [feel something], on occasion, listening to the tour guide speak.  His slow, plodding manner of speech sharply countered our restlessness and eagerness to escape the oppressive environment of Ravensbrück and the hostels and knowledge that SS officers flirted with pretty young things in the buildings we walked in and out of.  He [the tour guide] was so fucking smart and knew everything about everything that mattered.  I felt a pronounced sadness when he told us that people were weirded out by his career choice.  I felt the insignificance on a grand scheme of his role here on earth and how many high school students probably have listened to him talk without giving a shit.

15.03.2008

Topographie des Terrors

Intense photographs, it’s amazing to see photos of what Browning wrote about in Ordinary Men.  Even more strange when I think about how black and white changes everything.  It’s like when you see all the piles of corpses in photographs of concentration camps, they’re almost reduced to time capsules because you can’t tell what sickly shade of grey or putrid yellow the victims’ skin is, and you can’t compare that to the lively green of the attractive forests surrounding the sites of murder.  Black and white photographs create the illusion that the subjects of the photographs come from some olden time that has no bearing or connection to the present.  This is clearly not really the case, but also serves as an argument in favor of colorizing old photographs – bridging generational and technological gaps in photographs is essential when it comes to fostering understanding across multiple generations.  We wouldn’t feel so removed if we could see all the blood and the discoloration around the mouth of the hanging victims or the thick crusted blood around the gunshot wounds of those shot en masse by the Einsatzgruppen.