There's a new exhibit at the German History Museum in Berlin, exploring the way that everyday Germans participated in National Socialism. Unfortunately, it's only running through February 6th.

From the New York Times story by Michael Slackman:



Nazi Kitch

"This show, “Hitler and the Germans: Nation (Volksgemeinschaft) and Crime,” opened Friday. It was billed as the first in Germany since the end of World War II to focus exclusively on Adolf Hitler. Germany outlaws public displays of some Nazi symbols, and the curators took care to avoid showing items that appeared to glorify Hitler. His uniforms, for example, remained in storage.

Instead, the show focuses on the society that nurtured and empowered him. It is not the first time historians have argued that Hitler did not corral the Germans as much as the Germans elevated Hitler. But one curator said the message was arguably more vital for Germany now than at any time in the past six decades, as rising nationalism, more open hostility to immigrants and a generational disconnect from the events of the Nazi era have older Germans concerned about repeating the past."

Damage to Majdanek

AP reports that a fire burnt down half of one of the barracks buildings at Majdanek last night. Majdanek was one of six Vernichtungslager or "extermination camps" that the Nazis constructed in 1941. At this point, the cause of the fire is still under investigation, with the likely culprit a recent power outage. The most upsetting result of the fire was the loss of approximately 10,000 pairs of shoes belonging to former victims.
Earlier this year, flooding threatened Auschwitz-Birkenau as well. I suppose it's inevitable that these strucutures ultimately succumb to the elements. I wonder how long museums to Auschwitz and other death camps will stick around? Will they have the longevity of sites like the Dome of the Rock or Trajan's Column? Will future generations still want or need them around?

Above is the memorial to the victims of Majdanek. It also houses the ashes of the dead.

Auschwitz






 On Sunday, July 4 I visited the remains of Auschwitz I and II. Both are well-preserved, even though the Nazis tried to cover up all traces of their enormous crimes. I didn't sleep well the night before, because I can't understand a word of Polish and was worried I would fail to catch the early train. Auschwitz has become a huge tourist destination, attracting at least 1.3 million people in 2009. Because it's so busy, the museum now refuses to admit anyone without a reservation after 10:00. I wanted to explore the camps at my own pace (which was certainly the right choice) and planned to arrive the moment the museum opened in the morning.
There's a train that leaves once or twice each hour from Krakow main railway station. It's a slow ride, so I had to board the 6:10 train. I'm relieved that I did, because by 10:00, when I finished the first part of my tour in Auschwitz I, there were a dozen busses lined up and groups kicking off at 10-yard intervals to walk the camp. When I was there it was quiet and uncrowded, so I didn't have to compete with other people. The same was true for Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Click to see this up close. The guard post is eerie.

I expected empty, delapidated buildings, but at Auschwitz I (a former Polish Army barracks) the buildings are almost all stone and in perfect condition. In some cases, you can make out names or images that inmates scratched into the walls. There is faded German signage and the original paint still shows. [For example, above is the central square of Auschwitz I--the base of the guard house has been playfully painted to look as though it has stones set in it.] Important locations are clearly marked and often an illustration (by a former inmate) accompianies each explanation. The museum is located in a series of buildings or “Blocks”. There is no “fat” in the main exhibition which is housed in Blocks 4-7 and 11--the “Death Block”. Althogether the remnants are a damning collection of evidence and present a compelling argument against faith in human goodness and historical progress. Simply put, it's horrifying and demoralizing.

I couldn't photograph any of the exhibits in the Blocks, which is just as well. It wouldn't do the place justice and it seemed inappropriate anyway. Block 4 established a basic history and explained the purpose of the camp. Sometimes, the layout of each Block is unclear, and I believe I skipped a few exhibit rooms. For example, I realized late that I missed the upper floor exhibit on the "hospital" and SS medical experiments.

This is what the Soviets found.

I also almost missed room 5 in Block 4. The room holds a single exhibit: a sea of women's hair. Sometimes braided.

The scope of the orchestrated cruelty at Auschwitz is hard to accept. I can't stop thinking about the hair. As I walked the rest of the museum, and then the grounds of the Vernichtungslager at Birkenau, the accumulated weight of human suffering and the calculated cruelty of the perpetrators was tangible. The Death Block is an absolute torture chamber. And there are pools next to the crematoria where the Nazis dumped the ashes of their victims. Outside of the camp walls, there are acres of soil saturated with ash.

Above is one of the few clandestine photos showing the process of extermination at Auschwitz. Prisoners are burning bodies in giant pits outside the wire of the camp. In the summer of '44, the crematoria couldn't keep up with the gas chambers.

This is what the same spot looks like today.

The SS dynamited the crematoria when they fled. This is Crematoria IV. The ash pond is to its right in the photo below:

At the same location, we see a group of Hungarian Jews in the summer of '44. They are standing in the vicinity of Crematoria IV and V and waiting to be gassed (they would be in the stand of trees you see behind the foundations of the destroyed Crematoria) . All children were sent directly to the gas along with their mothers. There was no need to shave their heads until after they were dead. That task would fall to the Jewish Sonderkommando.

The monument at Birkenau is huge, and I admit I never appreciated it before (as though it were my place to judge the choices of the generation who lived it). The abstract sculpture, unveiled in 1967, always struck me as the product of a modernist impulse that I found sterile and obtuse.

When I saw it up close and in context, however, I changed my mind. It is an attempt to commemorate, define, and make a collective statement about a place that reflects the greatest imaginable barbarism. In multiple languages, at the foot of a line of abstract shapes, are a series of plaques. Each says the following: “Forever let this place be a cry of dispair and a warning to humanity where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children mainly Jews from various countries of Europe”. It was very moving.

I walked the extermination camp for about an hour. It was only busy toward the end of my stay, when the mobs from the museum arrived by shuttle. I walked past at least five student groups as I returned to the parking lot. Students from Israel had their arms around one another. Students from America seemed distracted by the heat.

Stolpersteine and Geocaching

Two fun activities today. One is geocaching. People hide small boxes of stuff (worthless stuff, as trophies the contents aren't worth much) in locations all over the world. Then they post clues to the locations of their chaches online. Anybody with a GPS device (most of our cell-phones) can search for the cache. Once you find it, you pull a book out of the box and pencil in the date and time. Leave a note. Take an object or leave one. Then move on to the next cache.

In Friedrichshain and Neukoelln we looked for caches. Despite online photographic clues, we simply couldn't find a cache located at the Frankfurter Tor U-Bahn station. We were more successful in Neukoelln. At the site of the ruins of the first gas station in the city we found a cache. Joon made the point that geo-cachers often choose spots of historical or other interest. He pointed out that both sites we checked would introduce a stranger to some of the cooler neighborhoods in Berlin.

We also kept our eyes out for Stolpersteine (without too much success, I fear--I was always looking up). In 1992, Gunter Denning of Cologne came up with concept combining public art memorialization and collective memory. He has placed approximately 7000 "stumble-stones" throughout Germany. He began his project in the Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg boroughs because they had previously been home to significant Jewish populations.

Stones (metal plaques) are laid in the sidewalk at the location of a person's last place of residence prior to deportation. Each stone includes the victim's name, birth-year, date of deporation and fate. Denning had the following to say about his project:

"The memory of this person will be called concretely into our day-to-day lives through the personal memory of this person, at the home where he lived until deportation. Each individual's stone goes on to symbolize the entirety of the victims, because it is impossible to actually place all of the stones."

These are not only Jewish victims, either. Sinti and Roma, political foes, homosexuals, Jehova's Witnesses are other groups included in the project.

Individuals can support the placement of Stolpersteine. Here's the site.

Jewish Berlin

Yesterday and today I visited sites associated with the history of European Jewry. The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe is powerful and really brilliant. Fortunately for anybody visiting Berlin, it's directly south of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate, so there's time for everyone to visit it. Just climb out of a train at the Hauptbahnhof and walk 15-20 minutes. Peter Eisenmann created a monument that would "develop a new idea of remembering" because his field of different sized stelae provide no symbolic guidance. One walks into a monument with "no goal, no end, and no [clearly apparent] way in or out". For an event as inconceivable as the Shoah, words seem insufficient.
Once you find the entrance to the underground information center however, you really understand how incredible this entire construction is. It not only provides historical context. It provides rooms that invite the visitor into the experiences of victims and seeks to humanize a historical event that most of us associate with huge, impersonal numbers. While the fact that it seeks to evoke an emotional response might bother some museum purists, this is not a museum. The "exhibit" halls -- if one can call them that -- are places of reflection and contemplation.
The Juedisches Museum Berlin, however, makes every effort to actively engage the visitor. I was overwhelmed by the richness of the permanent exhibition and had to break off my visit due to "museum fatigue". Even then, as I walked swiftly through the second half of the exhibit, I stopped two or three times because some artifact caught my eye/ear. For example, there was a clip from a brief television interview with Hanna Arendt. I sat down in front of the monitor, listened, and gaped.

This is a museum that deserves an entire day, or perhaps a couple of visits over time. The same is not true for Karlshorst. As much as there is to learn there, it doesn't have the same compelling power of narrative (and it should!). The architecture of the space lends much to the experience. One senses that this place is special, indeed.
This is another museum that seeks to inspire wonder and empathy. Does that limit its authority as an educational site? Does it fail the "objectivity" test? If the other extreme is the Panzer Museum at Munster, I'll take the Jewish Museum any time.