John Whatley
My East German friend, Jörg, says that visiting Buchenwald again, especially with a North American, will be difficult. He has offered to guide me through the camp out of a sense of duty and the responsibility is real. He says that if I want to understand socialist East Germany he should make the effort. Buchenwald lies near Weimar in Thuringia, the southernmost part of the old GDR--one of the six Länder or provinces that were returned with unification. Placed on the side of a hill called the Ettersberg it faces discreetly away from the city, and is only twenty minutes away from those twin monuments to German literary culture, the Schiller and Goethe houses. It is also not far from Jörg's birthplace and he has known it most of his life; he would have driven past it countless times on his way to Weimar from the small town he lives in. The trip from his home to the camp is not long and. my first impression is of utter normalcy--the camp could be a tourist attraction. As we arrive, two large private buses are emptying and a local high school class begins the tour with us; a couple kisses passionately in front of the large plastic map of the camp outside; caught by a gust of March wind, a man with an unruly German shepherd and three children struggles to make some headway toward an ice cream kiosk.
I wonder why Jörg thinks Buchenwald would be central to grasping the socialist culture of the GDR. Any details I know of it come from one indelible essay called "A Victim" by Bruno Bettelheim who was an inmate. From his account, it is clear that it was used as an instrument of genocide, the terminus of race hatred. Some of the books and pamphlets in the small store next to the entrance show this: In one, the camp specialized in solving the danger to the Nazi state represented by the missliebige Bevölkerungsgruppen, the 'unloved' or 'unwanted' segments of the population, a category that included communists, homosexuals, gypsies, Jews and Slavs. But after reading some of the other titles, Buchenwald re-emerges as a symbol of Marxist anti-fascist resistance, and I begin to guess its significance to Jörg. For him the camp played a central role in the working class struggle and it was taught to him as the defining example of the fascist attack on class solidarity. He tells me that it was a required visit in high school and that he learned a lot from it.
We walk slowly down past a set of kennels and the low, dingy officer's quarters to the entrance gate. Jörg takes special care to explain this entrance. It reminds me of a railroad station as it has a clock in the tower above it; though it is stopped at 3:15--the time of liberation. The gate itself is fixed in a large iron grille spanning the entrance archway and has the words, "Jedem das Seine," "To Each His Own," fixed at eye height and backwards in the iron work--you get the message only from the inside. I learn from a brochure that the words are "scornful and cynical" and Jörg comments on this before we go in. I turn to listen and, blindly put my hand out and inadvertently open the gate, entering awkwardly. I see the large, heavy letters turn, cant outward, hang momentarily in space, then cant inward, and "Jedem das Seine" is written into the air. This is the way it was done then. You would be off-balance, pushed or pummeled forward, perhaps getting a glimpse of the words. But it is a crude trick, and I hear the sneer, and a faint whiff of the terror it might have caused. Jörg is right, it was cynical and nihilistic. But how many other meanings did it project as the gates swung to and fro? How many variations? Today, the phrase has been given an official interpretation, "cynical nihilism," but would the inmates have felt this? I can feel one living meaning: the original intent has been fixed, stopped like the clock, and the irony has turned upon itself, and become self reflexive. Now the words damn themselves, reflecting back on their writers, connected forever to their victims; to and fro, words caught in the act, as long as this gateway can open and close. The variation I can hear rests finally where it should, on the guilty--"Jedem das Seine, " "To Each His Own."
Because Buchenwald has been set up as a learning centre, the sense of a textbook case of Fascism is noticeable throughout the 'exhibits'. The sadistic and psychotic events that went on there are explained in detail in one of the buildings left standing; it was used originally for storing the internees' possessions but now houses a model of the barrack interiors complete with a creaking wood floor. Small, typed cards of commentary have been placed throughout, but they have a way of making my own reactions reflexive because they fall so short. What kind of learning is called for here? What kind of student of this can I be? We view a crematorium. Jörg singles out the monument to the Marxist resistance leader Ernst Thälmann who was murdered in the camp. We view his grave stone. The crude ironies of Jedem das Seine deepen. We come upon a building especially constructed to disguise an execution room as a medical check-up area. Hidden in a room just behind the graduated post that was supposed to measure your height, an SS officer shot you in the nape of the neck as you were measured. In another case a medical dispensary was used as an excuse to perform experiments on sick inmates. The irony leers, shows itself, was everywhere. Outside, the pictures of agony and the wracked bodies swim upward in my mind. One in particular holds me: A thin, young man with a pinched grey face looking out into the camera and the future with a mixed expression of rage, disbelief, the awareness of an utterly unjust death. But the face comes to me sharply out of my own memory when I am standing in broad daylight blinking at the empty spaces where the barracks were. This is the way the past lives, in this cold wind, in these ghosts, not in the textbook commentary of the cards; it is beyond commentary.
The official interpretation of Buchenwald is, however, not left to the camp with its books, cards and exhibits. We next drive over to the memorial to Buchenwald's dead constructed by the GDR after the War; it commemorates a mass grave placed on the other side of the hill from the camp. The monument is made from rough stone blocks, unrelieved by anything simply sad or elegiac; nothing but the most military, neutral sense of design, no touch of human grief, everything large-scale, angular, uniform. At the last mass grave, wide flights of stairs take you up to a fifty meter high tower that watches over the camp eternally. It is bleak, windy, and cold and I wonder what the ghosts think of it. Can this be representative of their suffering? As we walk past the tower the bell high up sounds a few times. It, at least, has a melancholy tone. Inside the tower, which you can view only through a gate, is part of the oath the survivors made in April of 1945.
"The annihilation of Nazism to its roots is our motto. The construction of a new world of peace and freedom is our goal."
In this grandiose, militaristic context, it is easy to mistake this remnant of the oath made by the survivors of Buchenwald for a statement of the essential philosophy of the GDR. The idea of building a society on the ruins of an eradicated Fascism is found in a lot of the teaching and propaganda materials Jörg has shown me; and the metaphor of roots was often used to indicate the stability of the socialist state--it was well rooted--or how thoroughly the fascist system has been replaced--it had been uprooted. But it is so essential a fact, this place, so clear an instance of systematic genocide, that this monument says more about the GDR itself than the camp. The towers and wide steps, the stone blocks and the sweeping vistas are now creating another irony, mirroring another oppression.
This is what Jörg means when he tells me that the GDR misused an ideal. He sees the monumental style as a good example of the pumped-up rhetoric of the old government. But the camp itself is central to him. Heroes like Ernst Thälmann, and the phrase "Jedem Das Seine", were cemented into his memory, and his sense of morality, long ago, though one of Jörg's friends later said that they should resist any reorganization or reinterpretation of the camp--some essential things must remain.
Coming down the hill from Buchenwald back into Weimar, we pass through a Russian barracks area. Russian soldiers and officers are everywhere. Almost at the bottom, in front of a school, a shiny brass head of Lenin glistens in the March sunlight. Students from the school are returning home and making the long climb back to their housing area. One young boy passes me on the street and spits carefully in my direction; women walk doggedly upward, carrying full grocery bags. These Russians are now anachronisms and will not be here much longer. They have resisted going back to a poverty stricken life at home and emanate a tangible dislocation.
The monument at Buchenwald was part of an official symbolism of the GDR, but it never impressed Jörg, and the other GDR monuments around Erfurt, like the panorama of the peasant uprising at nearby Frankenhausen, seem also to have lost their meaning for him. The official language of the GDR is becoming empty; its monumentalism is eroding, as are all the values of the Old East. The bell, the tower and its steps, the typed cards, the textbooks, are slipping into the past, their lessons already vague. The camp at Buchenwald is returning to its darkness and its ghosts--until the next official interpretation. It is a dangerous time.
John Whatley
Weimar, 1994
Vancouver,
Simon Fraser University, 1995