by Ian Buruma
George Steiner, in an essay on Günter Grass, wrote: “One comes to understand how the sheer grossness of German pleasures—the bursting sausages and flowered chamber pots, the beer-warmers and the fat men in tight leather shorts—was the ideal terrain for the sadistic-sentimental brew of Nazism.”
Stephen Spender, writing in 1945, made a slightly more subtle point: “These Sprichwörter [proverbs] are characteristic of German seriousness, German piety, German good intentions, German self-congratulation, the desire to label every environment with a few inches of thought sliced out of the Bible or the Poets or the Classics, the desire at the same time to reduce thought to a common denominator of banality, the desire, at the worst, of the devil to quote scripture.”
Were the crimes of Auschwitz, then, part of the German “identity”? Was genocide a product of some ghastly flaw in German culture, the key to which might be found in the sentimental proverbs, the cruel fairy tales, the tight leather shorts? The danger here is to confuse the forms of German atrocities with their causes. It is, of course, generally true that mawkishness and brutality go together. Sentimentality, after all, is a substitute for feeling. Banal homilies and a beery sense of fun certainly lent a grotesque air to German crimes, but do they really explain them?
As I read the proverbs inside the Birkenau barracks, I noticed something curious about them: they appeared to have been freshly painted, almost as though the camp had only just been vacated. Was this for the benefit of the tourists? A touch of authenticity, like the reconstructed barracks in Buchenwald (“absolutely real,” assured my guide, as he pressed his heels onto the squeaky wooden floorboards)? Later I realized what had happened: a few months before I visited the camp, it had been used as a location for a Hollywood film production. One of the stars in that production, Willem Dafoe, said in an interview that he had grown accustomed to the place: “… it becomes where you work. It becomes a movie set.”
Kitsch is forever waiting to spring its trap in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Kitsch puffs up the banal by injecting it with the hot air of religiosity. Kitsch emotions are always false. To visit the site of suffering, any description of which cannot adequately express the horror, is upsetting, not because one gets closer to knowing what it was actually like to be a victim, but because such visits stir up emotions one cannot trust. It is tempting to take on the warm moral glow of identification—so easily done and so presumptuous—with the victims: there but for the grace of God go I, and so on. Places of horror hold a fascination which can all too easily slip into a form of masochistic pleasure. The imagination turns toward a morbid desire to be horrified. It is perhaps the hardest form of kitsch to resist, especially if one was brought up, as Oda Makoto, the peace activist, put it, from the point of view of the victims.
And yet the imagination is the only way to identify with the past. Only in the imagination—not through statistics, documents, or even photographs—do people come alive as individuals, do stories emerge, instead of History. The inevitable gap between what happened and its representation through the imagination can result in kitsch, to be sure. But is the fear of kitsch, so often voiced by German artists and intellectuals, a sign of moral fastidiousness where Auschwitz is concerned, or does it point to a fear of identification—with the aggressors or with the culture that nurtured them?
Kitsch can, of course, be a deliberate ploy, as in the films of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. He believes that “in kitsch, in banality, in triviality and their popularity lie the remaining rudiments and germ cells of the vanished traditions of our myths …” Hitler, he argues, understood this and knew how to activate the latent power of mythical kitsch. Syberberg, whose movie Hitler: A Film from Germany is a kind of delirious ode to such kitsch, thinks that the denial of German irrationalism and kitschy mythology robs Germany of its identity: “Hitler is to be fought, not with the statistics of Auschwitz or with sociological analyses of the Nazi economy, but with Richard Wagner and Mozart.”
In the midst of much woolly nonsense, Syberberg has hit upon one insight (perhaps he even exemplifies it): it is still difficult to sever in our minds the banal horror of Auschwitz from the kitschy glamour of the Nazi style. Syberberg expresses the legacy of Auschwitz by wallowing in the style, as though German Kultur can be saved, as it were, by deconstructing the mythology, by purifying it of its bloodstained history. He is trying to redefine the German identity, rather in the way that Mishima Yukio did in Japan. But, as with Mishima’s suicidal fantasies, his films leave you with the uneasy feeling that he identifies rather too readily with the ideals that at one time made the Germans such a dangerous people.
But Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is a maverick in Germany. His anguished rescue operation of the German identity from the greedy clutches of Americanized materialists and rootless Jews finds favor in the rancid pages of the extreme right-wing National-Zeitung. His collected essays were recommended together with picture books of Stukas and tanks—an odd place to be for this romantic aesthete. But he is shunned by the liberal intelligentsia. The temptation for those who grew up among the aggressors would not be to seek identification, but, on the contrary, to keep a distance, through silence, cliché, denial, abstraction, scholarship, busyness, or gestures of ritualized penance.
Peter Weiss visited Auschwitz in 1964 as part of a group of West German judges and prosecutors who were collecting data for the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. Their brief was to check up on the witness accounts. Men busily took out tape measures to determine the exact width of the railway ramp, or the precise distance from the ramp to the wash barracks of the women’s camp. One witness claimed she had heard prisoners screaming in the punishment cells. These “standing cells” (height: 2 meters; size: 50 by 50 cm; air vent: 5 by 8 cm) guaranteed a slow death through starvation and lack of air. The bodies of the dead had to be scraped out of the cells with iron pitchforks. Some of the victims had eaten their own fingers.
To check the plausibility of the witness’s claim, a judge ordered his assistant to wriggle into a standing cell and make a noise. Perhaps, the judge suggested through the tiny air vent, he could sing something. The young man, dressed in a neat suit, did as he was told. His voice was clearly audible: he sang Schubert’s “Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein stehn.”
The judges were doing their work. Distance was built into their job. They were not there to do penance, to deal with “Auschwitz” as a metaphor, to be tourists, or to empathize with the victims. They were there to sift the evidence, to decide whether the view of the crematorium from one of the prisoners’ blocks was obstructed or not, to determine whether a charred tree proved that bodies had been burned (or, as the protocol had to say, allegedly burned) in an adjacent pit. They were there to measure the past in centimeters.
Twenty-seven years later I wandered around that very same spot. It was now part of the Auschwitz museum, in what used to be the main camp, the one whose solid brick buildings fooled the Red Cross into thinking conditions weren’t so bad, really. The museum was divided into blocks, each containing an exhibition of photographs and memorabilia having to do with the Nazi occupation of specific nations. There was a Polish block, a Hungarian block, a Soviet block, a Dutch block, etc.
The Polish exhibition was the most harrowing, though for me perhaps not the most poignant. The photographs of Dutch Jews being rounded up and deported affected me most. But not because they were particularly gruesome. There was nothing in the Dutch block like the photographs of the Warsaw ghetto going up in flames, with grinning SS men in the foreground watching burning people jump to their deaths. Rather, it was the normality, the banal familiarity of the scenery, the streets, the houses, the railway stations, that struck me with such force. The people being herded into the trains looked familiar. I had grown up in those streets. Here again identification plays tricks upon the imagination. There seemed to be something particularly outrageous about the fact that these well-dressed, well-educated, middle-class Dutch Jews were being treated in this manner.
I wondered what it
must be like for a German to see these pictures. What pitfalls of the imagination lay in wait for one who was told to “internalize” Auschwitz, without being able to identify so easily with the victims, for one whose father might have been one of those smirking SS men in the ghetto. A German acquaintance of roughly my age, a post-68er, told me that his visit, in 1974, had been the worst day of his life. That, he said, as well as his Christian education, had made him refuse to serve in the army.
As I walked from photograph to photograph in the Polish block, wondering what had happened in these rooms long before they were converted to the clean, white-walled museum rooms of today, I encountered a group of German tourists, mostly people in their fifties and sixties. They would have been teenagers during the war. A Polish woman in her thirties was guiding them. The photographs spoke for themselves. Yet the guide quietly explained in fluent German what people were seeing: giggling soldiers watching elderly rabbis crawling on their knees, Himmler peering through an eyehole to inspect the efficacy of the gas chambers, children driven through the ghetto with rifle butts, bony corpses piled high. The tourists looked stricken as they silently shuffled from one outrage to the next. Suddenly one of them became agitated. She was a woman of about sixty, in a green hat, a beige twin set, and thick brown shoes. She went up to the guide and clutched her arm: “You must understand,” she said, “we knew nothing about this, wir haben nichts gewusst …” The guide looked at the woman and said, quietly and contemptuously: “I’m sorry, but I cannot believe you. I honestly cannot believe you.”
“But you must,” said the woman, “you must. We really didn’t know …”
She may have been right. She may not have known anything. Perhaps it even showed a measure of decency that she was so anxious for the Polish guide to realize this. That she was there at all must have been proof of some willingness to face the past. One only wished she had remained silent, instead of using the words which too many Germans had used before.
Auschwitz is a museum, but it is also much more than that. The Polish institution responsible for the site, under the Communist regime, was called the Council for the Preservation of Monuments to Resistance and Martyrdom. We know what was meant by resistance: the brave struggle against fascism by patriotic Communists. And those who fell in this struggle were the official martyrs of fascism. Auschwitz was turned into a museum by a Polish government decree on July 2, 1947: “On the site of the former Nazi concentration camp a Monument of the Martyrdom of the Polish Nation and of Other Nations is to be erected for all times to come.”
There were monuments to the antifascist resistance all over the Communist world. The monument at Buchenwald, near Weimar, in the former German Democratic Republic, is one of the most grandiose examples: heroic stone figures breaking the chains of fascist slavery and forging ahead toward a glorious future of peace and brotherly solidarity. The Rapoport monument in Warsaw shows, on a more modest scale, a similar configuration of muscles and chains. The leader of the uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz, is cast in bronze as a typical proletarian hero: bare-chested, rolled-up sleeves, a hand grenade held up like a hammer. On the rear of the monument is a different image: Jewish martyrs, including a rabbi holding a Torah, marching passively to their deaths. The dedication, inscribed at the base in Hebrew, is to “The Jewish People, Its Heroes and Martyrs.”
There is nothing heroic at Auschwitz. The focus is on martyrdom. The prison cells in Block 11, where many died of torture, have become shrines to martyrdom. Wreaths and candles commemorate the martyrs—mostly Communists, until the post-Communist government began to change the focus of the museum. Martyrdom implies faith, in an ideal, in nationhood, in God. A martyr’s death is terrible but it is instilled with deep meaning. Primo Levi’s nightmare of surviving in a silent world which refuses to listen is bad enough. The idea of millions of people murdered for nothing is unbearable. The temptation is to invent meaning, by calling them martyrs, by erecting crosses, by engaging in religious ritual.
The ritual can be quite specific, but it can also be oddly abstract. I spent some time inside the crematorium of the main camp, examining, as many had done before me, the primitive oven. Later, more efficient ovens were installed in the Birkenau death camp designed by J. A. Topf & Sons. The firm had applied to the German government in 1942 for a patent for their “crematory oven for massive requirements, functioning without interruption.” The patent was finally granted, after a renewed application, in 1953.
I was standing around with several tourists, mostly Americans. No one said much. A couple whispered, as though we were in a chapel. The silence was broken by a peculiar noise which seemed to be coming our way from the outside, something that sounded like “ushoi! ushoi!” The noise grew louder and then stopped. A tall man stepped into the crematorium, brandishing a feathered staff. He looked Oriental, Mongolian perhaps. He was followed by a group of mostly young people. Among them were several Germans and Japanese. One Japanese woman in denim overalls played softly on a tambourine. A banner was unfurled. “Walking for peace,” it read. Leaflets were handed out, showing the route of the peace walk through Europe. Various atrocities were mentioned, for which we were told to atone: the extermination of Native Americans, the Vietnam War, Hiroshima. The leader of the group, the tall man with the feathered staff, was a Native American, named, I believe, Red Hawk. When the group had assembled inside, Red Hawk lifted his staff and in a deep voice began to chant a kind of prayer. The tambourine played, feathers fluttered, eyes closed in devotion.
Just outside the walls of the main camp, near this crematorium, stood a large wooden cross. It was erected by Carmelite nuns in 1989, next to a drab red-brick building, which the nuns had turned into a convent. The building, built in 1914, used to be called the Theater. Entertainments were staged there for Austro-Hungarian soldiers stationed in the barracks next door. The Nazis used it to store Zyklon B gas canisters. The intention of the Carmelites, a devout Catholic told me, was to pray for all the victims, Jewish and Gentile. But this so outraged a New York rabbi named Avraham Weiss that he turned up with six of his followers to protest. They had dressed up in striped prayer shawls and tried to storm the convent. Polish workers then sprayed the protesters with cold water and tore off their skullcaps. This image swiftly went around the world. Auschwitz, the anus mundi, had become a squalid battlefield where people fought over the symbols of martyrdom.
Rabbi Weiss is a supporter of Gush Emunim, an association of religious settlers in Israel, settlers, that is, who believe in their right to claim land for religious reasons. History to him is symbolic, mythical, an indispensable compass in the continuing search for national identity. His view of history is exclusive. The Carmelites, in his opinion, were intruders in a place that has unique significance as the supreme symbol of Jewish suffering. The Christian cross—under which so much of this suffering was not only condoned but encouraged—was seen as an affront to the memory of the Holocaust.
But it was not quite the struggle between national or Jewish identity and the universal values claimed by the Carmelite nuns. Auschwitz, said the Archbishop of Brussels, is on “Polish Christian ground.” To Jozef Cardinal Glemp, the Primate of Poland, a Pole was almost by definition a Christian. After Rabbi Weiss took on the nuns, Glemp said that “Polish feelings and our hard-won Polish sovereignty had been offended” by Jews who “control the mass media in many countries.”
The Germans have no religious symbols of identity at Auschwitz. That is only for those who can claim the victims as their own. But there are other ways in which Germans can pray at the shrine. They can help to pay for its upkeep. The Auschwitz museum is fraying at the edges: the piles of shoes that once belonged to Jewish children are covered with mold, the crematorium is rusting. So a German television program called Panorama asked its viewers to donate money to preserve the camp as a warning to future generations. About 110,000 marks was collected. This may not seem much, compared with some other fund-raising efforts on television, but it must be one of the few ca
ses where money was collected for the sake of memory alone. There were, however, also letters addressed to the television producer, such as this one, anonymous of course: “I too am in favor of preserving Auschwitz. I would like it to be made fully operative again, so people like you can be ‘freed through labor.’ We can also find a solution for all these political asylum seekers. I volunteer to donate 50 kg of gas [Zyklon B].”
In the first two decades after the war, few Germans were keen to preserve the sites of Nazi crimes at all. But there are many Germans now, especially in the West, who regard the maintenance of former concentration camps as a sacred duty. A number of the main camps have become Gedenkstätte (places of remembrance). Like Auschwitz, they are museums, shrines, and tourist spots, all in one.
When you drive into Fürstenberg, a pretty, run-down little town in Brandenburg north of Berlin, you are greeted by two signs. One reads: “Fürstenberg greets its visitors.” The other shows the way to the town’s main attraction, the former Ravensbrück concentration camp, where 130,000 people, mostly women and children, were imprisoned between 1939 and 1945. Half of them died.
The National Warning and Memorial Place Ravensbrück was a monument, as my guidebook still stated, in pure East German style, to “our dead sisters, the immortal heroines of the antifascist struggle, who gave their lives for the freedom and independence of their countries and a happy future of all peoples.”
In 1992 most of the camp was out of bounds, since it was still a Russian Army base. Troops from the former Soviet Union were selling their uniforms and other junk from their former lives to tourists outside the main gate. The former SS homes were occupied by officers and their families. The privates lived in the barracks of the old camp.