I had a great time there. There was weinerschnitzel and wurst and copious beer, so I actually could eat the food of the country I was in and enjoy it, in a way that I haven't been able to in The Netherlands. So, there were several very satisfying meals to be had while I was in-country. I met cool people at the hostel, and we went out drinking together and promised to stay in touch via the internet. I only got robbed a little bit. The weather was generally tolerable, and I could get around okay. I mean, it was a pretty cool trip. Here follows some pictures.
I mentioned in my previous post that I wasn't in Nuremburg for fun, my purposes there were scholarly. I guess I need to elaborate on that. Nuremburg was, during the reign of the Nazis, their rally site. This was a non-trivial thing. As part of the fascistic ethos of subsuming the many into one, they had fucking gargantuan rallies. We're talking an obscene number of people, all shipped in for a week each year for dancing and drinking and parades and music and etc. They would usually also announce new policies that they wanted adopted here - like the racial purity laws. New means of oppression were handed out like party favors. Pursuant to this, several megalomaniacally large structures were built - the parade grounds, the zeppelin fields, the Congress Hall (intended eventually to hold fifty thousand people for indoor functions.)After 1945, this location is where the Nuremburg Trials were held. That's where a number of the high officials in the Nazi regime, as well as some influential civilians allied to it, were put on trial. A lot of them ended up being hanged. The building in the last two pictures above is the Congress Hall I mentioned. It was co-opted as the location of the trials. It is now a museum.
That's why I had to go to Nuremburg.
Now, I've been very reticent to talk about legal issues so far on this blog, and but I do promise I will eventually. When I do, the Nuremburg trials will be a centerpiece of the discussion. However, it is a topic about which I am passionate, and I'm just not ready to discuss it yet. A number of my most closely held ideals are put into conflict with each other by the confluence of circumstances in those cases - and they're very illustrative of problems we still face today. Or, perhaps, that we are still refusing to face today.
In any case, I'll tell a story and then move on.
The museum I spent most of this trip at is called the Documentation Center (in English. It's all one huge word with Zs in it in German.) It covers the rise of the NS Party, the use of the rally site at Nuremburg, touches on the camps, and goes through to the trial. It's a short but relatively thorough examination of the Nazi period with particular concentrations on those matters relevant to the site itself. One of those matters is Architecture.
Hitler had a favorite architect, named Speer. Speer was very, very good at building National Socialist buildings. The thing you have to understand is that from an emotional standpoint, the Nazis were subsuming the individual into the nation. This is a process of religious rather than political thought. Seriously. Nazism was a spiritual movement as much as an ideological one. Hitler was the fucking messiah. That's what a lot of the "Hitler is Awesome" propaganda was about. Similarly, the function of Nazi architecture was not that of efficiency or whatever goal you'd have with government buildings - these were temples to the ideological movement and the spiritual unity of the German people. Taken in this light, the style of architecture, with its big dominant blocky shapes, pillars, arches, high ceilings, and braziers, it all makes sense.
Anyway. Speer needed a whole shit-ton of rock for this job. Fortunately, he was given direct access to work camps. That is, he had a finger in the pie of the "annihilation through work" program, as he had his own labor force quarrying granite with which to face all these buildings Hitler wanted him to make. This is, incidentally, why he was on trial at Nuremburg himself: because he was directly responsible for making sure the appropriate number of people were worked to death, as a sort of "kill two birds with one stone" benefit to all the construction.
Anyway, there's an exhibit about this in the Documentation Center itself. I had not been aware of this information beforehand. So, in the midst of thinking critically about the legal theories used in the trials, I suddenly realized that a statistically-minded historian could put together a fairly accurate mathematical estimate of just how many people had been worked to death making the Documentation Center itself. So, yeah, I was standing inside a giant murder weapon.
It was not a great feeling. I'm getting over it, but, I'm now a little more apprehensive about this weekend. Tomorrow, I start my much-vaunted journey into the wonders of Eastern Europe, land of cheap tailoring, vodka, cute girls, and general weird shit. I'm going to Krakow in Poland for the weekend, and I'm going to try and buy maybe a couple suits and a briefcase, etc, see some of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites...and that also means Auschwitz.
2 comments:
Interesting post... that was a pretty good read.
I imagine that would leave a pretty sickening feeling in anyone's stomach - though I suppose, that's part of the point.
Having been there I recommend that you take the opportunity to respect and honor the sacrifices of those who died. Their gift to us is to remind us of our own humanity and they warn us to remain vigilant to abuses of authority and power. I found in those places a hope for a better world in which we wake up to the realities of what was, what is, and what could be if we can come together and abandon hate and ignorance. It's a long path, but as long as we remember and make the efforts there is still hope.
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