American Views Abroad


Friday, April 15, 2005
 
It has been a traumatic week as far as looking back to events of sixty year ago and the German media has been covering every aspect of it. Last Monday it was Buchenwald that was remembered for being liberated by US forces and today memory recalls Bergen-Belsen and its liberation. On April 10, 1945 Dieter Bonhoeffer, a very prominent German theologian, was executed by the Nazi regime and the FAZ, a leading newspaper, had a photo of his statue in Westminster Abbey under martyrs of the 20th century. Die Zeit, a weekly newspaper, has a special supplement each week devoted the The Hour Zero as May 8, 1945 is referred to here.

So much has been written, discussed and analyzed about why and how Nazi dogma managed to take hold and blind an entire society that little remains to add to it. The one thing that still jolts me, though it seems so trivial on one hand, is how Buchenwald is not far from Weimar, and Bergen-Belsen not far from Celle. These concentration camps were set up deep in nature, yet close to centers of culture. Here in Hamburg and right in the neighborhood I live in, you can't take a walk without stumbling over remains of camps set up for mainly Jewish women who lived under harsh, horrible conditions and were forced to slave away in factories. Signs very carefully point them out. School classes, usually the seventh grade, spend that year taking care of simple stone memorials where no camp remains are left and learning about what went on right in the middle of normal everyday life. A book reviewed on this site, Where She Came From by Helen Epstein, recalls how her mother ended up in such a camp in Hamburg at the end of WWII.

In the most recent New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson discusses a The End: Hamburg 1943 by Hans Erich Nossack and just recently translated into English. Nossack was a well-known German writer who was living in Hamburg when the city was destroyed by fire bombs that July and four months later he wrote a longer work titled Interview mit dem Tode (Interview with Death) and The End is that part of it where after the firestorm, Nossack walked through the city and recorded what he saw. Dyson writes:

'The book is a work of art, distilling into sixty-three short pages the German experience of total destruction, just as John Hersey's Hiroshima distilled the Japanese experience three years later... But Nossack was not so much concerned with physical horrors as with the state of mind of the survivors. According to his testimony, the survivors mostly returned to live in the cellars of their ruined homes and started as soon as possible to resume their accustomed routines. They preferred to live in caves among friends rather than in houses among strangers. The struggle to survive kept them busy and gave them little time for grieving. Since they had lost everything, all they had left was each other. They shared what little they had, and worked together to bring the city back to life.'
This article is not available online but an excerpt of The End can be read at www.press.uchicago.edu.

To go further back in time but remain in the 20th century, Not a Living Soul Around - A tour of WW I battlefields and burial grounds in Eastern Europe by Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk can be read at www.signandsight.com/.

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