unguided tour

The role of his life! A ghost, somewhere between dream and waking. A corpse, frozen into speechlessness.  The trial against John Demjanjuk exhibits for the world to see what has been daily routine in most German families since the end of World War II: silence.

If anything, the ghastly presence of John Demjanjuk — charged with murder of more than twenty-seven thousand Jewish prisoners at Sobibor — in a German courtroom proves that regarding the Holocaust the law has little power over the conscience of perpetrators. No judge, no lawyer will make them break their silence. They didn’t speak much of their crimes in Nuremberg and they remained mostly silent in Frankfurt, and so far we haven’t heard a word from Demjanjuk in Munich either. Deeds without doers. Genocide without perpetrators. A German way of life.

The law may fail to make the perpetrators admit their crimes, perhaps because it doesn’t always need their collaboration. In all likelihood, Demjanjuk will be convicted based on circumstantial evidence. But there are ways to end the silence. Why did it never occur to anyone to travel to Ohio where Demjanjuk lived for decades? Not to interrogate. Just to talk, to ask a few questions, to begin a conversation. Isn’t that what civilized people do?

The question is a rhetorical one, of course. For more than six decades Germans have been more than reluctant to talk with former Nazis — and who of my grandparents’ generation wasn’t one? — about their deeds and motives outside of the tightly regulated discourse defined by the law. What is true for the Holocaust is also true for the infamous State Security (Stasi) of East-Germany — which, by the way, had several thousand West-Germans on their payroll. While other countries emerging from a dictatorship have installed Truth Commissions to help resolve conflicts between victims and perpetrators, Germany  has sponsored memorials.

Freedom means the right to remain silent. Silence can be therapeutic, purifying. But silence is also a form of aggression — directed at oneself and at the other. Often silence provokes aggression: the desire to hurt, to crush, to elicit a reaction through the infliction of pain.

In the 1970s Germany defeated the terror of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). Why should Germans change their minds now?  Because very soon, when the last perpetrator will has passed away, the silence will be that of a graveyard. And then what?

Der Rest ist Schweigen?

The silence of the perpetrators has created a void.

The victims who remember fall into the void.

And the descendants of the perpetrators? — We’ve become tourists in everyone else’s past.

Could it be otherwise?

This photograph of John (Iwan) Demjanjuk being wheeled into a German courtroom in Munich reminds me of my grandfather shortly before he died: an old man, ill and barely conscious; an old Nazi who lived a full life, had children, grandchildren, a nice house in the suburbs; a perpetrator who saw himself as victim; a typical “Mitläufer” who for fear of his and his family’s life joined the NSDAP,  avoided resistance,  hung a photograph of Hitler in his living room, and somehow forgot to take it down when the Nazis no longer officially ruled Germany — that’s how I remember my grandfather. (more…)

Monuments are sites of symbolic exchange.

Last week Granada’s monument to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder + leader of the anti-republican, fascist Falange party, was decorated with a laurel crown, the symbol of victory and invincibility. Thus decorated the monument speaks about the future (rather than the past or the present) for Primo de Rivera was neither victorious nor invincible — found guilty of anti-republican conspiracy and insurrection he was sentenced to death and executed on Nov. 20, 1936.

Today someone left a reply.

"Granada será la tumba del fascismo," (Granada will be the grave of fascism), monument to Josè Antonio Primo de Rivera, Nov. 26, 2009

i’m falling in love with her
hopelessly smitten
and strangely driven
to stop and stare and wonder
how have i been before?
and why do i want more and more?
each into the other, this
plainly forbidden
fruit that has given
form to what was private bliss
upon reflection i find
i’m losing myself and my mind
can I woo her through the looking glass
this refraction of light i see?
in the pool face to face we match
like ghosts, like family,
like angels
translucent and
in-between
i’m falling in love with her
brazenly object
willingly subject
as sunlight through the moon
like a soliloquy or two
forever as one, me and you
(Patricia Barber, Narcissus, from the album Mythologies) (more…)

A king in a land without frontiers.
A postmodern solver of riddles, seduced 
by a masculine conceit.
Diffèrance.

I’m allergic to roots, eradication is my profession. (more…)

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. … I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity and genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block… (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory)

I’m sorry you feel that way. Try and look at it with my eyes. (more…)

Charges have been dropped against German artist Ottmar Hörl accused of displaying Nazi symbols in public. Authorities were not amused by his installation of an array of silver and golden garden gnomes, their right arms raised in Hitler salute. (more…)

“Wrong. We have to struggle towards it, forward, forward, word by word, to find this past. In other words, I have to tell you, if I want to find out what happened to me.

(Robert Kelly, The Book from the Sky)

Many things are verboten in Germany. For example, publicly displaying symbols of Nazi organizations. The latest case of violation of this law has been reported from Nuremberg where a golden garden gnome performing the Heil Hitler salute was exhibited in the window of an art gallery. The gnome was created by German artist Ottmar Hörl who is now under investigation from the office of the public prosecutor. It’s art, Hörl defends himself. It’s verboten, the representatives of the law insist. (more…)

In an unusually biased article in yesterday’s New York Times Michael Kimmelman praises Countess Elisabeth (Tisa) von der Schulenburg, sister of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg who was a member of the fervently nationalistic and anti-Semitic military conspiracy group which tried to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, as a model for German families’ efforts of ‘coming to terms’ with the Nazi past as well as “a cautionary tale about judging history or a people, any people, in black and white.” Kimmelman clearly prefers white, leaving out black and brown entirely. (more…)

A brief follow-up on my previous post. The section of highway 160, just outside of Springfield, Missouri that was adopted by a U.S. Nazi group has indeed been re-named Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway as Gov. Jay Nixon signed it into law on July 1.

The state legislature may think otherwise but to me it is an offense to one of America’s most distinguished Jewish theologian and civil rights advocate. “In a free society some are guilty, all are responsible.”

Nazis of all ages and nationalities love the Autobahn. Does that mean Jews must love it too? (more…)

Memory is performative. To remember is to repeat.
Not every memory gets performed and repeated. Some memories are so horrific that we censor their re-presentation. Perpetrator memories of the Holocaust as sexual extravaganza belong to this group.

Liliana Cavani’s controversial 1974 movie The Night Porter has been labeled “Nazi chic” (Roger Ebert). For some critics the film is a shamelessly pornographic fantasy of the Holocaust, a “sentimental idyll … exalting romantic love between victim and victimizer, against the brute reality of Nazi violence,” (Marga Cottino-Jones) using the Holocaust as a mere “backdrop to the erotic/sadomasochistic misadventures of Max and Lucia, Nazi and victim” (Rebecca Scherr); a “despicable attempt to titillate [the viewer] by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering.” (Ebert)
I’m not convinced.

(more…)

Ost-Tirol, Großvenediger seen from Lasörling

I’m in Ost-Tirol (East Tyrol). Surrounded by snowy Alpine mountains. Look! This is Großvenediger. And over here; this is where we’re going! And look… (more…)

“Whenever you pass along money, you circulate both heads and tails, both goods and bads, both pleasure and guilt, both food and poison, both life and death.” (Lloyd DeMause)

If all money is guilt-money, America is the world’s largest guilt-sharing network. Even in the current economic breakdown shopping remains a source of guilty pleasures; followed by eating and sex. As a German used to keeping guilt and its pleasures private (for obvious reasons) I am both fascinated and disturbed.

DeMause says that no matter how much pleasure we derive from making and spending money, it will always remain a guilty pleasure. Money functions as a container in which we inject all our negative emotions and bad feelings. A poison container. But, says DeMause, there is only so much guilt a society can contain. “When prosperity becomes too much, we begin to feel extremely sinful, polluted, and money seems more than ever to be all tails, full of our guilt.” (more…)

For three years I lived in a town of no imagination. Life was flat, tasteless, predictable. Lacking in resonance. A pre-cooked fantasy. An overpopulated movie set run by Pepsi™. Welcome to Happy Valley, Central Pennsylvania.

Where imagination is lacking death becomes a morbid fascination. Once in a while male students would tell me “true stories” of local women who had disappeared into the mountains leaving not even a single trace behind. I could tell from the look on their faces (grinning slyly) that they hoped to frighten me with these stories. When a female graduate student in my department was raped in her own home by another student, she too disappeared. No-one ever mentions her; I don’t remember her name. The rape has rendered her persona non grata. I wonder how long it will be before she becomes part of their collection of disappeared women.

Pennsylvania has the highest concentration of Nazi Organizations in the U.S. Inevitably some members showed up in my classes hoping I shared their admiration for Hitler and all things Nazi, perhaps even provide first hand knowledge of the Third Reich. In email messages they asked me to be less critical of the Holocaust.

After a while I began imagining things. My mind was always somewhere else: roaming the streets of some city or other; constructing angry exchanges with colleagues I rarely talked to.