Happy Christmas

Whatever you're doing over the next few days, have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'm off to Berlin on the 28th, so it's unlikely I'll post on here again until 2011. Here's my favourite Christmas song of all time, from Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It was No.2 in the UK Charts in 1984, which given the competition for No.1 included Band Aid's 'Do They Know It's Christmas' isn't bad going at all.

One other thing. The band had originally intended the video to be solely focused on the Nativity, but it was pressure from their label and others that made them have the weird border around the edge of the screen with Holly Johnson singing. Also, I think it's quite poignant to remember that the band that wrote the song 'Relax' wrote one of the most religiously focused Christmas pop songs this side of Cliff Richard. Enjoy.

'Die Toten reden durch uns'

I am back in Dachau after a very moving few days in Mainz, where I was staying with the Carmelite community there in order to research the life of Br. Raphael Tijhuis O.Carm. A friar from the Netherlands, he was arrested in 1940 after writing 'slanderous' comments in a letter to his provincial- he had actually suggested they take their church bells as they were banned by the Nazis from ringing them! - and spent five years in German captivity, three of which were in KZ Dachau. After the war, he moved to Rome to live in the Carmelite community of Sant' Alberto, the college for student friars. In 1978 he moved back to Mainz and died there during the celebration of Mass in 1981. Many are convinced it was the psychological effects of KZ Dachau that led to his rather premature death.

Br. Raphael Tijhuis, O.Carm (far right) with some of the Mainz community c.1930s. Also in the picture is Br. Thaddeus Karpinski O.Carm (far left), who would die on the Eastern Front

My time in Mainz was mostly spent with one document, his memoirs of his time in captivity written in the post war period. I had read the English translation "Nothing Can Stop God From Reaching Us", an edited version, but they were far inferior to the full document. With the title Von Kutte und Verbrecherkluft (lit. 'Of the Habit and the Prison Uniform') Raphael spoke of his time in KZ Dachau with great clarity, despite the fact he was writing in German, a foreign language to him. I plan to translate extracts into English and post them here in the coming months, but I will start with the thing that most struck me.

The first page of his manuscript began as follows:

'Maria.

DIE TOTEN REDEN DURCH UNS'

(The Dead speak through us)

The thought of Raphael, sitting down at his typewriter with all sorts of thoughts running through his mind about what to write, how to portray other people and his responsibilities to the dead, and him typing out that first, focussing word, a prayer to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, is frankly mindblowing.

Br. Raphael Tijhuis, O.Carm meeting Pope Paul VI in June 1972 during a Papal Audience for Religious who had survived Concentration Camps

His faith was always strong and many call his time in Dachau a purification of sorts, in which he met Titus and began to grow into a mature faith. Later on, when suffering from the psychological trauma of those years, he was always good humoured and pleasant to know, and stayed in contact with many fellow survivors. His desire to tell the world of what happened, and in particular of Bl. Titus's actions, led to his involvement in the cause for the Beatification of Titus Brandsma, which took place in 1985, four years too late for Raphael.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to be able to research the life of such a humble and inspirational man, who refused to hate humanity, and in particular Germans, despite being given reason to do so.

Br. Raphael in the courtyard of the Carmelite maintained school adjacent to the Carmel in Mainz, c. 1930s

Hello Mainz!

As ever pitiful excuses all round for my failure to post something on here in the last few days. My Uncle and Dad visited me over the weekend which took up a lot of time, then there was the matter of the usual workload to contend with. Next week will be far quieter, a break I will take advantage of to put the finishing touches on my guided tour of Dachau. Sometimes I long for my student days when procrastination required a small dose of Bullshit to avoid being found out - now faiure to get work done has consequences!

Having said that, I'm writing this from a small guest 'cell' in the Carmel in Mainz, Rhineland Palatinate. I posted a couple of months ago on my plan to write a short biography of Br. Raphael Tijhuis, who was in captivity for five years, three of which were spent in KZ Dachau, for the Dachau Remembrance Book project. The ever friendly Br. Thomas Feiten, O.Carm invited me to come to Mainz, where many of Raphael's documents are kept, so that I could undertake some research while enjoying Carmelite hospitality! It's actually quite a moving experience to be staying with the same community Raphael lived with. The Carmelite Province (region) of the Netherlands played an important role in the re-establishment of a Carmel in Mainz during the early 1930s, and Raphael moved to Mainz in 1933 to help with this work. It was also here in Mainz that on the 25th July 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo after a throwaway comment in a letter to one of his Dutch superiors about not being able to ring the Church bells. The Sacristy, where he was informed by one of the brothers that the Gestapo had come for him, is now the community chapel.

I will tell you more as my time in Mainz progresses. For now I'm admiring the perfect view from my window of the Mainz Hilton - the second best place to stay in town!

Just another day at the office...

One of the many wonderful things about my work in Dachau is the variety of projects I am involved in. I work with the Dachau Youth Hostel's Educational Department once a week, eventually with taking visitors round the site, with the Church of Reconciliation and with the Remembrance Book project. We discovered in late October that the Remembrance Book project had been awarded a Bürgerkulturpreis (Citizen's Cultural Prize) by the Bavarian Landtag (Parliament) and as such were to attend a ceremony at the Maximiliansaal, where the Parliament meets.

Myself, Irina and Klaus Schultz by the Remembrance Book project stall

We all dressed up for the occasion and got to spend the day in one of Munich's best buildings, where Irina and I manned our display stand. The Remembrance Book has so far about 130 biographies, and is growing all the time. One of the best things about the project is that it is open to all interested. Schoolchildren, priests, relatives are invited to engage with the life of a person who was transformed by their experience of KZ Dachau and hopefully learn something of their suffering not only during their time in Dachau but living with the memories afterwards. Thus the project gives the prisoners their lives, their identity back

A great day was had by all, as we all got to see a worthwhile cause receive well needed cash and promote the project to interested visitors. While eating our lunch, Knödel mit Gulaschsuppe, we were visited by a middle aged woman who asked us about the project. We obviously answered her questions willingly and explained our situation as volunteers, which suitably impressed her and she went on to the next stool. I jokingly told Irina we'd probably discover she was the Queen of Bavaria or some other lofty title.

Later on she returned and our bosses had their photos taken with her. Afterwards I asked Klaus who she was- It was only the President of the Bavarian Parliament and one of South Germany's most prominent politicians!

Myself, Irina and Frau Stamm, President of the Bavarian Parliament

I also had the privilege of meeting Max Mannheimer for the first time. In this part of Germany he needs no introduction, for he has spent the last thirty years or so telling people about his suffering in Auschwitz, Teresienstadt and finally Dachau. He is now the inspiration behind the International Youth Meeting, which meets in Dachau every July/August, and the Max Mannheimer Study Centre, for which I volunteer once a week. I have found meeting Holocaust survivors quite intimidating - what do you say to someone who has been through so much? - but he was extremely friendly and spoke in perfect English about my work and the project. It was a pleasure to meet him and hopefully not the last time.

It was a great experience to represent the project and spend the day celebrating the achievements of an extremely worthwhile cause.

Hr. Ludwig Schmidinger, Hr. Klaus Schultz, Fr. Felizitas Rath and Hr. Bjorn Mensing, just some of those involved with the Remembrance Book Project

A Very Twentieth Century Massacre

Why do I love Berlin so much? I'm in town for the second of four seminars run by my sending organisation, Aktion Suehnezeichen Friedensdienste, and I'm staying in a typical Berlin Youth Hostel i.e in a dingy, converted factory. Berlin means a lot to me on a personal level. I first came here on a school trip aged fourteen and the city continues to change with me. The Palast der Republik has been taken down and a Hauptbahnhof has been built. A city that was for decades a byword for men in trench coats and suitcases is now the poster child for an invigorated and politically ‘redeemed’ German nation.

Berlin has reinvented itself – and not for the first time – as a youthful city. One sometimes gets the feeling that the forty years of divided rule acted as a kind of purgatory for the city, in which all Prussian militarism and Nazi association were removed through the torture of security checks and foreign government, ending finally with the events of November 1989 and the huge opportunities for development. One word describes the city: Alternative, the kind of alternative that, like the mythology of the 1960s in the UK, is always happening to someone else. It is the sociological equivalent of a twenty two year woman with multiple piercings, multi-colored hair, a ripped shirt and an ill fitting bowler hat, this of course being her work uniform. There are art projects here, all sorts of buildings converted into bijou apartment blocks and studios as well as the kind of clubs and bars that are designed not for profit but for exclusivity.

Anyway, back to my seminar. The purpose of these seminars, organized alongside compulsory EU ones, is to allow us the chance to learn about the place of contemporary debate within discussion about the Extermination of European Jewry. On the 3rd December we visited the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz for what I assumed would be the usual memorial site visit. The Wannsee Conference is notorious as the meeting at which the Final Solution was decided, where numbers were crunched and the mass murder of millions was concisely processed. I expected to be taken through an exhibition explaining the Holocaust, with the centre piece the room in which, over brunch, Jews became numbers.

Of course History and Memory being the couple they are, preconceptions were not true. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference, known as the Wannsee Protocol, describes a formative moment in the extermination of European Jews but by no means the beginning or the end. Mass murder of the Jews had been set in motion by the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 – in hindsight what other conclusion could there be? – and Wannsee was but a bureaucratic meeting to confirm who would do what and who was in charge of the operation. After all, what makes the Holocaust unique in History is the bureaucracy and systematic nature of mass murder, an age old crime committed within a contemporary morality.

The exhibition was not to my taste, and followed the usual pattern of Concentration Camp Memorial Site exhibitions. In my humble opinion they tend to be text heavy, relying on the same descriptions and the same photos to make the same points. Visitors, in particular individuals unattached to groups, do not come to read; they come to see and to feel. According to the ASF volunteer who works there, an Israeli woman, the site receives many Jewish groups who view Wannsee not as a place of learning, but as a place of remembrance. Despite the assertion that Wannsee was one of many stepping stones to mass murder, many Jews view Wannsee as the grave they do not have. Visitor Guides explain the history, and yet they do not listen, such is the mythology that we build in order to be able to come to terms with the past.

Berlin is great, alternative as ever and it’s fantastic to be back with my fellow ASF volunteers. More to follow.

The Blindfolded Executioner

I recently joined Munich Public Library, which as it is based at the Gasteig Music Hall has a huge collection of classical and modern music CDs, as well as a huge range of English language books. Very useful for a music loving English speaker such as myself. Much to my delight they have a large collection of novels and essays by Martin Amis. Whatever you think of him, he's always a good read and leaves you thinking at the end of whatever you read of his, even if all you think is "what a smug, chauvinistic so and so."

I've started reading "Visiting Mrs Nabakov", a collection of essays he wrote for the Observer and other journals during the 1980s. One of them, "Nuclear City: The Megadeath Intellectuals", deals with a visit he made to Washington D.C to learn more about Nuclear Politics as they stood circa. 1987. I always find it fascinating to read articles on Nuclear War from the 1980s, as they almost always have a certainty of doom about them. For a member of the unimaginatively named "Generation Y" it is like reading foreign literature, especially given we are a generation with no memory of the Cold War nor any recollection of a time when 'google' was not even a noun let alone a verb. I found his conclusion quite powerful

"We must fix our kids so that they will have nothing to do with anyone who has anything to do with nuclear weapons, with instruments of blood and rubble. The process with begin at the moment of mortal shame when we acquaint them with the status quo, with the facts of life, the facts of death. So come on. In an inversion of filial confession, we will have to take deep breaths, wipe our eyes and stare into theirs, and tell them what we've done."

Amis's comments raised an interesting point for me. I've said elsewhere that the phrase "Never Again" sometimes rings hollow when we remember that to the names Auschwitz and Sobibor we must add Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina. What Amis makes clear in his article is that the shame of the Nuclear Age must be clarified as well, for it was a gamble of our peace that the planet only narrowly managed to emerge from. There are memorial sites for the Holocaust that happened, yet nothing for the Holocaust that very nearly did occur and for which the world waited with inaction.

One of the topics Amis returns to often is the nuclear experts he meets and the way in which they all acclimatise to dealing with casualty lists and statistics beyond comprehension. Coming up to twenty years since the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, it appears that an entire generation has no idea how close they came to being cooked to death at temperatures hotter than the Sun or being slowly eroded through radiation poisoning. From Kate Bush to Genesis, the 1980s is full of music, television series and novels written with the bomb always present. Generation Y is the first generation to have no conception of what it feels like to be threatened by extermination.During the Holocaust the Executioners knew exactly who they were murdering; during the Cold War, the "Red Button" served as a blindfolded executioner, who aimed straight and fired.

I am not saying that reading the latest nuclear statistics in The Guardian while living a relatively comfortable 1980s western existence is in any way similar to being treated like a subhuman before being rounded up and put into camps. They were two different scenarios. However where the sanctity of human life, tolerance and understanding are our educational aims, both histories can offer important lessons and enrich other's message. I have previously commented on the purpose of Memorial Sites both as a place of remembrance and a place of learning, yet it took almost half a century before people were able to face the Holocaust in this manner. Perhaps a similar process of coming to terms with the past must occur for the previous generation as regards the cultural fear of nuclear weapons before we may also learn their lessons on the culture of fear that can produce unimaginable outcomes.

Why Concentration Camp Memorial Sites can look attractive

Sorry for the inconsistency of blog posts in the last couple of weeks. I've taken on a new (and very worthwhile) position with the Education Department at the Jugendgästehaus (Youth Hostel) once or twice a week, which meant that last week I had a two day seminar to attend on top of my usual work. It was an amazing experience getting to hear what fifteen year old Hauptschüler (Secondary Modern students) knew about the Holocaust, as well as discovering their willingness to learn.

Anyway, as those of you in the UK probably realise by now, Snow is the order of the day across Europe. Technically it snowed in Dachau last week for the first time, but it soon turned into sleet and thus didn't really count. Yesterday however, the snow finally hit town in English terms, by which I mean a dusting enough to turn everything white.

This morning I took a few of the Memorial Site on my way into work at the Versöhnugskirche. The snow made everything seem pure and beautiful, particularly with the winter sun shining brightly, almost unsettlingly so. I've read articles before about the 'problem' with memorial sites looking clean and attractive, Dachau being a very prominent example. People are often surprised how nice the site looks, coming as they do with the film Schindler's List in mind. It often has to do with memory- is KZ Gedenkstätte Dachau's primary function to remember the dead, in which case the site can be made to look attractive like most graveyards, or is it supposed to be educational and look exactly as it was? KZ Dachau was a housing estate for longer than it was a Concentration Camp, thus much of the original site had been torn down, replaced and redecorated in the time between the end of the war and a public cry for a memorial site.

Obviously both are correct answers, though it makes the question of how to make the camp seem 'real' to someone and not turn the site into an historically accurate version of a Madame Tussauds attraction a very prominent one.

The sociologist Gerald E. Markle wrote a short book on Holocaust memory called 'Meditations of a Holocaust Traveler', in which he looks at his personal journey to answer the impossible "Why" that the Holocaust demands an answer to. His work is far too personal to my taste, his necessarily emotional tone sometimes bordering on the melodramatic, but he makes a good point about the place of trees at Dachau.

The Lagerstraße, the main street of the camp, these days has a long row of Poplars which makes the camp look quite attractive. Markle would argue that this is disconcerting for the visitor, which admittedly it is, but then again they have not been grown for the visitor. We forget sometimes that the memory of the Holocaust does not belong to us, it is merely entrusted to future generations in order that we do not forget. The bodies of 41,500 people rest here at Dachau; its first function should be its most human, as a burial site and final resting place.

Apologies...and a clue

Sorry for the lack of posts of late. I've been adjusting to an increased workload: challenging stuff but if it all comes through it could have a lasting impact. As a consequence of one aspect of my work this song has been in my head for a while. There are far worse people to leave you in the company of than Neil Diamond...

RIP Henryk Górecki (1933-2010)

It was announced some time yesterday afternoon that the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki has died aged 76. One of the few contemporary composers to make a mark on a wider public, he is best known for the 1992 recording of his Symphony No.3 Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust.

I first came across Gorecki's music on BBC4's excellent series Sacred Music, in which they compared his compositions with Arvo Paert's, another composer who used sacred music as a means of expression during the years of Communism in Eastern Europe. You can see a clip of Simon Russell Beale discussing Gorecki's success here.

Its popularity in the UK was helped along by its regular play on the newly opened Classic FM at the time, but its long term success lies in its simple, haunting melody that lingers long after the piece has ambled to its conclusion and faded out, sustaining one mournful note - no optimism, no catharsis, just a gentle ebbing away into memory. Like John Tavener's Song for Athene and even Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings the simplicity of the piece has allowed it to take on a life of its own.

We Will Remember Them

Last Thursday, the 11th November, people in the UK people remembered those who had fought, and sometimes fallen, in conflicts since WWI. It is a day on which people from across the political divides unite despite any misgivings about the need to fight or whether their cause was just; the sheer scale numbs all into silence. Two minutes of silence at 11am, the exact time the Armistice was signed on the same day in 1918 and ended hostilities.

I find remembrance cultures fascinating, though November 11th is no time to analyse it too deeply. Having said that, though I didn't observe the formal silence (Germany remembers the dead on 9th November for reasons I've previously mentioned) something did occur to me over the course of the day. On Thursday I began working at the Dachau Youth Hostel, which was developed in recent years in order to deal with the number of young people coming to the memorial site and provide a location at which educational work could take place. I was informed as I went through the door that there was going to be a Zeitzeugsgespräch (lit. Witness-talk) from a survivor and that I was warmly invited. Such is life in Dachau!

While the talk was interesting, it suddenly occurred to me, surrounded by a group of young people from Switzerland, that ours will be the most significant generation for WWI and WWII remembrance. We are the last generation to hear the veterans of WWI and will quite possibly be one of the last to hear the victims of WWII while they are active in telling their stories. Quite worryingly, we need to find a better reason for remembering the dead of these wars beyond 'He was my Grandfather' or 'it was in our lifetime'. Certainly the ephithet 'Never Again' has been shown to have been an empty promise in the twentieth century and these days feels more like a plea than a demand.

One final thing. One of my jobs on Thursday was to scan some photos for an upcoming workshop on the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, a word which denotes a kind of unified culture. Amidst the photos I found one of some men constructing one of the Autobahns that were developed during the Nazi era. They were British POWS. It was at that point that I remembered my countrymen who fought to liberate Europe. We Will Remember Them.

Kristallnacht and the Present

Twenty one years ago tonight, one of the most unexpected, and significant, events in modern European history took place. The fall of the Berlin Wall, and the consequent collapse of the German Democratic Republic (DDR), was an event that took almost everyone by surprise and as such remains full of emotionally charged memories. Footage of men with mullets in leather jackets weeping for joy at being able to traverse the few metres of the Death Zone unabetted is not easily forgotten.

I've written about the rather horrible cooincidence of history that means Germans must commemorate both one of their proudest moments with one of their most shameful in a previous post, so I won't go into much detail here. On Sunday I laid a Rose at the memorial to the unknown prisoner as part of a service of remembrance organised by the German Trade Union Congress, at which the representative for Munich, Matthias Jena, pointed out the similarities between the events of Kristallnacht and the current political 'hot potato', integration.

In late August a German Social Democrat politician, Thilo Sarrazin, published a book entitled Deutschland schafft sich ab, or "Germany does away with itself", in which he argues that immigration is slowly destroying Germany through a lack of social integration. He highlights in particular the negative impact of Islam on German culture. This is not a surprising view for him to hold given the group most associated with post war immigration is Turkish workers.

These views hit a raw nerve in Germany, and over the past three months or so it has been a huge topic of national debate. There are many who sympathise with his fears, and there have been many television debates relating to the topic. In fact one of the themes to arise from the publication of the book is the freedom of Germans to discuss questions of racial and cultural integration without being dismissed as 'Nazis'. When the SPD discussed the possibility of terminating Sarrazin's membership on the basis of holding views that were 'not compatible' with the party, many construed this as an attack on his right to speak freely.

It's an extremely difficult situation. There are many Germans who fear immigration and are angered at the seeming unwillingness of immigrants to integrate, yet they are instantly told by those who are supposed to represent them that there is no problem. They thus think that there is a problem and that they are now a surpressed majority. The history of many nations tells us that a 'silent majority' that feels marginalised is a very dangerous force indeed.

At the service on Sunday Matthias Jena was quite clear as to where the comparisons lie. He was quick to point out the poignancy of the memorial service coming in the middle of such a public debate, and that the current debate over integration was developing into a debate over selection.

These are topics that all nations find extremely hard to discuss openly. We in the UK are no different; just substitute 'Turkey' with 'Pakistan'. However as Germany commemorates the night on which the persecution of the Jews finally left the law court and erupted into the streets, they will continue to keep in mind where misunderstanding and intolerance can lead, as well as what happens when one marginalises the problem rather than dealing with it face to face.

Br Raphael

As things go this has been a very good week. I've got quite a bit of work done, made progess in some other areas of my work and generally things seem to be taking shape quite nicely.

One of the bext things to move forward this week was my work on a Biography for the 'Memory Book', a collection of detailed histories of over 120 former inmates of Dachau Concentration Camp. This is a project with which the Versöhnungskirche is closely aligned and as such we spend one day a week at the office in Münchnerstraße, Central Dachau, helping with things from translation work to administering the accompanying travelling exhibition "Names Instead of Numbers".

However, it is often considered important for volunteers to get involved with the production of a biography of their own, so as to understand better the personal nature of the work we do. I think I have mentioned the Carmelite friar Br. Raphael Tijhuis in a previous post (later pilfered by the website of the Biritsh Province of Carmelites!). His Dachau diary, Nothing Can Stop God From Reaching Us is a moving account of his experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis from his arrest in Mainz in 1940, to his incarceration in the camp at Dachau in 1942, right up to his liberation in 1945. I would recommend you read it yourselves rather than me bother to try and sum it up in a couple of paragraphs here.

However, my only complaint about the Edizioni Camelitani edition is that there is very little on his life after Dachau. This information is of vital scholarly importance, not only to a biography of his life but to an understanding of the post war lives of religious prisoners in general who were interned in Dachau. I have learned from various sources, not least friars who lived in Rome with Raphael in the 1960s and 1970s, that he was a deeply traumatised man with mental scars from the horrors he once saw.

What is less well known, and not remarked to in the book at all, is that he did come back to Dachau in the 1960s. I have seen photos in the Memorial Site Library of Raphael with other former prisoners at the opening of the memorials in around 1965. There is also a picture of him in audience with Pope Paul VI and a number of other survivors, suggesting that however painful the memories were he was involved in the remembrance culture of the day.

These are all preliminary thoughts, very broad brush strokes of his life. In December I will hopefully visit the Carmel in Mainz where he was arrested and begin to piece together something of his pre and post war life. If you have any information on Br. Raphael that may be relevant to a short biography of his life, or indeed have any queries pertaining to this work, please do not hesitiate to contact me at roy.scivyer@gmail.com

The image is of the Camp Chapel, attributed to Raphael, and was drawn as a gift for Bl. Karl Leisner on his ordination. Photo courtesy of http://www.schoenstatt.de/news2004/12dezember/4t1252de-d---leisner.htm

Gräbersegnung

Yesterday afternoon at around 4pm, a small group gathered at the Agony of Christ Chapel at the Memorial Site for a service to bless the mass grave of those who had died here in Dachau, one that was mirrored in countless cemeteries across the world on the feast of All Souls. Following a simple liturgy, which included a Service of the Word and a Psalmody we processed from the Chapel to the Crematorium area, where the mass grave of thousands of Dachau prisoners was blessed with holy water.

The homily, preached by Fr. Klaus Spiegel OSB, one of the two Catholic chaplains to the site, was a reflective one, pointing out that although Dachau was a site of particular pain to Catholics for the deaths of thousands of religious prisoners, the attitude of Catholicism had in many ways helped to build the camp in the first place.

As with many of these services held at the site, one feels sometimes like performing animals at the Zoo. Visitors to the site stop and take photos, peering in before wandering on to see the 'real' parts of the site. The Versoehnungskirche has two walls made of glass, which sometimes makes us feel like we are in a fish bowl. I wonder if visitors do feel that we are also a relic of the age remembered by the site, when most people professed faith.

Either way the service was an appropriate way of commemorating the lives of those who are no longer remembered by name, but by quantity. It was also nice to speak with members of the Carmelite Convent who live on the site as a sign of atonement. They were all very keen to talk about their experiences of Britain, which thankfully had kept them firmly in the safety of the South!

"The Key to Holiness"

In the foyer to the Church of the Assumption there were copies of a quotation of St Edith Stein, printed especially for the Feast of All Saints. As I have quite a few Carmelite readers (or at least I got the impression I did!) I thought it might appreciate it being quoted in full. The translation is a combination of Google Translate and my untangling its incomprehensible sentence structure:

"No one can say 'Holiness is out of my reach'.

It doesn't hang on some remarkable feat, belong to a specific age, require a certain relationship or a dead serious manner.

On the outside one notices very little, although with time it will begin to take shape.

God in heart and God in mind- there lies the key to Holiness"

Feasts of All Saints and All Souls

Happy Feast of All Saints for those of you who celebrate such things. Yesterday I was on the rota for the Mesnerdienst, the process of setting up for the Sunday service at the Church of Reconciliation. I had forgotten that the 31st October is actually a very important day for the German Lutheran Church, as it is the anniversary of Luther's Nailing of the ninety five Theses to the door of the Church in Wittenberg: Reformation Day. The sermon, preached by a local priest, was very much an attack on the Roman Church in the early sixteenth century and Luther's courage in standing up to the authorities.

Whilst in England and Wales the calender shifts prominent Feast Days to the nearest Sunday, here in Germany we get a Feiertag on which people head out for walks wearing traditional Bavarian hats and generally enjoy a little extra time with the family. It's been quiet, which has given me the chance to get some work done for a change. Tomorrow's Feast of All Souls will be marked at the Memorial Site with a particular focus on the victims of the concentration camp. More to follow.

In the meantime, I went for a wander yesterday around Theresienwiese, the location every September of Oktoberfest, and as you can see from the photos they're still trying to clear it all up just shy of a month since the festival ended!

It seems a very Bavarian thing for there to be images of the Madonna and Child on random buildings. Wandering towards Theresienwiese U-Bahn Station, I found a particularly striking one

The joys of wandering aimlessly on a Sunday afternoon...

Thoughts of Home...

The pace has begun to increase. We are now into the planning stages of our Memorial Site tours, which means that reading up on the history of the site is the main priority for the next couple of weeks. It feels a lot like I am back at University, struggling to concentrate on the texts and the work, only this time there will be serious consequences to my not reading properly. It will all be fine, and the fact that my bosses are expecting it of me is a confidence boost in that they must think we're up to the task, even after dealing with my paltry German for the past two months. It's just a case of burying my head in the books rather than the sand for once.

As a result of such pressure my mind has begun to turn to home, the comfort blanket for all ex-pats in the world. Yes, the Coalition is taxing people into oblivion and yes, we turn up at the bottom of almost every UN Standard of Living Index produced, but golly gosh I do miss my Sceptred Isle sometimes, especially the pleasure of understanding everything that's going on.

One of the ways I cure this Sehnsucht for home is through that wonderful bastion of Middle England; BBC Radios 3 and 4. I am the proud son of a mechanic and a shop girl, yet the soothing suburban voices of Charlotte Green, Sandi Toksvig, Petroc Trelawny (his name is Petroc for God's sake!!) force my accent and my tastes to ascend gracefully above my station. With its deliberately archaic theme tunes and cuddly soft Liberal viewpoints, there's nothing cosier to settle down with of an evening.

Radio 3 of course is on an even higher plane. While Radio 4 makes a token effort to be 'accessible', Radio 3 has thrown all caution to the wind and made it almost impenetrable to anyone aware of the existence of music that doesn't cost £100 for tickets or whose favourite musicians wear anything but an open collar shirt and a tweed jacket. They make you really work hard to become a proper listener, as if they are saying "Well if you bally don't like it, toddle on over to Classic FM- they're playing the Theme from Jurassic Park again, why not try that?". The day I heard something on Radio 3 and recognised the artist by its style (it was Dvorak) I knew I had earned my right to listen.

Sigh...

P.S- Apologies to non-British readers; the last two paragraphs probably didn't make any sense to you. Perhaps at some point I'll write a post on "The British Class System for Beginners"

Who needs to get over Hitler more?

On Telegraph Blogs there is a very interesting post from Guy Walters on the new Hitler exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. It is the first such exhibition in Germany's Post War history; there have been many on the Holocaust, Nazi crimes, the lives of individuals, but never on the man whose name more than anyone else's has become synonymous with 'evil' and the events of the early 20th century. The fear has always been that any such exhibition will stand as a rallying call for Neo-Nazis, which prompted the exhibition's directors to talk of their nerves in Der Spiegel a couple of weeks ago.

Walter's final conclusion, that the British still have longer to go to come to terms with the war than the Germans, is absolutely true; we have a relationship with the war that other nations would not believe possible. However, his description of the apathetic German isn't far from the truth. I will be heading to a lecture this evening with a holocaust survivor, at which I reckon there will be four, perhaps five people under the age of 40 out of an audience of thirty people. Of them, I will possibly be the youngest. The issue is not that the Germans must 'get over' the past, it is that they have not yet dealt with it fully.

There is a huge effort on the part of a few to face the past in a meaningful way, and they constantly hit a mental wall built by the German people in the 1950s and 60s of denial and ignorance. I would suggest that there is very limited interest from the youth of today in the Nazi era, perhaps because it belongs to the previous generation.

According to Spiegel Online,

"Over one hundred journalists from all over the world came [to the opening], including thirty camera teams, for of which came from Japan alone. All waited nervously for something to happen".

All the fuss over the Hitler exhibition makes little sense to my British mind, partly because if such a thing happened in the UK no one would bat an eyelid. I wonder if the German organisers of the exhibition are concerned not just with how Neo Nazis will react to the exhibition, but how the rest of the world will react too.

Memorials and Time

As well as attempting to impersonate Patrick Swayze, I also had some time to explore the city of Münster, which has a very important place in Western European History. After almost five years of negotiation, the Peace of Westphalia was signed in the Rathaus on the 24th October 1648, bringing to an end the Thirty Years War, the bloodiest conflict Europe had ever seen. Proportionately the only war that has killed more people were WWI and WWII. I thought it was important to go and see the room in which it was signed, if only to pay my respects.

Like most towns in West Germany, Münster was heavily bombed by the Allies in the last years of WWII and as a result much of the building had to be restored. Still, the room looks as it did over three hundred and fifty years ago when the treaty was signed. The place is surprisingly empty, given how many people suffered some of the most barbarous tortures at the hands of soldiers from all over Europe, some of which formed the first State Armies. Given I work for a memorial site that proudly proclaims "Never Forget" at its memorial, it makes you wonder whether in one hundred years time the site will still be as important to visitors, or even whether it will be relevant to them.

Of course the answer is yes, but I will be interested to see how the nature of the memorial changes as the last survivors go to their eternal reward. My guess is that, like with memorials to WWI, the onus will be on a broader memorial to those who have died in genocide, with Dachau being used as one of the first and most bureaucratic examples. It is a difficult question, yet one that needs to be considered.

For Carmelite readers, you may also be interested to know that Münster was home to St Edith Stein, who was a lecturer at the University until the Nazis implemented anti-Jewish legislation to stop her teaching. It was the last place she lived before entering Carmel in 1933. Today the Ludgerikirche, her parish church, still remembers her in a painting (possibly an Icon) by the south entrance. The other person in the picture is Bl. Niels Stensen, who was present during the time of the Peace of Westphalia.

It was a chance find; I knew of her time in Cologne, but had no idea she had lived in Münster. It is wonderful that the people of the parish still remember Edith Stein even though she was here barely a year and very few people must remember her by now. Perhaps Memorials are supposed to change their meaning. Perhaps the shifting nature of their meaning is one of the most important roles of the memorial once the last witness is gone and the memories lie in the hands of the next generation.

On the way back from Münster...

I stopped off in Cologne for a couple of hours to visit the Cathedral, which is possibly my favourite Cathedral in Europe, aesthetically speaking that is. The sun came out, which offered some fantastic shots for my camera, which valiently fought on until the battery finally died. Judge for yourself

RIP Father Dowling: Tom Bosley dies at 83

As you may have garnered from my last post, I have been in Münster for the last few days on a European Voluntary Service seminar. During this time, I was greatly saddened to hear from a friend of mine of the death of Tom Bosley at the age of 83. For most people he will be remembered as Mr C, Richie's dad in the classic TV series Happy Days, but I think in Britain it is perhaps his later work in the 1980s and early 1990s for which he is best remembered.

He was a regular to BBC1 at 2:40pm, when he appeared (and still appears) alongside Angela Lansbury as Sheriff Tupper in Murder She Wrote. However, for me he will always be Father Frank Dowling, the Chicago priest who solves crimes in his spare time with Sister Stephanie 'Steve' Oskowski.

The show was never trying to be ground breaking, and its charm came from its good natured humour, not its water-tight plots. I have lost count of the number of times Sister Steve managed to solve the crime either using the skills she learned 'growing up in the neighbourhood' or wearing a disguise! Many of the plot lines in the later episodes even tended to be rather fantastical; how could we ever forget the time Father Dowling met Sherlock Holmes, or had to fight Satan to save Sister Steve's Soul, let alone the two or three times his evil (identical) twin Blaine came to visit.

But none of that mattered. Father Frank was a good and honest man who always put other people ahead of himself, even when it endangered his life. It made for great television, and a fantastic model of TV Catholic priesthood. I doubt I would be Catholic today if it were not for the down to earth, human way Bosley portrayed Father Dowling. For better or worse, he was the first Catholic priest I ever knew.

Sadly, unlike other Murder Mystery shows of its time such as Murder She Wrote and Diagnosis Murder fans are still waiting for the series to come out on DVD. For now, I will have to content myself with the legendary opening credits sequence

"Nobody puts Linn in the corner!"

Just a quick word from Muenster, where I am attending a seminar run by the European Voluntary Service. I've been here about a week and, once again, it has been fantastic to meet so many wonderful people with all sorts of expectations and fears about their projects. There are Kindergarten volunteers from Leipzig, Office workers from Berlin, Franco-German Exchange volunteers in Wuerzburg and many others from all over Europe.

We have been playing a game called "No Stone". We pass round a small pebble with the word "No" in English and German. When you have the stone, you must pass it on by getting someone to answer "No" to a question. If you have the stone by the end of a certain amount of time, you have to perform a task for the group. Needless to say, I was the gullible fool who said "No" just as we went in for the final session of the day and ended up with the stone.

Meanwhile, during the day I had bought from the Youth Hostel library a fantastic book about Dirty Dancing. It's not one of my favourite films from the 1980s, but the book discussed the passion of dance as well as how the film was made, so I had no choice really. Having almost read this book cover to cover, the group were united in their decision for my task; to do the final "dirty" dance to the tune of "(I've had) The Time of my Life".

Thankfully the Lovely Linn (no stranger to previous posts), who has trained as a ballet dancer and had some experience, was nice enough to be the Jennifer Grey to my Patrick Swayze, who by now must be turning in his grave. It was chaotic, messy, but full of energy. I had a great time, and we even managed a pretty decent lift at the right moment!! Just goes to prove: dance has nothing to do with steps, it's about your style and passion

Münchener Freiheit

A wise man once said that there is no such thing as better or worse, just different. Of course this person probably made the comment in around 1976, before some of the world's most underrated music was produced and he had time to alter his comment. Whilst Germany is one of the few places in the western world where mullets and large moustaches remain popular (the other being Liverpool), Munich seems to have a fantastic pedigree of music for the masses, unfettered by criticism from spotty music journalists with tight jeans and ridiculously long fringes.

The most prominent of all is Schlager, which can only really be described as cover bands with wide appeal. Some exceptions, such as Wolfgang Petry and Claudia Jung, write their own synthesised, power chord driven songs. They all come out of the woodwork either on Saturday night German TV or during Oktoberfest, when they lead the masses in singalongs of such classics as "Sweet Caroline" or "Hey Jude". Germans, as British readers have probably realised from a childhood of War films, like to speak English in their spare time and much prefer to sing in their favourite language.

Personally, I think the 70s and 80s have provided some of the Germanic speaking nations' best music for the past three centuries at least. In the 1780s Mozart composed 'The Marriage of Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni'. Wagner's Ring Cycle was first performed in its entirety (as Wagner intended) in 1876. Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner wrote some of their defining work in the 1880s and continued into the 1890s.

By the 1980s, German music was once more reaching its centennial peak. In the former DDR rock groups such as Pudhys, Pankow and Karat were breaking down borders through intelligent lyrics that went unnoticed by the Stasi. On the other side of the Wall, bands such as Nena, Modern Talking and Münchener Freiheit were making waves and destroying the Ozone layer with their powerful music and hair spray.

What's that you say? "You cannot compare the majesty of Wolfgang Mozart and Richard Wagner with the synthpop of Münchener Freiheit?!" Well, yes I bloody well can. All three artists were not only writing work for the masses, often disregarded as German (in the wider sense of the word) rubbish by those from other European countries. Just read Mark Twain for a typical English speaking criticism of Wagner. They also proudly and unashamedly express their Zeitgeist, whether it be German nationalism or consumerism, and frankly I would happily sit through a concert from any of the artists I mentioned above with exactly the same respect and awe at their music.

Anyway, I'll come down from the soap box now. Feel free to listen to the following from 1985 if you promise to be open minded and leave your clichés and prejudices at the door.

Was bleibt?

I was at KZ Gedenkstaette Flossenbürg on Sunday for the opening of a new permanent exhibition, entitled "WAS BLEIBT?" (lit.'what remains?'). The aim of the exhibition was to show the post war history of the site (where the question 'what remains' is a poignant one for reasons shown below), as well as what happened to the victims and the perpetrators. One is faced firstly with the huge volume of bureaucracy that survivors had to wade through to be recognised officially as victims and thus be entitled to reparations. Then there are sections on the trials of SS officials into the late 1960s, when the statute preventing crimes from being prosecuted after a certain number of years was removed.

Someone commented that the exhibition lays the facts bare, leaving the visitor to see the successes and the failures and judge for themselves. I cannot think of a better compliment for such an exhibition.

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Just out of interest, had you ever heard of KZ Flossenbürg? It's not a nice game to play, but of the huge network of concentration camps there are the 'popular' ones, by which I mean the ones that get the tourists, and the ones that have almost disappeared from memory. Everyone has heard of Auschwitz due to the sheer number of deaths there, and everyone knows the name 'Dachau' thanks to the US Army's efforts to film the camp and open it to the press in the days after the liberation. KZ Flossenbürg however has a different story to tell.

It is no secret these days that the West German government was not the biggest fan of memorial sites in the post war years. Many sites, Dachau a prominent example, are surrounded by housing and blocks of flats (for an example see my previous post on the Titus-Brandsma-Weg). Dachau never went as far as Flossenbürg though; most of the land on which the prisoners' barracks stood is now taken up by housing.

This photo was taken from the Appellplatz (parade ground), looking up to where the barracks once stood. Industry in the area had developed on the parade ground itself, and it was only in 1997 after the State of Bavaria bought the land that the last building was demolished.

That isn't to say that there were no memorials at all. The Ehrefriedhof (honorary cemetary) was developed in the area around the Crematorium, and is absolutely stunning. Seriously, Southern Germany in Autumn with its array of sun kissed Orange colours is beautiful. KZ Flossenbürg is just near a quarry, now an unofficial national park, and thus has to compete with the scenery for the attention of the visitors.

One of the first memorials built to the victims of a concentration camp was erected here, a small Chapel tucked to the side. Dedicated to "Jesus im Kerker ", lit. Jesus in Prison, the first thing you notice is the chapel's altarpiece, in which a concentration camp inmate beats a fellow prisoner while Jesus looks on in agony from the cross. There was apparently a widespread misconception at the time that those interred in camps were criminals, and were thus brutal. They were almost certainly not criminals when they went in, but whether the system brutalised them is another matter. Either way, the fundamental message of the piece, that as Christ dies for our sins people continue to suffer, was clear enough.

There were also two stained glass windows in the pattern of the prisoners' uniform and the infamous triangles used to categorise them

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The church also contains a bust of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century and an opponent of the Nazis from the very beginning. He was hanged by the punishment barracks on the 9th April 1945. His theology would later influence huge theological debates on the nature of belief in a secular world, in particular the 'Honest to God' debate within the Church of England in the early 1960s. You can see the remains of the barracks where he spent his last months, which had been left largely untouched, below.

It might also be of interest to know that nine British officers were shot in KZ Flossenbürg in 1945. Britons were rarely sent to concentration camps as they were usually categorised Prisoner of War. However dozens of members of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), who worked with the Resistance in France, were sent to camps as spies. There is a grave in the honorary cemetery commemorating their deaths, as well as this plaque in the Chapel.

KZ Flossenbürg almost did the unthinkable and disappeared entirely, yet after over sixty years there is now two permanent exhibitions on the site. However, unless you have a car or a good couple of hours to spare making train and bus connections, it is unlikely many people will see it. For all the effort, the KZ Flossenbürg remains almost forgotten.

"Holocaust"

I have been re-reading Harold Marcuse's brilliant book Legacies of Dachau, which tells the story of the Dachau Site in the context of the wider German process of Verhangenheitsbewaeltigung. It is by no means complimentary, yet the KZ Gedenkstaette refers to it often in its 'Skript' of basic knowledge given to budding guides.

One of the most interesting chapters deals with the German response to the 1978 U.S. Miniseries Holocaust, which starred a host of popular American actors such as Meryl Streep and James Woods. The 40th anniversary of Kristallnacht in November 1978 saw more poeple than ever before take an interest in the Nazi era. In this context and after much deliberation by the TV networks, it was decided that Holocaust would be screened in Germany. The first showing, over four consecutive nights, garnered a massive response, and many see it as the catalyst for a new openness about what people knew of the persecution of those years.

One of the biggest historical debates, and one that continues to this day revolves around what people knew of Nazi persecutions. Most historians today would argue that the German people were, in the most part, fully aware, yet in the aftermath of the War the 'myth of ignorance' developed as a way of dealing with the guilt of the past. In one symbolic moment of change, the editors of Der Spiegel and Stern, two of Germany's biggest weekly news magazines, publicly confessed their knowledge of the Holocaust.

We must not forget that the very use of the word "Holocaust" actually originated with the miniseries, such was people's awareness of the Nazi murder of Jews shaped and influenced by the show.

Having watched it, I could understand the common criticism, led by Auschwitz survivor Eli Wiesel, that the programme trivialised the mistreatment and death of millions of people. The Weiss's, a wealthy Jewish family, seem almost identical to every miniseries family of the late 70s/early 80s in their make up. The portrayal of women in the show, either as manipulative Lady Macbeths to their SS Officer husbands or as petrified matriarchs who refuse to accept the persecution around them, is either a brave stroke of historical realism or a typical chauvinist fantasy. Ultimately, like all miniseries (and this is not a criticism of miniseries in general), it was melodrama.

That's not to say it was without merit. Some scenes were extremely powerful, in particular the moment the eldest son Karl is arrested by the Gestapo and all the neighbours peer through their doors before shutting out the events taking place. For a nation that had seemingly dedicated much of its energy to block out the past, "Holocaust", with over a generation's historical distance, forced many people to finally admit a very difficult truth about what they actually knew.

(Photo © Der Spiegel: Headline reads "The murder of the Jews moves the Germans")

A very large THANK YOU!

I received news late last night that the charity Living By Giving has agreed to award ASF a grant of £300 on my behalf. Living By Giving, previously known as the Glanfield Hospitalite Trust;

"was set up in 2010, to support and advance the standard of life for all people in need throughout the UK including; those who live in poverty, those with disabilities, those who are physically or emotionally deprived, those who have been neglected, and their families."

They also attempt to support young people in projects such as the one I am currently involved with in Dachau, so as to allow them to reach their full potential. I am humbled by the fact they felt my work in Dachau was worthy of such a grant, and on behalf of ASF I would like to thank Living By Giving for their generosity.

Kamilla og Tyven

Today, I am reliably informed by the BBC, is the 25th Anniversary of the a-Ha hit "Take on Me" entering the UK Top 40. You can read a fantastic report on the origins of the song, as well as how the video was made, on the BBC website here.

This took my mind back to the 9th September, when I was wandering down to Wuensdorf-Waldstadt train station with the other ASF volunteers. I was chatting with the lovely Linn Husby about what must be Norway's best known musical export when she began to sing me a solo single by a-Ha's lead singer, Morten Harket. It was beautiful. The song apparently came from a 1988 Norwegian family film called Kamilla og Tyven (Camilla and the Thief), in which Harket plays the Thief. Realising my lack of Norwegian, she explained that in the song Harket is about to be arrested for a crime he once committed, and is asking Kamilla to wait for him while he is in jail. Sadly, I have not been able to find a copy of the film with English subtitles, but I can at least show you a very nice video. For an image of life in Norway in which people wear period dress and 80s hairstyles, see below.

Harket apparently was studying for the priesthood when he was invited to be lead singer for a band called Bridges, two of whose members later formed a-Ha. It's a good thing he recognised he was being called to a far higher purpose!

UPDATE: The Lovely Linn has reliably informed me that Morten Harket does not play the Thief in the film, though he does have a small on screen role. Next time I make a post about 80s Norwegian Cinema I'l have to check my facts better!!

If you can't hear the music...

I have just got back from the Memorial Site Visitor Centre, where we heard Professor Livia Bitten-Jackson, a Holocaust Survivor, talk of her experience as a fourteen year old Czechoslovakian Jew who ended up first in a ghetto, then in Auschwitz. It was a fascinating talk (not least because for once it was in English and I could understand every single word) in which she shared many personal moments, many of them clearly painful. I will not bother to share with you all of them, as you can read them in her memoirs "I Have Lived a Thousand Years" just as I intend to. However, three points struck me deeply.

Firstly, Bitten-Jackson's talk was very down to earth and humble. She laughed a lot, indeed she had a fantastic rapport with the audience given almost everyone had English as a second language. Someone at the end asked her how it was possible for her to laugh after the events of those years. A good question, given she had most probably repeated this story thousands of times before. "It's all I can do," she responded. "When I stop laughing, I cry."

Her account of the Selection process was one such moment. It is a very common image now, the tales of people arriving at Auschwitz, being forced off freight trains and lined up for 'selection', led by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. In Bitten-Jackson's case however, Mengele spared her life. She and her mother were walking off in the wrong direction, with the invalids, children and elderly towards what they would eventually find out were the Gas Chambers. Mengele caught sight of her Ayran features, pulled her out of the queue with her mother and sent them off with the healthy people. This was where she said goodbye to her aunt, who would be dead within the hour.

All survivors stories tend to include moments of fate, points at which they are given work duties indoors for example, or manage to discern quickly enough when a selection is taking place.I think that one of the reasons many survivors feel obliged to tell their stories is the guilt they feel knowing that all that kept them from death or hard labour were small lies and their savvy. Part of the dehumanising process of the Holocaust was not just the moment they demanded you strip and hand over your belongings, but the moment they removed your ability to hold any real control over your very existence.

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I leave you with the answer to her final question. Bitten-Jackson, who has lived in Israel for over 33 years, is a practising Jew and regularly attends Synagogue. Somebody asked her how she could remain religious. She replied, simply enough, that she maintained her practices because so many people died because of them. I heard the same response from the Israeli ASF volunteers in Wuensdorf back in September when somebody asked them whether they got annoyed when all public transport in Israel stopped at sunset on Friday evening. Judaism is as much a tradition as a faith, and for many it is perverse not to carry on. This was not to say, however that she did not have regular disagreements with God.

She then tackled the question that was implied by the first: what about Faith? She proceeded to tell the story of a man who saw a light emanating from a closed window. He peered in to see people dancing, yet without the music they looked as if they were simply making strange movements. She concluded the talk saying this:

The man did not understand that they were dancing because he couldn't hear the music. If you cannot hear the music, you cannot understand the dance. I consider faith to be a gift. It stands on a level beyond logic and allows you to understand the world in a way impossible for those who do not have it.

From a woman who lost her father and her aunt to the Nazis, as well as having her relationship with her mother forever strained, I found those to be extremely powerful words. She asked the audience to pass her story on. This is my small way of doing that.

Sprachkurs

I love the fact that I have not had a proper conversation in English in well over a week. Even better is the fact I have not met another Brit in almost a month. I've heard them, drunkenly staggering back from Oktoberfest in costumes, some even wearing Kilts, but I didn't bother talking to them.

I thought about this as I began my language course at the Munich Volkshochschule, or Community College, on Monday. I've been through the set up before, i.e take a sterile teaching room, a CD/Cassette recorder, a teacher (normally a woman with short hair in her late fifties with a name like Ursula or Birgit), a ridiculously expensive textbook with a punchy name like 'Schwerpunkt','Zeitgeist', or 'Sehnsucht', mix together and enjoy! I mean that; I love to see the different people you get together wanting to learn a new language. This time I am the youngest person there, and the class includes (among others) an Au Pair from the Ukraine, an Engineer from Argentina and a fifty eight year old Italian women who seems to be here simply because she loves Munich!

Every one of these courses also seems to involve at least five handouts per session of newspaper articles about language problems. I remember seeing the same problem at GCSE and A Level, except instead of endless youth initiatives to recycle Aluminium cans you get endless descriptions of multi cultural literary prizes.

As I say, I love every minute of it. By the time we finish, I'm so Germanised I can't bear to go home, so I take a walk through the city back to Marianplatz or Sendlinger Tor and get the train back to Dachau from there. Munich is beginning to grow on me, now it has been cleared of drunks in Lederhosen.

Other ASF Blogs, and your help

Today we had Internet installed in the flat, which means (and take this as you will) there will hopefully be more frequent posting here. A quick question; do people mind me posting on other stuff that happens? I'm keen for this not to become too morose, as despite the work I do I am having lots of fun discovering new places and growing in a new language. This inevitably means lots of socialising and discovering lots of delightful German 80s music. I would like to post on them, but if people feel that would be too irreverent, that's fine. It's your blog.

For example, I have been reading the fantastic blogs of other volunteers and they deal a lot with their social lives as well as the overbearing nature of the work.

If you speak German/ have the Google Chrome translate tool, you may like to check out a couple of other Aktion Suehnezeichen blogs. Abenteuerwelten (lit. Worlds of Adventure) is written by Anne Rumpf, a German volunteer working with the central office in Berlin. Her posts show a different side to our work!

Also, for another experience of Berlin from the perspective of an underpaid, lovely ASF volunteer (in English) you can read the musings of Linn Husby at Linn's lille verden, where she even takes you through the step by step process of buying bubblegum from one of those vending machines you still get sometimes in big cities. Now that's service...

Happy Tag der deutschen Einheit!

Twenty years ago today the Bundesrepublik Deutschland officially embraced the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik and unified Germany after over forty years of division. In Bremen there are celebrations going on, but the atmosphere among most Germans is very subdued.

That's not to say they're not happy Germany is now unified (though that's a discussion for another time!), merely that for many there is no emotional attachment to the day. Today was the date on which Germany officially became unified, but most people would point to the more famous date of 9/10th November 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Our mentor Klaus said far more poeple have an emotional attachment to the 9th November and can clearly remember where they were when they heard the news, like people who remember the assassination of Kennedy or when the places hit the Twin Towers. Last night on the way back from Oktoberfest with the two German volunteers attached to the Memorial Site, one of them said they had forgotten the Day of German Unity was today.

So why not remember German Unity on the 9th November? The answer lies in a cruel coincidence of history; Hitler attempted to take power for the first time on the 9th November 1924 and, far worse, the night of the 9th November 1938 saw the events of Kristallnacht, the Jewish pogroms that many see as the start of the active phase of the Holocaust. Germans have quite rightly agreed that this day of remembrance must be commemorated as a matter of principle.

So most Germans will probably celebrate the Mauerfall on the 9th November, but like most attempts to celebrate German culture in the 20th century, it must stand awkwardly next to another significant date in German history.

Waldfriedhof

I have been thinking more about the last pages of Raphael's memoirs, in which he describes the last days in the camp between liberation and his journey back to the Netherlands. As with a lot of the book, he refers to places that still exist today but are not actually on the memorial site, and thus receive next to no visitors. Whether that's a good thing or not is not for me to say.

One such location is the Waldfriedhof, the Woodlands Cemetary, where around 1500 men who died in the days after liberation were buried. While those corpses discovered in the first days after the Americans arrived at the KZ were buried en masse for the simple reason of a lack of manpower, the Americans decided that those who died as a consequence of their treatment during their time as prisoners would be given an individual burial. They were laid to rest by local farmers, whose knowledge of the events in the camp is still debatable.

When you arrive, the place looks like any normal cemetary; in fact it is a functioning cemetary and there are plenty of ornate memorials with photos and flowers. However, then you notice an open space, where you see hundreds of stone slabs. They mainly bear Polish names, every so often a Star of David, and sometimes for people whose name is unknown there is only a cross to their final resting place.

When people talk of World War One burials, they often refer to the endless lines of graves bearing 'Known Unto God' at Tyne Cot. We rarely have the chance to have that same emotional effect where concentration camp victims are concerned, as they were treated merely as numbers right up to the point of their mass cremation or burial.

I said a quiet prayer and left. I liked the fact that the place was empty except for mourners. Unlike so many victims of KZ Dachau, they were laid to rest with the dignity and peace that many of us will take for granted when we finally pass on. They lie alongside Germans as residents of Dachau.

Carmelites to the left of him...

I should have pointed out that a couple of weeks ago I was featured on the website of the British Province of Carmelites. You can read it here, along with a horrible photo of me after I'd received the Brown Scapular.

The story rather ominously concludes with the line,

We hope to follow Roy's progress in the year ahead through news items on this website, particularly his reflection on the Carmelites who lived and died in Dachau.

So I really ought to start talking about Carmelites.

I got to know the Carmelites, a Roman Catholic Order of Friars, Nuns and Lay people, while at University in York. In many ways I am the person I am today thanks to their time, patience and presence, and they continue to challenge the way I live and think with their simple message of silence and contemplative living. They were quite struck by my placement at Dachau, not least because some of their brothers were interred here during the worst periods. Dachau was the central camp for geistlichen, religious prisoners who had opposed the Nazi regime in their respective countries. Among them were two Carmelites, Hilarius Januszewski and Titus Brandsma, who would later be beatified by the Catholic Church. Many of the brothers knew personally of Br. Raphael Tijhuis, who lived at their international college in Rome for over thirty years and who was haunted by his Dachau nightmare for the rest of his life.

The Carmelites are indeed still here. The Discalced Carmelite community of the Karmel Kloster Heilig Blut (of the Holy Blood) was established in 1964/65 and continue to pray for reconciliation through a life of prayer and solitude. I popped in for Non, a prayer of the Hours at 3pm, the other day and had a chat with the sister running the shop, in which you can buy rosaries and books looking at Dachau from a spiritual perspective. She seemed very pleased with the Carmelite connection!

Afterwards, I bought a new set of rosary beads. In the rush to pack I forgot to bring my York ones, which were on the altar at my reception into the Church two and a half years ago. I have been touched by Br Raphael's memoirs, in which he talks often of how he missed his rosary beads and risked a severe beating to pray the rosary while working on the Plantation opposite the camp.

It makes me wonder if I should try praying it more often while I'm here. Perhaps it would be appropriate to exercise that right denied to so many.