So much has changed... (I)

When writing about my seminar I didn't mention one of the most important moments of the week. The seminar leaders planned into the week one day to visit KZ-Gedenkstaette Buchenwald, approximately fifteen minutes outside of Weimar by bus. The group seemed unsure of going, and we spoke little on the bus journey there of what we knew about the Nazi Persecutions. It was agreed that we would join a guided tour offered by the site, then be allowed to wander the area and look round the exhibitions alone.

I wanted to make clear how we went round the site for a reason. The way in which we visit a memorial site, approach and engage with the land itself is incredibly important. I hadn't had the opportunity to visit a memorial site as a visitor since a day trip to KZ-Gedenkstaette Auschwitz in 2006, and I didn't have a tour of the memorial site in Dachau until at least my fourth visit to the site. It was very different approaching a Memorial Site as a visitor. As engaged as I am with the history I remained a stranger to the life of this site and, loath as I was to admit it, I was a tourist.

The tour was a short one, barely ninety minutes, in which we were introduced to the land and the basic history was explained. I heard familiar words, like Appellplatz, Krematoriumsbereich, Baracke, Wirtschaftsgebauede, Bunker. The only difference was the numbers, the names, the prisoner groups. KZ Buchenwald was established in 1937 as part of a shake up of the KZ-System. Theodore Eicke, the second Commandant of KZ Dachau and later Chief Inspector of the Concentration Camps, set up KZ Buchenwald and KZ Sachsenhausen at this time as Stammlager, central camps much bigger than before and with a network of small sub-camps with specific work details. I began to find it hard to concentrate on the differences between KZ Dachau and KZ Buchenwald, wanting to remain in the security of my knowledge of KZ Dachau.

We walked through the Gatehouse, where the words Jedem das Seine (All get what they deserve) taunt prisoners in a similar way to Arbeit macht frei. The site is vast and surrounded, as in the name, by woodland.

The crematorium and the morgue are not hidden, but clear for all to see. Here there was also a Genickschussanlage, literally a place designed for the shooting of soldiers in the nape of the neck. I am first amused by the beauty of the word on the display board, with its German stickle-brick logic - literally 'back-of-the-neck-shoot-enclosure' - then I am surprised at myself, that that is all I take from the place where 8,000 Soviet soldiers were murdered. I lean against the walls without thinking and my friend Karina lightly nudges me. The room is reconstructed, yet she finds something repulsive in my action; the walls still feel coated with the residue and bodily fluids of those men. Karina is Belarussan. I follow the group outside to where the barracks stood.

...

In one of the rooms in the Crematorium there is a wall covered with a few sparsely mounted plaques, some for individuals, others for groups and nationalities. There is one dedicated to British Officers of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), those who were in Block 17. There is the standard remembrance text for British and Commonwealth troops, one read out in Remembrance Services around the world in November:

At the going down of the Sun and in the morning, we will remember them

Later I stand by the rectangle of concrete and gravel that represents where Block 17 once stood. This is the closest I will ever come to experiencing what my Eastern European friends feel when they see a plaque with hundreds of familiar sounding names on them. McAllister. Thomas. I do not know how to feel. Their numbers were negligible compared to the plaque a few metres away for thousands of Poles, yet there is an attachment I feel to the familiarity of these men. I imagine them with pipes and well groomed moustaches, using phrases like "Right-O" and "Golly" in the way they do in the films. I realise Reality and Fiction are colliding again. This happens where national memories are concerned.

I make my way to the permanent exhibition. It is far better than KZ Dachau's, more detail and far more objects. More use of multimedia and less of display boards. Then again, I am not sure if this is better. The exhibition in KZ Dachau works best with a tour guide who can use the exhibition to illustrate their point. This is more like a museum. Memorial Sites should breathe for those whose breath was extinguished; Museums do not breathe because they are not designed to. I carry on round.

Outside there is the Goethe's Oak. This area was chosen by the Nazis for its association with the master of the German Romantic movement, the embodiment of the German spirit. The Oak stood in the camp as a sign to hope for the prisoners, of a Germany that was not yet dead but lived somehow through Romanticism despite all the Nazi's did to try and destroy it. They were forced to watch it burn in the last weeks before liberation when it was hit during an allied bombing raid.

I'll say more in my next post. That's enough for now.

A few days in Weimar

Before I post on a rather depressing topic again, I thought I'd share a few of my photos from my few days in Weimar. I was there for a EVS Mid Term Meeting, the third of the four seminars that make up the European Union's attempt at pastoral care for its underpaid, overworked volunteers.

Essentially we spend a few days eating well and socialising, talking about how we deal with conflicts within the workplace and hearing what new and exciting things the EU can do for us. I must admit it has given me a few ideas for things to do when September comes and I move on to pastures new, but that's something for another time.

One of the best things about these seminars is that the organisations that facilitate them on behalf of the EU often try and ensure they are held in different German cities, so we end up with an all expenses paid trip to another part of Germany. This was my chance to look round Weimar, the birthplace of German Romantic culture.

During the 18th Century, back when Munich was still a religious community and Berlin was just provincial Prussian bogland, pretty much every important writer and composer came to Weimar. Goethe lived there, Schiller lived there, Bach was resident for a few years, even Martin Luther lived in a Franciscan monastery for a time and was married there. Today Weimar is a sleepy tourist town that lives from its past and from its student population, a little bit like York but with less industry in the surrounding area.

I haven't read much of Goethe's work in German, partly out of fear that it would be like reading Shakespeare as a ten year old. I had however read 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' in English translation and bought myself a copy of the German. Werther is an amazing story, in which a man falls in love with a woman he can never have, with tragic consequences. I love the Opera adaptation by Jules Massenet.

One of my favourite moments in the Opera occurs at the end of the second act, when the object of his desires, Lotte, walks off a married woman and he is left inconsolable. He then decides that if he cannot have Lotte, he will take his own life, convincing himself that it is God's merciful plan for him to end his suffering. The concluding line of the aria gives me goosebumps every time:

Father! Father! Whom I know not but in whom I trust, in whom I hope - call me.

The following is a production with Jonas Kaufmann as Werther, in French with German subtitles. The bit I mean begins with 'Oh Vater, den ich nicht kenne':

So, a few photos were in order.

>

Statue of Goethe and Schiller in the Theaterplatz. The Constitution of the Weimar Republic, the first democractic German government, was proclaimed from the balcony of the theatre in late 1918

Goethe admired the 14th Century Persian poet Hafez, and wrote 'The West-Eastern Divan' as a response. This memorial symbolises the efforts of the Romantics to recognise the mutual enrichment that the Orient and the Occident could offer each other.

...and finally some shots of the Park by the River Ilm, including a duck pondering life's big questions...

Miłość - I go with the wind...

I just wanted to share this with you. As you know, for the first time in my life I am really getting to know the people of Eastern Europe, the part we used to see in the West as the big Red bit just past Germany. It still shocks me that when I was born it was almost impossible for these friendships to exist, and yet just twenty years later we can travel freely and really get to know each other. That fact still challenges me as a Briton and as a Volunteer for the European Union.

Anyway, I was chatting on Skype with a Polish friend of mine and we were talking about all sorts of things, including music. She sent me this song, from Polish Jazz vocalist Aga Zaryan. Called Miłość (Love), it comes from the album Umiera Piękno (Beauty is Dying), which is made up of a number of poems set to music. The album is dedicated to those who took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, which is why the video below is a montage of extremely moving images of young people at the time. Young and in love despite all that was going on.

I've included the lyrics below in Polish, then again with an English translation from Google to give you an idea of what the song is about. You don't really need the lyrics to find the song powerful - i certainly didn't - but the last line really is something special:

Słuchaj, słuchaj
Czy wietrze nie słyszysz jak śpiewa,
Mój głos, w którym jest moja miłość i tęskonota,
Taka prosta i mocna jak wiosenne drzewa,
Jak sprężone gałezie młodych wierzb w opłotkach

Poprzez pola wiatr gęsty
Wiosną w serce chlusta
Oddech w piersi tamuje
I krwią tętni w skroniach
Aż do bólu
Radosne serce niosąc w dłoniach
Chodzę z wiatrem z nieznanym imieniem na ustach
Chodzę z wiatrem z nieznanym imieniem na ustach
Chodzę z wiatrem z nieznanym imieniem na ustach...

Listen, listen
Can not you hear the wind sings,
My voice, which is my love and yearning,
As simple and powerful as spring trees
How young willow branches compressed in the enclosures

Through the dense wind field
Spring in the heart beating
Obstructs the breath in my chest
And teeming with blood in his temples
Painfully
A joyful heart is carrying in his hands
I go with the wind with an unknown name on the lips
I go with the wind with an unknown name on the lips
I go with the wind with an unknown name on the lips ...

John Cole R.I.P

I am currently at a European Voluntary Service seminar in Weimar, so I won't be able to write anything much until I get home on Saturday. However I just received news of the death of John Cole, a member of the York Carmelite Spirituality Group (YCSG), someone I got to know very well during my student days.

He was always a very engaged and friendly man, who was well loved by all who got to know him. While in York I did a lot with the Carmelites and attended some of the various meetings they organised in the local area. John never failed to turn up despite being in his eighties; one person who often gave him lifts to the events once told me there was 'simply no stopping him!'. He spoke a lot about his experiences during his time in the army, as a twenty year old serving first in Western Europe and then in Palestine, a period of his life he recollected often.

When he heard I was working in Germany at a KZ-Gedenkstaette he was very supportive and told me of his presence at the liberation of KZ Bergen Belsen in North Rhine Westphalia. He could still remember the bodies, and whenever I discuss the liberation of KZ Dachau by the Americans, I think of John and the strength of such memories almost seventy years later.

I can honestly say I will miss him, and I am sure there are many members of the YCSG who will too. I don't know how to end this; I'm young enough and lucky enough not to have seen the deaths of many friends. I'll quote the email I got from YCSG:

"He was much loved by many of us, and will be missed. We now confide him to the loving arms of Jesus, the Lord to whom he gave his full allegiance."

John (left) after his first profession of promises as a member of the Third Order at Thicket Priory, November 2009, alongside two other group members.

Because if you didn't laugh you'd cry...

A follow up, or "How I learned to stop worrying and read Brian Moore"

Following on from my last post, I thought I might very briefly elucidate on a couple of the points I made.

The feedback I have received has been very positive, and used words like 'challenging' to describe it. Whilst I think they were referring to the fact that the piece is hard to read (I got lost the second time I read it!), they may also have been approaching it thinking that it asks a very well worn question - why does God allow suffering in the world? That was the question I think my friend was asking me, and that was definitely the question I was trying to avoid as I answered it.

I say that as one of those who also asks the question sometimes. It comes up now and again, on Alpha courses, in sermons, during late night, semi-inebriated discussions with close friends, but there never was an answer. Some Christians just shrug their shoulders and wait until the conversation reaches safer ground, whilst others point out that Christ is light and bad things are the shadows that are created by the light, i.e God did not create evil but allows us to see it for what it is. Human evil is an easy one to answer in these situations; we have free will and some people go down the wrong path.

So far, so Radio 4. But that wasn't really the question I was answering in my previous post. I wanted to know if Christianity, and namely the Church, had any relevance to my work in Dachau. Does it help or, as I suspect, hinder what I do here?

I referenced Brian Moore in passing last time; this time he deserves deeper consideration. Moore was by far the best Catholic novelist of the late 20th Century, often touted as the successor to men like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. However, there was a key difference: Moore was openly atheist. His writing explored the Church from the perspective of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and his work would often consider priests and their inner crises of faith, using them to show the tension between the Church and the Modern World. In Catholics, a hundred-page novella, he sets the pre- and post-conciliar Churches together and finds them both lacking God. By the late 1980s and The Colour of Blood he took the Primate of an East European (and thus Communist) Catholic Church and made him ask whether popular Catholicism had more to do with identity and politics than genuine belief in God. Brian Moore was not looking at the Church as a religious entity, but as a cultural one. In his world, and perhaps in ours, God is an afterthought.

But Moore is cleverer than to simply suggest that everything be de-constructed so that all we are left with is a plain room in which people sit on comfy chairs in silence. Moore, as I already said, is an atheist. Moore's problem with the Church is that it cannot and will not admit that their God is dead. Please, I beg you, go away and watch the teleplay of Catholics from 1973, starring very young versions of Michael Gambon and Martin Sheen. You will finish with more questions than answers.

Ultimately Moore is right. I hate that he's right. Thirty, maybe even twenty years ago, young people were queuing up to join religious orders because they saw the Church as an agent of change. She survived on this energy even as the sacraments were deconstructed and, in the words of some commentators, 'feminised'. Then Germany went and hosted the second tumultuous event of the 20th Century to affect Catholic Christianity: the Berlin Wall fell.

Even Moore didn't have an answer to that. The Church is still reeling from it today. I put it to you, dear reader (and I say this with very limited theological knowledge, merely as food for thought) that the Church reinvented itself after Vatican II as an Ideology. In a society where Isms defined how people viewed the world, Catholicism began to find itself a niche whereby it could represent the middle ground away from the ruthless side of Capitalism and the overbearing side of Communism. In the end, the Wall fell and moved the proverbial goalposts. This 'end of history' nihilism still resides in modern politics. This time the Church hasn't even bothered to reinvent itself. A safer place to reside is in nostalgia and tradition, which is why the next significant battle in the Church will be 'in house', so to speak, and less about revolution and freedom as was the case up until 1990.

So where, once again, does this leave Dachau? The religious memorials serve the site well by offering free tours of the site (as opposed to the €65 charged by the memorial site itself) and providing a space for lectures on topics ranging from Jesuits in the Wehrmacht to Women Concentration Camp Guards. Up until recently they also provided a focal point for visiting survivors, and the Carmelite Community of Nuns on site was founded primarily to foster this relationship. However, the future seems far less rosy. Events attract (just as with religious services or Masses) the same twenty or thirty people each time. The Religious Memorials have become history themselves, not a position a living Church wants to be in.

As I have already said, the question of suffering in Dachau is not one that bothers me, or at least it doesn't bother me from a faith perspective. What does bother me is that the Church is losing (lost?) its ability to relate to the vast majority of God's people, and that has been made painfully clear to me through my work at Dachau. Religion, believe it or not, is a democracy, a dialogue between theologians and men of the road, Church and People. If the people do not like or relate to what they see or hear, they vote with their feet. They are voting, and the results suggest something must change...

OK, I lied when I said it would be brief. I promise the next post will be more light hearted!

The Death of the Mysterious God

I am just back from a pleasant few days at home in the UK and a nice opportunity to see family and friends again. It was very strange arriving at Gatwick Airport and seeing M&S, W.H.Smith, First Capital Connect trains among other things I associate with London and the UK; it was almost like a culture shock!

I was having a conversation with a friend who lives in South London when he posed a question I have been asked a few times now. We were discussing my work in KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, what went on there, when he asked "Has your work affected your faith at all?". I paused for a second. I can remember my previous answers had been the usual affirming stuff, about martyrs and people who survived on their devotion to God and little else. They are remarkable stories that at the very least display man's inate ability to survive inhumane tortures and treatment. However, the last few weeks have made me think. A lot. My mind has begun to wander and the existence of God is not so much challenged by the suffering of people in Dachau, but in the post-War use of God in remembrance.

KZ Dachau has always had a special place in the memory of Christianity during WWII. 2,700 Religious of various denominations were intered in KZ Dachau during the twelve years, the majority of these in the last three years of the camp's life (1942-45) and of Polish origin. KZ Dachau was the only camp that allowed the daily celebration of Mass for the religious prisoners. After the war, two men came to define the struggle to turn the former camp land into a memorial site: Fr. Leonard Roth and Bp. Johannes Neuhäusler. We have much to thank them for, as the establishment of a memorial site was by no means a popular or obvious action in the 1950s, but their remembrance focused on their Catholic faith. The first major memorial was the Agony of Christ Chapel, built in 1960 and facing the Appellplatz and Wirtschaftsgebäude. It stands triumphant, a symbol of the popular image of the Church at this time: the suffering of the prisoners in Dachau was a reenactment of Christ's suffering on the Cross. Dachau was a modern Calvary.

Someone later suggested to Neuhäusler that perhaps there should be Protestant and Jewish memorials on the site as well. Neuhäusler tentatively agreed, but ensured they were far smaller than the Catholic memorial chapel. Today I write this from the Protestant Church of Reconciliation, which aesthetically cannot look more 1960s. Concrete, abstract and half submerged, the work was supported and abetted by Martin Niemöller, the German Pastor intered in KZs Sachsenhausen and Dachau as a 'special prisoner'. There is stark contrast between the Catholic and Protestant Memorials in this regard. One celebrates triumph over adversity through standing proud over the camp (indeed at the time it had to compete with the baracks, now demolished and replaced with concrete rectangles); the other almost shies away from such celebration.

This is where the site affects my faith. We must not forget that the 1960s was in many ways the decade when, for many, God began to wither away. In the Catholic Church the Second Vatican Council began to deconstruct all aspects of Church life and make it relevant to the modern world, a painful but necessary process that carries on to this day. The Protestant Church also began a process of liberalisation that, whilst making the Church more tolerant, managed to alienate others. The 1960s did not mark the Death of Christianity, as some commentators would later claim, but the death of the Mysterious God, the one that required, in the words of Brian Moore, "a big dose of Faith.” In 1963 Bishop John Robinson wrote “Honest to God”, which argued that our conception of a God “up there” had to go and be replaced by an abstract definition of God as ‘Love’. It is perhaps apt to remember that he was heavily influenced by the theological works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a prisoner of Dachau.

Today, the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site stands on the front line of that battle between a God of Reason, and thus one with few miracles but a grounding in our experience, and a God of Mystery. On Sunday mornings there is a regular congregation of about 15-20 people who worship here, all of them wonderful people deeply committed to one another and to God. During the services, visitors will come and stare through the glass, cupping their hands like visors to observe. The door is open but they never enter. They hold up the audio watch us with a running commentary, the tinny sound of headphone leakage barely audible. For them we are a relic, as much an established part of the site’s history as the watchtowers. We commemorate the victims in a way that, in 1960, was the only human way to do so, but which today leaves visitors cold.

It has begun to leave me cold too.

KZ Dachau hasn’t really affected my faith. There are other things going on in my life that do that for me. However, it has begun to raise serious questions for me about the role of the Church in the modern world. Is it a relic of a bygone age, a form of palliative care for the elderly and those who feel the need to be told ‘someone loves you’ regularly? In the case of the religious memorials at Dachau, it is clear that their future will be as places of remembrance, spaces for reflection on the unanswerable questions that people inevitably come here with. To sum up, my faith in the power of God remains, but my belief in Him wavers.

I bet that won’t appear on the Carmelite website…

ADDENDUM 13/2/2011: It appears the British Province have called my bluff; you can read the slightly edited version of the above on their illustrious website here. They've renamed it "Death of a Mysterious God", which makes it look like my hypothetical God of Reason is separate from the God of Mystery (I was actually talking about perceptions of the One God) but anyhoo, kudos for posting such a nihilistic article on a site more used to stories about medieval manuscript translations and Carmelite Spirituality Groups.

I love them really, I'm just at the 'spoiled brat' stage of spiritual development...

Updates and a Happy February!

So much has happened in the last few weeks, and one thing had been on my mind throughout that time; the fact that on the 2nd February 2011 I would have to deliver a tour in German to a bunch of fourteen year olds. I remember what I was like at fourteen years old, and could imagine how some of my classmate would have treated someone with as limited a grasp of German as I have giving a tour, so I was understandably nervous.

The tour did not go perfectly, and for the first hour I was stumbling through all the concepts and facts I wanted to explicate with such conviction as to give the kids something to think about. However, by the end I knew what to expect, I was on solid factual ground and I was confident, and my German began to improve as a result. A predecessor of mine who has become quite a good friend said all the way back in September that giving tours are 'Dead easy like!' (He lived in Chester for a while, surprisingly enough), and I can see where he gets that point of view from. It wasn't easy, but I know the next tour will be better simply because I'll know what to expect. So all in all a very positive experience, and I got a few cheeky thumbs up from the group at the end, which is always a good thing!

Aaaanyway, I haven't been huddled by my laptop and talking to myself in my room for the entirety of January. In fact in January I celebrated my 22nd Birthday in a number of ways. First I folded about four hundred flyers for the 'Remembrance Book' project, before being accosted by a number of middle aged ladies (I work in the Catholic Dachauer Forum - middle aged ladies always abound where the word 'Catholic' is present!) and wished a Happy Birthday. I smiled bashfully in my Hugh Grant English way. Then my wonderful colleague Ludwig Schmidinger, part of the Catholic Chaplainy to the memorial site, popped in with a small present of his own; a short biography of Bl. John Henry Newman. I really do enjoy my work.

That evening, accompanied by ex-volunteer Dasha, I finally got round to seeing 'Rocky Horror Picture Show' at the Museum Lichtspiele in Munich, where the film has been shown every Friday and Saturday night for about twenty five years. There is even a purpose built cinema which looks like Professor Frank. N. Furter's lab. The film was, of course, amazing, and it was too difficult not to sing along, so I gave into temptation. I fear Dasha will never be the same again...

As I mentioned earlier, I was present at the Bundestag on the 27th January for a Holocaust Memorial Day hour of remembrance, but more on that when I haven't got so much stuff to do...