Because I haven't posted much recently...

Here's Act 1 Scene 2 from Kat'a Kabanova, one of Leoš Janáček's mature Operas. Janáček wrote a lot of Operas with women as his preferred protagonists, and this one is amazing in its portrayal of a woman clearly oppressed by the world around her.

I love this part, where Kat'a tells her friend and maid Varvara of how free she felt as a child, beginning with "I wondered why people can't fly!". She feels caged, and spirals out of control as the oppressive atmosphere of the Kabanov family household drives her insane.

In this production at Glyndebourne Kat'a is played by American Soprano Nancy Gustafson, who seems to act the role entirely with her eyes in such a way that you really believe she's about to do something crazy!

2011 Romero Lecture

The Archbishop Romero Trust held an ecumenical service at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square, London at the weekend to commemorate the 31st Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Oscar Romero. It is hard not to be moved by Romero's story, in particular his work in the last four years of his life leading up to his assassination on March 24th 1980 during the Celebration of Mass. A lot of what he said regarding the 'option for the poor' is profoundly challenging for our western society and continues to inspire many religious in their work today.In many ways Romero has already been unofficially, and it must be said, ecumenically, canonized, which I am sure is one of many reasons why his Cause for Beatification has not yet begun.

The phrase 'Justice and Peace' has tragically been taken over by a stereotype of geriatric impotence in recent years. A friend of mine from the Leeds Diocese once said to me that his father (in his mid-sixties) was always the youngest person at J&P meetings in the parish. Romero's example reminds us how vibrant, and urgent, the message is, as well as how unbelievably radical it really is to suggest that there is something wrong in an increasingly globalised society of abundance where millions still go hungry. It is lethargy on the part of everyone that allows it to continue.

Either way, here is the text ofthe 2011 Romero Lecture, delivered by Fr. Juan Hernández Pico, S.J. and combined with the service at St. Martins. It really is worth a read.

Leitenberg Stations of the Cross: 2

2. JESUS TAKES UP HIS CROSS

V: We adore you O Christ, and we praise you

A: For through your holy Cross you have redeemed the world

Not a few who were taken into so-called ‘protective custody’, or even murdered, were aware of the danger of persecution and readily accepted arrest as a consequence – also as a consequence of warning and attempting to rescue others. Because they cared more about humanity and the truth than their own need to survive, they were persecuted, arrested, abused and murdered. Take the case of Fritz Gerlich for example: in his newspaper Der gerade Weg (The Straight Way) he warned of the dangers of National Socialism to Germany and the wider world even before their came to power. He was fully aware of the risk he took with his own life.

How difficult it is often for us to deal with unpleasant goings on, to call out Injustice by name, to put ourselves out for others. How easy it is for us to avoid such burdens and justify our behaviour by assuming others will deal with the problem for us. Lord Jesus, you willingly took the Cross and carried it yourself. You did not avoid the suffering that is developed through lies and contempt.

A: Lord, have mercy on us and on the whole world...

Leitenberg Stations of the Cross

It is traditional for Catholic Christians to pray the Stations of the Cross during the season of Lent. Click on the link for a detailed description of the devotion, but to put it simply it is a series of fourteen scenes from Christ's walk up the hill to his crucifixion. As with most Catholic devotions, these scenes are chosen not to be accurate but to allow Christians to meditate on particular aspects of their own character and areas in which we fail to live up to our calling to love and serve God and his people

Sorry, that got a little preachy. At the weekend I joined the Catholic Chaplaincy to the Memorial Site in praying these stations at the Leitenberg Cemetery, where over 7,900 people are buried in eight mass graves. Among them are concentration camp prisoners and c. 1500 Wehrmacht soldiers.

The following reflections, prepared and led by Ludwig Schmidinger and Fr. Klaus Spiegel OSB, focussed on the actions of actual prisoners and compared them to Jesus' suffering on the Cross. This made for an extremely moving experience, especially for a group of almost fifty Dachau citizens. Every Friday (and on the days leading up to Easter Sunday) I'm going to post one of the eight stations.

...

STATION ONE: JESUS IS CONDEMNED TO DEATH

V: We adore you O Christ, and we praise you

A: For by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world

Persecuted without just cause, in an entirely arbitrary and imperious manner; in this way over 200,000 people were brought to Dachau Concentration Camp. At the very beginning it was made abundantly clear to them what lay in store for them: “no rights, no honour and worth nothing” – and thus they were treated, sworn at, beaten, abused and preyed upon. Every fifth one of them was so treated to the point of death. To judge them, pronounce a judgement on them – to dismiss them as troublemakers and as non-persons; we recognise this tendency in ourselves as well as others.

How often people place the blame on God for the state of the world – we judge him for it; how often people fail to see their own responsibilities and simply offload them on to other people . Lord Jesus, you took on Pilate’s sentence without so much as a word. We ask you:

A: Lord, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

So much has changed...(III)

This is my third and final post about KZ-Gedenkstaette Buchenwald, and concentrates on the memorials at the site. The first two can be accessed below by clicking on the links

So much has changed... (I)

So much has changed... (II)

For all the discussion that has gone into how one remembers the crimes of National Socialism, most memorials tend to be very similar in tone and appearance. They tend to be simple, grey structures, rectangular and exact, their plainness emphasizing perhaps, to borrow Hannah Arendt's book on the Eichmann Trials, the banality of evil. One thing however is constant in memorials in West Germany, and that is that they are a commemoration of the dead, not a celebration of the survivors.

I walked the two kilometres from the KZ-Gedenkstaette Buchenwald to the memorial erected by the Soviet Union in the 1950s. I expected something reasonably celebratory, and had seen pictures of the bell tower and the commemorative statue of a group of survivors, their torn garments hanging from them, crying out in triumph. The Bell Tower, in 1950s Socialist-realist style, seemed slightly out of place, as if it belonged on a Soviet university campus rather than in the middle of Germany.

I wandered over to the statue, and saw this...

I was stunned. It is not so clear from the photo but this is just one of two amphitheatre-shaped structures joined together by a row of what look like empty plinths that extend for at least half a mile. I didn't know what to think, or indeed feel. This was the kind of memorial that you simply could not imagine in Dachau, not least because Dachau simply isn't big enough. The architecture seemed almost neo-classical, the style you would have expected of a memorial to Goethe, Schiller and Romantic Germany but not for a place where thousands of people died of arbitrary starvation and maltreatment, victims of two different ideologies united in human brutality.

I descended the steps, stopping every so often to admire the scenery. Just as I had been shocked at how beautiful Dachau and Flossenbuerg looked, Buchenwald was built in a wonderful area. One could imagine this area being taken over by the usual group of anorak wearing enthusiasts who come out and wander the German countryside on weekends. Like other memorial sites however, this land has been tainted.

This memorial feels like an anachronism. I do not know what to do, as I slowly walk among the plinths. Each one has the name of a nation which had citizens in Buchenwald, and shows its age with nations such as Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union still represented. I then notice that there is another row of flagpoles, empty, as well as what looks like a fire-holder (I do not know the name!) on top of each plinth. Then I realise: this is part of the memorial site itself, no longer an 'active' memorial but as an example of how people used to remember! Twenty five years ago, this was still in use and a functioning memorial. Now it stands almost abandoned, a relic of another age. I know memory is politicised, but this is shocking all the same, to see how memorials really do have a sell-by-date.

Time is getting on and the Sun is beginning to set. I walk slowly back to the bus stop, still slightly shocked by this place. I begin to think about the memorials in Dachau, which have aged but are still in use. Will they one day be removed and replaced with new ones, or simply discarded as relics of another age? Will this be the Versoehnungskirche in forty years time, when the survivors have all gone, the historical immediacy of the Holocaust has begun to decline and the Bavarian Protestant Church decide they want to withdraw funding?

Such thoughts are quickly dismissed; I am overreacting. Memorials are constantly changing, adapting. I think back to earlier in the day during our tour of the site. Just by the Jourhaus is a recently installed memorial that is never covered by snow, whatever the weather. It is a memorial plaque which, similar to the old Soviet memorial, is covered with the names of nations affected by KZ Buchenwald. However, this memorial is warm. We are welcome to touch it, rest our hands on the surface. It is kept at a constant temperature of 37 degrees centigrade, the body our bodies need to be at in order to survive. This is a completely different attitude to a memorial. It looks like all the others, yet the way in which people reach down to touch the memorial, warm their hands, is profoundly affecting. Then I think again; should a memorial warm visitors? Either way, it offers a new attitude to engaging with memorials. The Soviet-era memorial has become a relic due to its pomposity; it is out of touch with the people who are commemorating the site, and if we are honest wasn't really built with people in mind. Modern memorials are fully aware that they represent a dialogue between past and present.

Visiting KZ-Gedenkstaette Buchenwald was an emotionally draining experience, more so than I thought it would be. Firstly, the site was bigger than I was used to. Secondly, the history was something both familiar and distant, and it felt at times as if I was learning about the system for the first time, not merely hearing the experience of another site in the same system. Finally, I could see first hand another battle of Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung,, of coming to terms with the past that had taken place in the East as well as in the West. Whilst the Eastern remembrance culture was dominated by the prevailing communist need to re-write history, the Western equivalent seemed to be run by the capitalist need to forget it, so that new houses and factories could be built on what was very fertile land. As ever, there were more questions than answers. Just as it should be.

Later on, we met again as a seminar group to discuss what we had seen. Our group consisted of people from nations such as Hungary, Latvia, Bosnia, Italy, Belarus and Peru among others and each one of us had a different opinion on what we had seen. Once again, it was moving to consider that when I was born this kind of dialogue would have been almost impossible to facilitate. So much has changed in such a short space of time, and despite the differences in our upbringing and what historical baggage we brought to the discussion we were able to talk about the past like adults and as equals. That really is something quite special.

So much has changed...(II)

Here's the second part of my reflection on my visit to KZ Gedenkstätte Buchenwald...

After the tour has concluded, we are at liberty to wander the site alone. Most of the group heads back to Weimar, but I remain with a few others to look round the rest of the site. I still cannot believe how large the site is. I have been working at KZ Gedenkstätte Dachau for six months on a site approximately a kilometre long and about 600m wide, all that remains for the purpose of memory. The rest of the land, preserved at KZ Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, is taken up by houses, shops, a kindergarten, the HQ for the Bavarian Riot Police. Dachau's land was usable. KZ Buchenwald was built miles out of Weimar and on a hill.

The others have gone off in groups of two, so I decide to wander now. On the top floor of the former Wirtschaftsgebäude there is an exhibition focussing on a few of the photos taken in the days following liberation, as well as those who took them. The majority are American press photographers, a few in uniform, some also SS officers later tried and hanged. I recognise one of the photos immediately. Taken by a member of the US Signal Corps, it was used in an exhibition in Washington in late 1945 designed to justify US involvement in the war and has thus become one of the most recognisable images of the Holocaust. It is also well known because poking his head round on the middle bunk, seventh from the left, is Elie Wiesel.

Noone else except perhaps for Primo Levi has written so much on the Holocaust and come to define its memory more than Wiesel. Before I came to Germany I read 'Night', his Nobel prize winning memoir of his interment in KZ Auschwitz and KZ Buchenwald. One paragraph remains, and perhaps even informed the posts I made a couple of weeks ago on the Death of God. It's often used during Holocaust Memorial Services and in classrooms, so you will most probably recognise it:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for ever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live
as long as God Himself.
Never.

There is another story to this site, not as well known but as important.

Beyond the trees, in the woodland that surrounds the former Appellplatz and Barracks, stand hundreds of metal poles. In late 1945, once the Americans had handed over the site to the Soviet Union in accordance with the terms laid out at the Potsdam Conference, the site was renamed NKVD Special Camp No.2. Those who were seen to be a threat to the new Soviet regime were interred here, including Social Democrats, former Nazis and any suspected opposition. The camps remained in operation until 1950, in which time thousands died from similar conditions to those experienced under the Nazis. 7,113 people died. Their families were never informed of their fate, and it was only after the fall of the Wall that people were allowed to use the site to commemorate the dead.

A large cross stands in the middle of the metal poles. It turns out that this was the place where the bodies were buried en masse, with the poles symbolising the graves denied them. I wander along the edge of this mass grave, and my mind is cast back once more to Dachau and the few plaques in the memorial garden, just to the right of the Crematorium. It is a different feeling, akin perhaps to the site of the memorial stones in the Dachau Waldfriedhof
.

There is an initial problem on my part. I wonder if some of these men were Nazis, those who had helped to erect the camp they would die in in the first place. Are they worthy of our memory? It is difficult to think of them as victims and purpetrators at the same time. This is a recurring theme in remembrance culture, one that is intensely controversial and can be difficult to explain. I head back towards the gatehouse.

I am mulling over these things when I notice the time. It is 14:45 and most likely I am the last of our group left here. I wander out about 2 km along the main road for one more important part of this memorial site...

Happy Lent/Fastenzeit!

As ever, you will probably notice the correlation between the amount of work I have to do and the frequency of posts on this blog. It hasn't been that long after all, just a week.

Either way for those of you of a Christian bent the last week saw the beginning of Lent, the forty days (and six Sundays!) leading up to Easter. Whilst in the UK most people mark the end of the good times with a few too many pancakes, topped with lemon juice and sugar, on Shrove Tuesday, before giving up something like - in the case of British folk - sugar in their tea. Not so in Germany. Here, predominantly in the Catholic South and West, there is Carnival.

To be honest I allowed the carnival atmosphere to slip by me. It was evident in the way all public festivities are; fast food stands, broken beer bottles, even stronger Bavarian dialects and a visibly increased police presence. So far so Oktoberfest. The difference is that this time people wear costumes. And I hate costumes. I do not know why, whether it is the memory of stage fright in school plays or some other reason deeply buried in my sub-conscious, but they creep me out. Animal costumes are the worst; then all I can think of is the last scene in The Wicker Man when the Police Officer is pursued by villagers with animal masks ready for the pagan sacrifice taking place...go watch it, it's a great film.

Of course Ash Wednesday arrived and it was time to give something up, or take something on if you're really trendy. This year, as I have been extremely unsuccessful in past years, I have decided to do something a little different. My pledges are as follows:

1. No Internet 'surfing' after 6pm. Emails, online dictionaries and blog updates are exempt.

2. No YouTube at any time.

3. Say the Divine Office every day

I swear like everyone I am internet addicted. I can spend hours surfing the net, going on Wikipedia and reading article after article of useless knowledge. Then there is the behemoth that is YouTube, which Pringle-like is hard to relinquish once one starts watching. Those of you who know me will be aware of what a sacrifice this entails. Most of my favourite television shows are hosted illegally on the site, the majority of which were made before I was born.

I love being able to watch an episode of Minder or half of The Thorn Birds on a whim. Yet there is a pile of books waiting to be read, poems and things waiting to be written and a whole world of experiences I am losing out on because of my love of old television. It is like the Kate Bush song Deeper Understanding, produced in 1988 and possibly the first song about computer addiction back when PCs had the RAM of an electric toothbrush. Anyway, I digress...

...

The third item on the list above is one inspired by recent events. Right now the word 'Future', like the word 'Life' is capitalised and though I know what I plan to do, it is still vaguely daunting. I have been rereading the work of Blessed Titus Brandsma, O.Carm as part of my research into the life of Br. Raphael. He is an amazing man. Labelled as the first saint to have had a European Rail Card, he was a journalist and educator who was as much at ease among students as he was among academics. In the early 1940s he became chaplain to the Dutch Catholic Press and pressured them to oppose the Nazis in print.

He would give his life for these convictions. In early 1942 he was interred in Schleveningen Prison in the Netherlands, then transferred to other prisons before ending up in KZ Dachau in early June of the same year. He lasted approximately six weeks before succumbing to Ermuedigkeit, fatigue.

His story deserves far more reflection than this, andI will post more at a later date. I should have done so long before now. It was just that I was reading a section of Br. Raphael's testimony on the life of Bl. Titus where he describes hiding the Blessed Sacrament in the camp:

The next morning before inspection we said a short prayer together and he gave me Holy Communion. Interiorly strengthened one could face the day. Father Titus used to say that Holy Communion was not only our supernatural nutrition but also our bodily food. How often did we feel this in Dachau!

To cut a long story short, I haven't been praying recently, and I have been using KZ Dachau as an excuse. It is paradoxical that while the Nazi persecutions are so often used as proof of God's non-existence, the majority of believers who entered the Concentration Camp system came out with a far stronger sense of faith than ever before. Bl. Titus and Br. Raphael's experiences are not unique; there is something in the power of God to help people overcome even intense hunger and maltreatment. I can only pray that I may one day come close to that kind of 'simple' faith.

Fr. Patrick Desbois and the Yahad-In Unum Association

This is actually amazing. French Priest Fr. Patrick Desbois has made it his life's work to identify all the mass graves of murdered Jews in the Ukraine, in order to further Catholic-Jewish understanding. Read more, including a couple of articles about Fr. Desbois, here

Seriously, this has knocked me for six. A lot of this work is very risky, not least for the wounds they reveal. If you do, pray for this work.

H/T Catholic With Attitude

Thoughts on "Metroland"

I think I've written before about how much I love the Munich Central Library, especially their English Literature section. There's about four or five cases full in the foreign language section, mostly donated by the British Council and the US Consulate in Munich, so you can pick up most Booker Prize and Pulitzer winners. I love wandering round the shelves, considering the possibilities, getting that sinking feeling you often have in bookshops when you consider how little time you have and how much you want to read everything there. Well, that's my experience anyway.

I tend to spend a lot of time around the 'A-C' section, where the Amises, Attwoods, Becketts and Bellows live. Their numbers sometimes grow, sometimes shrink, but every so often I look between at another name, Barnes. The other day I finally got round to reading Metroland his first novel about growing up and accepting reality. It is a similar tale to Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers, about bright-young-things in their late teens who have discovered a library for the first time and delight in knowing a little about a lot. They are undeniably middle class, undeniably university educated and undeniably misguided. The writers both tell their story fully aware that everything they went through was both necessary and futile.

I say this without a hint of irony of course; I'm still waiting for my clever-little-shit stage to end.

What hit me about Metroland was Barnes' depiction of the young man abroad for the first time, in this case Paris in the late 1960s. He delights in the anonymity of his new language, in being aloof from his fellow compatriots and the feeling that he has arrived at adulthood. That strikes a chord.

As aware as I am of my own failings, I do love the feeling of being an Englishman abroad, as if simply by being here I have achieved something. I come from a family that has spent the past century in the same area of Southern Hertfordshire, and here I am in a suburb of Munich. Barnes of course is writing this as a thirty five year old and has seen the other side, so to speak.

It irks me to use this term, but what I am doing here in Germany is actually extremely middle class, or to use a far older term, very bourgeois. One gets the impression that German itself is from a British point of view a very middle class language. The majority of ex-pat Germans living in the UK are educated and live in London suburbs. Indeed, there is no reason for me to speak German in a way; the vast majority of Germans can speak English to a degree of fluency that in German I can only dream of. Whilst with the other main Modern Foreign Languages, Spanish, French, even Italian there are whole continents that use this language still, many of which hold developing nations. German, on the other hand, is touted as the 'business language'. This is actually far from the truth; German is actually a language with a huge reach across Eastern Europe, even as far as parts of the Ukraine. Yet that is the attitude I carry with me as an Briton, and the attitude I get from the people I speak to.

...

Barnes' central 'self realisation' comes from a chance encounter with Marion, an English student in Paris. She asks him if he thinks of the future. Of course he does, he says. Will you ever be married, have a mortgage, children etc? Well, eventually, he answers. This is something that, like all students in their early twenties, the protagonist dreads thinking about. At this stage, Life is spelled with a capital L. It has not happened yet, or if it has happened it is used to describe disorder and experience, not commuting and taxes. It is the antonym of Boredom, not Death.

Metroland concludes with the central character at thirty years old, married, mortgaged and with child. He is content. It happened, and he is content. As I consider whether or not to stay in Germany, to travel home to some of the worst job prospects since the early 1980s or other options besides that, it's comforting to know that life, or Life, just happens.

Just a thought. It may also help to know that the book I read before that was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, which doesn't exactly support the case for free will. I'm not someone who adhere's to Rousseau's "We're born into chains" idea, nor the equally philosophical band 'Talk Talk's mantra of "Life's What You Make It", but I think we're all somewhere in the middle, between sending out countless CVs to Y and bumping into someone who happens to know someone who needs a new X. We're being buffeted by the two. Somewhere in that lot, life happens.

"Jump into Hell"

I referred in my previous post to the Allied troops who were interred in KZ Buchenwald during the last months of WWII. Digging a little further, I found this video on Vimeo by Mike Dorsey, a filmmaker. He appears to be making (made?) a film about the experiences of the 168 Allied Airmen who ended up in Block 17, of whom two never returned. There's a few fascinating interviews on there, including one with the 'leader' of the group Lt. Col. Phil Lamason. He was the only one aware of the provisional date of their execution, October 26th 1944, and kept the information to himself in order to avoid spreading panic and in the hope that the Luftwaffe would help to free them. A week before the execution date, all but eleven men were transferred to Stalag Luft III, a POW camp. Lameson would not reveal how close they came to execution until almost forty years later.

A section of the documentary "Jump into Hell" can be viewed here. I almost wanted to say it was an inspiring story, but these men probably would not use that phrase, not least Lamason himself. They knew how lucky they were to be British, American and New Zealanders, and not Soviets. One of the men says in the film,

"...the thing that frightened us most was this tall chimney, with smoke belching out of it..."