Four years ago I accompanied my friend Stephanie to stay with her Dad, Lothar, in Germany. At the time he lived in a small town called Erding, located about thirty minutes south of Munich. During our time there he wanted to show us as much of Bavaria as possible. Lothar took pride in showing us some of his favorite things about his home, including a historic and architectural tour of Munich, wine tasting, Bavarian festivals, and authentic cuisine from Southern Germany.
He also took the time to show us history that he was not so proud of. One day he and his girlfriend, Sabina, took us to Dachau. Dachau was a prison camp during the Third Reich and it is located a short drive north of Munich. It was one of the first of such camps and was a destination for political prisoners, Catholic priests, Jews, homosexuals, the mentally impaired, and anyone else considered a race polluter. It was a labor camp and a prison. Although there is no record of mass killings taking place at Dachau a great many people died there due to terrible living conditions. Disease and malnutrition ensured that the large crematorium in the compound always had fuel.
Lothar and Sabina gave us a tour of the camp. We spent several hours walking through the campus of office buildings, sleeping barracks and primitive latrines. Many of the rooms serve both a museum and a memorial function. There are plaques giving information on life in the prison camp, cases with examples of clothing prisoners were given, and displays of the different badges that prisoners had to wear to describe their offenses. It is a solemn and depressing place. Its functional and well organized design make you feel empty and knowledge of its history makes you feel heavy from the inside out.
I think that that is what I would have felt had I walked around by myself, but Lothar and Sabina leading us around the compound and through the buildings made it a lot more complicated and confusing. They made gruesome jokes and off color comments the entire time we walked through Dachau. I was eighteen years old and this was a very uncomfortable experience. Joking about death and Jews and cooking people and feeling like I had to laugh because that’s what the adults I was with were doing. My first thoughts were, Why would they bring us here if they wanted to joke about camps like this? Why are these good people saying awful things? What is happening right now?!
As we walked around, however, the crude jokes were interspersed with with their description of how the Holocaust was taught to them. They both grew up in West Germany and completed high school in the late 1970s, a generation removed from the war. They had to watch some really intense films about it in school and the gravity of a national history they didn’t help create and didn’t want was impressed upon them. I think I watched people deal with a national guilt and a national trauma that they have to keep finding ways to deal with. I think the horrible jokes and the nervous laughter were a way to cope with feeling really, really bad and the fact that you can’t change history by feeling guilty for something your parents or grandparents participated in or passively watched. Those feelings must be incredibly frustrating.
This experience created a lot of questions for me. Is it right to teach national guilt? Is it cathartic? Am I a bad person for trying to rationalize someone’s terrible jokes, or am I being understanding? If it takes me this long to make some sense of simply observing people coping with inherited guilt, I can only imagine how many times Lothar has had to grapple with these feelings.
Over the years I have had to keep revisiting and reanalyzing this experience. I am still unsure of what it means and I felt like had to unpack this visit again before I could go to Yad VaShem, as the majority of my classmates did today at Professor Mendelsson’s recommendation. I felt like I needed to make better sense of this experience before I went to a museum about the Holocaust. Can it be too much input even if the experiences are four years apart? It felt like it was today, but I’ll visit the museum sometime later this month.
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