Europe @ 2.4 km/h (27 page)

‘No,’ comes the confident reply, ‘I am Sorb, and the state I live in is Sorb.’

Isn’t it hard to keep up this illusion when the reality of the German state is all around him? Tomasz remains calm. ‘It’s not very hard because it’s how I feel inside. I don’t care what other people think about it.’

In 1937 the Nazis banned the Sorbian cultural society, Domowina, and began a program of forced deportations, starting with priests and teachers. ‘My grandfather, for example, was re located to Chemnitz in ’37.’ In 1949 the newly founded GDR said the Sorbs could have their own state as a separate nationality, but this never came to fruition. As the booklet speaks of a nation, then, is statehood the Sorbs’ aim? ‘We have our own schools, newsletter, theatre, museum,’ Tomasz points out. ‘It’s not that we want our own state. Many small states cannot survive on their own.’

Anyway, efforts to strengthen cultural awareness, beginning with language, must take priority. Tomasz estimates that 3000 members of what he calls ‘the smallest Slavonic nation’, a paltry 5 per cent of the population, speak their mother tongue.

From the viewpoint of wheelchair accessibility, my sleeping quarters in Weimar seem most inhospitable. But Hababusch is a hostel with a difference, run by student volunteers who have their own rooms on top and rent out the middle floor. A narrow spiral staircase in this 19th-century ivied tower brings me to room level and, once they see I am not going to be put off by such trifles as a two-minute haul upstairs, whoever is on desk duty reunites me with my personal transport. Oh, and at €11 (A$18) a night, this is the cheapest bed of the journey so far.

798-802 km

Weimar is a beacon of German culture. The hometown of Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, it was also the laboratory of Germany’s fledgling democratic culture after World War I. But the name of Weimar is still associated with the rampant inflation and a national Government so fragile that it crumbled to dust before the Nazi onslaught.

In the heart of Weimar stands the bronze double statue of Goethe and his protégé Schiller, and it is a rare visitor who leaves town without being photographed next to it. After nearly missing Beethoven in Bonn, I am relieved to know just where to find these two cultural colossi … directly in front of the German National Theatre, where Goethe himself was the director from 1791-1817 and composer Franz Liszt conducted the orchestra during the 1840s.

It is hard to think of a building of such wide-ranging significance as this theatre. The Weimar Republic’s Constitution was drafted there in 1919. And from 1936 to 1944 the Nazis turned
Kultur
on its head, housing their ‘cultural police’ inside and converting the theatre into an armoury.

Five minutes away is Schillerhaus, where the poet — who died at just 45 — spent the last three years of his life. But the period furnishings there only ‘represent the taste of his times’. Across town, by contrast, everything in Goethe’s house is ‘proved to have belonged to the Prince of Poets’. As Germans rightly boast, Goethe was a polymath. His voracious appetite for knowledge embraced the fine arts, science and politics. Indeed, he went one step further than Plato, governing Weimar according to his own political precepts. Germany’s greatest writer lived for 50 years in this palatial mansion, where he died in March 1832 aged 83. Much of the interior is wheelchair-hostile but this time the latest technology came to my assistance. The audioguide you are given at so many museums these days is, in this case, a videoguide as well, so I was able to park myself at one end of the reception counter and ‘visit’ the entire house in the palm of my hand.

Even though his 7000-volume library had to be disassembled in World War II for the books’ protection, they have been put back exactly where they were. How do we know? Because paper markers Goethe thoughtfully placed on the bookshelves were preserved.

The rebellious youth became a classic conservative, or rather a conservative Classicist, in old age, railing against what he regarded as the saccharine sentimentality of the burgeoning Romantic movement. But, then, if he hadn’t insisted on the architectural form of what came to be known as Weimar Classicism, we might not have had such an integrated heritage to view as we roam around his hometown today.

Kai, who is on duty this evening at Hababusch, tells me that shortly after war’s end in 1945 the US occupation authorities substituted all German place names honouring Adolf Hitler with the word ‘Peace’. So wherever you see Friedenplatz or Friedenstrasse today you can be sure the place used to be named after the Fuhrer. This seems to me a stroke of genius.

803-805 km

When planning my journey to Europe I did not think I necessarily owed it to myself to visit a concentration camp. Not because of any thought that ‘If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all’ (which happens not to be true). If there was one thought I had carried away from my visit to Auschwitz in 2003 it was that one must never stop remembering.

No, my intention of visiting one was formed in response to the most unexpected of remarks made by Melbourne film-maker Bob Weis who, for family reasons, would never stop remembering. When I told him I would be going to Weimar, and might take in Buchenwald as well, he said, ‘You really should. Buchenwald is different from the other camps. It’s in a beautiful setting in the forest, so close to civilisation.’

Of all the Nazi death camps Buchenwald was the biggest. Quarter of a million people from 30 European nations were brought here to suffer and in January 1945, three months before its liberation, the camp housed 110,000 inmates.

The entrance gate, with its lofty watchtower, is familiar from innumerable photographs. The camp was under the control of the SS Death’s Head Regiment (
SS-Totenkopfverbände
) whose role — and here is a key difference — was to use Buchenwald as a training base in how to run the ‘ideal’ concentration camp. As the official English guidebook relates, ‘Five concentration camp commanders and many of those who continued their career in the extermination camps and death squads emerged from the SS guard units of Buchenwald Concentration Camp’.
²²
This explains the heavy concentration of SS men stationed here: 1617 in 1938, and double that number at the outbreak of war.

As you pass under that watchtower, nothing prepares you for the wasteland on the other side, a rough square whose sides each measure half a kilometre, sloping down the Ettersberg plateau to the treeline of the beautiful forest. Where are the barracks? All you can see, apart from a few structures off to the left and right, is a desolate surface dotted with scree and a few foundation markers where buildings once stood.

You roll downhill, slowed by the rocks. Not until you near the foot of the slope, and get close to the forest, are your eyes opened to what went on here. See that infirmary over on the left. Every camp had one, so what? Debilitated by gruelling labour that would send thousands to their deaths — 56,000 are estimated to have expired at Buchenwald — many ended up inside the infirmary. As a former inmate chillingly explained in the 1960s, Soviet POWs who entered the old horse stables were told to stand against a height-measuring scale behind which stood an SS officer, who shot his victim in the back of the neck without ever having to look him in the eye. More than 8000 were murdered in this cold-blooded way.

It was impossible to know if rescue or death awaited one in this ‘hospital’. The first camp commandant, the sadist Carl Koch — himself shot by the SS, for corruption, within the camp early in 1945 — had derided the notion of healing the sick, saying, ‘In this camp there are only healthy persons or dead persons.’ SS officers strangled more than 1000 in the morgue.

One incredible peculiarity of Buchenwald was that Commandant Koch established a private zoo there ‘to provide diversion and entertainment for the men’ (his SS men) although he warned them against ‘loutish acts’ such as filing deer’s antlers, and threatened to have them punished ‘for cruelty to animals’.

Buchenwald could claim another distinction, a Resistance cell formed by the prisoners, which grew to include captives from more than ten nations. Block Eight, today only a rectangle where the building used to stand, was reserved for children and adolescents many of whose lives were saved after Resistance activists persuaded a reluctant SS that youngsters could be productive members of work details. For once,
Arbeit Macht Frei
was more than a cruel jest.

The composition of this community of death, forged of Sinti and Roma Gypsies, homosexuals, Jews and communists, is far too familiar to tell us anything we didn’t already know; their fate — gold teeth extracted, commodities made from their flayed skin — too infamous to make us retch. What is the terrible secret of Buchenwald, then?

That, alone of the concentration camps, its horrors didn’t cease in 1945? That, after a four-week respite, it reopened under new management? Nazi Buchenwald’s life was prolonged by six years when it became Soviet Special Camp No. 2. Another 7113 inmates died there, according to files that became public after the collapse of the USSR.

No, not even that. The thing you must come to Buchenwald to see for yourself is how culture and bestiality are as close as the tongue and the teeth. Only a short distance, 30 metres, separates the statue of Goethe and Schiller in front of the German National Theatre from the space behind it where from 1937 onwards, from morning to midnight, buses departed full of victims bound for the Ettersberg.

After the war, when it was thought all the horrors of Buchenwald were known, mass graves were found under the green forest floor.

Only with your own eyes can you see how close this ugliness was to Bob Weis’s ‘beautiful setting’. How near at hand was life in the City of Culture to death outside the limits. How handy Buchenwald was for Obersturmführer Fritz Sauckel, the regional Nazi chief who selected the Ettersberg site because he wanted a large contingent of SS troops stationed close to Weimar.

So close to civilisation.

Another act of extraordinary kindness made today’s travel easier. A marketing manager from Halle saw that Weimar was too small a station to provide a boarding ramp and assuming, correctly, that Wittenberg wouldn’t be any better equipped, rang ahead on his mobile from the train and, to my amazement, his friend Stephan, along with Diana — both from the Lutherstadt-Wittenberg Tourist Office — were waiting at the station to give me a lift into town.

806-809 km

Every year nigh on half a million people visit the city that gives half its name to its most famous son, Martin Luther. Every June, to the cheers of the local populace, one actor dressed as Luther ‘weds’ another dressed as his sweetheart, Katharina von Bora.

But don’t get Luther wrong. As Stephan explains, he was a Protestant but no Puritan. ‘Religion was of ultimate importance to Luther, but he had a bit of fun in his life too.’ His ‘table talk’ evenings with students in Wittenberg wouldn’t have been complete without the liberal imbibing of locally brewed ales.

It was Luther, after all, who wrote,

He who drinks much beer sleeps well.
He who sleeps does not sin.
And he who does not sin goes to heaven.