-Verweile doch! du bist so schoen-

A Week Away: Weimar and BUDAPEST!

I come home to a rainy, gray Berlin more excited to be here than when I left last Wednesday. The familiar and the non-familiar both have a place in our lives. As much as I fell in love with Budapest’s character-filled streets and wildly exotic-sounding language, I was really content to get back on the S-bahn to Yorckstrasse and understand what people were saying around me. It was an absolutely incredible weekend, and a heartfelt thanks to my knowledgeable host, the one and only Milan Kidd, who is steadily taking over Hungary one scan at a time.

But first, I went on an excursion with BCGS to the small, quaint and history-filled town of Weimar in central Germany. On Wednesday morning the twelve other students on the BCGS program and I departed from the Berlin main station southwest towards the province of Thueringen. I’ve heard a lot about this east-German province, famous for its forests, Christmas bread (called Stollen), its onion festival, and the Thueringen Bratwurst. Robert’s grandfather emphasizes every time it comes up that the people there say the Freistaat Thueringen, the free land of Thueringen, strong and proud of its early wars of succession. I guess we could call it the Texas of Germany…? Robert will surely disagree ☺ Nonetheless it is the small-city that the best of German literature calls home.

Goethe lived there most of his life, as sort of the “big man on campus” attracting other intellectuals like Schiller during Weimar’s “Golden Era”. Goethe was amazing; he basically at one time or another filled every job description possible in this small city – water tower manager, theater producer, statesmen, architect, cook, and most remarkably poet and writer. In a time when book-printing was still rather expensive and libraries had a limited volume of books, Goethe borrowed no less than 2,000 books for his studies. He had around 700 books in his own personal “stacks” next to his office and yet he still needed to borrow books. I guess we can then excuse him for being, well, not the most modest man of his day.
Our three-day visit taught me more than I would ever need to know and then some about Goethe and Schiller. But it also showed to me another side of Germany that had little to do with the Romantics and yet everything to do with the definition of Germany today.

We stayed in a Comfort Hotel on the outskirts of the city and commuted to Goetheplatz in the morning by bus after dropping our stuff off. A group of seven of us had a hefty lunch of Bratwurst and Sauerkraut. In the afternoon we toured the Belvedere Castle (turned art museum), but did not have time to see the impressionists due to the hundred Goethe and Schiller busts and the beautiful concert rooms. During quite possibly the coldest two hours I have ever experienced in Germany we went on a city-tour. Unfortunately the cold made it almost impossible to ask questions, take pictures, or concentrate (my feet were numb after ten minutes). But nonetheless we got a fairly good idea of the impact that the big writers had on the town.

One thing that did not strike me until the next day was how little the tour guide explained of Weimar as the capital of National Socialism. The history-makers write the history, and the woman giving us our tour simply focused on the highlights, pointing briefly to the balcony of the Elephant hotel where Hitler once spoke from before directing us to the plaque about Johann Sebastian Bach. Weimar is, according to some people and guide books, the cultural capital of Germany. And yet there was an unbelievably dark time in which culture and nationalism coincided, something that also took place in Weimar. What I mean more specifically is that while the citizens of Weimar proudly attended new versions of Faust and stood for their country, a concentration camp a few miles outside of the city served as the first and most central seat of the Holocaust.

We left for the KZ (Konzentrationslage) Buchenwald at around 10 am on Thursday morning. I remember feeling inconsolably nervous on our way there, not really wanting to talk to anybody. The KZ was the last stop on a bus line; of course that meant about a fifteen minute ride from the second-to-last stop. So far in the woods, hidden on the north side of the hills. Before we left various people kept telling us to bundle up, because no matter how cold it is in Weimar it’s at least ten degrees colder in Buchenwald. That sounded oddly metaphorical. We finally arrived to find about six new-looking buildings surrounding the parking lot, all built to house the tourist office, a movie-theater to show a documentary about the KZ, and a book store. My history professor said to me later that he previously disliked the idea of having a KZ be a tourist attraction, a place where unenthusiastic high school kids are forced to visit for a day who end up sitting around playing with their cell phones because they don’t want to learn about the Holocaust for the thousandth time (here in Germany, teachers generally go over the Holocaust a thousand times). That was certainly the case when we viewed the Documentary. Around 60 kids fighting to get seats up front… but the camp is so large that we didn’t see them at all after that.

I don’t want to go into details about the KZ. Perhaps I should, maybe those are the details about one’s trip to Germany that really count. That is in fact a very good question: how can a visitor simultaneously enjoy what Germany has to offer while facing head on a history of genocide? But the most important thing to remember from that question is that Germans large and small ask themselves the same thing, except they're not just here for a visit. The question of the "two Germany's", as I have once heard it said, the Germany of culture, of Wurst and Beer, of wonderfully sweet old people and adorable children, and the Germany of WWII will always need to be auseinandersetzt, or compared, contrasted and worked out. There's no reason for visitors to not be involved in that process.

To be quite honest, I'm not sure that I would have made the choice to visit a concentration camp had it not been on our excursion's itinerary for Thursday morning. It's not an experience one can say one is "glad at having done". But still I very much appreciate having been there. One feeling I will never forget is standing on the grounds of the camp while a strong, bitter wind threatened to knock you off of your feet. The weather could not have fit the occasion better; I sort of got the impression that no matter how sunny it was down in the quaint streets of Weimar it would suddenly become chilly and gray as soon as you started up the hill to the camp. We had audio guides with which we could walk around on our own and see the foundations of the barracks, the disinfection rooms, the crematorium with its hundreds of unused urns.

There were few original buildings still standing; the largest two were used as museums, unbelievably poignant museums, featuring some artwork made by prisoners in a struggle to maintain a sense of culture to contrast the cultureless SS guards. There was one section that featured old letters from SS-guards to their superiors, requesting very nicely and politely to punish a prisoner or two for misdemeanors. Of course the actual punishments were not mentioned and the reasoning would be something vague like, “He is not pulling his weight, and he is slowing progress”. The big red check of approval on these papers just makes my head swirl. How, how, how was all that ever possible. My good friend Bong said it succinctly in German, die Taetigkeit der Menschen ist einfach unbegreiflich. The capabilities of Man (to do such a thing) is simply incomprehensible.

Going on a tour of Goethe’s well-kept and fancy home felt a bit surreal after such an experience. And yet I welcomed the change of thought and the passive act of listening to an animated tour guide. Finally a chance to experience some Goethe first-hand, we went to the National Theater in Weimar to see a rendition of Faust that evening. Wow, it was, well, interesting. We had reread Faust: Der Tragoedie Erster Teil, the Tragedy of Faust, Part I in my intellectual history course the week before. Although we spent a good two weeks reading Faust in English in my HUME course my Freshman year at Chicago, I really didn’t understand a thing until we discussed it at length last Tuesday. It’s all about the context, the ROMANTICS. The unanswerable question remains, how Goethe, a man famed for saying, “Romanticism is the sickness; Classicism is the cure”, could write such a romantic play.

Carmen, our director, and Warren, my history professor, invited me and Bong out for some beer after the play (our group of twelve split off, as always). The version we saw was VERY MUCH a new interpretation, and must have been appreciated as such. It took me a while; there were a few too many homoerotic jokes in the first half that I just cringed upon seeing. It certainly did not help that perhaps the same school group that was with us at Buchenwald that morning had chosen to attend the same play. Of course they loved the stripping parts (catcalls were unfortunately common) and chatted through the actual meat of the play, the part when Gretchen prays to Mary Magdalene or the night of the crazy pagan witch-festival. Goodness, well I’d be up for seeing a more “traditional” interpretation although in retrospect this one was not so bad, and even ingenious at parts.

The next day involved packing and some sunshine. Still freezing, but the sunshine was certainly welcome for the hour or so that it stuck around. We visited a large Rococo library, one of the most famous in Germany (that’s where Goethe took out 2,000 books from). I’m pretty sure my Dad would have loved it, except for the fact that there was no engineering section and too many Schiller and Goethe busts to sit anywhere. We had free time the rest of the day before our train home, so Bong and I hid from the rain (it inevitably came, preventing us from walking around the Park by the Ilm river which is supposed to be very pretty), ate a large large lunch of local beer and Sauerbraten and Rotkraut and Knoesel (hard to finish but damn tasty), and took a quick tour of the Schiller house. Of course the Schiller house was much more sparse; he was in debt most of his life and did not make nearly as much money as Goethe did in his lifetime. But as a visitor I found his house much more appealing. Aside from the retro wallpaper that could very well have come out of the sixties… but the best part was that Bong and I found a little workshop space where we could do our own calligraphy! With beautiful long, black feather plumes and ink that stained my hand black. Here is the poem that I copied down. I was very thankful for the cursive we learned back in third-grade at that moment, particularly as I noticed Bong struggling with print letters.

Wanderers Nachtlied

Ueber allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh',
in allen Wipfeln
spuerest du kaum einen Hauch;
Die Voeglein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe


Rough translation: At the top of every peak is calm, in every treetop you can feel hardly any breath; the birds grow silent in the forest. Just wait, soon will you grow calm as well.

No class on Tuesday to make up for the three-day trip. All of the BCGS people went on their various trains back to their apartments and we will see each other again on Thanksgiving. We arrived back in Berlin in enough time for me to write a paper for my German class, and pack quickly for Budapest.

PS: the gift stores all over Weimar featured just about the greatest, tackiest, associations with Goethe and Schiller one could find... a highlight is the salt and pepper shaker (salt is Goethe, pepper is Schiller) that Robert will have the pleasure of using in Breslau. A-Rae Goethe, I missed you! Don't worry, you get your own souvenir!