deconstructing mark
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Thursday 3.7.03 | IF you ever feel like having your faith in God and human nature in general thoroughly tested, go and look around a former concentration camp. I went up to Sachsenhausen this morning, which is/was the -ironically and cynically called during the NS regime- 'protection camp' nearest Berlin. It was at one and the same time very interesting, engaging, upsetting, disturbing and generally unnerving, but well worth the emotional storm. I put on here, when I visited the new and wholly unsatisfactory Jewish Museum a few weeks ago, that the museum had put a gloss on the holocaust and made it user-friendly, and that I would probably have to go to Sachsenhausen to see for myself what it might have been like to be in such a camp. I happened to be right. Sachsenhausen is an ultimately worthy experience for a whole number of reasons, but most of all because its real power lies in its simplicity - it has no agenda. It is simply there to inform, unlike the Jewish Museum, which was there to show off how good an architect Liebeskind is. At Sachsenhausen, there is simply exhibit after exhibit, housed in the original huts of the camp, with simple, well-presented information boards. Bits of it are harrowing; the prison, for example. You walk along a narrow corridor and you can see into the cells, although they are barred. In each is a simple piece of text, sometimes with a photograph, about one or some of the prisoners held and killed in there. The effect of the prison, and of the museum of a whole, is like a historical cacophany; it builds and builds with gradually more information about the hangings, shootings, drownings, poisonings, ghastly medical experiments and so forth that when on until you feel quite sick that humans could have done such a thing to one another. Just two thoughts to close. Sachsenhausen was by no means one of the largest death-camps. 200,000 people were brought there from the time it opened to when it was liberated. They found roughly 87,000 there at the time of the liberation. The rest had left the camp through the crematorium or other means of horrific killing (the particularly disturbing 'Station Z.') Second thought: this started well before WWII did, and was well-known about for at least a couple of years by the western allies. In a way, it might have been a mistake for Hitler to invade Poland, for had he not done so, he might have been able to carry on his killing regime for much longer undeterred. Nice thought. Saturday 5.7.03 WHAT a twat Silvio Berlusconi is. Sunday 6.7.03 GRACIOUS, what a night last night turned out to be. I mean, I know that I was meeting Patrick for many drinkies and eventual clubbing, and I should have been prepared to get, well, trashed, and trashed did I get, but really. Ended up wildly ringing Matt's doorbell at 4.30am drunkenly pleading for shelter clutching a crutch which I had somehow picked up on the way home (I ended up at Matt's because I just couldn't remember where I lived or which country I was in or anything) so today has been a day of splendid nothingness. Ooh, and have got an exam on Saturday. Must do something about that, I suppose... Tuesday 8.7.03 SUDDEN panic stations about crappy French disseration (read it through yesterday - only word for it is 'lamentable'), unwritten and unresearched German dissertation, exam on Saturday, fact that I had until today to learn about the architecture of the German Parliament, and, erm, haven't (tour later, intelligent questions expected) etc etc etc - to cop it all off, I got pissed last night. Oh dear. Life really in tatters. | ||
