It turns out that the trains in Germany don't always run on time. As Lena and I set off at the end of November for our second ASF seminar in Berlin, we had no fewer than three delays and did at one stage end up going back through Weimar, having left it over an hour beforehand.
After this (and spending another while wandering through the streets of Berlin looking for our hostel...our own fault this time), though, we did arrive just as everyone was sitting down for dinner so we weren't too bad off.
Above all, the seminar was a great opportunity to catch up with all of the others. As I mentioned before, we are a group of 18 international volunteers living and working throughout Germany, and while we of course keep in touch on Facebook, it was good to have the whole group together again - and for the first time since our introductory seminar in September.
We started the seminar that evening by each presenting one or two photos that symbolised how our initial impressions of Germany had changed over our first three months of living there. I chose a map of Germany to show how the naive idea I had in September that I would spend my weekends travelling around the country visiting all the different cities had gone completely out the window once I got here and realised how big it actually is (and how expensive it is to travel around).
It felt a bit odd saying that in a room with several people from Russia (earlier that day, while we sat waiting for one of our many trains, Lena had said 'Germany is so small!') and the United States, but I suppose I can't help the fact that I come from a small island!
The following morning, we broke into small groups and each had the opportunity to present our work to the other volunteers. I really enjoyed hearing what the others do, because, while some of them also work in memorial sites, many are doing things that are completely different. For example, there are people working in the ASF office, others who work with elderly people and there is one volunteer in a youth club. Despite the variety of work however, we're all experiencing the same issues in terms of settling in and finding our feet in a completely new environment.
We spent one day visiting the House of the Wannsee Conference, exploring many of the issues relating to anti-Semitism and the Final Solution. The exhibition at the site is excellent, charting the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and helping to explain what led to the ultimate decision to exterminate the entire Jewish population of the continent.
That day ended with a visit to a synagogue for a Friday-evening service, which, as many in the group remarked afterwards, was quite refreshing after spending so long speaking of Judaism in the past tense. The exterior seemed a bit unwelcoming, with two police standing at the door and another keeping an eye on the security cameras (something which I have often seen outside the synagogue near my house in Dublin on a Saturday morning too) - a sad reminder maybe that some things haven't changed - but once we got inside, the atmosphere could not have been more different.
It was my first time ever inside a synagogue; I have to admit that the one I just mentioned near my house is somewhere I have passed thousands of times, but have never actually considered going in to. I immediately felt very welcome, with many people asking us where we were from and what we were doing in Germany and there was a group of old men sitting nearby who kept showing us where we were in the prayers and hymns, even though it was all in Hebrew anyway!
There was also a great sense of community: everyone was catching up with friends after the week's work and finding out all the news and gossip, just like many people do in Ireland after mass on a Sunday. As someone who is quite critical of religion in general, this gave me a different perspective on the role it can play in people's lives in terms of bringing them together with their neighbours and creating a sense of belonging.
And religion is a theme that came up again and again throughout the seminar, in particular when we talked about the meanings behind some rituals and festivals (mainly Christmas and Hanukkah, given the time of year) and the ways they are celebrated throughout the world.
Unlike our first seminar, this time we did everything through German. It was difficult at times, and I found myself getting quite tongue-tied when speaking in front of the whole group, but there was definitely a determination among those of us who had mostly spoken English in September to stick to German this time.
In comparison to the first seminar, which was geared primarily towards providing us with an introduction to the whole programme and our work, this seminar involved dealing with a much broader range of topics. As well as everything I've mentioned above, we also talked about many other things, including the concept of 'identity' and how we label ourselves and other people, the issues around how our perspectives of our own lives can change over time and even the most feared topic of all: what we're going to do once our volunteer service is over.
It was strange to be thinking of what comes next already when it seems like we've only started, but as I thought about it on the train home (perfectly punctual this time, thankfully) I realised I've been here for almost four months now and I'm well beyond the stage of 'just starting'!
Sunday 18 December 2011
Saturday 17 December 2011
Nothing in particular
It's a long time since I've posted here, and I suppose it's partly because, since my orientation phase finished up at the end of October, I've just settled into my weekly routine, with each day not being as exciting or new as during the first few weeks. That's not to say that things have got boring though - it's more so that we now have the time to devote to the specific things that we want to work on.
In fact, one of the things I am finding the most challenging is learning how to manage my time properly as I have nobody peering over my shoulder and virtually no deadlines to meet. We work here as volunteers and, apart from a few things like working in the information office, there is very little that we HAVE to do, so it is up to us to make what we want out of the year.
And with so many different projects that I want to work on, I initially found myself like a bit of a headless chicken sometimes, running between all of them and getting nothing done, though I think I'm getting better now at disciplining myself to focus on one thing at a time!
I have spent much of the past few weeks transcribing a set of interviews in English with former prisoners of Buchenwald who were children or teenagers when they were in the camp. While it took a long time, and while transcribing can be a very monotonous process, it was both fascinating and sad to hear the stories directly from the mouths of the people who experienced them.
In general the interviewers would let the men just speak freely about their experiences, but it was sometimes frustrating when they would butt in with a question and interrupt the flow of thoughts - I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for the men to talk about these events which, as well as being horrific, happened over sixty years ago.
In terms of gaining an understanding of the brutality of what happened, I had the same feelings when I was doing this work as I do when I'm in the archives: the sheer scale of the Holocaust makes it impossible to contemplate the human aspect of the suffering, but by hearing individual stories, I think we can begin to get a better sense of just how awful it really was.
One man spoke of a time when he was living with his family in a Ghetto and they were told that they had to choose one member of the family to be sent for deportation. Not knowing what would happen to the person chosen, they agreed that his older brother would go as he was the most likely to be put to work and not murdered (by this time there were rumours of gas chambers beginning to reach the Ghetto, he said) and thus had the best chance of survival.
Another spoke of how he and many others he knew got sick in the weeks after liberation because they ate more food than their systems could handle at the time. They had become so used to having almost no food, and they couldn't believe how much they now had, that they ate as much as possible in case it would be taken from them.
On the 9th of November, the anniversary of Reichspogromnacht (or Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass), we participated in a ceremony to commemorate the German Jews who, on this and the following days in 1938, had their property and synagogues destroyed and who were rounded up en masse and sent to concentration camps as a means of intimidating them into leaving Germany.
Our role was to read out quotes from some of the men who were sent to Buchenwald at this time; I read out two quotes, one in English and one in German. Needless to say I was quite nervous about having to read something like this out loud at a commemoration ceremony, and we spent most of the preceding two days rehearsing our German pronunciation.
Thankfully it all went well, and the ceremony itself was quite simple and informal. As well as the quotes we read out, the head of the memorial site and the site's chief historian spoke about the events of November 1938 and the mayor of Weimar laid a wreath at the location where temporary barracks were erected to house the men brought to Buchenwald as a result of the pogrom. Ceremonies like this took place all over Germany on the same day and I saw wreaths and flowers in many different towns and train stations over the following weeks.
Towards the end of November, I spent a full day working with a group of school students from England who were visiting Buchenwald as part of a trip through Germany. I accompanied them on a tour around the site and spent the afternoon running a workshop with some of them about the use of photos as sources on the history of the camp.
I found that the students were very engaged in the issues and were far more willing to contribute their opinions than I ever was when I was fifteen. While this was of course only one group, I was happy with my first experience of working with the students and this has encouraged me to work a bit quicker at putting together my own tour, so that hopefully I can start doing it more often myself in the new year.
Other than this, my life outside of Buchenwald has been greatly enriched by the arrival of glühwein and waffles at the Christmas market a few weeks ago and I am happy to report that the freezing German winter that I have been dreading since September hasn't arrived...yet.
In fact, one of the things I am finding the most challenging is learning how to manage my time properly as I have nobody peering over my shoulder and virtually no deadlines to meet. We work here as volunteers and, apart from a few things like working in the information office, there is very little that we HAVE to do, so it is up to us to make what we want out of the year.
And with so many different projects that I want to work on, I initially found myself like a bit of a headless chicken sometimes, running between all of them and getting nothing done, though I think I'm getting better now at disciplining myself to focus on one thing at a time!
I have spent much of the past few weeks transcribing a set of interviews in English with former prisoners of Buchenwald who were children or teenagers when they were in the camp. While it took a long time, and while transcribing can be a very monotonous process, it was both fascinating and sad to hear the stories directly from the mouths of the people who experienced them.
In general the interviewers would let the men just speak freely about their experiences, but it was sometimes frustrating when they would butt in with a question and interrupt the flow of thoughts - I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for the men to talk about these events which, as well as being horrific, happened over sixty years ago.
In terms of gaining an understanding of the brutality of what happened, I had the same feelings when I was doing this work as I do when I'm in the archives: the sheer scale of the Holocaust makes it impossible to contemplate the human aspect of the suffering, but by hearing individual stories, I think we can begin to get a better sense of just how awful it really was.
One man spoke of a time when he was living with his family in a Ghetto and they were told that they had to choose one member of the family to be sent for deportation. Not knowing what would happen to the person chosen, they agreed that his older brother would go as he was the most likely to be put to work and not murdered (by this time there were rumours of gas chambers beginning to reach the Ghetto, he said) and thus had the best chance of survival.
Another spoke of how he and many others he knew got sick in the weeks after liberation because they ate more food than their systems could handle at the time. They had become so used to having almost no food, and they couldn't believe how much they now had, that they ate as much as possible in case it would be taken from them.
On the 9th of November, the anniversary of Reichspogromnacht (or Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass), we participated in a ceremony to commemorate the German Jews who, on this and the following days in 1938, had their property and synagogues destroyed and who were rounded up en masse and sent to concentration camps as a means of intimidating them into leaving Germany.
Our role was to read out quotes from some of the men who were sent to Buchenwald at this time; I read out two quotes, one in English and one in German. Needless to say I was quite nervous about having to read something like this out loud at a commemoration ceremony, and we spent most of the preceding two days rehearsing our German pronunciation.
Thankfully it all went well, and the ceremony itself was quite simple and informal. As well as the quotes we read out, the head of the memorial site and the site's chief historian spoke about the events of November 1938 and the mayor of Weimar laid a wreath at the location where temporary barracks were erected to house the men brought to Buchenwald as a result of the pogrom. Ceremonies like this took place all over Germany on the same day and I saw wreaths and flowers in many different towns and train stations over the following weeks.
Towards the end of November, I spent a full day working with a group of school students from England who were visiting Buchenwald as part of a trip through Germany. I accompanied them on a tour around the site and spent the afternoon running a workshop with some of them about the use of photos as sources on the history of the camp.
I found that the students were very engaged in the issues and were far more willing to contribute their opinions than I ever was when I was fifteen. While this was of course only one group, I was happy with my first experience of working with the students and this has encouraged me to work a bit quicker at putting together my own tour, so that hopefully I can start doing it more often myself in the new year.
Other than this, my life outside of Buchenwald has been greatly enriched by the arrival of glühwein and waffles at the Christmas market a few weeks ago and I am happy to report that the freezing German winter that I have been dreading since September hasn't arrived...yet.
Sunday 23 October 2011
The realities of what happened here
I previously mentioned the positive work atmosphere that I have noticed in the memorial site. However, this isn't to say that working here is always easy, or that there aren't things that I find difficult about being here every day.
What has struck me is that I have not found myself being too affected by seeing places like the crematorium or the disinfection facility. I think these are places we all expect to see in concentration camps, so I suppose I was prepared for them to a certain extent.
There are, however, three places within Buchenwald that I find particularly difficult to reconcile and when I visit them I really begin wondering about how the people who worked here could actually do what they did to fellow human beings.
The first is in the building which now houses the administration for the site as well as the library and archives and it is where I have my lunch most days. As far as I am aware it was originally used as an SS accommodation block, but there is something about the main corridor along what are now offices that makes me think about how, in one way, the Holocaust was a very bureaucratic and clinical process.
I can imagine faceless civil servants sitting in offices poring over train timetables and planning transports across the concentration camp network, like they were moving cargo, and I think of how many of these people claimed innocence after the War; they were only paper-pushers carrying out orders, they didn't do anything wrong.
The second place is the collection of enclosures that made up the Buchenwald zoo. It was built using money stolen from prisoners (which was officially recorded as a 'donation') for the entertainment of the SS and their families. It was built directly outside the prisoners' camp, with a clear view of what was going on on the other side of the barbed wire fence.
When I visited this part of the site with a group of students, one of them asked the guide if this was meant as a way of taunting the prisoners. She said that she didn't think so. Rather, based on what former SS men said after the war about how they enjoyed their time at Buchenwald, her interpretation was that the SS just thought so little of the people who were in the camp that they had no problem enjoying themselves with their families on a day out to the zoo, regardless of how close it was to the concentration camp.
The third is a collection of houses in the forest that made up the SS-Führersiedlung, where the camp's commander and other top SS men lived with their families. The houses are beautiful, built in an idyllic forest location, and yet not far away at all was the quarry, where prisoners were made to do back-breaking work for twelve hours a day with no breaks. Like with the zoo, I don't know how people could carry on an outwardly 'normal' family life in a place like this.
I spend quite a lot of my time working in the archives, which I find really interesting. They get hundreds of requests each year from relatives of former prisoners looking for information about their experiences here. We, the volunteers, help by doing the preliminary searching through the microfilm and printed records of transport lists, daily roll-call figures, prisoner information cards, etc.
Up to 250,000 people were imprisoned here at one time or another between 1937 and 1945, a number so high that I think it is difficult, if not impossible, to relate to the human element of the suffering they endured. But when I look at one person's individual experience of Buchenwald, or of the Nazi persecution regime in general (many prisoners were brought here from, or were later sent to, other camps), I find that I can relate much more to it.
I find myself getting quite involved with each individual case that I research in the archives, and I really want to find as much information as possible for the family as I think that even seeing the name of their loved-one on a form or piece of paper can bring some sort of comfort.
There were 250,000 prisoners here, but no two have the same story - each single person had their own families, their own jobs and their own lives that were taken away from them, and each person had a different experience of Buchenwald. I think that is by focusing on personal stories that we can better understand just how terrible the events of the Holocaust really were.
What has struck me is that I have not found myself being too affected by seeing places like the crematorium or the disinfection facility. I think these are places we all expect to see in concentration camps, so I suppose I was prepared for them to a certain extent.
There are, however, three places within Buchenwald that I find particularly difficult to reconcile and when I visit them I really begin wondering about how the people who worked here could actually do what they did to fellow human beings.
The first is in the building which now houses the administration for the site as well as the library and archives and it is where I have my lunch most days. As far as I am aware it was originally used as an SS accommodation block, but there is something about the main corridor along what are now offices that makes me think about how, in one way, the Holocaust was a very bureaucratic and clinical process.
I can imagine faceless civil servants sitting in offices poring over train timetables and planning transports across the concentration camp network, like they were moving cargo, and I think of how many of these people claimed innocence after the War; they were only paper-pushers carrying out orders, they didn't do anything wrong.
The second place is the collection of enclosures that made up the Buchenwald zoo. It was built using money stolen from prisoners (which was officially recorded as a 'donation') for the entertainment of the SS and their families. It was built directly outside the prisoners' camp, with a clear view of what was going on on the other side of the barbed wire fence.
When I visited this part of the site with a group of students, one of them asked the guide if this was meant as a way of taunting the prisoners. She said that she didn't think so. Rather, based on what former SS men said after the war about how they enjoyed their time at Buchenwald, her interpretation was that the SS just thought so little of the people who were in the camp that they had no problem enjoying themselves with their families on a day out to the zoo, regardless of how close it was to the concentration camp.
The third is a collection of houses in the forest that made up the SS-Führersiedlung, where the camp's commander and other top SS men lived with their families. The houses are beautiful, built in an idyllic forest location, and yet not far away at all was the quarry, where prisoners were made to do back-breaking work for twelve hours a day with no breaks. Like with the zoo, I don't know how people could carry on an outwardly 'normal' family life in a place like this.
I spend quite a lot of my time working in the archives, which I find really interesting. They get hundreds of requests each year from relatives of former prisoners looking for information about their experiences here. We, the volunteers, help by doing the preliminary searching through the microfilm and printed records of transport lists, daily roll-call figures, prisoner information cards, etc.
Up to 250,000 people were imprisoned here at one time or another between 1937 and 1945, a number so high that I think it is difficult, if not impossible, to relate to the human element of the suffering they endured. But when I look at one person's individual experience of Buchenwald, or of the Nazi persecution regime in general (many prisoners were brought here from, or were later sent to, other camps), I find that I can relate much more to it.
I find myself getting quite involved with each individual case that I research in the archives, and I really want to find as much information as possible for the family as I think that even seeing the name of their loved-one on a form or piece of paper can bring some sort of comfort.
There were 250,000 prisoners here, but no two have the same story - each single person had their own families, their own jobs and their own lives that were taken away from them, and each person had a different experience of Buchenwald. I think that is by focusing on personal stories that we can better understand just how terrible the events of the Holocaust really were.
Settling in and meeting my new best friend: Google Translate
Before I started working here, I naively thought that one year was a long time and that I'd really have an opportunity to get to know the place very well. But after working here for six weeks now, I can't believe I ONLY have a year to try and learn as much as possible and make some contribution to the work of the memorial site.
The history of the site is very complicated. It opened as a concentration camp in 1937 and operated as such until its liberation by the US army on 11 April 1945. This is, of course, the most significant part of its history, and the one which on which I will be focusing the most.
But after the War, Buchenwald was used by the Soviet Union as 'Special Camp Number II' to intern thousands of people who had been involved in the Nazi regime or who had been members of the NSDAP, as well as thousands of innocent people who were wrongly suspected of being Nazis.
In 1950, the East German authorities decided that the process of De-Nazification should be ended and the camp was closed, re-opening soon afterwards as a memorial site. However, the official historiography of the DDR claimed that the camp had been 'self-liberated' by the secret communist resistance that had operated within Buchenwald throughout the camp's existence, so instead of commemorating the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazi regime, the site celebrated the glory of these 'anti-fascist' resistance fighters.
Needless to say, the story of the site as Special Camp Number II was completely ignored during this time, and it was only after German Reunification that proper research could be carried out about it and the rest of the history of the camp in general. Throughout the 1990s all the exhibitions were completely re-designed, and the memorial site has since attempted to present an accurate and balanced interpretation of the history.
So not only does the camp itself have a complex history, its time as a memorial does too.
We have spent the past six weeks in our so-called orientation phase, to allow us to get to know this history and the actual site itself which, as I mentioned in a previous post, has an area of 190 hectares.
I have visited all of the exhibitions, gone on tours and taken part in workshops with school students, visited the library and archives and spent countless hours just wandering around the site, trying to build up a mental map of where exactly everything is (or was).
I have also been given the catalogues which accompany the exhibitions on both the concentration camp and the Special Camp, which detail their histories in full. I don't think I have ever read anything more slowly in my life. I sit and read them at my desk, with my dictionary open on one side and Google Translate on the other, and poor Marlene is driven demented with my constant requests for her to clarify the meaning of a word or sentence.
We have also had to write weekly reports of what we have done and learnt and what we thought of the different exhibitions, tours, etc. I begin by writing them in English and can get one done in about an hour or two, but then have to spend about twice as long translating them into German, with my old friend Google.
But it works both ways; being a native English speaker means I am often in demand for translating work too. I have translated letters and invitations sent to former prisoners living in the USA, England and New Zealand for the ceremonies to mark the anniversary of liberation in April, and I will be working to take care of them when they come.
I am also transcribing a series of interviews with English-speaking former prisoners that will form part of a research project and I am translating some new information signs that will be put up in Ohrdruf, a former sub-camp of Buchenwald in a nearby town.
I found the first two weeks or so very tiring as I had to shake off the cobwebs from my summer holidays. Things also get going in Germany much earlier than at home - we were expected to be in work for 8am on many mornings, and myself and Lena are also doing a German course two evenings a week in Jena, a city near Weimar.
But by the end of the first six weeks, things have settled down a lot and I'm feeling quite at home at work and in Weimar in general. We have got to know the other volunteers and interns quite well and this has made settling in much easier.
By now German is coming much more naturally to me too. As you've probably gathered from the amount of times I mention it, language was the thing that was most worrying me before I came here. However, after only a few weeks it has become completely normal to speak German. Of course I make thousands of mistakes every day and I can still only speak very basic German, but nine out of ten times I can get the jist of what someone is saying and I think they eventually understand me most of the time!
Now the only thing worrying me is the snow, which we are promised could arrive any day now. I've been told that once it comes it's here to stay until about February, so I've already invested in a big new coat and I'm thankful that the heating in my apartment is quite good.
The history of the site is very complicated. It opened as a concentration camp in 1937 and operated as such until its liberation by the US army on 11 April 1945. This is, of course, the most significant part of its history, and the one which on which I will be focusing the most.
But after the War, Buchenwald was used by the Soviet Union as 'Special Camp Number II' to intern thousands of people who had been involved in the Nazi regime or who had been members of the NSDAP, as well as thousands of innocent people who were wrongly suspected of being Nazis.
In 1950, the East German authorities decided that the process of De-Nazification should be ended and the camp was closed, re-opening soon afterwards as a memorial site. However, the official historiography of the DDR claimed that the camp had been 'self-liberated' by the secret communist resistance that had operated within Buchenwald throughout the camp's existence, so instead of commemorating the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazi regime, the site celebrated the glory of these 'anti-fascist' resistance fighters.
Needless to say, the story of the site as Special Camp Number II was completely ignored during this time, and it was only after German Reunification that proper research could be carried out about it and the rest of the history of the camp in general. Throughout the 1990s all the exhibitions were completely re-designed, and the memorial site has since attempted to present an accurate and balanced interpretation of the history.
So not only does the camp itself have a complex history, its time as a memorial does too.
We have spent the past six weeks in our so-called orientation phase, to allow us to get to know this history and the actual site itself which, as I mentioned in a previous post, has an area of 190 hectares.
I have visited all of the exhibitions, gone on tours and taken part in workshops with school students, visited the library and archives and spent countless hours just wandering around the site, trying to build up a mental map of where exactly everything is (or was).
I have also been given the catalogues which accompany the exhibitions on both the concentration camp and the Special Camp, which detail their histories in full. I don't think I have ever read anything more slowly in my life. I sit and read them at my desk, with my dictionary open on one side and Google Translate on the other, and poor Marlene is driven demented with my constant requests for her to clarify the meaning of a word or sentence.
We have also had to write weekly reports of what we have done and learnt and what we thought of the different exhibitions, tours, etc. I begin by writing them in English and can get one done in about an hour or two, but then have to spend about twice as long translating them into German, with my old friend Google.
But it works both ways; being a native English speaker means I am often in demand for translating work too. I have translated letters and invitations sent to former prisoners living in the USA, England and New Zealand for the ceremonies to mark the anniversary of liberation in April, and I will be working to take care of them when they come.
I am also transcribing a series of interviews with English-speaking former prisoners that will form part of a research project and I am translating some new information signs that will be put up in Ohrdruf, a former sub-camp of Buchenwald in a nearby town.
I found the first two weeks or so very tiring as I had to shake off the cobwebs from my summer holidays. Things also get going in Germany much earlier than at home - we were expected to be in work for 8am on many mornings, and myself and Lena are also doing a German course two evenings a week in Jena, a city near Weimar.
But by the end of the first six weeks, things have settled down a lot and I'm feeling quite at home at work and in Weimar in general. We have got to know the other volunteers and interns quite well and this has made settling in much easier.
By now German is coming much more naturally to me too. As you've probably gathered from the amount of times I mention it, language was the thing that was most worrying me before I came here. However, after only a few weeks it has become completely normal to speak German. Of course I make thousands of mistakes every day and I can still only speak very basic German, but nine out of ten times I can get the jist of what someone is saying and I think they eventually understand me most of the time!
Now the only thing worrying me is the snow, which we are promised could arrive any day now. I've been told that once it comes it's here to stay until about February, so I've already invested in a big new coat and I'm thankful that the heating in my apartment is quite good.
Tuesday 4 October 2011
Starting work - the first week
The Buchenwald memorial site is located on the Ettersberg mountain that overlooks Weimar, about 8km from the city centre. The concentration camp was opened in 1937, in what had been a beautiful forest ('Buchenwald' means 'beech forest') with spectacular views over the city and the surrounding countryside. The road up to the site was once a narrow path through the forest which was widened in the early years of the camp's existence by prisoners working in horrific conditions - so many of them died in its construction that it immediately became known as 'Blutstraße' or 'Blood Road', a name by which it is still known today.
My first-day nerves were made worse when I found out that I would be thrown straight in at the deep-end: running the visitor information office with the three other volunteers.
Thankfully Marlene and Fabian had started a week before us, so had done it once before, but it was a little bit strange answering visitors' questions (in my terrible German) about a place I had only started working in that morning.
We work here every Monday, as most of the staff of the educational department have Mondays off because they work at weekends. Unfortunately all of the exhibitions are also closed and there are no guided tours, meaning that all the visitors can do is walk around the site themselves with a map and an audioguide. This works well in certain places, but Buchenwald is a 190-hectare site with very few original buildings still standing, so I do wonder how much the Monday visitors can really learn about it.
This also means that on Mondays my job involves apologising to a lot of disappointed (and sometimes angry) people and then asking them to give me their driver's licence as a deposit for the audioguide.
On the plus side, working here is great for my German. I have memorised a few important phrases for giving directions, explaining how the audioguides work, etc, but other than that I am left to answer all of the other questions in German as well as I can. The phrase 'necessity is the mother of invention' comes to mind fairly often as I attempt to answer the more complicated questions - I can always eventually find a way to explain what I have to, which has given me more confidence in speaking the language. The information office is also one of the rare occasions I get to speak English, as we get quite a lot of American visitors and other international visitors who can speak English but not German.
If Tuesday was a reminder of how some things really are the same everywhere, it also showed how different they can be. First, myself and Lena had to register as residents of Weimar. We were told that for me as an EU citizen it would be straight-forward. But then we entered the maze of bureaucracy and queuing that is the Weimar city administration building. Each person we met told us we needed to go to a different place with different forms and wait outside different offices in a building that can't have been built by anyone other than the Stasi. It was eventually sorted, of course, and I'm now a fully-registered resident, but it was interesting to see that some problems aren't confined to Ireland.
Second, we went to open new bank accounts. The first bank we went to wasn't interested in opening accounts for us because we'd only be here for a year - I tried to imagine a bank in Ireland turning away new business, but I wasn't able to. We then went across the road to Deutsche Bank who told us that they'd give us both free accounts for the year, but that there was nobody there at the time to open them, so we had to make an appointment to come back that evening.
On Tuesday afternoon we got to see our new office - three of us will share one office and one will share another with an intern. They are in a building that used to house some of the SS men, but which is now used to host workshops and events with groups of school students and young people. I wasn't expecting to have an office at all, as in general our work will involve us being in many different areas and working with different people all over the site, but it was a nice introduction to the very impressive set-up they have here, and in Germany in general, for volunteers and interns.
I have met at least ten other volunteers and interns working here in various capacities and for varying lengths of time. While the compulsory year of national service was recently scrapped in Germany, it is still very common for people to complete several internships or periods of volunteer services as part of their studies or just for the experience.
And they're not just here to do the photocopying either; many of them are involved in putting together exhibitions or working on the events for the anniversary of the camp's liberation. This also means that there are a lot of other young people working here, which has made settling in and getting to know everyone that bit easier.
Later that week, we began going around all the weekly departmental staff meetings to introduce ourselves and meet the other people who work here. For me this was quite intimidating at first, sitting around a table with ten to fifteen others (some of whom have worked here for up to thirty years) introducing myself in German, and then trying to remember all of their names and what they do here, before doing the exact same thing again twenty minutes later at another meeting down the hall.
There are a lot of people working here, in a variety of areas, from historians, librarians and archivists to those working in the educational department. One thing that I can say about all of them, though, is that they've gone out of their way to make us feel welcome and help us settle in.
The rest of the first week was mainly spent organising keys and e-mail addresses and the like, but I was absolutely wrecked by Friday evening, having met so many new people and after spending my first full week speaking nothing but German.
One of last year's volunteers told me that, despite the place you work in and the topic you have to deal with on a daily basis, you can really enjoy working here. This sounds a bit strange at first, but I can now understand what she meant.
Of course the place itself is a constant reminder of how low humanity can descend, but the people who work here now are so passionate about their work - learning as much as possible about the camp's history, teaching as many people as possible about it, and doing as much as possible to ensure that what happened here is never forgotten - that the atmosphere is in fact a very positive one.
By the end of the first week, all of my concerns about working in a place like this were gone and I was looking forward to starting again on Monday morning.
My first-day nerves were made worse when I found out that I would be thrown straight in at the deep-end: running the visitor information office with the three other volunteers.
Thankfully Marlene and Fabian had started a week before us, so had done it once before, but it was a little bit strange answering visitors' questions (in my terrible German) about a place I had only started working in that morning.
We work here every Monday, as most of the staff of the educational department have Mondays off because they work at weekends. Unfortunately all of the exhibitions are also closed and there are no guided tours, meaning that all the visitors can do is walk around the site themselves with a map and an audioguide. This works well in certain places, but Buchenwald is a 190-hectare site with very few original buildings still standing, so I do wonder how much the Monday visitors can really learn about it.
This also means that on Mondays my job involves apologising to a lot of disappointed (and sometimes angry) people and then asking them to give me their driver's licence as a deposit for the audioguide.
On the plus side, working here is great for my German. I have memorised a few important phrases for giving directions, explaining how the audioguides work, etc, but other than that I am left to answer all of the other questions in German as well as I can. The phrase 'necessity is the mother of invention' comes to mind fairly often as I attempt to answer the more complicated questions - I can always eventually find a way to explain what I have to, which has given me more confidence in speaking the language. The information office is also one of the rare occasions I get to speak English, as we get quite a lot of American visitors and other international visitors who can speak English but not German.
If Tuesday was a reminder of how some things really are the same everywhere, it also showed how different they can be. First, myself and Lena had to register as residents of Weimar. We were told that for me as an EU citizen it would be straight-forward. But then we entered the maze of bureaucracy and queuing that is the Weimar city administration building. Each person we met told us we needed to go to a different place with different forms and wait outside different offices in a building that can't have been built by anyone other than the Stasi. It was eventually sorted, of course, and I'm now a fully-registered resident, but it was interesting to see that some problems aren't confined to Ireland.
Second, we went to open new bank accounts. The first bank we went to wasn't interested in opening accounts for us because we'd only be here for a year - I tried to imagine a bank in Ireland turning away new business, but I wasn't able to. We then went across the road to Deutsche Bank who told us that they'd give us both free accounts for the year, but that there was nobody there at the time to open them, so we had to make an appointment to come back that evening.
On Tuesday afternoon we got to see our new office - three of us will share one office and one will share another with an intern. They are in a building that used to house some of the SS men, but which is now used to host workshops and events with groups of school students and young people. I wasn't expecting to have an office at all, as in general our work will involve us being in many different areas and working with different people all over the site, but it was a nice introduction to the very impressive set-up they have here, and in Germany in general, for volunteers and interns.
I have met at least ten other volunteers and interns working here in various capacities and for varying lengths of time. While the compulsory year of national service was recently scrapped in Germany, it is still very common for people to complete several internships or periods of volunteer services as part of their studies or just for the experience.
And they're not just here to do the photocopying either; many of them are involved in putting together exhibitions or working on the events for the anniversary of the camp's liberation. This also means that there are a lot of other young people working here, which has made settling in and getting to know everyone that bit easier.
Later that week, we began going around all the weekly departmental staff meetings to introduce ourselves and meet the other people who work here. For me this was quite intimidating at first, sitting around a table with ten to fifteen others (some of whom have worked here for up to thirty years) introducing myself in German, and then trying to remember all of their names and what they do here, before doing the exact same thing again twenty minutes later at another meeting down the hall.
There are a lot of people working here, in a variety of areas, from historians, librarians and archivists to those working in the educational department. One thing that I can say about all of them, though, is that they've gone out of their way to make us feel welcome and help us settle in.
The rest of the first week was mainly spent organising keys and e-mail addresses and the like, but I was absolutely wrecked by Friday evening, having met so many new people and after spending my first full week speaking nothing but German.
One of last year's volunteers told me that, despite the place you work in and the topic you have to deal with on a daily basis, you can really enjoy working here. This sounds a bit strange at first, but I can now understand what she meant.
Of course the place itself is a constant reminder of how low humanity can descend, but the people who work here now are so passionate about their work - learning as much as possible about the camp's history, teaching as many people as possible about it, and doing as much as possible to ensure that what happened here is never forgotten - that the atmosphere is in fact a very positive one.
By the end of the first week, all of my concerns about working in a place like this were gone and I was looking forward to starting again on Monday morning.
Sunday 25 September 2011
Ich bin ein Weimarer
Right after the seminar in Wünsdorf, I took the train down to Weimar with Elena, a volunteer from Russia who will be living and working with me for the year. There we met our two German flatmates, Marlene and Fabian, who had prepared a picnic to welcome us.
We're living in an apartment right in the middle of the city, not that location is a big issue in Weimar - nothing is more than a fifteen-minute walk away. What is important, though, is that the bus to the memorial site goes right by the front door.
Despite being home to only 65,000 people, Weimar is a hugely important city in German history and culture. Two of Germany's most celebrated writers, Goethe and Schiller, lived here and they're remembered by a large statue in the centre and countless plaques around the city claiming that one or the other had once breathed in a particular place. They also both have the honour of having shopping centres named after them.
The city was home to Luther, Liszt and Bach at different times and it's here that the constitution of what would become known as the 'Weimar Republic' was ratified in 1919. The original Bauhaus school was also opened here in that same year.
However, Weimar also has a darker side to its history. It was chosen to be the location for one of the 'Gauforen', large complexes that merged the ordinary civilian bureaucracy with that of the Nazi party, making the city an important administrative capital of the Third Reich. The Ettersburg mountain overlooking the city became the location for the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, which would become one of the largest within Germany.
Controversially, the old 'Gauforum' complex has recently been lovingly restored and is now used as offices by the Thuringian state government and the (never completed) conference hall at its centre has been converted into a shopping centre.
In comparison to the other towns I've visited so far, it's clear that a lot of money has been put into Weimar since Reunification. If anything, it's almost too perfect - as if it was designed by the same people who built Main Street USA in Disneyworld - but it's proving to be a great place to live and I have no worries about being here for a year.
We're living in an apartment right in the middle of the city, not that location is a big issue in Weimar - nothing is more than a fifteen-minute walk away. What is important, though, is that the bus to the memorial site goes right by the front door.
Despite being home to only 65,000 people, Weimar is a hugely important city in German history and culture. Two of Germany's most celebrated writers, Goethe and Schiller, lived here and they're remembered by a large statue in the centre and countless plaques around the city claiming that one or the other had once breathed in a particular place. They also both have the honour of having shopping centres named after them.
The city was home to Luther, Liszt and Bach at different times and it's here that the constitution of what would become known as the 'Weimar Republic' was ratified in 1919. The original Bauhaus school was also opened here in that same year.
However, Weimar also has a darker side to its history. It was chosen to be the location for one of the 'Gauforen', large complexes that merged the ordinary civilian bureaucracy with that of the Nazi party, making the city an important administrative capital of the Third Reich. The Ettersburg mountain overlooking the city became the location for the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, which would become one of the largest within Germany.
Controversially, the old 'Gauforum' complex has recently been lovingly restored and is now used as offices by the Thuringian state government and the (never completed) conference hall at its centre has been converted into a shopping centre.
In comparison to the other towns I've visited so far, it's clear that a lot of money has been put into Weimar since Reunification. If anything, it's almost too perfect - as if it was designed by the same people who built Main Street USA in Disneyworld - but it's proving to be a great place to live and I have no worries about being here for a year.
Saturday 17 September 2011
Museums and recycling bins: our first seminar
I arrived in Berlin on the 2nd of September to attend a ten-day seminar organised by ASF before starting work at my project.
The first thing that struck me about the group of volunteers that I am part of is its diversity. There are 18 of us in total, coming from Germany, the USA, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and me from Ireland. I will be working with one girl from Russia in the Buchenwald memorial, some will work in the Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme or Osnabrück memorials, while others will work in the ASF office, the Gay Museum, in the House of the Wannsee Conference, in youth clubs or with elderly Jewish people in Berlin.
The seminar was designed to give us a chance to get to know each other, to find out more about our projects and to help us to adjust to life in Germany.
To my relief nobody expected us to arrive fluent in German, and I wasn't the only person with quite a basic level. Everything we did was through German and English to ensure nobody was left behind, but also to gradually nudge us all in the direction of German. We all tried our best to speak it and a strange mix of the two languages became the norm around the place. Those like myself would say what we could in German and then switch to English (often mid-sentence) when we had to.
But it worked. It started to become more and more natural to speak German, and I stopped worrying so much about my der, die and das and just spoke, hoping I'd be understood.
We discussed history a lot. In particular we compared the different ways the Holocaust affected, and is remembered in, each of our countries. Coming from Ireland, which was virtually unaffected by the Holocaust, it was fascinating and slightly intimidating for me to meet people who had close family members who had been in concentration camps or who had died at the hands of the Nazis.
After listening to people from Israel or Russia talk about their family histories, I felt embarrassed discussing Ireland's neutrality in the War and its refusal to accept refugees. I read a quote from Michael McDowell when he was Minister for Justice in 2003, in which he acknowledged Ireland's failings during the Second World War.
He spoke of the contributions made by individual Irishmen and women to the fight against the Nazis, but claims that 'it remains the case that our State and our society in many ways failed that Constitutional recognition [of a person's right to freedom of conscience and the State's responsibility to protect that right], whether by tolerating social discrimination, or by failing to heed the message of the persecuted, or by failing to offer refuge to those who sought it, or by failing to confront those who openly or covertly offered justification for the prejudice and race-hatred which led to the Shoah'.
The seminar was held in a village called Wünsdorf, about an hour outside of Berlin. In World War One it was used by the German army as a prisoner-of-war camp for colonial regiments of the British and French armies. During the Second World War the village was home to an extensive complex of army bunkers, and it was here that Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, was planned from late 1940. After the War, Wünsdorf found itself in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the former Nazi bunkers were used as the headquarters of the Soviet army in East Germany until the Reunification of Germany in 1990.
So it's fair to say that we were surrounded by history. We visited the bunker complex, and got a taste of how most of us agreed history should not be presented. The site doesn't receive funding from the German government and is managed by an independent organisation. Our guide showed us around and described almost proudly how the shelters were so well-built that they survived extensive Allied bombing-raids.
We saw photos of locals cheering the Soviet army as they made their final withdrawal from the village in the early-1990s, but there was very little about how oppressive that army had been across Central and Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War period, or of how much of the area surrounding Wünsdorf had been closed to the public for over forty years.
Most of us found this presentation of history a bit disturbing, but I suppose it did have the effect of really making us think of the role of subjectivity and interpretation in the understanding of history.
By way of contrast, we also visited the German-Russian Museum in Berlin. It is housed in the building where Germany signed the capitulation to end the War in Europe in 1945. It presents the history of the War between Germany and Russia, and was put together by historians from both Germany and Russia. The difference in mindset here can be summed up by the reaction of our tour guide when we told him we had already visited the Wünsdorf bunkers: he rolled his eyes and said 'oh, THAT place...'!
The seminar was also an opportunity for us to present something from each of our cultures. Our countries were put into groups and we gave joint presentations, Ireland being grouped with Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. We had a little table quiz with questions about each country. I learnt that it's not as well known outside Ireland that the Titanic was built in Belfast or that the character of Seamus Finnegan in Harry Potter comes from Ireland. We finished up with a sampling of Polish chocolate, Czech beer and Jameson, before I attempted (as someone who can't even do my 1, 2, 3s) to teach a group of people in a very small room how to dance the Walls of Limerick, but I think they had fun anyway.
And last but not least, we had a lesson on how to separate our rubbish in Germany. I thought that things had become complicated in Ireland - with most people now having three different bins at home - but that we had at least become fairly responsible with our waste. But then I came to Germany.
There's a bin for plastic, one for paper, one for bio-degradable waste, one for glass bottles that you bring back for re-use, three others for glass bottles that you don't bring back, one for plastic bottles that are re-used, another for plastic bottles that aren't re-used (but which you still have to bring back to the shop anyway), and then one for everything else (except anything electrical, of course).
The lesson ended with a little competition. We were divided into two groups and each given a pile of rubbish to sort as fast as we could. I'm happy to report that my team won, but I'm here two weeks now and I still have to check with one of my German flatmates every time I go to throw something out.
The first thing that struck me about the group of volunteers that I am part of is its diversity. There are 18 of us in total, coming from Germany, the USA, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and me from Ireland. I will be working with one girl from Russia in the Buchenwald memorial, some will work in the Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme or Osnabrück memorials, while others will work in the ASF office, the Gay Museum, in the House of the Wannsee Conference, in youth clubs or with elderly Jewish people in Berlin.
The seminar was designed to give us a chance to get to know each other, to find out more about our projects and to help us to adjust to life in Germany.
To my relief nobody expected us to arrive fluent in German, and I wasn't the only person with quite a basic level. Everything we did was through German and English to ensure nobody was left behind, but also to gradually nudge us all in the direction of German. We all tried our best to speak it and a strange mix of the two languages became the norm around the place. Those like myself would say what we could in German and then switch to English (often mid-sentence) when we had to.
But it worked. It started to become more and more natural to speak German, and I stopped worrying so much about my der, die and das and just spoke, hoping I'd be understood.
We discussed history a lot. In particular we compared the different ways the Holocaust affected, and is remembered in, each of our countries. Coming from Ireland, which was virtually unaffected by the Holocaust, it was fascinating and slightly intimidating for me to meet people who had close family members who had been in concentration camps or who had died at the hands of the Nazis.
After listening to people from Israel or Russia talk about their family histories, I felt embarrassed discussing Ireland's neutrality in the War and its refusal to accept refugees. I read a quote from Michael McDowell when he was Minister for Justice in 2003, in which he acknowledged Ireland's failings during the Second World War.
He spoke of the contributions made by individual Irishmen and women to the fight against the Nazis, but claims that 'it remains the case that our State and our society in many ways failed that Constitutional recognition [of a person's right to freedom of conscience and the State's responsibility to protect that right], whether by tolerating social discrimination, or by failing to heed the message of the persecuted, or by failing to offer refuge to those who sought it, or by failing to confront those who openly or covertly offered justification for the prejudice and race-hatred which led to the Shoah'.
The seminar was held in a village called Wünsdorf, about an hour outside of Berlin. In World War One it was used by the German army as a prisoner-of-war camp for colonial regiments of the British and French armies. During the Second World War the village was home to an extensive complex of army bunkers, and it was here that Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, was planned from late 1940. After the War, Wünsdorf found itself in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the former Nazi bunkers were used as the headquarters of the Soviet army in East Germany until the Reunification of Germany in 1990.
So it's fair to say that we were surrounded by history. We visited the bunker complex, and got a taste of how most of us agreed history should not be presented. The site doesn't receive funding from the German government and is managed by an independent organisation. Our guide showed us around and described almost proudly how the shelters were so well-built that they survived extensive Allied bombing-raids.
We saw photos of locals cheering the Soviet army as they made their final withdrawal from the village in the early-1990s, but there was very little about how oppressive that army had been across Central and Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War period, or of how much of the area surrounding Wünsdorf had been closed to the public for over forty years.
Most of us found this presentation of history a bit disturbing, but I suppose it did have the effect of really making us think of the role of subjectivity and interpretation in the understanding of history.
By way of contrast, we also visited the German-Russian Museum in Berlin. It is housed in the building where Germany signed the capitulation to end the War in Europe in 1945. It presents the history of the War between Germany and Russia, and was put together by historians from both Germany and Russia. The difference in mindset here can be summed up by the reaction of our tour guide when we told him we had already visited the Wünsdorf bunkers: he rolled his eyes and said 'oh, THAT place...'!
The seminar was also an opportunity for us to present something from each of our cultures. Our countries were put into groups and we gave joint presentations, Ireland being grouped with Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. We had a little table quiz with questions about each country. I learnt that it's not as well known outside Ireland that the Titanic was built in Belfast or that the character of Seamus Finnegan in Harry Potter comes from Ireland. We finished up with a sampling of Polish chocolate, Czech beer and Jameson, before I attempted (as someone who can't even do my 1, 2, 3s) to teach a group of people in a very small room how to dance the Walls of Limerick, but I think they had fun anyway.
And last but not least, we had a lesson on how to separate our rubbish in Germany. I thought that things had become complicated in Ireland - with most people now having three different bins at home - but that we had at least become fairly responsible with our waste. But then I came to Germany.
There's a bin for plastic, one for paper, one for bio-degradable waste, one for glass bottles that you bring back for re-use, three others for glass bottles that you don't bring back, one for plastic bottles that are re-used, another for plastic bottles that aren't re-used (but which you still have to bring back to the shop anyway), and then one for everything else (except anything electrical, of course).
The lesson ended with a little competition. We were divided into two groups and each given a pile of rubbish to sort as fast as we could. I'm happy to report that my team won, but I'm here two weeks now and I still have to check with one of my German flatmates every time I go to throw something out.
Ich heisse Daniel und ich bin dreiundzwanzig Jahre alt
The minute I found out I'd be moving to Weimar I regretted giving up German after my Junior Cert. What was I thinking picking chemistry instead?
The programme is for international volunteers and prior knowledge of German isn't a necessity, but acceptance came with the understanding that I would do my best to learn as much German as possible before I set off.
Once I had got my finals out of the way, I sat down with 'Teach Yourself German', a book released in the 1930s that my dad had used a few years ago. Modern language books are all about interactivity and buying train tickets, but this one is unashamedly boring. Each section begins with a completely inadequate description of a particular aspect of German grammar (and anybody who has ever studied German knows that there are a LOT of them) and then gives you about twenty sentences to translate in each direction, using your almost-acquired new skills.
And it's absolutely brilliant. In no time at all I was translating complicated sentences about the child's uncle selling books to sailors and maidens from his shop by the beach. Knowing the ins and outs of the genitive case was all well and good of course, but I did also have to learn how to actually speak German so I enrolled in a course in the German cultural institute in Dublin, the Goethe Institut.
I spent three evenings a week for four weeks at the Institut and couldn't believe how much I learnt in such a short time. The two teachers I had were both excellent. They were native speakers and worked to make the classes as relevant and fun as possible, all the while focusing on getting us over the biggest hurdle faced by anyone learning a new language: making actual sounds come out of your mouth.
After my course I set off to Weimar in July delighted with myself and my new ability to speak German. I was going over for a two-week summer camp organised by ASF in Buchenwald - it's a sort of very condensed version of what I'm doing now. The main reason I went was to get a bit of practice in German before I moved over, but I immediately fell into the English-speaker's trap: I spoke English the entire time because everybody around me spoke it far better than I could speak German. Suddenly my pre-fabricated sentences about my family weren't as impressive as people from Germany who could watch 'Friends' in English without subtitles.
This was quite disappointing and I was determined not to let it happen again, so I decided that from the moment I landed in September Gearmánais briste would have to be better than Béarla cliste.
The programme is for international volunteers and prior knowledge of German isn't a necessity, but acceptance came with the understanding that I would do my best to learn as much German as possible before I set off.
Once I had got my finals out of the way, I sat down with 'Teach Yourself German', a book released in the 1930s that my dad had used a few years ago. Modern language books are all about interactivity and buying train tickets, but this one is unashamedly boring. Each section begins with a completely inadequate description of a particular aspect of German grammar (and anybody who has ever studied German knows that there are a LOT of them) and then gives you about twenty sentences to translate in each direction, using your almost-acquired new skills.
And it's absolutely brilliant. In no time at all I was translating complicated sentences about the child's uncle selling books to sailors and maidens from his shop by the beach. Knowing the ins and outs of the genitive case was all well and good of course, but I did also have to learn how to actually speak German so I enrolled in a course in the German cultural institute in Dublin, the Goethe Institut.
I spent three evenings a week for four weeks at the Institut and couldn't believe how much I learnt in such a short time. The two teachers I had were both excellent. They were native speakers and worked to make the classes as relevant and fun as possible, all the while focusing on getting us over the biggest hurdle faced by anyone learning a new language: making actual sounds come out of your mouth.
After my course I set off to Weimar in July delighted with myself and my new ability to speak German. I was going over for a two-week summer camp organised by ASF in Buchenwald - it's a sort of very condensed version of what I'm doing now. The main reason I went was to get a bit of practice in German before I moved over, but I immediately fell into the English-speaker's trap: I spoke English the entire time because everybody around me spoke it far better than I could speak German. Suddenly my pre-fabricated sentences about my family weren't as impressive as people from Germany who could watch 'Friends' in English without subtitles.
This was quite disappointing and I was determined not to let it happen again, so I decided that from the moment I landed in September Gearmánais briste would have to be better than Béarla cliste.
Thursday 15 September 2011
Why?
The question I'm most often asked about what I'm doing is 'why?'
Why would someone with no connection to the Holocaust (and virtually no German) choose to move to a small city in East Germany to work as a volunteer in a former concentration camp?
It's a fairly simple and obvious question, but unfortunately there isn't a simple and obvious answer.
I started looking into what I was going to do after college about a year ago. I considered all the options - continue studying, travel, try to find a job or internship, or go on the dole - but none of them seemed right for me. My classmates and I had spent the first three years of college joking about how unemployable we'd be with degrees in history and political science. But as we started into final year it suddenly hit home: for the first time in our lives there wasn't an apparent 'next step' to be taken.
The thoughts of looking for a 'real' job or of facing into more study made me want to fail my exams so I'd have to repeat. I started looking into the European Voluntary Service (EVS), an EU programme that allows young people to live and work as volunteers abroad, in both member and non-member states.
Literally the first project that caught my attention while I was searching through the mind-boggling EVS database was the very one I'm on now. I was studying the Weimar Republic at the time, so the simple fact that Weimar was listed as the location made me take a look. A year working in Buchenwald concentration camp memorial: it was intriguing, but not really what I had in mind at the time, so I continued looking.
I found a few other interesting possibilities and started looking into them, but Buchenwald had somehow lodged itself in the back of my brain and I kept finding myself reading over the details again and again. I've always found Germany fascinating. Here's a country that went from jingoistic monarchy, through experimental republic and fascist dictatorship, to economic powerhouse in the space of a lifetime, and all while still finding time to give the world Albert Einstein, Bauhaus and Haribo.
Much of our focus in college was on how countries choose to remember and interpret their own histories and the role this plays in forming a society's sense of identity. There is arguably no country with a more troubled history than Germany, but also none which has done more to face up to its past. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is exactly what I wanted to do.
The programme is run by Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (translated into English as Action Reconciliation Service for Peace), an organisation founded in 1958 by some members of the German Protestant church who felt that they had failed to provide resistance to the Nazi regime. They wanted to ease the suffering of the victims of National Socialism and work to ensure that they are never forgotten. ASF also works across Europe and the USA to fight against racism, anti-Semitism and neo-fascism.
I sent in my application in January, was called for interview in Berlin in February and found out a few weeks later that I'd be heading to Weimar in September...and the rest is history!
Why would someone with no connection to the Holocaust (and virtually no German) choose to move to a small city in East Germany to work as a volunteer in a former concentration camp?
It's a fairly simple and obvious question, but unfortunately there isn't a simple and obvious answer.
I started looking into what I was going to do after college about a year ago. I considered all the options - continue studying, travel, try to find a job or internship, or go on the dole - but none of them seemed right for me. My classmates and I had spent the first three years of college joking about how unemployable we'd be with degrees in history and political science. But as we started into final year it suddenly hit home: for the first time in our lives there wasn't an apparent 'next step' to be taken.
The thoughts of looking for a 'real' job or of facing into more study made me want to fail my exams so I'd have to repeat. I started looking into the European Voluntary Service (EVS), an EU programme that allows young people to live and work as volunteers abroad, in both member and non-member states.
Literally the first project that caught my attention while I was searching through the mind-boggling EVS database was the very one I'm on now. I was studying the Weimar Republic at the time, so the simple fact that Weimar was listed as the location made me take a look. A year working in Buchenwald concentration camp memorial: it was intriguing, but not really what I had in mind at the time, so I continued looking.
I found a few other interesting possibilities and started looking into them, but Buchenwald had somehow lodged itself in the back of my brain and I kept finding myself reading over the details again and again. I've always found Germany fascinating. Here's a country that went from jingoistic monarchy, through experimental republic and fascist dictatorship, to economic powerhouse in the space of a lifetime, and all while still finding time to give the world Albert Einstein, Bauhaus and Haribo.
Much of our focus in college was on how countries choose to remember and interpret their own histories and the role this plays in forming a society's sense of identity. There is arguably no country with a more troubled history than Germany, but also none which has done more to face up to its past. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is exactly what I wanted to do.
The programme is run by Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (translated into English as Action Reconciliation Service for Peace), an organisation founded in 1958 by some members of the German Protestant church who felt that they had failed to provide resistance to the Nazi regime. They wanted to ease the suffering of the victims of National Socialism and work to ensure that they are never forgotten. ASF also works across Europe and the USA to fight against racism, anti-Semitism and neo-fascism.
I sent in my application in January, was called for interview in Berlin in February and found out a few weeks later that I'd be heading to Weimar in September...and the rest is history!
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