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.
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