The last three months

I haven't updated my blog in a long time, so this post will hopefully sum up what I've done over the past three months!

After the Christmas break, I got down to the proper work of preparing for giving guided tours of the memorial site. This involved reading through the exhibition catalogue (the main introductory source to most aspects of the history of the concentration camp) and then coming up with my own concept for a tour.

Being honest, this prospect was quite a nerve-wracking one, knowing how complicated the history of Buchenwald is and how emotive and controversial it can be for each visitor or group of visitors in different ways. I have no personal connection with the Holocaust, so no matter how much I study or engage with it as an issue, it will only ever be that: something I have studied from a certain distance or remove. Many of the visitors to the site have grand-parents or great-grand-parents who were persecuted by the Nazi regime, or come from places where the effects of Nazism can still be felt, so there are naturally many sensitivities about how the history of the site is interpreted and presented.

Add to this the size of the site (almost 200 hectares), and the sheer amount of information there is to get through, and suddenly the 90 minutes allocated for the tour doesn't seem so long.

After numerous corrections, revisions and complete re-starts, I finally finished writing my tour by the end of February. I will initially only be giving tours in English and if this goes well, I'll try it in German too in the future. There's not as much of a demand for tours in English as I had thought, but I have an arrangement with the information office whereby I can give tours to individual English-speaking visitors as they turn up and if I'm free. I gave my first tour to an American couple last week and really enjoyed it. Doing it on a smaller scale means I can talk to the visitors a lot more and we can tailor the tour to suit their particular interests.

To return to January, we spent the last week of the month in Berlin at the annual Youth Meeting of the German Parliament, the Bundestag. It was attended by 80 young people from Germany and abroad, many of whom, like ourselves, also work in memorial sites. We spent a week examining many of the different issues in relation to Nazism and how it continues to play a role in the world today.

Speed-dating at the start of the Youth Meeting to help us get to know the eighty new faces!

We were based for the week in the Reichstag building itself and the complex of buildings surrounding it. There really couldn't be a more perfect place to be to engage with twentieth-century German history. The Reichstag had been the seat of the German parliament in the years before the coming to power of the Nazis and they exploited a fire started in the building by a communist in the weeks after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 as a way to consolidate their power and stamp out opposition to the new regime. The Berlin Wall used to run directly behind the Reichstag and since Reunification the building has been completely renovated and once again hosts the parliament of a unified Germany. One of the features maintained in the renovation is graffiti left by some of the Soviet soldiers who captured the Reichstag during the battle of Berlin in May 1945.

For the week we were divided into themed work groups and I chose the one focused on the memorial culture surrounding National Socialism in Germany today. Our group visited many of the larger memorials in Berlin, including the well-known and controversial Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime and the memorial for the Sinti and Roma victims of National Socialism, which, despite twenty years of debate, is still a building site. However, we also visited smaller, more local memorials throughout the city, many of which were erected much earlier than the 'official' ones.

With the whole group, we visited the Sachsenhausen memorial site and the Jewish Museum, where I took part in a workshop examining original documents dealing with how life for Jewish people changed in the immediate aftermath of the Nazis' coming to power. We also visited a synagogue and held a discussion with a Holocaust survivor.

The programme was very packed and we were all wrecked at the end of each day, but we always had a bit of free time in the evenings so we were able to catch up with the other ASF volunteers based in Berlin.

The event ended with us attending the 'Gedenkstunde', or 'memorial hour', that takes place each year in the Bundestag chamber on 27 January, the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism. The ceremony itself was very simple, with some music and addresses by the president of the Bundestag and a survivor of the Holocaust.

Beyond this, I have continued to work in the archives and the visitors' information office, as well as doing translations and helping out here and there around the site. In the middle of April there will be a five-day programme of events to mark the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp. I'll be working to take care of the group of English-speaking former prisoners and their families for the duration. I think it will be a fascinating experience to accompany them as they return here and spend some time getting to know them on a more personal level.

I have also just returned from a preparation seminar for this year's ASF summer camp at Buchenwald. All loyal reader(s) of this blog will know I was a participant in this summer camp last year before I started working here, and this year I will be working in the camp as a 'teamer' (as they call it!). The seminar itself was a great way to meet about 40 other ASF volunteers from Germany who are currently on placements across Europe, Israel and the USA and who will be 'teaming' the dozens of other summer camps this year.

I think that pretty much summarises my work since Christmas. The weather here has really picked up over the past few weeks - I was beginning to wonder in February if I would ever see the end of the snow - but spring has thankfully finally arrived.

Since Christmas, I have visited Leipzig and Munich (to visit the volunteers living there) and am looking forward to spending Easter in Hamburg. I am now beyond the half-way point in my volunteer service, but there is thankfully still plenty more to come!