by S. Jovian Radheshwar
Bombay, India, July 5, 2003 (Originally composed on the InterCity Express Bullet Train, en route from Munich, Germany to Karlsruhe, Germany, June 19, 2003)
I rose very early this morning, full of purpose, well rested, and totally unprepared for the events of the day would follow. I hopped onto the S-Bahn number 2 train at Munich’s central terminus and rode it for twenty minutes to the central terminus of the town of Dachau. There I caught the number 724 bus to the site of the first and model concentration camp of the 3rd Reich, Germany’s Nazi regime of the middle part of the last century. Immediately, upon entering the camp’s grounds, I was greeted by guard towers and a formidable perimeter defense, largely intact save for the small opening kept for tourists and the otherwise curious. What follows may be overdone, cliché writing, but I must express myself. I was shortly after entering the War Memorial overcome with emotion, forcing me to lower my wrap-around shades over my eyes to conceal my more or less constant weeping throughout the morning (quite cloudy that day). Indeed, I cried, and not so much walked, my way through the exhibitions that have been set up there.
Indeed, despite, or perhaps because of the enormity of the crimes committed there, the survivors of the camp had to overcome German attempts of collective amnesia to construct the museum and memorials found there now; something that, upon learning the progression of the events post-WW2, shook me almost as much as standing in a room containing ovens specifically designed for the incineration of human beings. This desire of the war generation to forget the crimes of their people reminded me all too much of the genocide of the various peoples who inhabited the North American continent, committed for the most part by white people and their offspring in America over three-hundred years of treachery. Hopefully, it wont be construed as prejudiced if I mention here that the various American peoples are not as well-organized as the survivors of Dachau and Auschwitz, and thus the collective amnesia of the American people of other backgrounds continues, poisoning our nation with an imperceptible festering slowness, revealing itself here and again through the increasingly racialized body-politic.
As I walked around Dachau, in a gas chamber, rooms for gruesome medical experiments on prisoners (which resulted in thousands of especially horrifying deaths, depicted in photographs saved from the war), the animalistic sleeping quarters and other places of sheer horror, I could feel the death in the air; I mean this not in some short-changing magico-religious way. The people who gave tours, the thoughts of other visitors, the thoughts one has as they sit in a room in which thousands were choked to death with Zyklon B; these all create psychological and metaphysical realities, religious people refer to them as ghosts, which infect the mind. Certainly, contemplating the Holocaust so directly as I did this morning has changed me in a way I might not be able to describe here, I know only that I may not have ever felt sadder in my entire life. This memorial, and no doubt other ones at Birkenau, Trebelinka, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and others, are a visit that ought to be required of every person in the world. It will render the most fierce-spirited into a pacifist.
There is truly not any solution to a cycle of violence, other than to merely not retaliate at the moment of the decision’s onus being cast upon you. But this is certainly very old news, and has been mentioned by far more learned people than I. For some reason, collective amnesia prevails, and rules the day.
I think that the work of those who keep Dachau open as an exemplary memorial is the most commendable work I have ever seen, and their enthusiasm for history and truth is so heartening in the cold world of heartless killers. German schoolchildren go to Dachau on class trips, there were hundreds of them there today, and it seems that together they will derive the truths of such horrors and perhaps by the next generation’s leadership era, the collective amnesia of the German people will be replaced by collective admission, and naturally, after collective acceptance, and a damn lot of tears, Germany might be embodying of its more progressive heritage. We need such a spiritual cleansing to begin in America, needless to say, especially now. As the ship of our state is hopelessly led down the path of fascism by the truly terrible, ignorant and hateful men, and token woman, who run the country, we must remember the freedom found in free expression and curse the bastards, careful to not wish them any physical ill-will.
In Germany, when I was nine years of age, a Wall, erected by Nikita Khrushchev, separated the city of Berlin, and while the Germans use their coined term: die Mauer in der Kopf: to describe the ongoing split between the mentalities of the former east and west Germans, it applies to the wall in the minds of all too many white Americans and their continuing collective amnesia regarding their position in American society and the extreme violence of that position’s derivation. I have personally tried to confront this Wall with American friends of mine; the results have been catastrophic for me. Loss of friendships, and certainly at least one previously excellent relationship with and otherwise intelligent (beautiful, too) girl unraveled and turned utterly acidic. Her racial superiority mechanisms kicked-in. She jumped off the Wall as she and I were scaling it together and was caught by the ghosts of her Nazi spy great-grandfather (truthfully, he was, and he continues to enjoy a vaunted position in her family’s mythology). I however, continued on, and sit now totally on the other side. I’ve always been quite good at understanding the Wall.
But I lose track of my thoughts (I am currently on a Bullet Train, going some 175 miles per hour, the sun is setting over the German countryside, this is all so breathtaking) and I wanted to talk a little bit about something I saw in West Berlin, an der Mauer, when I was nine years old. I saw a lot of graffiti, in particular one graffito: “Fuck the Army”. As a boy of nine, I was quite fascinated with cursing, but it seemed transcendentally appropriate to see this expression in West Berlin (at the time, as well as remembering it today). No particular army was singled out, so fuck ‘em all. I like that. The Nazi army that invited ruin on the German people, the Soviet army and its brutal occupation and management of the east German state, and of course, the mad and fucked up American army for making Germany (both west and reunified) a constant target of islamo-fascists and the Soviets by deploying Pershing-2 Minuteman intermediate range nukes there and by practicing an unenlightened foreign policy predicated on hate, fear and all the things that the Germans wish to put behind them. Germany is more or less a pacifistic nation today, being dragged this way and that by armies. Fuck the army. Du hast gesagen es, mein Bruder. Graffiti is everywhere in Germany today, and for that I commend the free expression of the German people. Graffiti was long ago declared illicit in its birthplace, New York City, by our retarded former mayor Ed Koch, who wouldn’t understand modern culture on any count.
I could really go on and on (indeed, I think I am). Roger Waters, an idol of mine, the lead artist of Pink Floyd, wrote an album, The Wall, which explores themes of World War 2, Nazism, and how Britain and America are not so different. Furthermore, this was once performed by the Berlin Wall when it still stood. No doubt the Wall is a symbol in all our minds, and like the excellent new film “Matrix Reloaded” suggests, perhaps of all humanity, only some 250,000 have crossed it into freedom.
To walk through Dachau is to learn the worst aspects of oneself, to realize what evils humans have perpetrated upon our little soccer ball floating in the void round a life-bulb of birth some 93,000,000 miles away. When one witnesses the commitment of the tour-givers, the catholic nuns who have set up on the camp’s grounds (their head nun was a prisoner at Dachau) and the numerous memorials scattered about the grounds, one realizes that humans are yet capable of good and beauty. The world has been a cold, cold place in my lifetime, and it is not a god, or wealth, or anything else, other than other people, where I find the will to go on. And when I realize that they and I are equals in spirit (read: mind, psyche) I am made happy, invincible and find the ability and desire to go on within myself. Ever changing, I realize spiritual stasis is certainly not as good as a short and meaningful life. Mind death is worse than actual death. Of course, a long life and a long mind are the best of all. I’ll close this ramble with words, so simple yet poignant nonetheless, that I saw at Dachau today. Call it advice for the Mad King George the Second of America, and ruthless heartless cadre of Ministers:
“ NEVER AGAIN” (You Fuckers)