Walls That Remain by John Rodden

Author:John Rodden [Rodden, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317249412
Google: b_tYCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-01-08T05:06:24+00:00

IV

Back at the main administration building, I talk again with the students participating in the JBS program, who have just finished their own tour of a different part of the campgrounds with Herr Rook. The students are discussing the documentary film O Buchenwald!, which introduces the camp to visitors. Produced in 1984—during the GDR era—the film explains the development of political repression during the Third Reich and the daily life of inmates in Buchenwald. Nobody is born a neo-Nazi, says one eastern German boy. Two western German students observe that the film lays heavy emphasis on the fate of the German Communists. An eastern student replies that, although O Buchenwald! stresses the role of German finance and industry in Hitler’s rise to power, and how German socialists and Communists were mistreated, the film is surprisingly free of blatant propaganda. The exchange reminds me that these youth encounters are also opportunities in post-reunification Germany for youth groups to meet and discuss problems of understanding one another’s culture. Each year thousands of European youth from dozens of student and extracurricular groups visit the JBS. As in GDR days, German schools also regularly sponsor competitions in modern history, where prizewinners go to Buchenwald for several days to research history “on site.”

The JBS is unique, partly on account of the strong financial support from the federal and state governments that Buchenwald continues to receive. Buchenwald was the largest camp in Germany before reunification, and the one that received the highest level of financial support during the GDR years—and the same is true today. (Dachau, near Munich, is the only camp left in western Germany; eastern Germany also continues to maintain two other camps: the Ravensbrück camp for women and Sachsenhausen camp, both located near Berlin. Due to its proximity to Munich, Dachau has a million visitors; Buchenwald has less than half that number.)

As I walk and talk with students, I am struck by how seriously these young people take their visit. They do not gawk and prattle like some tourists. Indeed they often treat their visit as a chance to grapple with the unfathomable and carry that struggle back home with them. That impression is most strongly conveyed during my visit to the JBS “research rooms.”

Here the JBS makes available an archive to the students as well as a library that includes 12,000 volumes on the concentration camp system, national socialism, and the history of the Soviet camps, whereby they may investigate those aspects of the camp that they choose. It is entirely voluntary. “This isn’t school,” Herr Rook repeats to the students after our interview. “Do what you wish.” He tells me that students are free to watch TV, to go for a walk, to have a beer and chat. Perhaps surprisingly, when they are left just to themselves, several students spend hours going through the documents, putting together reports for themselves on the history of the camp. They read diaries from officers and surviving prisoners; they scrounge up evidence from scholars about camp life.

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