Dachau/Peissenberg /Mittenwald

Schloss Nymphenburg

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Wednesday. Today was a complicated one logistically, and included running for three different trains and trams, but we caught all of them and our plans all fell into place. After a very full day, we arrived in Mittenwald this evening around 8:45 and ate dinner outside at a very pleasant Greek restaurant here. (The pork and potatoes seemed more German than Greek, but the waiter brought us shots of ouzo instead of schnapps to go with our pints of Mittenwald draft.)

This morning we took the train to the concentration camp memorial at Dachau, and it’s a little hard to find words for the experience. My first impression of the gravel expanse bounded by ugly barracks was that it was the negative image of the garden expanse we saw at the Nymphenberg Palace in Munich the day before. One has a certain grand beauty on an unreal scale, the other is utterly life-denying on a similarly inhuman scale.

Dachau

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Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp, established in 1933 to hold political dissidents. It was a work camp and was never intended to be a death camp, though it certainly became one through overcrowding and cruelty. Doug thought it was more disturbing to see this camp than it might be to see Auschwitz or Treblinka because he found it almost understandable to see how such evil can grow through small steps. We both found ourselves seeing the evolution of the concentration camp from the perspective of Americans troubled, horrified, and frightened by the steps our government has taken since the attacks of 9/11. I still think that the United States has a stronger tradition of constitutional law than 1933 Germany had. But the experience is nonetheless chilling.

The sheer amount of information available at the site is overwhelming, and I found myself drawn to artifacts that reflected particular personalities: a chess set or small illicit drawings of fellow inmates being beaten. Some sense of shame at being a voyeur in the presence of others’ suffering kept me from taking pictures of these, though I wish now I had these pictures to post to this site. I was also moved at seeing a packet sent to an inmate from the Red Cross, which had been returned since the inmate had been sent on to a death camp. After seeing so many pictures of anonymous dead bodies, it’s almost more unbearable to realize how carefully the government tracked what was happening to every person. After three days of appreciating the careful efficiency of Germany, I’m cast down by the terrible combination of that efficiency with the Nazis' genocidal mania.

The Orwellian message over the entrance to the camp

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En route to Mittenwald, where Doug studied violinmaking in the sixties, we reentered the intense green of Bavarian countryside, an idyllic and finely-crafted world on a very human scale. A short side trip took us to the small town of Peissenberg to visit colleagues of Doug’s, who also studied at Mittenwald. Wendy and Peter Moes live in a beautifully restored house from the 16th century. You can see from the picture of it that it combines house and barn in the traditional Bavarian style. Wendy and Peter have converted the lower half of the barn into their violin studio and they use the upper half for concerts.

Beautiful as the Bavarian countryside is, I feel I will be carrying with me throughout the rest of the trip a more visceral awareness of the horrors inflicted on so many by the grandparents of the friendly people around us.