to, and from, Auschwitz

Scale, smell, and order: Auschwitz stretches reason, and defies it, too. It is a grid of barracks, crematoria ruins, and shooting sites. And green fields. Fields of nothingness and excess. To the victims: I am exhausted from thinking about what happened to you here and there. In "My Place/Meine Ortschaft", Peter Weiss wrote about the trains, the arteries of death, and their destination: "At the station of Auschwitz the goods trains clank. Locomotive whistles and lumbering smoke. Buffers that rattle up against each other. The air full of misty rain, the paths softened, the trees bare and damp. Soot-blackened factories, surrounded by barbed wire and walls. Wooden carts grind by drawn by thin horses, the peasant shrouded in silence, the colour of earth. Old women on the paths, wrapped in shawls, carrying bundles. Further off in the fields single farmsteads, bushes and poplars. Everything dismal and worn to bits. Forever the trains up above on the rail embankment, slowly rolling backwards and forwards, barred airholes in the wagons. Sidings lead further, to the barracks, and still further, over barren fields to the end of the world".

memory points

Krakow to Sachsenhausen: from Galician ghetto to model concentration camp in Oranienburg, memorial spaces to the victims are partially archived in their original state. Chairs in the wartime deportation point of Podgorze symbolise the absence of bodies, while "former" is the generic keyword to describe the erasure of Jews from Krakow following their deportation to Belzec and Auschwitz. Crowds and congregation.

Contrary to this intimacy is Sachsenhausen, a model camp in a sprawling suburban memorial site. Neighbours and knowledge. It is disturbingly clinical and experiential in its presentation of the past. The preservation of execution trenches and pathology rooms invites entry into the after life of Nazi persecution.

Srebrenica: on and off the road

Commemoration day, July 11, 1995/2007: departure from Hotel Hollywood, Ilidža, Sarajevo. Convoy of seven buses under police escort for the trip to Potočari cemetery, 6km north of Srebrenica, the site of Europe's worst genocidal massacre since the end of World War II. Voice overs punctuate the journey; sound bite information of forced marches and round ups recalls the intimacy of injury and violence against Bosniaks. Packed lunches for the travellers aspire to minimise the motion sickness for the widely rumoured short journey. But what about preparation for viewing the ongoing exhumation of a mass grave? Help is at hand. Miserable coldness and sludge provoke disappointment in the experience yet the appetite for viewing bones remains unsuppressed. Local remembrance - name calling of the dead in the cemetery and visiting the Srebrenica memorial room. What's in a road trip? Enduring, spectating, navigating, analyzing, complaining, a collective witness experience for the IAGS participants.

balkan book burning

Cultural cleansing: the Serbs' destruction of national library holdings in Sarajevo in 1992 recalls (in part) "Actions against the Un-German Spirit", the student-organised book burnings in Nazi Germany of May 1933 which targeted local and foreign "degenerate" literature. Heritage and documents erased; the building is an archive of ruins in need of new materials and history.

Lindenstrasse 9-14, Berlin

The Jewish Museum: the brochure promotes it as offering "Zwei Jahrtausende Deutsche-Juedische Geschichte". It is more than a museum and an architectural signature of postmodernity. It is a cultural artifact of Jewish integration and disintegration; an experiential, interactive and voluntary intimacy with the Jews is invited and less so with the Germans who engineered their exile and destruction. The building, like the ambivalent history of the Jews in Germany, is disfigured, a permanent and violent scar in endless recall of the past.