Levi describes Améry’s total dislocation at Auschwitz, his sense of being a complete outsider, though surrounded by people who were, apparently, speaking his own language. But the German of the camp was ‘a barbaric jargon that he did understand but that scorched his mouth when he tried to speak it’. Like other supposed ‘survivors’ of the Holocaust – like Celan, like Levi – Jean Améry never recovered from his experience; he also committed suicide, in 1978. The words on his gravestone in the Zentralfriedhof cemetery in Vienna are stark in the extreme:
JEAN AMÉRY
1912–1978
AUSCHWITZ NO. 172364
*
8 July 1999, Weimar
We arrive in Weimar on a sticky summer’s evening. A huge banner outside the station reminds us that it is ‘European City of Culture’ this year. We find our gasthaus, and then walk back to the centre. We pause by the Nationaltheater, where the Weimar National Assembly hosted the German Parliament briefly after the First World War, from February to August 1919, after the January 1919 election – the first time women had been able to vote in Germany, and also the first election carried out under a system of proportional representation. This was also the place where the Weimar Constitution fully established Germany as a parliamentary democracy.
In front of the theatre there’s the famous double statue of friendship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Friedrich von Schiller, the two spiritual giants of this place. A young guy with a ponytail, a music student, is playing classical requests on a piano in the main square. How is it really possible to grasp the meaning of Weimar in German culture? It’s best known as the home of those twin pillars of German thought, Goethe and Schiller, the place where Goethe lived for most of his life – arriving in 1775 at the age of twenty-six, and staying here until his death nearly sixty years later in 1832. He and Schiller met in Weimar in 1794, and then followed a rich collaborative friendship here until Schiller’s early death in 1805. Our Rough Guide puts it thus, with admirable brevity: ‘At Weimar, with Herder, Schiller and others, Goethe evolved the classical German ideal of culture as a process of personal spiritual development.’ There’s no directly comparable place in Britain – I suppose you’d have to fuse together Shakespeare’s Stratford, Britten’s Aldeburgh and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lake District to get close to the sense of artistic centre that Weimar possesses.
And not just in literature either – it was a mecca for the greatest musicians and artists too. Bach lived and worked in Weimar for nine years as a young man (1708–17), as director of music at the ducal court. He had married his wife, Maria Barbara, a year before the move to Weimar, and this was where his first four children were born. It was the place where he created many remarkable works for organ and harpsichord and where he began writing his cantatas on a regular basis. In the nineteenth century Liszt spent almost twenty years there between 1842 and 1861, composing his finest choral and orchestral works. And in the visual arts, in 1919 Walter Gropius founded the revolutionary Bauhaus movement there with Klee and Kandinsky. It became a destination for literary and musical pilgrimage, with grand figures like Tolstoy and Wagner visiting and staying at the Elephant Hotel on the central square. It also lent its name, as we’ve already seen, to the short-lived Weimar Republic and that Parliament – those fourteen years that are forever associated with the twelve years of Nazism which followed. All this vibrant cultural and political activity that a large city would envy, yet one of the things that strikes us on our arrival is just how small it is – a town of only around 60,000 inhabitants.
We walk north, through Goetheplatz, and after a few minutes reach Weimarplatz, where I’ve heard about an exhibition, ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, currently on as part of Weimar’s year as European City of Culture. The exhibition is closed, but we see the rather grim building, the Gauforum, that it’s housed in – a Nazi-era edifice by one of Hitler’s favoured architects, Hermann Giesler. The exhibition has managed to cause great controversy this summer by pairing Hitler’s private collection of art (remarkably kitsch, by all accounts – lots of bland nudes and giant eagles flying to distant mountains) with the art of former communist East Germany. This has touched a nerve in Weimar, partly because this city was previously within East Germany, and the curator of this exhibition is West German, and the implied equivalence between Nazism and communism has not gone down well either in many quarters.
There are some photographs exhibited outside, and very informative panels about Weimar and its complex history – one picture shows thousands of people saluting at a Nazi rally just by the Goethe and Schiller statue we saw a few minutes ago. A panel tells us that in December 1929, the Nazis gained 11 per cent in local elections in Thuringia, enough to gain the party its first representation in Parliament and government. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, author of Art and Race, was made head of culture, and appointed director of the United Art Schools of Weimar, with the specific remit of cleaning out the remnants of the ‘cultural bolshevism’ of the Bauhaus era. One of his first acts was to remove all the art of Kandinsky, Klee, Kokoschka, Dix and others from Weimar’s museums, and in 1930 he ordered the destruction of Oskar Schlemmer’s beautiful mural on the main staircase of the Bauhaus. It was the first Nazi declaration of war against what they called Entartete Kunst (‘degenerate art’). Seven years later, in Munich, the Nazis put on the infamous exhibition under the same title, which apparently broke all attendance records, with over 2 million Germans coming to laugh at the ‘decadence’ of Dada and Picasso’s cubism.
We continue walking, down towards the river now, past the former Gestapo headquarters on Kegelplatz, and find an attractive bar and restaurant with tables outside under lime trees. Over supper we look at maps, and I talk about the walk tomorrow, with the readings that I’ve prepared. We will be walking north-west out of the town, over the Ettersberg hill, and then through the Buchenwald (‘beech wood’) at the summit of the hill, to the camp. If J. and Kay are happy to trust in my plan, we will walk the distance between Weimar and Buchenwald in silence. Our only companion will be the voice of Semprún – the readings I’ve chosen from the book. We will stop every 800 yards (wherever we happen to find ourselves) to listen to his words. I will also take two photographs at these points – showing the direction we’re walking in, and the direction we’ve come from. So, according to the arbitrary nature of where the paces take us, we may be hearing these words next to pounding traffic, in the shade of a hedge or under the gaze of curious villagers …
J. and Kay are happy with this plan; we order coffees and brandies, and talk of past summers and many journeys made together. I notice a group of young people at the next table. Something in their behaviour, a kind of ease with each other, and relaxation in this place, makes me realise they must be from here. I love the way that every few minutes, another couple of friends joins this group, pulling up extra chairs, to laughter, cigarettes offered, stories shared. We head back, past the house where Gropius once lived, and a little further on, Rudolf Steiner’s former home, through the tree-lined streets of Weimar, to our little gasthaus.