9 July 1999, Weimar to Buchenwald
We walk into the centre and find a café on Schillerstrasse for a late breakfast. I go off to get more film for the camera, and then we make our way to a meadow, just to the east of the town centre. Here Goethe’s famous Gartenhaus still stands, close to the River Ilm – the place where he loved to write in the summer months, given to him by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar in 1776, and which he used right up until his death in 1832. Large parts of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Faust were written here in this tranquil place.
Outside the timbered building, in the meadow, sitting on a bench, I read these lines:
In living nature nothing happens that is not in connection with the whole. When experiences appear to us in isolation or when we look at experiments as presenting only isolated facts, that is not to say that the facts are indeed isolated.2 The question is: how do we find the connections between phenomena?
And then we begin our walk, at 12.45 p.m. For the next hours the only words we will hear will be from Semprún. Only the words of a survivor will be spoken in this place.
We imagine Jorge Semprún here, at exactly this spot, on that fine April afternoon, only days after the camp was liberated, when he accompanies Lieutenant Walter Rosenfeldfn4 of the American army and they begin to discuss the towering contribution of other German exiles – Adorno, Brecht, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Broch and Hannah Arendt – here by the Gartenhaus, which on that day in 1945 is padlocked. Rosenfeld then recites the following, from Brecht:
Oh Deutschland, bleiche Mutter!
Wie haben deine Söhne dich zugerichtet
Dass du unter den Völkern sitzest
Ein Gespött oder eine Furcht!
Oh Germany, pallid mother!
How have your sons mistreated you
That you sit among other peoples
A scarecrow or a laughing stock!
We walk westwards into the town centre again, but this time I’m counting the paces – transferring coins from my right pocket to my left pocket every hundred yards so as not to lose count. When we stop after 800 yards, very conveniently we happen to be close to Goethe’s town house on the Frauenplan:
Semprún: Trip to Weimar with Lieutenant Rosenfeld
The streets of the small city were almost empty when we arrived. I’d been amazed at how close it was: only a few kilometres separated Buchenwald from the first houses of Weimar. Of course the city wasn’t visible from the camp, which had been built on the opposite side of the Ettersberg, overlooking a verdant plain with peaceful villages. But Weimar was very near, and practically deserted in the April sunshine when we arrived. Lieutenant Rosenfeld drove the jeep slowly through the streets and squares. We saw that the entire north side of the marketplace in the centre of town had been damaged by Allied bombs. Then Rosenfeld parked the jeep on the Frauenplan, in front of Goethe’s town house.
The old man who finally opened the door to us was not at all friendly. At first he wanted to deny us admission. Under the circumstances, he told us, we had to have special permission from the authorities. Lieutenant Rosenfeld informed him that actually, under the circumstances, it was he, Lieutenant Rosenfeld, who represented the authorities – indeed Authority itself, with a capital A, in its extreme singularity: all the authority imaginable. This fact clearly vexed the old German, the zealous guardian of Goethe’s museum-home, but he could not prevent Lieutenant Rosenfeld from entering this shrine of Germanic culture. So [he] entered … with me on his heels. While the old man closed the front door (I’d had time to decipher the Latin inscription above it stating that the house had been built in 1709, for the glory of God and the embellishment of the town, by one Georg Caspar Helmershausen), he shot a look of pure hatred at Lieutenant Rosenfeld, who was already going off to explore the house – and at the automatic pistol hanging from his shoulder. Then that black, mistrustful eye, brimming with desperate anger, had looked me up and down. Rather, it was my outfit he looked at. I must say it was somewhat unusual, and not very respectable. He had doubtless figured out where I’d come from, which wasn’t very likely to reassure him.
In reality, we didn’t need a guide to visit the house … Rosenfeld talked about it quite knowledgeably, providing a wealth of pertinent information. The old guardian had followed us anyway. Sometimes we heard him muttering behind us. He was itching to make us understand how much we were intruders, unworthy of profaning such a place. He reeled off the names of the writers and artists from all over Europe whom he had personally ushered through the rooms of this noble house in recent years. Lieutenant Rosenfeld ignored his mumbling, however, continuing to tell me all he knew – and he knew a lot – about Goethe’s long life in Weimar. Finally, probably frustrated at not having provoked a reaction, the old Nazi spoke more loudly, describing – to our backs – Hitler’s last visit, when he stayed at the Elephant Hotel in Weimar. The voice swelled with admiration in praise of that remarkable man, the Führer. Suddenly unable to stand any more of this, Lieutenant Rosenfeld turned around, grabbed the old man by the collar, dragged him over to a cupboard, and thrust him inside, locking the doors. We were able to complete our visit in peace, out of range of his despairing and malevolent voice.
We walk out of the town square, the old houses give way to a bustling street of shops and cafés, with tubs of saplings growing, as if trying to offset the commercialism of what’s on offer all around. Knots of students browsing in a cavernous bookshop, well-dressed retirees having their Kaffee and Kuchen. An ordinary summer’s afternoon, fast-moving clouds overhead. I check the map again, pausing at a corner; J. and Kay are a few yards behind. We cross a busy road, and now seem to be heading towards the outskirts of the town. Eight hundred yards has brought us to a stop outside a chemist’s; a young woman is just locking her bike in the rack outside.
Semprún: The citizens of Weimar pay a visit to their neighbours, April 1945
A few days earlier, some of the inhabitants of Weimar had gathered in the courtyard of the crematory [at Buchenwald]: women, adolescents, old men. No men of an age to bear arms, quite obviously – those who could were doing so still, carrying on the war. These civilians had arrived in buses, escorted by a detachment of black American soldiers …
On that day, some of them stood at the entrance to the crematory courtyard, leaning against the high fence that usually prevented access to the area. Their faces were stiff, impassive masks of bronze as they gazed with stern attention on the small crowd of German civilians. I wondered what they could possibly be thinking and what they might have to say about this war against Fascism, these black Americans so numerous among the storm troops of the Third Army. In a way, it was the war that had made them full-fledged citizens … whatever their social background, no matter how humble their origins, in spite of the overt or veiled humiliation to which they were exposed by the colour of their skin, the draft had potentially made them citizens with equal rights. As though the right to kill had finally given them the right to be free …
In the crematory yard that day, at any rate, an American lieutenant addressed (in German) the several dozen women, adolescents of both sexes, and elderly men from the city of Weimar. The women were wearing spring dresses in bright colours. The officer spoke in a neutral, implacable voice. He explained how the crematory oven worked, gave the mortality figures for Buchenwald. He reminded the civilians of Weimar that for more than seven years, they had lived, indifferent or complicitous, beneath the smoke of the crematory.