Dachau (Munich.4)

Stearns and I visited Dachau, which is a concentration camp a short ways from Munich. Visiting a concentration camp is a really hard experience, but I think also an important aspect of living with the fact that these things happened.

I'm not sure that I've had such a strange experience in my life as walking through a gas chamber. I wonder if the experience is a bit like Arendt's explanation of evil as banal (a phrase that evoked many negative reactions, but by which she meant that evil is shallow and at the surface and doesn't bear deep thought)--there was an arbitrariness to the Nazi plan that is frightening. Seeing a concentration camp makes the evil closer and less abstract, but it also makes you see that it could have been you, just as well as someone else. I'm not sure that I can explain this at all.

In this picture, you can see the row of poplars in the middle of the camp. The sign says that the row was the central place for the people held in the concentration camp to gather when there was any free time.






In the center left of this main building, you can see a sculpture erected. Something that struck me on seeing Dachau was the problem of how to make memorials in these places. The three chapels in the back (one Protestant, one Catholic, and one Jewish) were built in concrete--they were ugly and grotesque (even the crucifix in the Catholic chapel was distorted).




Behind Dachau, but attached to it, is a Carmelite convent, devoted to prayer and silence.