Every block would have its own restaurant, catering to 2,500 people per meal, divided into two sittings. Every week, 20,000 workers from the industrial powerhouses of Nazi Germany would be brought here under a program called Strength Through Joy to prepare themselves mentally and physically to fulfill Hitler’s dreams.

The stuff of dreams, the stuff of nightmare.

“Of course we cannot forget it,” said Peter Spiekermann, 48, a vacationer cycling among the apartment blocks, referring to Germany’s history. “But we can’t go around atoning forever.”

Not sure I’ll ever find a language as musical, as gentle to the ear, as German.

And here’s an OIB preview – the prologue is nearly done.

I was feeling sure enough of the former – it was simply stated to me as “the right choice” – safer, and more art! – even as I received reports of Tel Aviv’s Miami-like quality, a boxy city, international in the bland way, in comparison to Jerusalem’s magic, otherworldly, center-of-the world qualities – and better weather.  And just yesterday, an artist friend from Jerusalem said, “oh no, you must!” – in the past few years, the artistic community there has flourished, and nothing, nowhere, compared with Jerusalem.

The good thing is: for the first time in my life, I am asking a lot of questions.  In part, because I am engaged enough to have them.  In part, because I now know how.

The forecast says a week of rain – well! I can’t deny happiness at the anticipation of all this gray and the way the water paints colors brighter, turns the world into one great canvas of drip and blurring color. Everything transformed and heightened – and yet brought closer, the sky coming in a bit, closing us off for moment from the yawning enomority of the universe.

Last week was beautiful too – a different beauty, the more glorious kind, who needs the security of cloud when you have nothing to hide, to hide from. Tapped out the following on my phone while walking to the subway, dodging automobiles and park slopians on their way to work:

“Such a beautiful day that it’s a little sad – the superlative clarity, gladness, clap of the air, the pigment pure blue backdrop to the sun-lit green of the trees (leaves just in adolescence, imagine that, to begin again each spring) implies all the other days that aren’t so – even when they’re close to perfect – but perhaps it’s muggy or the clouds impinge a little casting the light a sick gray or it’s a bit too warm and the forehead grows moist or the temperature is just so but rain is on its way -

As beautiful as it was, maybe, when WWI began, as told by Stefan Zweig.*

It’s a little sad, but not very – and anyway that sadness anchors the beauty in reality – it’s not a drunken beauty, it’s not heady or soporific or floating. It is brief but it is very real and so I gulp.”

_____________________

*And indeed, I have the Zweig passage referred to en route stowed away in the dusty archives of my gmail drafts, a little jewel waiting and winking in the darkness, to reach the light, gleaming (as part 2 to the blog post I wrote now nearly a year and a half ago) – Zweig on the beginning of the Great War, and the terribly incongruity of the beauty of the summer & the doom, as he says, of Europe’s first implosion. Funny – you know, now that I think of it – I heard again and again on the Thursday Obama came down to the World Trade Center to lay a wreathe and hug the widows – I heard the radio and tv announcers say – a day of such crystalline beauty, it has us all thinking of the day itself of 9/11, our 1 (one) day of war, when even though the sun shone through the September trees dappled onto my driveway with my father home too early from work, even though the sun shone bright in the construction paper blue sky, it felt like the sky had been stripped away, vanished, and there was no gravity, no security at all.

The summer of 1914 would have been memorable for us even without the doom which it spread over the European earth.  I had rarely experienced one more luxuriant, more beautiful and, I am tempted to say, more summery.  Throughout the days and nights the heavens were a silky blue, the air soft yet not sultry, the meadows fragrant and warm, the forests dark and profuse in their tender green; even today, when I use the word summer, I think involuntarily of those radiant July days which I spent in Baden near Vienna.  In order that I might concentrate on my work I had retired for the month of July to this small romantic town where Beethoven loved to spend his summer holidays, planning to pass the remainder of the season with my honored friend Verhaeren in his little country house in Belgium.  In Baden one does not have to leave the city to enjoy the country.  The lovely, hilly forest insinuates itself between the low Biedermeier houses which have retained the simplicity and the charm of the Beethoven period.  At all the cafes and resturants one sat in the open and could mingle at the pleasure with the light-hearted visitors who strolled about the Kurpark, or slip into a solitary path.

Already on the even of that twenty-ninth of June, which Catholic Austria celebrates as the feastday of Saints Peter and Paul, many guests had arrived from Vienna.  In light summer dress, gay and carefree, the crowds moved about to the music in the park.  The day was mild; a cloudless sky lay over broad chestnut trees; it was a day made be to be happy.  The vacation days would soon set in for the people and children, and on this holiday they anticipated the entire summer, with its fresh air, its lush green, and the forgetting of all daily cares.  I was sitting at some distance from the crowd in teh park, reading a book – I still remember that it was Merejkovsky’s Tolstoy and Dostioevsky – and I read with interest and attention.  Nevertheless, I was simulatenouusly aware of the wind in the trees, the chirping of the birds, and the music which was wafted toward me from the park.  I heard the meoldies distinctly without being disturbed by them, for our ear is so capable of adapting itself that a continuous din, or the noise of a street or the rippling of a book adjusts itself completely to our consciousness, and it is only an unexpected halt in the rhythm that startles us into listening.

And so it was that I suddenly stopped reading when the music broke off abruptly,  I did not know what piece the band was playing.  I noticed only that the music had broken off.  Instinctively I looked up from my book.  The crowd which strolled through the trees as a single, light, moving mass, also seemed to have undergone a change; it, too, had suddenly come to a halt.  Something must have happened.  I got up and saw that the musicians had left their pavilion.  This too was strange, for the park concert usually lasted for an hour or more.  What could have caused this brusque conclusion?  Coming closer I noticed that the people had crowded excitedly around the bandstand because of an announcement which had evidently just been put up.  It was, as I soon learned, the text of a telegram announcing that his Imperial Majesty, the successor to the crown, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, who had gone to the maneuvers in Bosnia, had fallen victims of a political assassination there.

More and more people pressed toward the placard; the unexpected news was passed on from one to the other.  But to be honest there was no particular shock or dismay to be seen on their faces, for the heir-apparent was not at all well-liked.  From the very earliest days of my youth I can recall another day … [reminiscence about the death of the emperor] My almost mystic premonition that some misfortune would come from this man with his bulldog neck and his cold, staring eyes, was by no means a personal one but shared by the entire nation; and so the news of his murder aroused no profound sympathy.  Two hours later signs of genuine mourning were no longer to be seen.  The throngs laughed and chattered and as the evening advanced music was resumed at public resorts.

Like.
To.
Read.

It’s not just that now there’s a bit of time for reading, or that I get to choose what to read next – it’s that I feel, quite naturally, that there’s something I’d like to do.

Not so today.  The body is weak in comparison to the full, conscious force that blinked into nervous awareness at 5:30 am when a car roared by the newly opened window and the eyes shot open to an explosion of early morning blue.  Still in dream palette for a moment, the soft brilliant blue was shocking, too bright, the end of the world, or at least the end of the dreaming.  Perhaps the body can’t withstand the moment of rupture, the thrill and the horror of the every day; perhaps it is reading Patti Smith before bed, how she & Robert Mapplethorpe drew deep into the night, until they fell exhausted into each others’ arms; perhaps it is the urgency to figure where and who and how I’ll be and what and when and where I’ll make, to answer all the questions now that it takes a life to answer.

Whatever the case, sleep isn’t coming again today.  I’m in this life now.

By way of entertainment, I’m clearing out my gmail drafts. For instance:

15 january 2011
i would like to have knowledge in the following area
type design
computer programing
biological reasons for

12 january 2011
353
251

6 january 2011
haven’t done this in a while.
i think a large part of my fear of religion is my fear of ceremony
my fear of roles
my fear of performance, and things being distant, something i can’t control…

choco chip cookies:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/2011/01/battle_of_the_w_2.php

14 december 2010
Sehr geehrte Teilnehmerin der Jugendbegegnung, sehr geehrter Teilnehmer der Jugendbegegnung, vielen Dank für das Ausfüllen des Formulars. Wir haben Ihre Daten erhalten und werden uns bemühen, sie zügig zu bearbeiten. Ihre noch offenen Fragen werden wir schnellstmöglich per Email beantworten. Wir freuen uns auf Ihr Kommen! Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Das Vorbereitungsteam der Jugendbegegnung 2011

22 november 2010
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2010/nov/22/whos-getting-married/

9 november 2010

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125231223

[fresh air interview with an ailing tony judd]

17 october 2010
i think part of the reason it is so hard to use words as neutral tools is because they have so many
ASSOCIATIONS for me
they are so laden with other meanings and COLORS even
that I can barely see a word for just a word
but rather I feel all of the other words that sound the same, smell the same
stood next to each other on a bleached out sign in fresh pond by the dull grassed rotary on the way home from high school

5 March 2010
allowed me to feel like part of long line of master-pupil relationships, which i’ve never been able to adopt before — in part because i was always a diffident student of the violin, which would have been the perfect place for falling into that relationship.
I’ve always retained some detachment, some sense of self.  I wonder if, in part, it’s the awkwardness of being a female pupil, the potential discomfort that role could create, if only because it reverberates with others’ stories.  The old boy model does not translate over well.

Even here I have no desire to draw like carlos – i know instinctively that I want a greater sense of line, of mark, that i want a roughness to correspond, to offset the smoothness.  But the way he teaches, gentle comments, a suggestion now and then.

october 2009
coolness versus class

there is nothing unusual in the idea that cool would be related to class; it feels simultaneously repulsive and desirable. But this will always be the case; a higher class and more money BUYS YOU THE TIME BUYS YOU THE THOUGHT BUYS YOU THE ROOM BUYS YOU THE CLOTHES

to be cool

I can’t like it, I can’t warm to it — and, while I don’t want the “cool”, I want the privileges of cool: the time to think, the ability to self invent, the luxury of respect.

hipsterism contextualized. our generation is not, after all, a thing entirely new, unto itself. But a product. A GROWTH.

“It’s that Selfhood has its own berth now in the psychiatrist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” a generational shift presaged by American sociologists who, as early as the 1970s, posited that, while hungry people are concerned about survival, those who grow up in abundance will hunger for self-expression.”

GAG ME — and yet.

We may be among the last to have had our kind of education. Our obscene, bloated, unnecessary education.
Always, the charge: AND WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH IT?
WHAT UTILIZES PRIVILEGE AND EDUCATION AND NATURE?

how can i justify? because it is always important to have people who think and do. Always.

You have to be straight on your ideas about the world.

I love that andrew bird’s music is in part dictated by the technology at his disposal: the loops he uses affect the very compositional structure of his live performances: layers, introduced one at a time. And then faded in or out — like poetry: the art is born from its constricting, limiting factors.

“But to read them all through is to sense that even if their proximate cause is the easy availability of gobs of money from wealthy men who decided, in their declining years, to do something for the Jews after betraying tikkun olam for their whole working careers, they are nonetheless associated with a real historical situation, and a generational one: that of a group of young people raised on simplistic fairy tales about the Holocaust as the core of Judaism and then suddenly placed into a real world for which the Holocaust is no longer a useful analytical tool.” – http://www.nplusonemag.com/people-magazine

a sort of reverse misery poker:
someone is always working harder than you
someone is always more jewish than you…

he was the kind of person who only truly came to life in the presence of alcohol; the state of action excited in him by consumption and the state of acceptance brewed in everyone else combined to a kind of perfect world for [college classmate's name]. (combined to create the only world in which he could truly rule).

COMICS THAT I LIKE
Tin-Tin
The Night Fisher
Persepolis
Maus
Perdida
99 Ways

What I absolutely need:
Photoshop
A good scanner
A printer
Xerox (?)
SPACE SPACE SPACE

get in touch with M & J

black glasses slipping down her nose, she looks over at us like a turtle. scrunchy in her hair. the most annoying voice i’ve ever heard.

without a pen in hand, a keyboard at fingertip’s touch — i am mute.
it’s about having a quiet pride. a firm, calm belief in one’s self.

having pride in one own’s work – the ESSENCE

read robert mortherwell

Though an abstract painter, de Kooning “worked from observable realuity, primarily from figures and the landscape.” Inspired by his adopted city New York and later, East Hampton. An association between his figures and landscapes, focused especially on them after the Woman. Worked in his studio. Highway paintings.

“I’m just crazy about week-end drives, even if I drive in the middle of the week. I’m just crazy about going over the roads and highways. They are really not very pretty, the big embankments and the shoulders of the roads and the curves are flawless – the lawning of it, the grass. This I don’t particularly like or dislike, btu I wholly approve of it. Like the signs. Some popel want to take the signs away, but it would break my heart. All those different big billboards. There are places in New England where they are not allowed to put those signs, and that’s nice too, but I love those grotesque signs”

“I refrain from ‘finishing’ it. I paint myself out of the picture, and when I have done that, I either throw it away or keep it. I am always in the picture somewhere. The amount of space I use I am always in, I seem to move around in it, and there seems to be a time when I lose sight of what I wanted to do, and then I am out of it. If the picture has a countenance, I keep it. If it hasn’t, I throw it away.”

you can tell the straight male artists, because there’s invariably a series of dirty drawings of girls.

THE YEAR THAT CHANGED THE WORLD; The Untold Story Behind The Fall of the Berlin Wall
By Michael Meyer
Scribner. 239 pp. $26

all attention attuned to a potential flash in the upper left hand corner of my screen. communication! sociability!
i don’t want to ally myself with the brocade sewing, stitching, menstruating feminist art. i don’t want that. i recognize, or am just beginning to recognize.
it’s really not about this or that or the other thing. it’s completely different perceptions of reality.

WANT TO PAINT ON MIRROR. just sayin./

http://www.heymancenter.org/events.php

it’s not that you wait around two decades to become famous. it’s that you wait around to get GOOD (and to know people). it just takes time, mothafucka. tiieeaaiiimme.

god save me from marrying a man who divorces me for a woman 20 years my junior.

29 July 2009

I suppose most would find the analogy, “New York is to Fairfax, VA as Kansas is to Oz” puzzling, if not outright backward.  But after this past weekend, the big city herself seems a little lacking in shine, diminished in magic, in comparison to glittering basement of one Matt Delauder and his merry band of Fairfaxians.

#masthead {
height:137px;
}

<strong><a href=”">Read more on our blog!</a></strong>

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despair
debonair
impair
declare
fair
pair
pare
fare
spare
bare
bear
air
e’er
chair
mare
where
wear
ware
underwear
lair
layer
mayor
prayer
care
dare
tear
rare
share
extraordinaire
hair
hare
ne’er
scare

The conference began on a gray Saturday afternoon at the Jungendgästehaus in Dachau with an opening discussion surrounding the question “was geht mich das noch an?” – what does this have to do with me? How does this involve me? A very Passover question – a similarity no doubt lost on many – but just one of the frequent curious overlaps I’ve noticed with Jewish themes, this business of asking question, of remembering, of gathering and talking together. Sometimes I felt the Germans have become more Jewish, the Jews more German, but that neither party has a foot enough in the other world to know or notice…

Gerta Hasselfeldt, Vice-President - Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag / AMO

Max Mannheimer, Auschwitz & Dachau Survivor - Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag / AMO

"Was geht mich das noch an?" - Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag / AMO

Various representatives of the Bundestag (German government) and Max Mannheimer, Jewish survivor of Dachau and Auschwitz spoke and responded to questions, the underlying format for all of our encounters with officials throughout the conference. We then had the option of choosing among six different Arbeitsgruppen (working groups), with the themes Sinti und Roma im KZ Dachau, Jüdische Häftlinge im KZ Dachau (Jewish Prisoners in Dachau), Aussenlager des KZ Dachau (working camps surrounding the actual concentration camps, where workers were essentially enslaved at organizations such as BMW), Die Stadt Dachau und das Lager (the city and the camp), Denkmal und Erinnerungskultur (Monuments and Memory Culture), and Tat und Täter (the Act and the Perpetrator — or really, the do and the doer — I love the simplicity of German, sometimes).

My first choice was Tat und Täter — I am fairly well versed with the plight of the prisoner at this point, several YA Books hammering the question “what would this have been like” into my head at a young age, forming the backbone of my rather grim, atheistic view on life to date — and wanted to learn more about the other side. But it seems that several others felt similarly (perhaps because of the pretty young tour guide who presented the topic), so I landed my second choice, Sinti und Roma, and I am grateful for it. Both for the chance to learn a story entirely new to me, and for the people in the group, who, though often several years younger than I, essentially swept me into their embrace and took care of me.

Arbeitsgruppe Eins - Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag / AMO

The first full day, we all toured the camp of Dachau.

Dachau - Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag / AMO

There is very little to say of the experience, at least emotionally: both times I have visited camps have resulted in an absence of feeling: I am moved at so many mundane, prosaic things (ambulances, babies, standing ovations), that perhaps the greatest respect I can pay something is simply not to feel. To be left cold (which we were, terribly, three hours outside in a German January). I stood in the gas chambers, I stood in the crematorium, and I did not shed a tear: in part, it was not the time. I was with strangers and I recognized, on some level, that I was a symbol, the American Jew from afar: my tears would have meant something beyond me, and I wasn’t ready to take on that symbolism.

Dachau - Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag / AMO

In a strange way, this ended my experience with the Holocaust as a Jewish event – while I was acutely aware at all times of where I came from and why I was at this conference, my focus was on the story of the Roma and Sinti.

Before my first trip to Germany three years ago, what did I know about WWII? I have a very modest history education: I know the world through its artistic artifacts, through sounds and sights, not men and acts and laws – and my 11th grade course on American history. There was that American girl book on WWII, those serious YA books, Maus, degenerate art, Elie Weisel, Benjamin, Zweig, snippets of family history, war movies. Since then I have been filling in the gaps (about this sad story, but the history of Europe in general), and I am still regularly humbled by how little I know about this world.

Here’s one thing I didn’t know: the Nazis killed 500,000* Roma und Sinti. That is “gypsies,” wandering people, die Zigeuner – Roma referring to the Eastern European population, Sinti, the West. Following the visit to the actual camp, our group spent the next day and a half reviewing the narratives of four Roma and Sinti men who were imprisoned in Dachau, reading actual briefs from the Nuremburg Trials, and tracing the doctors’ reports of the “Seawater Experiments” performed on prisoners (as ordered by Himmler, to test tablets intended to mitigate the effects of drinking sea water, to benefits members of the Luftwaffe who ended up in the North Sea).

At work - Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag / AMO

At work - Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag / AMO

Along with other neglected Holocaust victims, such as homosexuals, disabled, and religious prisoners, the Roma and Sinti have only begun to receive recognition in the last 20 years. This is in part due to the lack of an organized Roma and Sinti movement until the beginning of the 80s, which is related to the continuing discrimination their people face in Europe. Noch ein wichtiges Thema – still an important issue in German politics, as Germany struggles with the different non-citizen populations living within its borders: along with the Sinti, Turkish immigrants (the story of the decade in Berlin), Kosovo refuges – as I learned during the conference – forced to return to the Balkans after 15 years in Germany. All cousins to our own immigration problems here in the US. Again and again, I see our humanfolk struggling with the ‘wandering people’ of the world, on an individual level – of distrust & fear, resistance to change, do not love thy neighbor – and on a governmental level – calling into question taxation, the distribution of social resources, and threatening the majority identity in a land…
(With the Jews and the Germans, it’s still about the land.
But in the end, isn’t it always about the land?)

Roma and Sinti Timeline - Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag / AMO

Learning about a non-Jewish holocaust (in fact, the Roma and Sinti call it Porajmos, as distinct from The Shoah, if you’d like to be technical) was perhaps one of the most revelatory aspects of this trip.  As ambivalent as I feel about claiming the Holocaust as “my story” or my “family’s story,” the history of the Roma and Sinti was even less my story — and I deeply felt the difference. Open as I am to Germany, the culture, the history, my German family, I didn’t realize how personally I hold the Holocaust in my own life, how the stories of the 40s are seared into my consciousness, my fears, my pride, my basest beliefs about human nature.
But I did not take on the German perspective, either — later, sitting in a train compartment from Nuremburg to Berlin, trading stories of where our grandparents were then, how they were or weren’t involved — I saw that I was not implicated by my grandparents, did not carry the guilt, or even the probability of guilt, of a family in a smaller, less wandering country than our vast, ever-shifting US, surrounded by those seas of supposed innocence.
Rather, this was like learning about Armenia or Rwanda — it affected and affronted my sense of humanity, but it did not cut to the core, constrict the throat, invade dreams.**

I’m not sure what to make of this yet, but I find my own reaction upsetting.
_______________________________________________

Somewhere during all this, something beautiful happened: over the course of a day and a half of deep discussion of one of the most evil events in human history, on the very land where the Täter tat - I fell in love, collectively, with Arbeitsgruppe Eins. I have a few theories for this:
- I think we were united in part by our shared compassion for the stories of the people we studied ***
- Young Europeans, and Germans in particular, who are willing to engage with this subject tend to be incredibly compassionate, generous people.
- Arbeitsgruppe Eins were just good folk.

We were a good international blend – Mainly Germans, we also had a young man from Poland, a young man from the Czech Republic, and me, of course, a rather exotic figure in this context (ha!). And, as I said, they took care of me – offered me whispered explanations of directions and speeches (even when I understood!), claimed me as theirs and saved me seats, encouraged me through difficult grammatical constructions, and eventually worked out a fluid system of language, where we all alternated between English and German, Deutsch und Englisch, depending on the whim of the moment. All this without any of the American “trust-building” exercises I’m familiar from orientations at college and summer camps. Simple good-natured communal spirit.

I knew so little of them, but I watched so closely and listened so closely (I had to) that I could write volumes on each.

But I’m fading, and this is a public space. So, I’ll trail off — but, as this entirely lacks conclusion, with every intention of continuing the task initially laid out — at some point –

Arbeitsgruppe Eins through the Snow - Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag / AMO

_______________________________________________
* Recently I was incredulous to see I have accumulated 1000 friends on facebook: How do I know 1000 people? And how many people that? I’m not even friends with my mother on Facbeook. And then to think – 500,000. 500 times as many people in my virtual social network.)
** In fact, my uncle told me that there is a program called Abraham’s Vision, which exposes Israeli and Palestinian youths to the conflict in former Yugoslavia. Wise.
*** I won’t discuss it here – but yes, I did find it extremely problematic to discuss a group of people wasn’t in the room – a very American reaction, which hopefully I will discuss elsewhere, if I can find the follow through. (– and was there some relief in not having to review the story of the Jews, die Juden once again? Or am I just imposing my own relief?)