Arbeit Macht Frei

You aren’t going to describe your experience at Auschwitz?

Why should I try? I don’t have the right words or emotions to attempt to describe the atrocities of this genocide, let alone the authority to.

Still, don’t you think that you, as a writer, should at least attempt to use words to convey the emotions that you personally experience during your visit?

It was claustrophobic, it was haunting, it was agitating, and it was too immense to mentally grasp in any one thought. Is that good enough?

I suppose. But why not try to use some more dramatic language?

Because this location is not about me. It’s not about how serious-sounding words I can come up with to describe my three hour visit to this death camp. Human lives were dragged here. Human lives were destroyed here. They deserve more than dramatic, flowery language. At the end of the day, human life is simple: we are alive, we feel and think; hurt and love. That’s the simple truth of it.

If it was really that indescribable… perhaps you can describe how can we prevent it from happening again?

Can we? I mean, can we really? In order to do that we need to be vigilant. We need to be on guard, not just as an individual, nor a country: but as a world. The price of liberty is constant vigilance (working) against those who would rob it from us. To use the Nazi phrase in bitter irony… Arbeit Macht Frei.

Work Sets You Free

The name of the game for these two weeks has been DISSENT. Having covered Art & Nation, and Art & Ideology, we now moved to Art & Dissent, within the confines of a totalitarian communist state. This is perhaps the lessons that have appeared most similar to some of my lessons in German history and culture, because East Germany was also trapped under the obscurity of The Iron Curtain. This fact puts Germany into a very interesting place culturally and historically today, because it’s strong identity as part of Western Civilization culturally. BUT… that is a discussion for another day.

The thing that has surprised me most of all since coming to Poland and learning briefly about their fall to communism, is the radically different approach to submitting to communism. In the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia at the time – that is an important distinction), the approach was submissive in appearance, and leaving the dissidence to the intellectuals and the artists. There is an overwhelming amount of material about artists who were banned by the government – some who grew depressed over that fact, some who took pride it in, and some who were determined to conform to the law, in order to keep being creative. We also learned that common in both Czechoslovakia and Poland, there was a difference between the communism of the 1950s and the communism of the ‘70s and ‘80s. But it was reversed (I say that loosely, rather, they were perceived differently) to each other. The communism of the 50s in Poland was positive, and life was cheerier, whereas Czechoslovakia was under communism’s iron clad grip and fear. The ‘60s were a period of growing progressiveness in Czechoslovakia until Stalin invaded Prague, and August 1968, he crushed the growing agitation. Then life became dreary, and bleak, and grey… but not quite as oppressive.

Grey is an important theme, which draws me back to our classes. In history, the discussion focused on the grey zone – the area in which people neither dissented nor forwarded The Party’s message (meaning, the communist party). They merely survived, and then reaped the reward in the fall of communism in ’89, by being the best well off in the new political momentum.

Our theater history session was with historian Ripka and our theater lecturer Dr. Barbara Day. We got to learn a lot about her personal involvement with the underground universities taking place in Czechoslovakia in the 70s and 80s, in which professors from the Western world would come on a traveler’s visa and teach a few lectures over the course of a weekend. Being able to talk to someone directly involved was unreal.

In literature we talked about the cultural reality of the present day, as affected by the communistic era. One piece that I really liked was The Tragedy of Central Europe by essayist Kundera, a famous Czech writer. In this discussion, we talked a lot about world literature (having read another piece titled Die Weltliterature) and whether or not it can exist. We were very divided, even when discussing examples such as Shakespeare, the Canterbury Tales and so on and so forth. But this other reading considered the reality and struggle of Central Europe being recognized. Poland, and certainly the Czech Republic (again, formerly Czechoslovakia) has felt a cultural tug towards the west, but a heavy and oftentimes oppressive tug politically towards the East. As a result, it at times has felt like an area that has fallen into disregard and abandonment, and not taken seriously enough as a region or set of countries. And besides, how does Central Europe even become defined? By political borders? How, when bigger countries on either side of Poland keep changing its borders for itself?

And that’s the basic idea to what we have learned about these past two weeks. This week we are in Krakow, Poland; Cíerny Balóg, Slovakia; and Žilina, Slovakia. Next weekend, I will be in Munich, Germany. Then it’ll be back into the classroom, the last two weeks before final exams. Yelp.

Until Next Time,

Joe

In order to cover my Czech Republic Regional Stay in an efficient and satisfactory method, I will not be doing a day-by-day recount of what happened. Check out the Regional Stay Assignment when I post it, if you want to see the journal entries for a couple of the days. Instead, I will be covering the excursion by topics that were relevant and significant to the excursion. My topics discussed will include Family, Hauntings, Art, NGOs, Cultural Curiosities.

On Family

In the personal home we stayed in, family was a strong aspect of life for the week. We were hosted by the grandmother Mirka, who used to be the Mayor of the village Olbramov, and over the weekend, we were guided by her daughter Lucka and son-in-law Markus. They were not at all what I was expecting. Just having spent a week learning about the flip-flop expulsions of first Czech and then Germans from this region, the last family I expected to meet was a mixed marriage of Czechs-Germans. I will refrain from going into personal details, out of respect for this family (who are people, not subjects) but it led to some very interesting conversations. Then Sunday – Tuesday, we met and were guided by their son (Mirka’s grandson) Krystof. In this time, we got to meet Lucka’s other three sisters, as well as her youngest son. We went on an arts tour with her on Tuesday, since she had been an art “major”.  Throughout all of this, Sunday night was the craziest, because the whole ensemble was there. The interesting thing was, we got the sense that it was not that uncommon of an event. Certainly no time was spent preparing the house to look extra nice, like what would happen in the US.

On Hauntings

Hauntings pervaded much of this trip, because we were really living in an area (the former Sudetenland) that had suffered some terrible history between the Czechs and the Germans. As a German speaker, I was lucky to have been placed in a family that not only encouraged learning about the history, but in a real sense of the word, lived it (lives, I should say). Multiple times we saw German graveyards, and these get me every time. The state of the tombstones is shocking in some cases, some… in fact, completely nameless and simply tossed into the corner. That once represented someone’s life, and now, not even an identity is attached to them. The same could be said for the abandoned villages. There are countless of them in the Czech countryside, but the one we saw consisted of a stone pillar next to a wooden swing, and a small pile of mossy stones just off to the side. That is all that remains of the village center.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about these experiences however, is if you go and simply contemplate in silence. You get a powerful sense of the history that is speaking to you, and you also get an unspoken sense of what has been lost here: the memory, and sometimes even the lives; you look at a pile of mossy stones, and you realize that there is where someone used to return to every night, somewhere they used to call home. Then you back up and realize that the memory of a whole generation of Germans living in the borderlands got completely obliterated, in a surge of resentment, anger, and sometimes even outright hatred.

On Art

Art was also a fairly common one here. It started with our first night, which we went to go see a Pecha Kucha performance. Pecha Kucha is a “performance”/presentation style, where you present 20 slides in 20 seconds each for a total of 6:40 long presentations. There were some really interesting ones: an artist who uses wet cement to create paintings of everyday items or scenes (e.g. looking down a city highway) and one about creating city wide hammocks all over the country/continent, that homeless people could use by night, and could be used for recreation by day, as just a couple examples. Another cool art exhibit was this modern artist that was clearly using technology for his paintings, and they were super simple. It’s hard to describe, but the paintings consisted of basic shapes: blocks, circles, lines, in order to paint some sort of domestic or nature picture (a harvest field, or a bowl of spaghetti, for example). Then of course, there was the big art tour on Tuesday morning. Here we saw a lot of restoration efforts of these historical sites, and some of them were absolutely mind-blowing how much work had been done, and how successful they were. We also learned a lot about art history when we went to the cathedral as well. A memorable statue was the one we visited in the middle of the woods. No back story to that. It was just found there. Randomly.

On NGOs

Non-Governmental Organizations. We learned about two of them, Monday morning. We learned about one that funds money to towns and villages that apply for this funding, and can prove a real need with important projects. We learned about another the funds children’s art programs. If they have a project idea, they can apply and get a considerable amount of money (for young children’s programs, which the idea is often created or at least shaped by the kids). Both of these were quite interesting: the first had more to do with efforts to help preserve these villages, and maintain both their present use, and their historical significance. The second was motivated in attempting to create a home culture for these kids, so they will recognize the village as their home, as somewhere they want to be, and hopefully somewhere to stay and live their lives, rather than heading off to a bigger city (such as Brno or Prague).

On Cultural Curiosities

Now, I could write a whole ton on this. Probably literally. At the very least, I could right 15 weeks’ worth… (from August 30 – December 13, 2014). But in the context of this visit, I came up with the term because we had several notably lengthy conversations with Krystof (and even some with his dad, Markus) about the American culture vs. Czech/Prague culture vs. Czech/countryside. One of the biggest discussions we had was regarding the American workaholic culture, and how that really defines every single other aspect of an American life. Where you live, who you fall in love with, how much money/what kind of living you have… they’re all based on this idea of you go and find work, and everything else will follow. Notably different than the less competitive Czech spirit, and even more different than the laid back life of the Czech countryside. The other reason I came up with this phrase is because it relates back to the beginning and the discussion of family. Living with this mixed Czech-German family could not have been a better inspiration for me in regards to my ISP and regards to my future plans regarding German. It’s a curiosity because of the region’s history, but perhaps most of all, to me it’s a cultural curiosity because it has so much to offer to the future in terms of healing, learning and growing. As a culture, for which direction that will take you, there could be no greater curiosity.