As Goethe's City Is Honored, Buchenwald Lurks Nearby

By Roger Cohen

WEIMAR, Germany, July 28, 1999

Always a crucible of the best and worst in Germany, this small town has emerged a decade after the fall of the Berlin wall as a focus of national questioning and conflict.

Festivity should be in the air. This year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Weimar's most distinguished son, Goethe. The town was selected by European ministers as the Continent's "cultural capital" for 1999, an accolade that has spurred spending and sprucing on a scale unknown elsewhere in the former East Germany..

Its Communist decay dusted off, its church spires repainted, Weimar now suffuses cobblestoned charm, the stuff of fairy tales. But the town - home to Schiller and to Nietzsche, birthplace of the Bauhaus - is also adjacent to the Nazis' Buchenwald concentration camp, where more than 50,000 people were killed between 1937 and 1945. This juxtaposition of high German thought and base German barbarism has complicated the celebration of culture. Goethe's drawings have been put on show -at Buchenwald,. Schiller's house was chosen for an exhibition about the death in 1939 of several hundred Viennese Jews at the camp. Not everyone approved.

This week, in a sign of the tensions, six sculptures by the British artist Stuart Wolfe that were on display in a Weimar church and represented camp victims were destroyed by unknown assailants. The police have offered a reward of several thousand dollars for information.

Friction has also stirred between the "Wessis" from the former West Germany who have dropped anchor here to direct many of the cultural events, and the "Ossis" who feel resentment over what they call the "Western conquistadors." Some locals feel that their past is being misrepresented at Buchenwald and elsewhere.

"Weimar is a mythical place, our Jerusalem," said Volkhard Knigge, the director of the Buchenwald memorial. "What we have been trying to do is sort history from myth, and show the story of Weimar and Buchenwald are intertwined. The Goethe Society was furious over our exhibition of drawings, but this process is inevitably painful." The pain, in many ways, is. also that of all of Germany. The country, a little weary of seeing its history reduced to Hitler, is struggling to find a balance between a renewed thirst to celebrate the great flowering of German culture in Weimar and elsewhere with the duty to remember the Nazi past.

It is also battling with a unification process that has proved far more difficult than expected precisely because the "cultures" of east and west are so divergent, and the memories of each part do not coincide. "Everyone in Germany now feels themselves responsible for Goethe, for Schiller and for Beethoven - but nobody for Himmler," Ignatz Bubis, the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in an interview published in the magazine Stern this week. It was an angry outburst, and a wild accusation, but it reflected the cultural uncertainty of a country moving its center of gravity back to Berlin from Bonn even as Germany's two 20th-century dictatorships - Hitler's and Erich Honecker's are still heatedly debated.

Nowhere more so than in Weimar, which suffered the ravages of both Nazism and Communism with particular intensity. The name of Goethe, synonymous with German genius, has consistently acted as a magnet to regimes anxious to bolster their standing. "The good and the bad have always wanted to exploit the symbolism of this city," said Friedrich Folger, the Deputy Mayor. From the moment, six years ago, when Weimar, with a population of about 60,000, was chosen as Europe's cultural capital for 1999 - the first town of the former Soviet bloc to be so honored - Bernd Kauffmann, the director of the festival, was determined to break with the city's habits and treat Weimar and Buchenwald as a single entity.

This decision, he said, was rooted not in perversity or guilt, but in the history that has made the alternation of eclectic culture and narrow provincialism, avant-garde audacity and reactionary conservatism, enlightenment and repression, perhaps the single most distinguishing characteristic of Weimar. Bach lived here, only to clash with the ruling family and land in prison. Goethe and Schiller came to Weimar, befriended each other and together ushered in the "Golden Age" of German Literature in the late 18th and early 19th century. But by the end of the 19th century, reactionary, anti-semitic thinkers like Adolf Bartels had made Weimar their home.

In the 19th century, the Bauhaus movement was founded here in 1919, drawing the likes of Walter Gropius and Paul Klee to Weimar. But then, the narrow-mindedness of central Germany reasserted itself, driving the Bauhaus 100 miles away to Dessau, and ushering the Nazis to power in this region as early as the late 1920's.

Hitler loved the place, visiting it dozens of times, trying to make the town of Franz Liszt and Lucas Cranach a showcase of the qualities of the German "Volk". Not for nothing did he decide in 1937 to build Buchenwald a few miles from town as a prison for Jews, homosexuals, leftists, Gypsies and others seen as enemies of the Reich - and those whom the Nazis saw as emblematic of the Weimar Republic. "In the ideology of the Nazis, Buchenwald was a cultural project that belonged in Weimar," said Mr.Knigge, the director of the camp memorial. "Its purpose was to root out all that was unworthy, all that was seen as cancerous, from Germany society, so that the Volk could be united and at one in its genius."

The intimate ties between town and camp were graphically illustrated in 1942 when Otto Koch, the Mayor of Weimar, had the singular idea of ordering prisoners at Buchenwald to build wooden boxes to protect the works of Schiller and to make reproductions of the furniture in the writer's house so that the originals could be stored.

"It is essential that we understand how close one is to another, how Weimar and Buchenwald are the light and dark of our psyche," Mr.Kauffmann said. "This, for me, remains a central German theme." But the way that theme has been illustrated has proved an affront to some. The former Christian Democratic Interior Minister Manfred Kanthner has called the emphasis on Buchenwald "tiresome." Petra Uberhause of the Goethe Society said several of its members were unhappy about the writer's drawings going on display at Buchenwald, although no formal protest was made.

Tensions have been fanned by the fact that both Mr. Kauffmann and Mr.Knigge are "Wessis," the former from Hamburg and the latter from Cologne. Achim Preiss, the curator of an exhibition devoted partly to the art of the former East German state that has prompted outrage from "Ossis," is also a westerner.

"What the westerners cannot understand is that we also had our birthdays, our weddings, our marriage, our moments of happiness," said Elvira Greiner, a city official who lived in the former Communist state. "Not everything was the crass stupidity and lies they portray."

One of the official East German "lies" concerned Buchenwald, which was turned into a memorial in 1958 by the former regime at a time when West Germany was doing its best to ignore the history of camps like Dachau, near Munich. But the memorial was naturally fashioned to bolster the prevailing ideology. Thus the prisoners who suffered and died in Buchenwald were all, for the purposes of the East German regime, "anti-fascists" and Communists who fought Hitler. This was part of the story - but said nothing of the Jews, Gypsies and others.

The fact that, from 1945 to 1952, the Soviet Army used Buchenwald as an internment camp for Germans, most of them low-level Nazis, and that thousands died there, was also passed over in silence.

Mr. Knigge has now dragged all this history to the surface and is organizing an exhibition of the "history of memory" at Buchenwald since 1945 as part of the celebration of Weimar as Europe's cultural capital. It will open in October.

But although many applaud his efforts, the director has been attacked by east Germans who feel that their Buchenwald has been violated, and by some conservative west Germans who argue that the camp should be devoted as much to the memory of Stalinism as Nazism as a way to remember the German victims of the Soviet Army.

For 34 years, from 1960 to 1994 , Manfred Dathe, 65, was the gardener at Buchenwald. He had enough to live on, he said, and life was secure and predictable. Then the wall fell and all certainties with it.

"We're as German as the westerners, but my pension is only 80 percent of theirs," he said. "Why is that? And why are all the directors - of the festival, the museums, this camp westerners? Do they think we are incompetent?" He continued: "I lost my father on the eastern front in 1942. 1 was 8. And then, when the war was over, we were told that Hitler was bad, and the capitalists who supported him, and fascism, and of course we believed the Communists. Now these people come here and tell us that our history, all we learned, was wrong."

Mr. Dathe shook his head in dismay. Memory in Germany remains an insistent and divisive subject. From the camp, the organizers of the festival have cut a path through the woods that they have called "Slice in Time." It connects Buchenwald with the beautiful Ettersburg Castle, less than a mile away. Here, at her summer home, Duchess Anna Amalia held her the "Court of the Muses" between 1776 and 1780, drawing writers including Goethe, who performed in his own works.

To leave behind Buchenwald's brick-chimneyed crematory, the photographs of corpses piled high, the fence-posts shaped like question- marks, and to emerge- a short time later - from the peaceful woods onto a soft hillside dominated by a castle where civilization bloomed in the 18th century is to grasp something of Germany's agonizing, and enduring, ambiguity.

Goethe's hero Faust declared, "Two souls, alas, are housed my breast, and each will wrestle for mastery there." The message from Weimar in this anniversary is that the wrestling has by no means entirely abated.

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