May 27: history’s stage

[logged by HB]

Today we saw two pieces of WWII history: the Nazi Party rally grounds outside Nuremberg and Dachau Concentration Camp. The rally grounds are massive. The two main structures left are the huge coliseum, which was never finished but is nonetheless imposing from the outside, and the grandstand at Zeppelin field. The grandstand is a familiar sight to anyone who’s seen footage of Nazi parades and speeches. The whole complex was built to stage propaganda. Today however, the field next to the grandstand was being set up to stage ‘MTV Rock im der Park’. I suppose it’s good that big public event spaces are used for new things to help heal old wounds, or something like that, but for the one-time visitor, it seems like tainted space.

What also arose while here was a strong suspicion about the few other tourists milling around. Could they be neo-Nazis? Do people come here to admire or pay homage to the villains? Maybe they thought we were. It just wasn’t the place to make chit chat with others. And was I allowed to be impressed with the massive scale of the coliseum or only disgusted by its original builders? It’s a strange vein of tourism, indeed.

If the day’s first stop wasn’t enough to make us queasy, we then headed south to Dachau Concentration Camp, just outside Munich. This is yet another experience I wanted to have to get a better sense of something that we all read and hear about our whole lives. Dachau wasn’t the worst of the camps but it was the first built, the model on which all others were based. It is more preserved/reconstructed than other camps and you get a good sense of what day-to-day life was like for those interred.

Unfortunately, Edie was cranking out during our visit and we were all two hours past hungry for lunch, so many of the recorded recollections from survivors on our audio tour were skipped, lessening the impact of the overall tour. So, yes, Edie nursed here too — no photo.

We ended the day in Schwangau, right down south in the Bavarian Alps.