Why Visit Dachau?

Prien am Chiemsee, Germany-My gray-haired Hausfrau is perplexed. "Warum denn dorthin? Why in heaven’s name would the young American want to go there of all places?!" We are standing in the doorway of her spotless rooming house in this picturesque little Bavarian resort town on Lake Chiem, just outside Munich. A Fulbright Fellow preparing to enter a German university, circa 1973, I am enrolled at the local Goethe Institute to beef up my German. "Those were bad times, but you didn’t live through them, better to forget!" my Hausfrau mutters, half to herself, wiping the stoop behind me in her tireless crusade against dirt and dust. 

Why, indeed, on such a sunny Saturday morning, with warm weather rare in Bavaria this late in September, with King Ludwig’s fabled palace a short boat ride away on the deep blue lake, a brand new Olympic village to admire, and Munich’s streets teeming with pretty blond Fräuleins-why visit Dachau?

"Wohin, bitte? Where to, please?" the ticket clerk asks officiously without looking up.

"Dachau, please." I try to make it sound neutral, like any other suburban destination.

Even after paying the fare, pocketing my ticket and taking my seat on the suburban S-Bahn for the leisurely Dachau Barracks Todaytwelve mile gambol, I cannot quite believe that such a place really exists.  Staring out the window at Munich’s bland gray satellites, I try to superimpose stamped arms and shaven heads on the faces of my fellow passengers spied in reflection, then nervously reach into my pocket to finger the reassuring cardboard rim of my return ticket. Are they all headed there too? I wonder, as the train slows to a stop. In big block letters, black on white, the word is repeated on uniform station signposts:

DACHAU.  DACHAU.  DACHAU.  DACHAU.

Having spit me out, the little suburban train snaps its doors shut and slips off to mundane destinations. 

There’s a woman pushing a baby carriage along the platform. Babies are born in Dachau. I fasten my eyes, incredulous, on the license plates of passing cars, all incised with the capital letters DA for Dachau. No need to ask directions. My hesitation is a dead giveaway. The station master points to a public bus already waiting at the Ausgang. 

The woman seated behind me on the bus taps me on the shoulder and nods when it’s time to get off. 

A yellow sign in English says "Concentration Camp." Am I the only one who sees it?

Guard towers loom in the distance. They could just as well be the turrets of some "historic" fortress or castle, which Germany has aplenty, were it not for the white stone wall beset with barbed wire. But the barbed wire looks squeaky clean, like its Hollywood facsimile on the old T.V. sitcom "Hogan’s Heroes," only minus the canned laughter. Even up close, the compound with its refurbished barracks and perfectly aligned, parallel, gravel-strewn pathways, looks a little too neat, like a movie set. A pleasant breeze stirs up a fine cloud of sand. Birds flit about, chirping. My sneakers make the only dissonant sounds, kicking up gravel. The spectacle is, in fact, so serene that the Bürgermeister of Dachau saw fit to plant a placard right at the entrance: "Visit Dachau, the 1200-year old Artistic Burg with its Castle and Castle Gardens…"

The silent charade would come off well, and the visitor would leave with a head shake and a sigh, abstractly considering how difficult life must have been "back then," happy to have been born afterwards, eager and ready to move on to the next "historic" monument-if it weren’t for the exhibits in the museum. The Bürgermeister should not have permitted a museum in Dachau.

While the white walls and gravel pathways play it dumb, the black and white photographs and documents meticulously preserved by the antecedents of the current caretakers, tell the story.  An SS directive explains: "…when the word ‘verschärft,‘ (sharpened,) is used, punishment is to be meted out, to male and female prisoners alike, on the bare ass." "Toleranz bedeutet Schwäche!  Tolerance means Weakness!" reads an The Camp’s Gates As They Are Nowhistorical placard. A letter on display written by the camp doctor requests official permission to employ the prisoners as guinea pigs in clinical trials.  Inmates, including captured American airmen, were deliberately infected with malaria or immersed for lengthy spells in icy water to test the effect on their bodies. On display beside the letter are expressive photographs of the progress and outcomes of those trials. 

"Arbeit Macht Frei! Work Makes You Free!" reads the engraved slogan above the original gate in a snapshot taken at liberation. Behind the grill huddle ghastly skeletons. Skulls covered with a translucent sheath of skin and sunken eyes silently confront the visitor. Also on display is a popular German saying of the day: "Lieber Gott, mach mich stumm,/Dass ich nicht nach Dachau kumm!" ("Dear God, make me dumb/That I may not to Dachau come!") 

A short documentary film shot by the U.S. Army and screened at the museum once a day shows General Eisenhower and his troops wincing at the spectacle of open pits heaped high with bodies and still more corpses littering the gravel pathway. In another segment, the local civilian population, compelled by the liberators to visit the camp, file by one by one, heads bowed, with kerchiefs over their noses to mask the stench and wipe the tears.

By curious coincidence, a municipal scheduling glitch no doubt, visitors who stay to watch the movie from beginning to end miss the last bus back to the suburban train station, with no time, alas, to take in historic Dachau, the 1200 year old Artistic Burg with its Castle and Castle Gardens. 

Weary from walking, I sleep soundly that night, awakened early Sunday morning by the roar of a vacuum cleaner. "So," my Hausfrau inquires, long-necked lance of decontamination in hand, "how did the young American find Dachau?"

"Clean, very clean," I replied.

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Copyright © 2006 Peter Wortsman. Peter Wortsman is the author of a book of short fiction, A Modern Way To Die (Fromm, 1991), two stage plays, The Tattooed Man Tells All (2000) and Burning Words, (2004), and an artists’ book, it-t=i (Here and Now Press, 2005) on which he collaborated with his brother, the artist Harold Wortsman. His travel writing has appeared in various newspapers, magazines and on websites, and been selected for The Best Travel Writing 2008 and 2009.

Also a critically acclaimed translator from the German, his translations include Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, by Robert Musil, now in its third edition (Eridanos, 1988; Penguin 20^th-Century Classics, 1995; Archipelago Books, 2006); Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg (Archipelago Books, 2005), Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine (Archipelago Books, 2008), and Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist (Archipelago Books, forthcoming 2009).

The recipient of the 1985 Beard’s Fund Short Story Award, the 2008 Geertsche Potash-Suhr SCALG Prosapreis of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, and fellowships from the Fulbright and Thomas J. Watson Foundations, he was selected as a Fellow in 2010 at the American Academy in Berlin.