Dachau is the first concentration camp that I’ve seen, and even though I’ve learned about the depths of depravity we humans are capable of by reading about the horrors and visiting the Rwanda Genocide Museum, by visiting the old slave market in Stone Town, by walking through Berlin and learning about the Holocaust in school and in Germany in an unapologetic way, it felt important to see this place, to walk through the ghosts of things that should not have happened.
Ditto, Oktoberfest. I mean, it felt important to go. I’ve been in Munich a few times (even when the Wiesn was in full swing). I love Germany. Aachen feels like my 2nd home. Yet for some reason, Oktoberfest has never been on my list… But this time there was time in the itinerary, so why not.
That these two juxtaposed realities can exist in the same plane of existence is both appalling and yet somehow not entirely unexpected.
The words arbeit macht frei (work makes you free) are wrought into the iron in the entry gate at Dachau. It was a work camp more than a death camp, though the calculated deliberateness of the atrocities and the hypocrisy of the arbeit makes it very clear why chiefs from this camp went on to do even more evils at Auschwitz and others.
Walking the grounds and exhibits, in their brutal honesty, makes you realise that as horrible as the recounting was, it was sanitized for the sake of the viewer. Sanitized, for fucks sake. What actually happened there was far worse.
It was a gray, semi-rainy late-September morning. By the time we left, I was cold. My feet hurt. I was hungry. I needed a shower. Absurd first-world problems by any measure. Unfathomable, by today’s.
A cold, almost metallic, shiver stayed with me throughout the gray morning, and I couldn’t get the word hypocrisy out of my mind as I tried to align the thoughts this should not have happened with how close are we now to the timeline then?
It was a quiet bus-then-train ride back to the hotel, where a shower felt a little more decadent than the day before and a snack of some day-old bread was a luxury in a real world that felt so surreal and undeserved after the morning.
Rhetorical question: How can we simultaneously release ourselves from the past while living with empathy and integrity and inclusiveness so that history doesn’t get the chance to repeat itself?
Genuss lässt dich vergessen (indulgence/enjoyment makes you forget) is written nowhere that I’m aware of, yet the visions of the morning dissipated as we meandered the streets of Munich and wended our way to the Theresienwiese, the Oktoberfest fairgrounds. Along the way we saw lederhosen-clad revellers on electric scooters, dirndl-dressed Fräulein, and oodles of others dressed in traditional garb and less-so.
We had been with German friends for the past week and a half, all of whom joked and rolled their eyes that we wanted to go to Oktoberfest; all of whom suggested visiting the more authentic Oide Wiesn.
So we entered the fairgrounds via the Oide Wiesn, the historic Oktoberfest, in hopes of avoiding some of the chaos outside these gates. It felt like a state fair, only 11,000 times bigger, replete with enormous beer tents and oompah bands and Bavarian folk dancing. As one does, we indulged a bit: drinking steins of local beer, eating Bavarian pretzels and Fischbrötchen, riding the Willenborg Ferris wheel, and maybe the best part, peoplewatching, because the outfits and the mayhem truly make the day.
The Oide Wiesn felt like the safe place, as venturing into the wilds of the main Oktoberfest madness felt like a frat party on steroids. We ducked in and out of beer halls and played “spot the American tourists” (inebriated 20-somethings in rented lederhosen with stuffed chickens on their heads…I am not kidding) and “dodge the detritus” (unfortunate results of said inebriation) enough to call it quits for the day and head to the exit with one final auf Wiedersehen to the experience.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to visit the polar extremes on the humanity spectrum in the same day…But maybe it does. Maybe they both teach us lessons on balance and compassion and bramacharya, restraint.
- Be kind.
- Don’t let apathy win.
- Indulge…but not to excess.
- Practice equity and empathy and compassion.
- Laugh…at yourself before others.
- Live modestly.
- Love generously.
- Learn rabidly.