Sept. 15



GERMANY:

At the Gift Shop: Souvenirs of Buchenwald


Tourists visiting the city of Goethe and Schiller are bombarded with
busts, key chains and other trinkets bearing the likeness of Weimar's two
biggest celebrities in nearly every shop.

Just a few miles away, on a swath of wooded hilltop that is the site of
the city's most somber tourist attraction, a gift shop offers little more
than a wide assortment of books and postcards. For years, the Buchenwald
Memorial has preferred to keep it that way.

But in a move that aims to confront the challenge of passing the solemn
lessons of the Holocaust on to future generations, the memorial began
working with design students at Bauhaus University in Weimar last spring
to create what until now had been taboo: concentration camp souvenirs. A
sampling of the results, ranging from small plaques to stationery embedded
with tiny pebbles and twigs from the site, are to go on sale at the
memorial's gift shop in time for the 60th anniversary of the camp's
liberation in April.

"This generation has grown up in a different culture, with different
mediums," said Volkhard Knigge, a Holocaust scholar who directs the
Buchenwald Memorial. "We need to attempt new ways of communicating with
them, and give them the chance to formulate their own way of accessing''
the history here. "Otherwise we're speaking a language they don't
understand."

The pioneering project has already caused a stir among Holocaust memorial
organizations. Critics say the line separating piety and profit is crossed
when camp memorials sell anything other than educational material like
books or DVD's. Last summer a Polish artist, Agata Siwek, caused a
sensation with an exhibition in the Netherlands of Auschwitz "souvenirs,"
including key chains and refrigerator magnets that visitors to the show
could buy. Attempts in the past to sell cheap trinkets near concentration
camps, including Auschwitz, have been quickly shut down.

"We don't have things like medals or pencils with 'Auschwitz' printed on
them, and we don't intend to," said Jarek Mensfelt, spokesman for the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland. "That would mean
commercializing it."

The Buchenwald project organizers say their souvenirs are well thought
out, and that the money is not the main draw. The memorial's $9.2 million
budget, financed by state and federal grants, is enough to maintain the
site, Mr. Knigge said.

He said that he did not think the items would sell well, but that the
project was "about building bridges.''

"The greatest profit will be to see how people between the age of 20 and
30 remember this time,'' he said. "How do they build themselves bridges to
this period?"

Like Mr. Knigge, Gerrit Babtist, the design professor who led the class at
the Bauhaus University, said he thought souvenirs might be a way. "There
is not one type of person who visits a camp. There are many different
people who react differently," said Mr. Babtist, who brushed aside the
reservations he had when first approached by the Buchenwald Association, a
group that plans and organizes exhibitions and special projects for the
memorial. "I think it is a very human thing to want to take away
something, an object, that is loaded with the emotions of the place."

Together with an archaeologist and a Weimar historian, Mr. Babtist began
by immersing his 11 students, almost all in their early 20's, in Holocaust
history. They traveled to Berlin and met with an architect who worked on
the city's Jewish Museum with Daniel Libeskind and toured the Jewish
quarter with a historian before returning to Weimar for much of the same.

They spent three days at Buchenwald, where from 1937 to 1945 the Nazis
murdered an estimated 56,000 people of many nationalities. Today, a few
reconstructed buildings, a stone memorial and the rubble remains of
prisoner blocks lend a haunting, empty feel to the place. It was there,
just a 30-minute bus ride up a hill from the center of town, that many of
the students came up with their first ideas.

Sabine Hipp, who grew up near Weimar, created a small booklet featuring a
black-and-white photograph of one of the victims from pre-camp times and
that person's life story, gleaned from the camp's archives. The pamphlet,
which will eventually feature a number of different camp victims should it
go on sale, is designed to accompany the visitor throughout the
concentration camp.

"I wanted to pull a person out of this mass of people and numbers, and I
wanted to pick a photo that the victim themselves would have picked," Ms.
Hipp, 21, said.

Other students used Germany's postwar constitution as inspiration, copying
quotations from the paragraphs dealing with human rights onto small
plaques or wristbands. One used the thousands of buttons unearthed on the
site as a metaphor, creating a simple, clear button pin with "Buchenwald''
inscribed on it.

The forest of beech trees that served as the camp's namesake inspired Tom
Hanke's souvenir, one of the association's favorites. Mr. Hank took sprigs
of beech and planted them in pots that visitors can take home.

"The tree, without question, carries the crime within itself while at the
same time representing, as a growing plant, something else: life," he
wrote.

Like many classmates, Mr. Hanke was unsure what would come out of the
project as they began work in April. No fan of souvenirs himself, it took
some time before he came around to the idea that mementos can help fill a
need for some visitors.

"Sometimes not just the knowledge, but the feeling that you have is easier
to translate into an object than into writing," he said at an exhibition
of the students' work in July.

Olaf Theuerkauf, a media consultant who founded the Buchenwald Association
and gave wings to the idea, said that he thought that this generation was
perhaps the best equipped to tackle such an emotionally volatile project.
Though the Holocaust remains a strong presence in German society, enough
decades have passed to allow the young students the necessary distance to
go at their work pragmatically, he said.

"We're the third generation, we are not the ones directly affected and
that simply changes the way you think about it," said Stefan Unholtz, one
of the design students. "This project shows we're just confronting'' the
history more actively, he said.

There is no indication other camp memorials intend to follow in their
footsteps. Mr. Mensfelt said the possibility of selling souvenirs at
Auschwitz was "beyond consideration." Dirk Mulder, the director of the
memorial at the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, said the
project was "one step too far," for him.

In 1991 Westerbork set up a memorial of 102,000 stones commemorating the
number of victims deported from the camp who eventually died. They were
quickly bombarded with requests to sell the stones in souvenir form.
Officials of the camp memorial, which has its own corporate logo, declined
but did agree to sell small coins commemorating the different victim
groups who died.

"I'm curious to see what they come up with," Mr. Mulder said of the
Buchenwald project. "Maybe in a few years, people will look at what they
did and see they did a good job. Maybe things will change. I've been
working here 19 years and my ideas of how to deal with these memories have
also changed."

Visitors had mixed reactions. Renate Blther lost her father in Buchenwald
and returns twice a year to the memorial to lay flowers "because we have
no grave."

After a recent visit she said that she thought that souvenirs were "more
for people who haven't lost anyone."

"For us, such a thing would probably be too kitsch,'' she said. "It's not
a bad idea if they do it tastefully. I could understand it then."

On the pathway to the main camp, a young couple making their first trip to
Buchenwald said they had nothing against souvenirs. "I generally find the
idea good," said Sandra Gehrmann, 28, a geriatric nurse visiting from
Dresden. "I don't see it so fanatically. This is simply a piece of
history, and nothing more."

Last month, the Buchenwald Association decided on the 10 objects, of the
39 produced by the class, that will most likely go on sale. There are a
number of questions that need to be answered, such as what final form the
souvenirs will take and how they will be presented. The biggest question
of all - whether anyone will buy them - won't be answered until next year.

"Maybe one person will put the souvenir on their desk, another person will
put it in a drawer, yet another may carry it out around with them in their
pocket," Mr. Theuerkauf said. "I think everyone has a different way of
looking at this."

(source: New York Times)