A Visit to Buchenwald

Editor's Note: Breyten Breytenbach—poet, painter, prose writer, and political activist—was born in the Western Cape province to an Afrikaner family. Educated in art at the University of Cape Town, he early chose, in the face of the apartheid regime, exile, leaving South Africa in 1960 and settling in Paris in 1962. Here he began his dual career as a painter and writer, his poetry in Afrikaans early winning him recognition as the leading poet of his generation. During a clandestine return to his homeland in 1975, he was arrested, charged under the Terrorism Act, and spent seven years in prison (the first two in solitary confinement). Under the bizarre terms of his imprisonment, he was allowed to write (for the prison censor); his manuscripts were returned to him after his release in 1982. They formed the beginning of his ongoing experiments in the mixed genre of memoir, fiction, travel journal, and lyric. Much of his later prose has been written in English. Although he and his wife are still based in Paris, he was invited to join the faculty at the UCT, has recently taught at NYU, and is associated with the Gorée Institute in Senegal. His memoirs, like his poetry, establish strong ties between landscapes, language, and memories (both political and private). The following account of his visit to Goethe's Weimar and Hitler's Buchenwald will appear in a work still in progress.

3 November
(Write and Wrong.)

I don't know whether I've written this before. One plunders the notebook again and again.

I find: "The past is the ink with which we write the present—and in the process and the flow of writing the words, the concepts and ideas, the images, the flights become . . . just ink. Whereas, what we'd probably like to write would be an open hand wherein time, which is the future of the present movement of surfacing, could find its fit and its fist." (One also remembers that there is lamp-black in ink.)

A little further I find: "You must polish the word—not to have it shiny or smooth, but to make it as clear as the mirror or the pebble in which you can read your face, and may see that your face is death." And then: "The recognition and the acceptance of the Other's humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to know that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows."

These reflections surface during the visit to Weimar where I'm to be a member of the jury tasked with deciding which philosophical essay best answers the question of how to free the future from the past and the past from the future.

It is a curious town, the small provincial capital of Thüringen, egg-yellow façades are washed to keep up a sun-splashed face of classicism and quaint comfort and the late bourgeois charms of GDR democracy—but in the back streets houses are rotting from neglect and decay. The place is flooded with Goethe; he is on every menu—the dogs don't piss against trees and lamp-posts, they bark snippets of the great man's wisdom. And to a lesser extent there's Schiller and Herder and Liszt who played his piano in a big room with an ornate ceiling and Nietzsche who stroked his madness in his mother's house as if it were a moustache. . . . Their spirits flutter above the rooftops and the steeples the way, banners are the remembrance of republics and of battles.

It is dark when we visit the replica of Goethe's Gartenhaus. A blonde lady architect guides us through the low-beamed rooms of the exact copy of the small house where the master used to work. Look, she says and points, we photographed the floor-tiles of the original dwelling so that we could faithfully reproduce the spots and the...