{"id":95361,"date":"2022-06-09T15:16:32","date_gmt":"2022-06-09T21:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=95361"},"modified":"2022-06-09T15:47:47","modified_gmt":"2022-06-09T21:47:47","slug":"extremes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2022\/06\/extremes.html","title":{"rendered":"Extremes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Dachau<\/a>
An international memorial at the former KZ-Dachau (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

With several friends, we spent a substantial part of yesterday visiting the former Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, which is located in what is now pretty much a pleasant suburb of Munich.\u00a0 Fifty-two years ago, I was scheduled to visit Dachau with a group of recent high school graduates during my first visit to Europe.\u00a0 Our tour guide, though, was a neo-Nazi \u2014 not at all the stereotypical skinhead thug that I would have expected; he was the son of an SS officer, yes, but he was also a charming young fellow, completely fluent in English and a student in what is now known as the Technische Universit\u00e4t Wien <\/i>(the highly ranked Vienna Technical University) \u2014 and he really, really didn\u2019t want us to go, because, he said, the Holocaust was an anti-German myth.\u00a0 We still wanted to go, however, so he finally made us an offer that, in the end, we just couldn\u2019t refuse:\u00a0 He came up with tickets for our whole group to the Oberammergau Passion Play, for the same day as our scheduled excursion to Dachau.\u00a0 Roughly sixth row back, center.\u00a0 (I wonder what back channel Nazi-sympathizer connections he used to make that<\/em> happen.)\u00a0 I remember reasoning that Dachau would always be there, but that the Passion Play was performed only every ten years.\u00a0 So, with my fellow tourists, I chose Oberammergau.\u00a0 As it turned out, I\u2019ve now attended three seasons at Oberammergau and will shortly attend my fourth.\u00a0 But, until yesterday, I had never made it to Dachau.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve now been to three of the former Nazi labor camps \u2014 Mauthausen (which I\u2019ll be visiting again tomorrow) and Buchenwald and Dachau \u2014 which I have done, to a significant degree but not solely, out of a sense of moral obligation.\u00a0 Such places and such things simply must not be forgotten.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Gedenkstein<\/a>
The memorial stone in front of Adolf Hitler\u2019s birthplace in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria, which we won\u2019t be visiting this time around but which my wife and I visited some years back.\u00a0 (Wikimedia Commons public domain).\u00a0 Significantly, the stone was quarried at Mauthausen.\u00a0 Happily, the inscription says absolutely nothing about the F\u00fchrer. It doesn\u2019t so much as mention his name.\u00a0 Instead, it reads: \u201cFor peace, freedom, and democracy \/ Never again fascism \/ Millions of dead admonish [us]\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thereafter, my wife and I accompanied three new arrivals for our tour to the Marienplatz, the Petruskirche, and the Viktualienmarkt back in Munich.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Our tour formally began today.\u00a0 Our group took a combined bus-and-walking tour of greater Munich, including the remarkable Allianz Arena<\/a> where FC Bayern M\u00fcnchen plays (which is encased entirely in plastic that can change colors at night) and the spectacular BMW Welt<\/a>.\u00a0 We drove past the Feldhernhalle<\/a> \u2014 which we and our friends had already walked past a couple of times before I realized that it\u2019s the site where the famous 1923 Beer Hall Putsch<\/a> that was led by Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff (inaccurately but not altogether unjustly portrayed as a crazed villain in the 2017 film Wonder Woman<\/em>) came to its unsuccessful end.\u00a0 And we walked them around the Marienplatz, the Petruskirche, the Viktualienmarkt, and the famed Hofbr\u00e4uhaus, which, I\u2019ve now figured out, was the scene of one of Hitler\u2019s very last public speeches.\u00a0 On that occasion, he addressed the alte K\u00e4mpfer<\/em>, the \u201cold warriors\u201d who were among the earliest members of the Nationalsozialisten<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We had a good Bavarian lunch at a restaurant near the Hauptbahnhof, the main Munich train station, and then spent two hours or so at the magnificent Nymphenburg Palace, the summer residence of the Bavarian royal family, and on its vast grounds.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"At<\/a>
Nymphenburg Palace, Munich
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thereafter, we drove away from Munich toward the Bavarian Alps.\u00a0 I must honestly say that, as the Alps began to appear ahead of us, and as we began to drive among the meadows and the woods of the Alpine landscape, I was surprised at the emotional impact that seeing them had on me.\u00a0 I had found Munich interesting, but it\u2019s this green and mountainous Alpine scenery that really moves me, much more than I know how to express.\u00a0 I had almost forgotten:\u00a0 This is the kind of landscape that I find most powerfully moving.\u00a0 It has really affected me, still tonight.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Looking down on Ruhpolding from the Unternberg in a photography that flatly doesn\u2019t do justice to the beauty of the place
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Our group had a good dinner of soup and Wienerschnitzel and panna cotta<\/em> with raspberries in a nice restaurant here in the pretty town of Ruhpolding, where we\u2019re now going to be staying for a while.\u00a0 My wife and I went out after dinner for a pleasant walk under occasional rain sprinkles to visit with some sheep and to stand on a bridge looking down at a rapidly moving stream.\u00a0 Glorious.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Scholl<\/a>
A monument to Hans and Sophie Scholl and the \u201cWhite Rose\u201d (\u201cWei\u00dfe Rose\u201d) anti-Hitler resistance group at Munich\u2019s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit\u00e4t
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I bought three books yesterday in the shop at KZ-Dachau (how very remarkable, in a sense, that KZ-Dachau even has<\/em> a shop!):<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen<\/em> [\u201cHitler: The 101 Most Important Questions\u201d] (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2019)<\/li>\n
  • Inge Scholl, Die Wei\u00dfe Rose<\/em> (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1993).\u00a0 An account of the famous non-violent anti-Nazi resistance group \u201cThe White Rose,\u201d which was led by five students and a professor at the University of Munich \u2014 including the author\u2019s devoutly Christian siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were executed by guillotine just four days after their arrest, on 18 February 1943.<\/li>\n
  • Harald Welzer, T\u00e4ter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenm\u00f6rder werden<\/em> [\u201cPerpetrators: How Mass Murderers Emerge from Completely Normal People\u201d] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2005).\u00a0 This, I think, is perhaps the most important and urgent question posed by the Third Reich.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    \u00a0<\/p>\n

    In the third book, the author cites a 1946 passage from the Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch that I will share here in my own rough translation:<\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/p>\n

    When people who have enjoyed the same upbringing that I did, who speak the same words that I do and love the same books and the same music and the same paintings that I do \u2014 when these people are in no way protected from the possibility of becoming monsters and of doing things that we never would have believed possible for people of our time except in uniquely pathological cases, on what basis can I be confident that I myself am protected from such things?<\/strong>\u00a0 (7)<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/p>\n

    Posted from Ruhpolding, Upper Bavaria, Germany<\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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