Rosie Loves Schnitzel

Living history. What exactly does that mean?

In the kitschy-est sense it means people dressing up and re-enacting some historical moment or period. This can be fun, and useful, but for me it distracts from the actual history of a place or a thing.

In Germany it feels like history is living in the most real sense. This is a nation whose past leaders plunged the continent into two bloody wars. And, of course, a nation that saw the rise of a madman intent on the slaughter of an entire people.

Nowhere you go in Germany can you escape that fact. There are little markers and memorials and plaques everywhere.

There are, of course, also the bigger memorials. Like the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

And the camps.

Yesterday I went to one of the camps.

Sachsenhausen.

Sachsenhausen sits to the north of Berlin in the little town of Oranienburg. It was created as the model concentration camp for the SS. In addition to the prison camp, there was a barracks for the training of troops who would go on to become concentration camp guards.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a camp before, or perhaps the Holocaust Museum in D.C., but from the moment a person came into the camp he or she was stripped of their individuality. Possessions taken away, shaved bald, given striped uniforms to wear, they became nothing in the eyes of the guards.

I’ve been to one other concentration camp — Buchenwald — and at both I was struck by how vast desolate the camps feel.

To be someone stolen from life because of religion or who you married or because you disagreed with party policy and to be locked away in this place where you were less than everything.

I don’t know how people survived the ordeal. 

Neither of the camps I’ve been to — Sachsenhausen or Buchenwald — were death camps. They were simply prison camps where the inmates did hard labor and were expected to expire, but extermination was not the goal of Sachsenhausen. Not the way it was at Auschwitz or Treblinka.

I met a man in Birmingham who had survived one of the death camps and I remember him saying how he was so naive going in. That he wanted to believe they weren’t going to die there.

His mother and a younger sibling were taken off to the showers. When this man asked another inmate where all this smoke was suddenly coming from, the inmate told him it was his family.

I don’t know how you go on after that. But, somehow, he did.

At Sachsenhausen you can go inside restored Jewish barracks. You can walk around the area the rest of the buildings stood and see large markers pointing out where the other buildings were.

All over the camp, where there’s a flat surface, you will find stones and other objects.

In Judaism it’s customary to leave, with your left hand, a stone on a gravesite to show you’ve been there. It’s a form of gravetending.

Sachsenhausen is a giant grave. In a way all the camps are.

You are surrounded by death. And you can’t escape it, not at the camp.

It doesn’t matter that it all happened long before you were born. That these were people you did not know, could not have known.

You look at the photographs of the victims, read their writing, read the descriptions of what was done to them and you are overcome. You are overwhelmed.

You find yourself in a wide open area underneath the infirmary barracks and suddenly the sobs start and you can’t breathe and you rush back into the light because the horror all becomes too much.

This is living history.

The first time I visited Weimar, it was December. The wintermarket filled the town square and my companions and I wandered about the city for an hour or so before driving back to Leipzig.

What had brought us to Weimar had not been the market, but Buchenwald. Buchenwald is the concentration camp just up the road from the city.

I remember being charmed by Weimar, and needing to be charmed by something, and promising myself to go back one day when I had time.

Last weekend I did.

Weimar, for being such a small place now, is important to Germany’s history. It was there the failed experiment with democracy began after WWI. It is also where Goethe and Schiller and Liszt and Bach and a boatload of other important figures in the 19th Century called home.

I visited both of Goethe’s houses in the city as well as Schiller’s. What struck me about all three was how modest they were. I know the men were writers — although Goethe was also much more — but the rooms in the houses, especially Goethe’s gardenhouse and Schiller’s townhouse, are on top of one another.

How can you ever have privacy?

Although, in Schiller’s case, he did take the entire top floor of his home for himself. So, I suppose, that’s one way to do it.

It was rainy, wet and muddy while I was in Weimar so my plans for spending most of Sunday afternoon in the park along the River Ilm were dashed.

Instead, I went into the large Stadtschloss where Bach spent some time as a violinist.

The palace has a pretty impressive collection of artwork, including some wonderful portraits of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the elder, and is, itself, a really gorgeous example of Baroque architecture.

Weimar is celebrating Franz Liszt’s time in the city and I also got to go on a tour, while at the palace, that showcased the old pianos and klaviers. Along the way a young pianist played some of Liszt’s most famous pieces. It wasn’t a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon.

My time in the town was too short. I had hoped to find both Goethe and Schiller’s tombs while there and did not. And, had the weather been nicer, I would have liked to have spent more time simply wandering about.

Even with the rain it was a really pretty place and a nice, quiet, break from Berlin.

After we visited Leipzig we moved on to Cologne. We were only there for a day and a half, which didn’t give us much time to see many sights.

The first thing on the agenda was a stop by the RTL studios for a chat with Peter Kloeppel, aka “Dashing Peter.”

Kloeppel is the lead anchor for RTL’s nightly newscast as well as RTL’s chief editor. He spoke with us about how commercial TV news operates in Germany and gave us a bit more information about the differences between commercial and public broadcasters.

After his talk with us, we went on a tour of the facility. It’s fairly new and is right on the River Rhine. 

The entire set, except the anchor desk and chair, is green screened. (I’m not sure how this compares to NBC or any other nightly newscast back home.) 

Of course, a stop by a set means it’s time for photos. 

That evening we went to dinner on the other side of the river, not far from the cathedral, where we enjoyed kolsch. Kolsch is a specialty of Cologne and is a bit on the hoppy side.

It was the evening of the summer solstice, so a few of us meandered further along the river to enjoy the light before heading back to our hotel.

The bridge we used to get back and forth is a train bridge. Along the pedestrian walkway lovers fasten locks — signifying their commitment to one another.

I said, if I lived in Cologne, it would become my hobby to snip locks. 

Because I’m obviously evil.

The next day we visited the cathedral, which is incredibly beautiful, as well as the Roman ruins in town.

Then off to Brussels!

The last time I actually wrote anything of substance we were in Leipzig, so I’ll pick up there.

After our tour of sites important to the GDR protests of the late 1980’s (I wrote about that earlier) we visited a commercial radio station in the city.

PSR is just one of the properties owned by a larger radio conglomerate. It’s housed in a building near the old town hall and has a beautiful view of St. Thomas Church and the market square below.

Walking in I realized it was my first visit to a commercial broadcaster in Germany. During my last RIAS trip, and on my other visits, I’ve only ever been inside public broadcasters. I was struck by how similar the operation at PSR is to commercial broadcasters in the States.

I interned at WTAM Newsradio 1100 in Cleveland about a hundred years ago and the studio set up and automation were not all that different. 

It was interesting to learn PSR has been turning a profit for years. It has had it’s ups and downs, but, according to our guide, has been on an upswing the last year or so.

Of course, commercial broadcasters in Germany are battling the larger public broadcasters for audience and, like public radio and TV in the United States, the commercial broadcasters are winning in the target young adult demographic.

The difference is that public broadcasting in Germany is funded by a license. If you have a TV or radio in your home, you have to pay a fee for it. This fee then goes into the coffers of the public broadcasters.

Commercial broadcasters do not like this; public broadcasters worry cries for a move away from the fee system will gain more ground. 

I actually got a chance to visit the big public broadcaster while in Leipzig. A friend of mine is a reporter there for the venerable Taggeshau and invited me and another fellow to attend MDR’s — the region’s public broadcaster — private 20th anniversary party.

First of all, the station is located in what appears, to my inexperienced eye, to be a shady part of town. My traveling partner was African American and after hearing how he should be careful where he goes in the east because of the rise of neo-Nazism, we were both a bit on edge. 

The fact our cabbie was mean and spoke violent Russian did not help the situation.

(Seriously, I thought he was going to rob us and dump us in some remote corner of the city.)

We both sighed with relief when he pulled in front of MDR’s complex and we could get out of the cab.

The complex is … well, it’s amazing.

The main production building is this tall glass skyscraper that has incredible views of the city. It sits on the site of an old slaughterhouse complex and they’ve turned the original yellow brick buildings into office and archive space.

The party, by the way, was not small. There were easily 2,000 people there when my friend and I arrived. And we arrived and left early. This was no small event.

My MDR reporter friend, Michael, took my RIAS colleague and I around the complex. He showed us the view from the top floor, the newsroom for a program and the studios on the very bottom.

Afterward it was time for currywurst and beer before we, the RIAS fellow and I, headed back into town to join the other fellows at the official Leipzig dinner at Auerbachs Keller.

Goethe spent a lot of time at the restaurant when he lived in Leipzig and a pivotal scene in Faust takes place there.

After dinner a few fellows and I wandered into a biker bar and lived to tell the tale.

Barely.