The crematorium was not constructed as a part of the “final solution”—one would have to go to Auschwitz or elsewhere for that. Its size was a response to the high mortality among inmates, given the conditions they were exposed to, and specifically after a dysentery epidemic in the camp. My recall of precisely when the crematorium was constructed, however, is beginning to blur. Again I felt sick, vaguely convulsive; I wanted to bolt from this space. Between the two ovens were a profusion of flowers that had been recently left, along with a banner appealing for world peace. To the side, a privy and toilet were on display; these had an effect of connecting bodily shame directly to the crime. Cowardly, ashamed of the body, cruel: Allen Ginsberg would explore this relation in his work. The hero of Nackt unter Wölfen was a spitting image of a young Allen Ginsberg, but also a socialist intellectual, with spectacles (which of course would be smashed during interrogation). The cell in which the interrogation took place was supposedly in a police building in Weimar, thus establishing a connection outside the camp. Another room held a series of urns in which ashes had been secreted; these had been found secretly buried throughout the camp but were assembled here. Another sculptor’s project came to mind: Allan McCollum’s 10,000 inert, mass-produced, hybrid objects. (Some of his work—a series of empty frames, depicting nothing—appears on the cover of my collection Frame.)
I stepped into the courtyard. A plaque informed me that I was standing on the spot where Ernst Thälmann, a socialist intellectual and head of the KPD (German Communist Party), was murdered. Shot on his arrival at the camp. I routinely swim at the Schwimmhalle in Thälmann Park in Berlin, a model urban development of the DDR. My feelings about Thälmann are mixed, as is his legacy: though he died a resistance hero, he also implemented the Stalinist policy of not uniting with the SPD when Hitler’s minority government came to power. Had the KPD and SPD joined, the NSDAP would not have won its absolute majority a short time later. And things would now be different. But Stalin was playing a game with history, betting on his eventual winning hand. The DDR turned out to be the last move of that failed strategy. I stood on the spot where Thälmann was murdered, anticipating that outcome; there was a memorial plaque. His body was carried into the “corpse cellar” through that door. I went down into it. It was a cool, plastered room where corpses were stored. And created: on the wall was a series of hooks, as for sides of beef, where strangulations took place (not hangings; there would be no body drop to break the neck). Eleven hundred persons were killed in this manner.
There was a chute for the delivery of corpses from above; I returned to the courtyard to inspect the opening for the chute. It was like a chute for coal or any other material delivery. It was said that bodies were stacked “like cords of wood.” I walked through the courtyard to another small and open door. By this time, I was joined by several other people, so my reactions were in some sense in relation to theirs as well. Everyone acted stunned, slowed down, and somewhat dissociated. Later a non-German man, speaking German, asked me if I thought the height-measuring device with the slot behind the neck was used to kill prisoners. Yes, I thought so. This was the way Russian prisoners of war were dispatched: shot in the neck as their height and weight were measured. There was a reconstruction of the horse-drawn sled that carried masses of bodies shot in this way to the ovens. There was also a room, connected to this method, that displayed Nazi medical procedures. A photography of human form titled “Mensch,” an eye-exam chart of letters (seeming to me to be in the wrong order), and medical paraphernalia.
The crematorium was the impact zone, and little else needed to be said. You could not get closer to the event than that: a small brick building as a monument to the unspeakable. What was left was to investigate the more dispersed traces of what occurred: the foundations of buildings destroyed, the buildings that remain, two large-scale historical exhibitions, also the field of unmarked burials from the Soviet occupation and use of the site, when interned former Nazis and others who fell into the security net died at comparable mortality rates. After the fall of the DDR, the site of their burial, in a field behind the limits of the camp proper, was discovered. It is now marked by metal columns in a thin forest just beyond the perimeter: another aesthetic moment of memorial culture. While I felt that the shame of the DDR in not publicizing this use of the camp in the period after Stalin was being somewhat overplayed, the regime was complicit in Stalin’s crimes, albeit in the context of the greater crime of the Nazis: most of those who died in this manner were interned in the East Germans’ form of denazification.
In the West, outcomes were often less severe, as witness the fate, established in the exhibit, of the prison commanders and guards. Only the highest among them were executed; many of the others were tried and retried, often becoming free by the early 1950s. A discourse of these differences in denazification was a part of the Cold War; at the DDR exhibition in Berlin (“Parteidiktatur und Alltag in der DDR,” Deutsches Geschichtliche Museum), a “Braunbuch” was on display that listed former Nazis later prominent in the BRD (West Germany); an answering tome was produced in the West. I am writing this overlooking a stretch of the former Berlin Wall, with a working smokestack immediately behind it in the distance, as I have said. My exploration is thus of one of the origins of the Cold War: the void left in Central Europe by Nazism’s crimes, and what lies beneath it. The recovery of that history, for me, is a political question that underlies any narrative of the present. Or any nonnarrative, for that matter: a primary concern is how artistic representation, separated from cause and effect, does its work.

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