It is hardly for an aesthetic experience that one visits a site such as Buchenwald, but its entailments for literature and art after the war are everywhere clear. The field of former inmate dwellings, now simply the trace of their foundations: the device of the trace. The abstraction of the Real from its material construction, and the reconstruction of the Real by abstract material means. The use of voids to represent what cannot be expressed: the memorial to Jews killed at the camp, which, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, creates a negative space within the trace of the foundations. The serial but uneven repetition of stainless steel columns placed at intervals at the site of the Soviet-era graves, with a living forest as defining context. The entire history of site-specific art demands an understanding of historical sites that have been denied, as Kristine Danielson’s account of Robert Smithson (from the 2005 “Authorship and the Turn to Language” conference in Tübingen) shows: unrepresentable history is the ground of the site-specific. The abstract meanings that may be constructed around decontextualized objects separated from their initial purposes, which cannot be known: the pile of cement fence posts, with their hook for electrification wires, stacked outside the exhibition hall as a metonymy for stacks of corpses, on the one hand, or as a device used by Joseph Beuys in his deployment of materials (cf. his use of streetcar poles at the Hamburger Bahnhof), on the other.

The slope of the field itself, entirely abstract in its dismantling of progressive narration, thus signifies the perverse logic of the site, its reversal of the achievement of the summit or highest point as the goal of history. Here, precisely the opposite is the case: history moves in reverse of any progressive narration; to go up the slope ends finally in being looked down upon from the summit of humanly denying repression. The masters look down on the slaves from the perverse height of Enlightenment. I experienced this directly as a physical fact, as I trudged up from the exhibition hall back to the entrance gate/guard tower as the close of the site drew near. I had been walking around the area for several hours and had earlier done the same in Weimar: I was a bit fatigued. Imagine what the effect of being summoned to inspection must have been for someone living in these conditions: on five hundred calories a day (food allotments were carefully measured), with little heat in winter; subject to disease from overcrowding; psychologically reduced to the point of bare existence. And one must find the energy to get up the hill and in line for inspection—a scene staged in Nackt unter Wölfen—or face the most dire consequences.

Finally, it was the perverse core of the site’s construction, its reversal of the “good” that societies measure themselves by, that left one with the sickest feeling of all. This was more than intended; it came together through a perverse underlying logic that was entirely coherent and structured. This is why Buchenwald was built only eight kilometers from Weimar, fount and origin of Enlightenment and the German concept of Kultur as unifying. “When I hear the word Kultur,” Goebbels said, “I reach for my gun.” That act was not simply a volitional affirmation of the racist will to power: it was an effect of an underlying structure whose logic is discernible in the traces of a site such as Buchenwald. Its being discerned is an act of reconstruction, of course, but such a reconstruction is part and parcel of Adorno’s “new categorial imperative”: that such a thing should never happen again. In the spirit of reconstruction of a perverse history, one can only return to the site of what refuses comprehension. An understanding of what cannot be comprehended there is what makes the unity of abstract art and narrative comprehension a truly open field.

30 June—1 July 2007
[An entry from Processing DE, a book-length manuscript in process drawn from my experiences of writing and traveling in Germany, from 2005 to the present.]

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