I've just returned from leading the law program of the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics ("FASPE"), which I blogged about extensively when I did the trip last year. (Go here and scroll down a bit.) FASPE is a traveling seminar that looks at professional ethics and identity through the lens of the Holocaust. The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York sponsors the trip.
This year we added a visit to the city of Nuremberg -- the birth site of the racial laws that today bear the city's name, the home of Hitler's annual mass rallies (until the war started), and the site of the post-war trials of major German perpetrators by the International Military Tribunal.
I found myself unsettled by the interpretive approach at the Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds, the museum that presents the megalomania of the Nazis' architectural and propaganda efforts at Nuremberg. The museum is in the Congress Hall:
Most of the interpretive materials in the museum document the crazy enormous grandeur of the buildings and grounds that the Nazis built to showcase their 1000-year Reich and the extravagance of the mass displays of patriotism they engineered. Toward the end of the exhibit, the visitor comes upon a smaller area documenting the genocide in which this all culminated.
This is, I suppose, as it should be: what the museum interprets is its site, and the site is principally about Nazi architecture and propaganda -- about the Nazis' ascension to and cementing of power. It's not chiefly about genocide. Yet I found the site disturbing. There is a certain awe-inspiring beauty to the Nazis' architecture and their patriotic displays. They were an astonishing achievement, and there is a riveting aesthetic to them. It made me deeply uncomfortable to acknowledge these things.
I came to Nuremberg from a visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau. That provided more than enough ballast against the odd fascination of Nuremberg. Much more than enough. I wonder, though, whether some visitors to Nuremberg focus more on the aesthetic and less on the horror -- more on the Nazis' improbable achievement of order from chaos and less on where it all ended up.
To be sure, the museum depicts the sobering impact of the Nazi propaganda machine, like this German first-grader's school drawing:
"The Jews are our misfortune," it says, parroting one of the ubiquitous Nazi placards of the day. (The young artist's name is concealed; he or she might still be alive.)
But this was a little paper in an out-of-the-way display case. I would have sooner seen this blown up huge on the wall in place of one of the wall-sized rally photos.
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