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Es muss ein kleiner Fischerort mit Reetdach geschmückten Häuschen sein, aber es soll nicht nach Fisch riechen. Es soll einen Fischmarkt geben, wo es frischen Fisch zu kaufen gibt. Selbstverständlich soll es kein Fisch aus dem Westpazifik sein, sondern regional. Er soll Substanz haben. Doch nur die, die dem Ort die Substanz geben, sollten nicht da sein, maximal nur dekorativ.
*England, England (Julian Barnes, 1998)
soon to be gone for good, the Eggartenhäuser grew over the years unnoticed by most. A new residential development will soon hause 2000 souls in this forgotten patch of Munich.
The park becomes the only reasonable escape from home and the corona lockdown. Empty and cold in the winter mornings of March and April before the warmer hours of the noon bring the sun-seeking denizens. The sun in its lowest angle is barely able to saturate the colours of tree, leave, flower and stone.
three exceptional persons met in time and place in Alfeld, Lower Saxony in 1910 to create and build a dream; the Fagus-Werk. In one side the experienced 52 years old Carl Benscheidt believed that people’s feet deserved healthier shoes, in the other side Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer on their late twenties believed that architecture must and can enlighten the job of people and organisations. These people seemed to me as leaving reasons of profit aside and focusing on better health for everyone, and enlightment for the those who will design and produce the lasts to make the shoes.
Being within these Bauhaus styled premises, one feels that economical success is a consecuence rather than the motive of this project that emerged from these three outstanding persons together and ultimately brought better feet health to mankind.
Landmarks of Bauhaus architecture and lifestyle mix with the traditional timber framed houses of the old city center in Celle, Lower Saxony.
The principal’s villa was about to be demolished to extend a parking building. Now turned into a museum.
The first attempts to use color in housing facades at the “Italian Garden” houses. Nearby the central services house at the Blumläger Feld that shows the attempts in the 30’s to provide affordable housing at the lowest cost and the Otto Haesler Museum, and details of the preserved Kitchen at one of the workers houses.
Closing the day in late afternoon in the streets of the old town in Celle and yet a Bauhaus styled Cafe.
Twelve persons killed by terrorism have their names engraved in a granite stone T-shaped memorial under one of the steel cables holding the canopies of the Olympiastadion. In the beloved and ever busy with joggers Olympiapark of Munich.
Opened in September 2017, the Erinnerungsort Olympia-Attentat stands at direct eyesight of the Olympiadorf, where the hostage in 1972 was started. Towards the opposite side you almost can see the memorial stone.
Today, the Memorial of the KZ Dachau is a place for unconventional tourists and brave women and men who dedicate their lives to dig deep in the roots of that monstrosity with the purpose to understand how such holocaust of mankind can come to happen. And they leave us with one final message: “From the memory of the dead for the warning of the living”
The Concentration Camp of Dachau was not only the first Nazi camp to be built but also became the learning centre where the network of hundreds of camps of misery and death of Europe in the WW2 was architected.
We live times of loud voices and bold stances. Times where the narcissist and the idiot find fertile ground to make themselves comfortable and every body around uncomfortable. These are times where those who see less and comprehend still less, strive with simplistic attitudes and weltanschauung.
Wars and catastrophic events bring in their aftermath the best of humankind together to mend those horrors. As soon as peace and order are reestablished, generations spawn that take goodness for granted and fall in a vicious circle of complacency. The sense of community slowly erodes. Fences are built. Mistrust falls over the people like thin dust in expanding waves. We begin to close into ourselves in reaction to this environment. We fall to the vices of becoming “we” against “them”. Dialogue will dry out to give way to words thrown as arrows, avoided or parried.
We become, day by day, a more fragile version of ourselves. More fearful. We see more threats. We become immersed in a slow but penetrating process of destruction of the “I, social” in spite of the “I, lone wolf”. Every time one abusive driver is on the road doing his shenanigans, everyone nearby raises a notch in their pool of discomfort. Every time a neighbor abuses shared space, everyone else looses a portion of their tolerance and willingness to cohabiting. Every time… small aggressions that stack and split us apart, not only apart from the aggressors but also apart from everybody around us; we are bathed in the dust of mistrust. One particle at a time.
May 24, 2018.
…on a walk on the early spring-green beech woods of the central Thuringian forest an outlandish stairway stands suddently on the path for no apparent reason. Left and right posts of what used to be a very peculiar fence stand. A story of the Buchenwald concentration camp unfolds.
Triggered by chance, the overcast dark gray hues set a somber mood as the woods give way to a wind beaten clearance. The fences now very real and unmistakable on their former purpose. A few scattered souls behind them wandering at a heavy pace
Past the entrance with its foundry-cast words over the iron gate “Jedem das Seine”, a field of desolation rolls slightly downhill to the north. Now empty of tens of thousands of bare hopeless feet standing in rows at roll call, day after day. The lay-out of the former blocks lays imprinted in the earth. Not even a memory of what happened in the northeast edge of the Buchenwald concentration camp is left in the ground for next generations, because it is too monstruous to be left there.
The Crematory and its court are standing at a corner of the camp behing a darkened wood fence. What Patton saw in there we cannot see today, but from photographs and reports of american and british journalists urgently summoned to that spot after the liberation.
Jewish polish children were found inside an inbound train wagon stuffed with 200 mostly frozen corpses. Those had to be axed out of the wagon onto the platforms. They children were set on a human hunt along the road to the camp for the sport of the SS-Guards. Dogs and bullets marked their end.
Recalled details are taken from the permanent exhibition on the history of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial and the book “The Cattle Truck” by Jorge Semprún.
