At the beginning of September in 2007, I went to Bronte Creek Park very early one morning when Alex was still asleep. Late summer there shows a bit of the coming fall: the tall grass in the fields was turning brown, the thistle was dry, and the sun was closer to the horizon than before at this time, showing a lovely golden light. That morning, nobody was around. It was perfectly clear, perfectly beautiful, the kind of day that suggested why this park and its fields and trees are part of me.

Three days later, I was standing in front of the Führerbau in Munich, where, in the presence of Hitler and Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain had agreed to carve up Czechoslovakia to stave off a likely war.

It was an abrupt and surreal displacement for me. I stood on the sidewalk opposite the building, looking up at the spot where the Reichs Eagle Hoheitszeichen, the Nazi national symbol of a menacing eagle clutching a bewreathed swastika, was once pinned. The marks in the facade were still clearly evident. Some windows were open, and I could hear piano music drifting out to the street. The building is now a music school, and this turn of events seemed purposeful and fitting.

I’d arrived in Germany earlier that day. As the aircraft descended en route to Munich, I was struck by the prettiness of the German countryside, with its square fields of green and yellow, and the clutches of houses and other buildings all with bright terracotta roofs. The tangibility of history being something I’ve always striven for, I couldn’t help myself wondering what the scene was like down there in the spring of 1945, with the Allies advancing across this countryside, overtaking villages and cities as the conflict wound steadily down.

It was pouring rain in Munich the day I arrived. I’d taken the train from the airport to the Bahnhof, but mistakenly got off only two stops short. I’d been certain I was on the wrong track. It seemed to be taking too long, and the environs around Munich seemed too pastoral. But I managed to ask a couple of people in my uncertain German to confirm my way, and soon, I was waiting in a doorway in the train station for the rain to let up. I eventually got a cab and arrived at my hotel on Uhlandstraße by the Theresienwiese. It was a pretty street with a lot of unusual corners. The room wasn’t quite ready, so I had to go exploring.

The city is like most European cities, and the centre is a ring of criss-crossing streets. It is very easy to get lost, and so I did. I had to take a cab back to the hotel, but not before a somewhat alarming tour of the centre that included many repeated street crossings.

I have a love-hate relationship with travel. I long to see the sights I know from books, and I crave to touch history at every opportunity. But I suffer particularly acutely from jet lag. On that first day, indeed, throughout my entire trip, Alex’ voice at the other end of my cell phone was not just nice to hear; it was critical to arriving safely at the end of a day. I wish for every solitary traveller to have the kind and patient and ever understanding voice of a loved one at the opposite end of a phone.

The first day in Munich was soon over. Alex helped me through the night as well, when I awoke disoriented, exhausted, and still quite jet lagged. When dawn came, I was soon out the door and in the city centre again.

Louis About me, Germany, History Bronte Creek Park, Germany, History, Jet lag, Travel

I have a love of history that manifests in a desire to touch it, to see it; or at least, to see what it has left behind. I have several Greek coins over two thousand, three hundred years old. A few coins with Elagabalus on them from Rome, a handful of bills from the Weimar Republic, a coin from Germany in the thirties. I have my grandfather’s Iron Cross. I’ve got a few interesting original documents from those times. I have old Latin and Greek textbooks from the early nineteenth century.

When I look at the coins, especially the very old ones, I can’t help but wonder how many hands they’ve passed through, and what arcane things they purchased. The documents, typewritten, were surely handled by some female secretary with oddly coiffed hair. I wonder what she did the evening after she typed this letter or that? What route did it take across the city to find its destination in the hands of some beaureaucrat?

I like to handle history. Perhaps I seek to make it more real, or to make tangible the historical accounts I’ve loved so well all my life.

Connections

This desire was problematic for me in 1984, when I was in Athens. I was in the Agora, the haunt of Socrates and Plato, and I was confused. It seemed so small to me. Not merely ruined, it was barely visible. I could hear traffic. A modern building was immediately nearby. It was hot, though it was October, and the air was difficult to breathe. Here was a ruined marble bench; I did not dare sit on it, and I wondered who had in centuries past. It’s age was difficult to tell. It could have been two hundred or two thousand years old. It was curiously interesting.

This was all I could get from my visit to the Agora.

I don’t know what I had expected, but I hadn’t found it. Did I expect some kind of epiphany? Some transcendant experience? A kind of blinding flash of insight and beauty, as though I were a Saul? I was embarrassed. I felt silly, I felt small. I probably felt the most thoroughly disappointed than I ever had before in life. I would remember that moment often in years to come, when I had expectations I sought to temper, or when it was particularly meet that I should bear in mind how life is a series of small and large sorrows, connected by smaller, but gentle and pleasant, surprises.

A journey alone

Last year in September, I went on a three week trip through Austria and Italy with my parents, and my sister. I wanted a few days alone, so I arrived earlier than they, and stayed in Germany. I had never spent any significant time there, and I was sorry about that. With history and convenience in mind, I thought that Munich was the most strategic place to say, and a day or two after arriving, I decided to go to the concentration camp at Dachau.

When I started out at the Bahnhof, it was appropriately dismal weather, grey and rainy. I was one of only two or three on the train that morning. The announcer’s clipped voice ended with my destination — “Dachau” — and she pronounced it by inflecting the second syllable. It seemed strange.

The trip ended in a necessary bus ride through the small town of Dachau to the camp. In my barely practiced German, I had to ask a patient young woman with a small child how to use the transportation system from that point, but eventually, I arrived at the site, and found myself on a pleasant path that led to the terrible Jourhaus and the gates bearing the infamous slogan, Arbeit macht frei. (I have since learned that the iron gate that now opens into the camp at Dachau is a replica.)

I stood inside the Jourhaus gate, looking at the camp through the iron bars. I didn’t go in. People were silently milling around, passing me, as I looked in. On the grounds inside, moving slowly across the Appellplatz, I could see a dozen young men in German military uniform, touring a disgraceful part of their past. There was surely a lesson here their superiors were eager to teach them. Some school kids passed me and went through, carrying cheerfully coloured umbrellas. There were very few non-Germans here. Perhaps this was due to the time of year.

Instead of entering the camp, I looked through the filthy windows of the Jourhaus that opened from officious rooms of some kind into the area of the gate. Old electrical panels still hung on the wall at one end. It was dirty inside. I saw a door at the back of the room. I walked back out of the gate, to the rear of the Jourhaus. Nobody was around; others had either long gone into the camp, or quite simply, noone was interested in this building.

A small set of stairs led to the door, which was locked. The plaster on the outside of the building was cracked. The cement crumbled somewhat near the foundation, and left a few loose stones. There were steel loops or something set into the wall — were they wire fasteners?

And here, suddenly, without notice to me, was History.

I was momentarily dumbstruck. Had I stood on this spot seventy years earlier, had I made my way casually to the rear of the Jourhaus, I would likely have been shot, or worse. A large enough quota of human suffering began at this gate and ended inside, and I was confronting this terrible fact, and defeating the insane purpose behind it, by walking freely round this building. By examining the prosaic details of its construction. By picking up, then dropping, a small piece of concrete. By peering through the locked fence nearby, into the inaccessible grounds beyond it.

Sadly, a desire fulfilled

Eventually, I went through the gate, but not before opening and closing it a few times, feeling its iron heft. I walked the entire surface of the site, as far as I could go in all directions, over the course of several hours. I entered every open building. I touched virtually every surface I could. I read every display, looked at every artefact. I watched others, listened when I could, tried to read their faces. I stayed apart, purposely.

I recalled the trip to Greece, and my feelings in the Agora, and I was very sad. There, amidst the ruins of a beautiful age and a beautiful people, I had felt nothing but the hollowness of disappointment. Here, in this shrine to tears, I could feel, smell, and taste history. The immediacy of it and the horror of it.

Here was a convoluted fact: I experienced a pleasant surprise in finally touching history, almost quite literally; and at the same moment, connected in the same tangible and immediate way, I experienced profound and deep sorrow. I am a selfish man. I hope that the greater measure of my sorrow was for the lives needlessly ended there, for the remains under the stones that say, Ashes are buried here, for the lessons not learned, for the humanity not saved.

Louis About me, Germany, History Agora, Concentration camp, Germany, History, Travel