My childhood included a traumatic time in Germany (1950-1953). Some buildings were still bombed-out shells. Many Germans hated us, and the USSR was threatening an invasion. My father had parachuted into Normandy with the 101st Airborne and fought across Europe. They liberated Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.
His Unit’s history books lay on the coffee table and showed horrific images of war, including graphic images of the Nazi extermination camps. I found a Nazi sword and dagger hidden in our apartment. Beneath our building and down a spiral staircase, our neighborhood gang discovered a hidden room with five barred cells. Even as a 10-year-old, I understood that evil lies behind the most ordinary appearances.
Adults, both German and American, discussed anti-semitism, extermination of Jews, and the continued presence of ex-Nazis in our neighborhood. I listened. Herr Schmidt down the street served at Auschwitz. Dr. Braun was in the Nazi Party, but was forced to join, he says. Sophie Scholl, a University of Munich student, and the White Rose movement, resisted.
I was confused. Surrounded by ruins, I struggled to understand how this happened. Those images and issues have haunted me ever since, leading to this painful portfolio compiled some 70 years later.
I have discussed the metaphorical meaning of walls in the context of other portfolios (e.g., Walls Rise, Fall, and Rise Again, and Street Life. Walls may provide protection and security or separation and duress. They may be physical constructions or mental constructs. This portfolio explores walls in the form of images of Nazi concentrations camps and the psychological dogmas of racial propaganda.
The Holocaust symbolizes the concept of “othering,“ that is, creating a category of persons as alien to oneself by building a “wall” of differentiation. The Nazis had extreme views in regard to “othering,” seeing certain groups as less than human and therefore subject to discrimination and even genocide. Existentialist philosophy examines this urge toward “othering” extensively. French philosopher John Paul Sartre declared, “Existence precedes Essence.” In other words, according to Sartre, man becomes (acquires values) rather than is (inherits values). An Existentialist viewpoint then would deny that the urge toward “othering” is a pre-existing value and maintain it is a choice.
The Nazis held that Aryans (Germanic people) are intrinsically superior to all “others.” They attacked Jews, Roma, Slavs, Blacks, the disabled, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The “others” became victims in the name of racial purity. In fact, Nazism arose out of the German defeat in World War I and the Depression of 1929. The Nazis blamed a host of enemies: Communists and capitalists as well as various racial scapegoats for the economic and social disaster that developed in Germany following World War I.
I still struggle to understand whether “No One Knew” or they chose to look away out of fear or self-interest. My conclusion, found on the Teesch family tombstone: Nur Gott Weiss Warum! (Only God Knows Why).
