Disneyland For Historians

**I think you should fuck yourself. / Oh, my dear boy. Don’t you see? We are fucking each other.- Todd (Brad Renfro) and Dussander (Ian McKellan), Apt Pupil **

I watched Apt Pupil last night, where Andrew McCarthy Brad Renfro plays the intense teenager, Ian McKellan plays the bad guy and we all learn that Nazism is evil…and quite possibly contagious.

It got me thinking about the evils of Nazism – as it is probably supposed to do – and it’s something I’ve always had sort of a passing interest in; not in Nazism per se, but I spent four years studying all sorts of aspects of Germany and the Nazi history is somewhat intrinsically linked. For someone who graduated with a degree in German language and European Business I actually took a lot of classes on history, specifically post 1945-German history, as you do.

A few years back – March 2005 to be exact – on one of my sojourns to Berlin I visited Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and even now, I don’t know exactly what I think about it. When you’re actually there, standing in the gas chambers or reading that 200,000 people were imprisoned there, or that tens of thousand of people were killed right where you now stand it doesn’t seem real. Walking around the guides point out that this is where Jews were medically experimented on, that’s where homosexuals were worked into exhaustion and beat to death and over there’s where the Soviets had their gold teeth removed before they were shot in the back of the head. Your brain isn’t able to understand those sorts of facts and figures and you begin to wonder if all that tv really did numb your brain to the point you’re now immune to the horrors of the Holocaust.

I expected that actually seeing it there and then would make it somehow more real, sure the history books have taught us that thousands upon thousands of people were killed for being anything other than an Aryan superhuman, but seeing the physical structures didn’t actually hammer the point home. I’d already got the point, ovens and crematoria didn’t bring anything new to me.

I did, however, slowly start to feel quite disgusted by it all as the day wore on. Jamie Kastner reacted more-or-less the same way in his documentary ‘Kike Like Me‘, I too was incensed by the touristy-ness of it all. There was a gift shop, for crying out loud! Who in their right mind thinks, I’ve just walked over the graves of thousands of murdered innocents, time for a little spot of souvenir shopping?!

I don’t know whether we should destroy places like this completely, if we blow Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and Dachau off the map it won’t change the fact that they did exist and that the Holocaust did happen, but do we need to market what should be sacred memorials as Disneyland for the historians? No, we don’t. We need to remember it, but we don’t need to glorify it.