(Sorry, but) Kind of Dark Thinking

dear erik,

(reading back over this, it's awfully depressing.  sorry about that.  i promise in the next one i'll do my best to describe some wacky hijinks...)

we arrived in munich last night after a 7 hour train ride.  it was actually a very nice ride - we had a little compartment to ourselves (for the first 5 hours - then some other people came in).  it's two rows of 3 seats each, facing each other, and then a big window on one side, and a sliding glass door on the other that leads out into a little hallway that opens onto other compartments. 

as the embarrassingly loud american child in the next compartment exclaimed - "It's just like Hogwarts!"  and indeed, in a less magical-gothicky/more functional-airplane-y way, it is a lot like the compartments in the train to Hogwarts. 

at any rate, we arrived at the main station, and were promptly assisted by a nice german fellow in a VERY bright red shirt who helped us figure out how to take the Ubahn to our hotel.  he was clearly someone in the service of some company, which unfortunately will never rake in the benefits of his gracious help because we couldn't read his shirt, which i imagine told us the name of the company that had kindly provided an english-speaking helper to all lost-looking tourist-types.

the hotel keeper assured us that their breakfast is famous, and he didn't lie.  the breakfast this morning was not only extensive and delicious, but also served until 11am, which made it even more wonderful.

on a side note, venice was beautiful - our last day there we just rode the vaporetto (water bus - see how international i am!) up and down the grand canal at sunset.  we were pretty much church-ed out by the time we got to venice, so we mostly just wandered around the city and looked at the architecture.

anyway - back to munich.

today we took the train out to dachau to tour the site of the concentration camp and see the memorials/go to the museum there.  it was a cold, gray day, which felt just about right.  it was strange to be there, since so much of what is there is not original, but has been re-built to give tourists a sense of things.  

while it's definitely a very intense experience, as it is now the place is mostly wide-open space, surrounded by beautiful trees in their fall colors.  it feels horrible, because the buildings that are there are cold and gray and utilitarian, but for me at least it is impossible to imagine what it must have been like.  barracks built for 200 with 2,000 men in them, typhus raging, continual insane brutality, starvation... it just doesn't matter how many books i read or how many pictures i look at or films i see - i can't seem to wrap my head around it. 

i admit it sounds grotesque, but megan and i were feeling like it would be worthwhile for someone to recreate a barracks as it actually was.  mannequins to show how the people were crammed in to sleep, bedding, clothes, their personal items like bowls or spoons.  i feel like the smell alone must have been almost unbearable.  a lot of the accounts talked about the ludicrous, over-the-top requirements for cleanliness - like the ticking on the mattresses had to line up, and if there was a single piece of straw on the floor you'd be beaten, etc.  so does that mean that the barracks actually looked spotlessly clean?  how is that possible if they're full of (in this case) men who are being worked to death and fed nothing? 

at any rate, we were both glad we had seen it, but it's pretty insane that it ever existed at all. 

the thing i liked best about the movie the reader was that it had honestly never occurred to me before what it must have felt like for that first generation of germans after the war.  to be a kid and have to look around and know that your parents and every adult you know or love was complicit in such a thing, or at the very least refused to see it.  i worry that someday the world will look back on abu ghraib and gitmo and think the same thing about all of us.  people being taken away and tortured or killed, but "we don't know anything about it.  i'm sure those people are probably criminals/ terrorists/bad people."

as you can see, it definitely takes your mind into some dark places.  plus, for me at least i feel like it inspires a kind of hysteria.  we were going through the crematorium- not the original one, but one that was built when there were just too many bodies to be dealt with using the small crematorium.  they're very clear that dachau was not an extermination camp, and this crematorium was never used for mass killings. 

however, i couldn't stand to be in there.  you go in through the 'disinfection rooms', where they would pile up people's clothes, and through a waiting room, and then into the 'shower room', and i swear i couldn't stand the smell in there.  i got totally overwhelmed and had to go outside and breathe for a minute before going in again.  it's embarrassingly purple prose, but it smelled like Evil in there.  just thinking of the terror of all those people pushed into this tiny room not being sure what was going to happen, but being pretty certain that whatever it was, it was gonna be horrible. 

i went back in but just sped through the rest of it.  the thing is, though, that it's likely that in the case of that particular building in that particular camp, none of that ever happened.  all those people i was envisioning didn't go through that in that space, but i swear, i could SMELL it.  all that to say - who knows how much of the power of these places comes from a truly sinister energy and history, and how much comes from whatever history we're carrying into them with us?

oy.

enough horribleness.  we were actually hoping to end the day on a nice, light note by going to see looper at a nearby movie theater.  the way it was listed in the paper led us to think that it would be in english.  anyway - we got to the theater and the woman (and the guy next to us in line, who spoke better english) told us that in fact nothing in that theater was playing in english, but there was another theater just down the street where it was. 

we got to that theater, and the woman told us that no, it wasn't playing there, but there was another theater nearby where it was.  she gave us muddled directions, which we tried to follow but were unable to find the theater.  on our way back to our hotel, we realized that in fact, she had been trying to direct us to the first theater. 

it was a less than successful outing.

i'm pretty sure this is the longest i've ever gone in my adult life without seeing a movie.  even if i'm somewhere where i don't go to the movies, there is always netflix streaming or movies on tv or whatever.  happily up until now it's been mostly the dark season at the movies where they just dump the crap that they know isn't gonna win any awards or bring in big money.  but i do really want to see argo and looper (and a bunch of other stuff, but those are the two biggies).  still - i'll probably make it another few weeks if i have to.  :o)

all right.  it's well past midnight, so i'm gonna go attempt some sleep.  i hope life is wonderful with you all, and that you liked looper, which i assume you've already seen.

much love,
murph