weimar

as part of the program i´m on, this weekend was a scheduled trip to weimar, an idyllic town southwest of berlin and the birthplace of ´the german classical period.´ goethe lived there for 50 years, and was later joined by schiller. there is a beautiful park that stretches along the ilm river, complete with ruins purposefully constructed as such - to add to the atmosphere. the town is full of perfect 16th century renaissance villas with their tastefully daring color schemes. my favorite had a smooth stucco exterior, grey with a hint of violet, set off perfectly by orange window frames, outlined in black.

we spent this morning at what remains of buchenwald, a nazi concentration camp 6km from weimar. we spent 3 hours milling around, listening to an audio tour on ipods hung around our necks. i walked along the railroad tracks until they mossed over in the encroaching forest. there, i found a series of simple aluminum poles planted in the ground at regular intervals. at the bottom of one i read ´unbekannt 893.´ unbekannt means unknown, nameless.

after walking around for an hour inside the camp proper, i chose at random one of the paths leading down the hill into the trees. signs pointed towards ´the little camp,´ where conditions were worst: many prisoners lived barely a few weeks. but i chose wrong at the fork, and arrived at a dead end. from there i could see the path i should have taken, and cut across a small orchard towards it.

but i had to turn around. looking down, i saw enormous plums, oozing out of their overripe skins, scattered everywhere. i felt them under my feet. one looked stretched out like a pear, as though while still on the branch its flesh had liquified and weighed down in the peel, like pennies in a sack. turned with my toe, its underside was all rotten, clinging to the grass.

i was very angry: no one had picked these plums when they were ripe on the branches, no one had put them in a basket to sit on their kitchen counter or to be made into preserves. why hadn´t someone gotten some sweet out of these plums? i picked one up and it went to mush in my hand. it was so heavy. i put it down carefully, afraid it would splatter if dropped, and watched my step along the way i had come.