Legacies of Dachau : The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001

Rating:
Summary: Winner of Hans Rosenberg Prize
Review: In January 2003, the Conference Group for Central European History explained its selection:

To stand out among 49 submissions, the award-winning book had to be challenging and ambitious, theoretically informed, solidly researched, wellwritten, and nicely produced. The winner of this year's Hans Rosenberg Book Prize is Legacies of Dachau.- The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 by Harold Marcuse, published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press. The title suggests only part of the sweep of this well-illustrated book. Marcuse traces the multiple transformations of the camp in Dachau from a concentration camp to a camp for displaced persons to an internment camp for Nazis to a heavily-visited memorial and museum site, but he also includes the adjacent site that housed first an SS garrison, then a US army unit, and then part of the Bavarian state police. These multiple uses, as Marcuse shows, point to the difficulty in fixing the memory of Dachau in both the professional and public understanding of the history of not just this site but also the broader histories of Nazism, the Holocaust, the postwar occupation, and the Federal Republic. The uses and abuses of Dachau illuminate how different age cohorts of postwar Germans selectively remembered and forgot parts of their history and how they created and challenged what Marcuse calls the founding myths of victimization by, ignorance of, and resistance to Nazism. Because these cohorts confronted each other as they evolved, Legacies of Dachau is a story of the intellectual growth of postwar Germany. Just as Dachau Concentration Camp is itself a site for education, reflection, and memorialization, this book will help readers better understand the events that transpired there and the complex, contested ways in which Germans have come to grips with those events.

Rating:
Summary: Worth the Wait
Review: Three generations after the horror of the Holocaust, the images that concentration camps like Dachau evoke are still the benchmark for man's inhumanity to man. The question this book seeks to address is what should be done with sites where hundreds of thousands of people were mutilated and murdered, abused and disposed of? Marcuse traces the history of Davhaufrom the beginning of the twentieth century through its time as the Nazis' 'flagship' concentration camp, to its current state as museum and memorial site. At pains to keep this history within the broader confines of German history, he goes to great lengths to make clear the relationship between historical events, individual memory and political culture. As he painstakingly documents the difference in post-war treatment of Nazi perpetrators and the survivors of the camp, it is clear that the questions of morality which first fuelled his interest (in West Germany's relationship with its Nazi past) have yet to be fully answered to his personal satisfaction. The early post-war 'we didn't know' became 'we don't want to know' and a collective amnesia materialised allowing the camp to be erased both physically and psychically. Apartments and stores were built, most notoriously a restaurant called AT THE CREMATORIUM, before being razed to the ground in preparation for a permanent memorial. In the meantime, there was plenty of bickering over who would manage the site and, by the way, have those pesky Bavarian survivors been repatriated yet?! The underlying dynamic of German memory regarding responsibility - read of the debates, the 1968 rebellion,the first Holocaust docu-drama in the 70s, Bitburg in the 80s and the memorial controversies of the 90s - is meticulously laid bare. It is not remotely enjoyable reading (this weighty, hefty tome) but it is necessary. Fortunatelu it's accessible history and historiography. The notes seem inexhaustible but are concise and user friendly, as is the index. Some of the post-war posters and postcards are bleakly amusing, others are graphic and unflinching in their apportionment of responsibility and all are compelling. I believe this is the first lomg-term aassessment of Dachau and the ways it has been made to serve the present. Perhaps a long time coming but certainly worth the wait.