January 21, 2007
Wannsee and Victory II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 PM EST I’ve been thinking more about Josh Zeitz’s article on yesterday’s anniversary of the Wannsee conference, where the extermination of European Jewry was, as Josh carefully puts it, formalized. A number of years ago I went to see the villa where the conference occurred, a handsome building now preserved as a museum. Wannsee is a lake, actually two lakes—Berlin is, among other things, a city of lakes and forests—and the villa has terraces looking over the shore; Wannsee is one of the longest inland beaches in Europe. It was winter, so there were no swimmers and nude sunbathers teeming on the shore, as happens on the beaches in better weather, but you could rent boats at a marina near the villa. At the time, the idea of going boating on the Wannsee seemed bizarre to me, because as a tourist seeing the place for the first time, the name was malignantly resonant in a very pure way, and the idea that masses of people could and did swim and sunbathe there seemed quite fantastic. The museum is chillingly effective—understated, with placards and photographs of what was decided there—and the name Wannsee echoed and re-echoed in my mind; for me, the name meant nothing but the hideous thing there resolved. By a fluke of fortune, a dear friend later moved to Wannsee, which is also a splendid Berlin suburban neighborhood, and I have since spent a lot of time there. One of her daughters is my goddaughter, and I have since the early 1990s spent weeks at a time living in Wannsee, getting on and off the commuter line that takes you into the center of Berlin, playing with a child in the playground near that train station, walking a large and very friendly dog through Wannsee’s streets by night. Slowly the power drained out of the word; Wannsee became in my mind more than a dreadful name, it was also a rather beautiful place, the scene of the collective life of thousands of people, a life that predated the conference. For example, there is another villa in Wannsee, very close to the notorious one, a villa that was, from 1909 until 1935, the residence of Max Liebermann, the greatest German Impressionist. Once you know that, and Liebermann’s painting, the focus on what happened down the street becomes a little less exclusive. A party at a house in Wannsee, one designed by a great Bauhaus architect, also diluted the power of the name; it was amazing to be in a house designed by such a genius, rather than horrific to be in terrible Wannsee. I had always been taught that Germany was more than the Final Solution, and now Wannsee, too, became more than the Final Solution. I am not sure what I make of this process. Most sites of awful events are places we go to only to ponder a single moment of the past, but the sense of that power is dependent on a kind of ignorance. We need to know nothing else of a place, to experience the power of its name in its purest form. Some places where ghastly things happened are preserved in a pristine state, so that all we can think of when we see them is the famous and terrible thing that happened there—Antietam is such a place. Wannsee is no longer such a place for me. On balance, I think it is better to drain names of their power, as long as we do not cease to attend to the things that were once all we attached to them. Sometimes, of course, this process is reversed. An English friend grew up in Old Windsor, where his mother still lives, and where I sometimes visit. I was astonished to learn one day that what looked like a little island in the river there, more properly, I think, called a water meadow, was Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed. And there I learned that the ordinary place can become eerily resonant, just as the eerily resonant name can finally become almost ordinary.
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