15
was architecture: the interior of Les Invalides with Napoleon’s sarcophagus, the Eiffel Tower, the Opéra Garnier, the triumphal arch in the Empire style, and the Haussmannian, monumental urbanism of the French capital. But while on 23 June 1940 Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer were photographing themselves on the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot with the Eiffel Tower in the background, a week and a half earlier the first mass transport had arrived at Auschwitz. In the camp, for three days already, Jan Liwacz, a blacksmith from Dukla, had also been imprisoned; later that same year, on the orders of Kurt Müller—one of the most brutal functionary prisoners—he made the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei. Earlier forged for the gate of the Dachau camp, present also in Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg, and in the form of an arch still visible today above the gate in Theresienstadt as well as at the entrance to Gross-Rosen.
For a long time, it was not obvious to me that I could look at the gate in Auschwitz as a triumphal arch. First of all, because the inscription was always the most important thing. Three words. They drew the eye, forced reflection and indignation, evoked dread and disbelief. Besides—triumph? What a category. Surely it is obvious that this is the last place where one could use that concept. And then some art-historical digressions? In a world in which, like
a commandment, there sound the words of Clausner, a French prisoner who, on the bottom of his mess tin—where others scratched their camp number—wrote: “Ne pas chercher à comprendre” / “Do not try to understand”? It is also known that Auschwitz is above all an unspeakable tragedy, millions of tragedies, and that the human being is its core. That is why, if one considers the problem of architecture here at all, it is only through the prism of its agency and functionality. Auschwitz, which escaped all the categories of the humanities up to that point, is also—en masse with other problems—as if beyond the reach of aesthetic categories, traditional styles with their chronology of great epochs, and artistic references fixed in the lexicons of architectural history. That is probably why art historians considering the dark years of Nazism most often do not venture beyond the boundaries of Berlin and Nuremberg, beyond the architectural megalomania of Speer and Hitler. There, unlike in Auschwitz, the classic art-history textbooks still more or less work.Yet perhaps what was needed was simply time—and an awareness of how closely, and how perversely, aesthetics and ethics sit side by side. That evil men, even at the bottom of hell, hang comforting landscapes with idyllic panoramas on the walls of their SS quarters. And that the camp gates of Birkenau, Mauthausen, or Gross-Rosen—behind which there was
a functionalist machine for killing—have, in and of themselves, that absurdly theatrical, historicizing shape, like medieval fortified gates, at which an SS man indoctrinated with pseudo-Germanic ideas could look with pleasure.
Only—is it permissible for us to look at the gates of anus mundi in the context of prosaic kitsch—after all, one of the most widespread and at the same time most ambiguous aesthetic categories? Is it fitting to engage in such reflections—doubly dangerous, because they not only brush against our pop-cultural everydayness, but above all concern sites of execution and mass crimes? Well, I would have remained silent on this if not for the awareness of how dangerous kitsch can be: spiritually demoralizing, intellectually draining, feeding on human ignorance, and therefore most often something convenient for all kinds of dictators and seducers of the masses. After all, that familiar, Orwellian aesthetic of totalitarian systems—the cinematic visions enclosed in dark concrete buildings invariably silhouetted against
a steel sky—is most often a Hollywood cliché with a grey filter over the lens. Meanwhile, Hitler’s dystopia began in Bavarian beer halls. Its essential expression was formed not only within the framework of the Nuremberg party rallies, with Speer’s decorations and a variation on the Pergamon Altar of Zeus, but also during sunny Sundays in the gardens of Gasthäuser, amid jaunty slogans, schnapps, and pork knuckle.
But returning beneath the arch bearing the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei, I also had to understand what I wrote earlier: that despite the dignified and classical proportions of ancient triumphal gates, despite the spectacular processions that once accompanied them—whose splendor and wealth successive rulers competed over—those very first Roman arches are, in fact, gates of someone else’s torment. They are architectural symbols of glory à rebours, and thus also (and perhaps above all) monuments of human suffering and death. Besides, I also had to remind myself of two cardinal works from the collection of camp art made by survivors of Auschwitz:
a drawing by Mieczysław Kościelniak and
a painting by Władysław Siwek.
The first sketched the gate and prisoners walking beneath it—in the morning, on Fridays, to the hard labor called work. And one day I noticed that the composition of his work is extraordinarily close to the perspective arrangement of Paris photographs from 1940—those showing Wehrmacht soldiers marching along the Champs-Élysées after the conquest of France. I realized that this is exactly how one frames people passing beneath
a triumphal gate. Except that in Kościelniak, instead of a Napoleonic arch in the background, one sees a gate crowned with
a steel ribbon and—exactly as in the tradition of Roman triumphal gates—a maxim. In this case, a sentence about work
was architecture: the interior of Les Invalides with Napoleon’s sarcophagus, the Eiffel Tower, the Opéra Garnier, the triumphal arch in the Empire style, and the Haussmannian, monumental urbanism of the French capital. But while on 23 June 1940 Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer were photographing themselves on the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot with the Eiffel Tower in the background, a week and a half earlier the first mass transport had arrived at Auschwitz. In the camp, for three days already, Jan Liwacz, a blacksmith from Dukla, had also been imprisoned; later that same year, on the orders of Kurt Müller—one of the most brutal functionary prisoners—he made the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei. Earlier forged for the gate of the Dachau camp, present also in Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg, and in the form of an arch still visible today above the gate in Theresienstadt as well as at the entrance to Gross-Rosen.
For a long time, it was not obvious to me that I could look at the gate in Auschwitz as a triumphal arch. First of all, because the inscription was always the most important thing. Three words. They drew the eye, forced reflection and indignation, evoked dread and disbelief. Besides—triumph? What a category. Surely it is obvious that this is the last place where one could use that concept. And then some art-historical digressions? In a world in which, like
a commandment, there sound the words of Clausner, a French prisoner who, on the bottom of his mess tin—where others scratched their camp number—wrote: “Ne pas chercher à comprendre” / “Do not try to understand”? It is also known that Auschwitz is above all an unspeakable tragedy, millions of tragedies, and that the human being is its core. That is why, if one considers the problem of architecture here at all, it is only through the prism of its agency and functionality. Auschwitz, which escaped all the categories of the humanities up to that point, is also—en masse with other problems—as if beyond the reach of aesthetic categories, traditional styles with their chronology of great epochs, and artistic references fixed in the lexicons of architectural history. That is probably why art historians considering the dark years of Nazism most often do not venture beyond the boundaries of Berlin and Nuremberg, beyond the architectural megalomania of Speer and Hitler. There, unlike in Auschwitz, the classic art-history textbooks still more or less work.Yet perhaps what was needed was simply time—and an awareness of how closely, and how perversely, aesthetics and ethics sit side by side. That evil men, even at the bottom of hell, hang comforting landscapes with idyllic panoramas on the walls of their SS quarters. And that the camp gates of Birkenau, Mauthausen, or Gross-Rosen—behind which there was
a functionalist machine for killing—have, in and of themselves, that absurdly theatrical, historicizing shape, like medieval fortified gates, at which an SS man indoctrinated with pseudo-Germanic ideas could look with pleasure.
Only—is it permissible for us to look at the gates of anus mundi in the context of prosaic kitsch—after all, one of the most widespread and at the same time most ambiguous aesthetic categories? Is it fitting to engage in such reflections—doubly dangerous, because they not only brush against our pop-cultural everydayness, but above all concern sites of execution and mass crimes? Well, I would have remained silent on this if not for the awareness of how dangerous kitsch can be: spiritually demoralizing, intellectually draining, feeding on human ignorance, and therefore most often something convenient for all kinds of dictators and seducers of the masses. After all, that familiar, Orwellian aesthetic of totalitarian systems—the cinematic visions enclosed in dark concrete buildings invariably silhouetted against
a steel sky—is most often a Hollywood cliché with a grey filter over the lens. Meanwhile, Hitler’s dystopia began in Bavarian beer halls. Its essential expression was formed not only within the framework of the Nuremberg party rallies, with Speer’s decorations and a variation on the Pergamon Altar of Zeus, but also during sunny Sundays in the gardens of Gasthäuser, amid jaunty slogans, schnapps, and pork knuckle.
But returning beneath the arch bearing the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei, I also had to understand what I wrote earlier: that despite the dignified and classical proportions of ancient triumphal gates, despite the spectacular processions that once accompanied them—whose splendor and wealth successive rulers competed over—those very first Roman arches are, in fact, gates of someone else’s torment. They are architectural symbols of glory à rebours, and thus also (and perhaps above all) monuments of human suffering and death. Besides, I also had to remind myself of two cardinal works from the collection of camp art made by survivors of Auschwitz:
a drawing by Mieczysław Kościelniak and
a painting by Władysław Siwek.
The first sketched the gate and prisoners walking beneath it—in the morning, on Fridays, to the hard labor called work. And one day I noticed that the composition of his work is extraordinarily close to the perspective arrangement of Paris photographs from 1940—those showing Wehrmacht soldiers marching along the Champs-Élysées after the conquest of France. I realized that this is exactly how one frames people passing beneath
a triumphal gate. Except that in Kościelniak, instead of a Napoleonic arch in the background, one sees a gate crowned with
a steel ribbon and—exactly as in the tradition of Roman triumphal gates—a maxim. In this case, a sentence about work