Seeing Dachau
Fifty years from now, students may not know who you were, but they will know what you did.
When we’re college seniors, that awful case of Senioritis we tend to suffer from can make us unbearable. It’s to the credit of our family, friends, fellow students, teachers, and professors that we survive that year relatively intact. Put another way: It’s a credit to the restraint of that circle that we survive.
Because Senioritis makes us think we are invincible, irreplaceable. We do an awful lot of navel-gazing our senior year in university. Doesn’t seem to matter whether we intend to go to graduate school or enter the working world. We anticipate receiving that diploma that (we think) entitles us to everything good in life. Because we are God’s gift to the world, and we know it.
All well and good, but Senioritis takes our twentysomething selves to ridiculous extremes. I was no exception.
At the same time, I was luckier than most. My professors had seen many like me come through the revolving door of university life. While their encouragement was an invaluable part of my education at TCU [thank you, Dr. Deeter, for walking down the up escalator to talk me through a personal crisis when I was a freshman], it did not extend to enabling Senioritis.
Shortly before graduation, I sat with Dr. Goldbeck [Abstract Algebra, art], whining about my legacy. I spent all that time and effort working with Dr. Colquitt [Linear Algebra, piano, clarinet, French, everything] establishing a free tutoring program for non-majors. I worked my butt off making Parabola Club popular on campus, attracting non-majors to our meetings and getting the Skiff to cover our events. I helped Dr. Addis [topology, tennis] and Fred Reagor create the first-ever self-paced course of any sort for TCU. And when I leave here, no one will remember me. Waah-waah-waah. Poor pitiful me.
Dr. Goldbeck would have none of it. Denise. Elaine. Heap. Stop it!
He proceeded to remind me that someone else had started the tutoring program for Math majors, that charged “cost” to students (whatever the Math Department paid tutors, that was amount charged to those tutored). Together with Dr. Colquitt’s irresistible pitch to The Powers That Be (finance), I had taken the work that that forgotten person did and transformed it into a free 17-hours-per-day study hall for everyone, Math 101 to graduate level courses. And yes, Parabola Club had been transformed. But it had been started decades prior (1938?) by someone – and even I don’t know who, said Dr. Goldbeck – who wanted an alternative to the more-serious Pi Mu Epsilon, the Math honor fraternity. You took their concept and ran with it.
And that self-paced course? Hell yeah, that was cool. The good people at Tarrant County Junior College took our work and applied it to many entry-level courses at that institution. So yes, kudos, ya done good, kiddo. But. But. The impetus for that self-paced course had been birthed by TAGER in 1970, a consortium of seven universities in northern Texas that figured out how to share professorial resources across campuses. Remotely. I took two semesters of Italian from a professor at SMU, without ever leaving the TCU campus. Pre-Zoom. It was a big freaking deal at the time. Everyone in the “class” could see and talk to everyone else, with no ability to turn off camera. Loved it.
Yes, Dr. Goldbeck was right. We drew inspiration from TAGER when we put together our self-paced “Calculus for Business Majors” course.
He was not done with me quite yet. Just as you built on other’s work to create good things, useful things, amazing things, so others will build on your work after you leave TCU. Someone else will take that tutoring program and do things with it you cannot imagine. Who knows what Parabola Club will look like in another fifty years? And we’ll always find fresh ways to teach, building on that self-paced course. Fifty years from now, students may not know who you were, but they will know what you did.
I must have sat there for ten minutes, mouth wide open. Fifty years from now, students may not know who you were, but they will know what you did. Wow.
I thought about that conversation the day before the Willi Graf conference in Munich. Jennifer Rosenfeld and I “prepped” for the conference.
First, we ate lunch at the Seehaus, a tony restaurant on the short list of favorite expensive hangouts for the White Rose friends. Willi Graf, his sister Anneliese, and her “male friend who is visiting” ate lunch there on December 19, 1942. Willi returned – again for lunch – on January 31, 1943, likely with friends from Bach Chorale. They were annoyed by the slow service; Willi vowed never to eat there again. Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, and Gisela Schertling ate lunch at the Seehaus on February 14, 1943, and supper there the evening before their arrest.
The Seehaus therefore is almost a “must” for anyone interested in the texture of the White Rose story.
Afterwards, we drove out to Dachau. This was my fifth or sixth time visiting that memorial site, and it was Jennifer’s first.
My first time at Dachau was 1973. The indoor exhibit started off relatively benign, very simple and plain in those days. By the end, I was sick to my stomach, glad to get outside in the fresh air. The horror, even in the days of the more modest presentation, was inescapable.
I returned with the Katholische Hochschulgemeinde Augsburg in 1978/79. The KHG had arranged for an audience with the Mother Superior. Honestly? My expectations for the meeting with that imposing woman were minimal, almost nonexistent. But I left the meeting in awe of her work. None of the memorials (Jewish, Catholic, or Lutheran) is staffed. The Carmelite Cloister served as place for survivors to seek refuge and counsel, to cry, to scream if needed. She took her work seriously.
She also insisted that the Dachau memorial site document and honor current victims of genocide, no matter where on the globe, no matter who the victims are, no matter the faces of the perpetrators. She wanted Dachau to be more than a monument to the past. She demanded it be a mirror of contemporary action.
I was reminded of a Fall 1999 article in the This is TCU magazine, penned by Jason Crane (TCU ’00). A journalism major from Shreveport, Louisiana, Jason had advocated on behalf of absolute First Amendment rights for CODOH – the Holocaust denial group “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust” – when they placed an ad in TCU’s student-run newspaper. As a member of the Skiff’s editorial board at the time, Jason rode his high horse all the way to a meeting with Jewish Studies and others representing anti-CODOH sentiments. But the First Amendment, he argued.
“I was taking the ultimate journalistic joyride in which free speech reigns,” he wrote, “even if the speech is offensive.”
Until he went to Dachau. “I remember the anger and fear I felt as I entered the crematorium, where thousands of bodies had been burned. I remember the nausea I felt as I walked through the gas chamber, even though Dachau’s had never been used. Most of all, I remember my stunned silence on the bus ride home, as I tried to imagine, failing miserably, what it would have been like to be Jewish, packed onto a slowly moving train, headed for Dachau.”
Jason noted that as a non-Jew, he knew relatively few Jewish students (although TCU’s Jewish Studies program has improved that metric). He had never met a Holocaust survivor. “My generation” – millennials, not Gen-Z! – “has been raised free from anything as horrific as the Nazi’s reign of terror. To us (brace yourselves), the Holocaust may as well have never happened.”
That evening, Jennifer and I sat with Barbara Distel, retired director of the Dachau memorial site. Barbara is another intrepid librarian/archivist (would that the world were ruled by archivists!), graduated from LMU – the university of Munich. She is credited with “massive” work, while still a student, creating the archives for the Dachau memorial site. From 1975 through July 2008, she was Director of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site.
Retired now, Barbara eschews the limelight. She refuses most interview requests and attends as good as no conferences, lectures, or memorial services. Barbara was born the same month that Kurt Huber and Alexander Schmorell were executed – July 1943. At 80 years of age, she is content to cheer successors on from the sidelines. She accepted our invitation because her good friend and mine, Harold Marcuse, persuaded her to do so. (Thank you, Harold!)
I won’t speak for Jennifer, although I believe she agrees: There was a real sense that we sat in the presence of someone who was a trailblazer, who had done the hard work when no one else would do so. In the 1960s, it was anything but popular to publish works related to the Holocaust in Germany, much less to grow a memorial site dedicated to the memories of those who were slaughtered in places like Dachau. She must have had nerves of steel, backbone of titanium, heart of gold.
Unsurprisingly, she would not accept praise for her work. The archbishop of Augsburg, he deserved credit for envisioning Dachau as a memorial site, for keeping it from being razed. She only expanded on that vision. That Mother Superior who had meant so much to me? To me too, said Barbara. The two women supported one another’s goals.
As we sat in that popular “Vietnamese fusion” locale (Banyan), a restaurant unthinkable my first time in Munich fifty years ago, even more implausible to an LMU student of the 1960s, I was hit between the eyes by Dr. Goldbeck’s maxim. Fifty years from now, students may not know who you were, but they will know what you did.
L’dor v’dor, from generation to generation.
My White Rose work built on foundations laid by Michael Kissener, Klaus Vielhaber, Christian Petry, Hermann Krings, Hildegard Vieregg, Jos Schätzler, Anneliese Knoop-Graf, Lothar Drude, Silvester Lechner, Christiane Moll (what a debt all of us owe Christiane Moll!), Hinrich Siefken, Bernhard Hanssler, Rudolf Lill, Gerda Freise, Armin Ziegler, and more. (Check my bibliography and footnotes to see the extent of the foundation!)
Some worked on that foundation long before proper tools were in place, before Protokolle, before archives started creeeeaking open. They scratched in White Rose earth with bare hands, planting seeds, watering a desert, a desert of German scholarship that did not want to know from Holocaust studies. But they persisted.
I come along in 1994, me who’s not afraid of technology – Mathies rule! – and with the help of Finley Shapiro, create a massive database that “manipulates” All. That. Data. (Because history is made up of a series of concrete data points.) The intersections, weavings, contradictions (blowing legend out of the water), tiny nuggets overlooked in the big picture, all these wonderful threads of the tapestry we call White Rose start to take new shape, new forms.
This database destroyed the Scholl-centric version of the White Rose story. When Protokolle, diary entries, letters, oral history, speeches, interviews, newspaper articles, i.e., everything including the kitchen sink, is unceremoniously and without reverence dumped into an objective, impartial database, the result takes White Rose history from two dimensions to five, not stopping for 3D along the way.
Layers upon layers, reflecting the reality of their friendships, pushing, pulling, messy, oh my word, is the true story ever messy! Allowing the impartial database to start the process of bringing order to the messiness, of riddling new rabbit holes… Seriously, the first time I generated a data dump – around 2000, 2001? – I almost didn’t want to write the histories. I envisioned a publication entitled In Their Own Words. The plain, unadorned language is that wonderful.
I returned to writing the histories only because I realized their story needed context. The further we travel from 1945, the harder it becomes for readers to “get” the milieu that was their world. It was about that time that I read Jason Crane’s article. When he wrote, “To us (brace yourselves), the Holocaust may as well have never happened…” – I knew their story needed context for it to maintain its relevance for future generations.
And you know what? Those future generations are going to come along with something new that blows my work out of the water. But their work will continue to be built on top of mine, which was built on top of… you get the idea. Their work will not invalidate mine, just as my work did not invalidate that of my predecessors.
[Parenthetical: I only ask of future generations – if you layer AI on top of my work, CITE! ATTRIBUTE! New tools will not invalidate the ethics of scholarship. And if any of you makes Jean Luc Picard’s Holodeck a reality, I want in! IYKYK.]
Jennifer is part of that L’Dor v’Dor chain. As is Katelyn Quirin. As are the students who – right this minute – are sitting in high school and university classrooms in the USA, Germany, Canada, Australia, the UK, Russia (hi Igor), Japan (Jun!), perhaps hearing about the White Rose for the first time, who want to know more.
And in hospitals and homes across the globe, babies are being born, babies who in twenty years will come along with something new that blows the work of Jennifer, Katelyn, et al, out of the water.
Fifty years from now, students may not know who you were, but they will know what you did.
It is my desire that “what I did” be worthy of these young people, who – fifty years before I heard their names – gave everything for what is right, what is just, what is real.
© 2023 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote.