WEIMAR, Germany Tourists visiting the city of Goethe and Schiller are bombarded with busts, key chains and other trinkets bearing the likeness of Weimar's two biggest celebrities in nearly every shop.
Just a few kilometers away, on a swath of wooded hilltop that is the site of the city's most somber tourist attraction, a gift shop offers little more than a wide assortment of books and postcards. For years, the Buchenwald Memorial has preferred to keep it that way.
But in an effort to confront the challenge of passing the solemn lessons of the Holocaust on to future generations, the memorial began working with design students at Bauhaus University in Weimar last spring to create what until now had been taboo: concentration camp souvenirs.
A sampling of the results, ranging from small plaques to stationery embedded with tiny pebbles and twigs from the site, is to go on sale at the memorial's gift shop in time for the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation in April.
"This generation has grown up in a different culture, with different mediums," said Volkhard Knigge, a Holocaust scholar who directs the Buchenwald Memorial.
"We need to attempt new ways of communicating with them, and give them the chance to formulate their own way of accessing" the history here. "Otherwise we're speaking a language they don't understand."
The pioneering project has already caused a stir among Holocaust memorial organizations. Critics say the line separating piety and profit is crossed when camp memorials sell anything other than educational material like books or videodiscs. Last summer a Polish artist, Agata Siwek, caused a sensation with an exhibition in the Netherlands of Auschwitz "souvenirs," including key chains and refrigerator magnets that visitors to the show could buy. Attempts in the past to sell cheap trinkets near concentration camps, including Auschwitz, have been quickly shut down.
"We don't have things like medals or pencils with 'Auschwitz' printed on them, and we don't intend to," said Jarek Mensfelt, spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland. "That would mean commercializing it."
The Buchenwald project organizers say that their souvenirs are well thought out, and that the money is not the main draw. The memorial's $9.2 million budget, financed by state and federal grants, is enough to maintain the site, Knigge said.
He said that he did not think the items would sell well, but that the project was "about building bridges." "The greatest profit will be to see how people between the age of 20 and 30 remember this time," he said. "How do they build themselves bridges to this period?"
Gerrit Babtist, the design professor who led the class at the Bauhaus University, brushed aside the reservations he had when he was first approached by the Buchenwald Association, a group that plans and organizes exhibitions and special projects for the memorial. "I think it is a very human thing to want to take away something, an object, that is loaded with the emotions of the place."
Together with an archaeologist and a Weimar historian, Babtist began by immersing his 11 students, almost all in their early 20s, in Holocaust history. They traveled to Berlin and met with an architect who worked on the city's Jewish Museum with Daniel Libeskind and toured the Jewish quarter with a historian before returning to Weimar.
They spent three days at Buchenwald, where from 1937 to 1945 the Nazis murdered an estimated 56,000 people of many nationalities. Today, a few reconstructed buildings, a stone memorial and the rubble of prison blocks lend a haunting, empty feel to the place. It was there, just a 30-minute bus ride up a hill from the center of town, that many of the students came up with their first ideas.
Sabine Hipp, who grew up near Weimar, created a small booklet featuring a black and white photograph of one of the victims from pre-camp times and that person's life story, gleaned from the camp's archives.
The pamphlet, which will eventually feature a number of camp victims should it go on sale, is designed to accompany the visitor throughout the concentration camp.
"I wanted to pull a person out of this mass of people and numbers, and I wanted to pick a photo that the victims themselves would have picked," Hipp, 21, said. Other students used Germany's postwar constitution as inspiration, copying quotations from the paragraphs dealing with human rights onto small plaques or wristbands. One used the thousands of buttons unearthed on the site as a metaphor, creating a simple, clear button pin with "Buchenwald" inscribed on it.
Last month, the Buchenwald Association decided on the 10 objects, of the 39 produced by the class, that would most likely go on sale. There are a number of questions that need to be answered, such as what final form the souvenirs will take and how they will be presented. The biggest question of all - whether anyone will buy them - won't be answered until next year.
The New York Times
