A Dream of a Concentration Camp

If anyone had told me a few months ago that a colonoscopy might have anything at all to do with psychohistory, I would have laughed; I have learned otherwise. Those who have experienced this intrusive procedure know that the day and night before it are uncomfortable as one drinks a vile liquid that purges one’s bowels so that the doctor may have a clear view of any growths or obstruction in them. I experienced no exception. But the discomfort had the unique consequence in that for the second time in my life, I had a terrifying dream about a specific aspect of the past that interwove my conscious and my unconscious. Below I will describe my dream of January 14, 2004, and then give my associations and analysis.

The Dream: In the first scene of the dream, I was running to the latrine in a concentration camp; I was wearing poorly fitting and dirty prison garb. I desperately had to visit the latrine but an SS guard stopped me in the muddy area in front of the latrine. It was horrible to be stopped and the area itself was disgusting. He had me do push-ups until the pressure in my bowels exploded, soiling my pants further. I was disgusted with myself and ran on as the guard laughed. All this was truly upsetting because on the inside I felt like a lieutenant in the regular German army (die Wehrmacht). In the next scene I realized that I was half German and half Jewish, and that I was kneeling at the edge of a ravine. I was about to be shot by someone whom I could only see as a shadow from the corners of my eyes. Half turned, I told the man that I was a lieutenant in the army. “Ja, ja, me too,” he said sarcastically. All

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the same, he shot the pistol next to my ear, simultaneously kicking me into the ravine. Oddly, I did not hear the shot go off. In the next scene, I was buried under several bodies. I felt tremendous weight on me; blood and filth were everywhere and the stench was unbelievable. I recall trying to crawl from underneath the bodies and out of the ravine. People were moaning and some of them were also attempting to escape. As the scene progressed, I crouched at the top of the ravine, bloody and filthy; all was quiet between the nearest barracks and me. I realized immediately that I had to find water and clean myself up so I did not end up at the edge of the ravine again, this time with a bullet in the back of my head. In the next scene, I had found water because I was now clean and looking for my uniform inside the infamous warehouse in Auschwitz. It was between the walls at the place I had hung it. I put it on, being sure to place the iron cross first class, the wound badge, and the tank medal in the correct positions. In the final scene, I walked out of the camp, saluting smartly and being saluted smartly.

My Associations and Analysis: Dreams have intrigued human beings since the ancient world and it is not uncommon for a dream to allow access to a world of thoughts we sometimes avoid consciously. Freud taught us this.

The scenes in my dream stem from my imagination because I do not have any experience with a concentration camp nor with service in the German military. But the dream brought to the fore my longstanding concern with German history, the role of the Holocaust in it, and my personal relationship with both. The dream became so specific because of other relevant experiences, many conversations, much reading, and considerable reflection on all; they moderated the progression of the dream. Naturally, the colonoscopy put a lot of pressure on my bowels and that given showed up in my dream in having to run to a latrine and in scenes of filth. In some ways, the filth reminded me of the open outdoor toilets of my childhood. The one that was particularly offensive was attached to our elementary school; it literally stank up the entire three-storied building. The filth also reminded me of the smelly chicken coop on our farm where I collected eggs as a child. This recollection in turn evoked aspects of the thoughtful Alan Dundes and Gerald Dumas, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Study of German National Character Through Folklore (1984). It likens life to a chicken coop ladder with people on different places in the pecking order. Those at the bottom are forced to spend most of their time in chicken shit. While I doubt that Germans are more scatologically oriented than most other Europeans, this background allowed concentration camp officials to design amazingly effective ways to dehumanize and depersonalize camp inhabitants by sticking them into poorly fitting and filthy uniforms, and exposing them to all sorts of other abuses, one of them being the open latrines. I understood in the dream that being filthy and becoming depersonalized would be my end, and I was not about to let that happen.

The source for the idea that I would be half Jewish and half German stems from Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s German Soldiers: The Untold Story of

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Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (2002) and several pictures in it. On picture that has intrigued me in particular is of the subsequent German Prime Minister, Helmut Schmidt, who is a quarter Jew by Nazi racial doctrine (insert following p. 247). Another is of two half-Jewish generals, Johannes and Karl Zukertort. As I read this book last spring, I felt profound empathy for the 150,000 or so quarter-, half-, three quarter- and small number of full Jews who served in the Wehrmacht during WWII and who faced increasing difficulty toward the end of it. With time, I became even angrier with the Nazi Regime, which on the one hand accepted these soldiers for years and on the other created the devaluation of the long-standing tradition of Jews serving in the German and Austro-Hungarian armies. The more I thought about it, the more my anger grew at the destruction of the patriotism and the murder of most of the soldiers’ relatives—and with them, German-Jewish culture. This anger has peaked over the last few years when my good colleague Professor Zohara Boyd and I, she a hidden child and I the son of a German officer, presented our stories to students and teachers in western North Carolina. The more we dug into our pasts, the more we realized that while we needed to tell the story of the National Socialist (NS) regime, the more difficult it had become for us to bear the anguish that we feel because of it and some of the policies of our own present government.

The image of being rescued stems in part from Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s autobiography, entitled Mein Leben (My Life, 2000). In it he describes two pertinent scenes from Warsaw. In the first, he had just arrived on a transport from Berlin and was to help with clearing a pool; as he stood and waited for his assignment, he began to talk with a young soldier guarding him and others. Their conversation quickly turned to Berlin, their common home city, and their favorite soccer team. The soldier then told him to leave the area, thus most likely saving him from considerable hardship; Ranicki did not hesitate. In the second scene, several months later and as the remaining Jews were taken from Warsaw east to Treblinka, Ranicki and his wife ran away from their column and for some reason none of the soldiers shot at them. These rescues and several others allowed Ranicki to survive and become Germany’s most famous literary critic.

The third point deals with having available a clean uniform and walking out of Auschwitz. This scene is described similarly in Thilo Thielke’s Eine Liebe in Auschwitz [A Love in Auschwitz] (2000) in which a Polish Catholic and a Polish Jew fell in love in the infamous warehouse, and he carefully planned their escape. To do so, Jerzy Bielecki gradually assembled an SS officer’s uniform in the warehouse where he served as a prisoner supervisor and hid it in a wall between some boards. When he had all the parts of the uniform assembled, and placed other details, he posed as an SS officer and led his Jewish love, Cyla Cybulska, out of the camp, with a pistol trained on her back. They escaped to freedom, unlike most others who attempted to escape.

The medals are important to me as symbols of high honor and good work. More importantly, they are symbolic of the heroic Jewish contribution to the Austro-Hungarian and German military and my disdain for the NS regime because they threw away the awesome gift to those countries. The medals were (and are) to me symbolic of cultural and other contributions to those Central European areas and the disdain with which the NS regime treated them.

Dealing with parts of the dream will hopefully now also allow getting closer to the center of the mission of the psychohistorian. But before I elaborate about this aspect, I must admit that Professor Jay Wentworth, one of my dearest colleagues at Appalachian State University, told me years ago that one can rescue oneself from a bad dream by taking an active part in it, to go on the offensive, so to speak. Thus, in this dream, too, I probably assumed a more active part than I would have without this advice and was able to rescue myself. I am grateful to Jay, Zoe Boyd, and Professor Paul Elovitz of Ramapo College for assisting in the following interpretation.

Quite obviously, the pressure in my intestines during the night that preceded the colonoscopy brought forth the first image, but the others need further elaboration. Because I am German by birth and descent, have had many family members in the German military since the 18th century, and am a historian, World War II and the Holocaust chose me long ago. For example, I endeavored to understand my father’s role during that time (“Father, Son and Uncertain Solutions: Conversations and Reflections about National Socialist Germany,” Biography: An

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Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Vol. 7, No.3 (Summer, 1984): pp. 189-205). Additionally, I listened, often carefully, to many stories of relatives and friends regarding the horrors and traumas for everyone who remained alive during this time. But the Holocaust gained renewed immediacy recently through my colleague Zoe Boyd; her telling of her experiences give further coherence to all of these tales of woe and my reflections on them.

Uniforms are one of the underlying themes of the dream—those of the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the camp detainees. My most appreciated images are associated with the first, and thus I wore it in the dream. It was the uniform of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, my favorite German officer; most of the men I have known since the war; and the German-Jewish soldiers. This uniform, in addition, is an affirmation of my heritage and its implicit courage, in this case the family of my mother, and some of my conflicts with that part of the family. Simultaneously, it represents a way to stand my ground against authority, both that of my mother’s family and also my father, and father figures since then.

Importantly, the Wehrmacht uniform was not my father’s uniform; as a diplomat in Italy, he wore that of the SS. It was also the uniform of the death camps and the Waffen-SS (weapons storm troopers): despised, disdained, and maligned. Nevertheless, it was the uniform of the man in the dream who did not shoot me, thus allowing me to gain my freedom. For me this uniform stands for doubt, hesitation, and complete and utter disappointment with the NS regime. The NS administration not only threw away the loyalty of the Jewish-German soldiers, it threw away the loyalty of all Germans by dragging them into a disastrous behavior toward their follow human beings and a terrible war.

Finally, a word, too, about the “uniforms” of the camp inhabitants; they were the antithesis of the other uniforms. They were the miserable garb of the men and women who were assigned as laborers to keep alive the machinery of death.

The uniforms thus carry tremendous symbolic weight. Because my father did not wear the uniform of the regular army, I may have been able to show a distance to his uniform and at the same time an affinity to him. Because my parents were divorced while my father was in one of 14 American prison camps, we were distant by the very fact that he and I lived in different places and worlds until we met once more when I was about 10; but even after that, we rarely saw each other. The man behind me at the edge of the ravine may indeed have stood for my father; he was, after all, the man who rescued me at a critical point in my life when he encouraged my emigration to the U.S.

Unlike “regular” historians, as psychohistorians we are to gain empathy for our subject so that we may, to paraphrase Peter Gay in Freud for Historians (1985), recreate/relive the events of the past and thus understand them more fully. Thus, the way to gain insight is not to create distance from our subject but rather to embrace it, to enter it. The Jewish-German soldier I imagined myself to be in the dream is one example of how one can enter the context of these men. Imagine being a career soldier who discovers one day, when his family recreates its family tree, as everyone was required to do in those days in Germany, that he is not of pure German blood but rather a Mischling (of mixed blood). A whole world must have collapsed around the young man. Having heard, read about, and seen enacted the anti-Jewish policies of the NS Regime, and knowing some of his relatives to be Jewish, he had two principal options. He could stay in the military or he could leave the military. In the first case, he had a genuine chance to survive and hopefully protect his family; in the second, he endangered himself and his family. Most soldiers chose to stay, some saved themselves and, in some more cases, their families. In my dream, I was one of the ones who stayed, but because of some infraction, I ended up in a camp, as did some of my would-be comrades, only to be saved, so to speak, by a man in SS uniform.

The escape from the imaginary camp is a function of having learned to deal with negative dreams, but it is also a function of having enough spunk left after a few weeks in the camp to attempt an escape. The issue of cleanliness is directly connected to it. Aside from being a person who does not thrive on dirt, I would like to offer two other explanations. First is the obvious need to clean myself up in order not to appear as a prisoner because anyone who looked like a prisoner was a prisoner. Second, I associated the dirt of the camp with the filth of the regime and, if I was to walk out “clean,” that is, untainted by

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it, I had to be rid of its dirt. Of course, I am aware that I wore a uniform that fought with the regime.

The father figures I referred to earlier, and whose opinions and behaviors I often admire and sometimes wonder about, include colleagues in psychohistory who would have us believe that our understanding of the past and our behaviors in the present rests principally, if not exclusively, on our childhoods. No doubt our personal essences rest on our relationship with our parents and our other experiences in our childhoods, however good, indifferent, or bad they may have been. But they also rest on later life’s experiences and insights. As this dream illustrates, hopefully clearly, with time these later experiences, and our reflection on them, may tend to dominate our very psyche, understanding, and action.

In conclusion, this dream is about several issues important to me and possibly to psychohistorians. Triggered by the preparation for the colonoscopy, it revealed undercurrents in my understanding of the Holocaust and World War II, and my connection to both. I had gained these understandings through conversation, reading, and writing, but some insights remained hidden below the surface. Thus, the placement of the dream in a concentration camp allowed insights to surface that had not emerged during waking hours. I gained a better understanding of the dehumanization of the concentration camps through filth, arbitrary rules, starvation, overwork, and murder. Yet in this very misery was also the hope for resolution by walking out of it. I was able to get closer at sorting out my admiration for the regular German army and the contribution to it by German-Jews. I was able to address further the difficulty with my father’s SS uniform and the general implications of it and having to live with him as my rescuer. The broader implication of the dream for me as a psychohistorian is that one needs to embrace one’s childhood and later life experiences as an integrating part of any analysis of our chosen topics, or the topics that choose us. Without getting at the underlying currents that shape our conscious thoughts, genuine honesty and caring generosity with our topics will elude us.

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