Ordinary and Not: Augsberg - Dachau

Dachau Concentration Camp, Germany

Dachau Sculpture - a tangle of living skeletons
Living because they reeked with the memory of movement.

The open square where roll call occurred and the point of a finger or gun determined fate.

1933 to liberation 1945
The first Nazi Concentration Camp, it opened only 51 days after Hitler took power.

The entrance and guard house through which every prisoner entered.
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
works sets you free
the motto molded in metal in the entry gate
the (meaningless) phrase was used at other concentration camps also

Blood wall at the firing range where people were executed.

The barbwire was old, rusted,
and the same in-place barbs that extinguished the future.

The first year, Dachau housed 4,800 prisoners. By 1937, 13,200 in 32 barracks.
One barrack was reserved for clergy who opposed the Nazi regime
and another for medical experiments.

Today there are memorials on site, reflecting different faiths.

The sculpture, the barbwire, the prisoner poetry, and the row of poplar trees
impacted me the most.
The poplars were the one place that selected prisoners could walk at designated times.
Free time, if you will.

If only the trees could talk...

And as far as I'm concerned, they do...

From Dachau to Oktoberfest 2011 in Munich on the same day -

the exhaustive gamut of human display.

The light-hearted in Munich: watching the Glockenspiel with Travis and Phyllis
The crowd waited with palpable enthusiasm for the twisting turning dancers;
instantly, the crowd was "done with it" 30 seconds before the wooden characters stopped.
Is it the anticipation that stirs us?

Munich: it was brilliant how scaffolding and buildings under construction
were covered with silk-screen (?).
The fabric was imprinted with the coming building-to-be, a preview...

The random meetup with Travis in the Munich bus/train station.
He's the physics guy we met in Scotland from the Pacific Northwest.

Chocolate heart cookies given as a sign of affection and freely worn around the neck at Oktoberfest.
I love chocolate but these cookies seem more like heavy cowbells.

The tables were full in the biergarten but we were invited to share the table with a group of work colleagues. All were from Switzerland except the young woman above from Germany. She was the coordinator of the Swiss men.