Arbeit Macht Frei sign: the logic of desecration
Posted on Monday 21 December, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized
THERE was – from Indira Gandhi’s point of view, anyway – obvious security justification for Operation Blue Star. Sikh militants were hoarding arms in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest site of all for adherents to that religion.
So one day in 1984, India’s prime minister ordered the army to move in. Hundreds perished in the subsequent shootout, with the exact death toll unlikely ever be known. But this was killing in the name of raison d’etat, not killing in the name of mere money.
There was a justification of sorts – in so far as religious fundamentalism ever needs to look to justification – behind the Taliban’s wilful demolition of the Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan eight years ago.
For Mullah Omar’s brand of Islamism, the existence of monumental statues of great antiquity on Muslim land was simply intolerable, because they were idols pertaining to another belief system.
This grotesque vandalism on a grand scale was mercifully unsullied by any vulgar considerations of cash. In its way, it represented a principled and worked out ideological stance. Pity about the principles involved, but I suppose you can’t have everything.
Henry Moore’s sculpture Reclining Figure was of no religious significance whatsoever. The decision to steal the two tonne statue, worth perhaps £3m, was motivated by the desire to melt it down and sell the brass for scrap, thereby netting perhaps £1,500. The irony here is that the Henry Moore Foundation offered £10,000 for its safe return. The crims that pulled this one off must have been pretty thick.
I suppose the Arbeit Macht Frei sign that stood over the gates of Auschwitz is not precisely analogous to any of these other artefacts. If it qualifies as an object of veneration, it is in the secular rather than sacred sense of the word. If it can be represented as a work of art, it is important to remember that it was intended as the functional equivalent of a mere street sign. No bloodshed was involved in its theft.
Yet it too was stolen, most likely because a collector of Nazi memorabilia was willing to pay a high price for it, and because a gang of crooks was willing to do the job. Fortunately it has been recovered, albeit hacked into three pieces for ease of shipment.
Yet note here that there was demand and there was supply, and the market reached equilibrium at the appropriate price. In a world where there is a market price for everything from nuclear technology designs to prepubescent hookers or smack cut with rat poison, it would be naïve to be shocked at that.
But as acts of desecration go, what happened here looks disappointingly tawdry. At least Gandhi and the Taliban came up with classier excuses.
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22 Responses to “Arbeit Macht Frei sign: the logic of desecration”
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“We are only breaking stones”
Mullah Omar
Many years – decades – ago I was among those who opposed Lancaster University purchasing yet another of Henry Moore’s ho-hum bronzes – you know the sort of thing: “Toilet Seat for a Deformed Giant #4″ – on the grounds that it was aethetically nothing much and that any bronze workshop could run up a serviceable replica at a fraction of the price.
On aesthetic grounds I was right, on vulgar Gagosian-style art-investment grounds I was among those totally wrong. Anyway, Lancaster University got a Frink instead. The Frink may, or may not, have appreciated more or less than the ho-hum Henry Moore.
The Arbeit Macht Frei sign will not be appearing on Ebay then, unlike Jeffry Dahmer’s fridge [which was swiftly removed after anguished protests] but the idea of nicking such an artefact – so iconic and yet so easily reproduced – for the student bar or a Texan vulgarian’s den is an amusing one.
Where is the Trotsky-slaying icepick? There was a press story that it surfaced recently in Mexico City.
The most interesting debate re the giant Buddhas in Afghanistan is actually around rebuilding them.
Put simply if Afghanistan ever becomes a war free country, the Buddhas could be its main tourist destination, bringing in much needed currency and employment.
The problem though is that actually getting agreement to put up Buddhist icons in a country with so many rampant Islamists is virtually nil. Looking at the gaps where the Buddhas were is probably not quite the same…..
“Put simply if Afghanistan ever becomes a war free country, the Buddhas could be its main tourist destination, bringing in much needed currency and employment.”
This guy is taking the piss, isn’t he?
You could have mentioned the student pissing on the war memorial, it’s not just those jolly foreigners who get sensitive about desecration you know.
Back in the old days, the days of the Monarchy and the First Republic, hippies and those crudely but erroneously thought to be hippies, went out of their way to go and see the Buddhas and appropriately smoked dope while watching the Buddhas disappear at sunset. The local Hazaras made a few bob in catering for the tourist trade.
One clever Japanese idea is to replace the Buddhas not in stone but with holograms at certain times of the day.
Cheaper and less likely to enrage the very touchy bearded ones.
Marko – Run that by me again, because I really don’t see the connection between one student pissing on a war memorial, and the Buddhas of Bamiyan not being rebuilt because it appears impossible for some Islamists to allow any non-Muslim imagery in Afghanistan?
Paul Stott – Pissing on a war memorial could be described as desecration (the theme of the article!!) by some and indeed was by the media.
The point being that Dave’s examples could have done with a few closer to home (another could be the loss of ancient treasures after the invasion of Iraq).
Some of the racist idiots that sometimes frequent this site need that kind of perspective.
The “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign at Dachau concentration camp disappeared shortly after the 1945 liberation and has never been seen since. Most probably an American soldier took it as a souvenir. The sign there now is a later copy.
Paul Stott,
“You could have mentioned the student pissing on the war memorial, it’s not just those jolly foreigners who get sensitive about desecration you know.”
Paul, this was meant for Dave not you! I can see why you were confused!
I’d assumed it was to be melted down for its scrap value.
Bill,
The icepick never left Mexico City and is now the property of the senior investigating agent’s daughter. Click on this link if you want to see a set of photos of the house that St. Leon the Loser occupied as well as the one and only twatting hammer itself.
Trotsky’s ashes are in the back garden. I don’t know if the local CP still climb over the wall and have a good piss every 20th August or not, but they used to back in the day.
I’d read that the Soviets removed the sign in 1945 but returned it after complaints. Presumably Stalin wanted to re purpose it by hanging it over the entrance to a gulag or the Supreme Soviet.
Unlikely story about an American soldier lifting it since Auschwitz was overrun by the Red Army – the Americans were hundreds of miles away on the other side of the river Elbe.
Marko – We were talking at crossed purposes purposes – not to worry.
Who cares, the sign was stolen because of the scrap value or some idiot wanted to buy it, we will run after the swine who stole it yet cannot give them a decent job or wage.
THE CASE OF THE MEXICAN ICEPICK
The story about the lethal icepick being offered for sale surfaced briefly and then submerged once more. I assumed a well-heeled Trot like Tariq Ali might have bought it to venerate as a sacred relic.
Exile now raises the horrific possibility that there is the ‘real’ icepick and a substitute authenticated by established tradition.
[Rather like the various relics of St Francis Xavier and the claim that the fragment of bone in Malacca is a fraudulent substitution, unlike the body in Goa, the fragment of bone in Macau and the arm in Rome and the toe or toes in Portugal.]
If the icepick claimed by the Mexican officer’s daughter has blood adhering to it [as all good relics really should] there are certainly enough of L. D. Bronstein’s kin around to get a DNA match.
If you had read what I posted, you would have seen I referred to Dachau, a camp in southern Bavaria liberated by the Americans in late April 1945. It also had one of these signs, which were common at the entrances to camps.
Incıdentally, the Germans set up a poster just outside Auschwitz camp with the words in German “Better dead than red”. A slogan to be revived by the Americans a few years later.
My brother told me that the sign was stolen for scrap value, but I don’t know if he was joking or not. Yes, us Brits are so lightfingered though unlike the Noble Savages of other lands. It is a fact that the metal plaques on the local war memorial in our park in Palmers Green were stolen for scrap. Whether the culprits were Brits or not, I don’t know. Probably were nasty English types, don’t you think? The same ones who steal the copper cable on the railways and telephone systems. we are genetically encoded to be thieves, don’t you think, Mark, Victorystooge, Marko and skidmarx.
SueR
I have no idea whole stole it but we should keep in mind that it was ‘civilised’ Westerners not ‘barbarian’ dark skinned people who erected the thing in the first place.
Why do I even need to point that out to people on the left?
Marko is right; it was the noble Rwandese who came up with the idea of an ecologically responsible genocide, instead of the polluting mess the beastly Huns made.
Toot Toot Tutsi, bye bye
‘Scuse me Marko, ‘civilized’ here isn’t used in a moral sense, it’s used to mean ‘organised for industrial production’. It was precisely because Germany was one of the largest economies in the world and highly industrialised that they were able to set up the death camps etc. Take the example that Bill Corr mentioned of Rwanda. As a small, peasant based state Rwanda could only manage brute violence and mob rule. It was the same in Uganda. The Middle East doesn’t exactly lead on showing the world the way forward in warfare either does it? Just lobbing stones and blowing up shoppers, and why is this? Because they can’t work together and set down their weapons long enough to organise a viable economy. That’s why China and India are streets ahead. Pretty soon people will be asking ‘what is the point of the Middle East?’. I suppose they have their extractive industries, but oil is being discovered in lots of more politically stable areas. I’ve noticed that some people are incapable of rising above moralism. It clouds their judgement.
The pick that is held by the agent’s daughter is the real one. Her father was afraid that it would be stolen so he put a copy into the Mexican Black Museum – sure enough it was nicked.
The woman wants to have the ice-pick’s blood subjected to a DNA examination and that just needs Trotsky’s grandson – who is a Mexican national – to go to the laboratory. I suspect that they are haggling over the asking price for the pick once it has been proven to be authentic. The Mexican state has gone on record as saying that it has no interest in the item.
I wonder how much it will fetch?
Exile -
Yes, who WILL end up as owner of this historically-significant [?] murder weapon?
Are there any really well-off people who are admirers of Trotsky?
Tariq Ali and/or the Redgraves come to immediately mind but it is known that at least one of the Redgraves had a pressing tax demand paid out of the funds the WRP and Workers’ Press got from Iraq and/or Libya and Tariq Ali probably isn’t REALLY wealthy.
Someone like one of the Saatchis would be the sort of person I have in mind. Damian Hurst or Tracey Emin could incorporate the murder weapon into an artwork. [Now THERE'S a thought!]
Or the sort of Japanese billionaires who own all those Impressionist canvases of disputed authenticity.
Or the Georgian [?] oligarch who paid $93,000,000 in real money for one of Picasso’s horrible paintings of Dora Maar looking like she was made out of papier-mache in a primary school.