The legend over the gates to the Auschwitz extermination camp was "Arbeit Macht Frei" -- Work Makes Freedom. The sponsor of this exhibition window in the NorthStar building has gone to considerable expense and trouble to bring a reminder of something that seems horribly out of place in the skyway/downtown work environment. Doesn't it? Is there any parallel in modern American experience with the emergence in 1930s Germany of a monstrous disorder of the human spirit, a hatred so great that it tried to eradicate a whole people from the face of the Earth? Is there anything in Minneapolis that would inspire this commitment to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive at a physical and symbolic level for the hordes of workers who race through the skyways daily?
As a pseudo-intellectual and recovering liberal, I am deeply moved by the sight. We cannot forget that the 20th Century happened. We cannot forget what the lessons learned in blood were meant to teach us. And we are so close to forgetting. Putting this image in the path of struggling wage earners during the holiday season is a shocking and provocative gesture. On the whole, it will be lost on many who do not recognize the story behind the stage set, and it will be ignored by many who find the sketchy minimalism of the gates and photos to be simply unattractive.
But for a few, it is profound hook into that part of the subconscious that needs to be dealt with on a regular basis: the human capacity for blood-lust and dehumanization that can lie buried in the self-involvement of an entire nation, waiting to rise up and overwhelm the spirit without notice. It is a reminder of the checks and balances our appetites and desires must submit to in the interest of civil order, and the monstrosity that is unleashed when reason, and memory, sleeps.
We cannot leave that maintenance of civil order, and of national conscience, to a few people. We remember the heroic few who risked their fates in the face of mass psychoses in Germany. Some escaped, many didn't. But we don't know how to emulate them. We trust the will and direction of the crowd. We celebrate it, and empower it with technology now in social media, without a backward glance at the horror represented by the tainted homily. Work makes freedom. It really meant Might makes Right. And we haven't learned to question that effectively yet. Have we?
What really makes freedom?
If you can think about that seriously for a few minutes today, the investment in this grisly tableau will have paid off a bit. In the meantime, Happy Holidays. Really. You have a lot to be grateful for. So do I. We also have to be courageous in the face of crowd-sourced stupidity and evil.
On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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