Nietzsche Was Probably Right!

Dark, grim and eerie the amphitheatre that was built by the Nazis to serve their propaganda on the top of a hill shouldering Heidelberg. A huge venue on the top of the hill, where few ten meters down philosophers and poets used to stride discussing truth and pondering existence, contemplating human reason and expressing nature and beauty.
No sign to guide you to the place through the sloping road that digs its curvy tale through the high trees of the woods. As if nobody wants you to know it even exists or find your way to it. The overwhelming large construction stands all-of-a-sudden in front of you in its massive body, dressed up with its dark and solid and cold stones. It can definitely contains tenth of thousands of people, who would have been mostly university students and academicians: the minds of the future who would be summoned there, brain-washed and militarized with the ideologies that swerve the cause of the regime; of ‘Deutschland über Alles,’ of the myth of the ‘über Mensch’ of the ‘unique race’.






In the heart of the huge construction, when you set on one of the long and arch-like benches and stare at the main entrance with two bars that must have carried high the flag of Germany and the flag of the Gestapo and the oval-like stage, where probably the Fuehrer or one of his spokesmen stood to energize the crowd, history embraces you to the extent of suffocation with its think and heavy garment.

You look like an Ant in front of an elephant echo of ideology and fear. You linger like a helpless insect under the boot of a monster of death and human arrogance. Today, the monster was swallowed up by history, while the ants still visit the remaining witness and stare at the fading traces of the glory and power that are blown hither and thither by a roaring, devouring and smashing wind.




On the same hill, few meters further up, stands the remaining of another venue: an old Benedictine monastery. You climb up the wide stars of the amphitheatre and walked further ahead to find yourself walking into ruins of a chapel and an old convent that must have been one day big and lively; the oldest part of which goes back to the Middle Ages.
Side by side, stands two venues of two religions that once upon a time collided, clashed but even sometimes allied in ruling Germany: Christianity and Nazism.
On one hand, an amphitheatre, where people ‘gather to form the new German nation who obeys and does the will of its Führer’, as General Gobles, the media man of the rule says. And, on the other hand, a monastery where monks gather to form the community of the Lord who obeys the will of God. Two religions, one of obedience and one of submission, side by side, shoulder to shoulder: the religion of the human and the religion of the divine; each in its own shrines; in its own remains. Nietzsche was probably right: the death of God brings along with the death of the human self. I add, still, the other way round may be relatively as true.

Heidelberg, 28, Feb.2010