A Visit to Buchenwald

Abstract

Editor's Note: Breyten Breytenbach—poet, painter, prose writer, and political activist—was born in the Western Cape province to an Afrikaner family. Educated in art at the University of Cape Town, he early chose, in the face of the apartheid regime, exile, leaving South Africa in 1960 and settling in Paris in 1962. Here he began his dual career as a painter and writer, his poetry in Afrikaans early winning him recognition as the leading poet of his generation. During a clandestine return to his homeland in 1975, he was arrested, charged under the Terrorism Act, and spent seven years in prison (the first two in solitary confinement). Under the bizarre terms of his imprisonment, he was allowed to write (for the prison censor); his manuscripts were returned to him after his release in 1982. They formed the beginning of his ongoing experiments in the mixed genre of memoir, fiction, travel journal, and lyric. Much of his later prose has been written in English. Although he and his wife are still based in Paris, he was invited to join the faculty at the UCT, has recently taught at NYU, and is associated with the Gorée Institute in Senegal. His memoirs, like his poetry, establish strong ties between landscapes, language, and memories (both political and private). The following account of his visit to Goethe's Weimar and Hitler's Buchenwald will appear in a work still in progress.