Die rote Blume

The blue flower is a well-known symbol of German romanticism. Coined by mining engineer and writer Novalis, it embodies the longing for a return to a beautiful unity of nature and culture. Along these lines, later on, the expressionist poet and medical doctor Benn used the color blue to express what he called thalassale Regression, the inherent longing of all forms of life to return to the ocean, to dissolve its form into the formlessness of water as the origin of life, echoing Freud’s obscure idea of a death drive. I encountered the red flower during a hot summer day when visiting the concentration camp Sachsenhausen close to Berlin for the first time. As Peter Watson put it in The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century (2011), the 20th-century was supposed to be Germany’s absolute blossoming—but it was cut off right at its peak. The contingent course of history took a fatal turn and led from a Germany that was flourishing in terms of culture and science right into the barbaric era of National Socialism. The red flower reminded me about the dialectical course of history, as Benjamin said, every document of culture is also a document of barbarism. The heavy load-bearing cylinder, a technologically highly advanced »laboratory« is inherently intertwined with the victims of Sachsenhausen whose blood turned the blue flower red like the bricks being produced in the nearby Klinkerwerk Oranienburg, a collaboration of Himmler and Speer.