The corona pandemic does not prevent twelve elderly concentration camp survivors from arriving in April 2020 for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald camp, although the official ceremony has been canceled. Shortly after their arrival there was the first Covid-19 case among them, and the private meeting became a quarantine. Inspired by Boccaccio's Decamerons, they pass the time with storytelling. Ivan Ivanji called his new novel “Corona in Buchenwald”.
Image: APA
Ivan Ivanji, born in 1929 as the son of a Jewish family of doctors in the Banat and deported to the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps during the Nazi era, was a teacher, journalist, lecturer, theater director, diplomat and interpreter (for example by Tito). In the pension, the man who lives in Vienna and Belgrade is above all an avowed “scribomane”, a writer. In recent years, “My beautiful life in hell”, “Death in Monte Carlo” and the novel “Hineni”, his own version of the story of the biblical Abraham, have appeared. In the dozen men he gathers in the Weimar Hotel Elephant, accompanied by partners, children or grandchildren, the Serbian writer Sascha, who traveled with his son, is easily recognizable as the author's alter ego.
Sascha came up with the idea of the twelve storytelling evenings. What a great idea! Unfortunately, the implementation does not quite hold up. Ivan Ivanji affectionately describes the atmosphere of the veterans' meeting, the diligent support from the German officials and the interaction with each other and with the younger generation. Here he is undoubtedly drawing from his own experience. The highlight of the book is the visit to the concentration camp memorial, which after the epidemiological all-clear is possible under strict security precautions. There Sascha gives a speech and recalls the “Buchenwald oath” made by liberated concentration camp prisoners, to which the survivors felt obliged to continue: “An essential sentence of the oath is: 'The annihilation of Nazism with its roots is our slogan. Building peace is our goal. '”
The twelve stories told by the survivors do not always approach this intensity. Ivan Ivanji spends a lot of time characterizing the narrators and gives relatively little space to the individual stories themselves. They are a mixture of eyewitness accounts from the concentration camp, anecdotes from later life and episodes from the author's favorite topics, Roman and Biblical history. This is how you encounter the exiled Roman poet Ovid and the great Spaniard Jorge Semprun, but also boxing matches and visits to brothels in the concentration camp. And Corona also appears, namely Corona Schröter, an actress who was also Goethe's lover. Sascha finds matching verses in Goethe's elegy “Auf Miedings Tod”: “So she willingly piles up every stimulus, / And even your name adorns you, Corona, / She comes over. Look at her to please! / Only unintentionally, but as with you Nice on purpose. “
(SERVICE – Ivan Ivanji: “Corona in Buchenwald”, Picus Verlag, 256 pages, 24 euros)
