Adventurous Life

In my post "Ebensee" I mentioned that I have been reading for my PhD while travelling to different places in Austria. As I was on the train to Ebensee, I was reading Dirk Lange's Trauma Recalled: Liturgy, Disruption, and Theology . The focus of this book is how. How do you put a traumatic event into words? How do you describe it? How do you recall it? How do you remember it and bring it about in repetition? He writes, "What does it mean to witness or remember an event when the truth of the event cannot be represented?" (69). This reading set me up for what I was about to experience in at the former concentration camp location in Ebensee. Not much remains of the camp. There is the main entrance, the now cemetery which was and is the location of mass graves, and the tunnels in the mountains about a 5 minute walk away. The town has built up and on the camp. As I was walking around I thought back on Lange. How does one remember, continue to remember, when living amo...

I have found that I concentrate better on my PhD readings when I am on a train. Fortunately, I have a yearly ticket that includes about 95% of travel in Austria, so I decided that once a month I would hop on train, read and travel for a few hours with a destination in mind, tour the destination a bit, then board a train for home and read a bit more. This gets me out of hibernating in my hobbit hole, I see more of Austria, get some exercise, and am productive with my studies. Win-win-win.  This month's stop was Ebensee. I tend to choose a location not just based on how far away it is from my city, but also for what it offers culturally and the natural beauty around it. Ebensee did not disappoint. It is a small town on the southern edge of a lake, ringed with mountains at the beginning of the Alps. Yet, it has a dark past. Ebensee was a concentration camp site with the purpose of building tunnels in the surrounding mountains for armament storage. It is estimated that over 8,000 peopl...