Observance: “everyone receives what he deserves” 

Sept 22 2025

In a society radically tilted towards authoritarianism, it’s good to revisit history. In a nation traumatized by gun violence, polarized by social inequality and burdened by hate speech, it’s good to revisit poetry.  So, here’s one from the great Ernesto Cardenal, pastor and poet of the Sandanista revolution and of Latin American liberation, from his book, From Nicaragua With Love, published in 1986 by the inimitable City Lights Books. 

Consider it a form of tough love for the tender-hearted. 

Visit to Weimer (German Democratic Republic)

By Ernesto Cardenal

We were passing through Weimar and naturally

we went to Goethe’s house.

His paintings were there. A Lucas Cranach …

An Italian primitive …

Also a delicate pencil drawing he made

of his pretty wife asleep in the garden. 

The piano where the young Mendelssohn played.

Greek statues, his collection of minerals.

The desk where he wrote Faust.

His poor bed. The armchair where he died.

Very elegant drawing rooms because he was Prime Minister; 

his bedroom 

Modest like Lenin’s in the Kremlin.

The couch where he used to spend all night talking

with the Prince of Weimar.

“Profound thoughts concerning nature and art.”

A time de devoted more to the natural sciences than to poetry.

Here he discovered the intermaxillary bone in man.

Also the vertebrae theory of the skull.

In 1790 he began the study which led to his theory of colors.

(The same year that he wrote The Metamorphosis of Plants.)

It was a snowy day when Schiller came to Weimar to live.

He had a conversation with Napoleon here. 

In 1815 he was appointed Prime Minister.

(He was also a kind of Minister of Culture.)

This was the intellectual capital of Germany.

Here young Heine, boasting, told him

that he too was at work writing “his” Faust. 

And that the plums in Weimar were so delicious!

The devastating effect that Schiller’s death had on him.

The Botanical Garden in Palermo revealed the proto-plant to him.

Working on The Metamorphosis of Animals

he became more and more convinced

that the art of poetry is “a common property of mankind”

and in all times and places it exists in thousands of people. 

Poetry writing could be taught to the masses.

All that mattered to him were culture and barbarism, he said.

He was ending up alone.

In 1827 his Charlotte died.

The next year, the Grand Duke.

But he had written: “There is always a quiet in the treetops.”

As the end of Book II, Faust, now blind, has the vision

Of “a free people living on this earth.”

He put a lock on the covers of Book II

and stuck it in a cabinet he locked so that no one could read it.

Later on, he no longer left his room to go into

the elegant drawing rooms. 

The day he was dying in his armchair

he thought he saw a letter from Schiller on the floor

And 15 minutes from there

forests all around

We enter the “Highway of Blood.”

The prisoners themselves paved it.

It ends at deserted platforms

where hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of trains

used to come.

The imposing bronze doors open for us,

with a flowered grille

and big letters backwards, above the grille,

that only can be read inside, once the doors have closed:

EVERYONE RECEIVES WHAT HE DESERVES

like the entrance to Dante’s Inferno

Lasciate ogni speranza, o voi che entrate

It’s the entrance to Buchenwald.

Barbed-wire fences inside of barbed-wire fences inside

of other electrified barbed-wire fences.

The horrifying turrets.

And we saw the red-brick ovens of the crematorium.

The “special” cells of the ones who resisted,

where before dying heroes cried out

from the little hole with bars,

to the whole camp, not to surrender.

It was truly another town. 

With as many inhabitants as Weimar.

Their bodies walking skeletons

a tottering footstep

a blank stare full of terror.

Everything well planned. 

The name of each person who was going to arrive

announced beforehand at the concentration camp

With a copy to the Central Office of Concentration Camps,

Cc: Gestapo, etc. 

“In reference to what has previously been

discussed I enclose in duplicate, for the

necessary purposes, the list of those unable to do work”

(Signed)

Camp Doctor of Buchenwald

On the outskirts, mounds of corpses.

The grey building with different floors where they

left their clothes.

Girls wearing elegant dresses

came outwearing the blue-and-white striped uniform

with a number tattooed on their left arm

many soon dying from sheer grief.

Human skin was good for parchment.

For writing poems on it, romantic ones.

For binding books.

For lampshades.

They shrunk Jewish heads (like the Jívaros), for souvenirs.

And doctors doing all kinds of experiments on live bodies.

There were 18-hour workdays in December, out in the snow and wind,

wearing just a thin jacket,

and many were so cold they threw themselves on the

barbed wire to be electrocuted.

The children put in a separate pen

their barbed-wire pen inside of barbed-wire fences

inside of more barbed wires.

Next to them a small barbed-wire cage with bear cubs

(the children loving those cubs)

and when the children cried from hunger

the guards poured plenty of milk for the bear cubs

so that the children might see it,

the cute little bears

and the children crying, screaming.

Floodlights revolving in the fog, revolving,

searching for a fugitive

and the gruff barking of police dogs behind

the barbed wire fences

and its echoes.

One could tell if they were burning corpses in the ovens

if the smoke coming out was black or white.

And from the delicious smell of roasting meat.

The voice of the pastor admonishing them, gripping the bars

in the final call.

we saw the apparatus “for measuring a prisoner’s height”

and the little window behind it that opened up and out

came a hand with a pistol

to shoot him in the back of the neck.

Before, a “doctor” examined his teeth

looking for gold.

The fact is they’d discovered the dead bodies yielded money;

hair, gold teeth, fat, skin for artwork.

Capitalist economy to the point of madness.

“Contents of shipment:

2 kilos of hair in locks and braids”

The death trains always pulling up to the platforms.

And in Weimar nobody knew anything.

They only saw a forbidden zone and a long line of trains.

But they got suspicious

when an army truck crashed right in the center of town

and piles of corpses fell onto the street.

These were the forests where Goethe would go for walks.

Close to here the oak tree that Goethe used to read beneath.

And that the Nazis took good care of.