I do believe all your points are valid David. For those with an interest here's a short article on the Mr. Lubbe David referenced in the title of his last post. I will respond further but I'm on the move at the moment and wanted to keep this discussion going. I also would like those that are reading along to have a look at the article below. A very good point on David's part to bring his name into the discussion.
Hats off,
Doc

Read on everybody...






Marinus Van der Lubbe, Tragic
Weirdo
Matt Steinglass on Marinus Van der Lubbe,
tragic weirdo

WHEN THE REBUILT, glass-domed Reichstag
opened in Berlin last April, it was hailed as the
embodiment of rationalism and transparency in politics.
But politics are not rational, and they're certainly not
transparent, as Helmut Kohl's Swiss banker could tell you
-- and as Dutch artists Ron Sluik and Reinier Kurpershoek
found out last month. The artists had applied for
permission to place a memorial next to the Reichstag
commemorating their fellow Hollander Marinus van der
Lubbe, who burned the building down in 1933. (The
24-year-old communist bricklayer was discovered
standing naked in the flaming Reichstag, having
apparently used his clothes to stoke the fire.) The
German Senate refused their request, and the
confrontation quickly made headlines in Holland, stirring
up all the murky accusations which have long made the
fire a historical riddle, and a conspiracy buff�s dream.

The facts of the case were never simple. The Nazis, who
had recently come to power in a coalition government,
claimed the fire was a signal for a communist uprising;
they declared a state of emergency, suspended
democratic rule, and put Van der Lubbe on trial as a
Bolshevik agent; leftists the world over charged that Van
der Lubbe was a Nazi agent, and that the fire was a
frame job. Van der Lubbe, meanwhile, insisted he had set
the fire alone, as a plea to Germany's workers to rise up
against the Nazis. He was beheaded. But long after his
death the argument continued: Did he do it alone? Or
was he a Nazi stooge?

The consensus in Holland is that he did it alone. To the
Dutch, Van der Lubbe is not exactly a hero, but a sort of
cherished tragic weirdo. (Renewed fascination with Van
der Lubbe has occasioned a recent biography, and the
cutting-edge theater troupe Hollandia is now touring with
a production based on his life.) Van der Lubbe grew up
dirt-poor and fatherless; he apprenticed as a bricklayer,
but lost most of his eyesight when fellow-workers stuffed
a bag of chalk over his head as a practical joke. Unable
to work, he became a full-time communist youth
organizer, but broke with the party because he couldn't
stand taking orders. He tried to raise money by entering
a newspaper contest to swim the English Channel, but
failed due to poor weather. He then set off to walk to
China, but had to turn back at Romania. Van der Lubbe
exemplifies Holland's image of itself during the war -- he
was mercurial and ineffective, but he had his heart in the
right place.

To the Germans, of course, Van der Lubbe is a strange
foreigner who burned down their legislature and touched
off twelve years of totalitarianism and horror. Thus, Sluik
and Kurpershoek�s rather weepy memorial -- a rough-cut
block of stone, engraved with fragments of a poem Van
der Lubbe wrote in jail -- seems completely inappropriate.
Van der Lubbe is one of the great figures of historical
indeterminacy, like Hiss, Oswald, O.J., or Paula Jones.
And such figures call for a whole new kind of memorial --
a memorial to confusion, to media circuses, to the mad
discursive frenzy of mass information society. "The fire
itself," said Van der Lubbe at his trial, wearied by eight
months of surreal interrogation, "was not at all
complicated; it's very easy to explain. But everything
that's happened around it, that's something else." It�s
that "something else" that a memorial to Van der Lubbe
would need to commemorate; it would need to be an
absurdist counterweight to the Reichstag's glass dome,
and to the gray certitude of Peter Eisenman�s 2,000-pillar
Berlin holocaust memorial. An image from Hollandia�s
production of Van der Lubbe�s life suggests itself: a man
struggling valiantly to extract his head from a bag full of
chalk. Or perhaps an eternally flaming pair of pants.

Matt Steinglass studied Russian History and Literature,
wrote TV cartoons for Disney and PBS, got a degree in
Interactive Technology, and moved to Amsterdam to
become a journalist. Predictably, he now lives in Togo
with his girlfriend, who works for the UN.
Other articles by Matt Steinglass