“I have started to carve wooden moorland figures”, wrote Wilhelm Henze in his diary, “I made the male and female figures as comical as possible. It gave me a lot of pleasure. The days here on the moor are so boring and empty. There’s nothing to read.”
Henze was a motor mechanic, a commercially unsuccessful writer and a dedicated antifascist. In August 1933, the authorities of the Third Reich arrested him for distributing oppositional pamphlets. Nine months later, they sent him to Brual-Rhede in northwestern Germany, a work camp simultaneously designed to cultivate the adjacent moor and to re-educate left-wing inmates through a brutal disciplinary regime.
Culture offered Henze a way of coping with his dire situation. At times, he dreamt of a future life beyond the universe of the camp, by practicing the quintessentially internationalist Esperanto language with some like-minded prisoners, singing socialist songs, or imagining visits to the cinema and theatre. At other times, Henze felt compelled to address camp life itself. He wrote poems that vividly capture hunger, toil, and humiliation. And he drew emaciated figures who are digging up the inhospitable moorland or pushing heavy carts, all the while under threat from exaggeratedly tall guards.
