Buchenwald. What do the city of New Orleans and the former German/Russian concentration camp Buchenwald have in common? A reverence for the dead. And, as Mark Jacobson writes in his memoir/history/travel log, a lampshade of indeterminate origin that was purchased at a garage sale after Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans.
This lampshade found its way to Mark Jacobson, a writer from New York who spends a lot of time in New Orleans and has built up a great many contacts among the city's residents. Early on, after acquiring the lampshade from an acquaintance who had acquired it from a cemetery-robber (a big no-no in New Orleans, where the dead are revered in the above-ground cemeteries) Jacobson begins to investigate the claim that the lampshade was made of human flesh and had likely come from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Buchenwald has long figured in Holocaust lore as the place where Ilse Koch, wife of commandant Karl Koch, supposedly had lampshades made up from Buchenwald inmates, whose tattooed skin she had taken a liking to. After the American liberation of the camp in 1945, a table of Nazi "trophies" was put on display to the residents of the surrounding area who claimed they didn't know what was going on inside the camp. Two shrunken heads and a largish lampshade were among the objects on the table.
Years after the war, a lampshade surfaced in post-Katrina New Orleans. As noted above, Mark Jacobson purchased the lampshade for $35.00. He set out to trace the history of the lampshade, taking it, and the reader, on a five year journey from New Orleans to Germany to Israel to New York and New Jersey to El Paso and Albuquerque to Washington DC. And a few other places in between. Though forensic science found the parchment shade to be made of human skin and probably from the 1930's or 40's, nothing definitive was ever proven about the provenance of the shade. Jacobson takes the reader with him on visits to psychics and other practitioners of the paranormal to officials of various Holocaust museums and scientific labs to houses of historians and former Buchenwald inmates.
During the five years of Jacobson's inquiry, the lampshade almost took on a life of its own. One mystic pronounced it a "male" lampshade and said that spirits emanating from the shade wanted Jacobson to take care of it. How Jacobson does so is told in this very interesting, well-written, though slightly-off-the-wall book. It has to be slightly off-the-wall, I think, because the stories of Buchenwald and New Orleans, both pre-and post Katrina, are not simply told. Jacobson does a good job tying everything together as well as it could be tied together. The lampshade still exists, and its secrets will probably never be completely ferreted out.
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