Brayard's account of Buchenwald concentration camp draws on survivor testimonies and camp records to reconstruct daily life and death on the Ettersberg ridge above Weimar. It does not flinch from the details, but it also examines how the camp and the city coexisted — how the citizens of Weimar claimed ignorance while smoke rose from the crematorium visible from town.
Reading this before visiting the Buchenwald Memorial gives the site a weight that the exhibition alone, good as it is, cannot fully convey. The juxtaposition of Goethe's city and the camp that bore his oak tree is the central tension of modern Weimar, and Brayard addresses it directly.