The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans
By Mark Jacobson
Simon & Schuster. 368 pages.

After journalist Mark Jacobson comes into possession of a lampshade — purportedly made out of human skin at a Nazi concentration camp and pilfered from an abandoned house in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans — he takes a voyage into the unfathomable.

Jacobson describes this journey in his new book, The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans, initially focusing on the roundabout way he got ahold of the grisly artifact. In the chaotic wake of Katrina, Dave Dominici — a “gap-toothed” junkie and convicted cemetery bandit — was rummaging through a pile of left-behind belongings in a home in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans when he spotted the lampshade sitting on top of the heap, “like a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae,” “glistening” in the glow of his flashlight.

“Don’t ask me where I got the idea of what it was,” Dominici tells Jacobson. “But I’d been watching some Hitler stuff on the History Channel … You have to trust your instincts, know when something’s special … That’s why I say it was from Katrina. If it wasn’t for the storm, I never would have found it.”

Dominici showed the lampshade to Skip Henderson, a New Orleans friend of Jacobson’s, whose collecting of collectibles — Fender guitars, wristwatches, records — is a “life-defining joy.” Skip holds it in his hands.

Now he began to grok it, the material of the lampshade itself. The warmth of it. The greasy, silky, dusty feel of it. The veined, translucent look of it.

“What’s this made out of, anyhow?” Skip asked.

“That’s made from the skin of Jews,” Dominici replied.

“What?”

“Hitler made skin from the Jews!” Dominici returned, louder now, with a kind of goony certainty.

Skip bought the shade from Dominici. But owning the lampshade and contemplating its horror started to distress Skip and disrupt his sleep. He bowed out and sent it to Jacobson. “You’re the journalist, you figure out what it is,” he says to him.

So begins Jacobson’s globetrotting mystery tour to learn everything he can about his newly acquired “parcel of terror.” He starts at Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Weimar, Germany. “If you are interested in lampshades, allegedly made out of human skin,” he writes, “Buchenwald is the place.” While camp commandant Karl Koch “imposed a reign of relentless cruelty … marked by innovative tortures” at Buchenwald, his redheaded, “legendarily hot-blooded” wife, Ilse Koch, inflicted her own special brand of brutality. According to a US prosecutor at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, the “Bitch of Buchenwald” ordered tattooed human skin to be made into lampshades for her home.

There’s a problem, though, with the provenance of Jacobson’s lampshade. Even though DNA tests certify that it is indeed made of human skin, the skin is not tattooed. So, Jacobson agonizes. Could his lampshade really be an authentic Buchwald artifact, or could it be one of those “illusionary tchotchkes of terror, the product of Allied propaganda and the brutalized imagination of prisoners?”

The characters Jacobson encounters, as he travels to Germany and Jerusalem and hops back and forth from New York to New Orleans, add insight and color to The Lampshade. Among others, Jacobson seeks out neo-Nazi David Duke, “Louisiana’s most famous fascist,” who’s living “under the radar” in Germany and finishing up his latest book, Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question. He also interviews a Holocaust denier who calls himself Denier Bud.

“It is my goal to lead the Holocaust denier movement away from the stench of anti-Semitism,” Denier Bud tells Jacobson. “I don’t think the Jews should be punished or suffer unduly for continuing to spread the lie about what happened to them during World War Two. They were a society under stress, so it is easy to sympathize with their motives. What I’m looking for is a Jew-friendly solution to the Holocaust hoax problem.”

Distinguished Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer advises Jacobson to continue telling the story of the lampshade no matter how much or how little certainty about its origin he may finally uncover:

For Bauer, oral history was mutually beneficial to the teller and the listener. In the past decades, he’d heard so many stories. “Thousands of terrible stories, rattling around in my brain.” Some of these narratives were more revealing than others, but all of them, even the lies, had value. One day, however, the last survivor will die. Then, even though he and many other historians had written down the stories, finding the truth of things will become more difficult because the voices, “the sound of them, the voice of the teller, will never be heard again.”

The Lampshade is a multifaceted, indelible, and haunting tale full of silences and unknowns. Jacobson recognizes that the sweep and scope of human history is shaped by the interconnectedness of all things, and The Lampshade serves as a commentary on this “commonality.”

“As I stared off into the Buchenwald fog,” he writes,

I felt a connection between this place of terror, where the lampshade supposedly had come from, and where it ended up, in the New Orleans flood. The lampshade had its secrets, things I needed to know ….

But the inconclusiveness did place the lampshade in a unique, and possibly illuminating, existential position. Here was an example of an object that … had served as a most repellent symbol of racial terror, an icon of genocide. Yet it [may not] be possible to know who had died and who had done the killing …. The lampshade was an everyman, an every victim.

… It sounded insane then and it sounded insane now. But I had hopes, inchoate as they might be, that this purported symbol of racist lunacy, product of the worst humanity could conjure, might through its everyman DNA somehow stand as a tortured symbol of commonality.

It was just a thought.

Update, August 4, 2013: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.

Amy O'Loughlin Amy O’Loughlin is a freelance writer and book reviewer whose work has appeared in American History, World War II, ForeWord Reviews, USARiseUp, and other publications. She blogs at Off the Bookshelf.

In 1997, when I landed in Mali, West Africa, as a volunteer with the U.S. Peace Corps, my knowledge of the place was based mostly on broadcasts of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia and the fantasies of Joseph Conrad. The first night, I was awakened by a distant thumping and couldn’t go back to sleep as I imagined my hosts drumming around a fire, enacting some ancient, possibly savage, rite. It was only through the light of many days that I learned the noise was from women pounding millet and sorghum, which they rose before dawn to do for the day’s meals.

The root of my assumptions about Mali and Malians was a diet of bad news — and badly reported news — on Africa that even the most discriminating Western publications have found difficult to resist. “[We] constantly face an American view of Africa that’s been mediated through stereotypes,” Frederick Cooper, a historian at New York University, once told me. “For an Africanist, reading The New York Times was just as depressing in 2004 as it was in 1964, or probably worse. In 1964, they were at least reporting on new things happening. Instead every reporter wants to rewrite “Heart of Darkness.”

Most foreign coverage of Africa is by journalists who parachute into a place and wrap a story in a matter of hours or days; they don’t know the background and fail to give adequate context to the issues and events they are covering. Instead, they fall back on what journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault calls “the four D’s of the African apocalypse — death, disease, disaster, and despair,” plus corruption, which have become a convenient short-hand for most news about the continent. In Hunter-Gault’s latest book, New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2006), she argues that there is a world of news to report beyond this and that Africa is now experiencing the earliest quivering of a rebirth that values democracy, human rights, civic life, and women’s empowerment. Hunter-Gault takes this argument a step further by insisting that the endlessly bleak and clichéd accounts have actually colored the rest of the world’s perception of Africa, discouraging foreign engagement and investment, and leading to pessimism and confusion there and elsewhere.

Hunter-Gault, who won two Emmys and two Peabody Awards for her coverage of Africa, is well-suited to make this case. She was first sent to South Africa in 1985 on assignment for PBS’ MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and was till recently the Johannesburg Bureau Chief for CNN. She bases her assertions on her own detailed reporting — including multiple interviews with Nelson Mandela, his successor as president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki, and a host of other high-level government officials — and the work of a small group of colleagues. She starts the book with what she knows best both professionally and personally: South Africa’s transition from apartheid to real democracy, weaving in her own experience in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, during which she helped desegregate the University of Georgia as its first black woman student.

For Hunter-Gault, 1994, the year apartheid officially ended and South Africa held its first truly democratic election, was a major turning point for all of Africa. The transition has not been without its challenges, she writes. South Africa, for example, has more than five million people living with HIV — the highest number in the world — and a staggering majority of the population was, until a decade ago, totally disenfranchised from education, health care, civic life, and professional opportunities.

The journalist acknowledges this in her deconstruction of the South African government’s policies on HIV/AIDS, affirmative action, and the economy, but also offers nuggets of hope and progress. While president Mbeki has been criticized for his ambiguity on the extent of the AIDS crisis, she gives him the benefit of the doubt and touts the country’s program of free antiretroviral drugs, and the fact that it spends far more than any other African nation (about $2 billion between 2003 to 2006) on treating the disease. She also discusses the country’s urgent efforts to increase access to education and employment for its majority black population. This is critical if South Africa is going to compete in a global market, but it has also overwhelmed many universities, whose budgets are contracting under the burden of so many needy students. Hunter-Gault contends that this dire problem has spurred innovations, such as the CIDA (Community and Individual Development Association), a free university for business and management education supported by corporate donors.

Based on her American experience, she notes that the sudden creation or implementation of laws can take generations to be fully felt. “It is through the prism of the United States’ history that I daily bear witness to the changes occurring in South Africa, and that is the yardstick against which I measure its progress.” But in this dance forward — and back — Hunter-Gault sees South Africa as the most powerful black-led country in the world and believes that it has the potential to lead not only its own Renaissance but that of an entire continent.

With South Africa at the helm, all of Africa is taking its first uncertain, but meaningful, steps toward democracy. She writes: “[T]here is a second wind blowing through the continent today: the forty-eight countries of sub-Saharan Africa are attempting to break free of the lingering legacy of colonialism, as well as many of the demons of their own design.” This new movement, she says, is most evident in the founding of NEPAD, or New Partnership for African Development, in 2001 and the formation of the African Union in 2002.

NEPAD, led by South Africa’s Mbeki, Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, and Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade, has vowed to eliminate poverty by concentrating on sustainable growth and development, promoting Africa in the global arena, and accelerating the empowerment of women. The African Union, meanwhile, replaced the Organization of African States, originally formed in the 1960s to support decolonization across the continent, but subsequently used as a bulwark for defending dictators’ sovereignty (and oppression) of their respective nations. The new organization has its eye on African unity and development, through the creation of democracy and conflict resolution. Hunter-Gault acknowledges that these institutions are young and must still prove their mettle in the face of ongoing tensions in Central Africa and the genocide taking place in Darfur.

But for the world to hear and understand any of the changes afoot, they must be well reported. Those on the frontlines of reporting this “new news” are African journalists. Many still contend with limited training or access to computers and the Internet, as well as government harassment and threats — Zimbabwe and Sudan presenting the direst cases of silencing foreign and domestic journalists alike. Yet there is an increasing crop of independent, homegrown media, who are providing a more nuanced perspective of the events and people in Africa. Even in the harshest of conditions, Hunter-Gault cites instances where “guerilla type-writers” are getting the word out, posting their stories surreptitiously in the continent’s burgeoning Internet cafés.

However, African journalists cannot report the news alone. Hunter-Gault advises more collaboration between Africans and their foreign colleagues both to help cover extremely sensitive stories, where the international press may be more immune to government pressures and retaliation, and to gain more informed perspectives by working closely with counterparts on the ground.

Above all, she counsels journalists to “come in right” — or report the news honestly and fairly — an expression taken from an encounter she had with a member of the Black Panthers, while covering that organization in Harlem in the 1970s for The New York Times. “[This phrase] has served me well, making me particularly sensitive to trying to strike a balance between stories of war, conflict, corruption, poverty, pestilence, and disease, on one hand, and on the other, stories that tell us of the people who live amid all that and yet survive, endure, and sometimes prosper despite the odds. These people are the embodiment of new news, but they rarely, if ever, hold news conferences.”

Without downplaying the real challenges facing African nations, Hunter-Gault should not be dismissed for her optimism. With the rise of the Internet, foreigners have fewer excuses than ever for ignoring what happens there, while African journalists and citizens are increasingly discovering the power of information. Africa may have experienced a Dark Ages, replete with foreign invasion, pestilence, societal breakdown, oppression and exploitation — from within and without. And yet, if we look closely as Hunter-Gault suggests, we might see the first stirring of the continent’s own, true Renaissance.

Nicole Marie Pezold