Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance 9780755603671, 9781780768960

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Chapter 2: Migration and Motif Het Mesje (Anna Maria [Settela] Steinbach in a train from Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz), photograph. Credit: Chronos. Courtesy Yad Vashem Photoarchive, Jerusalem.

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Chapter 3: The Two Stages of the Eichmann Trial Images 3.1–3.14 from video recording of the Trial of Adolf Eichmann reproduced with permission from Israeli Government Archives and the Estate of L. Hurwitz. Chapter 4: Brushing the Film against the Grain Bernard seen through a kaleidoscope by Marie-do from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films). 4.2/3 Hurried Spectatorship: just 37 seconds separate shots 1 and 25 in the opening to the film from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films). 4.4 The first photographic image to punctuate the film from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films). 4.5/6 The photographs found during Alphonse’s search from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films). 4.7 Figures located at the edge of the frame from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films). 4.8 Rotating the image from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films). 4.9 The unexplained figure concealed in the grain of the image from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films). 4.10/11 Close-up: the attention to the cigarette in the opening sequence from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films). 4.1

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CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES Chapter 6: A New Visual Structure for the Unthinkable Lee Miller, Prisoners Scavenge on the Camp Rubbish Dump, Dachau, Germany, 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www.leemiller.co.uk. Lee Miller, Pile of Prisoners bodies, Buchenwald, Germany 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www.leemiller.co.uk. Lee Miller, Suicided SS prison guard, Buchenwald, Germany, 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www.leemiller.co.uk. Lee Miller, Dead SS Guard floating in the canal beside camp, Dachau, Germany 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www.leemiller.co.uk. Believe It, Vogue, New York, June 1945. © Condé Nast Publications Ltd. Courtesy Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www.leemiller.co.uk. Lee Miller, Bürgermeister of Leipzig’s Daughter Suicided, Leipzig, Germany, 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www.leemiller.co.uk. Chapter 7: Muselmann Henri Christiaan Pieck (1895–1972), Behind the Wire, 1945, charcoal, pastel and ink, dimensions unknown, National Oorlogs en Verzetsmuseum, Netherlands. Hellmut Bachrach-Barée (1898–1964), Women’s Camp (Frauen – K.Z.), c.1945, pencil on paper, 180 × 214mm, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem. Yehuda Bacon (b.1929), Muselmann, 1946, ink and gouache on buff paper, 300 × 218mm, Beit Lohamei Israel Haghetaot. Léon Delarbre (1889–1974), Le Lendemain de la Libération: trop tard! (The morning after Liberation: too late!) Bergen-Belsen, 1945, pencil and black chalk, 260 × 280mm, Musée de la résistance et de la déportation de Besançon. Yehuda Bacon (b.1929), Muselmann and the Angel of Death, 1948/49, wood-engraving, 100 × 75mm, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem. Yehuda Bacon, Study for Muselmann, 1948, pencil, ink and wash, heightened with white tempera on buff paper, 151 × 102mm. © Yehuda Bacon 2013. Jakob Steinhardt (1887–1968), Illustration for the Book of Yehoshua Eliezer ben Sirah (Plate I) 1929, woodcut and letterpress, 280 × 195mm, Private Collection, London. Yehuda Bacon, Muselmann, winter, 1948–49, oil on board, 495 × 315mm, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 7.13 7.14 7.15

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Yehuda Bacon, Landscape with rooftops and cypresses, Beit ha’ Kerem, 1948 oil on board, 495 × 315mm, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem. Yehuda Bacon, Untitled, Tree study, Beit ha’ Kerem, 1948, charcoal on newsprint, 505 × 305mm, Trustees of the British Museum, London. Edvard Munch (1863–1944), The Scream, 1895, lithograph, 352 × 251mm, Munch Museet, Oslo. © Munch Museet, Oslo/MunchEllingsen Group/DACS London 2012. Yehuda Bacon (b.1929), Head of Muselmann, 1948, woodcut, 65 × 50mm. © Yehuda Bacon 2012. Yehuda Bacon, Large Head, undated, black and white chalks, 480 × 385mm. © Yehuda Bacon 2013. Captain Edward G. Malindine (1906–70), Prisoner, Bergen-Belsen, 17–18 April 1945, photograph, 60 × 80mm negative, Imperial War Museum, London. Le Monde Illustré (cover), 5 May 1945, Caption: Camp de Bilsen, Torturé pendant trois ans par les nazis, ce malheureux arrive, épuisé au seuil de la Liberté (Tortured for three years by the Nazis and exhausted, this unfortunate reaches the threshold of Liberty). British Library. Yehuda Bacon, Prisoner 168194, I, 1961, monotype with over painting 595 × 423mm. © Yehuda Bacon 2013. Yehuda Bacon, Prisoner 168194, III, 1961, monotype, 640 × 475mm, Inscr. 168194. © Yehuda Bacon 2013. Chapter 8: Nameless before the Concentrationary Void Felix Nussbaum (1904–44), Self-Portrait in the Camp, 1944, oil on plywood, 52.5 × 41.5cm. Neue Galerie, New York. List for Transport no. 60 Drancy-Auschwitz. Courtesy: Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Paris. Wedding Registry, Nice Town Hall, June 1943. Wedding Registry, Nice Town Hall, June 1943: close-up of signature. Dani Karavan (b.1930), Passages-Walter Benjamin, Port Bou, Catalunya, Spain, 1994. Courtesy Atelier Dani Karavan. Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. Final painting JHM no. 4925. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, transparent overlay for JHM no. 4925. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. 30 January 1933 JHM no. 4304. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

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CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. Der Angriff JHM no. 4761. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 c 32.5 cm. Pogromnacht JHM no. 4762. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. Prof. Salomon in hard labour at Sachsenhausen rejected painting JHM No. 4885 verso. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. Jewish shops being attacked, 9 November 1938 JHM no. 4903 verso rejected painting. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm., 10 May 1940 JHM no. 4913. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. ©Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. AVIS 1940 JHM no 4914. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 by 32.5 cm., Train JHM no. 4915 recto. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. View of Gurs, 1941–41, photograph, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jack Lewin. Horst Rosenthal, Mickey Mouse at Gurs. Courtesy: Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Paris.

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Chapter 9: Animating Memory Carmi’s Dream, Waltz with Bashir (2008, Ari Folman).

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Chapter 10: Isn’t this Where …? Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink with standard lamp and TV in surreal landscape. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink with Mantis Wife. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink being (s)mothered; mother as wall. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 10.9 10.10 10.11 10.12

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Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink as Dictator – the crossed arm salute. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), The masses reflect back. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink builds what looks like an aerial view of a camp out of the detritus of the destroyed hotel room. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), The law is an arse. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), A hallucinatory image of deportation occurs in the train tunnel. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Young Pink becomes faceless as a reflection of the faceless ones in the cattle trucks. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), A set of false fathers: Pink watches a sequence from The Dam Busters. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink as blob – the larva of a fascist. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), The emergent subject. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. Chapter 11: Memory Work in Argentina 1976–2006 Adriana Lestido, Madre e Hija de Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires/ Mother and Daughter on the Plaza de Mayo 1982. Juan Travnik, Buenos Aires, 1985. Página/12, 27 May 2006. Página/12, 15 April 2006. Collective exhibition: Identidad, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 1998. Photo: Archivo CCR. Marcelo Brodsky – Opening page of Memoria en Construcción, with the photograph of his brother Fernando in captivity. Buenos Aires, 2006. Gustavo Germano, Two photographs of the series Ausencias 1969: Gustavo Germano, Guillermo Germano, Diego Germano, Eduardo Germano 2006: Gustavo Germano, Guillermo Germano, Diego Germano Marcelo Brodsky, Sara Brodsky observa el nombre de su hijo desaparecido, Fernando, en el Monumento a las Victimas del Terrorismo de Estado, Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires [Sara Brodsky observes the number of her disappeared son at the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism, Park of Memory Buenos Aires].

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the product of a four-year research project, Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation (2007–11), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of England. We gratefully acknowledge its financial support for this research. We would like to thank Francesco Ventrella for unstinting administrative support during the project. We are also grateful to the many students and participants in the seminars through which this book was developed. Strenuous efforts have been made to contact all copyright holders for the images illustrated in this volume. If any copyright holder has reason to request our attention for permissions please contact the publishers forthwith.

SERIES PREFACE CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES The Politics of Representation

This mini-series is part of the series New Encounters: Arts, Cultures and Concepts. It is the product of a collaborative research project in cultural analysis, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of England, entitled Concentrationary Memories and the Politics of Representation. The series consists of the following titles: Concentrationary Memories, Concentrationary Imaginaries; Concentrationary Art. Concentrationary Memories and Concentrationary Imaginaries are collections which we have edited and introduced. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of two essays by French writer and concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol, who proposed a new form of art that he named concentrationary art, and two new essays that we have written to accompany them. The aim of the series is to re-engage with the relations between aesthetics and politics in the aftermath of World War II when the images of the opened concentration camps of Germany and the testimony of their (for the most part) political prisoners/survivors dominated the world’s horrified responses. This was a time when the political deportee rather than the racial deportee was the major symbol of victimhood and Buchenwald was more infamous than Auschwitz. The term ‘concentrationary’ was coined by David Rousset, a returning French political deportee from Buchenwald who wrote an analysis of the system of what he called ‘the concentrationary universe’. In 1951 political theorist Hannah Arendt published her substantial analysis of ‘evil’ in the aftermath of the concentrationary universe, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt showed how the search for total domination has its roots in imperialism, racism and the development of the nation-state and is then realized in its most egregious form in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Arendt saw this novel form of totalitarianism as a turning point in history as it unleashed the new reality of total domination, not merely of a territory or its resources, but of ‘men’, and ushered in the epoch in which, in Rousset’s words subsequently adopted by Arendt, ‘everything is possible’.1 Since that time, the growing recognition of the racially-targeted genocide at the heart of Nazism’s atrocities and the engagement with the Jewish (and to a lesser extent

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Romani) experience of attempted annihilation have focused attention on the horror now known by the name ‘Holocaust’, whose historiography and commemoration raise a number of challenging philosophical and aesthetic questions. Without wishing to displace Holocaust memory and the terrifying issues it raises about the novel but repeated crime of genocide, we aimed in our project to reintroduce the parallel but eclipsed domain of the concentrationary as a prism through which to examine the relations between the politics of total domination with its systematic destruction of the human, and the self-conscious aesthetic practices which identify and resist that persistent threat. Our purpose, then, was to consider cultural responses, not to the specific event we now know as the Holocaust but to the larger context within which the genocide occurred, namely totalitarian terror, and also to track the initial forms of response to that system of terror of which, as Arendt said, ‘the concentration camps are the most consequential institution’.2 In the first part of our project, we devoted 18 months to the study of one film, Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), made in France in 1955 by Alain Resnais in collaboration with Mauthausen survivor Jean Cayrol and the German socialist composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962). It was made as a commemorative study of the experience of political deportation. In the process of research for the making of the film, however, the racialized genocide was apparent alongside the system of political terror, yet was not given the prominence that it later acquired. Hence, the film was criticized for insufficiently exposing the genocide of the Jewish and Romani peoples. Our argument resisted this simplification to read its aesthetic structure as the production of a different kind of memory, one which agitates the present to warn us of the continuing threat, not only of genocide but of the experimental elaboration of a system of total domination and systemic dehumanization. We argued that the film delineated a politics of aesthetic resistance to this system of total domination. In our study of the film, now published as Concentrationary Cinema (2011), we adopted the term ‘the concentrationary’ to frame our research and speculatively established four aspects of the concentrationary.3 The first is the concentrationary universe itself, that is Rousset’s term for the political/industrial/military complex which underpins totalitarian rule; the second, concentrationary art, is the term used by Cayrol to define a new art which will register the novelty of the world and the menaced human in the wake of the camps and, consequently, be equipped to challenge its continued presence and reappearance in the future; the third term, concentrationary memory, extends Resnais and Cayrol’s understanding of the persistence of the concentrationary universe in post-war everyday life and registers cultural resistance to and vigilant anxiety around its continued threat in different contexts; the fourth term, concentrationary imaginary, examines the unprocessed and unacknowledged seepage of a totalitarian mentality into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. The first book in this new series, Concentrationary Memories, extends the inquiry into art’s response to the concentrationary universe. It assumes that what Cayrol termed ‘the concentrationary disease’ (la peste concentrationnaire) which is mentioned at the end of Night and Fog, was not simply confined to Nazi Germany

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and destroyed along with the fall of the Third Reich, but embraces other sites and times, colonialism and Stalinism being perhaps the two most obvious examples. It also assumed that, like Resnais and Cayrol in Night and Fog, other artists have created forms of concentrationary art by identifying and resisting radical terror. In contrast to the ethical imperative of testimonial works on the Holocaust and related questions of the representability of such an event, we believe that concentrationary art and concentrationary memory are more concerned with a political aesthetic of representing and resisting the radical presence of the concentrationary universe and its system of total domination. Concentrationary Memories thus has as its premise the proposition that the concentrationary plague is not simply confined to one place and one time but, now unleashed on the world, is a permanent presence shadowing modern life, and that memory (and art in general) must be invoked to show this permanent presence of the past haunting the present so that we can read its signs and counter its deformation of the human. Concentrationary Memories applies these ideas to different cultural responses to concentrationary terror in different sites in the post-war period. In seeking to conjugate the diagnosis of the ‘evil’ of totalitarianism with modes of critical-aesthetic resistance, Concentrationary Memories has to negotiate Theodor Adorno’s paradoxical proposition that, although it is barbarity to offer the solace of any aesthetic artefacts to the cultures that ‘beat people until the bones break in their bodies’ (here Adorno is quoting Sartre), it is nevertheless only in art that the enormity of such suffering can find any voice.4 Our book seeks to supplement Adorno’s perspective with a specific focus on the politics of representational/ aesthetic practices. Straddling art, cinema, literature, political theory and philosophy, this focus places the aesthetic in an ethical relation to the political: it is the duty of art to monitor totalitarianism which, first realized in the laboratories of terror of the concentration camps and the gulag, has changed the conditions of all human life. The book includes chapters which, firstly, re-examine the responses by writers, poets, filmmakers, and others involved in the cultural production of memories of the horror of totalitarianism, and, secondly, analyse the works of those who sought to find forms/languages/image systems through which to make sense of and resist this new state which, as Hannah Arendt argued, made ‘human beings as human beings superfluous’.5 The next title in the series, Concentrationary Imaginaries, is based on the second strand of our project. The concentrationary imaginary is the possible realization of Resnais and Cayrol’s worst fear, namely that instead of being able to recognize and challenge the continued threat of the concentrationary universe in our midst, our culture has become saturated with its devices and strategies to such an extent that we are largely unaware and ignorant of its presence. In this book we are, therefore, asking whether a failure of concentrationary memory to agitate the present (which it achieved by making us aware of a past that has never passed) could produce an installation of aspects of the totalitarian in the realm of the cultural imaginary. Thus, our major research question, which is the core theme of this book, is as follows: can a concentrationary legacy be located in post-war and contemporary popular

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culture in the form of an unconscious and politically unprocessed concentrationary imaginary? This book, informed by but extending the work of Giorgio Agamben and Paul Virilio, who suggest that the camp and war are now the matrices of postwar society, considers the cultural forms and subjectivities that are symptomatic of a concentrationary imaginary. What would be its indices, locations, tropes and affects? The use of the term ‘imaginary’ in the cultural field refers to two elements. The first is a repertoire of images, tropes and formulae that are, often unconsciously or spontaneously, drawn upon in representation. The second is the manner in which a cultural apparatus, relying on processes of identification and misrecognition to lure us as participant spectators and ideologically-interpellated readers, structures subjectivity through the operation of fantasy. Our question could thus be reformulated as follows: has anything of the historical and political event of the concentrationary universe seeped into the cultural imaginary, the repertoire of images, self-understandings and cultural representations that we encounter through cultural forms? Does anything of the totalitarian mindset inform elements of contemporary culture, without being fully acknowledged as such? Has the totalitarian mind-set been normalized by narratives, styles, images, attitudes and tropes so that, without the active work of warning performed by an agitating, ever-anxious and haunting memory of a past (one that was simply the beginning of a new terror that could and has been repeated), it has become an integrated part of our cultural repertoire? Refashioned by changing times, is this mind-set now an unmarked presence of an egregious historical event that we should remember to condemn, not use to entertain? Has the concentrationary passed from the political real into culture? Unhinged from its specific historical origins in Nazi camps and Stalinist gulags, does the concentrationary shape the contemporary cultural imaginary like a political unconscious, normalizing narratives of military superpowers enslaving and annihilating its subjected and dispensable others, and accustoming us to unspeakable violence and suffering where arbitrary extinction is no longer murder but wasting, or, worse, just business? Are its once singular images and objects now iconic tropes that glamorize what Susan Sontag called ‘fascinating fascism’? Is our cinematic culture of spectacular violence – as opposed to cultural forms which present violence politically – the iterating imprint on our cultural unconscious of what we were once shown in order to shock and warn us that this must never happen again? Is there a ‘concentrationary imaginary’ in popular cultural forms that exhibits an unconscious assimilation of totalitarian modes of violence through which, as Arendt argues, human beings qua human beings are rendered superfluous? Does this imaginary operate through fantasies of total domination via our specular identification as consumers of films, games and other cultural practices? These are difficult questions that we wish to raise as a way of plotting a speculative field of enquiry that in turn has no clear signposts. As an imaginary, the concentrationary does not announce itself as such but, nevertheless, may inhabit other spaces. Is it, however, too labile and non-specific? Does the concept merely colonize other existing sites? How is it different from, yet related to, the colonial imaginary, the imaginaries of current urban cultures, of crime and the city, or political

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wars on terror, and so forth? What are the signs of ‘concentrationariness’ that may piggyback on other formations? The book addresses these questions by exploring the concentrationary imaginary within the wider representation of violence, terror, and criminality. It asks whether a cultural politics of resistance to this imaginary is possible. Is the very act of identifying such a possibility as the concentrationary imaginary already a resistance that may reveal contradictions within it? The book investigates the legacies of the concentrationary in diverse forms of contemporary culture, from literature to cinema and video games, and explores the notion of cultural resistance to the threat they present. The third book in the series, Concentrationary Art, presents the ideas of Jean Cayrol on ‘concentrationary art’ to an English-speaking audience for the first time and is accompanied by two new essays by the authors. Cayrol was a surrealist poet and political deportee to Mauthausen concentration camp. He wrote the narrated script for Resnais’s Night and Fog, and also collaborated with Resnais on his 1963 film Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour. In 1950 he published a book called Lazare parmi nous. It is divided into two parts, ‘Les Rêves lazaréens’ and ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’ (which had themselves previously been published separately). ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’ was then reprinted as ‘De la vie à la mort’ to accompany the publication of Cayrol’s commentary for Night and Fog in 1997. In 2007 a complete collection of Cayrol’s writings on the Lazarean was published by Editions du Seuil under the title Jean Cayrol: Œuvre lazaréenne. None of Cayrol’s work on the Lazarean has ever been translated into English. Given the importance of Cayrol’s thinking on the development of post-war culture in France, and the centrality of his ideas on concentrationary art to our own thinking about a political aesthetic relating to art and horror in the post-war period, we believe that this book will be essential reading for an English-speaking public with an interest in these areas. Cayrol uses the Christian figure of a man resurrected miraculously from the dead, Lazarus, as the symbol of the new art after the camps. This art, that he termed both ‘concentrationary art’ and ‘Lazarean art’, will show human life shocked out of its familiar contours through revealing the ‘invisible thread’ that ties it to the presence of death, humanity haunted by its inhuman double, the known always shadowed by the unknowable. Lazarean art, for Cayrol, is therefore founded on a ‘doubling’ (and troubling) effect to cast us into a state of the ‘in-between’. Its duty is to alert us (the unbelieving, those who want to re-establish the comfort of ‘ordinary life’) to a radically altered reality in which the concentrationary cannot be confined to the past but is still present today in different forms and under different guises. Concentrationary art must be able to read the signs of the normalization of the concentrationary universe in everyday life in order to make us constantly vigilant of its ruses. This is a political aesthetic employing the techniques of defamiliarization to allow us to read the terror in our midst. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman Leeds

INTRODUCTION THE POLITICS OF MEMORY From Concentrationary Memory to Concentrationary Memories Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman

The SS has made the camp the most totalitarian society in existence up to now. David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire [The Concentrationary Universe] 19461 The term concentrationary is an unfamiliar neologism in English. Attached to the noun ‘memory’, it does not refer to the concentration of memory, focused memory work, or any mental act of concentration. ‘Concentrationary’, a translation from the French concentrationnaire, is a term freighted with a history of political terror and the need for continual vigilance. Attached to memory, the term evokes those aspects of modern history, society and politics that in this book we wish to bring back into contemporary cultural analysis in an expanded vision of intersecting sites of terror and their current legacies. Concentrationary memory is an agitated, agitating, anxious memory, heavy with fears that a terrible event initiated a repeatable possibility in human history. It recognizes that what was generated in the concentration camps in Germany and the countries Germany occupied during World War II must not be buried under the ruins of destroyed crematoria at Auschwitz or effaced from mind by the transformation of innumerable concentration camps into gardens of memory in Germany. It is a memory that purposively erodes divisions between past and present, using specific histories to become a constant probe with which to interrogate the present for any current affinities with absolute horror and aspirations towards total domination. It is a memory aimed at activating the vigilant defence of the dream of a full democracy still to come, one that attends to all the assaults on human dignity, safety and, above all, our defining human plurality. It is neither a particularized memory, nor blandly universalizing. It is attentive and speculative, particular and

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general, perpetually alert to the changing configurations of that menace to the social and political foundations of plurality, spontaneity and creativity. If total domination was the ambition of those who created the horror of the concentrationary system, ‘concentrationary memory’ is the necessary counter-force to that system. It defends and promotes genuine democratic justice and freedom. We have, therefore, chosen the term ‘concentrationary’ as a theoretical framing for a series of studies that overlap with current work on Holocaust memory (our own included), while delineating a different dimension that has both political and aesthetic implications that are distinct from the ethical and commemorative imperatives of Holocaust memory, its focus on uniqueness and specificity, and its spatio-temporal particularity. The concentrationary: Rousset’s take, 1945–46 The adjective concentrationnaire, which we are translating as concentrationary, was coined by French political prisoners returning in 1945 as survivors of the Konzentrationslagers, the concentration camps of Germany, such as Buchenwald (David Rousset), Gandesheim and Dachau (Robert Antelme) and Mauthausen (Jean Cayrol). These camps – notorious in the immediate post-war period because of their visibility as a result of liberation by the Allies and their immediate photographic and cinematic documentation – were part of a vast system extending across Germany and some of its occupied lands.2 Wolfgang Sofsky calculates that there were over 10,000 concentration camps across Germany by 1945.3 In the summer of 1945, Rousset (1912–87) wrote a series of articles in the Parisian press that were published as a book in 1946 under the title L’Univers concentrationnaire, and then as a novel in 1947 based on his experiences in Buchenwald entitled Les Jours de notre mort [The Days of our Death]. L’Univers concentrationnaire was translated into English as The Other Kingdom in 1947, and again in 1951 as A World Apart. In both cases, the specific connotations of his original title were lost to the English-speaking world. Thus, when Alan Sheridan came to translate the adjective ‘concentrationnaire’, used by Jacques Lacan in his 1949 essay on the Imaginary ‘The Mirror Phase’ (which we discuss below), he invented ‘concentrational’ rather than following the logic we are using of translating a French word ending with the suffix -aire as the English suffix -ary (in the way ‘imaginaire’ becomes ‘imaginary’).4 We will return to the relation between the imaginary and the concentrationary later in this chapter (see section IV). The significance of Rousset’s writings, and hence his coining of the term concentrationary, lies not in personal testimony of his experience in Buchenwald, where he was sent after arrest by the Gestapo in 1943 and where he was liberated by the Americans in 1945, a man of substantial proportions reduced to a bag of bones. His post-war writings offered, instead, a political reading of the camps, not as localized sites of internment and torture but as symptoms and laboratories of an anti-political system unleashed on the world. We suggest that the term ‘concentrationary’ coined by Rousset designates precisely the novelty and continuing threat of this system. For, despite his clear desire to warn the world about what fascist Germany had done in the camps, and hence done to itself as a society, Rousset was appalled to discover

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camp systems still functioning elsewhere after 1945. He was the first to denounce the ‘gulag archipelago’ of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Rousset formed the International Committee against Concentration Camps in 1949, condemning not only Russia and its satellite states but also China and Spain. That we can date the emergence of the term concentrationary in French literature and political thought to the period immediately after 1945 means that, in addition to being fundamentally a historicallysituated term, it registered a novel historical event that necessitated a new concept to encompass (and, indeed, to resist) what had hitherto not existed, but now had happened, was still present, and could reappear in the future. This sense that the concentrationary represented a system that was at once political – concerned with power and structural to a regime seeking total domination – and anti-political – seeking to destroy citizenship and all forms of democratically participatory political and individuated cultural life – and that the concentrationary was, thus, not merely a site of terror and murder but needed to be considered in a wider context, was first represented and documented by returning political prisoners, resistance fighters and other victims of German Occupation. They wrote not only to bear witness to the harsh regimes they had personally endured in the camps; they wanted to report on what they had discovered there through recognizing that this regime represented something more than chance sadism and localized carceral abuse. Writers like Rousset delineated a political anatomy of l’univers concentrationnaire, the concentrationary universe whose aim was the destruction of the human in conditions where, he argued, ‘everything is possible’.5 The concentrationary universe is not only the world of the concentration camps; it is also the total society of which the camps are a symptom, instrument and symbol. The camps are indicative of a society in which thought is deadened, action is programmed, and there is no vigilant anxiety about or active resistance to the absolute corrosion of human singularity and human rights. Rousset identified the concentrationary as an instrument of a totalitarian, anti-democratic political regime that had politically eviscerated its home country: Here in France, in spite of the occupation, we do not even yet know what terror is, permanent and universal terror. Not only did it crush the old parties morally and physically, but also it got so that everybody was afraid to speak and finally ceased to think. Not only was opposition stamped out, but the classes were disintegrated in their component elements … Everybody dropped the reins. The concentration camps left Germany drained of all substance.6 He uses the metaphors of ‘gangrene’ and ‘contamination’ to suggest how the camps are a sign of the disease of the whole body politic: The decomposition of a society and of all the classes of that society, in the fetid stench of destroyed social values, they came to know at first hand, an immediate reality like an ominous shadow threatening the entire planet with a

4

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES fate in which all men must share. The evil far outweighs any military triumph. It is the gangrene of a whole economic and social system. Its contamination spreads far beyond the ruins of cities.7

Rousset concludes that the camps are a sign not only of the demise of German society but of a deeper systemic threat that exceeds the borders of Germany itself: The existence of the camps is a warning. German society, both because of the strength of its structure and the violence of the crisis that demolished it, underwent a decomposition that is exceptional even in the present state of affairs. But it would be easy to show that the most characteristic traits of both the SS mentality and the social conditions which gave rise to the Third Reich are to be found in many sectors of world society – less pronounced, it is true, and not developed in any such scale as in the Reich. But it is only a question of circumstances. It would be blindness – and criminal blindness, at that – to believe that, by reason of any difference of national temperament, it would be impossible for any other country to try a similar experiment. Germany interpreted with an originality in keeping with her history, the crisis that led her to the concentrationary universe. But the existence and the mechanism of that crisis were inherent in the economic and social foundations of capitalism and imperialism. Under a new guise, similar effects may reappear tomorrow. There remains therefore a very specific war to be waged.8 This statement is exemplary of what we are calling concentrationary memory. Rousset’s argument is not about commemoration of the suffering of the concentrationees as martyrs to a foreign oppressor. He links the camps he has experienced from within – and which scar him viscerally with that extremity of experience – with the society in which they were built and the system of total domination which they have unleashed. The camps are thus to be read in particular and general terms; the domestic corruption of German society is a lesson for humanity as a whole. Rousset reveals the synergy between the inside and outside of the camp to suggest that the concentrationary universe is not simply confined behind the barbed wire and contained within the inhuman acts of the SS: ‘The existence of the camps is a warning’ … ‘There remains, therefore, a very specific war to be waged.’9 Concentrationary memory derived from texts such as Rousset’s is monitory and vigilant. It addresses the invisible but present infection that corrupts a polity. It refuses boundaries that enclose the past as an event of history; it speaks, instead, of leakage and contamination to which the present must become alert. This is not paranoia but an urgency born of understanding that the horror of the camps is not exclusively enclosed within those sites. Concentrationary memory generates a heightened awareness, created out of actual concentrationary experience, which is sceptical of compartmentalizing horror. It sees its presence within everyday life, and, therefore, does not necessarily bear the visible signs of the camp to mark it out. The detection of these signs is crucial to the defence of democracy and freedom.

INTRODUCTION

5

The voices of political analysts returning from the camps, like that of Rousset, were a sign of French resistance to fascism. They should not, however, simply be assimilated into the narrative of heroic resistance by the French nation to collaboration and occupation (which was the case in the aftermath of the war), for then we fail to comprehend their true import. They were a warning to the post-war world of what lurks within our midst and has not been destroyed with the defeat of Nazi Germany. They cast a shadow over post-war, consumer-driven modernization, with its eye trained steadfastly on the future, by disturbing the new comfort zone of bourgeois society. These voices should be linked not to myths of the nation but to other political analyses, such as Eugen Kogon’s Der SS Staat and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which define the concentrationary universe as a novel political system and continuing menace.10 Our aim in this book is to re-position the concept of the concentrationary in this context. We wish to use it as a prism for the analysis of cultural responses to horror in twentieth-century political history, which fall outside, but complement, the paradigm and concerns of Holocaust Memory. Concentration camps: A historical digression with representational repercussions In order to fully understand the concept of the concentrationary as used by Rousset, and the way in which we are linking it here to memory, it is first necessary to clarify an important distinction between the concentration camps and the extermination camps. This will allow us to disentangle the confusion in representation that has taken place, by which an iconography and memory of the Holocaust have, in fact, been constructed on the basis of images drawn from the concentration camps. Having been invented by the Spanish in Cuba in the late nineteenth century, and used by the British in their war against the Boers in 1899–1902 and the German colonial rulers of Namibia against the Herero between 1904–08, concentration camps were instituted on German soil immediately after the overthrow of the Weimar constitution in March 1933 by the National Socialist party.11 Under the Third Reich that was then established as a dictatorship, camps were run initially by the paramilitary arm of the party, the SA; by 1935 the system was placed under the SS, directly reporting to Himmler and Hitler. The fluctuating population of these camps rose from about 4,000 in 1933, when the incoming National Socialists aimed to eradicate all domestic political opposition amongst Communists, trade unionists, and other opponents of fascism, to a peak after the persecution of German Jewish men in November 1938, to fall again by 1940 and to rise once more to over 700,000 by January 1945. During these years, the function of the camps changed due to both planned strategies and contingent necessities.12 The names of a few of the major camps have become notorious: Dachau (the first to be founded on 22 March 1933), Sachsenhausen (established 1936), Ravensbrück (primarily for women), Oranienburg, Natzweiler-Struthof (1941–44), Neuengamme (1938), Flossenbürg (1938), Gross-Rosen (1940), Mittelbau-Dora (1943), Buchenwald (1937), BergenBelsen (1943), Vaihingen (aka Wiesengrund 1943), Mauthausen-Gusen (1938).13 Some of these camps, like Ravensbrück, were the personal property of Heinrich

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Himmler, who leased them back to the state in return for allowances for each prisoner (a practice which became extremely profitable to the camp proprietor). Historian Wolfgang Sofsky calculates that 1.6 million people were admitted into the concentrationary system between 1933 and 1945, and that 1.2 million died in the frightful conditions of starvation, overwork and brutality that characterized its regime.14 Many were in forced labour camps; some, like Mauthausen, the notorious camp in Austria, formally practised the policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit, annihilation by labour. This was reserved for political resisters in occupied countries deported to the camps under the rubric of Nacht und Nebel [Night and Fog], the decree of 7 December 1941 by which political prisoners would be made to ‘disappear’ as if into night and fog, that is, they would be removed to camps without any possibility of being traced or rescued. Concentration camps expanded and contracted over 12 years, and were at their largest and fullest when the Allies liberated them in 1945. Their inmates had, in many cases, been abandoned by the SS weeks before, leaving massed prisoners starving, scarcely living amidst the piles of the very recent dead, and without medical or any other kind of aid. It is this image of the walking corpse and the abandoned, unburied corpses of the liberated concentration camps in Germany that were first circulated in the press and newsreels. These images – first associated with what was initially named ‘Nazi atrocities’, then with war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg tribunals – have more recently come to represent the genocide of European Jewry that is now called the Holocaust. Yet the paradox of this postwar evolution in the naming and representing of the event is that the Holocaust as such did not happen in concentration camps, although it is precisely those camps that have become, in common memory, its iconic sites. The Third Reich murdered in total about 6 million Jewish Europeans and about 300,000–500,000 Romani people. Some of the mass killings of Jews took place in parts of the Soviet Union through shooting, while attrition in the appalling conditions in the ghettoes also created a vast death toll. Specialized death camps were not the single sites of the genocide. In a polemical intervention in The New York Review of Books in 2009, Harvard historian Timothy Snyder challenged the ways in which memory of the Holocaust uses Auschwitz as its central image or metaphor. According to Snyder, this is first of all a distortion of the full history of the genocide itself: The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.15

INTRODUCTION

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Snyder, therefore, suggests that Auschwitz as a symbol of the Holocaust is problematic: … [it] excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims – religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden – were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today’s Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.16 For Snyder, a different, or at least an enlarged, perspective is needed to grasp the full scale of the horror of racially-targeted genocide to incorporate the slaughter that was not connected with such a hybrid camp space as Auschwitz: An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhard, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Belzec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived. About a million more Polish Jews were killed in other ways, some at Chelmno, Majdanek, or Auschwitz; many more shot in actions in the eastern half of the country.17 Yet even this necessary corrective concerning the much less renowned sites in which the mass murder was carried out is insufficient: All in all, as many if not more Jews were killed by bullets as by gas, but they were killed by bullets in easterly locations that are blurred in painful remembrance. The second most important part of the Holocaust is the mass murder by bullets in eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. It began with SS Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jewish men in June 1941, expanded to the murder of Jewish women and children in July, and extended to the extermination of entire Jewish communities that August and September. By the end of 1941, the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal of local assistance) had shot

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CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist.18

Snyder’s observations raise significant issues for forms of memory as well as for the politics of representation. The Holocaust as racially-targeted mass murder took place in the open on the Eastern front under Operation Barbarossa and in a few secret sites of mass extermination of Jewish and Romani victims in Poland. In 1941– 42, the SS was charged with creating a small number of specialized extermination camps in which just over 2 million innocent people were murdered. Never having been liberated, these sites and their procedures are almost without documentation or visual representation. As Snyder points out, there were only four dedicated sites built to carry out the Final Solution of the Jewish Question; Aktion/Operation Reinhard would implement the minuted policy affirmed at the conference at Wannsee on 21 January 1942. The three new camps, all in Poland, were Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, which joined Chelmno, where gassing of Jews by carbon monoxide in closed commercial trucks had begun on 7 December 1941. By mid-1943, these camps had been destroyed, forested over or farmed in order to remove all traces and evidence. These four sites were not visible in 1945 and remain much less known today as memorial sites or the locus of pilgrimage and tourism. As death factories, they yielded no more than a handful of survivors. Some were escapees from the successful revolts at Treblinka and Sobibor (closed down because of the uprising of the work details). Others survived despite being injured in the final executions of the remaining work details. Few of them wrote testimonies to the extermination camps. In contrast, the vast number of extant concentration camps in Germany, witnessed by the Allies and the press in 1945, were bursting with dying and dead prisoners. Only a small number of these men and women were Jewish. Their presence in the German camps was a result of being death-marched east from Auschwitz to hide them from the advancing Red Army, which discovered the Auschwitz complex in January 1945, or they had been sent to slave labour sites such as the underground munitions factory Mittlebau-Dora. The populations of the concentration camps were highly varied and international. Thus it was that images and journalistic reportage of the final stages of the abandoned and disintegrating concentration camps on German soil came to function as the predominant iconography of the cultural memory of the clandestine genocidal event that eventually came to be known as the Holocaust. If the name ‘Holocaust’ denotes, apart from war crimes and general atrocity, the specific genocidal assault on European Jewry and the Roma peoples, that genocide did not take place in those camps, like Bergen-Belsen, that have acquired iconic status, however, as its image. Extermination left no corpses. The notorious and replayed images of the massed bodies of abandoned dead and dying were the residue of the concentrationary system. The meaning of these images needs to be re-contextualized, rather than confused and conflated with (or substituted for) a mass murder whose specificity is the absence of traces, the lack of survivors and the disappearance of the bodies.

INTRODUCTION

9

To insist on the geographical and functional difference between a concentration and an extermination camp might seem a questionable corrective, or even a mere footnote to history, in the light of the collective horror of genocide at the heart of Europe in the mid-twentieth century. We argue, however, that there is much more at stake in this difficult attempt to distinguish the iconic images of massed corpses of diseased and starved people in Bergen-Belsen and Dachau from the terrible reality of the mass murder on an industrial scale of over 2 million men, women and children that took place out of sight, its evidence systematically erased.19 For example, one of the effects arising from the representation of the victims of a hidden mass murder through abject images of humiliated corpses and walking skeletons has been the politics of ‘resistance to representation’ practised by Claude Lanzmann in the making of his nine-and-a-half-hour film Shoah (1985). This film returned to the secret, abandoned, sometimes planted-over, and hence now invisible, sites of Chelmno and Aktion Reinhard camps like Treblinka and Sobibor, to film the present-day landscapes populated with the faces of Polish bystanders, rare surviving Jewish victims (five), and German perpetrators, but resolutely refusing to use any archival footage and imagery. But what footage was he refusing to include? The archive that, predominantly, has been used to create the popular image of the Holocaust is drawn from the concentrationary universe. By distinguishing between the concentration and extermination camps, we would argue, therefore, that Lanzmann could not refuse to use material (images of the extermination camps) that did not exist. Hence, the heated debate about the representation of the Holocaust could be said to be founded on misrepresentation. Lanzmann’s refusal of the archive was, in fact, a refusal of the concentrationary archive above all; as such his film is a considered stand against the misuse of images that might enable viewers to envisage mass death, and indulge in sadistic voyeurism of the helpless victims. Focusing on a politics of representation grounded in the difference between concentration camps and temporary sites of mass murder moves the debate to the distinction between the politics of the representation of horror and the aesthetics of the representation of absence (the latter being what Jacques Rancière identifies in Lanzmann’s film20). The other major reason for making this distinction is to bring back into focus the destruction of the human that is the ambition of the concentrationary universe. The conflation between the concentrationary and the exterminatory can hide from view the radical nature and long-term legacy of this experiment in ‘total domination’. The footage and imagery of the liberation of the concentration camps contain something that encompasses but goes beyond ‘Nazi atrocity’, namely, an antipolitical and dehumanizing project that can only inspire the viewer with the horror of such disfigurement of fellow beings. The politics of representation: Holocaust memory and concentrationary memory Our insistence on the need to distinguish between the concentrationary and the exterminatory is to clarify a different politics of representation and different forms of memory appropriate to each. The specification of the concentrationary as

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a novel, (anti-)political form has a particular political significance relevant to our present situation, as well as to the reading of the history and culture of the latter part of the twentieth century. The conflation of the concentrationary universe and the Holocaust can hide both these from view. Our previous volume, entitled Concentrationary Cinema, on the politics of representation in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955), attempted to highlight the post-war battleground of representation at play. The tensions between two different forms of memory are embedded in the film itself: the initial aim to commemorate the experience and suffering of deported political resistance fighters was complicated by the materials discovered during research for the film which disclosed the calculated planning and execution of the racially-targeted mass murder of the European Jewish communities. How should we read this tension? Some have condemned Resnais and his film for failing to see and show the Jewish tragedy; others trace subtle inscriptions in the film that indicate his full awareness of the racist assault. Our aim in Concentrationary Cinema was to use the prism of the concentrationary to make sense of both the tensions within the film and its relevance as a different kind of memory work from that which has become known as the memory of the Holocaust. The present discussion seeks to clarify this distinction further. These two forms of cultural memory are not in competition but, as we suggest above, they should be distinguished from each other. Holocaust memory is about a unique event that involved the massacre of two racially-targeted European minorities and called forth from the world community the definition of a novel crime: genocide, and the subsequent definition of crimes against humanity. Holocaust memory not only commemorates the appalling destruction of European Jewry and its millenniaold civilization in Europe, but demands a new attention to the rupture in humanity’s troubled histories that racist genocide represents, shattering the assumptions and foundations of every field of thought and practice from theology to aesthetics. It demands constant reflection on the repercussions for humanity hereafter. The concentrationary as a system, however, with the camp as its locus and symbol, historically stretches back into European imperial wars and extends beyond Germany and its satellites between 1933–45 into the post-war German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Stalin’s gulags, South African townships, Argentina’s ESMA, Chilean secret prisons and stadia, and even beyond these politically-specific sites. The analysis of the concentrationary gives rise to two fundamental features of the cultural memory that shapes it. The first is the deadly proximity of horror and the everyday, and the fragility of the boundaries that we imagine keep them apart. This is represented cinematically by the opening shots of Night and Fog, where the camera, installed inside the camp perimeter at Auschwitz-Birkenau, films the tranquil pastoral scenes of fields and roads, only to pan down or across and reveal the lines of barbed wire that both demarcate the camp from the world outside, and reveal the permeability of those demarcation lines. These are not worlds apart; as Rousset says, the camp is at once a demarcated zone and a defining feature of the society in which it functions. It is, therefore, both exception and exemplar.

INTRODUCTION

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The second feature of concentrationary memory is a permeability of a different order: that of time rather than space. Concentrationary memory does not isolate a single, singular, and exceptional event in the past; it draws attention, instead, to seepage and leakage of the political, or rather anti-political, menace that was once incarnated in these places at that time. The threat arises not from exceptionality but from a gesture of innovation that created a new model that becomes a future possibility: that of total domination. If, as Rousset and Arendt acknowledge, this gesture ensures that now ‘everything is possible’, the human being can be rendered superfluous, the body can be subjected to a process of total attrition, then this means that a new model is available which cannot be contained within one time. If genocide has rightly been defined as a crime against humanity in terms of removing whole communities, the totalitarian experiment undertaken through the system of German Konzentrationslager waged a total war on the human within the human person. This does not lead to a simplistic opposition between Holocaust and concentrationary memory. Such a misreading would suggest that Holocaust memory addresses the eradication of a group on the basis of ethnocultural specificity (the Jews were killed for being Jewish, the Romani for being Romani, according to a racialized ideology), while concentrationary memory departicularizes through engagement with a universalizing notion of humanity, hence repeating the gesture of annihilation that Holocaust memory resists. Our distinction between the two forms of memory refutes crude formulations of this kind. If Holocaust memory focuses on the exceptional and demands ‘Never again!’, concentrationary memory is monitory and says ‘Watch for the signs!’. Concentrationary memory draws attention to a political logic of terror and a radical threat to democratic society. The concentration camp system in Germany and in Stalin’s Gulags introduced into modernity the possibility not of liquidation of a targeted other in mass, and sometimes industrialized, genocide. According to Arendt, it experimentally pursued the destruction of the human in the living human being. The figure of the Muselmann – the living corpse, the body in which most signs of human life (personality, memory, language, will and identity) have been effaced21 – is the key figure of concentrationary memory. The texts of concentrationary memory deal not with the systematic ‘production of corpses’ – Hannah Arendt’s term for the extermination camps – but with the horror of still living corpses. This is what Primo Levi asks the world to consider in his poem Shemà! of 1946: ‘If this is a Man’.22 The extermination camp subjects its victims to immediate death, often within the hour of arrival at the extermination point. Its space is void of life, attended only by a small work detail and its SS guards. In the concentration camp, however, death is not the main object; terror and the enactment of the terrifying idea that humans qua human beings can become superfluous are its purpose and its legacy. This understanding depends on recognizing that Primo Levi is not only a writer of Holocaust literature: If This is a Man can also be read as an analysis of the concentrationary qua system, working not like the gas vans or gas chambers and the crematoria to destroy victims by immediate death, but to submit inmates to a prolonged process of psychological disintegration, reduction to bare life and, hence, to becoming a living corpse. In his

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final book The Drowned and the Saved, Levi, anguished at the failure of the society around him to honour the memory of the camps and the gas chambers, wrote: Remember that the concentration camp system even from its origins (which coincide with the rise to power of Nazism in Germany) had as its primary purpose the shattering of the adversaries’ capacity to resist.23 Here Levi registers a different kind of destruction of both the individual and the polity to that constituted by mass extermination. Our attempt to ‘recover’ the concentrationary is premised on registering this other form of destruction in which a space is systematically produced to maximize the assault on the inmates so that a death that would be desired as an escape from the living torture is, in fact, denied the inmate. The legacy, not the system itself, of the experiment of total domination and the destruction of the human is still with us today. This experiment, therefore, requires a different form of memory – concentrationary memory – to register the transformed landscape of the post-war period initiated by the creation of a concentrationary universe. Let us be clear, however: the distinction between the concentrationary and the exterminatory is not absolute and, indeed, cannot be sustained in certain spaces, notably, as we have seen, in that most iconic and misunderstood of loci of horror, Auschwitz. Yet it is vital for the honour of the victims of both systems, to which Primo Levi gives particularly vivid and analytical witness, that we open up the fold which overlays the concentrationary and the exterminatory, for these have become conflated in recent years. Intellectual fashion has turned its back on the concept of humanity and the hawks of cultural theory have outlawed the word ‘human’, fearing, rightly, that its former usage as a term of universalization concealed within it an oppressive politics of disowned power relations around race, class and gender. Particularity, reaching its extreme in fractious identity politics since the 1980s, has been the order of cultural analysis. Those who had to struggle hard to break open falsely universalizing terms and claim recognition of diversity, difference and specificity are justly suspicious of any ‘return’ to generalizing claims. Concentrationary memory, however, dares knowingly to re-engage with the question of the human as it was described, in the aftermath of the concentrationary assault upon it, in the located and politically-sensitive writings by post-war analysts of the concentrationary universe, most notably Hannah Arendt. Arendt, we know, was never really touched by the emergence of postcolonial, feminist, queer or other critiques of false universalization and generic humanism, despite being a very astute reader of Jewish cultural predicaments in European culture and of the racisms that emerged in colonial encounters. Nevertheless, her writings on camps, totalitarianism and what she came to theorize in the mid-1950s, in the wake of her work on totalitarianism, as ‘the human condition’ – the title of her major book published in 1958 – continue to demand a measure of critical rereading as they courageously perceived the dangers of compensatory nationalisms and defensive particularities at the same time as forcing us to recognize Nazism’s

INTRODUCTION

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deep roots in European imperialism. Thus, Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism re-reads the preconditions of the Third Reich’s excesses in European colonialism/ imperialism and nationalism (but not to explain Nazi genocide away as merely identical with, or caused by, that past) in order to reflect on the novel post-Third Reich, post-Stalinist era in which we collectively have to live with what is no longer exceptional. In Shemà! Levi thunders at us to know that ‘this has been’. As such, the camp is not, like the death factory, exceptional; it was, in fact, a beginning, the initiation of a novel possibility, experimentally realized under Hitler and Stalin, but now available as a potential political strategy to create other concentrationary universes, for example in Chile and Argentina. We believe that the evolution of narratives surrounding events of World War II should now be extended to encompass an understanding of overlapping but distinct histories of the concentrationary universe and the extermination of racialized communities. There is no doubt that, initially, in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of the camps in 1945 and for the following decade and more, the focus on so-called Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps did have the effect of marginalizing the specificity of Jewish and Romani suffering, and hence of not fully acknowledging the genocide that had taken place.24 This is despite evidence of a huge outpouring of Jewish writing and some non-Jewish studies in the first decade after 1945.25 The small publication runs in the 1940s of what later became key texts, such as those by Primo Levi or Anne Frank, indicate that publishers did not foresee a market for this material. Few films were made, fewer museums built, and it is only with certain internationally-transmitted media events like the televised Eichmann Trial in 1961 and the TV series Holocaust in 1979 that the cultural memory of the Holocaust, as we understand it today, was established on a general scale internationally. As scholars who have researched, published and taught for many years in the area now known as Holocaust Studies, we are intensely aware of the political stakes in the emergence of this cultural memory and are certainly not advocating either a return to a time of forgetting of the specificity of the genocide or that Holocaust memory is simply a particular instance of a generalized crime. We believe, however, that exclusive address to the exterminatory crimes of the Third Reich has caused aspects of what was valuably foregrounded in the immediate aftermath of 1945 to fall out of the frame of attention. We have, therefore, lost sight of the concentrationary presence in modern and colonial, as well as late modern and postcolonial, societies at the level of actual totalitarian political systems, and often fail to identify this continued presence in aspects of the cultural and political imaginaries and subjectivities within democratic societies.26 By the same token, we argue that the term ‘Holocaust’ has now become a confusing umbrella, encompassing different kinds of experience under Nazi totalitarianism. Under the rubric of Holocaust literature, for instance, writings of non-Jewish political deportees are studied alongside those confronted with the policy of extermination, thus confusing racially-targeted genocidal destruction and eradication of political opposition.27 It is now common to find in the media a use of images of concentration camps as if they directly represented the places

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and processes of the genocide of Jewish and Romani people, thus misleading viewers while also failing to distinguish between different types of victim.28 Our emphasis on the concentrationary therefore aims to bring back into focus a form of memory consisting of a distinctive blend of post-war political thought, a particular photographic and cinematic representation, and self-consciously avantgarde aesthetic practices. We then suggest that this form of memory, in the singular, founded in a specific historical experience, opens onto what we call, in the plural, concentrationary memories that share with concentrationary memory elements of its politicoaesthetic resistance to forms of total domination which have recurred in different configurations since 1945. The concentrationary: Lacan, Arendt and Agamben A deeper understanding of the nature and significance of ‘the concentrationary’ will help us to clarify the way we are using the term in relation to memory and memories. As we mention above, just as we translate the French term imaginaire as imaginary, so concentrationnaire becomes concentrationary. The word imaginaire/imaginary itself has several meanings depending on the theoretical context in which the term is used; so, too, the concept of the concentrationary is not self-evident. The link, however, between ‘imaginary’ and ‘concentrationary’ is not coincidental. In the version of his foundational paper on ‘The Mirror Phase as Formative of the Function of the I’, published in 1949, which confirmed the theoretical outlines of his concept of the psychic register of ‘l’Imaginaire’, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also uses the term concentrationnaire. His use of the term occurs towards the end of the paper where he mounts a polemical assault on Sartrean existentialism for, in effect, failing to grasp the concentrationary. Lacan is commenting on earlier psychoanalytical insights into primary narcissism, the difference or tension between primary narcissistic libido and sexual libido, and the recognition of the death drive which ‘explain[s] the evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I, the aggressivity it releases in relation to the other, even in a relation involving the most Samaritan of aid’.29 Lacan suggests that this psychic ‘existential negativity’ is proclaimed as a reality in contemporary Sartrean philosophy in Being and Nothingness. Lacan concludes: At the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one, and in the anxiety of the individual confronting the ‘concentrationary’ form of the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort, existentialism must be judged by the explanations it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of pure consciousness to master any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of the sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other that be satisfied only by Hegelian murder.30

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The translator in 1976, Alan Sheridan, struggled with the French word concentrationnaire. Knowing of no English term at the time, he translated it as ‘concentrational’, explaining his problem in a footnote: ‘Concentrationnaire’, an adjective coined after World War II (this article was written in 1949) to describe the life of the concentration camps. In the hands of certain modern writers, it became, by extension, applicable to many aspects of ‘modern’ life. [Tr.]31 What is significant in Lacan’s paper is that the psychoanalyst uses a term culled from the literature created by returning French deportees, thereby demonstrating that, as an adjective, concentrationary had a currency in post-war culture in France, and that it functioned both as a political descriptor for a specific experience, and a qualifier that touched on subjective experience of contemporary political realities beyond the camps as such. The contemporary individual, according to Lacan, experiences the anxiety of a concentrationary social bond that is linked to a society failing to resist functioning in a purely utilitarian, calculating mode. What makes the social bond ‘concentrationary’ is not that we are all enclosed in horrifying camps; it is that the dominant social principle is one of pure exploitation, unmitigated by any logic other than use and profit. This utilitarian logic contains a logic of dehumanization, in which people are treated as, and feel themselves to be, mere things, cogs in vast machines of production, or are trained and manipulated to ‘perform’ in ways that are predictable and manageable, be that as consumers or workers within a logic of abstract profitability. Lacan’s very compressed comment resonates, however, with Hannah Arendt’s more detailed arguments, published in her essay on ‘The Concentration Camps’ in 1948. Drawing on French and German deportee literature as well as documents amassed for the Nuremberg Trials, Arendt identified an operation specific to the concentrationary universe: the production of living corpses. At their extreme, camps became laboratories for effecting the destruction of the humanity of a person. Arendt plots this destruction through three phases. First, the camp eradicates the judicial person who is stripped of rights, passports, identities, family, name, dwelling and work. Second, in the camps there is an assault on the moral person who, being placed in an impossible and compromised situation, is denied any chance to make moral choices and any possibility of meaningful action for self or others; martyrdom becomes meaningless in this space when retribution might fall even more terribly on those around the one who tries to make a gesture. The third level of destruction is the systematic erosion of all signs by which individuals can recognize their uniqueness. Conditions of existence are reduced to the barest of struggles for daily life so that the organic basis of life transforms humans into creatures of pure physicality, guided only by their instinct for survival. Subjected to a pre-programmed, animal reaction, humans are deprived of their spontaneity and hence their difference. This, indeed, was the aim, for when the human being is totally overpowered and becomes something other than a person, total power accrues to the dominator:

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CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES It is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to demand unlimited power. Such power can only be secured if literally all men, without a single exception, are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life […] Men insofar as they are more than animal reaction and fulfillment of functions are entirely superfluous to totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous. Total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity. Precisely because man’s resources are so great, he can be fully dominated only when he becomes a specimen of the animal-species man. Therefore character is a threat and even the most unjust legal rules are an obstacle; but individuality, anything indeed that distinguishes one man from another, is intolerable. As long as all men have not been made equally superfluous – and this has been accomplished only in concentration camps – the ideal of totalitarian domination has not been achieved.32 (Our emphasis)

From this conclusion about the camps as laboratories of total domination, to which a particular regime has aspired, Arendt, however, fears that there is a lesson to be learnt about its possible reappearance now that such a solution has been tried out: Today, with population almost everywhere on the increase, masses of people are being rendered superfluous by political, social, and economic events. At such a time, the instruments devised for making human beings superfluous are bound to offer a great temptation: why not use these same instruments to liquidate human beings who have already become superfluous?33 So far that has not happened in a systematic destruction; it takes the form that Zygmunt Bauman has more recently identified as ‘wasted lives’. For Bauman, the logic of contemporary capitalism is to make waste of humans and make humans redundant, forcing them to live in new forms of spiritual as well as economic immiseration, a form of bare life amidst the expanding prosperity and privilege of others, who create camps and fortress-cities to protect themselves from these excluded others.34 In the concluding section of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt thus writes: ‘The concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible [Rousset’s phrase] is being verified …’.35 The everything that is possible involves a total assault on the human condition at the heart of a systematic experiment undertaken by a modern regime: Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random with any other. The problem is to fabricate something

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that does not exist, namely a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only ‘freedom’ would consist in ‘preserving the species’ [Arendt is quoting Hitler] Total domination attempts to achieve this goal through ideological indoctrination of the elite formations and through absolute terror in the camps.36 The assault on the human condition defined by Arendt therefore consists in the effacement of differences, the erasure of particularities, and the reduction of the creative plurality of the human self and of cultural and social production to a kind of minimal struggle to maintain organic life. Thus, the human being is forced to experience the extinction of his or her human identity. Arendt concludes: The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behaviour and transforming human personality into a mere thing, something that even animals are not.37 Arendt’s analysis of the systematic destruction of what it is to be human, and the reduction of the human to ‘a mere thing’, is the most developed understanding of the concentrationary as defined by Rousset and taken up by Lacan in the post-war period. The lack of a theoretical distinction between the concentrationary and the exterminatory, however, means that some dimensions of the political theory born out of this analysis today encounter hostility and generate anxiety amongst those for whom the specificity of the Holocaust disallows any generalizing deductions about society after it. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is perhaps the most prominent theorist to be taken to task for generalizing the historically specific instance of the concentration camp into a recurrent, if not defining, ‘nomos’ of modern society.38 We would suggest that underlying this critique of Agamben’s thesis is the failure to distinguish between the concentrationary and the exterminatory. ‘Nomos’ is a sociological term, like Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, and defines the socially-produced ordering of experience at the intersection of specific laws and habits or customs that shape the everyday life-world that most people take for granted. Agamben has written: The camp is merely the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realized: this is what counts in the last analysis, for the victims as for those who come after. Here we will deliberately follow an inverse line of enquiry. Instead of deducing the definition of the camp from the events that took place: we will ask: What is a camp, what is its juridicopolitical structure, that such events could take place there? This will lead us to regard the camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past

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CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES (even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living.39

Agamben alights on Primo Levi’s reference to an account by a Hungarian doctor, a survivor of the last Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s death factory, of a soccer match played by representatives of the SS and of the Sonderkommando (the latter being the changing teams of Jewish prisoners selected to service the gas chambers and crematoria in return for extra rations but regularly exterminated themselves at the end of a period of a few months). Clearly this is a singular situation, hellishly created by the SS to compromise Jewish victims by making Jewish prisoners, under a temporary stay of execution, perform the actual work of destruction of other Jews. Any failure to carry out their duties or resistance by members of the Sonderkommando was horrifically punished, for example, by being cast alive into the crematorial fires. For Agamben, it is the soccer game, not the obligatory work of the Sonderkommando, that is the grey zone, the space of ambiguity par excellence, for it is here that the true horror of the camp as nomos is exposed: ‘I, like the witnesses, instead view this match, this moment of normalcy, as the true horror of the camp.’40 Even if the massacres have stopped there, the horror is that the system that this scene represents, and which makes it possible, is the conflation and co-existence of what should be two utterly separate fields of activity, namely the extreme cruelty of the forced labour of the Sonderkommando in the exterminatory process and the ritual of competitive sport between equal, competing teams (when, in fact, it is between the totally empowered and the totally powerless, the masters of life and the already dead on temporary reprieve). What this scene suggests is, first, that the total power and unconstrained violence regulating the space is occluded and can be passed off as a normal, everyday activity, and, second, that this ideological trick is not a singular instance. Agamben puts it like this: But that match is never over; it continues as if uninterrupted. It is the perfect and eternal cipher of the ‘gray zone’, which knows no time and is in every place. Hence the anguish and shame of the survivors … But it is also our shame, the shame of those who did not know the camps, and yet, unknowingly, are spectators of that match, which repeats itself in every match in our stadia, in every television broadcast, in the normalcy of everyday life. If we do not succeed in understanding that match, in stopping it, there will never be hope.41 It is in the dehistoricizing and generalizing of this instance that Agamben has been critiqued. True enough, we should mark the specificity of the exterminatory violence contained in this moment by a memory of the Holocaust. Yet if we only understand the event through the prism of the Holocaust, we fail to give sufficient attention to Agamben’s interpretation of the match through the lens of a concentrationary memory. Agamben’s philosophical project is to identify the repeatable effect and logic of a system in which a web of compromising horror was not only possible but realized

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in an advanced, industrial, technological and once democratic and constitutional modern society. He is not generalizing the exterminatory system into every sports event, via a reading of a soccer match at Auschwitz. Instead, he reads the scenario for a specific dimension that is structural: what appears as an even-handed game between two matched teams masks the extreme inequalities of human access to life that persists today – in other forms. Exceptional in its treachery and sadism, the action of the SS – forcing men whom they had terrorized into doing the truly horrific killing for them to play soccer with them (or their representatives) – exposes us to something sinister beyond the exceptional horror daily witnessed by the Sonderkommando, something from which we cannot so easily distance ourselves. Our complacency before it should not shield us from recognizing other kinds of social, political and economic ‘matches’ in which the powerless are forced to participate in utterly unequal conditions of access to life. Agamben’s thought perhaps draws on Marx’s darkly humorous passage in volume one of Capital when he describes the wage-system of capitalism as one such illusory play of free exchange when, in reality, the worker meets the capitalist not on equal terms, but only to sell his hide, and can thus only expect a tanning.42 It should be a source of shame to realize our continuing complicity with grey zones that unfold in everyday life. We are suggesting that Agamben’s analysis is not transhistorical; it is rather a vivid and anxious political comment on the realities of ‘greyness’ in liberal and not-so-liberal capitalist democracies. By teasing out the strands of the concentrationary from the exterminatory in this infamous case, we can thus identify another form of memory alongside Holocaust memory. This nuanced and strategic understanding of what constitutes the total fabric of Nazi totalitarianism may then enable us to value both the historical specificity and the particularity of the victims of genocide, and the possibility of producing, from the historical instance of a realized system of terror across a vast network of concentration camps, a form of memory that is not bound to the ethics of particularity. This other memory opens onto the politics of post-concentrationary vigilance, incites political shame before all abuses of the human-ness of another’s humanity, and obliges us to attend to the awful proximity of horror and the everyday. The politics of memory of the Holocaust and that of the concentrationary universe will depend upon respecting the necessary distinction that can be drawn from the work of Agamben. This distinction lies between our knowledge of a historical event and the political logic that forms one of the conditions for that event but also exceeds it. The concentrationary can thus infect non-fascist societies with its specific logic determining the manner in which people are used and, as Lacan pointed out, in which individuals experience their social subjectivity systemically as dehumanizing. Historical extremity provided a concept through which to recognize something in modern society that was not exceptional, and was no longer confined to Nazi camps. An analysis of the conditions that gave rise to actual camps – concentrationary and exterminatory – exposed, in the midst of non-fascist or potentially fascist societies, a concentrationary type of utilitarian world, to whose annihilating

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negativity Existentialism offered, to Lacan’s mind, only a perverse response, one which, in effect, internalized a mirrored version of the concentrationary itself. Lacan demonstrates to us what was quickly understood, at a cultural and psychic level, as the concentrationary, with his description of the underlying psychic and sexual violence – a death cult – that he identifies in Existentialism’s non-psychoanalytical, hence self-deluding, response to the modern situation. Interestingly, translator Alan Sheridan confirms this extension of the concept of the concentrationary by the mid-1970s, from its initial use as a description of a specific situation – the concentration camps in Germany – to a more general understanding of post-war Modernity through the critique of the utilitarian destruction of human relations in post-war consumer society by theorists like Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and others. As we have seen, this argument would later be more formally theorized by Bauman and Agamben.43 What is less known, however, are the links (largely established through the work of Jean Cayrol) between the critique of the objectification of human relations in the 1950s and 1960s and the idea of the concentrationary defined in the immediate post-war period. The text by Lacan, therefore, functions as an instance of what we are identifying as concentrationary memory: the invocation of a historical event as a condensation of tendencies against which democratic societies must be continually vigilant because the menace cannot be ‘othered’ (located over there, in other people, places and times). But it must be recognized as a present potential infectant of any system in which the humanity of the human can be compromised by a logic of both instrumentalization and ‘uselessness’, and in which uniqueness, plurality and spontaneity (Arendt’s defining qualities of the human condition) are not protected. By adding a psychic dimension to the understanding of the concentrationary, Lacan was not ‘naturalizing’ deadly aggressivity towards others as a fact of the human character; psychoanalytical insight into psychic tensions are the impulse for political and cultural work to guard against their unknowing, unfettered or politically and culturally-encouraged release. Psychoanalysis is not a panacea: in exposing the infantile foundations of subjectivity and psychic life, it calls for adult responsibility towards the management of those tendencies, which, in effect, fascist group manipulation permitted to be acted out. Theodor Adorno had already recognized, in Freud’s initial studies of group psychology, the terms through which to analyse the formations of fascism and their dangerous power over groups. He reminded us that it was not that the mass followers of fascism were primitive people but that a sophisticated system calculatedly encouraged the enactment of primitive attitudes contrary to normal rational behaviour.44 Concentrationary memories Pluralizing the term into concentrationary memories, we therefore suggest that there have been other sites and moments in which the elements that were so concentrated and explicit in the historical Lagers of the Third Reich were, in varying degrees, repeated in totalitarian, fascist or dictatorial experiments in anti-political, antidemocratic regimes of terror. The example of the Lagers and the regime of which

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they were emblematic was not simply consigned to a past memory but became an experimental resource for other regimes. Hence, concentrationary memories become the space for extended studies of totalitarian instances, torture, and the assault on human dignity in diverse geopolitical locations. We can then see that, while Holocaust memory deals in the specificity of a unique extremity whose memorialization is a monument to mass suffering and to a crime against humanity, concentrationary memory opens intertextually onto memories of comparable events of state political violence that share a camp logic without necessarily repeating the actual practices of the concentration camps. Intertextual and inter-locational, concentrationary memories become a means of ensuring the tabulation of the terrible instances of state-sponsored abuse of humanity on a world scale, while respecting the historical specificities of each instance. The concept of concentrationary memories involves an engagement with the politics of representation. In this collection, authors explore the question of political aesthetics or the creation of specific aesthetic forms or procedures in literature, film and art, as the means to make visible a necessary political stance towards what is being represented, that is, a critical positioning vis-à-vis the ‘camp’ as a logic and an instrument of human destruction. We are therefore working with the broad meaning of the term ‘camp’ that we find in Paul Gilroy’s work, Between Camps: conversations around histories of colonialism, imperialism, racism and fascism, and an intertextuality already acknowledged by Arendt and fully articulated in the work of Achille Mbembe.45 Concentrationary memories can be aligned to recent trends in Holocaust studies that are beginning to forge links with post and anti-colonial histories and memories, forming what Michael Rothberg has theorized, from readings of post-war critiques of colonialism by key concentrationary writers such as Charlotte Delbo and others, as multidirectional memory. Confronting controversies in American society over the commemoration of different communities’ traumas, Rothberg boldly defines the problem of competitive memory in which various constituencies compete for space for their identity-securing memory in a zero-sum-game of public commemoration: The understanding of collective remembrance that I put forward in Multidirectional Memory challenges the basic tenets and assumptions of much current thinking on collective memory and group identity. Fundamental to the conception of competitive memory is the notion of the public sphere as a pregiven, limited space in which already established groups engage in a life and death struggle. In contrast, pursuing memory’s multidirectionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions, but actually come into being through dialogical interactions with others.46 Concentrationary memory/memories are not tied to any specific group identities. What is retrieved in returning to this concept is a resource for understanding the present that locates particularities within a reconceptualization of the human

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without collapsing one into the other. It is, instead, a reformulation of the binary divide between the particular and the universal to suggest that the perception of interconnections and similarities across space and time does not necessarily involve an assimilation of differences into a unified and homogeneous whole. There is, we argue, much to gain from such a tricky, Arendtian move in a climate that still disowns the concept of humanity in the name of fractured particularities and communal identities, and at a time when so many people are struggling to access even the barest of existences and to claim democratic self-determination. *** The book is divided into four parts. The first section pays homage to the role of Hannah Arendt’s thought with an essay by a political philosopher. The second considers the mediatization of memory and conflation of concentrationary and Holocaust memory. The third focuses on aesthetic strategies in art, photography and literature created from experience of the camps. The final section treats work that has no direct relation with the Nazi experiment but registers a continuing anxiety in the encounter with its legacies in other forms and places, and in cultural memory itself. Thus the book has drawn together a range of scholars around the concept of the concentrationary. The aim is not to question the nature of Holocaust memory but to consider specific configurations of thought, memory, representation and aesthetic transformation that are elided in the specificity of Holocaust memory. We suggest that the identification of concentrationary memory and its elaboration of concentrationary memories can expand the nature of our debates about the politics of representation and the function of memory in the wake of moments of extreme violence. In the short first section, ‘Theorizing the Political Space and Beyond’, we explore aspects of Hannah Arendt’s political analysis of the concentration camp as a laboratory of totalitarianism because Arendt has been one of the theoretical foundations for this project. John Wolfe Ackerman suggests that if Arendt’s ‘totalitarianism’ is ‘the perpetual menace to be monitored and resisted in all its forms’, it is not just because it is identified with particular twentieth-century regimes. These totalitarianisms, though utterly unprecedented, represented a realization of what Arendt identified in their wake as the threat to the political, a threat embodied in all modes of conceiving and doing politics in the manner of a movement of selfrealization or totalization. Such modes obstruct the encounter with plurality, without which there can be no new action or beginning, and thus destroy politics. Indeed, The Origins of Totalitarianism is Arendt’s contribution to the tentative memorialization of the twentieth century’s totalitarianisms – to that memory capable of ‘guarantee[ing] the pre-existence of a common world’ and thus ‘the possibility of politics in the aftermath of the camps’. Ackerman argues that this effort can only be understood as part of the theologically-informed critique of the pursuit of totality that forms the backdrop to all of Arendt’s work. Ackerman thus links Arendt’s confrontation

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with the concentrationary with her earlier philosophical reflections on friendship and love. The second part of the book, ‘Mediations of Memory’, focuses on the role of different media, primarily photography and cinema, in the politics of memory and representation. In ‘Migration and Motif: The (Parapractic) Memories of an Image’ film theorist and historian Thomas Elsaesser reminds us that one of the great themes of the ‘archive’ in the twentieth century is the presence, proliferation but also the uncertain status of iconic photographs in collective memory and popular culture. Can they preserve their authenticity when they have been reproduced a thousandfold in different media and different contexts? Were they ever authentic, in the sense of actually capturing the unique moment for which they are remembered? How many of them were staged, either as the memory of a visual motif guiding the photographer’s eye, or as re-enactments of a moment too dangerous to document first-hand? How often is context edited out, or no longer recoverable, and, in the process, meaning reframed and reference altered? A somewhat different problematic arises when still and moving images are quoted, appropriated, and re-purposed in films, whether fiction or documentary, not least because the question of iconicity versus authenticity becomes one of narrative and argument, as well as of temporal registers, evidentiary context, contiguity and enunciative force. This chapter presents a case study around an iconic image and ‘found footage’ from the commissioned film documenting the transit camp at Westerbork, in the Netherlands, extracts from which were included in Resnais’s Night and Fog. The chapter traces the filmic afterlife of one iconic image from historically specific footage of a deported woman that destabilizes the memories the image has been used to support (predominantly Dutch Jewish memory of the Holocaust as the genocide of the Jews). Introducing the idea of parapractic memory, Elsaesser’s comments relate directly to concentrationary memory precisely by highlighting the historical contingency and political agendas shaping the reproduction and circulation of images that serve as the loci of invested but uncertain memory work. In their joint paper ‘The Two Stages of the Eichmann Trial’, film historian Sylvie Lindeperg and Holocaust scholar Annette Wieviorka analyse a major event in the production of the cultural memory of genocide, the television recording and international transmission of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, about which Hannah Arendt wrote so controversially in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Although the ambition of the trial was to try Eichmann for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity – a trial which became one of the most public explorations of the specific operation of the persecution and annihilation of European Jewry, and thus a landmark in the creation of public memory of what would become known as the Holocaust – the detailed study by Lindeperg and Wieviorka contributes to the analysis of concentrationary memories in the astute analysis of the politics of representation when a historic event is mediated by the rituals of the courtroom and the conventions of television drama. Basing their analysis on the archives of the state of Israel and those of filmmaker Leo Hurwitz, Lindeperg and Wieviorka examine the unprecedented

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decision to videotape the trial in its entirety and subsequent negotiations between Milton Fruchtman of Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation, the state of Israel, and the judges in charge of the case. Their study of the filmmaker’s preparation for the recording sheds light on his intentions and his expectations of the coming trial. Their analysis of the recorded documents reveals the principal figures in Hurwitz’s scenario and the disparity between his preconception and the reality of the trial. Finally, they reflect on the interaction between judicial ritual and TV drama and the unavoidable influence of the recording itself. Thus, historical analysis of the mediation of memory directs attention to the politicized construction of the past through the mediation of the novel technology of video recording and transmission. In ‘Running the Film against the Reel: Locating Jean Cayrol’s Lazarean figure in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour’, Matthew John identifies a concentrationary landscape in French cinema by bringing to light key moments in Resnais’s 1962 film Muriel. Unlike the viewer of a photograph who is able to contemplate the image at his or her leisure, the cinematic spectator is rarely afforded this privilege. The confrontation with the moving image is, instead, continually frustrated by the onward progression of the medium in which one image succeeds another. Indeed, Roland Barthes opposes film to photography on precisely these grounds; given its inherently ephemeral, fleeting nature, the film leaves no time for a meaningful confrontation with the image and, thus, there can be no ‘punctum’ in the cinema. John seeks to revise this view of the cinema by considering the notion of delay in Muriel. On the one hand, mechanisms of delay are internal to the film itself, in the form of the privileged moment of the photograph as it punctuates the film text. On the other, they are externally imposed upon the work through the revised modes of spectatorship engendered by the transition from celluloid filmstrip to digital technology. If we can perceive in Muriel Jean Cayrol’s thesis of the Lazarean (as Cayrol wrote the script for the film), then this ‘concentrationary’ reading of the film can be more firmly established through the extended confrontation with the image offered by these mechanisms of delay. It is ultimately in the dislocated time and space of a cinema of delay that the image of Cayrol’s Lazarean figure most forcefully emerges within the film. The appearance of Cayrol’s despoiled and degraded human figure in some of Muriel’s most hidden moments calls for a dramatic re-examination of the film and the memories of historical violence it contains, as it allows us to move beyond the historical and temporal specificity of the French involvement in Algeria and perceive the broader concentrationary framework that Cayrol’s Lazarean project necessarily demands. In other words, by using techniques of delay to understand key moments in the film we can understand violence in terms of a persistent totalitarian threat that begins with the German concentration camps, and continues to haunt different times and different sites across the ruined landscape of modernity. The third section of the book, ‘Camp Visions’, focuses on the literary and visual inscription of memory through self-conscious aesthetic practices. In his chapter ‘Symbol Re-formation: Concentrationary Memory in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After’, cultural analyst Nicholas Chare examines the complex psycho-aesthetic dimensions of the writings of a French political prisoner who was one of the

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few survivors of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück from a transport of French women deported for their work in the resistance in Occupied France. In her final collection of reflections, Days and Memory (1985/2001), Delbo distinguishes between two forms of memory, deep memory and intellectual or common memory. The latter is concerned with thinking processes whilst deep memory preserves physical imprints of experiences. Delbo describes deep memory as a form of bodily remembrance that operates beyond words. Drawing on ideas from Wilfred Bion and Hanna Segal, Chare’s chapter argues that Delbo employs specific literary strategies that enable her to access the realm of sensations that is deep memory through her prose. The deep memories embodied in works such as her trilogy Auschwitz and After provide a means of gaining insight into the abject horrors of the concentration camps. By means of her literary style, Delbo is able to carry something of the horror of her past experiences into the present. Art historian Isabelle de le Court focuses her attention in ‘A New Visual Structure for the Unthinkable: The Surrealist Aesthetic and the Concentrationary Sublime in Lee Miller’s Photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau’ on the case of American photographer Lee Miller, who accompanied the American forces when they liberated some of the most notorious of the German concentration camps. Working as an unlikely war reporter for American and British Vogue magazine, Man Ray’s former assistant and later independent Surrealist photographer, Miller, followed the Allies’ progress towards these locations, haunted and still inhabited by horror and death, and delivered photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau at their liberation in April 1945. Like other war photographers’ works, Miller’s photographs probe the limits of representation in different ways. First, they raise the question of how (im)possible it was for these photographers to take pictures of the scenes of suffering they were actually witnessing. Second, these images raise the issue of the reception of the photographs. According to the concept of ‘truth’ related to the photographic media, Miller was obsessed with providing proof of the unspeakable reality of the concentration camps at their liberation. Nonetheless, it is clear that she also drew upon a ‘surrealist’ legacy, which gave her photographs a different aesthetic from the plethora of photographs taken of the same subjects. Miller’s choice of topics was also exceptional as it included the corpses of former SS-guards who committed suicide or were killed by their former prisoners before the arrival of the Allies. Through a close reading of Miller’s body of work of April 1945, de le Court suggests that the ‘concentrationary universe’ introduced a new visual structure of horror which she examines in terms of Miller’s enactment of a surrealist-informed ‘concentrationary sublime’. In his chapter ‘Muselmann: a Distilled Image of the Lager?’ art historian Glenn Sujo undertakes a detailed reading of selected works by the Israeli painter, draughtsman and book illustrator and Auschwitz survivor, Yehuda Bacon (b.1929, Moravia) in order to examine his significant and repeated representations of the emblematic figure of the concentrationary universe, known in Auschwitz jargon as the Muselmann. Placing Bacon’s return to this figure, over many decades after his own experiences as a teenager in ghettoes and camps, in the context of other artists’

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visual representations of the figure, precedents drawn upon from earlier European art, and documentary, photographic, literary and philosophical reflections from Levi to Agamben, Sujo also considers Bacon’s aesthetic practice in the context of the abuses and political instrumentalization of the collective memory of degradation that his images re-summon in their particularity. Bacon testified at the Eichmann Trial in the very same months as he held his first professional exhibitions. Sujo suggests, however, that the uses made in Israel of the artwork of survivors for evidential purposes blinded the public to the aesthetic significance of the visual creation of memory and to the potential of such work to counter the totalitarian through affective fidelity. The artist Charlotte Salomon (1917–43) was murdered on arrival in AuschwitzBirkenau at the age of 26 because she was a pregnant Jewish woman. Thus her work, created in and about an era ‘before Auschwitz’ but produced after a period in a concentration camp in France in 1940, has largely been incorporated into the tragedy of Holocaust Memory. In her chapter, ‘Nameless before the Concentrationary Void: Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? Oder Theater? 1941–42 ‘After Gurs’, Griselda Pollock focuses on Salomon’s formative experience in a French concentration camp which led to the creation of her single work, a theatre of memory composed of almost 1325 paintings compiled in 1942 as Leben? Oder Theater?. Although nothing of the camp experience is incorporated in this massive visual text with musical cues, and despite evidence of artistic activity by inmates in Gurs, Pollock argues that what the artist encountered during her incarceration at Gurs became the structuring void that the vast artistic work of memory was created to blot out. Salomon was in the French administered camp at Gurs in 1940 with many other German-Jewish and German communist refugees, including Hannah Arendt, whose survival was made possible by her being known (through her politically active husband) to a group of political activists in the camp who counterfeited exit passes that enabled a group of women to escape before the Germans took over the camp from the French officials in the summer of 1940. Many were subsequently ‘rescued’ by the American Varian Fry while making their escapes from Europe itself. Salomon was not a ‘name’ and was not on the list. She later explained the making of Leben? Oder Theater? as the means of finding/making a name for herself. The loss of name, hence of civil, personal and historical identity, was, for Arendt, the primary assault of the concentrationary system on the subject. This chapter explores the proposition that Salomon’s art work, created in the aftermath of her exposure to the concentrationary universe, can be read through the prism of what she intuited from that experience about the nature of the concentrationary assault on humanity, against whose annihilating negation of self, memory, and history her massive visual, textual and musical undertaking was engendered as an aesthetics of resistance through the invention of a theatre of memory. The fourth section of the book, ‘Beyond the Limits’, moves from these varying studies of concentrationary memory and the aesthetics of resistance to the expanded field of concentrationary memories which examine aspects of the totalitarian emerging in other places and times, and being configured actively or obliquely as

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memory through different aesthetic strategies. Working on memory politics in the Middle East, Claire Launchbury analyses Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman’s disturbing feature-length animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (2008) in her chapter ‘Animated Memory: Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir ’. The film revisits the Israeli war and occupation of Lebanon in 1982 from the remembered and amnesiac perspective of conscripted soldiers. Dialogue with witnesses and therapists examine areas of memory, including the quest through recalled testimony and dream sequences for the recovery of what has been forgotten. Leading towards Folman’s own recovered memory of his participation – as observer – in the massacre of the Palestinian refugee camps in south Beirut that followed the assassination of Lebanese presidentelect Bashir Gemayel, the film works through both collective and individual trauma, abstracted yet re-animated by the use of graphic animation as the film’s language. Yet there is a broader discourse, beyond the complicated contemporary politics enacted in this contested area of the Mediterranean, in the form of a post-memorial reworking of both the extermination camps of World War II and the role of the Jewish soldier in uniform. Analysis of the polyphony of references to the postHolocaust memoir suggests that psychoanalysis, and indeed the waltz of the title, are important beyond the narrative and the identities – national or personal – it might seek to construct. This chapter examines the use of the archive and testimony by assessing their role in the re-working of memories resulting from religious, military and state totalitarianism in the broadest sense. In his chapter ‘Isn’t this where …? Projections on Pink Floyd The Wall : Tracing the Concentrationary Image’ Benjamin Hannavy-Cousen offers a reading of the collaboration between film director Alan Parker, artist Gerald Scarfe and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters which resulted in the British film The Wall (1982), a remarkable portrayal of an individual’s dehumanization in the face of various forces. ‘Pink’ is shown as war baby, through fatherless childhood to eventual breakdown, megalomania and a fascist fantasy of rock stardom. Radical aesthetic and filmic procedures are utilized in making visible these forces; constructions of memory are laid bare through a mixture of chronological breakdown, the hallucinatory and the surreal. The film reveals what may be regarded as the ‘concentrationary universe’ as it inhabits both British society and its systems at a particular historical moment, and its potential to envelop the psyche of an individual. To a certain extent, this revelation could be said to embody a politics of resistance, reinserting the warning of the ‘1933’ moment of Resnais’s Night and Fog. Yet the fact that the film is also stuck in this very moment, and given the totalizing walled-in nature of its own structure which aesthetic forms inside it cannot demolish, suggests that The Wall fails to resist a concentrationary logic inherent in contemporary popular culture. Reviewing the conflicted processes of memory-making in post-dictatorship Argentina, Laura Malosetti Costa offers detailed and contextualized readings of memory in her chapter ‘Memory Works in Argentina 1976–2006’. This chapter reviews the complex ways in which the legacies of Argentina’s dirty war is being negotiated through various modes of memory work. The dictatorship in Argentina 1976–83 was a seven-year campaign by the military junta against political dissidents

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who were arrested and tortured in the notorious ESMA, a naval school that became the regime’s most atrocious camp, before they were murdered in a form of ‘disappearance’ equivalent to the Nacht und Nebel punishment of political resistance by the Nazis, which also constituted an effective genocide of a generation of political activists. Many of the political dissidents were drugged and then dropped from planes into the Rio Plato to drown. Rather than the piles of bodies that visually marked the discovery of the German concentration camps, it is the absence of bodies, the endless openness of the undocumented ‘disappeared’ that haunts Argentinean society. This is evident in the work of numerous cultural practitioners, from the work of the Madres del Plaza di Mayo to recent uses of photography, performance and failed attempts at the creation of a memory park and sculpture. In addition to the disappearance of a generation of 20–30 year olds, the regime stole their children, delivering them to adoption by supporters of the regime, disordering families and creating other sites of disappearance and remembrance. This chapter examines the specificity of the Argentinean experience of a political ‘genocide’ and its concentrationary terror in the context of the major critical debates around the European concentrationary universe, but also with an awareness of the most recent developments in the politics of memory and memorialization. In a sense this book is itself a laboratory. Our proposition that concentrationary memory is historically formed and its problematics subsequently disseminated into other societies and later periods are tested out by the individual authors against materials from their own disciplinary spaces of research and analysis. The chapters are not illustrations of concentrationary memory/memories but specific case-studies, investigated through the prism of analysis opened up by the recovery of a forgotten concept for critical theorization, the concentrationary. This was once a potent political probe, urgently reminding becalmed post-war society of unimaginable crimes against humanity and of a novel (anti-)political possibility. Reading works from the period of camps by Jewish and non-Jewish artists and writers, and discerning tracings and hauntings of other places and times, this book reintroduces the concentrationary as a probe into the issues of memory, aesthetic resistance and the politics of representation.

1 THE MEMORY OF POLITICS Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt and the Possibility of Encounter John Wolfe Ackerman

It is not only human solidarity that commands us to understand the holes of oblivion and the world of the dying as the central issues of our political life; the fact is that the true problems of our time cannot be understood, let alone solved, without the acknowledgement that totalitarianism became this century’s curse only because it so terrifyingly took care of its problems.1 In the Preface to her The Origins of Totalitarianism (hereafter Origins), Hannah Arendt undertakes, improbably, to present the devastation wrought by ‘the totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination’ as a crux in which the accumulated political conundrums of human history have been uncannily distilled.2 In this situation, unwelcome but urgent, there can be no going forward that does not involve a permanent taking stock of what will have become past. The very possibility of politics after totalitarianism, it seems, will remain inseparable from an overdue awareness that totalitarianism itself will have brought about. As Arendt concludes: We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.3

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This was ‘the burden of our time’, of a reality to be both faced up to and resisted. This new reality called for a singular form of memory of what totalitarianism had effected – a memory that could cultivate what totalitarianism had destroyed without seeking to recreate the lost world that the totalitarian phenomenon had – problematically, cryptically – deciphered. What it would require was, in fact, an overcoming of the oblivion that totalitarianism had sought to institute as allpowerful – a lasting repudiation of the continuing temptation to indeed try ‘to forget the holes of oblivion’ that totalitarianism had created.4 Totalitarianism’s ‘holes of oblivion’ were the concentration and extermination camps, ‘the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified’.5 Their capacity to approximate this claim lay precisely in the fact that they ‘were organized and planned … explicitly to make people disappear, to destroy people’s capacity of memory’ – easing the way into ‘the abyss of the “possible”’ by eliminating those whose sheer difference, or the encounter with the mere memory of their difference, might have posed an obstacle to the unilateral realization of unhemmed possibility: ‘The main purpose is to make people disappear from the face of the earth, and to make those they left behind forget that they ever existed.’6 The totalitarian belief that everything is possible, Arendt argued, represented a resentment, in the face of human power and responsibility, of the fact that man, despite his many accomplishments, ‘is not the creator of the universe and himself ’.7 The camps, as ‘the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power’, constituted a bold if outrageous attempt to overcome this finite condition by organizing and instituting a collective forgetting of the contacts, interactions and relationships with others variously different from themselves that every member of society had had; if they were to succeed, they would indeed have realized ‘total rule’.8 The call with which Arendt ended the book’s first edition was thus an effort to overcome totalitarian oblivion with a new sort of plural, political memory that might repair the tear in the fabric of ‘the common world’ – a world in which others can be encountered – that totalitarianism had effected. It offered a cautious prescription for political renewal, one that, unlike contemporary ‘neo-humanist’ calls ‘to reestablish stability by making man the measure of all things human’, would centre upon adopting a decidedly non-totalitarian attitude – gratitude – toward some of those many things that human beings, in politics as in general, can only encounter as ‘given’ if they are to encounter them at all: Generally speaking, such gratitude expects nothing except – in the words of Faulkner – one’s ‘own anonymous chance to perform something passionate and brave and austere not just in but into man’s enduring chronicle … in gratitude for the gift of [one’s] time in it.’ In the sphere of politics, gratitude emphasizes that we are not alone in the world. We can reconcile ourselves to the variety of mankind, to the differences between human beings … only through insight into the tremendous bliss that man was created with the power of procreation, that not a single man but Men inhabit the earth.9

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Joining Faulkner with the New Testament chroniclers of Acts, Arendt recalled the words attributed to Paul, calling out to his Roman jailer after an earthquake had opened the cells in which he and his fellow prisoners were being held: Those who were expelled from humanity and from human history and thereby deprived of their human condition need the solidarity of all men to assure them of their rightful place in ‘man’s enduring chronicle.’ At least we can cry out to each one of those who is rightly in despair: ‘Do thyself no harm; for we are all here.’10 Such memory, both solidary and political, of those whose very existence totalitarianism had sought to erase from ‘man’s enduring chronicle’, was necessary if what Arendt called a common world was to be constituted anew and safeguarded from renewed destruction through resurgent totalitarian impulses. The difficulty of achieving such a politically viable, post-totalitarian memory was potentially overwhelming, however, for it would have to dedicate itself to the memorialization of the concentration camps without succumbing to the politically fatal paralysis that the ‘dwelling on horrors’ sure to result from any attempt to tell their story would be sure to bring about.11 Rather, this singular effort would have to entail precisely the undoing of what the camps were intended to accomplish, an ongoing political and memorial practice of ‘reconcil[ing] ourselves to the variety of mankind’, to the given differences between human beings, that the concentration camps had been designed to make it brutally possible to avoid. Origins was itself conceived as, in part, a tentative act of such political memory – of marking, and thus in a politically crucial sense perpetuating – the very existence of those who had been and continued to be caught up in the calamities of totalitarian movements and at the extreme, in the camps, made to disappear from not just the face of the earth but even ‘from the memory of those who loved’ them.12 The book’s reception from the time of its publication – often as a Cold War text with an interest in legitimating totalitarianism’s apparent sole alternative, Western liberal democracy, almost always perplexed by its tripartite structure, which only somewhat allusively traces totalitarianism’s relationship to the other two phenomena analysed in the first two-thirds of the book, antisemitism and imperialism – has, however, obscured this effort. That the book is largely viewed as disconnected from both the works more transparently concerned with political theory with which Arendt followed it and from the apparently non-political writings of Arendt’s youth in Germany, most notably her published dissertation, on the concept of love in the writings of Augustine, has been both a consequence and a cause of this difficulty making sense of Arendt’s broader arguments in Origins. In what follows I seek to better the conditions for understanding Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism by reading this work back into the context of Weimar debates at the intersection of politics, philosophy and theology that shaped Arendt’s problematic in her dissertation and, I argue, her later political theory. I focus in particular on the significance of the lasting confrontation with the work of the jurist Carl Schmitt that Arendt quietly

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entered into with her book on Augustine; this critical engagement with Schmitt’s ‘political theology’ forms a steady if surprising point of reference for Arendt in the development of her account of the possibility of refounding a common world and reviving politics in the camps’ aftermath, and a necessary reference also for the effort to comprehend the political memory that Arendt thought would be required for such a task – a memory uniquely attuned to the possibility of political new beginning. I Encountering the neighbour (love and Augustine) Arendt’s dissertation, published in 1929 as Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (The Concept of Love in Augustine), was dedicated to the question of whether the self-reflective subject of Augustinian faith could actually encounter the neighbour, an encounter that, Arendt maintained, could only take place in the world. It also contained her first meditations, to be developed further in Origins, on the potential for memory to at least partially redeem the past: in Augustine’s conception, she explained, memory makes the past present and thereby institutes it as a present and future possibility; in the context of Arendt’s investigation of ‘the relevance of the neighbour’, memory was especially important because it established the human self ’s dependence on an origin beyond itself.13 Still, within Augustine’s conception of love, memory proved insufficient to propel the Augustinian subject into any meaningful encounter, for, as she later clarified, Augustine ‘equates [memory] with self-consciousness as such’; this equation ‘cuts off the human being’s contact, its communication, with the “world” and is thus the sign of the individual’s isolation, or better: of the individual’s imprisonment in itself ’.14 Arendt had turned her attention to ‘encounter’ (Begegnung) in her dissertation at a time when, in the wake of World War I, disenchantment with ideologies of world history and inevitable progress had led to an explosion of calls among philosophers, theologians and political thinkers alike to renew the possibility of encounter – the capacity to meet, respond to and engage with a Being or beings beyond our selves, with God in revelation and with fellow humans in love of neighbour. Such appeals had garnered considerable attention in works like Martin Buber’s Ich und Du and the writings of radical Protestant theologians like Karl Barth.15 Most significantly for Arendt at the time she wrote her Augustine study, Heidegger had developed an emphatically de-theologized account of encounter in his seminars of the 1920s including the courses in which Arendt was a student, in which he worked out the ideas that would become his published Being and Time.16 There, Heidegger presented ‘encounter’ (Begegnis) as the way of Being of Dasein through which the world is permitted to appear or show itself.17 It is thus not surprising that encounter became a key term in Arendt’s investigation; what is perhaps surprising is her choice to resituate the problem of encounter in the explicitly theological context of love of neighbour, at a point at which Heidegger had moved fairly definitively away from his earlier theological considerations, and to do so via none less than Augustine, among Heidegger’s preferred Christian thinkers, in order to refocus on the question that she thought had been obfuscated through Heidegger’s philosophical appropriation.18 Whereas the encounter with God issued in the demand to encounter the neighbour

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in love of neighbour, Heidegger had flattened out encounter, leaving it to occur only with a world rendered uniform and reinforcing a ‘Self ’ content not to reach beyond itself. By investigating love, Arendt sought to foreground the confrontation with plurality that the theological invocation of ‘encounter’ at least implied – and to ask whether Augustine’s account was any more successful than Heidegger’s at permitting such worldly encounter to occur. If not, if in Augustine’s understanding the neighbour was always already viewed as instrumental to another purpose, whether beyond this world or within the recesses of the individual soul, then, Arendt proposed, love of neighbour would have been rendered meaningless, for the neighbour would not matter to it at all. Arendt would formulate this criticism of Heidegger directly almost 20 years later in the essay, ‘What is Existenz Philosophy?’, in which she introduced the work of her German teachers to an American readership, but it already defines the problem explored in her dissertation and lends it its structure.19 Arendt’s conclusion in the dissertation itself as to whether Augustine’s account left any room for worldly encounter is ambivalent; her intention there, she stated, was to illuminate the contradictions of Augustine’s thought, not to solve them.20 However, her initial turn to the worldly encounter with the neighbour involved another crucial innovation that slyly inserted this work into a separate, emphatically political debate that had also recently surged to prominence, and which is even more decisive for understanding how her later account of totalitarianism, as well as the political theory that emerged out of it, is illuminated by this earlier work. At several key points in her study, Arendt emphasized that experiencing the neighbour in a ‘concrete, worldly encounter’ meant encountering the neighbour ‘as friend or enemy’ – a formulation that would have been familiar, and striking, to many of Arendt’s readers.21 In 1927, first in May in a lecture at the Hochschule für Politik in Berlin and then in August in an article in the Heidelberg Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Carl Schmitt had introduced his ‘concept of the political’.22 In this lecture and essay, Schmitt had asserted, quite controversially, that the political was distinguished from other spheres of social life by the fact that all of its activities could be traced back to the ultimate distinction (Unterscheidung) between friend and enemy. Arguing as he had repeatedly during the years of the Weimar Republic against the ‘pluralism’ that had paralyzed the Republic’s institutions and ‘denie[d] the sovereign unity of the state’, Schmitt insisted that ‘the political’ requires a single, political entity, the state, which possesses the capacity to distinguish friend from enemy (in the political sense), and thus to decide on what he called the exceptional case.23 Indeed, throughout Schmitt’s critique of Weimar’s institutions, his primary complaint was that their sclerosed pluralism no longer permitted parties to encounter each other politically so that differences could be registered, comprehended and negotiated. The problem with the Weimar parliament was not just that, as Schmitt observed, what occurred there was all talk, but that Weimar’s political parties saw themselves as representing fixed, sectional, social interests that it was their task to realize through the capture of the state apparatus. As a result, Schmitt intoned, ‘a discussion no longer takes place’, and the unity of the state is threatened.24 Schmitt’s

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proposed remedy for this ‘pluralistic party-state’ continued to be what he had earlier called a ‘political theology’ determined by the ‘systematic and methodical analog[y]’ between the sovereign political entity and a personal God with the ultimate power of decision.25 In alluding to Schmitt’s controversial argument, Arendt was thus, already, in this, her least political work, politicizing (theological) encounter along the lines urged by Schmitt, while also, however, pluralizing it – a move that immediately set her in opposition to the ‘political’ remedy Schmitt proposed. For whereas Schmitt insisted that the capacity to make the political friend-enemy distinction required a unitary order constituted by a sovereign possessing the power of decision, Arendt demonstrated that, to the extent that Augustine insisted on the existence of an order assigning the bestowal of love (i.e., an order determined by a sovereign, personal God with the ultimate power of decision), to that extent, encounter, and thus love, was no longer possible. In that case, the neighbour is no longer experienced in concrete, worldly encounters – namely as friend or enemy; rather he has already, in advance, as a human being, been placed in an order, which decides on love [schon in eine Ordnung hineingestellt, die über die Liebe entscheidet] … The decision on the being of the other is not made in love, but prior to it.26 In work stretching from her dissertation through her writings of the early 1930s on German romanticism and antisemitism to the study of totalitarianism that eventually grew out of it and beyond, Arendt met Schmitt’s attack on Weimar pluralism with the argument that politics is contingent upon the encounter with plurality – precisely what totalitarianism, and Schmitt’s totalizing political theology, abolish. By demanding a unitary, sovereign order as the precondition for the political and the friend-enemy distinction, Schmitt had in effect ruled out the very encounter with the other in which any political judgement about him – etwa als Freund oder Feind, as friend or enemy – could be made. II Eliminating encounter (origins of totalitarianism) Indeed, over the course of the next two decades, Arendt would build her account of totalitarianism, and totalitarianism’s antipolitical nature, on this very criticism of Schmitt – who within a few years would himself develop a positive account of the ‘total state’ that ultimately sought to justify the Nazi party’s takeover of the German state apparatus.27 Whereas Schmitt, however, continued to rely on the analogy that he saw between a sovereign instance of decision and the Judeo-Christian God, Arendt’s critical response takes its cue from a political theology not of sovereign decision but of encounter. This alternative guided Arendt’s subsequent investigations: first in her study of Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt examined how both the German romantic and the German Jew caught up in romanticism refused worldly encounter, a refusal that would be instrumental to the development of modern antisemitism.28 Then in the ‘Antisemitism’ manuscript written at the end of the 1930s in Paris, Arendt

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developed the connection between the Romantic theory of the ‘total state’, the denial of encounter and the destruction of politics.29 When Arendt focused there on ‘the political failure of German Jews and of world Jewry in the face of the German catastrophe’ (as it had so far taken shape), she already meant by ‘political’ the ability to engage with others in concrete encounters, in which it is possible to both acknowledge difference and respond to it.30 Continuing to take her cue from Schmitt, Arendt warned against ‘Zionism’s lack of interest in its political foe, its programmatic blindness to both friend and foe’, and declared ‘the bankruptcy of the illusion of autonomous, isolated Jewish politics’, which would be no politics whatsoever, having already excluded the possibility of political engagement with anything or anyone beyond its own putative, pre-existent ‘self ’.31 This conception of politics mirrored that of the group of nineteenth-century German intellectuals whom Schmitt had dubbed the ‘political romantics’, whose theories of the ‘total state’, Arendt argued, were ‘the fertile soil of all antisemitic ideology’.32 Arendt carried this line of argument over into Origins, where she explained: ‘As an object that had been romanticized the “people” lost above all its quality of being separated and distinguished (unterschieden) from other objects’; in the romantic conception, it simply was its self, the people, indifferent to whether it shared a world with any others.33 Totalitarianism would take the additional step of recognizing the extent to which it needed to realize and enforce such world-alienation in order to make real its ‘claim to totality’, which ‘again formulated and only reversed the bourgeoisie’s own political philosophy … In this sense the bourgeoisie’s political philosophy was always “totalitarian”; it always assumed an identity of politics, economics and society, in which political institutions served only as a façade for private interests.’34 This had been Schmitt’s original complaint about the nascent Weimar ‘total state’. Arendt completed her analysis of the world-alienation realized by totalitarian societies in the essay ‘Ideology and Terror’, which she wrote while the first edition of Origins was being prepared for publication and then substituted for the original concluding remarks in subsequent editions of the book. Here, she showed that the key feature that distinguished totalitarian societies was the condition of radical social isolation of individuals, or abandonment by each other, that she called ‘loneliness’ (Verlassenheit); the striking significance of this condition was that in it, no encounter was possible at all, because men could no longer constitute a common world. Totalitarian movements and the regimes of total domination they produced prepared their ‘victims and executioners’ through the dual totalizing forces of ideology and terror: on the one hand, ‘total terror … substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions’.35 Simultaneously, ideology – literally, ‘the logic of an idea’ – succeeds in replacing memory with ‘logical reasoning whose premise is the selfevident’, i.e., that which realizes itself without any appeal to or intrusion of alterity whatsoever.36 Thus:

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CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES Just as terror … ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them.37

Under these conditions, in which men are no longer consigned to act into a world that they share with anyone else, it is a matter of course that everything seems possible. III Refounding a common world In the wake of World War II and evidence of a spreading ‘concentrationary universe’, Arendt argued for the need to refound a common world, in which encounter, and politics, would once again be possible. It was no coincidence, she argued, that the camps ‘were organized and planned as holes of oblivion’, for memory, as Arendt understands it, would pose a fatal danger to totalitarian rule. As against the selfevidence of ideology, its self-representation and self-legitimation, the memory of others encountered attests to the commonness of a world, to the challenge every such encounter poses to every pre-understanding, and to the new beginnings that continually shake and realign that world and thereby keep it in reality. Still, memory, like laws, can only ‘guarantee the pre-existence of a common world’ and is thus insufficient to keep such a world in existence as a site of politics – or, on its own, to guard against nostalgic attempts to resurrect a purportedly settled and more harmonious prior world in the place of continuing encounter and altercation.38 This is the circumstance that led Arendt to her consideration of the problem of the ‘foundation of a new polity’ as she concluded the first edition of Origins, a problem that would continue to guide her subsequent work; that such a new foundation was required, that any return to some prior status quo was impossible, reflected the specific perplexity that had been made visible by totalitarianism, which lay in the political problem of the encounter with difference.39 In the modern, globalized world that totalitarianism’s ‘claim to global rule’ had revealed, in which ‘mankind’, in its infinite differentiation, ‘is no longer a beautiful dream of unity or a dreadful nightmare of strangeness, but a hard inescapable reality’, only the founding of a political common world could effect the equalization of difference necessary to make any political action possible in the first place.40 As Arendt explained: ‘Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals.’41 Indeed, totalitarianism, Arendt observed in the book’s original conclusion, far from being a random aberration, ‘became this century’s curse only because it so terrifyingly took care of its problems’. It was for this reason that totalitarianism, despite its ‘futility’ and ‘ludicrousness’, was ‘more deeply connected with the crisis of this century and more significant for its true perplexities than the well-meaning efforts of the non-totalitarian world to safeguard the status quo’; the ‘disturbing relevance of totalitarian regimes’ lay in the fact that the ‘monstrous equality’ created in the camps represented a perverse but precariously effective answer to the key challenge facing a global humanity.42

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The ever-present danger in such a world is that given differences will be experienced as ‘mere differentiation’ – as difference which, ‘representing nothing but … absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within and action upon a common world, loses all significance’.43 When this happens, difference threatens to provoke attempts to achieve an excessive equalization that destroys difference instead of engaging it politically, and totalitarianism carried this attempt to a lethal extreme. This is the problem to which the (re)foundation of a common world was the only possible answer: not because it could erect a determinate institutional order that once established would govern what follows – for this, as in Augustine’s ordinata dilectio or Schmitt’s sovereign constitutional order, would eliminate the very possibility of encounter – nor because it could identify new philosophical foundations for politics – the other tried and true method of evading the predicaments of politics – but because it was possible to envision, tentatively, and again in dialogue with Augustine, another founding of a special sort, one enacted in the ongoing political encounter with difference. When Arendt inquired in her dissertation into the role of memory in recalling love from its fixation on the self ’s own desired future to an acknowledgement that the self ’s very origin lies beyond itself, her analysis led her to consider the significance of the ‘two-fold’ character of Augustine’s conception of ‘world’. This discussion was the one instance in the book that Arendt explicitly situated as a critique of Heidegger, charging him with explicating Augustine’s humanly ‘constituted’ concept of world but neglecting the corresponding concept of world as ens creatum on which it rested. ‘Since the world, and with it every creature (creatum), first comes into being … it becomes, it has a beginning’, she wrote.44 Heidegger’s neglect of the given, created world – the necessary ground of and limit to all human constitution – reinforced one of the most important legacies of his previous investigations of early Christianity: indeed, his self-centred notion of ‘encounter’ was a reworking of what he had earlier called the ‘self-world’ – a ‘world’ that, in Dilthey’s parsing of Augustine, ‘appears to the self, as its phenomenon’.45 But, for Augustine, the concept [of world] is twofold: first, the world is God’s creation (heaven and earth), which antedates all love of the world; and second, it is the human world, which constitutes itself by habitation and love (diligere) … [I]t is from the divine fabric (fabrica Dei), from the pre-existing creation, that man makes the world and makes himself part of the world … God’s creation is found in existence, and as the creature finds the world, he also finds himself ‘of the world’ … Man’s dependence as a creature on ‘finding’ in his ‘making’ expresses the particular strangeness in which the world as a ‘desert’ (eremus) pre-exists for man.46 In the wake of the loss of the common world that totalitarianism had effected since she wrote this, making the world again into a desert, it was necessary, Arendt argued 20 years later, to found, or refound, a political world on the persistent ground of differentiated givenness. When in 1963 a translation of her dissertation was prepared,

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it also adopted this language of founding: ‘For even if the creature has a hand in founding the world, this foundation always takes place on the ground of the divine fabric, on the ground of the world that is found in existence as God’s Creation, and this alone makes it possible to establish the world once more in an explicit sense.’47 That the verb konstituieren was translated here, in the year she published On Revolution, not as ‘to constitute’ but as ‘to found’, could be further justified by the fact that by this point Arendt had credited Augustine also with recognizing ‘the central political experience of Roman antiquity, which was that freedom qua beginning became manifest in the act of foundation’.48 Arendt had turned to political foundings at the end of Origins, and subsequently, as a response to the problem of how to sustain, navigate and negotiate the encounter with difference, as the ground of plural political action in concert. In a world finally, decisively, disabused of its claims to innocence, in which the acknowledgement of man’s limits is combined with the manifest impossibility of appealing to traditional absolutes, the political task of freedom is also one of foundation, of refounding a common world. This can be accomplished neither by ‘nostalgia for a still intact past’, and even less in the form of an ‘anticipated oblivion of a better future’; it is instead contingent upon the political capacity to recall that past, present and future plurality of encounters that totalitarianism had sought to erase from memory, in persistent remembrance of man’s continuing dependence on the world into which he is born, and on that plurality of others who inhabit it.49 This was the terrain of the distinct form of foundation that Arendt saw the need for in the wake of totalitarianism and which she would formulate most fully in On Revolution. There, again taking up her critical engagement with Schmitt, Arendt praised the American revolutionaries’ unwitting discovery of a form of founding that endures precisely in the extent to which, in founding a polity, it sustains the possibility of new beginning. In such a ‘foundation of freedom’, the ‘constitution’ of a stable and lasting political order – one that cultivates the always new encounters necessary for politics and the new beginnings they provoke – becomes possible precisely to the extent that, neither unitary nor sovereign order, it does not preclude ongoing encounter. IV Concentrationary memories/representing encounter after totalitarianism If it is true that the concentration camps are the most consequential institution of totalitarian rule, ‘dwelling on horrors’ would seem to be indispensable for the understanding of totalitarianism. But recollection can no more do this than can the uncommunicative eyewitness report.50 The utterly novel character of totalitarianism’s assault on political existence, Origins proposed, lay in its effort to eliminate not just individual human beings, or even whole peoples, but, even more terrifyingly, the very possibility of encounter with other beings altogether. Arendt’s own contribution to the tentative and politically salient memorialization of the twentieth century’s totalitarianisms therefore entailed a counter-effort: the attempt at a form of ‘representation’ that itself cultivates and

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sustains political ‘encounter’, re-presenting from beyond the essentially isolating experience of any self reduced to itself, making ‘present’, as a present and future possibility, the myriad elements of the historical constellation that had crystallized in totalitarianism and the variety of human acts that had made this crystallization possible. Only through such efforts at understanding, Arendt wagered, might it be possible to once again ‘guarantee’ – always precariously – ‘the pre-existence of a common world,’ a durable space of appearance in which politics – the ongoing reception and negotiation of difference, and the plural action ‘in concert’ that issues from it – might continue to be possible. New political foundings in the wake of totalitarianism would therefore require a kind of memory that was both informed by Arendt’s reading of Augustine and went beyond it. On the one hand, ‘remembrance in Augustine is primarily recollection, “collecting myself from dispersion”’, from the self ’s dispersion in, and into, the world – a (re)collecting that, perhaps paradoxically, throws the self back upon the fact that it is not self-made but created even as it shores it up.51 Still, what politics requires is something more: a memory that indeed disperses and decentres the self in the world, confronting it with its ‘dependence … upon others for help’ and reembedding it in ‘the co-acting of his fellow men’.52 ‘Only by making himself at home in the world’, Arendt wrote in her interpretation of Augustine, ‘does man establish the world as such’; only by, with others and ‘through love of the world’, co-founding a common world, can man move beyond recollection, which takes him out of the world, to become ‘of the world’, ‘worldly’.53 Only where people come together continually can actions themselves generate the limited and tentative durability of a realm in which plural beings can appear to each other: action, Arendt would explain in The Human Condition, ‘in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history’.54 Organized political bodies, with the qualified equalization and tentative, ongoing memorialization they enact – ‘the polis’, in Arendt’s metaphorical and self-conscious usage of the term – create, or can create, the conditions for politics. Yet such efforts, which cannot be reduced to the production of formal institutional structures, are always fragile and can never guarantee that such a world will remain in existence. Even the polis, in Arendt’s view, ‘does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears … with the disappearance or arrest of [political] activities themselves’.55 Still, where politics is risked, speech and action, insofar as they are necessarily engaged in with others, themselves generate a tentative memorialization sufficient to make further political interaction possible: speech and action, the ancients rightly perceived, ‘despite their material futility, possess an enduring quality of their own because they create their own remembrance’.56 Indeed this self-sustaining remembrance was the key to the mode of political founding Arendt theorized in On Revolution, one uniquely adequate to the ongoing threat to politics that totalitarianism had unleashed – for such a uniquely political founding, neither liberal nor traditionally republican, founding neither individual rights nor the sovereignty of the people, can be kept alive only to the extent that those who come after it continue to bind themselves back to it in further

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political activity. Such activity necessarily entails an ongoing and always contingent remembrance that is crucial to sustaining political coexistence, a remembrance that, Arendt argued, is accomplished in everyday, unelevated talk: ‘What saves the affairs of mortal men from their inherent futility is nothing but this incessant talk about them, which in its turn remains futile unless certain concepts, certain guideposts for future remembrance, and even for sheer reference, arise out of it.’57 Whereas, in the heated atmosphere of Weimar, Schmitt had argued that displacement of politics by everlasting conversation (‘ewiges Gespräch’) imperilled the Republic and demanded the sovereign reassertion of the political ‘unit’, Arendt countered, appealing once more to Faulkner, that never-ending conversation, the scene of continuous, everyday, plural encounter between speaking, acting, remembering beings, was the very tool for sustaining enduring political existence: How such guideposts for future reference and remembrance arise out of this incessant talk [aus diesem unaufhörlichen Gespräch], not, to be sure, as concepts but as single brief sentences and condensed aphorisms, may best be seen in the novels of William Faulkner. The content of Faulkner’s novels is often read and misread in political terms – but his singular handling of conversation is really ‘political.’58 In the months following the publication of Origins, as she engaged in intensive reading of classic works in the tradition of political theory, Arendt reflected further on the conception of ‘human being’, or ‘mankind’, that she had sought to conjure into existence there – ‘as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders of a common world’ – through her call to comprehension and the repudiation of oblivion.59 Staking out her distance from Augustine, she reiterated that memory, at least in its political form, cannot be located in consciousness. Bound up inextricably with plural speech, in its ceaseless movement of conveyance, memory may assure human beings of the measure of durability that they may aspire to qua humans: Memory and speech indicate the ‘position of the human being in the cosmos’ as a position of many human beings, indicate plurality, indicate the position of the human species as resting upon one another in appearance and disappearance. Therein lies also the conclusion that the plurality, in which all being encounters, only appears to have a meaning in the plurality of successive human generations, namely, the meaning of making it possible to persist on earth at least for the duration of the human species.60 Human meaning, Arendt asserts, appears in plurality and in time; never simply available to any self, no matter how reflective, it is only ever constituted in encounter and its ongoing altercations and negotiations. The task of political-historical representation qua remembrance that Arendt set herself in Origins, which seeks the cultivation of new political possibility in the face of its utter destruction, is part of this ‘cosmos’ too. The question provoked for Arendt by her analysis of totalitarianism was how, in

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its wake, to found a polity in such a way that it would be durable enough to endure in the face of the same threats to its existence out of which totalitarianism emerged – a durability that, she would conclude, could only ever be attained through rather than at the expense of politics, ensuring that it would only ever be contingent and fragile. The question of how nonetheless to manage to keep a common, political world in existence would preoccupy her throughout her career, continually returning her to the confrontation with Schmitt and his own series of answers to it. And this question, Arendt proposes time and again, is a question of the viability of political memory, of an active, restless memory capable of continually invoking the past into the present and re-enlivening it, making present encounters of past ones, to which it is possible to respond politically – to encounter others, even, when necessary, etwa als Freund oder Feind. The memory and speech in which The Origins of Totalitarianism participates ‘indicate’ that in a world shared with others, in which everything cannot be possible, human beings can still (re)found a durable common world, and organized political bodies, on the shifting but accommodating ground of all that they find themselves to have been given – if only they do not themselves obliterate the memory, and possibility, of encounter.

2 MIGRATION AND MOTIF The (Parapractic) Memories of an Image Thomas Elsaesser

The past has often been most present to the popular imagination through the single image. Even before the advent of photography in the middle of the nineteenth century, generations of rulers have known about the power of visual representation, when it comes to writing themselves into history, and generations of painters have obligingly risen to the task, by providing them with iconic portraits. If we know not only what Henry VIII looked like, but what he represented, it is thanks to Hans Holbein’s mural from 1537, which, even before it was destroyed by fire in 1698, had been reproduced – on the orders of the King himself – several thousand times, at home and abroad, circulating as the icon of Tudor might and power.1 But no century prior to the twentieth produced as many images that, in their contraction of complex events, in their condensation of multi-layered meanings, or merely in their seeming authenticity of the moment, absorb so much history into so much seemingly selfevident presence. We tend to call these images ‘collective memory’ and each one of us could easily list a dozen or so photographs – sometimes no less ‘staged and arranged’ than Holbein’s Henry – that ‘represent’ moments from our lifetime which are henceforth considered part of history. Germany’s admission of guilt for the crimes of World War II, for instance, now is Willy Brandt’s genuflection at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial in December 1970, a highly controversial signature moment of his Ostpolitik. The (first) Great American Depression is Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936) and the Vietnam War has entered memory as the photo of a naked girl, skin burning from napalm, now known by her name, Kim Phuc.2 Such publicly circulating images have helped make porous, or have altogether dissolved the boundaries once separating memory, as the sense of the past experienced by a living consciousness, from history, as the professionally legitimated and

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collectively negotiated version of that past. With so many of the historical events of the past 40 years experienced in more or less real-time on television, from the Vietnam War and the Challenger disaster to droughts and hunger in Ethiopia, from earthquakes in Turkey to the Mullah’s Islamic Revolution in Iran, from the Gulf Wars to Ground Zero, from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to the Indonesian tsunami, these acts of ‘spectatorial witnessing’ take place in the intimacy of one’s home and are simultaneously shared with millions of others. What in an earlier age would have been the privilege or predicament only of those present at a precise moment in time – and at the precise site of the event – now happens in a living room that doubles as a public realm. These very general and generally well-known observations may serve as a point of departure for examining the peculiar reality-status of certain public images, but they can also help us understand the force and impact of less public images, experienced as ‘authentic’ before they become iconic. The reality status of images in the force field of cultural memory can be compared with what Jean Baudrillard named the ‘simulacrum’ or ‘hyper-reality’.3 For reasons I hope will become clear, however, I see this status as often depending on a special kind of performativity, inherent in still and moving images, and especially in ‘stilled images’. Such images exceed the common distinction between fiction and documentary, without thereby constituting either a special ‘truth’ (like the much invoked and much-lamented photographic indexicality), or a new ontology of the real (Baudrillard’s ‘copy without the original’). If in these images, qualities of the indexical, the hyper-real, the virtual and the digital tend to blur and induce conceptual confusion, an equally potent (and for some, equally pernicious) confusion often attaches itself to the viewer’s subjectivity in the face of this performativity: it elicits a sense of ‘presence’ that is no longer defined by the trace of my physical ‘being there’ at the event depicted, or guaranteed by my reflexive self-presence (‘I was here and this happened’: the ‘having been there’ of Roland Barthes’ photographic tense).4 Rather, my awareness of self now includes the experience of ‘being here and being there’, where an awareness of self-presence derives from knowing myself, in the act of looking, in two places at once, and part of a large community, i.e. of being looked at in the act of looking (on). An example of this latter kind of ‘being there’ would be the experience of those who lined the streets of London to watch, or watched in public spaces, the funeral of Princess Diana, conscious of the presence of cameras, for whom they in turn were the onlookers that constituted the authenticity of the event. A ‘being there’ of a different, but complementary kind, where the place index replaces the time index, would be spectatorship in the aftermath of a major disaster, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘9/11’ or – for an older generation – the assassination of President Kennedy. There, the question asked is not ‘were you present’, but instead ‘where were you when …’.5 Presence, in other words, is no longer secured by markers of simultaneity in time and space, but by a separate index that implies a time- or space-shift in relation to an event: ‘where were you when …’ refers to a mode of presence that requires some form of ‘dis-placement’ and a meta-level awareness, hence one of my reasons

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for referring to it as ‘performative’. Without being either (forensic) witnesses or (participating) agents, our presence in this new kind of performed space – often called, somewhat lamely, mediaspace6 – is sufficient to confer ‘authenticity’ onto our experience, however mediated, while the ‘historicity’ of the occasion is constituted precisely by the mediated presence of so many other pairs of eyes, whose role exceeds that of either ‘viewer’ or ‘spectator’. A moment becomes ‘authentic’ and by extension, a ‘historic’ occasion, because multitudes lend their virtual presence to the event. A mutually confirming ‘loop of authentification’ ties together audience and event: yet authenticity thus redefined is no longer understood as the subjective truth of an experience, or the shared participation in an event, but instead emerges in the tension between self-presence (‘being there’) and performed presence (sharing the experience) generated by the circulation of the event’s media images, which make up the event’s status as cultural memory. I am raising these questions in part because of the extraordinary interest that the cinema has taken in narrativizing emblematic historical photographs or filmic images. Whether we think of Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991 – the Zapruder footage), of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998 – Robert Capa’s D-Day Landing photographs), of Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima/Flags of Our Fathers (2006 – around the (staged) Raising of the Star Spangled Banner) or Uli Edel’s Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (2008), it would seem that mainstream cinema has become, to a surprising degree, a prime cultural site, where the collective memory of mostly still images is reconstructed through narrative and refracted through a subject, while simultaneously ‘worked through’ or otherwise ‘processed’ by memory or trauma. If history survives thanks to its iconic images, taken by newsreel cameramen, agency photographers, or even at times, by amateurs, these images are not simply reproduced, inserted or re-staged: they become newly contextualized and charged with story and anecdote, and sometimes they are explicitly shown to be faked, forged, staged, or owed to accident and mistaken assumptions.7 Yet what for a historian would undermine their credibility (and thus their value as record and evidence), merely seems to increase their power to seduce, to capture our attention, radiating the fascination that lodge them in our minds. Why should this be so? Have we become more sceptical, fending off the flood of visual information by a perverse ‘faith in fakes’? Do these images behave like psychoanalytic symptoms of mourning, for which Freud advocated the coping strategies of ‘remembering, repetition, working through’? If visual overload produces deconstruction as our ‘protective shield’, then an iconic image’s repeated use points to a potential trauma: in either case, our idea of agency would have passed from the (collective) production of history to the (audio-visual) post-production of memory. Focusing on this ‘post-production of memory’, i.e. the active ‘work’ by which the cinema processes the media images of history, I want to mention a term first introduced by Pierre Nora in his Lieux de mémoire, but elaborated for film and memory studies by Alison Landsberg, when describing the renewed attention to popular memory and public commemoration in American culture from the 1980s onwards. Since the origins of this ‘transformation of remembrance’ in the US can be traced back to the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, while in Europe it has tended

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to focus on the Nazi destruction of the Jews, it is fitting that the term which Nora chose should be prosthetic memory.8 A useful definition of prosthetic memory is given by Landsberg in her introductory chapter: ‘Prosthetic memory theorizes the production and dissemination of memories that have no connections to a person’s lived past and yet are essential to [his/her…] subjectivity.’ They are ‘prosthetic’ because they are […] derived from engagement with a mediated experience (seeing a film, visiting a museum, watching a television mini-series). […] These memories, like an artificial limb, are actually worn on the body […]. [Secondly], prosthetic memories, like an artificial limb, often mark a trauma. Thirdly, calling them ‘prosthetic’ signals their interchangeability and exchangeability and underscores their commodified form. […] Finally, I call these memories prosthetic to underscore their usefulness. Because they feel real, they help condition how a person thinks about the world and might be instrumental in articulating an ethical relation to the other.9 Prosthetic memory, in other words, identifies new experiential, sensory and representational modes, made possible by photographic and electronic mass-media, but also by changes in museum policy and exhibition practices. Along with television and the cinema, these history-and-commemoration machines ‘have decisively changed the relationship between the individual and […] the archive of the collective memory of his culture’.10 Landsberg concedes that memories founded on simulations and re-enactments, i.e. what I have called ‘post-productions’, rather than direct confrontation and personal engagement, can have the effect of both alienating the individual from his/ her own experience and of giving succour to those who would want to rewrite the record, falsify the past or generally further some form of revisionism. On the other hand, she sees the possibility that such a sensory embodiment of the past, by allowing for direct imaginative and affective engagement in the life and pain of others, can also encourage collective identification and, in so doing, ‘produce empathy and social responsibility as well as political alliances that transcend race, class and gender’.11 One might object that this final thought is no more than a pious hope, for how to measure the increase in empathy, social responsibility and political alliance, following from a museum visit or watching a Spielberg film? Is prosthetic memory not just a new name for propaganda, the ability to ‘shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behaviour to achieve a response that furthers a desired intent’.12 Does prosthetic memory not merely extend the affective charge and emotional appeal of sounds and images, in an effort to involve the whole body, exploiting the matrix of ‘being here and being there’ that have become typical of media-generated modes of spectatorship? In the course of reviewing these difficult questions, in a book devoted to ‘Terror and Trauma’ I complicated the idea of prosthetic memory, which includes the new performativity of the public images just discussed, by suggesting the possibility that

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their performativity comes about through accident, coincidence or even ‘failure’. Once more borrowing a term from Freud, this time from the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, namely parapraxis, or Fehlleistung, I argued that to prosthetic memory one needs to add parapractic memory, in order to identify the peculiar symptom-formation of this specific ‘media-memory’. The post-production of memory – so my second thesis – often functions through the double conjuncture inherent in the word Fehlleistung: ‘the failure of performance’, but also the positive meaning of ‘the performance of failure’. The ‘Freudian slip’ would manifest itself not only verbally but also in images, making their use, context, provenance and epistemic status oscillate, while hinting at levels of deceptiveness and misprision, of retroactive revision and even misuse, which cannot find expression other than in the mode of parapraxis. In other words, these Freudian slippages, instead of being a defect, would signal important ‘truths’ about history-as-memory and memory-as-history not otherwise accessible to either individual consciousness, or to public culture and rational argument. Both types of performativity of memory – prosthetic and parapractic – would then have a special role when ‘processing’ or ‘working through’ historic events, insofar as they highlight the difficulties of ‘representing’ the past, not because of the traditional opposition between truth and fiction, but because both visual records and visual representations, as they come down to us, also transport the misalignment or lack of coordination between the sense of self (reflexivity and self-presence), of body (sensory perception, physical presence and motor-coordination) and of agency (the ability to act purposively on the basis of past experience). Parapractic memory, in short, recognizes a kind of constitutive non-synchronicity in our dealings with still, stilled or moving images when referring themselves to or signifying ‘history’. It is in this sense that parapractic memory would be a kind of corrective or necessary supplement to prosthetic memory, its reality check or friction-energy, built into the very fabric of media memory, preventing it from becoming propaganda, but also making it more effective than propaganda, because aligning it closer with the affective site of trauma. With the help of this concept of parapractic memory, I want to explore one of the particular challenges that the ‘archive’ in the twentieth century poses to the historian, thanks to this presence, proliferation and uncertain status of iconic photographs or fragments of film in collective memory and popular culture. This challenge is the ‘migration’ that occurs when such images are being reproduced a thousand-fold in different media and different contexts: does their migration drain them of meaning, or on the contrary, does each unexpected reappearance of their familiarity energize and charge them with added presence? Can attention to their special kinds of contiguity, their displacement and their misprision tell us something about the life of images in their cultural afterlife? Jean-Luc Godard is perhaps the filmmaker who, in his Histoire(s) du Cinéma, has pondered the question of image migration and iconic motif most deeply, preoccupied as he has always been with the different lives that cinematic images lead: independent of their creators and outside the films that give them a temporary narrative home. A culmination and celebration of 100 years of cinema to some, and to others, a four-and-a-half hour funeral oratorio for many voices, mourning the death of the

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seventh art, Histoire(s) du Cinéma is also an extended meditation on the many missed encounters of cinema with twentieth century political history, its anticipation of disasters, but also its sometimes naive and sometimes willful ignorance of realities at once over-colonized by discourse and under-represented by images. Godard’s vast archive, which is also an echo-chamber where the cinema holds an interminable dialogue with itself, and where each face or gesture seems to connect with every other face or gesture ever put on canvas or cast in bronze or stone, can also be read as a catalogue of gaps and omissions, of silences and wrong turns, as well as felicitous accidents and portentous coincidences – in short, Godard’s history of cinema is the history of significant failure – or ‘parapraxes’. Godard’s Histoire(s) seems to have recognized that what makes an image iconic, in the sense of being uniquely representative of a particular semantic category, is – besides its rhetorical power and resonance, its indexical register and enunciative force, its sheer beauty or terror – also a range of factors that almost point in the opposite direction, as it were: to contingency and circumstance, to retrospective causality and unintended consequences, in short: to the performativity I called parapractic. Rather than cite one of the instances that Godard uses from cinema history to demonstrate the dynamics of parapraxis, I want to cite an example from the history of ‘found footage’, in order to examine the disconcertingly as well as revealingly parapractic migration of a ‘stilled’ image. It concerns an image from the Dutch memory of the Holocaust. More even than the diary of Anne Frank, more than the paintings of Charlotte Salomon (both, of course, German by birth), it was the image of a young woman – het meisje, as she is usually referred to – that came to symbolize what the Germans had perpetrated on the Dutch Jews in The Netherlands when they arrested them, held them in the Westerbork transit camp (‘Durchgangslager’), and then transported them to Auschwitz, Sobibor or Ravensbrück, between 15 July 1942 and 13 September 1944. Taken from film footage shot in the transit camp, the single frame of the girl has been reproduced many times on book covers, in newspapers and on posters, so much so that it became, in the years between 1946 and 1992, almost as common an icon as the boy from the Warsaw ghetto.13 It is indeed an image to haunt the mind, never forgotten, and which the Dutch Jewish community, further more, was determined not to have forgotten. Pictured in the small opening of a cattle truck, just before the door is shut and bolted, the iconic significance of the girl’s image partly rested on the fact that she is nameless. Like the unknown soldier whom many nations honour with an eternal flame, het meisje is the single embodiment of the terrible wrong that had been done to millions, looking us directly in the eye, asking us to take note, to remember her, but also to take responsibility that this can never happen again. Nevertheless the image poses several questions: not only whether a single image or frame can or should stand for an event, as photographs of war and disaster so often have in the twentieth century, like the vulture sitting behind a skeletal boy in Ethiopia which led to the 1984 Band-Aid concert, or the emaciated man behind barbed wire in Bosnia which finally persuaded the Clinton administration to bomb Belgrade, but which later proved to be a fake.14 The image’s iconicity also raises doubts whether quite generally, the one can stand for the many,

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Het Mesje (Anna Maria [Settela] Steinbach in a train from Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz), photograph. Credit: Chronos. Courtesy Yad Vashem Photoarchive, Jerusalem.

whether one human being can or should give up his or her individuality, identity and singular history to become such a symbol. The issue, however, on which I wish to focus concerns the migration of the motif of het meisje, in its parapractic complications. Several other trajectories attach themselves to her image, the first of which begins in 1954, with Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog [Nuit et brouillard] and continues in a feature film of 1959, is revived in a documentary of 1992, and once more enacted in a meta-documentary essay film from 2007. About five minutes into Night and Fog Resnais utilizes the Westerbork footage, without specifically indicating its provenance. He also edits the images – of the gathering of deportees, their being loaded into the box-cars, the shutting of the doors, the loitering SS men and the commandant with his dog, and finally the departing train – into a sequence of almost unbearably relentless logic, documenting the steps and measures taken in preparing the annihilation and systematic destruction of so many human beings. At the culmination point of Resnais’ sequence, underscored by Hans Eisler’s music, there is the girl, looking at us, now embedded in the swift and repeated action of the men shutting the wagon-doors, her face the last and only face we see of the many hundreds deported that day, the poignancy heightened by the number ‘74 Pers’ chalked on the wall of the car, just before we see her face – inexorably forcing us to imagine the other 73 human beings cooped up in this cramped space.

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The Westerbork sequence is one of the most famous among the filmed material that the Germans took of their brutal campaign to implement the infamous ‘final solution’, and it has been used, in exactly the manner edited by Resnais, in countless compilation films, in commemorative television programmes and on other occasions when 50 seconds are about all a programme maker can afford in order to tell the story of the trains to Auschwitz and the deportations. As recently as December 2008, in another of those publishing scandals, when a Holocaust memoir of a touching love-story across barbed wire was ‘outed’ as a fake a mere two weeks before it was to be published, the television news report on ‘Angel at the Fence’ once more showed the (unidentified) images from the Westerbork footage, in order to contrast the fake memoir with the ‘real’ evidence of Auschwitz. Such is the visual immediacy of the Westerbork images that we imagine ourselves present, and cannot but wonder: who took these images and why? Before turning to a possible answer, I want to follow a further pathway leading from het meisje via Resnais to another filmmaker, the East German director Konrad Wolf, and his 1959 film Sterne [Stars]. As one of the very first German feature films to deal with the deportations, the transit camps and the trains to Auschwitz, Sterne has often been regarded as something like the ‘good conscience’ of DEFA in the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Germany’s coming to terms with the past). The film was a German-Bulgarian co-production, whose plot depicts a German corporal who, embittered and disillusioned with the war, is posted in 1943 to a small Bulgarian town to oversee a motor vehicle repair shop. When a transport of Sephardic Jews from Greece is housed temporarily in the town’s school, he comes into contact with a Jewish girl, who entreats him to find medical help for a pregnant woman. Initially indifferent, he refuses, yet he is so affected by her allegation that all Germans are wolves that he eventually does agree to provide a doctor and some medicines for her. A sense of attachment and burgeoning love ensues between them, which leads slowly to his changing sides. However, when the corporal finally decides to find a hiding place for the young woman and thereby rescue her from certain death in Auschwitz, his help arrives too late: the deportation of the Jews by train has already occurred. He can only watch as the last carriages disappear into the night and the woman stares out of the barred-up window. In a short closing sequence we see the corporal offering his services to a Bulgarian partisan leader as a contact person for weapons deliveries. If one turns to the visuals of the film, one is struck by the many images that convey a sense of déjà vu. This begins with the women and children being loaded into railway trucks at the start of the film, and continues through the shots of the detainees at the barbed wire, to the emotionally and thematically central image of Ruth, the Jewish woman, clinging to the bars of the truck window after the transport train has left the station. Here, factual material from the history of Balkan Jews – in particular, the deportation of Greek Jews through Bulgaria – blends and is overlaid with the iconographic material from another history, that of the Westerbork transit camp,15 which, however, came to Wolf via his central iconographic source for Sterne, namely

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Resnais’s Night and Fog. The film made a lasting impression on Wolf, as the director explained in an interview he gave in 1964.16 The image of barbed wire, for example, which runs as a leitmotif through Stars can also be found in Resnais’ film, whose filmed sequences of emaciated prisoners, of course, were taken from the material shot by British and American troops, when liberating the camps of Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Dachau, Falkenau and others on German soil, rather than from Auschwitz or Sobibor. The most substantial borrowing from Night and Fog is the motif of the transport of the Jews from the transit camps to Auschwitz. Like the more recent examples I gave earlier, of films re-staging the cultural memory of a particular photograph (Saving Private Ryan, Flags of Our Fathers) Wolf ’s film seems conceived around this Westerbork sequence from Night and Fog. One might even say that the film tries to work through the overwhelming if not traumatizing force that these images have in Resnais’s film, trying to ‘tame’ them by turning them into narrative and attaching to them a story. Or to put it slightly differently: it is as if Wolf and his screenwriter had asked themselves exactly those questions with which I left the Westerbork footage: who made these images, and what would it have meant to be present at such a transport and take these images as documents? What subjectivity can attach itself to such a gaze? And the narrative of Sterne – which elsewhere I have analysed as the parapraxis of an impossible rescue-mission,17 doomed in retrospective memory as a fiction because it could not have taken place in historical fact – finally pivots around one image: that of the loved one, clinging to the iron bars of the cattle truck that takes her away, which can, of course, be read as the narrative image of het meisje, now given not just a face, but a name and a ‘story’. Thus, when one compares Wolf ’s central thematic motif – the Jewish woman left at the window of the box car and abandoned by her German lover – with the icon of the Holocaust from Resnais’s film, one is struck not only by the similarities, but also by the differences: in the case of Resnais, as indicated, she is the anonymous victim who represents millions; in Wolf, the personalized angel of mercy, whose altruistic love and willingness to sacrifice herself eventually call the man to moral duty and to a political decision. The highly melodramatic charge of this image in Wolf ’s film relates in a particularly instructive manner to a discovery which was only made in 1992, namely that this Dutch icon of the Holocaust also has a name and in fact does not depict a Jewish victim. For this discovery, we have to go back to the original Westerbork footage, and turn to the historians to tell us more about its author, its purpose and provenance.18 The Westerbork footage was commissioned by the German Camp Commander Albert Konrad Gemmeker, who conceived the idea early in 1944, with the aim of sending the finished film to Berlin as documentary evidence of his orderly and efficient approach to camp discipline and transportation, reputedly so that he would not be relieved of his post and sent to duty in one of the extermination camps in the East.19 After the war, Gemmeker was tried and sentenced to ten years. He received a relatively lighter sentence because of extenuating circumstances, namely that he had

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never beaten inmates, was not corrupt, and ‘in general he had treated Jews decently during their stay in the camp’. Others, mostly former inmates, said that he should be hanged, preferably with a silk rope, in recognition of the fact that he thought of himself as an officer and a gentleman. In March 1944, Gemmeker instructed Heinz Todtmann, a baptised Jew and righthand man of the Commandant, to write a treatment for this documentary. After approving the script and ordering raw film stock from Agfa in Arnhem, Gemmeker asked Rudolf Breslauer to film the activities of the camp, which he did between March and May 1944. Rudolf Breslauer was born in Munich in 1904, studied at the Munich Academy of Photography and then worked in the printing company of his grandfather. In 1935 he fled to The Netherlands with his wife Bella Weissmann, two sons and a daughter. He worked in print shops in Leiden and Utrecht until in early 1942 he and his family were picked up and sent to Westerbork. As a professional photographer, he worked in the camp, like hundreds of other Jewish prisoners who staffed dental offices and the hospital, ran a kindergarten and gym-classes, did kitchen duty and organized cabaret evenings. Along with the camp police, the Fliegende Kolonnen, and those who acted as camp elders, the Ordnungsdienst, all the trained professionals were Jews. They tried to make themselves useful as long as possible in order to remain in the camp and be spared transportation. Before being asked to shoot the footage of the transport, Breslauer had mainly been taking ID-photos of the inmates for the camp administration. It is not clear, whether Gemmeker ever sent his film to Berlin, but it seems that some editing of the filmed material did take place, however, not by Breslauer himself, but by another inmate, Ezard (‘Wim’) Loeb. This was because Breslauer, along with his family, was one of the last transports from Westerbork to Auschwitz, where he, his wife and two sons were murdered on 24 October 1944. Only his daughter Ursula survived.20 The transport filmed in Westerbork, which Resnais spliced into his film and which Wolf transformed into the symbol of a futile rescue attempt, was only one of the many scenes and sequences captured before the camera by Breslauer. The vast majority of the almost two hours of material depicts other camp activities, from everyday chores like ironing and dental treatments, to outdoors gymnastics, a football match and scenes from the evening dance and comedy revues. These images have rarely been shown – a fact that inspired Harun Farocki in 2007 to render homage to them in Respite/Aufschub, a montage of 40 minutes of Breslauer’s film work, presented silently, but with intertitles pointing out salient aspects of the material. When editing the footage Resnais, as Sylvie Lindeperg has also indicated, added two striking shots of an old man with three small children, which belongs to film material shot in Poland rather than in Westerbork.21 However, the shots following the scene with the old man – a barrow with large wheels carting a sick woman to the loading ramp, was to prove vital for another aspect of the migration of the motif, this time undertaken by the journalist Aad Wagenaar, who took it upon himself in 1992 to see if he could not identify het meisje, whom he initially called ‘Esther’. He in turn was helped by two experts at the Dutch National Centre for Information (the

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Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst, RVD), who began piecing together the written documents and collating them with the visual material, running the extensive paper trail kept by the Camp Administration parallel with the image track of the Breslauer footage, so to speak, in order to synchronize the two.22 In the Westerbork case, the breakthrough turned out to be the suitcase briefly visible on the barrow of the sick woman. Using their forensically trained image recognition skills, the experts managed to identify the name of the woman and her date of birth, which led them to the date of her transportation, 19 May 1944. It gave them not only the exact day on which Breslauer must have shot this part of the film, but also the list of the other deportees of that date. In the meantime, however, Loeb, who first edited the footage and who had survived the camp, expressed his doubts when interviewed by Wagenaar, about whether het meisje was part of the same convoy, since to him she did not look like anybody he had ever seen in the camp, with her head-scarf and very different facial features than the rest who, as Loeb put it, were mostly middle-class Dutch Jews, well-dressed and in no way different from the rest of the Dutch population. Had somebody – even before Resnais – spliced het meisje into the transport footage for added emphasis and pathos? Armed with the date of the transport and the camp administration papers, Wagenaar was able to ascertain that on Friday 16 May there had been a raid throughout the Netherlands, rounding up all the Sinti and Roma on Dutch soil, men women and children, with orders to bring them to Westerbork. They stayed there for only two nights, not long enough to make it into the camp’s registration books, before they were sent to Auschwitz the following Tuesday. Since the Sinti all had their heads shaven as a preventive measure against lice, the improvised headscarf of het meisje thus made it plausible that she was indeed a Sinti. But the researchers at the RVD had noticed another anomaly about the transport. All the boxcars had horizontal planks, except the one with ‘74 pers’ and the face of het meisje, which had vertical planks. Again: inserted footage, and a different train, maybe not just from a different time but even from a different location? The researchers ran the train, or rather the film strip, back and forth, back and forth, comparing chalk markings and planks, counting the wagons, until they were sure that the wagon with 74 pers – which now that the train was moving, had actually been amended to read 75 pers – was no. 15 and was the only one with vertical planks. So het meisje did indeed belong to this transport of 19 May, and Aad Wagenaar was a step further in identifying her. By interviewing one of the Sinti survivors, Crasa Wagner at a trailer camp in Spijkenisse, he was able to conclude that het meisje must have belonged to the Steinbach family, and that her name was Settela: ‘Anna Maria (Settela) Steinbach, to give her her full name, was born the 23rd December 1934 in Buchten near Born in southern Limburg as the daughter of a trader and violinist. On 19th May she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau along with 244 other Roma, on a train that also contained carriages with Jewish prisoners. As the doors of the goods truck in which she would be transported were closed, she briefly glanced outside, at a dog running past. This image was captured by Rudolf Breslauer.’23 Thus a long chain of automatic assumptions, mistakes and surmises, manipulations, narrative strategies, and symbolizations taken out of context – in

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short, performative parapraxes – leads nevertheless to an important discovery and a momentous recognition: one train may hide another, or inside one transport there may be a further transport, one licence in editing may be countered by an unexpected continuity through discontinuity and a new contiguity, so that one genocide may conceal another, only then to reveal the known one in a new form, as one image’s iconic force may obscure another reality’s claim to our closer attention. To reclaim the truth of the suffering of the European Sinti and Romani is not to make it ‘compete’ with that of the European Jews, however much the discovery of Settela’s identity at first upset the sensibilities of Dutch Jewry. On the contrary, it is the very force of the images of the Jewish Holocaust, and the work of memory subsequent generations of survivors and descendants have devoted to it, which should make us not only sensitive to genocide elsewhere and in our own time. Settela’s story testifies to the power of the stilled image taken from its filmic context, which in its sequence of images, its cuts and spaces, carries a time-index, as do Dorothea Lange’s contact sheets, discarded or retouched in order for an image to become iconic.24 Once reinserted into the discursive space of written documents, with their own sequence and consequence, this time index of the contacts sheet or the filmed archive footage can preserve a truth or reveal a meaning not available to the single image, however powerful and striking it might be. The new identity of the face of het meisje may have deconstructed the mythic force of the image, but in a sense it has restored another truth to this image, indeed, intensified its resonance as a symbol. Now when we see the image of ‘the girl’, we can think of Jews and Roma, we can think of history and its obliteration, we can remember the one and the many, and we can work on a common European history, hopefully with renewed confidence in what the cinema may still be able to tell us. Its images, as Godard also realized so poignantly, do not simply come to a standstill at some point in time, or merely turn in the round on a reel, a tape or a disk – rather, they move among us, they migrate with us: they accompany us, and sometimes they even overtake us. After the ambiguous account sketched at the beginning about the prospect of photographs and films usurping not only our private memories, but impoverishing or even amputating what was once considered the task of history, leaving us to the mercy of prosthetic memory, one can take some comfort in the idea of a parapractic (media) memory: it seems to offer a chance of redemption or restitution to the extent that it helps us work at media memory’s own unconscious, as it were, work with it, and work through it, so that one truth may not only cover another but also be recovered by another. A train can indeed hide another, as one image hides another, but alerted to the performative parapraxes each carries with it, the cinema – and with it, our vast visual heritage – need not be the train that runs us over. Acknowledgement A German translation of this text has already been published as ‘Migration und Motiv: die parapraktische Erinnerung an ein Bild’, in Peter Geimer, Michael Hagner (eds), Nachleben und Rekonstruktion: Vergangenheit im Bild (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2012), pp. 159–76.

3 THE TWO STAGES OF THE EICHMANN TRIAL Sylvie Lindeperg and Annette Wieviorka

The Eichmann trial was the first major account of the Holocaust of transnational scope to establish the genocide of the Jews as a distinct event in World War II.1 It combined a number of unprecedented aspects. It was the first time a trial set out to offer a lesson in history; the first time education and transmission appeared as themes; and the first time a historian – Salo Baron, then a professor at Columbia University – was called to the witness stand to provide the historical framework of a trial that also marked the ‘advent of the witness’.2 But another first has by and large escaped historians’ notice. This was the first time a trial had been filmed in video in its entirety with the aim of supplying images to televisions all over the world.3 The examination of this recording and how it was broadcast allows us to see the event in a new perspective, perfect our knowledge of it and grasp its nature as accurately as possible. The ironic thing is that Israel did not yet have television in 1961. In countries where TV did exist, it was unevenly distributed and coverage of events in foreign countries was scanty. The complete recording of the trial and notably the broadcasting of the film represented an impressive technical achievement. Yet this achievement was passed over in silence as it was thought that bringing it to the public’s attention would be harmful to the commercial interests of the firms that supplied the technical means. Ampex, the company that invented the tape recorder and later the videotape recorder that was used to record the images of the trial, did not want its involvement publicized. Even today, the chronology on the firm’s internet site does not include the fact that Ampex equipment was used to videotape the Eichmann trial.4 In this chapter we shall examine how the idea of filming the trial was conceived, how the event was filmed and by whom, and to what extent the filming influenced the way the trial was understood and perceived.

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How Fruchtman hit upon the idea In the autumn of 1959 Milton Fruchtman, a producer then in his thirties, was in Munich to take charge of a programme for an American television station. After work one day his cameraman invited him to come along to a large brasserie, the Hofbrauhaus. That evening Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) was being screened and the place was packed. Fruchtman was stunned to see the thousand people gathered in the bar watching the film break into shouts of ‘Heil Hitler!’ during the Führer’s speech. The next day the same cameraman took him to a fencing club. There he saw 16 photos of Hitler and other Nazi leaders hung on the walls. As members entered the sports club they would click their heels and give the Nazi salute in the direction of the portrait of Hitler. Fruchtman decided he wanted to let the public know about the strong residue of the Nazi movement and national-socialist ideology that persisted in the Bavarian capital. But no American television channel was interested in his film project. As one of the programme managers told him, ‘The war is over’. On 23 May 1960, Fruchtman heard Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announce before the Knesset, ‘A short time ago the security services apprehended one of the most infamous Nazi criminals, Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible, together with the Nazi leadership, for what they called the “final solution to the Jewish question” – in other words, the extermination of six million of Europe’s Jews’. Eichmann was already in Israel and would soon be brought to trial ‘under the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950’. Fruchtman immediately decided to go to Israel. He had once directed the shooting of a biography of Ben-Gurion for NBC, and now he recalled that BenGurion had thanked him and invited him to visit him the next time he was in the country. Fruchtman had not given up his idea of a report on neo-Nazis; he thought that thanks to the wide media coverage Eichmann’s capture would provoke, his project would have a chance of succeeding if he obtained permission to use footage from the upcoming trial. But once in Israel, the producer learned that no filming of any kind had been envisaged. Negotiations Ben-Gurion was in fact hostile to the presence of cameras and lighting, which he believed could disturb the trial and turn the courtroom into a movie set.5 A great deal was at stake; he wanted the Eichmann trial to become a seriously prepared, welldocumented and widely covered Nuremberg of the Jewish people. But the role the filmed image might play in this media coverage did not seem crucial to him. In Israel the announcement of Eichmann’s capture and his transfer had the effect of a bomb. Journalist Tom Segev wrote: ‘It is hard to remember any other instance of emotion and shock like the one that hit us this week’, one of the newspapers said. The key word in all that was

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said and written in those days was ‘we’; the Israelis had not known, since the Declaration of Independence, so deep a sense of national unity.6 Historian Hanna Yablonka described the euphoria that took hold of the population. Day after day the Israeli press published articles about Eichmann’s role, reactions to the kidnapping and the future trial, letters from readers, and interviews with survivors. In her opinion no event since the Sinai Campaign in 1956 had stirred Israelis so strongly. They were now citizens of a sovereign nation that was the master of its own destiny and could do justice to past and future victims.7 The publicity generated by the event all over the world was also considerable. The press devoted long articles to the Final Solution in general and to the figure of Eichmann in particular. Many books were published and translated into a host of languages.8 Films and telefilms were shot in Germany and the United States.9 In short, Eichmann’s arrest was widely relayed in the written press and television – but it had been neither anticipated nor prepared by the media.10 Fruchtman read everything he could get hold of about Eichmann and his role in the Final Solution. It was then that he hit upon the idea of filming the trial using the latest technology. Television was just starting to reap the benefits of the Ampex Corporation’s inventions. Founded in California in 1944, Ampex had manufactured the first tape recorders; later it became interested in recording images. In 1956 its first videotape recorder was developed. The six inventors who developed it were honoured for their achievement with the first award ever given by the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.11 On 24 July 1959, Nixon and Khrushchev debated the merits of their respective countries’ political systems in a kitchen recreated for the American National Exhibition at the Moscow Trade Fair. The debate was captured on an Ampex videotape recorder. Two days later the ‘Kitchen Debate’ would delight American television viewers.12 Fruchtman, then the number two executive producer with the New York-based Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation, went to the directors of the major networks and proposed creating a pool that would film the trial using Marconi video cameras and record the images on an Ampex videotape recorder.13 These technical systems would obviate the drawbacks of conventional filming – namely, the presence of cameras in the courtroom and harsh lighting – but above all, they would change the ultimate purpose of the recording by making television broadcasting and coverage of the trial possible. Yet no one responded to his request. When the European union of television companies met in Madrid, the professionals to whom he set out his project were equally unenthusiastic. Finally the German television stations, in particular the Hamburg-based Norddeutscher Rundfunk, stated that they were interested. On the strength of this first expression of support – and after making sure he would be able to avail himself of the services of the Ampex Corporation in Redwood City and those of Marconi in Chelmsford, England, where the video cameras were manufactured and perfected – Fruchtman returned to Jerusalem. For Ben-Gurion and the Israeli government, a number of issues were at stake. Thirteen years after the creation of the state, there was a need to consolidate a

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national identity that was threatened by the heterogeneity of the population: in addition to the generation of Sabras – young people born in Israel who had not known life in the Diaspora – there was a growing community of Jews from the Mediterranean basin. The trial was an opportunity to produce an account of the catastrophe for those who had not lived through it. It was a matter of showing that the State of Israel represented the interests of all Jews. But the trial had an international scope as well: to emphasize the Jews’ great solitude during the war, and perhaps to put the world to shame, ‘recalling to world-wide public opinion’, as BenGurion wrote, ‘whose followers are those who are planning the destruction of Israel, and whose accomplices they are, consciously or not’.14 The trial, therefore, had to be given extensive mass media coverage. Preparations for the trial got under way. The prosecutors and judges were chosen, documents gathered and witnesses selected; the investigation of the defendant by Avner Less was tape-recorded and legal questions were examined.15 At the same time, the elements required for wide media coverage were being put in place. Teddy Kollek, the director of the prime minister’s office, played a key role in preparing for the media attention. The choice of venue was the first element. The trial could only be held in Jerusalem, the city that symbolized the State of Israel. Beit Ha’am (House of the People), a theatre and community centre, was under construction at the time, and the mayor, Mordechai Ish-Shalom, promised to have it completed in time for the trial. The centre’s auditorium, which had a capacity of 750 people, would be turned into a courtroom. A joint ministerial committee was set up; it was chaired by David Landor, the director of the government press office, whose task included informing the Attorney General of everything that concerned what we now call communication. A second committee, which Landor and Kollek also sat on, was in charge of assigning seats. A handful was reserved for diplomats (45 seats on the mezzanine), representatives of the Justice Ministry, well-known survivors such as Simon Wiesenthal, representatives of organizations or research centres like the Wiener Library in London and the Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris, and personalities such as the widow of the first president of Israel, Vera Weizmann, the wife of chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner, and Foreign Minister Golda Meir. The vast majority of the seats in the orchestra – 450 in all – were reserved for members of the Israeli and foreign press, who were also allotted an additional 25 seats on the mezzanine. For, just as in Nuremberg, this trial was a must that the cream of journalism along with a number of intellectuals wished to attend. There were those, like Joseph Kessel, who had already covered the International Military Tribunal,16 and those, like Hannah Arendt, who had missed it. As she explained in a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation, she felt she simply had to cover this trial; she had been unable to attend the Nuremberg trial and had never seen those people in flesh and blood; and this was probably her last chance to do so.17 To provide facilities for the host of journalists who had flocked to Jerusalem from all over the world a press room was set up in the basement, complete with teletypes, telephones and closed-circuit television. Every day mimeographed copies of the minutes of the

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proceedings were distributed to them in four languages, Hebrew, German, English and French, together with a ten- or 12-page summary in Yiddish.18 The national radio, the Voice of Israel, was able to record the proceedings in their entirety. In this organization the filming had a special place. To our knowledge no camera had ever entered an Israeli courtroom. The question of filming a trial had never even come up. There was, therefore, neither precedent nor jurisprudence. It is true that Israel was not to install a television network until after the Six-Day War in June 1967. The importance of the filmed image as a vehicle of propaganda or information seems not to have been clearly perceived. The major media were the written press and the radio. Yet Fruchtman managed to convince the Israelis to have the trial filmed. On 8 November 1960, the government and the State of Israel signed an agreement with Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation that included a short preamble. It stipulated that the trial was an event of worldwide interest; it was highly desirable that all the proceedings be broadcast as extensively as possible by all available media. Capital Cities was an American radio and television company and could provide the means of recording the sound and images on tapes; the government would give Capital Cities exclusivity provided it did not make a profit on the broadcasting operation; any profits were to be turned over to a charity or other organization designated by the Israeli government.19 The agreement went on to stipulate that filming rights would not be granted to any other authority, not even the Israeli government. It was also agreed that three months after being notified of the date of the start of the trial, Capital Cities would transport the filming equipment to Jerusalem and take charge of installing it; it would bring a qualified team to Israel and Milton Fruchman would be authorized to make all the decisions on site in Israel. The company would make the video recordings available all over the world on a fair basis to television networks and distributor groups that requested them. The agreement was valid for four months. Should the judicial proceedings last longer than that, Capital Cities could ask to be replaced for the end of the trial if it did not wish to pursue the recordings. The last measures concerned the material. The agreement stipulated that Capital Cities must provide the Israeli government with a copy of all the material supplied to the networks and that, owing to the historic significance of the trial, the company was not allowed to destroy the body of the material for the 90 days following the conclusion of the trial without the government’s written permission. This last measure shows that neither the production company nor the State of Israel was in the least bit preoccupied with the idea of building up film archives of the trial. The contract with Capital Cities was signed by the government, but it fell to the judges alone to authorize the filming. This they duly did on 10 March 1961, by a decision that they justified. No, the filming would not disturb the trial.20 They had inspected the premises and were satisfied that the cameras could be neither seen nor heard. But did that necessarily mean that the filming was useful? The judges recalled first of all that under Israeli law all judicial proceedings, both civil and penal, are public, and that justice is done in full view of all. They cited Bentham on the subject:

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‘Where there is no publicity there is no justice.’ Publicizing what happens before the Court was simply extending its scope. It was not desirable to set any limits on publicity. The present trial was arousing immense interest in Israel and all over the world. Besides, audio or video recording of court proceedings is more faithful than the written word. The judges, then, raised no objections to filming the trial. On the contrary, they felt that it was in the interest of justice. Nearly half a century later, when the power of images, their unfaithfulness to reality, and the recording of judicial proceedings on film are topics that are heatedly debated and carefully analysed, the judges’ thinking seems somewhat naive. As French legal scholar Antoine Garapon writes, ‘The traditional conception of publicity was well suited to the fragility of the glance, the evanescence of visual memory. Technology gives this publicity disturbing power; henceforth the traces of events remain eternal and indelible.’21 Another task remained for the judges: to respond to the objections of Dr Servatius, the counsel for the defence. Servatius was bitterly opposed to allowing cameras into the courtroom. He claimed that filming could influence the witnesses, who would alter their testimonies either out of fear of being seen on television or because they would have the feeling of performing in front of an international audience; moreover, television programmes could distort the view of the trial, by omitting the defence’s arguments for example. To his objections the judges replied that the risk of false evidence exists with or without television and that a witness can also be overly theatrical in front of the court, the press and the audience. The judges deemed the risk of distortion a much more serious matter – but that risk was not restricted to the defence, it existed in like manner for the prosecution and the court, especially since the court had no means of taking civil or penal action against what was broadcast in the foreign media. Yet there too the dangers were the same as for the written press. Nevertheless, the court reserved the right to react in the event of serious distortion by withdrawing the permission to film. Thus about one month before the trial began arrangements were made for wide media coverage, in which television held a special place, as it was doubly beyond the Israelis’ reach – in terms of both recording and broadcasting. In February 1961, the task of carrying out this unique operation – shooting in the courtroom for months on end, seven hours a day, five days a week – was officially entrusted to Leo Hurwitz.22 II Hurwitz in Jerusalem From ultra-left films to televised news When the American filmmaker Leo Hurwitz learned about the negotiations under way with the State of Israel, he contacted Milton Fruchtman and offered his services. Hurwitz, a Brooklyn native, was the son of East European Jewish immigrants. A Harvard graduate, he had been one of the leading members of three successive groups of radical leftist American documentary filmmakers: the Workers’ Film and Photo League (1930–35), Nykino (1935–37), and Frontier Film,23 which he had

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founded in 1936 together with Paul Strand, a photographer and filmmaker. Frontier Film was an independent company that operated as a cooperative. Among the films it produced were Heart of Spain (edited by Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand – the latter also did the scripting of the film – from shots filmed by Geza Karpathi and Herbert Kline, who had followed Dr Norman Bethune’s team around Spain), People of the Cumberland, China Strikes Back and Native Land.24 Co-directed by Hurwitz and Strand after a long period of preparation, Native Land was a very innovative ‘documentary’ film that combined newsreels with re-enacted scenes. It fulfilled Frontier Film’s vocation of promoting films that blended radical content with radical form. It dealt with the struggle for civil and social rights in the United States while touching on the subject of racism against Black Americans. Racial bias was also the subject of Hurwitz’s first post-war film, Strange Victory, released in 1948.25 The connection with World War II and the focus on Nazism were even more marked in The Museum and the Fury, a documentary about the state museum at Auschwitz that Hurwitz directed in 1956 for Film Polski. It is this strange film, a long meditation on art and barbarity, that he showed Milton Fruchtman to convince him that he was the right man for the job. However, the decisive trump card in Hurwitz’s hand was his experience in television. In 1944 Hurwitz had started working for CBS as a director; with the fascination of the pioneer he had discovered this ‘extremely primitive and complex’26 new medium, for which almost everything remained to be invented. In 1946 he became the head of news and special events at CBS. As he acquired experience with live filming, he measured the differences between directing a film and directing a TV programme: ‘[on television] you can’t hold the film in your hand, you can’t try out little things to test an immediate response. You’ve got to put that show on the air. You have to edit it, direct it while on the air.’27 To form his crew, Hurwitz called on radio professionals and film projectionists and trained them in television techniques. It was not only a matter of individual training but of training them to work in perfect symbiosis with the knowledge of each other’s tasks and the understanding of the specific nature of the televised event.28 When in 1947 Hurwitz took leave from CBS to devote himself to the editing of Strange Victory, he thought he would return to his job as soon as the film was completed. But this was reckoning without McCarthyism. Denounced as a Communist, he fell victim to blacklisting and was not rehired. Thus began a long period in the wilderness for Hurwitz, from which he had not really emerged when he met Fruchtman, who agreed to entrust him with the recording of the trial.29 For Fruchtman, Hurwitz embodied the ‘ideal combination’30 for resolving the specific problems of the filming in Jerusalem. Aside from his availability and the acute awareness of Nazism he had demonstrated in his artistic work, which meant that as a director he would be ‘passionately implicated’ in the filming of the trial,31 his background in television would enable him to rapidly train Israeli cameramen who would be recruited on site and to assemble an effective, coherent crew by incorporating technicians of different nationalities,32 profiles and horizons.

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Hurwitz’s contract was signed in February 1961. On 2 March he was on a flight out of New York bound for Lod airport. At the age of 51, he was making his first trip abroad. During the flight, in that muffled state of disorientation typical of air travel, he began to think about his task as a director, mulling over philosophical ideas and the historic meaning of the future trial, but also dwelling on several images and reference points pertaining to the camera’s place in the courtroom. Hurwitz was familiar with the footage of the Nuremberg trials, excerpts of which he had edited into Strange Victory and The Museum. He had in fact had some courtroom experience himself in the distant past.33 In March 1933, at the request of the American Communist Party’s International Labor Defense, he had filmed the second trial of the Scottsboro Boys, nine teenagers falsely accused of raping two white girls in an Alabama train in March 1931.34 In that Decatur, Alabama, courtroom Hurwitz had shot using just one very noisy camera with very limited mobility. The technical resources video offered gave him hope for more elaborate ‘stage direction’ work when it came time to cover the Eichmann trial. It was this imaginary exercise that he engaged in during the flight to Tel Aviv: in the excitement of beginnings, lacking any concrete information about the configuration of the courtroom, the judges’ requirements or the projectionists’ skill, Hurwitz pictured a series of positions for his cameras that would give them maximal potentiality so as to penetrate as accurately as possible the spirit and ‘meaning’ of the trial.35 On his arrival in Jerusalem, however, Hurwitz came back down to earth: ‘the neat desirable plans I had had in my head, on the plane, were quickly consigned to the bin for wishful thoughts’.36 Once he had settled in at the Reich guesthouse in Jerusalem,37 he became aware of the restrictions imposed on the filming of the hearings and the obstacles posed to his preparatory work. The judges demanded that the cameras be invisible from the courtroom; the time allowed for training his crew would be limited due to delays in the construction and fitting out of the courtroom. From 5 March to 10 April Hurwitz worked relentlessly to find solutions. For Milton Fruchtman and myself, it was the rough matter of making do with the rules set by the court, the existing spaces and walls of Beit Ha’am, the press of time; making use of whatever was to hand, and pushing it as far as we could beyond the restrictions imposed … And yet, those wishful thoughts in the plane somehow served as the driving motor to the whole experience.38 Preparations The stages of the preparation for filming can be reconstructed thanks to Hurwitz’s working notes and the letters he sent his wife Jane and son Tom from Jerusalem. By 5 March the director was already on site. First he visited the control room, which had been set up on an upper floor of a bank building across the street from Beit Ha’am. A cable had to be stretched between the two buildings to connect the four cameras to the control room monitors and the recording equipment. Hurwitz spent most of his time at Beit Ha’am picking out new spots where he could position the first two cameras, which initially had been installed in such

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a way as to impose absolute immobility. ‘I came in time’, he told Jane.39 The first place he chose was in back of the glass cage: concealed behind a false wall, camera one (which he called the witness camera) would shoot through a screened opening running lengthwise along the wall. The camera was placed on wheels so that it could be moved over a span of more than six feet. This meant that not only could it film the witnesses from the front, it could also record Eichmann either in profile or from behind with the judges in the background, film the members of the defence and prosecution, and shoot views of the audience and of the witnesses as they walked from the orchestra to the stage (3.1 and 3.2).

Images 3.1–3.14 from video recording of the Trial of Adolf Eichmann reproduced with permission from Israeli Government Archives and the Estate of L. Hurwitz A second camera was set up in a recess high up on the opposite wall and likewise concealed behind a wire screen. Camera two was in Eichmann’s axis and could take slightly high-angle shots of him; it also would film the members of the prosecution and defence and, in a more difficult axis, the judges’ table (3.3 and 3.4).

After the first cameras were installed there began a round of visits to the court, the defence, the police and the press. At this point Hurwitz confided to his

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wife that he hoped to be allowed to place two other cameras in full sight, at the back of the auditorium or on the mezzanine, so that they would be as mobile as possible. But although the demonstrations proved convincing – visitors entering the courtroom noticed no noise at all and were unable to locate the cameras that were filming them – the court stipulated that the other two cameras must also be hidden. Consequently Hurwitz set up camera three to the left of the mezzanine, concealing it behind the wall of a hallway. It was also somewhat moveable and could film Eichmann’s booth, take threequarter angle shots of the witnesses and high-angle shots of the defence, and get shots of the judges (3.5). Camera four was installed at the back of the courtroom inside the projection booth built for the future theatre. It would provide general and overall shots of the court and capture details with its powerful zoom. It would film the spectators from behind and record any reactions they may have (3.6). Once the devices were in place Hurwitz organized a work session with the electricians. The Marconi cameras that had arrived from England were acutely sensitive; they could shoot in poor lighting conditions and record through screens and through the glass enclosing Eichmann’s dock. But because Hurwitz set great store by the quality of his images, he nevertheless had the electrical installation changed so the light beams would be more carefully directed; larger light bulbs were tried out to obtain top lighting and light the proscenium, mainly the tables of the defence and the prosecution; and lights were redirected into the interpreters’ booths to illuminate them. Now all that remained to be done was to test the equipment, prepare the 20-odd members of the crew and allot them their roles. Training Training began on 23 March and after a short Passover recess got more intensive as the opening date approached. The Israeli projectionists40 were trained in technical handling and in the subtleties of video cameras by the two British technicians sent by Marconi,41 and under Hurwitz’s guidance were introduced to the conditions of live shooting. Connected by headphone to the director, who issued instructions from the control room on shooting angles, shot scales, and the directions and movements

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of the cameras, they had to acquire new reflexes and learn to work quickly so as to adapt to the directives and the unforeseen circumstances of filming. Not all of them seem to have responded with equal agility to the instructions and Hurwitz assigned the four cameras in accordance with the skills he thought he could detect. During the preparatory phase the director became friendly with a very promising young projectionist named Emil Knebel (known as Millek), who was particularly involved in the initiation in television. In late March Hurwitz took the talented young man along on a trip to the Negev during which he sought to sound the country out and find out how Israelis felt about the trial. An incident with Israel’s security, however, compromised Millek’s participation in the filming. On 5 April Commander Koppel, the head of the police force’s court unit, refused to grant Millek a permanent pass on the grounds that he was a member of the Israeli Communist party. Hurwitz was stunned. Aside from arousing his political solidarity and the painful personal echo of being banned from exercising professional duties, it worried him, because Millek’s exclusion jeopardized his whole arrangement. The Israeli had mastered the camera positions to perfection and, considering the time allowed, he could not be replaced at a moment’s notice without harming the production. Commander Koppel met with Hurwitz and asserted that Knebel’s political affiliation was a security threat to the trial; he could steal documents or jeopardize the proceedings by acts of vandalism.42 Tense negotiations ensued. Hurwitz argued that ‘the Eichmann trial is not a secret military installation’, and deplored ‘the inhuman inflexibility’ of the police chief, who was confined in a purely administrative line of thinking that Hurwitz did not hesitate to compare to that of the Nazi bureaucracy. The outcome of these stormy discussions was that Millek was granted a partial lifting of the interdiction and in the end was able to participate fully in the filming. After five weeks of preparation, the team was ready to film. On 11 April, the eve of the opening of the trial, Leo Hurwitz wrote to Jane: We had our first day of televising the trial. And it went remarkably well! Considering the fact that all the cameramen had never [handled] a TV camera before and had to whip together a team in a very short time, it went smoothly and of excellent quality. Better I think than most shows of experienced crews. This day is the climax of weeks of preparation, and I feel I’ve run the 4 mile run as a sprint. A look at the way the recording apparatus was set up sheds light on the director’s intentions and the relations between the judicial and televisual staging. III Judicial ritual and televised dramatic art ‘The reality of the filmed trial will … first be the reality that justice has settled, regardless of whether the cinema enters the courtroom or not’, writes Jean-Louis Comolli.43 In fact, it is from a pre-existing stage design that Hurwitz thought out, designed and adjusted his apparatus. He knew he would have no hold over the unfolding of the judicial ritual and the figures imposed on it, or over the emplotment

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chosen by Hausner; nor would he have control over the bodies, the positions or the verbal exchanges. He designed his installation based on the auditorium’s architecture, the stage and the imposed decor.44 Indeed the trial was first thought out by the Israeli prosecutor in the framework of the constraints of a procedure determined by the law. The newly-created Israeli legal system was based on English law which, unlike continental law, has no examining magistrate. By and large, cases are investigated before the court and the defendant serves as a witness at his own trial. The order of events was determined as follows: reading of the indictment by Judge Landau; the defence’s objections and legal discussions; reading of the charge, sometimes called the opening address, by prosecutor Hausner; and witnesses’ testimonies (the first being that of Eichmann – or rather his voice, since it consisted of excerpts from a tape recording made during his detention), interspersed with presentations of documents. Then came the cross-examination of Eichmann by the prosecutor, his lawyer, and the judges; the prosecutor’s charge; the argument by the defence counsel, Dr Servatius; and the defendant’s final statement. Finally, on 11 December, after a very long four-month deliberation the judges passed the sentence. Hausner and Servatius addressed the court, followed by Eichmann, who had the last word. On 15 December the court sentenced him to death. This immutable order of legal proceedings explains why Eichmann spoke for the first time on 20 June, two and a half months after the opening of the debates. Hannah Arendt, who did not cover the trial in the journalistic sense, since she left Israel on 7 May after less than one month of the four-month proceedings, did not see – not in the courtroom at least – Eichmann rise and take the floor, except to say, like the defendants at Nuremberg, he pleaded not guilty ‘in the sense of the indictment’. This framework determined by the law constituted the first stage direction. It was not negotiable. Within this pre-established framework Hausner imposed his own conception of the trial, which was also an emplotment. The first element was the story the prosecutor wished to tell. He chose not to limit himself to facts directly linked to the accused but rather to retrace the complete history of the genocide, from Hitler’s rise to power up until the German surrender. The second element was who would tell the story – in other words, what elements would be used to back up the history. Hausner knew how monotonous the lengthy presentations of documents in Nuremberg had been. As a result he chose to give the witnesses the central role: to select them through a veritable casting and call to the stand ‘as many as the framework of the trial would allow, and to ask each of them to tell a tiny fragment of what he had seen and experienced’.45 The debates took place in fact before a stage, in front of an audience. In this sense, as Agnès Tricoire remarks, the architects were also the authors of the judicial staging.46 The stage direction imposed by the law, Hausner’s choices and the architecture of the auditorium were elements imposed on Hurwitz. Taking them into account, he worked out his recording arrangements, which offered a fourth staging of the event.

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The positions of the first two cameras, which were set up facing each other, respected – but also in a sense reinforced – the way the accused – witness axis was dramatized by the spatial organization of the courtroom. The face to face encounter of the cameras offered an interpretation of what could be one element of the trial’s dynamics, intensifying the prosecutor’s own interpretation. The choice of main characters on whom the projectionists would direct their attention was underscored again by the names given to cameras one and two: in his preparatory notes, Hurwitz called them the ‘Eichmann camera’ and the ‘witness camera’, in contrast to cameras three and four, which were designated by their location (mezzanine and projection booth).47 Moreover, while the dramatic art of the trial was thought out separately from its filmed recording, we note that the work on lighting interacted to some extent with the judicial stage direction: by redirecting the play of lights, Hurwitz modified somewhat the audience’s perception of the stage, made secondary characters (the English-Hebrew interpreters) more visible, and emphasized the theatrical effect of the judicial drama. A last point concerning the raising of the curtain on 11 April is worth mentioning. To prepare the filming of Eichmann’s first entrance into the courtroom, the security team provided the filmmaker (and probably the press) with a very detailed and carefully timed description of the opening of the trial.48 It indicates that at 8:45 a.m. the defence, the prosecution, the interpreters, the stenographers and the usher would take their seats. Around 8:50 a police officer would enter the glass booth, from which he would signal to the judges with a small light that the defendant could be brought into the courtroom. This procedure would take three minutes. The usher would immediately inform the judges that the defendant was installed. They would be in control of the timing from then on. When they would decide to enter, the usher would go to his seat between the witness stand and the stenographers and shout ‘Beth Hamishpat (the court)!’ .The judges would then open the first session and, the memo adds, ‘the most significant trial of the 20th century will be under way’. This document is very edifying. It brings to light the theatrical quality conferred on Eichmann’s entrance and the meticulous organization, which aimed not only to surround the ‘opening ceremony’ with great solemnity but also to make it easier to record. Prior to the schedule being drawn up, in fact, Koppel the police commander and Hurwitz the director conferred on the details of Eichmann’s entrance.49 The whole procedure was set up so that there was no chance of the cameras missing this historic moment, the image of which must be presented to the world. This collaboration contributed toward making the opening of the trial, the importance of which was emphatically underlined at the end of the technical memo, into a spectacular event. What we see here is the co-production of an event, played on a dual stage, the judicial stage and that of the mass media coverage, combining the thorough organization determined by the masters of ceremony, the demands of precision required for filming the event, and the timing specific to the judges, who retained control over the second climax of the scene underscored by the usher’s

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cry of the court. This scene would be repeated for the opening of each of the 114 hearings.50 So while on the whole the filmed recording was subordinated to a pre-established stage design and emplotment, these few points of conjunction between the judicial machinery and the mass media machinery underline the effects of making this trial, with its unique status, into a performance. It is precisely by focusing on the dynamics of the two stages – judicial and televisual – that Leo Hurwitz’s directing should be analysed. Stage, off-stage, off-screen To assess what Hurwitz’s directing may have contributed, let us first follow the second proposition of Jean-Louis Comolli, according to which a film cannot reproduce the reality of a trial but necessarily offers a ‘fundamentally different translation of the “same” reality that is not filmed, such as a spectator present at the hearings could observe it’.51 Antoine Garapon mentions that a trial proceeds in a delimited but completely visible space: ‘in a trial, the same people must see everything and nothing else, in time as well as in space … The courtroom is organized in such a way that each individual sees everyone at the same time’.52 Now the filming of a trial, even if it is claimed to be a pure ‘captation’, by necessity modifies the perception of space and the relations between the protagonists. As Comolli points out: The camera is not a machine that leaves what is visible intact. And it is not because it is a machine that it is assumed to be ‘objective’: indeed, even before a cameraman intervenes, the frame determined by the aperture and by the focal distance of the lens being used blocks out (André Bazin) a portion of the visible field that is greater than the part it circumscribes and shows. In the tribunal there is no ‘off-screen’ but only ‘off-stage’, that is, the wings, hallways, waiting rooms and so on.53 The camera may fragment the space of the stage, but it changes the view of the protagonists even more perceptibly. The cameras set up in the courtroom isolate the actors of the trial and offer them to television viewers at a distance, in a framing ratio and from an angle that are not the same as those afforded the spectators attending the hearing. At the trial of Klaus Barbie, the images captured in the courtroom and then rebroadcast by the history channel showed television viewers the faces of witnesses who faced the judges while giving their testimonies, with their backs to the spectators attending the hearing. By the same token, spectators at Beit Ha’am saw Eichmann from a distance, in profile, through the reflection of the glass booth, whereas television viewers could see the accused from the front, sometimes close up. This is why Joseph Kessel went to the press room every day, because it had television screens on all four walls. Eichmann delivered himself up to the ‘ruthless eye of the cameras’. He was, wrote Kessel, ‘much clearer than in the courtroom, better outlined, and above all, seen in

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full face’; these images ‘were truer, more detailed, more revealing than the features of his face directly offered to the audience’.54 By isolating the characters, moreover, the camera defuses the effect of the co-presence of protagonists, which, according to Emmanuel Levinas, constitutes the very essence of justice in action.55 In addition, when several cameras are involved, the recording constructs new relations between the actors through editing. It is with the aim of limiting these effects of producing meanings that strict specifications were imposed on the director of the Klaus Barbie trial: cutaway shots in particular were prohibited and the rule was to record only whoever was speaking and not those who were listening or supposed to be listening (e.g., actors in the trial, journalists and spectators). The ban on cutaway shots was based on the awareness of the effects they produced in films of the montage school (the famous ‘Koulechov effect’56 comes to mind) and on the desire to rebalance the unequal relation that is played out on screen between image and sound. As Jean-Louis Comolli remarks: What the audience-spectator of a hearing hears and sees is quite different from what the spectator-audience of a film of this same hearing sees and hears. I emphasize the term ‘audience’ (from the Latin audire, to hear), which indicates that speech and the act of hearing it are the main pieces of information of the judicial stage in the unfolding of the trial … Film an audience, and you force-reinforce the visual aspect, you draw it over on the side of the visible, spectacle, spectators; at the same time you distance it from the dimension of the audible.57 To limit the production of affects and over-dramatization of the filmed image, the specifications drawn up for the Barbie trial also prohibited the use of close-ups, zooms and camera movement. In light of these considerations, the filming of the Eichmann trial stands out from the outset by virtue of the directing work Leo Hurwitz asserted and his manifest desire to mark the difference between the place of the spectator and that of the television viewer. The role of editing and the status of the media In all his works, Leo Hurwitz gave editing a central role. His first initiation into cinematographic language was imparted to him by Pudovkin: reading Film Technique was a veritable ‘illumination’58 for Hurwitz; it instilled in him an intimate perception of the architecture of a film and the function of editing. Even before he became a director, Hurwitz saw in editing the means to combine political involvement and poetic expressiveness. The ultimate purpose and the truth of a shot were not to be sought in the shot itself, according to this approach, but in its relation and interaction with the other shots in the film. For Hurwitz, then, film does not have the illusory vocation to duplicate reality: truth does not offer itself to the camera, it is constructed with the camera as the outcome of a patient operation of the production of meaning.

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From this perspective, we understand that Hurwitz’s work in the control room for the Eichmann trial seemed to him decisive: sitting in front of the four monitors that transmitted what his cameramen could see live in their viewfinders, he had to choose which of the four images – selected on a fifth monitor – would be recorded on the band, according to the concept of ‘shoot and edit’. He also had to define the rhythm, logic and form of the transition from one shot to another. It is this stage direction that Hurwitz dwelled on in a letter to New York Times television critic Jack Gould after seven weeks of shooting.59 Protesting against the American networks, which used his images without listing his name in the credits, Hurwitz stressed the creative part of his directing work: the footage is not automatically captured ‘as if it flowed into their studios from the water tap’; the images are the product of a human act, of the combined action of a hand, a mind and a spirit, and thus the fruit of creative work. In this viewpoint, Hurwitz takes note of an intrinsic difference between what the spectators of the hearings saw and what he offered to television viewers: My objective was to reveal the events of the courtroom with greater clarity and penetration than would be possible for the public really present in the courtroom. The ability of the TV cameras to bridge the distances – to show the details of Eichmann’s face and hands, the expressions of the judges, counsel and witnesses – in such a way that these events could be seen from all relevant angles [meant that the cameras showed] more than can be seen from the court itself where most of the key participants had their backs or profiles to the audience. In a later interview with Susan Slyomovics, Hurwitz pointed out again that a courtroom audience is not involved in the same exercise of observation and perception as a director in the control room.60 Once spectators got their bearings and familiarized themselves with the décor, the positions of the protagonists and their features – Hausner’s bald spot, the judges’ appearance and faces, Eichmann’s profile, Servatius’s thick neck, the witnesses’ bodies – they would have a generic idea of the overall scene. Then they could concentrate on speech and let themselves be guided more by hearing than by sight.61 In contrast, Hurwitz, sitting outside the courtroom in front of his four monitors, had a panoptic view of the trial, a multiplication of capacities of vision that allowed him to glimpse what no one else could see: in a state of extreme concentration, far greater than that of a person seated in the courtroom, Hurwitz set out to offer the television viewer the front-row seat of an super-powerful observer fitted with an apparatus that gave him keener, more acute vision. The primacy of image over sound was all the more pronounced as the meaning of the words was delayed in reaching him owing to the slight time-lag of the translation. Hurwitz understood Yiddish (the language his parents spoke) and consequently German, which is fairly close to it. But the exchanges in Hebrew were unintelligible

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to him and he had to interpret the situations he watched unfolding on the screen before being enlightened as to their meaning. The emphasis on the visible aspect and the heavy-handed editing were justified in Hurwitz’s eyes by the target audience and the conditions in which the recordings were broadcast. He was thinking about the expectations of the viewers who would be receiving his footage daily – live but for the delay entailed in shipping the tapes – when he fought for the right to move his cameras around: if they had remained stationary, he explained to critic Jack Gould, the live pick-up of the recording would have become tiresome and ‘the trial would not have had the freshness of each new day’.62 By virtue of its very nature as a ‘TV series’ destined to be rebroadcast on a daily basis to American viewers, the filming of the trial seems to be intrinsically subject to being stylized and dramatized in order to keep the audience’s interest up. Unlike the directors who filmed the trials of Barbie, Touvier and Papon, who worked on recording archives for history and were subject to restrictive specifications, Hurwitz was totally in control of his cinematographic choices. To analyse them as thoroughly as necessary, we would have to go through all the available resources. This we have not yet done.63 The present analysis is based on about 30 hours of recorded material. IV The main stylistic device of Hurwitz’s dramatic art An examination of Hurwitz’s filming confirms the effects of cutting scenes and heavily editing. The recording of the first day of hearings, devoted mostly to the reading of the charges, reveals the choices made by the director in the preparatory and training phase. Although certain static shots by cameras three and four seize all of the judicial space, the director also crosses it and explores it by means of panoramic movements: he emphasizes above all a combination of tight shots and close-up shots that re-cut up the stage of the trial. The stage, moreover, was extended to the orchestra (images of the audience, isolating at times a profile or a hand writing on a notebook) and to the wings (shots of stenographers or translators at work in cubicles placed high up along the mezzanine) (3.7, 3.8 and 3.9).

This fragmentation of space was combined with effects of reconstruction offered by camera one, which captured the reflections on the glass wall of Eichmann’s booth. Superimposed by refraction on the image of the defendant from behind with

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the judges in the background were the first rows of the audience and the table of the defence (3.10). The depiction of the actors in the trial is marked by the variety of points of view. For example, Eichmann’s counsel is filmed from the very first session from all possible angles: high-angle shots from behind, left and right profile shots, but also from the front when he speaks to his client or when his image is reflected in the glass enclosure. These images of Servatius sometimes appear in line with the bodies and faces of the other members of the defence or prosecution; but most often the lawyer is isolated in the frame and shown in tight or close-up shots that emphasize the presence of his powerful body, the rolls of fat on his neck and the expressiveness of his watchful face. During the same session, camera one frames the first sharp look Hausner darts at the defendant who has just made his entrance, foreshadowing the upcoming confrontation. Thus by isolating the protagonists, by yielding them frequently in close-up shots, Hurwitz knowingly produces effects of dramatization; his portrait gallery emphasizes the character traits of the individuals present and transfigures them into characters in a drama (3.11 and 3.12).

In his videotape recording, Hurwitz does not stop at modifying the view and the angle of vision on the protagonists; he puts them in relation to one another and constructs their relation by means of editing. This production of meaning is particularly pronounced in the recording of the witnesses’ testimonies, which for Hurwitz constituted the main dramatic thrust of the trial.64 Using the effects of editing, the director takes pains to construct a confrontation, which is sometimes artificial, between the defendant and the witnesses. Relying on cameras one and two, which face each other, he uses the shot/reverse shot technique to create an exchange of looks – albeit with no attendant exchange of words, since Eichmann remains silent during this phase of the trial.

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The bias of the directing appears clearly in the way the testimony of the psychologist Gilbert is filmed. Gilbert had been assigned to the prison at Nuremberg to look after the defendants’ mental health. In Jerusalem he testified about what the leading Nazis who stood trial in Nuremberg had confided to him about Eichmann’s role in the Final Solution. While he testified Hurwitz caught the penetrating looks Gilbert would shoot at the accused and the obvious annoyance they provoked.65 Yet although the shot/reverse shot procedure does work with some of the other witnesses – those who had known Eichmann, like Joel Brand, whom Hausner asks if he recognizes the accused – most of the time the confrontation between the defendant and the witness appears artificial, as if the reality of the trial were resisting the director’s preconceived ideas. There are several reasons behind this. First of all, most of the witnesses do not look at Eichmann: sometimes they face the prosecutor who is questioning them, but more often than not they are self-absorbed, entirely focused on reliving their story. Moreover, Eichmann does not seem to be looking exactly in the direction of the witnesses. For this reason their eyes do not follow the same axis and their looks fail to meet in the shot/reverse shots. Lastly, the accused remains impassive most of the time and falls short of the expectations of the camera and the production crew, as well as those of the journalists and other spectators of the trial. In his interview with Barbara Hogenson, Hurwitz recalled: He looked as stony as he could for nine months. I told you, in one camera I had his face on the screen all the time. In order to cut to it, if there was a betrayal of emotion. He had a twitch on one side of his face. I tried to watch that twitch to see whether it corresponded to some responsiveness to whatever was being said, or whatever was happening. I couldn’t locate a parallelism between the twitch and events.66 Hurwitz’s device is also based on a premise that is particularly well developed in fictional cinema: the assumption that the observer can read the truth on the face of the accused, and decipher an enigma in his features. The shot/reverse shot betrays his hope – closely akin to Hausner’s – of seeing what he assumed was the mask of Eichmann the actor fall off.67 Thus the discrepancy between the actual trial and the one Hurwitz imagined also results from the free will of the ‘actors’, from ‘the dose of acting, that is, enactment, artifice and simulation’68 inherent in every judicial procedure. The choice of shots on the defendant during the testimonies of the survivors – most of whom had had no direct contact with Eichmann – reinforces Hausner’s proposed emplotment of the trial. The shot/reverse shot contributes in fact to producing the image of Eichmann’s guilt and makes him personally accountable for all the tragedies recounted in the courtroom. On this point, however, Hurwitz the dramatist was not necessarily in harmony with Hausner the stage director. Several times in his correspondence Hurwitz deplored the fact that more emphasis was not put on what he called ‘fascism’ according to the Communist terminology of the time. In the interview he gave in the framework of Columbia’s oral history

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programme he expressed his disagreement with the Israeli point of view that, in his opinion, isolated the Jews from other victims, undermining the meaning of the word ‘fascism’. The second stylistic device of the filming of the testimonies appears more spontaneous. It relies on the observation of the trial and Hurwitz’s desire to capture its distinctive characteristics in action. As the hearings proceeded, the director became the witness of an event in the process of happening and recorded the signs of that event – the effects and the shock produced on the audience by the testimonies. The filmmaker brought out this aspect by taking cutaway shots of the audience and the court, showing their attentive, sometimes deeply upset, faces (3.13 and 3.14).

The emotion of the speakers and onlookers during certain testimonies echoed that of the filmmaker in the sound room. On 9 May Hurwitz wrote to his wife after two particularly trying days. On the previous day Rivka Yoselewska had related in Yiddish how her small daughter had been killed before her eyes, while she herself was shot and thrown alive into a ditch full of bodies, from which she managed to extricate herself. On 9 May Georges Wellers, the only French witness at the trial, described the arrival of a group of children at Drancy. The children had been arrested in the Vel d’Hiv round-up and transferred to camps in the Loiret region; they had been separated from their mothers, who were deported, and left alone. ‘The daily testimonies of the trial are frequently devastating’, Hurwitz writes. ‘I fear often that tears will close my eyes and that I will not be able to see the monitors to direct the programme. I find my voice getting flat and monotone to defend myself in talking to the cameramen and switcher.’ He adds, And yet, in all this overwhelming feeling, there is a curious relief. It is the catharsis that the witnesses have in at last relating their ungraspable experiences to the world. They stand at the loudspeaker of history and each one of them revenges himself by his clarity, his recall and his full statement of feeling. The choice of the term catharsis can be understood in the psychoanalytic sense (with which Hurwitz was familiar), the courtroom testimony appearing as the means

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by which the witness manages to liberate himself from repressed traumas. But by underscoring the fact that the witness is confiding ‘to the world’, Hurwitz summons up the Aristotelian definition of catharsis, whereby theatrical performance produces the effect of purifying the soul and passions of the spectator. By using cutaway shots on the audience in Beit Ha’am, the director intended to reveal the effect of the testimonies on the spectators, particularly on the Israeli public. In the letters he wrote to Jane during the preparatory phase Hurwitz was initially surprised at Israelis’ apparent indifference to the trial that was about to open. As the hearings proceeded he discovered the unplanned part of the judicial event and made room for it in his staging. Instead of emphasizing a face-to-face encounter between witnesses and television viewers, Hurwitz’s staging gave preference to a triangular exchange of looks. By showing the spectators’ faces he added a third dimension to the viewing experience, highlighted the affects it produced, and dramatized the perception of the testimonies that by then had become an integral part of the event. At the same time he shifted it to another scene, that of the trial’s reception in Israel and the unforeseen emotion it brought about. The filmed recording was thus not simply a matter of captation. It constituted a new staging that Hurwitz took upon himself – a staging that contributed to accentuating the primacy of image over sound, transfiguring the protagonists into characters, producing a drama of testimony, and constructing the confrontation between accused and witnesses. This set design of the trial was staged one last time by the television networks, especially in the US and West Germany. Televised staging The representatives of television networks in the US and in English-speaking countries in Europe made their selections from Hurwitz’s recordings. The director had no influence over their choice. As he explained in a letter to his wife dated 16 April, it was an American delegate, somewhat amateurish in fact, who made the choice for the major American networks every day, selecting one hour of images out of the seven hours recorded. This footage was transported daily by plane to New York, where representatives of NBC, ABC and CBS took turns accepting delivery. For Europe, it was London that served as the hub.69 Judging from the few TV programmes we were able to watch, we ascertained that the footage was re-edited into broadcasts that showed highlights of the hearing; the images were then commented on and analysed by journalists on the set and compared with interviews, in particular interviews of survivors and certain witnesses who had testified during the trial.70 The American programmes were constantly interrupted by commercials. In a letter dated 13 April, Jane Hurwitz told Leo about it with a sense of humour: the programme aired on ABC New York was ‘sponsored by Glickman Real Estate Interests with a speech explaining that property is one of the first things taken away from people when their freedoms are deprived them – hence, said Mr. Glickman in person, we are sponsoring the Eichmann trial’. Hannah Arendt mentions this same commercial.

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These broadcasts themselves deserve to be studied, but the difficulty of such a study should not be underestimated. Television programmes were very poorly preserved and archived at the time. Although many different accounts testify to the considerable impact the images of the trial had in the United States71 and West Germany, only an analysis of all the broadcasts would allow us to assess what TV viewers actually saw of the trial: a selection of Hurwitz’s footage, filtered a first time in Jerusalem and a second time by the networks or the European channels, which then proposed a new emplotment specially designed for their national audiences. It was based on these different filters that television viewers formed an opinion of Eichmann. In part this was also the case of Hannah Arendt who, as we mentioned, stayed only a short time in Jerusalem. To write her book, which is not strictly speaking a report, she explains that she made use of the sources accessible to anyone: the mimeographed minutes of the trial, a press file, and certain books, including those by Hilberg and Reitlinger. The portrait she draws of the accused – and which has come to depict the ‘real’ Eichmann – was modelled in part on the transcript of his interrogation by Avner Less and what Arendt or people close to her saw of the trial on television. Thus the televised mediation of the trial and the effect the filmed images had of dramatizing the trial influenced even the most critical minds. Conclusion The trial of Adolf Eichmann marked the emergence of the memory of the genocide in Israel, the United States and West Germany. Its legacy was considerable and took a variety of forms. In particular it spurred the resumption of legal proceedings. There was, for example, the trial of the Auschwitz personnel held in Frankfurt (1963–65), which generated considerable publicity in Germany. Yet it was not filmed. The entrance of television cameras into the courtroom in Jerusalem was a unique event in the history of media coverage of crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide. Granted, the trial of major war criminals that was held in 1946–47 had been filmed in 35 mm, but this was done very scantily; only 30 hours or so were filmed – a few snatches of the hearings. Those images were in all likelihood intended to be used in newsreels and compilation films. They were used liberally by Marcel Ophüls in his 1976 film The Memory of Justice. After the Eichmann trial, more than 20 years would pass before the complete proceedings of a trial would be filmed again. The idea was resumed with the political trials that began in the 1980s, the last trials connected to World War II – Barbie in 1987, Touvier in 1994, and Papon in 1998 as far as France is concerned – and the trials connected to events in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and, more recently, Cambodia. But for these trials, filming was coupled with an aim that was absent in the Eichmann trial – the desire to build up archives in order to contribute to the subsequent writing of history. The filming of these later trials adheres to rigid specifications and tends to be a simple captation, very far removed from Hurwitz’s work in Jerusalem. On this account the Eichmann trial was both a turning point in the perception and memory of the genocide of the Jews and a major landmark in the history of a new medium, television – a medium still in its infancy, whose possibilities and

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effects had not yet been fully assessed at the time. If international reception of the proceedings was uneven, it was presumably due not only to the degree of interest in the trial of a Nazi responsible for the Final Solution, which varied from one country to another, but also to the role of television in these countries’ systems of media coverage. Yet television contributed in large part to determining how the event was imagined; this imaginative depiction, filtered by the nature and processes specific to the medium, dramatized the trial and made it more spectacular. The event marked a concurrence between a memory that was in the process of being internationalized and this moment in the history of television, perhaps prefiguring the new nature of global events widely covered in the mass media that are brought to fulfilment by the advent of live filming.

4 RUNNING THE FILM AGAINST THE REEL Locating Jean Cayrol’s Lazarean Figure in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour Matthew John

I relate here what I lived through. The horror in it is not gigantic. At Gandersheim there was no gas chamber, no crematorium. The horror there was darkness, absolute lack of any kind of landmark, solitude, unending oppression, slow annihilation.1 The horror of the concentration camp system lies not with the abrupt and immediate extermination of human life, but rather with the slow and agonizing decay of the body and mind. The unimaginable limits of the violence inflicted upon the site of the human body as it is starved, beaten and worked to the very precipice of death, deformed and disfigured it almost beyond recognition, pushing the definition of the human species to its very limits, and beyond, in the terms identified so lucidly in Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine. It is however, with the work of Jean Cayrol, and his notion of a ‘Lazarean protagonist’, that this degraded and despoiled human figure is located outside the all-too-narrow confines of the Nazi concentration camp, and placed at the very centre of an apocalyptic literature which stands in their wake.2 Much like his counterpart on the inside of the barbed-wire perimeter fence, the figure at the centre of the Cayrolian literary universe is subject to the slow destruction and seclusion of his very own self-imposed camp, standing anonymous and isolated, withdrawn from society at large. As such, the desecrated and depersonalized human figure which emerges from the camps is understood not as an aberration of modernity, which can be neatly confined to the specific historical moment of the German concentration camp system, but rather as the site for the persistent return of a concentrationary threat across the landscape of modernity.

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Thus, attempting to locate the emergence of Cayrol’s figure within films which span different historical periods and respond to different moments of historical violence, some real and some fictional, is analogous to a process of tracking the development of a concentrationary cinema as it traces the persistence of this threat. It follows, therefore, that my consideration of Alain Resnais’s 1963 film Muriel ou le temps d’un retour in this chapter derives precisely from the attempt to locate the transition from literary figure to cinematic protagonist at the very heart of a concentrationary cinema. On the one hand, this transition is fairly straightforward, in so far as it can be identified in the major themes and concerns of the film, whose often stark and unsettling portrayal of modern isolation and anonymity is altogether characteristic of the decay of Cayrol’s figure. As Cayrol writes, ‘There is nothing to explain. The concentration camps were suffered in different ways by their victims. Some died, others perished more slowly, severed from return, and growing old in this larval form of a horror only half-extinguished’.3 However, on an entirely different level, an identification of the Lazarean figure within the film seems to be inseparable from the striking modernity of the text, and the very specific form of spectatorship this engenders. Gilles Deleuze reminds us that, faced with the modern film text, the spectator is thrown into a deeper engagement with the image as it becomes both readable and analytical.4 The terms of this relationship between viewer and text seems particularly visible in Muriel where, amidst the apparent chaos of the film text which arrives in a series of disjointed fragments, it is the emergence of several photographs in the film which provokes the kind of deeper engagement with the image identified by Deleuze. As I will seek to demonstrate, it is in exploring the dislocated time and space of this deeply analytical confrontation with the image, that Cayrol’s Lazarean figure emerges within the film. My location of the Lazarean figure within Muriel does not simply, however, rely on mechanisms internal to the film itself, but rather extends to those mechanisms of delay engendered by the transition from celluloid filmstrip to digital technology. Indeed, it is by operating within the time of reflection offered by what Laura Mulvey describes as a ‘delayed cinema’ that I hope to demonstrate that the image of the isolated, anonymous and disfigured human penetrates to the very core of the film text and arises in some of its most hidden and meaningful moments.5 The work of locating Cayrol’s figure within the film therefore becomes much like that of Walter Benjamin’s material historiographer; in brushing the film against the grain, that is to say by working against its natural linear progression, the anonymous and depersonalized human figure can become visible in the dialectical moment of the standstill.6 The time of return: Jean Cayrol and the Lazarean figure Deported to Mathausen concentration camp in 1943, Jean Cayrol resumed his literary activity almost immediately upon his return with three works under the collective title of Je vivrai l’amour des autres. These texts, however, do not constitute a return to the camps; Cayrol’s work is not the survivor testimony which will become synonymous in France with Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine. Rather, these works

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reflect the condition of Man who has emerged from the camps. In the anonymous, depersonalized speaker of the first novel, On vous parle, and the figure of Armand in the second, Les premiers jours, these early works represent the very beginnings of what Cayrol will later more concretely define in his more theoretical writing on the Lazarean. Indeed, it is writing in one of his two critical essays published in 1950 under the collective title of Lazare parmi nous that Cayrol openly laments the narrowly retrospective gaze which persistently returns to the original site of the concentrationary threat, confining its vision to the barbed-wire perimeter fence of the German concentration camp: Up until now we have only read witness accounts … which reveal one face of the camps, the most sensational, the most trustworthy, the most hideous, but this side was only valid until the liberation; we did not know what mask it would assume afterwards. Only the works of Antelme and Rousset float; they have outlined the general appearance of the German camps which enter already into the preface of a concentrationary historiography.7 With its emphasis on the possibility of return beyond the narrow historical time and space of the German concentration camp system, Cayrol’s notion of a ‘Lazarean protagonist’, which he develops in the pages of this same essay and places at the very centre of his literary universe, very much follows the intellectual trajectory of David Rousset, the French political deportee to Buchenwald.8 Towards the end of his major work on the camps, L’Univers concentrationnaire, Rousset uses those words, ‘everything is possible’, later taken up by Hannah Arendt in her own thesis on the totalitarian threat, to shift our understanding of the concentrationary threat from a closed chapter in the long succession of narrative history, to an anachronistic space of a perpetual possibility and return.9 Cayrol’s Lazarean figure becomes the very site of this return. It is, thus, in beginning to identify the anonymity, depersonalization and even physical disfigurement which characterize this figure at play within Resnais’s Muriel that we can hope to offer a re-reading of the film which would explode the violence and torture it contains beyond the narrow context of the French involvement in Algeria, to the persistence of a threat which emerges with the concentration camps themselves. In his own consideration of the transition of the Lazarean figure to Resnais’s cinema, René Prédal provides the following description: Lazarus is a man who has been raised from the dead, a man who has known death and cannot return to his former state before this experience. In the same way, modern man has known the awful death of the camps and is also no longer the same way as he was before the war, as he, too, is marked forever by the presence of these atrocities. To be affected, he does not need to actually have been interned. It is sufficient that this imprisonment and death have taken place to transform humanity completely. The Lazarean hero is therefore the

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This vision of modern man provided by Prédal seems to be the very vision of humankind which emerges in Muriel, Resnais’s third feature film. The film provides an often troubling picture of anonymity and isolation amidst the banal setting of Boulogne-sur-Mer, where a series of retracted individuals have withdrawn to the seclusion of a world of objects and ever-complex love affairs. However, the link between Cayrol’s anguished modern literary hero and the protagonists of Resnais’s film begins perhaps most obviously with Cayrol’s involvement with the film itself, where, as Jean-Luc Alpigiano notes, ‘we know that Cayrol was more than simply a script writer’.11 Thus, the seclusion and alienation of Cayrol’s literary universe in which ‘beings exist each in their own kingdom or prison’12 is seemingly transferred directly to the cinematic universe of Muriel in its stark, and often depressing, portrayal of the ‘alienation endemic to contemporary French society’.13 This isolation is, in fact, something evoked by one of the film’s own protagonists, Robert, when he states, ‘the main thing, you know, is that every Frenchman feels alone and paralysed by fear: he constructs his own barbed wire perimeter fence around his person’.14 In its overt reference to the barbed wire of the concentration camp, this remark immediately betrays the hand of Cayrol behind the script, and favours a reading of the characters of the film as Lazarean. However, in figuratively displacing the image of the barbed-wire perimeter from the specific context of the concentration camp to which it is often delimited, and placing it in the very lap of the post-colonial French society of Muriel, Cayrol’s script allows the space for the speculative, but entirely necessary, leap between different sites and different times of historical violence. The Lazarean protagonist therefore becomes both a figure of and a site for a returning concentrationary threat which persists across different sites and different times of modernity. In line with Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that, rather than being an aberration of modernity, the Holocaust was ‘a possibility that modernity contains’, a Lazarean reading of Muriel therefore recognizes that the kind of isolation, anonymity and dehumanization witnessed in the concentration camp system is not distinct from the goals of modernity and its very own dehumanizing project of social engineering, but rather that the former is the horrific potential that the latter necessarily contains.15 Yet, if these fears are announced by Robert, then they are almost certainly lived by the figure of Bernard who visibly fulfils the living figure of despondency embodied by Cayrol’s vision of Mankind after the camps. Indeed, Alpigiano makes this link in explicit terms, referring to Bernard as ‘the alter ego of Cayrol’.16 Consumed by his involvement in the torture of a young Algerian girl named Muriel, his struggle with this past clearly translates itself into his often unpredictable and inexplicable behaviour; as the shooting script to the film attests, ‘Hélène is scared of her son, of his mania, his reactions’.17 Bernard’s inability to interact with others is visible in his first awkward exchanges with Alphonse and Françoise where, much to Hélène’s obvious displeasure, he extracts a sleeping scorpion from a matchbox in his pocket. When alone together in the bedroom, Françoise concludes, ‘it is not easy to talk with

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you’.18 Seemingly unable to integrate into the world around him, Bernard instead withdraws further into the isolation and seclusion of his own world where, like the literary figure described by Cayrol, a series of objects receive his displaced affection; the revolver dissembled with care and placed in the draw of his bedroom, the knife which Françoise examines, and, of course, his beloved camera with which he films his surroundings. In her article on the film, Celia Britton highlights the particular importance of the image of Bernard seen through the kaleidoscope by Marie-do (4.1). This, she suggests, stands as a kind of ‘mise en abyme of the film as a whole: it is not only a fragmented image, but also one which moves outwards from the centre’.19 The image is certainly an interesting one, and I would agree that it holds a particular importance within the film. However, rather than those terms suggested by Britton, I would suggest that the image seems to support a reading of Bernard as a typical Cayrolian protagonist; the kaleidoscope serves not simply to fragment his image, reflecting the fissured and fractured sense of selfhood of the figure: more importantly, as one image merges inconclusively into another, it distorts the figure of the human face, casting it towards anonymity. Indeed, these are the very themes which will re-emerge later in my discussion of the photographs within the film. If, as Predal suggests, the figure of Bernard seems to be the most obvious point of reference for the existence of Cayrol’s literary figure within the film (‘of course the most characteristically Lazarean heros in Resnais’ cinematic universe is Bernard’20), then it is by no means limited entirely to him. It appears that no-one in Muriel is who, or what, they seem. Each of the characters presents a series of distorted identities and hidden lives which confounds any attempt on behalf of the spectator to invest

4.1

Bernard seen through a kaleidoscope by Marie-do from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films).

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securely and confidently in them. In stark contrast to the seductive elegance and glamour of Resnais’s other leading females, Hélène is a heroine who, with her slightly tired appearance, seems to be refreshingly simplistic. However, beneath her banal bourgeois exterior, she too has a past which is difficult to assimilate; a complex fling with Alphonse aged 16, married and widowed during the war, and now mistress to one of the town’s leading industrial figures, she is left traumatized and unstable, reduced to compulsive gambling and withdrawn to the world of objects which clutter her apartment. Once again, as Cayrol himself suggests, ‘the world of objects will play … a special, detailed role in the Lazarean work’.21 Alphonse, too, is a man who seems to have multiple identities. Yet, in his case, this past is built on a series of carefully constructed lies which unravel with Ernest’s outburst at the table towards the end of the film. It transpires that, despite his ever-elaborate stories, he has never even set foot in Algeria. He is, rather, a failed restaurant owner who has abandoned his wife in returning to his former lover. Finally, even Françoise is not who or what she seems. First introduced as Alphonse’s niece, even though it later emerges that she is his lover, her ability to obscure her real identity is suggested by her profession as a young debutante actress, something which Bernard will, in fact, later highlight himself when he suggests that ‘one might say that you were auditioning for a role right in front of me’.22 The film then presents a vision of people which, in its themes of anonymity and social alienation, is almost unmistakably wed to the literary universe of Cayrol. This reading of the film, however, is not particularly easy to extract, being somewhat obscured by the chaos of the text which surrounds it, which seems to alienate the viewer with its dislocated and disruptive scheme of montage. Dissecting the space of Hélène’s apartment into an entirely incomprehensible succession of people and objects, the opening sequence of the film alone seems to set a precedent for the fractured and fragmented images which will follow. Alyssa O’Brien refers to the film as a series of ‘jarring visual effects’ which often offers ‘sequences of seemingly unconnected images’.23 Furthermore, the film does not simply arrive as a series of bits and pieces, but does so at an almost dizzying rate due to an unusually fast paced montage; almost astonishingly, just 37 seconds separate the very first shot of the film, a gloved hand holding a door knob (4.2), and shot 25 (4.3). As O’Brien suggests, the images of the film simply ‘come too fast for the spectator’, leaving us dazed and confused in front of an ever-changing puzzle of people and places. In short, Muriel ‘does not give way to visual stability … does not allow the spectator relief ’.24 In this respect, the viewer of Muriel would seem to be the very epitome of the hurried and harassed cinematic viewer identified in turn by both Roland Barthes and Raymond Bellour.25 Writing in La Chambre Claire, Barthes states his preference for the photograph over the film. Seemingly, what draws him irresistibly towards the former, whilst in the very same breath estranging him from the latter, stems from the concept of time: that is to say, not the representation of time as it is expressed internally by the image itself, but rather time as it is consciously perceived by the spectator. Where, on the one hand, the photograph might deny the image itself

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4.2 and 4.3 Hurried Spectatorship: just 37 seconds separate shots 1 and 25 in the opening to the film from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films). a sense of duration, it affords its viewer the time of a reading, time for reflection and, perhaps most importantly, time to add to the image. The cinema, on the other hand, whilst providing the image itself with a sense of duration, offers its viewer no such respite for thought or reflection. As Barthes reflects, ‘do I add to the images in the movies? I don’t think so; I don’t have time: in front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not discover the same image; I am constrained to a continuous voracity; a host of other qualities, but not pensiveness’.26 As Susan Sontag suggests, ‘the reading time of a book is up to the reader, the viewing time of a film is set by the filmmaker and the images are perceived only as fast or as slowly as the editing permits’.27 When the photograph penetrates the film text: a Lazarean reading of the photographs in Muriel ou le temps d’un retour The images of Muriel, which seem to simply flicker momentarily on the screen only to move relentlessly onwards, would therefore seem to deny the viewer the kind of confrontation with the image in which Barthes locates the notion of meaning itself. Indeed, at first glance, the film would seem to raise a considerable challenge to any conventional notions of spectatorship, in terms of both pleasure and meaning. The film seems to estrange rather than seduce the viewer. Britton, for instance, suggests that ‘most people who have seen Muriel seem to remember it less for its specific characters or themes, important as these are, than for a kind of overall lack of harmony on both a visual and a thematic level’,28 whereas Sontag identifies what she terms a ‘filmic alienation effect’.29 Although it is true that the film does, to a certain extent at least, seem to alienate its viewers, estranging them from the image, it will also become clear that such a reading denies the importance of several key moments within the film in which the ephemeral and fleeting nature of the cinematic image subsides to the relative calm of the photograph. Furthermore, it is, as I will demonstrate, in these stark moments of difference and delay provided by intrusion of the photograph into the film text that the image of Cayrol’s Lazarean figure most forcibly emerges within the film.

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The photographic image penetrates Muriel on four separate occasions. The first arises near the beginning of the film when Françoise and Bernard are alone together in the bedroom. Situated between a close-up of Françoise and then Bernard respectively, an image of a group of men in military fatigues abruptly, and at first inexplicably, interrupts the dialogue between the two characters (4.4). It is not until a more distanced shot shows Françoise holding a framed photographic image in her hands that the viewer is able to identify the sudden emergence of the image as the point-of-view shot of Françoise as she looks at it. To facilitate the terms of my analysis, I will subsequently refer to this image as photograph one. The remaining three instances of a photographic intrusion all come later in the film during Alphonse’s secretive search through Bernard’s possessions. Flicking through the contents of a notebook presumably owned by Bernard, Alphonse discovers three separate sets of images amongst its pages. Amongst the first set of images, he picks up and pauses over one image in particular (4.5). I will subsequently refer to this image as photograph two in my analysis. In continuing to flick onwards through the notebook he subsequently discovers a single photographic image (4.6), and then one final set of images, in which, once again, only the top image is clearly visible (4.7). These will be referred to as photographs three and four respectively. The penetration of these photographs into Muriel offers a double moment of signification. On the one hand, the photograph quite simply offers the time for thought and reflection that the cinema characteristically denies. As Bellour observes, ‘this is not to suggest that the film allows me to add to the image itself, as I would with a photo (it does not allow, in any case, the time). But the confrontation with the photograph does on the other hand allow precious time to add to the film’.30 Indeed, it is in the direct confrontation with photograph three in particular that a Lazarean interpretation of the film can be more clearly discerned. The film lingers on this photograph just long enough for the viewer to make out both a male and female figure framed in a pose reminiscent of holiday photographs from a family album

4.4

The first photographic image to punctuate the film from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films).

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4.5 and 4.6 The photographs found during Alphonse’s search from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films).

4.7

Figures located at the edge of the frame from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films).

(4.6). But, critically, it also leaves just enough time to notice that the face of the male figure has been physically removed, cut out, to leave nothing but a dark void in its place. The figure in the photograph is therefore not simply anonymous, but actually physically disfigured, as the image realizes those fears announced by Hélène earlier in the film when she states ‘I was so afraid that you might be disfigured by the war, a wound … I always saw you in my dreams, your face cast in shadow’.31 Given that this male figure is presumably Bernard, this physical disfigurement stands proxy for the much deeper psychological disfigurement which lies beneath an already jaded and cracking surface.32 Furthermore, this photograph not only connects with those fears announced within the film itself, but extends to themes which resound more broadly within the Cayrolian literary universe, and, in particular, what Daniel Oster describes as the ‘degree zero of the face’.33 It is therefore in the confrontation with the depersonalized and anonymous human figure of this image that the viewer of Muriel is able to add to the relative chaos of the images of the film which surround it, and arrive at the tortured and troubled protagonist of the Cayrolian literary universe.

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On the other hand, however, there is something inherently intriguing about the otherness of the photographic image as it erupts into the flow of filmic images which goes beyond the simple fascination with a moment of stasis at the very heart of cinema. The moment of stasis provided by the freeze-frame, for example, seems to remain somewhat different from that of the still photograph as it erupts into the film text. In fact, this is a difference that Laura Mulvey, perhaps unwittingly, reflects in her own analysis of the freeze-frame in Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera: she describes the freeze-frame of the horse as it gallops down a Moscow street as a moment when ‘the film freezes into a still “photograph”’.34 Her use of inverted commas around the word photograph seems to indicate a certain hesitation, a certain moment of intellectual uncertainty. Is the stilled image of a film a photograph? The distinction certainly seems to be a fuzzy one, hence perhaps Barthes’s hesitation in the very opening lines of La Chambre Claire when he writes, ‘I decided that I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it’.35 Is it correct to suggest that cinema is merely a series of photographs brought to life, that the photograph is, in fact, the essence of the latent cinematic structure? To answer these questions, and respond to the nagging doubt which wants to distinguish between the photograph on the one hand and the freeze-frame on the other, it is necessary to make reference to Deleuze’s classification of the movement image as it appears in his very first volume on cinema. According to Deleuze, any opposition between the two becomes more visible when one deconstructs the movement of cinema to compare the freeze-frame with the pose of the photograph; it reveals that, even in stasis, photography and cinema remain fundamentally different. Whereas the long exposure of the photograph offers the ‘actualisation of a transcendent form’, that is to say a given, non-changeable Whole, the freeze-frame, on the other hand, represents one instant of the many progressive and changing instants which form the basis of cinema as a ‘system which reproduces movement as a function of any-instant-whatever’.36 Essentially, if one were to still the movement of the film, one would not be confronted with the eternal pose of the photograph, but the snapshot of cinema. When the movement of the film is stilled, then, the snapshot represents the paralysis of a continuous movement; it is a moment immanent to movement. Whereas, when the movement of the film is itself punctuated by the photograph, the pose is the interruption of movement. Movement is no longer immanent but completely discontinued. Indeed, Deleuze makes one extremely important point of clarification in this regard: ‘the determining conditions of the cinema are the following; not merely the photo, but the snapshot (the long-exposure photo (photo de pose) belongs to the other lineage)’.37 Walter Benjamin too, in his ‘Small History of Photography’, aligns the origins of the photograph firmly with the pose. He describes how, because of the low light sensitivity of the early photographic plates, ‘the procedure itself caused the subject to focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying on past it; during the considerable period of the exposure, the subject as it were grew into the picture, in the sharpest contrast with appearances in a snapshot’.38

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The intrusion of the photograph into Muriel, therefore, does not simply impose stasis upon the motion of the image, which can similarly be achieved by the freezeframe; it additionally usurps the snapshot with the pose. This intrusion produces a moment which is altogether unique, a moment which challenges Deleuze’s concept of the movement-image itself; the cinema can no longer be defined by movement as a function of ‘any-instant-whatever’, but by fixity as a function of the ‘privileged instant’ of the photograph.39 It is the very singularity of this instant which has led Bellour to propose that the moment the film is penetrated by the photograph in this way becomes its most meaningful of moments.40 Thus, the emergence of Cayrol’s Lazarean figure within the film is not simply limited to the surface level of the text, but is in fact inscribed within its most profound moments of difference. From celluloid filmstrip to digital technology This confrontation with the photographic image in Muriel still remains, however, frustratingly brief. Although the moment the photograph erupts into Muriel is certainly a privileged one, marked by a certain difference, this privilege is perhaps somewhat eroded by the ongoing flow of the film; the moment offered by the photograph as it penetrates the film is, after all, not eternal. It, too, will simply melt away into obscurity. Furthermore, it is the only photograph in the film which allows any kind of meaningful engagement with it from within what Mulvey identifies as the ‘present, or remembered, time of the viewing’, that is to say from within the time afforded by the onward progression of the film itself.41 The spectator is thus afforded glimpses of several other photographic images which populate the film, without being fully able to take their measure. There is, of course, a way of extending the confrontation with the image, in order to add to it, in the same way that one might add to the photographic image itself. Certainly the work of Mulvey has focused on how the move from celluloid filmstrip to new digital technology has radically transformed our access to the film text, and with it the notion of spectatorship. The temporal and spatial restrictions which once governed the cinema have been quite literally shattered by the penetration of industrially produced films in digital format into a diverse number of contexts beyond the restrictions of the movie theatre. The film text can now be viewed as never before. It can be dissected, and indeed manipulated, at will; a simple touch of the button will now place the notion of the freeze-frame, once the great secret of the cinematic sect, in the lap of even the most unsuspecting viewer. Likewise, the same touch of a button can shatter the notion of temporal irreversibility which the cinema had made its own as figures are drawn backwards against the very flow of time itself. Therefore, the viewer need no longer rely on the privileged moment of the photograph for a moment of thought and reflection; by simply slowing down or stopping the film altogether – in short, by delaying it – he or she can hope to access moments which would otherwise remain evasive when viewed at the rate of 24 frames a second. Thus, every moment in the film is potentially privileged. As Mulvey observes, ‘to delay a fiction in full flow allows the changed mechanism of spectatorship to come into play’.42

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Equipped with this new technology of cinematic delay, we can return to the site of the photograph in Muriel, drawn almost irresistibly by the promise of a prolonged confrontation with it, in an attempt to locate those troubling elements of the image which escape perception at the normal rate of projection. It is ultimately from within this space of fetishistic and playful return to the image that a more secure reading of the anonymous and depersonalized Cayrolian figure will emerge. In the case of photograph one (4.4), our interest is almost certainly aroused by the mystery surrounding the figure on the front row to the left of the image as the viewer faces it. In particular, the move this figure makes to raise his hands to obscure his face as the photograph is taken shrouds him in uncertainty, thus stimulating our curiosity as a viewer. Our curiosity in the image is arguably further stimulated by the two figures positioned behind him, one over his right shoulder, who extends a comforting hand in his direction, and the other who stands directly behind him, unable to confront the camera with his gaze, which he instead directs nervously downwards. This series of awkward gestures is reproduced in photograph four which emerges as Alphonse flicks through Bernard’s notebook (4.7). Like the first image, this photograph too strikes the viewer with a certain unsettling force; the three male figures seem unable to hold eye contact with each other or direct their gaze towards the camera. It is as though each one exists in an entirely separate photograph. Whilst these gestures certainly remain obscure, they equally resound with Cayrol’s description of the Lazarean figure. Photograph four (4.7) particularly emphasizes the isolation and seclusion of the Cayrolian universe, where the world ‘resembles the world of the camp and its protagonists are its prisoners’.43 Such a reading is equally possible with photograph one (4.4). In particular, the attempts of the nearest figure to conceal his face from the camera and the way in which the figure behind him seems to simply vanish into obscurity amongst those figures who surround him, resonates particularly strongly with the anonymity of the Lazarean figure described by Cayrol. As Cayrol reminds his readers, ‘to be lost in the crowd is a phrase which is not without meaning for him’.44 The two photographs thus provide a visual realization of those very fears announced by Robert where Man simply withdraws to the isolation and seclusion of his own world, as if constrained by ‘a barbed wire perimeter fence around his person’.45 Furthermore, as I have already suggested above, the human face becomes the very site of this anonymity for Cayrol. Just as the Lazarean figure himself is unable to distinguish any defining features from amongst the crowd of now-anonymous faces which he finds before him (‘the individual details of a face vanish before his gaze’), so too are these details absent from his own face.46 This depersonalization is, of course, a legacy of the camps where ‘human disfiguration was taken to its limit: we came to resemble corpses’.47 The violence inflicted upon the human image within the camps is now projected onto the human figure who emerges from them, wearing its legacy like ‘a veil of ambiguity’.48 In the case of photograph one this is immediately visible in the figure on the left of the front row who raises his hands to his face in a gesture to remain anonymous, as if physically disfigured, and of course, as has already been suggested above, the depersonalization and anonymity of the

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human figure is even more considerable in the case of photograph three, where a certain violence is inflicted upon Bernard’s image, removing his face altogether and replacing it by a neutral, dark void. Taken in isolation, the photographs which punctuate Muriel appear to constitute a confusing and seemingly inconsistent array of images, thrown together almost haphazardly. The return to the image in the time and space of the pause does not provide the viewer with knowledge or authority over it but, quite the opposite, places him or her in a state of crisis. As such, the identification of these irregularities amongst these stilled images in Muriel is very much like Barthes’s identification of ‘the third meaning’. Writing in his essay of the same title, Barthes expresses a profound interest in the still, filmic fragment as a means of acquiring a new access to the images of cinema that the normal time of the projection would not ordinarily allow; ‘whence the interest, for me, of the photogram’.49 Indeed, it is in his confrontation with the still fragments of Eisenstein’s film that Barthes identifies a layering of meaning within the images of cinema not dissimilar from his distinction between a ‘studium’ and a ‘punctum’ in the photograph. Much like his interpretation of the system of signs within the photograph, Barthes’s reading of the filmic fragment is split between those signs which reside within the symbolic order of culture and language, and those which reside outside in an affective space beyond language and meaning: Obvious means moving ahead, which is just the case with this meaning, which seeks me out … As for the other, the third meaning, the one which appears ‘in excess’, as a supplement my intellection cannot quite absorb, a meaning both present and fugitive, apparent and evasive, I propose calling it the obtuse meaning.50 When taken collectively as a kind of Benjaminian constellation, however, the images are able to interact dialectically, to speak to one another. It is precisely through this language of dialectics, as one image is brought into dialogue with another, that the pervasive nature of the Cayrolian themes of isolation, anonymity, and even physical disfigurement becomes apparent. As Barthes himself suggests, even when located only in a few images, the presence of an altogether more obtuse, third, meaning becomes ‘an imperishable signature, like a seal which endorses the entire work’.51 The process of viewing the film through these mechanisms of delay therefore very much resembles Benjamin’s observations on the activity of the material historiographer. Just as Benjamin suggests that we brush history itself against the grain, breaking down its strictly linear temporality, stopping the film involves working against the natural progression of the narrative which, in the inherently linear format to which it is restricted, sees the succession of one moment by another, rather than their dialectical collision. It is only by stopping the text, and bringing these moments into contact with those other moments which surround it, but which would otherwise remain distant, that these images realize the full extent of their dialectic potential. As Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project:

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If new mechanisms of delay allow the viewer to accentuate and prolong that already privileged moment when the photograph penetrates the film text, then with these new tools of cinematic dissection ready at their disposal the viewer is equally free to wander over the film text at his or her leisure, slowing down the images, pausing, in short accentuating moments ‘that would be impossible to perceive at 24 frames per second and can only be discovered in the “playful” process of repetition and return’.53 It is therefore in very same spirit of ‘playful’ return that I cast my own look as a viewer of Muriel beyond those moments offered by the photograph to the text at large, slowing the film down, watching it at an almost tedious rate, delaying the image to discover the secrets it potentially conceals. Of course, sometimes this implies merely re-watching those elements identified on first viewing in a prolonged tedium. However, occasionally this tedium is shattered by that moment which ignites the screen with the flash of the dialectical image. In the case of Muriel, this flash once again brings the viewer into contact with Cayrol’s Lazarean figure. The first of these potentially lost moments lies amongst the final set of blackand-white photographs which emerge during Alphonse’s search of Bernard’s room. The shot in question shows four photographic images piled one on top of the other, the top image, the only one clearly visible, showing the three male figures already discussed above (4.7). However, what is of interest here has little to do with the photographic image in this instance. Rather our decomposition of the shot should continue to its far right-hand edge and to the number of staring faces gathered there. These faces form part of a drawing which lies partially obscured by the photograph and papers which lie on top of it. It is no doubt at first devalued simply by the presence of the photograph which captures the attention of the viewer. Indeed, viewed according to the perspective offered initially by the film, the figures form little more than a disturbing presence at the edges of the frame. However, by pausing and rotating the image, the hidden dominance of these figures as they stare imposingly over the top of the photographs becomes apparent (4.8). The rows of staring, expressionless faces which confront the viewer in the extended time of delay are reminiscent of Cayrol’s description of the Lazarean figure when he writes ‘it is always a crowd that the Lazarean figure sees before him, even in the most simple face … a face multiplies endlessly under the gaze of the concentrationary figure’.54 Imposing, and seemingly obvious once seen within the reconfigured time of the

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Rotating the image from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films).

pause, this drawing would almost certainly go unnoticed when viewed at 24 frames per second. Thus, these faces, hidden at the very edges of the image, once again place the anonymous and depersonalized human figure at the very heart of Muriel, inscribing it in its most hidden of moments. The second of these potentially lost moments arises during the section of the film which shows Bernard’s own footage from Algeria. Once again, it is only by slowing down the film that it becomes discernible. About 30 seconds into the film, just after some seemingly mundane images of soldiers firing their weapons, the image jumps abruptly. This sudden jump is perhaps difficult to distinguish at first as it is disguised amongst the graininess of the image; it appears simply as a flicker or a blemish, just like countless others which pepper this ‘home video with its rough, clumsy movements’.55 Indeed, the moment in question is preceded by a similar jump in the image where the image of a man firing his rifle is repeated twice. However, this blemish, which at first appears simply as a sudden flash, an abrupt assault on the senses which is impossible to place, does just enough to draw attention, to stimulate the desire for a playful return to it. When slowed way beyond the rate of normal projection, an extreme-close up of a male figure lighting a cigar dominates the screen (4.9).

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The unexplained figure concealed in the grain of the image from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films).

Seen with this newly afforded clarity, the image is still certainly not easy to place. There is something almost troubling about it; it does not seem consistent with those images which surround it. However, unlike the previous drawing, this image can potentially be integrated within the themes of torture and human disfiguration which pervade the narrative of Muriel. The huge cigar which protrudes from the figure’s mouth links the image with Bernard’s description of the torture of Muriel, which provides a kind of off-screen voice-over to accompany the images we see. He narrates as follows: ‘Robert lights a cigarette. He approaches her … with blood staining her body and hair … burns on her chest’.56 O’Brien also alludes to the significance of the cigarette in her reading of the film, which she suggests ‘provides shots of both Hélène and Alphonse crushing out their cigarettes or cigars in the way that Robert did upon Muriel’s body’.57 This reading could arguably be extended even further to include the opening sequence of the film where the only exception to a whole series of still-frame shots comes at shot 4, with a pan from left to right, and then the reverse pan from right to left. This panning movement of the camera follows the movement of a cigarette from Hélène’s side to her mouth, and then obsessively follows its movement back again (4.10 and 4.11). In one sense, therefore, the significance of this hidden figure lies precisely in the fleeting engagement between image and narration provided by the cigar which emerges from his mouth. Indeed, the images of the home movie are noted for their lack, for the absence of any images of the torture itself, which is instead displaced from visual to audio track in the form of Bernard’s commentary. Therefore, unlike the other images of the home movie, which seem to have little or nothing to do with the scene of torture being described by Bernard, here the film appears to anchor its images momentarily in the commentary, a fleeting reference at most, perhaps.58 In doing so, however, this image also rhymes with the other images of violence and human disfiguration which, as this analysis has demonstrated, pervade the film on a level simply not accessible from within the normal rate of projection. The

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4.10 and 4.11 Close-up: the attention to the cigarette in the opening sequence from Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963, Argos Films). image thus constitutes one of the many possible moments which support a Lazarean reading of the film. If the themes of isolation, anonymity and physical disfigurement are initially visible in a first enticing encounter with the photograph and the dark hole which replaces Bernard’s face, then they can be more substantially supported by a playful return to the text from within the mechanisms of cinematic delay. Mobilizing this playful and ultimately critical gaze reveals that Cayrol’s Lazarean figure migrates throughout the film, re-emerging not just within other photographic images, but within some of its most hidden moments, revealed only by the altered politics of the pause. The migration of this figure across the landscape of the film thus becomes indicative of its migration beyond the narrow confines of the barbed-wire perimeter fence across the landscape of our modernity. Our identification of the ‘Lazarean protagonist’ in Muriel ou le temps d’un retour thus allows us to perceive the themes of torture, violence and physical disfigurement beyond the post-colonial context of the Algerian war to which the film would initially seem to restrict them, towards a more global understanding of them as the persistence of the concentrationary threat as it returns across different times and different sites of historical violence.

5 SYMBOL RE-FORMATION Concentrationary Memory in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After Nicholas Chare

Imagination is the first luxury of the body receiving sufficient nourishment, enjoying a margin of free time, possessing the rudiments from which dreams are fashioned. Charlotte Delbo1 Aftertaste For the French résistante and writer, Charlotte Delbo (1913–85) the action of imagining, of forming a mental concept for what is not actually present to the senses, requires food and leisure.2 Delbo’s trilogy of memoirs Auschwitz et après, translated as Auschwitz and After, which detail Delbo’s experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück and afterwards, reveal that imagination was a luxury seldom afforded to inmates in the concentration camps.3 Theirs was a life grounded in material reality, in constant physical experience, rather than flights of fancy. This is revealed clearly, for example, in Delbo’s descriptions of her experience of thirst. In the first of these accounts she writes that ‘reason is able to overcome almost anything, but it succumbs to thirst’.4 Thirst – the vehement wish to drink – quashes logical thought. It does more than this, however, also disappointing and suppressing the imagination. The discussion of thirst begins by contrasting thirst as it is imagined in children’s literature, the tale of the parched explorer lost in arid sands who is eventually saved by water from a caravan train, with the dipsetic reality of Auschwitz. The story unfolding in the camps differs from the narrative structure of the desert fantasies consumed in childhood in that salvation never arrives. There is never satiation, only unremitting frustration: ‘the thirst of the morning and the thirst of the evening, the thirst of the day and the thirst of the night’.5 The story from

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infancy, the template of thirst as exceptional experience carried into adulthood, cannot adequately express the lived reality of thirsting. In the literary forerunner, thirst is a precursor to satisfaction. It forms the middle of a story, an episode on a journey to deliverance. Thirst as pictured in such tales of the desert, literary thirst, is what previously stood in for the experience for Delbo, imagined it for her. It was envisaged as an exotic, far away need, distant from the everyday in which the word is used lightly: ‘There are people who say, “I’m thirsty.” They step into a café and order a beer’.6 These people, as will be returned to later, do not know thirst as the survivors of Auschwitz do. They only know the word, a particular kind of symbol, which stands for it – ‘thirst’. Delbo, by contrast, has moved beyond words. Her knowledge of thirst is, first and foremost, physical. In Auschwitz, she experienced thirst through her mouth, by way of its incapacity to speak: ‘a mouth cannot form words when it is dry, with no saliva’.7 In the mouth that thirsts ‘cheeks are glued to teeth, the tongue is hard, stiff, the jaws locked’.8 The orifice that contributes to the formation of words seizes up. It asserts its presence through this solidifying. Delbo runs her finger across her gums to feel the dryness of her mouth.9 This action, a kind of reality check, is prompted by the unusual condition in which she finds herself. Thirst, in this instance, assumes the status of a kind of pain, what Elaine Scarry has referred to as ‘a shrill sentience’.10 For Scarry, physical pain, bodily hurt, destroys language whilst foregrounding the corporeal. She writes of the process of torture that what it does: … is to split the human being into two, to make emphatic the ever present but, except in the extremity of sickness and death, only latent distinction between a self and a body, between a ‘me’ and ‘my body’. The ‘self ’ or ‘me,’ which is experienced on the one hand as more private, more essentially at the centre, and on the other hand as participating across the bridge of the body in the world, is ‘embodied’ in the voice, in language. The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it.11 Delbo’s thirsting deprives her of voice, of the ability to articulate herself. It also creates a schism of the kind described by Scarry. To her companions, Delbo appears to have lost her mind: there is no longer a glimmer of awareness in her eyes.12 In their eyes, her muteness, her lack of expressivity, signals her loss of self. This is, indeed, how Delbo retrospectively describes the condition in which she was, writing that ‘it took me a long time later on to explain that, without being blind, I saw nothing. All my senses had been abolished by thirst’.13 The only sensation of which Delbo was capable was pain, a painful wish to drink. The mind narrows in outlook as the body demands that basic needs are satisfied. In her thirst, Delbo still thinks but in silent, singular terms dictated by a want of water. It is only after she drinks that her voice returns. In one instance, desperate to quench her thirst, Delbo breaks ranks from a work detail and runs to a brook to fill her tin cup with water. She then rejoins the marching

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column and drinks: ‘it is not swampy water, but it tastes of rotting leaves, and I feel the taste in my mouth even today as soon as I think of this water, even when I do not think of it’.14 After Auschwitz, the taste of this water remains as a sensory remembrance that appears separable from thought. The taste is seemingly not summoned by mental action but simply appears; it returns at certain moments. It is difficult to know what to call this revenant sapor. If it is a concentrationary memory, it is of the underlying kind that Delbo calls deep memory in which ‘sensations remain intact’.15 Deep memory, the memory of the senses, is contrasted with external or intellectual memory, the memory connected with thought processes.16 The taste that resurfaces after Auschwitz, however, is not a recollection. If memory is conceived of as similar to imagination in that it also involves conceiving of something that is absent (specifically the past) as present, then the taste of rotten leaves does not fit such a description. It does not stand in for the past event of drinking. It forms a trace of it. The actual experience is engrained in Delbo’s mouth. It is not really taste Delbo is talking about here. It is more a sense of texture, the feel of tiny fragments of vegetation clogging the lining of the mouth: ‘once again the paste of rotting leaves petrified into mortar fills my dry mouth. It is not even a bitter taste. When you taste bitterness it is because you have not lost the sense of taste, it means you still have saliva in your mouth’.17 Deep memory is seemingly not memory at all. It is the perpetually present residue of experience. It does not substitute for but is a part of: a lessening sensory intensity that carries unbroken across time. The sensations Delbo accrued at Auschwitz cannot be replaced by words. The failure of language in the face of the concentrationary experience is a recurring theme in Auschwitz and After. Delbo writes that subsequent to her return from the camps she saw through words, their ‘banality, conventionality, emptiness’.18 She found herself bereft of imagination and of the capacity for explanation.19 In spite of this, however, she wrote. There is a tension in Auschwitz and After between a belief in the failings of language in the face of extreme experience and a faith in writing’s ability to catch or contain something of that experience. The trilogy strives to memorialize and vehicle sensations such as thirst whilst also foregrounding the impossibility of doing so. As discussed earlier, Delbo exposes the inadequacy of descriptions of thirst offered by children’s books, the failure of the literary imagination. This is, however, followed shortly afterwards by her resorting to the familiar trope of the desert in order to describe thirsting at roll call: ‘My eyes see nothing but the brook, far in the distance, the brook I am severed from by the roll call which takes longer than crossing the Sahara’.20 The very model of thirst, which Delbo has previously labelled as deficient, ineffective, is now being deployed. This recourse to a medium, the written word, and to techniques, here the desert metaphor, which are simultaneously dismissed, can be explained by the assertion, either by Delbo or her friend Gilberte, that ‘the survivor must undertake to regain his memory, regain what he possessed before: his knowledge, his experience, his childhood memories, his manual dexterity and his intellectual faculties, sensitivity, the capacity to dream, imagine, laugh’.21 In this context, writing – the process of composition – assumes a powerful therapeutic role. It permits the writer to

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remember their capacity for creativity, their imaginative faculty. Writing enables survivors such as Delbo to return from what Edith Wyschogrod describes as the language-destroying death-world of the camps and to reclaim their place in the lifeworld of the everyday.22 Auschwitz and After, however, also simultaneously provides the reader with insights into the psychic effects of the concentrationary environment upon camp inmates. It is these effects that the act of writing seeks to redress. They are best explained by turning to Hanna Segal’s ideas about symbol formation. In what follows these ideas about symbolization will be outlined at some length and then their pertinence for understanding Delbo’s project explained. Symbol formation In Dream, Phantasy and Art, Hanna Segal writes that it ‘is only with the advent of the depressive position, the experience of separateness, separation and loss, that symbolic representation comes into play’.23 The symbol, that which stands for, represents, or denotes something else, requires separation, the establishment of distance and difference, in order to be. The symbol represents a thing. It is not the thing itself but the thing refashioned. In her essay ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’, Segal distinguishes between two forms of symbol, a ‘symbol proper’, which has attained this requisite distance and difference, and a ‘symbolic equation’, in which the symbol-substitute ‘is felt to be the original object’.24 The symbolic equation is not recognized as different from the thing it should represent, it is, instead, perceived to be that thing. It lacks the separateness necessary for it to be seen as a symbol proper. The symbol proper can productively be related to Delbo’s idea of intellectual memory and the symbolic equation to her idea of deep memory. As a way of illustrating the distinction between these two forms of perception of symbols in ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’, Segal provides the example of two patients who play the violin. Her first example is of a schizophrenic. This patient feels his violin to be his penis and has, therefore, ceased to play it as to do so, would, for him, literally be to masturbate. The second patient, who also plays the violin, recognizes, through his associations to fiddling and masturbating, that a violin he dreamt he was playing ‘represented his genital’.25 In his dream playing the violin denoted masturbation. Segal explains that the ‘main difference between the way that the first and second patients used the violin as the symbol for the male genital was not that in one case the symbol was conscious and in the other unconscious, but that in the first case it was felt to be the genital, and in the second to represent it’.26 For the second patient, who kept his distance, the violin was not the penis. It was a symbolic substitute for it. He was mindful of the gap between the object he dreamt of and what he associated it with, of the gap between being and representing. This second violinist observed his violin in a dream. Dreams are, predominantly, visual phenomena although they also sometimes possess an acoustic dimension. They very seldom involve senses such as touch, smell and taste.27 These last three senses, olfaction, gustation and tactility, could fairly be referred to as intimate in that they frequently involve contact between two bodies: a soft, sweet segment of orange being savoured in a mouth, for example, or a warm, giving hand clasping another.28

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Dreams usually privilege the senses that operate at a distance and, therefore, work to maintain detachment. The dream itself is, of course, only perceptible as oneiric if a certain level of mental disengagement has been achieved. For the dream to be recognized as dream a recognition of its distinction from waking life is required. It can be, in a sense, a representation of waking life. This is not to deny that the dream has a reality of its own but Segal’s dreamer realizes that the violin he played in his dream was not actual but virtual. The violin in his dream was an imaginary one, a product of mental life, of synaptic firings, rather than a material object. Segal’s elaboration of the symbol proper is, therefore, carried out by way of an example that privileges the acoustic and visual and, by extension, distance. The example of the first patient, however, despite an ostensible tactile theme in the reluctance to touch the violin, also has a strong visual element: the patient is afraid of being seen to masturbate. It is this that renders his violin as penis untouchable. He does not wish to come into contact with his violin, his penis, in public. He wants to keep his masturbation out of sight. For reasons of propriety, this requires that he not touch the violin. His emphasis on not being seen masturbating in public does, however, imply that he would not be averse to playing the violin in private. It is the presence of an audience – the possibility of their seeing him touch himself – that fills him with dread. He therefore also recognizes his violin, his penis, as a form of representation. If he were to play with his instrument in public he would be representing himself to that public as someone improper. For the first patient, the violin is felt to be the penis but this penis is still a symbol, a penis coded as a bad object, a symbol of shame. Like the second patient, the first also demonstrates some distancing in his relationship to the symbol. The penis is seen as more than a mere appendage of flesh. Both patients could, therefore, ultimately be said to experience symbols as representations. The first patient can, however, still be distinguished from the second in that the source of his potential shame is actually wood, be it maple, spruce or ebony, coupled with glue and varnish; it is not erectile tissue. The material out of which the symbolic equation is formed is mistakenly identified. In the case of the first patient, wood is mistaken for woody, violin for penis. There is some confusion at the level of objects. Symbolic equations, uncertainties of this kind, usually occur when the infant is in the paranoid-schizoid position.29 In this position, the infant has no concept of a whole person and relates instead to part objects that are split into ideal and persecutory kinds.30 During this period of psychic development or subsequent psychic regression ‘the ego is labile, in a state of constant flux, its degree of integration varying from day to day, or even from moment to moment’.31 The ego integrates through the establishment of provisional distances and differences from its surroundings by way of continual introjections and projections, but these instances of integration are, at least initially, fragile and fleeting for, despite its integrative tendency, the ego can disintegrate ‘under the impact of the death instinct and intolerable anxiety’.32 The anxiety created by day-to-day conditions in the concentration camps led to the production of a psychic state akin to the paranoid-schizoid position and

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a falling to pieces of the ego. After Auschwitz, only gradually did inmates begin to reassume the depressive position. Delbo writes that the survivor Gilberte, for example, upon her return home, initially experienced the furnishings of her house as aggressive objects: ‘Everything became sharp, threatening. I didn’t know what to do to avoid contact with these things that encircled me, attacked me, knocked against me’.33 These persecutory feelings demonstrate that Gilberte is, as if returned to childhood, unable to deal with her own destructive impulses and, like a young infant, has instead projected them into her surroundings. She must once again learn to occupy the depressive position. Writing, as will be discussed later, provides one means of achieving this. First, however, it is necessary to understand how thinking, of which the imaginative exercise that is writing is a facet, becomes possible. Thinking is different from sensory perception although both are bound up with representational encounters. Representations are already present in the paranoid-schizoid position, something Segal implies when she explains that the immature ego of the infant is ‘immediately exposed to the impact of external reality, both anxiety-producing, like the trauma of birth, and life-giving, like the warmth, love and feeding received from its mother’.34 External reality is always already representing itself to the ego either in the form of the chill of anxiety or in the warmth of comfort. Reality is always already coded at an emotive level, one closely bound up with sensation. In a process of differentiation, segments of reality, inner or outer, transitory experiences, are recognized either as things to be loved or to be hated. It seems that in this position these experiences as representations are registered as sensations rather than thoughts. This parallels the way Delbo experienced the taste of the water from the brook described earlier. Events in the camps existed as a series of sensational encounters rather than as interesting episodes leading to contemplative reflection. Thought emerges out of loss, a loss of contact, a degree of separation between mouth and nipple, between want and satisfaction, between sensation and its registration. This implies the infant has some sense of temporality, of passing and returning sensations such as warmth and touch, of cycles of frustration and satisfaction. In ‘A Theory of Thinking’, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion suggests that if the infant’s ‘capacity for toleration of frustration is sufficient the “no-breast” inside becomes a thought and an apparatus for “thinking” develops’.35 In this sense, thought frustrates frustration by filling in for it. It is developed by the psyche through a modification of frustration, a modification of the ‘absent’ breast as a mating of the ‘expectation of a breast’ with ‘a realization of no breast available for satisfaction’.36 If the infant can tolerate frustration sufficiently it develops the cognitive apparatus for thinking that frustration as ‘absent’ breast. Thought then serves to suckle the infant through standing in for this absence. There is, however, a difference between these twin satisfactions of thought and breast; thinking is detached whereas suckling brings together. The thought, ‘no-breast’, is not the breast. It is, like the violin for Segal’s second patient, only a representation of it. Thought as thing and breast as thing are not confused but firmly differentiated, separated, split. If this differentiation cannot be accomplished

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because the infant is incapable of tolerating frustration sufficiently for that frustration to be modified into thought then the frustration has instead to be evaded. As Bion explains, this leads to what ‘should be a thought, a product of the juxtaposition of pre-conception and negative realization’ becoming ‘a bad object, indistinguishable from a thing-in-itself, fit only for evacuation’.37 This thing-in-itself, the bad object, this thought mistakenly perceived as an absent breast, is a symbolic equation. It is a symbolic equation which is sensed to be bad and, therefore, as something to be voided. Gilberte appears to be expelling symbolic equations of this kind in the passage discussed earlier. Like the unthinking infant, she makes judgements about experiences but her judgements are guided by sensations rather than thoughts. The death drive causes distress and is felt to be bad. The feeding breast is gratifying, complying with the drive to satisfy hunger, and felt to be good. Judgements, a kind of symbolism, begin by way of experiences of pleasure and pain: these are the primers of representation. The good and the bad, the pleasurable and the painful, are, however, not yet securely tied to objects. Symbolic equations are excitations that are not yet concretely mapped to things. The absent breast is not thought as such; it simply represents a zone of feeling within reality for the infant. Segal’s first patient has regressed to this infantile state. For him, the violin is as much a source of bad excitation, apprehension, as it is a penis. The desire not to touch it is as much a desire to avoid encountering anxiety as it is a desire to avoid impropriety. This wish to avoid a zone of bad excitation demonstrates that the symbol proper can always be said to carry the residue of a symbolic equation within it. Symbolic equations are formed within the ‘crude phantasy life’ of the infant that ‘can be assumed to exist from birth’.38 The breast as a symbolic equation is, in fact, a phantasized object capable of sating hunger. Primitive phantasies, such as the breast as fulfilling object, ‘derive directly from instincts on the borderline between the somatic and psychical activity’ and ‘are experienced as somatic as well as mental phenomena’.39 Bion’s description of the moment in which thought emerges is, therefore, also a description of the moment in which the somatic is subordinated to the mental, body becoming understudy to mind. In this instant, instincts as ideas, as primitive phantasies that embody frustration and satisfaction, begin to become representations that are stripped of their sensational aspect, their corporal component.40 This stripping, this subordination of the somatic can only ever be partial. As Segal rightly stresses in her Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, ‘no experience in human development is ever cast aside or obliterated’.41 The somatic underside to thought retains the potential to reassert itself in times of regression. This is what has occurred to Segal’s first patient, for whom the violin has become something carnal. It has been reduced to a body of sensations, stripped of its status as symbol proper, of substitution, of thought for thing. The patient has experienced a breakdown at the level of symbolism such that there is a ‘disturbance in differentiation between the symbol and the object symbolized’, which has led ‘to the concrete thinking characteristic of psychosis’.42 The violin has become a penis, or more specifically,

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a bad object, a zone of negative excitations. This object as penis is, of course, a part object. The patient’s fear of public opprobrium should he play (with) his penis suggests that as a part object it is persecutory and, therefore, bad. The patient has lapsed into the paranoid-schizoid position. He relates to part objects and is filled with anxiety. Positioning at Auschwitz I suggest that it is possible to detect a description redolent of this reversion to the paranoid-schizoid position in many survivor testimonies from the Shoah. The experience of the concentration camps was, at times, so intense that the inmates regressed to a psychotic mode of functioning. We could theorize this, following Segal, as their shifting back from the depressive position to a state analogous to the paranoid-schizoid position. This is accompanied by a return to a world of part objects as is illustrated in a passage from Robert Antelme’s The Human Race, in which he describes his time at the Gandersheim. Antelme writes: There’s blood on my shirt, there’s blood on my chest, which is red from scratched bites; scabs are starting to form, I pull them off, and they bleed. I can’t stand it any longer; I’m going to scream. I’m nothing but shit. It’s true: I’m just a piece of shit.43 Antelme’s description of his suppurating body figures his own mental state. His labile ego is also in a state of disintegration. He is collapsing back into the paranoidschizoid position. This collapse manifests itself in the way he employs symbols. He does not feel like shit. He is shit. He represents himself to himself as a partobject–faeces. This part-object is connected with pain: Antelme wants to scream. He has, therefore, identified himself with a bad part-object. The ego has projected its frustration in this extreme situation into the part object that is excrement. The earliest symbols are, for Segal, formed through projective identification. It is by ‘projecting parts of itself into the object and identifying parts of the object with parts of the self ’ that ‘the ego forms its first most primitive symbols’.44 Due to a state of acute anxiety, Antelme’s use of symbolism has reverted to one of symbolic equation. His symbols are representations of zones of excitation, specifically zones of negative excitation, of pain. His ego has disintegrated in order to ward off this pain: ‘in order to avoid suffering anxiety the ego does its best not to exist, an attempt which gives rise to a specific acute anxiety – that of falling to bits and becoming atomized’.45 In fact, the psychoanalyst Victor Frankl, who was an inmate at Auschwitz, recounts ‘a “regression” in the camp inmate – a retreat to a more primitive form of mental life’.46 This reversion can be identified as to the paranoid-schizoid position, a position that does not admit of symbols proper but only of symbolic equations. It is characterized by a surfeit of sensation, the ‘impact of external reality’ described by Segal in her Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein.47 The ego collides with multiple experiences of which it strives to make sense. These experiences, which are registered as either ‘blissful or hellish’,48 are initially of an

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acoustic, tactile and olfactory nature. In the ‘state of chaos’49 that predominates in the first four months of life, comprising relentless waves of internal needs and external stimuli, the visual is less significant than the other senses. In the early stages of infancy the child has no centred vision. The fovea, the pit in our retina that aids the identification of objects in the visual field, does not develop until several months after birth. Sight begins as an objectless blur of shape-shifting excitations. Sight – which works to distance things – is not in the ascendant as the child negotiates the paranoid-schizoid position. The sense and sensory deprivation that assail the ego are registered through touch, the contact or lack of contact with the breast, the warmth of the maternal embrace, the chill of its disappearance, the balmy taste of milk, the empty taste of no milk, the scent of the mother, or the pang of her olfactory absence. The camps were also frequently experienced not primarily through sight but through more proximate senses. Wolfgang Sofsky points out in The Order of Terror that the crowding, which frequently took place in the barracks of the camps, shifted ‘the sensual foundations of social contact’.50 In such a crowded environment the senses ‘of eye and ear, those main organs of social interaction, forfeit[ed] significance to the more proximal senses of touch, heat, and smell’.51 The internee was overwhelmed by the stink of sweat, urine, pus, warm skin (dry or damp with blood or sweat), their neighbours, the unwelcome taste of others, encroachment and he or she experienced intense anxiety. Any sense of detachment, or of secure boundaries was unsettled. Camp inmates were forced to relive the sensory characteristics of the paranoid-schizoid position but this time without the experience of bliss, of pleasure, only in the grip of pain, of hell. In such a situation the role of symbols was drastically reduced. Segal’s work on symbol formation permits us to understand the nature of this reduction. Using Segal’s conception of symbolism it is possible to state that the symbol proper that exists at a distance from things, making sense without obvious recourse to sensation, is replaced in importance by the symbolic equation. The symbol is pared. It is reduced to its early status as a representation of sensation. This state of affairs is ably expressed by Wyschogrod in Spirit in Ashes, in which she writes that in the death-world of the camps, ‘a massive intervention in a takenfor-granted system of meanings’ occurs which leads to ‘new meanings [becoming] affixed to the body through the systematic substitution of pain for the ordinary complex of meanings that constitute our corporeal transactions’.52 The internee is bombarded with things such as thirst which, as symbolic equations, all signal pain. The camps are worlds of persecuting objects. Delbo skilfully communicates the feel of this world in her trilogy Auschwitz and After. When, as discussed earlier, Delbo writes of the experience of thirst, ‘there are people who say “I’m thirsty.” They step into a café and order a beer’: these people are interpreting ‘thirst’ as a symbol proper. It represents a satisfying object, a chilled beer, a cool lemonade, a warm cup of tea. In the camps, however, thirst carries none of these meanings. In Days and Memory, in fact, Delbo writes that the word ‘thirst’ has, for her, been split in two.53 There is the thirst of the camps and there is commonplace thirst. The thirst of the camps is pain. It is frustration. It is the

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affliction of sensory deprivation, of having nothing to sate a physical need. Thirst, the frustration of liquid satisfaction, becomes all encompassing. Delbo’s sense of hearing and sense of sight disappear. She also no longer thinks. She just thirsts. It is useful to quote at relative length from the section on thirst: I’d been thirsty for days and days, thirsty to the point of losing my mind, to the point of being unable to eat since there was no saliva in my mouth, so thirsty I couldn’t speak, because you’re unable to speak when there’s no saliva in your mouth. My parched lips were splitting, my gums were swollen, my tongue a piece of wood. My swollen gums and tongue kept me from closing my mouth, which stayed open like that of a madwoman with dilated pupils in her haggard eyes. At least, this is what others told me, later. They thought I’d lost my mind. I couldn’t hear anything, see anything. They even thought I had gone blind. It took me a long time later on to explain that, without being blind, I saw nothing. All my senses had been abolished by thirst.54 The repetition here of the words ‘mouth’ and ‘tongue’ operates to emphasize a fragmented body, a body experienced as parts rather than as a whole. The mouth and the tongue are no longer present to shape words, to communicate. They now only form part of the painful experience that is thirst. The repetition of the word ‘thirsty’ in the opening sentence reinforces for the reader the primacy of this experience over all others. Thirst, through the absence of saliva that accompanies it, has literally destroyed the capacity for speech, for verbalization. Verbalization is associated with depressive symbolism, with symbols proper developed in the depressive position. It is only once concrete symbolism has been superseded by depressive symbolism that ‘the basis […] laid for further abstraction, including verbalization’.55 Delbo experiences her thirst as a concrete symbol. It is does not represent anything other than the sensation of pain caused by frustration. Thirst is simply bad. This experience of being thirsty represents a regression to the paranoid-schizoid position. In the moment of her thirstiness Delbo is not able to represent herself to herself. She is not able to see herself as a symbol proper. It is only retrospectively through the testimony of others that she is able to reform the experience of thirst through the use of symbols proper, of words describing things rather than words reduced to being things. The word ‘thirst’ at Auschwitz signalled a sensation and nothing beyond that. The word had no sense of detachment from that sensation. It is only after Auschwitz that Delbo is able to begin to use symbols with sufficient separation to represent objects as apart from sensations. Her writing may be read, in the light of Segal’s work on symbol formation, as a kind of symbol reformation, specifically a reforming of proper symbols. It is only through this kind of reformation, which represents a repositioning within the depressive position, that the experience of the camps becomes communicable in the life-world of the present. In this sense, Delbo’s writing can be said to embody the spirit of the symbol in its original sense of symbolon, the symbolon is ‘half of a baton in a relay race, in which one runner passes to the next one the other half of the baton’.56

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Delbo’s writing bridges the gap between the death-world characterized by symbolic equation and the life-world in which the symbol proper is the norm. Her use of symbolism links death-world and life-world.57 This is achieved through a re-finding of the nourishment that is language and, through that, of the capacity to imagine. In Auschwitz and After, however, the imagination is shown to be never wholly absent. It appears fleetingly in dreams and fantasies and is reduced to its sensory aspect: a segment of orange, for example, savoured in the mouth.58 It is this world reduced to sensations that Delbo is able to skilfully bring to the fore in her poetic-prose. The stylistic techniques Delbo employs such as repetition, which is explored here, and also assonance, alliteration, rhyme and rhythm, serve to evacuate words from their sense, to assert their materiality, their status as things, allowing us to taste the words, to savour their textures or their sensuous qualities. Delbo carries symbolic equations into her writing, permitting them to appear alongside symbols proper. This can be understood to perform a therapeutic function and also to provide the reader with an insight into the effect upon the psyche of life within the concentrationary universe.59 In her study on Delbo’s literary style, Nicole Thatcher’s emphasis upon Delbo’s ability to foster conditions in which the reader feels a part of the experiences they are reading about is certainly apt in this last respect.60 Segal’s work on symbol formation allows us to appreciate the way a writer such as Delbo struggles to resolve the impact of the camps upon the self ’s capacity for symbolization as well as contributing to a broader understanding of the way the experience of the camps inflicted upon the inmates a seemingly permanent condition akin to the paranoidschizoid position theorized by Kleinian psychoanalysis. The memories of those who were interned in the camps take, at least initially, a profoundly fragmentary and physical form. They are carnal, concrete and oppressively heavy. The fleshly aspects of these remembrances, as I have argued elsewhere, are something the late poems of Paul Celan come close to embodying.61 His final poems skilfully track the collapsing of language and the assertion of the corporeal experienced by many inmates in the concentration camps.62 Celan’s poems, compressed, dense, forged out of a language over-burdened with sense to the point of non-sense, are anti-lyrical; they are not vehicles for thoughts and sentiments, or for imaginings, but rather they become splinters of extreme feeling. Delbo’s writings differ markedly from this although, as Michael Rothberg notes, their structure echoes the fragmentary perceptions of the camp inmates.63 Delbo’s poetic-prose is unlike Celan’s poetry in that it plots a location, a site in language through which the symbol proper can be re-appropriated. Her prose shows the way towards what we can finally identify as a concentrationary memory. This memory takes the form of a remembrance that attests to the harrowing physical immediacy of the camps without surrendering to it. It functions as a hinge between the devastated language of the death-world (pared to brutal basics, bodily and unimaginative) and the secure language of the life-world. It carries the reader towards the collapse of symbols whilst simultaneously performing its re-forming of the symbol proper. In Delbo’s writing, after Auschwitz, a concentrationary memory emerges in and as this complex negotiation.

6 A NEW VISUAL STRUCTURE FOR THE UNTHINKABLE The Surrealist Aesthetic and the Concentrationary Sublime in Lee Miller’s Photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau Isabelle de le Court

In 1945 the American photographer Lee Miller (1907–77) was working as a war reporter for Vogue magazine in Britain and the United States. She was one of a group of press photographers and war correspondents present in the concentration camps in April 1945. Born in 1907 in America, Lee Miller became an outstanding photographer within the Surrealist movement. Having spent a few years in Egypt (1934–39), she moved to England to join her partner, the Surrealist painter Roland Penrose (1900–84), shortly before the beginning of the Second World War.1 Miller worked in London as a photographer and chronicler for the English Vogue before being accredited as a US war correspondent in December 1942. In 1944 she gave an on-the-spot account of the fighting in Normandy and witnessed the liberation of Paris. In 1945 she reported from Hitler’s house in Munich shortly before the death of the Führer. She then moved on to Buchenwald and Dachau in April 1945. In this chapter I will examine Lee Miller’s photographs taken in Buchenwald and Dachau in 1945, outlining the difficult conditions and subsequent emotional states to which the press photographers were subject while entering and photographing the German camps. I shall not, however, focus on the military photographers, whose assignments were clearly directed by their superiors with a view to maximizing the evidence against the Nazi regime. The press photographers, I shall argue, had more freedom to choose which objects or features of the camp they wished to focus on (in a double sense); this very fact also meant that they encountered the risk of censorship or editing by their employers who had to negotiate the horror in the images with their readership.

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In the case of Lee Miller, my own focus will be shifted towards the fascination her work appears to exhibit for photographing corpses – in the courtyard outside the Crematorium of Buchenwald as well as SS corpses lying in and around the camp of Dachau – and portraits – SS guards and officers kept as prisoners in Buchenwald. David Scherman, a photographer who was working for Life Magazine in 1945, attests to this fascination.2 Taking into consideration Lee Miller’s photographic education within the Surrealist movement – she worked with Man Ray – I will propose that we can recognize in her work in the camps the formation of her images within a surrealist aesthetics, drawing on concepts of ‘automatic image’ and ‘convulsive beauty’, to use André Breton’s terms. I will then propose the concept of a ‘concentrationary sublime’ to capture the distinctive quality of the concentrationary memory her photographs produced. If concentrationary memory suggests a specific form of memory carried by survivors of the concentrationary universe, opening up to a space for extended studies of totalitarian instances, where torture and assault on human dignity played a predominant role, as proposed by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, Miller’s photographs of the camps are better considered as an aesthetic inscription rather than this memory itself. Both convulsive beauty and concentrationary sublime catch the specificity of Miller’s poetics. Hence, not willing to make evidence of the scenes of horror, Miller does not share this orientation towards documentary realism. She does not give horror in excess. Rather, I suggest that she recast a surrealist concept of death in the face of the utter novelty of what she encountered in the concentrationary universe. Buchenwald and Dachau The war correspondents attached to the Allied units who entered the newly liberated German concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau in April 1945 were horrified by the scenes of horror before them.3 Those who took photographs did so in the belief that the photographs they shot in the first days of encounter with the liberated camps would serve as perpetual evidence of the Nazi atrocities. Taking photographs was understood as their duty in order to show the world the extent of the atrocities that had been perpetrated in the camps. It appears that the photographers not only felt an immediate sense of obligation despite the pain they experienced in having continually to gaze upon such scenes that had to be recorded in order to inform the world, but they hoped that their images would stand in perpetuity as evidence. Far away, in California, a very young Susan Sontag had her own first encounter with photographs of the camps of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen in a bookshop in Santa Monica in July 1945. She later described that moment as a ‘negative epiphany’.4 In their testimonies to their experiences, the war photographers variously affirmed that they found the experience of encountering the scenes in the camps almost unbearable. Faced with mass death and carnage they had to force themselves to continue their task. Sometimes, as Margaret Bourke White attests, they used their cameras as a barrier between themselves and what they were obliged to photograph.5

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We know neither exactly when Lee Miller arrived at the camp of Buchenwald, which was liberated on 11 April 1945, nor how long she stayed there. In her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Lee Miller, Kriegskorrespondentin für Vogue: Fotografien aus Deutschland 1945’, Katharina Menzel-Ahr estimates, through an examination of Miller’s negatives from Buchenwald that show a visit to the camp of German civilians from the neighbouring town of Weimar, that Miller was probably there on 16 April.6 The camp of Buchenwald, located outside Weimar, was built in 1937, and became one of the largest concentration camps on German territory. It is estimated that 238,380 people were interned there between 1937 and 1945 and, of that number, 56,000 died. It was a camp designated for Vernichtung durch Arbeit – destruction through labour – and many inmates fell prey to malnutrition, disease, exhaustion and arbitrary SS or Kapo violence as well as horrific medical experimentation. It was liberated by a detachment of troops belonging to the US 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, US 6th Armored Division, and US Third Army on 11 April 1945. Miller’s time in Dachau, outside Munich, is better documented and took place on 30 April 1945, the day after its liberation by the 42nd and 43rd American Armored Divisions. Dachau was the first camp built in Germany in 1933 and its primary purpose was to hold Communists and other opponents of the Nazi regime. Miller gives a picturesque description from her Baedecker guide book of the outskirts of Dachau, ironically naming her journey in Germany during the Liberation as ‘my fine Baedecker tour of Germany’: Just outside of a picturesque town, it was typical of all great Nazi concentration camps, a large barracks area of oblong buildings. Half of the camp was a permanent billet for SS troops, the remainder for starved, half crazed prisoners.7 More details are to be found in Miller’s letter sent together with her report to London: Dave Scherman and I took off from Dachau to go look for the war front which seemed a mirage of cleanliness and humanity. The sight of the blue and white striped tatter shrouding the bestial death of the hundreds of starved and maimed men and women had left us gulping for air and violence, and if Munich, the birthplace of this horror was falling we’d like to help.8 Although Miller was clearly horrified by sight of the camps, her photographs reveal a fascination with the exceptional scenes of death and starvation in front of her. According to Scherman in a letter to Antony Penrose, Lee Miller’s son, dated 1993, she was first shocked then angry at the Nazi regime, before turning her anger into a visual attention to the specific subjects she then started to shoot. Scherman describes Miller’s reaction in these terms: My point is that Lee, far from having an emotional breakdown and crying into her friend’s arms, was in seventh heaven. This was a journalist’s finest hour;

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a story worth crossing Europe for. This was to Lee proof of all the bestiality she had been exposed to since 1939. This was a scoop of huge proportions – rotting corpses piled like cord-wood around the living-quarters. Trusties loading naked bodies with arms and legs stuck out every which way, onto big carts. The prevailing colour was the bluish pink of death. If she had any emotional reaction at all it was almost orgasmic excitement over the magnitude of the story. She was, in her quiet, methodical, practical way, in seventh heaven, shooting a scoop. When, as a journalist, do you get the chance to shoot as fast as you can, left and right, and make a horrible, exciting, historic picture? The emotional breakdown, if any was in the subsequent let down after the high of Dachau, and a week later, the burning of the Berghof. The let-down of no ‘more hot, fast-breaking story’.9 I am not convinced that Miller’s reaction would have been as cheerful and positive as Scherman makes out. On the contrary, what appears between the lines of Scherman’s letter is what many war photographers would later report regarding their personal emotional state on that day: they had to concentrate on their work to help them keep photographing. Margaret Bourke-White, another war photographer at the time, described her own work in the camps of Erla and Buchenwald and how she used her stupor as a veil to her mind: I was telling myself that I would believe the indescribably horrible sight in the courtyard before me only when I had a chance to look at my own photographs. Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me.10 […] In photographing the murder camps, the protective veil was so tightly drawn that I hardly knew what I had taken until I saw prints of my own photographs. […] It was as though I was seeing these horrors for the first time. […] An atrocity like this demanded to be recorded. As difficult as these things may be to report of to photograph, it is something we must do. […] Our obligation is to pass it on to others.11 The objects and places within the camps that later became iconic emblems of both the concentrationary and exterminationary universes such as the gas chambers, crematoria and the barbed-wire fencing did not attract Miller’s eye. She did photograph the ovens of the crematorium in the concentration camp of Buchenwald, used for disposing of the dead, in two photographs,12 one picturing an entire wall against which the ovens were aligned, the second being a detail of an oven still containing some human remains. Miller may not have felt the need to photograph such sights again in Dachau, where there were four gas chambers used for fumigating the inmates while some historical evidence suggests that one may have also been homicidal.13 It is not known if she photographed any of them, but she did describe the disinfection/fumigation chambers in an unpublished note:

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The gas chambers look like their titles, written over the doors, ‘Shower Bath’, where the elected victims having shed their clothes walked in innocently, to be bathed and deloused […] leaving their prison clothes behind them and turning on the taps of the bath, killed themselves. Thereby saving the SS the stigma of being murderers.14 A further explanation for the absence of any images of the gas or disinfection chambers in Miller’s photographs is that her employers, Vogue, had made it clear to her that the magazine was not interested in publishing pictures of ‘torture chambers’. Her response to this restriction was as follows: I’ve seen several, Ohrdruf [a satellite of Dachau liberated earlier than Dachau] among them, now there will be Penig and I suppose the prisoner of war camp at Nuremberg. I don’t take any pictures of these things usually as I know you wont (sic) use them. DONT (sic) THINK FOR THAT REASON THAT EVERY TOWN AND EVERY AREA ISNT (sic) RICH WITH THEM; EVERY COMMUNITY has its big concentration camps, some like this for torture, and extermination […] well, wont (sic) write about it now […] just read the daily press and believe every word of it.15 The barbed-wire fence became, in its way, representative of the camps, particularly perhaps because of the lethal consequences of the gesture of touching it because the wires were often electrified. This is shown in a photograph from Mauthausen (1942) representing a dead Kapo trapped by the barbed-wire fence.16 In a much reproduced photograph by Bourke-White from Buchenwald in 1945,17 former prisoners finally dare to touch the fence, and thus symbolically succeed in defying death. Barbed wire occurs, however, only once in Miller’s photographs and when it does the de-electrified barbed-wire fence appears awkwardly devoid of its lethal potential. It is being innocently used by the former prisoners to hang the clothes they could finally wash (6.1). Photographs of corpses, Buchenwald In Buchenwald, Miller focused particularly on a pile of former prisoners’ corpses lying outside the crematorium, shooting it from different angles in three takes. The two most powerful images of this subject are close-ups taken slightly above or looking straight into the pile (6.2). In these photographs the bodies are so tightly intermingled that it is quite difficult for the spectator to identify an entire body between the tangle of different heads, arms and legs. The viewer is confronted in the foreground with the gaze of a corpse still expressing its pain. In the second image, we encounter a head symmetrically framed by a pair of legs. The spectator has no possible way of escaping the horror. By taking such details of the mountain of bodies, Miller succeeds in inciting horror in the spectator. In these two particular photographs, Miller utilizes three main compositional devices typical of the photographs of the camps, as analysed by Barbie Zelizer in her book Remembering to Forget: The ‘composition of the

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6.1

Lee Miller, Prisoners Scavenge on the Camp Rubbish Dump, Dachau, Germany, 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www. leemiller.co.uk.

6.2

Lee Miller, Pile of Prisoners bodies, Buchenwald, Germany 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www.leemiller.co.uk.

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gaze’ (in this case the unseeing eyes of the dead); the ‘placement’ (the photographer’s decision where to place evidence of atrocity between foreground and background) and the ‘number’ (the photos oscillating between pictures of the few and pictures of the many).18 Seeing Miller’s compositions in the context of this set of photographic conventions identified by Zelizer, we can see that Miller mainly photographed the few whilst laying the atrocity as much as possible in the foreground. In Dachau, Miller particularly focused on the train found outside the camp: 39 wagons containing corpses in an advanced stage of decomposition, which had probably arrived two days earlier from Buchenwald. The Allies counted 2,310 corpses.19 Miller portrayed not only victims, but also former perpetrators, all lying down either in or around the train. Other subjects in Miller’s photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau are the SS men kept in the camp by their former detainees or lying dead in the immediate surroundings of the camps. Ten photographs from Buchenwald display these former perpetrators; nine photographs picturing the same subject were shot in Dachau.20 Miller is the only known photographer to have taken pictures of these men who were kept in cells within the camps and guarded by the Allies.21 Menzel-Ahr notes that none of these photographs display a direct confrontation between ex-prisoners and ex-German guards. The loss of power and the now powerless status of the SS appear in a very obvious way, as exemplified in one photograph depicting two Germans on their knees in a small cell.22 Nonetheless, another photograph also portrays a German provoking the photographer by greeting her with the Nazi salute.23 Five further photographs show a German who committed suicide by hanging himself on a radiator. Miller chose to frame the scene in terms of head and torso, a framing that exaggerates details such as the blood on his face and the tongue hanging out of his mouth (6.3). Miller does not seem to have shown any interest in the identity of those she photographed; for this reason she does not provide any accurate archival material in terms of a purely documentary kind. Her rage against the Nazis increased according to what she saw and she just assumed that this man ‘[…] had enough of everything and hanged himself sitting down by tying a string to the radiator’.24 Even beyond the state of death of this German, Miller still criticizes the fact that his aspect greatly contrasted to the emaciated corpses of former prisoners lying outside: ‘He was taken out on a stretcher, stripped and thrown on a heap of bony cadavers where he looked shockingly big, the well-fed bastard.’25 Among her photographs of dead Germans in Dachau, some still wearing SSuniforms, others not, three were taken next to the train from Buchenwald. One depicts two soldiers lying on a wagon, two people who have presumably been beaten to death, judging by the blood on the face of the soldier on the right.26 In this picture, the frame of the photograph is perfectly reinforced by the frame formed by the doors of the wagon. A group of three German men lying dead by a fence were also the subject of four of Miller’s photographs, two of the men still wearing their SS uniforms. One is a depiction of revenge from former prisoners, showing a man lying dead, covered

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Lee Miller, Suicided SS prison guard, Buchenwald, Germany, 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www.leemiller. co.uk.

with blood, the stick that was probably used to kill him lying across his lower body.27 But the most challenging pictures of dead SS men are two photographs that are coloured by a poetic aesthetic, an issue to which I will return in due course. The first photograph displays a young German, lying next to the fence, still properly dressed in his uniform and who seems to be sleeping on his side, his arms out to the left.28 Neither wound nor blood are to be seen. Only the sharp, small stones on which he lies and perhaps the map next to him may attest to his death. Miller portrays him in a quiet and poetic way which is quite similar to another photograph taken a few weeks earlier in Leipzig, The Bürgermeister of Leipzig’s Daughter Suicided, representing a young woman lying dead on a sofa in the town hall of Leipzig. The second picture represents an SS guard – recognizable by his warm coat, even if no Nazi insignia are to be seen on his clothes – floating dead in the Canal near the camp in Dachau (6.4). Miller explains the context of these two photographs:

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Lee Miller, Dead SS Guard floating in the canal beside camp, Dachau, Germany 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www. leemiller.co.uk.

There were dozens of SS lying around killed in the battle and by the uprising of prisoners themselves. The small canal bordering the camp was a floating mess of SS, in their spotted camouflage suits and nail studded boots … they slithered along in the current, along with a dead dog or two and smashed rifles. Prisoners and soldiers tried to fish some of the bodies out.29 Publication of the photographs of the camps In terms of imagery, the photographs of the camps at their liberation in 1945 mark a new moment in the iconography and strategies for the representation of atrocities. As Clément Chéroux puts it in his study Représenter l’horreur [Representing Horror]: In the history of representation, the images of Nazi camps in effect mark the transgression of a certain number of limits, in the sense that this term defines at once the place of the transgressions and the lowest depths of such a transgression … The discovery of the camps corresponds to the initial photographic registration of mass death as well as to the tragic inventions of a veritable ‘photogénie’ of the charnel house.30

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From their first publication in the press, the photographs were taken to be more important than the accompanying text published with them. Worse still, some photographic material from the liberation of one camp was used to illustrate an article on the liberation of another. This shows how, amidst the overwhelming sight of such horror, little attention was given to accurate identification of place and date of the photographs, thus rendering the attempt to make an association between time and place with the photographs even more difficult, as Zelizer argues: In using many of the shots already presented in the daily press, the picturemagazines were instrumental in recycling a certain visualization of atrocity. This was central to consolidating the importance of photography, even if picture-magazine played a secondary role. The combined presentation of many familiar images renewed their power. Impact, then, had as much to do with the repeated presentation of certain photographs as with the informative news value of any one image.31 To illustrate this process of loss of informational value, I would like to take the example of one photograph first published in 1945 by the French Ministry for Information. The simple legend of this photograph only indicated ‘Dachau’.32 The same image, conserved by a French association of former detainees, has the following caption: Be careful with the use of this image. It does not come from Dachau / Convoy departed from Gross-Rosen, arrived at Nordhausen at the end of February 1945 /torn to pieces by shelling on the fourth of April / corpses stayed in the wagon / photographed by American services 15 and 16 of April 1945. The corpse is that of Louis Joriman …33 In a third interpretation, a Parisian press agency which was also in possession of an image of the same corpse, but photographed from another angle, indicates that the photograph represents ‘a mass grave from the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen’. Only a further study of the negatives of the same series taken by Eric Schwab and kept at the France Press Agency allows us to state unequivocally that this picture represents a corpse from the train standing outside Dachau.34 The danger arising from such variations of identification and lack of consistency with verified identifications of the contents and locations of images is that it has assisted those who would deny the full horror of the Nazi camps and genocidal programme. In Miller’s case, however, she encountered a specific set of problems in persuading her employers to publish her war photographs at all. Vogue had difficulties in general in adapting its editorial standards to the conditions of war, and even during the London Blitz its pages were still reporting on the latest fashion. In an editorial dated September 1939, one can read an explanation of the attitude of the magazine towards the war:

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Our policy is to maintain the standards of civilisation. We believe that a woman’s place is Vogue’s place. And women’s first duty, as we understand it is to preserve the arts of peace by practising them, so that in happier time they will not have fallen into disuse […] British Vogue found this to be true in the dark years of 1914 to 1918, during which it was born and throughout which it mirrored women’s many sided activities so, once more, we raise the carry-on signal as a banner.35 Miller’s first published report from Normandy on the Siege of Saint-Malo in 1944 would change this. Nonetheless, only one photograph of the many taken of the Nazi victims was published in her report on Dachau and Buchenwald, entitled ‘Believe it’ in June 1945. The English editor-in-chief Audrey Withers justified this choice by underscoring the fact that: ‘The mood then was jubilation. It seemed unsuitable to focus on horror.’36 Another reaction, that of Edna Chase, editor-in-chief of the American branch of the magazine, describes more accurately the attitude towards Miller’s reports: In horror and cold rage Miller gazed upon the tortured dead of Buchenwald and sent us home her photographs. We hesitated a long time and held many conferences deciding whether or not to publish them. In the end we did and it seemed right. In the world we were trying to reflect in our pages the wealthy, the gently bred, the sophisticated were quite as dead as the rest of human kind.37 The publication of Miller’s photographs from the camps were, however, edited and cropped by Vogue in ways that are problematic, as we can see if we compare the original photographs to the images published in both American and English Vogue. Miller’s photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau were severely cropped and reframed by the magazine (6.5). In this photo spread, Miller’s photographs are published in a blurred and highly darkened black and white. More troubling is the way that Miller’s images are inserted into the text, which removes part of their power and impact. Even if the magazine finally accepted her chronicle ‘Believe it’ for publication in June 1945, its interventionist reframing of image and text had the result of reducing it to a fait divers, directly followed by an article reporting on the growing fashionability of barbecuing in California. Surrealist aesthetic Thus, if Lee Miller’s photographs are atypical in terms of their subject matter and suffered in the manner in which they were finally published in an equally unexpected site for representations of a new kind of encounter with atrocity and mass death, is it possible to read these photographs as producing a distinctive aesthetic form of concentrationary memory that draws the pre-war surrealist aesthetic in which she had worked into confrontation with real horror? If I aim to frame Miller’s work

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Believe It, Vogue, New York, June 1945. © Condé Nast Publications Ltd. Courtesy Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www. leemiller.co.uk.

through invoking the Surrealist aesthetic, it is necessary to remind ourselves initially of how Surrealism’s founder André Breton defined Surrealism in his first Manifesto of 1924: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual function of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.38 Surrealism made its own the concept of ‘automatic image’, a process derived from automatic writing, a technique used in psychiatric departments in the nineteenth century. If Breton, as a writer, refers to automatism while speaking about his writing task, art historian Rosalind Krauss linked the term ‘automatic image’ to the process of photography, using the Greek etymology of ‘photography’, meaning to ‘write with light’.39 Surrealism played a role in the work of Miller before she encountered the scenes in Buchenwald and Dachau. I am, therefore, arguing that during that encounter, certain scenes imposed themselves upon her in these camps. In a Surrealist-inspired practice, the photographer does not actively look for the subject of his/her photographs; instead, the photographic signifier claims

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the photographer’s attention itself, acting like a ‘found object’. This might account for why Miller’s photographs do not replicate the scenes and objects that were to become standard elements of the representation of the camps. This argument does not completely exclude the probability that, at the same time, the photographer was involved in staging/restaging or moving the corpses within the camp in order to get a better picture once a certain scene had presented itself to her. Furthermore, it is worth analysing the surrealist concept of beauté convulsive, or ‘convulsive beauty’, in order to apply it to the photograph of the dead SS guard at Dachau floating in the canal and The Bürgermeister of Leipzig’s Daughter Suicided (6.4 and 6.6). First used by Breton in the surrealist periodical Minotaure, in 1934, ‘la beauté convulsive’, a phrase borrowed from the last lines of his urban novel Nadja (1928), would later be incorporated into L’Amour Fou (1937), to which book this concept would form the prologue. Breton writes about ‘convulsive beauty’ in these terms: The word ‘convulsive’, which I used to qualify the only beauty which should concern us, would lose any meaning in my eyes were it to be conceived in motion and not at the exact expiration of this motion. There can be no beauty at all, as far as I am concerned – convulsive beauty – except at the cost of

6.6

Lee Miller, Bürgermeister of Leipzig’s Daughter Suicided, Leipzig, Germany, 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved www. leemiller.co.uk.

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affirming the reciprocal relations linking the object seen in its motion and in its repose.40 Breton, therefore, identifies three different cases of convulsive beauty: the first one, ‘érotique-voilée’ or the ‘veiled-erotic’, refers to the existence of phenomena of representation, illustrated by crystal. The second, ‘explosante-fixe’ or ‘fixedexplosive’, is linked to the expiration of movement. Breton illustrates it with a locomotive, abandoned for years in a jungle. The third aspect, ‘magiquecirconstancielle’ or ‘circumstanced-magic’, resides in the object, in chance, marked by a message informing the subject of its own desire: Such a beauty cannot appear except from the poignant feeling of the thing revealed, the integral certainty produced by the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary logical paths.41 In the light of Breton’s definitions, I want now to turn to the photograph of the Dead SS Guard floating in the Canal and refer at the same time to The Bürgermeister of Leipzig’s Daughter Suicided, a photograph of a young woman lying dead on a sofa and taken by Miller a few weeks earlier in the town hall of Leipzig. I would argue that these could be regarded as expressing a kind of convulsive beauty, of a pre-existing movement – of life – abandoned to a certain immobility – of death.42 In the Dead SS Guard, by floating in a canal, the immobility of the corpse is in a way countered by the movement of water, the reflection of light on his face and on the leather of his uniform, as well as the play of light in the water around him. As in the Bürgermeister of Leipzig’s Daughter Suicided, the question arises whether the photographs are framed in terms of a state of death or a mysterious yet fascinating state of sleep. What would have been Breton’s reaction if confronted with Miller’s photograph? In his book Compulsive Beauty, art historian Hal Foster reminds us again how, for Breton, the expiration of movement is one condition of the convulsive beauty, and how the veiled-erotic, as well as the fixed-explosive, directly alludes to the phenomenon of death. Thus, as, Foster puts it: The veiled-erotic brushes up against the uncanny, and each example does evoke a petrified nature in which not only the natural form and cultural sign but also life and death become blurred […] The fixed-explosive, the second category of convulsive beauty, is uncanny primarily in its mobility, for this suggests the authority of death, the dominant conservatism of the drives.43 Concentrationary sublime Can Lee Miller’s photographs generate yet a further definition? Distinguished by their resonance with surrealist concepts of convulsive beauty as that which unsettles the boundaries between the living and the dead, could they also touch on what we might name a ‘concentrationary sublime’? In his Lessons of the Analytic of Sublime,

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the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard analyses the concepts of resistance and negation, which are both implied within Kant’s Critique of Judgement, using the assumption that, in a philosophical tradition, ‘sublime’ refers firstly to the feeling involved when human imagination and understanding have reached their limits, prior to being affected somehow by the concept of beauty and the aesthetic: Here the resistance, which marks the sublime feeling, bears testimony to what the dynamical synthesis is, of which the sublime feeling is the result. This synthesis involves the incommensurability of one power of thought with another. If, however, we accept along with Kant that their dissonance and not its resolution attests to a finality, a supreme consonance of thought with itself, then we have to conclude that it is essential for thought to feel reflexively its heterogeneity when it brings itself to its own limits (something it cannot avoid doing).44 On the one hand, Lyotard writes on the sublime and the way it affects our imagination when it reaches its own limits. The concept of ‘Concentrationary Sublime’, on the other hand, is the subject of James Chiampi’s essay on Italian author Primo Levi, ‘Testifying to his Text: Primo Levi and the Concentrationary Sublime’ (2001). Referring to the Crocean etymology of the atrocious sublime, Chiampi defines the concentrationary sublime as ‘the shock evoked by an incomparable transgression of expectation and ethics, an experience of lethal otherness’.45 Chiampi sustains his argument by drawing on the Latin root sub and limen, the threshold, to evoke both concepts of sublimity and the subliminal as overpassing the threshold of the imagination. According to Chiampi, both sublimity and the subliminal were at stake in Auschwitz. Chiampi, therefore, suggests ‘a grotesquely apt’ link between the chemical meaning of sublimation, that is ‘to pass from a solid to a gaseous state under the application of heat’, and the extermination process.46 Chiampi adds that, in the enclosure of Auschwitz, the constant threat of this ‘sublimity-transformation from person into ashes – total victimization’ constituted the frame for the inmates’ lives. Chiampi, however, states that this same extermination process is neither being described in Levi’s If this is a Man, nor, I would add, in David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire. Both, as survivors of Auschwitz III-Monowitz and Buchenwald respectively, offer witness accounts of the concentrationary experience, which itself was, in its distinctive way of what the inmates has to endure that was excessive to the imagination: unspeakable. Levi writes of what he defines as the ‘offence’ of the concentrationary universe: Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us; we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this: no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak they will not

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listen to us, and if they speak, they will not understand. They will even take away our name.47 Rousset similarly reflects on the loss of human dignity and on the constant fear and suffering in the totalizing enclosure of the camps: Of all the people met, of all convictions, when winds and snow were slapping our shoulders, were freezing the bellies at military rhythm, shrill like a broken and mocking blasphemy, under the blind lights, on the Grand-Place of the frozen nights in Buchenwald; men without convictions, pale and violent; men carrying destroyed beliefs, defeated dignities; a whole naked people, interiorly naked, undressed from all culture, from all civilization, armed with shovels and pickaxes, with pickaxes and hammers, chained to rotten Loren, piercing salt, cleaning snow, preparing cement; a people bitten by blows, obsessed by the lost heaven of forgotten food; intimate bite of decays – an entire people adrift on the stream of time.48 If the photographs taken at the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany cannot be representative of the everyday life within the camp – the life of the functioning camp that was part of a system – they can approach something of what the concentrationary universe looked like in its final moments. So, in the light of both the potentiality in Surrealist aesthetics and the sense that photographic imagery could register the scene and the seen of the final stages of the concentrationary universe, I am suggesting that Lee Miller’s photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau of April 1945 also invite us to consider the rubric of a concentrationary sublime. Horrific sights of inhuman atrocity overwhelmed those who looked at the photographic and filmed images made in the immediate moment of 1945 or at a later date. These photographs reached the limits of imagination and understanding of that time, while generating an image that structured a new imagery of horror, and at the same time, by making the unimaginable visible, they pushed the boundaries of collective imagery further to create what Chéroux names ‘the novel photogénie of the charnel house’.49 Miller’s images did not directly participate in the creation of such an archive. Her selection of topics requires other terms of analysis that lie between the enactment of a Surrealist attention to the convulsive shock of death as a stilling of life and of an excess, the sublime, which defeats the imagination but, as a result, initiates new concepts. It is in this sense that Miller’s photographs are not documentary at all. In his article ‘Against Holocaust Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory’, Zachary Braiterman grounds his argument against the use of the concept of a Holocaust sublime in terms of resistance to the argument of the illusion of art, such as provided by Friedrich Schiller in the eighteenth century while reflecting upon the Laocoön group.50 Braiterman argues that ‘when the image becomes unpleasant, the subject remembers it as only a representation. In contrast, the same cannot be said of the Holocaust, even of its simulacra, photographic archives’.51 Instead of

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using the word ‘sublime’ in referring to this problematic, Braiterman proposes the term of ‘naïveté’, as less self-dramatizing than the reference to sublimity. The question here is not to acknowledge or contest the validity of the use of ‘sublime’ in the context of the camps, but to share Braiterman’s fear of the misuse of the representation of the camps in more recent photographic and cinematographic forms and a concomitant banalization of this imagery: The Holocaust and its memory demand no less: images and narrative that allow analytic reserve alongside deeply felt emotional and moral commitments; and a body-politic that respects the enormity of catastrophic suffering but resists the maudlin sentiment observed by Schiller, what Foster calls ‘the schizo intensities of the ‘‘commodity sign”’, by which it is remembered.52 To counter the possibility of any banalization of the events that took place in the camps, we can only rethink Rousset’s final words in L’Univers concentrationnaire: ‘Normal men do not know that everything is possible. Even if the evidence forces their intelligence to admit it, their muscles do not believe it.’53 Between the evidence offered to the intellect by so-called documentary evidence and a self-consciously aesthetic selection of certain sights that defer documentation in favour of a surrealist poetics that touches on the sublime, perhaps Lee Miller’s photographs made under contract to Vogue magazine reach out to meet Rousset’s sense of an impassable gap between those who were inside and those who arrived to see and to show to the world outside what had become possible. Not aiming to produce a documentary form of collective memory, Miller’s work participates in the creation of concentrationary memory through her oblique gaze on both mass suffering and individual acts of dying and killing.

7 MUSELMANN A Distilled Image of the Lager? Glenn Sujo

What force compelled the imagination to resist the brutality of the Lager, described by author-survivor Tadeusz Borowski as ‘this sudden frenzy of murder, this mounting tide of unleashed atavism’, in works of art and literature then and after?1 The enduring preoccupation with seamless chronologies and causalities of the Lager proves defining, if not also deeply problematic – as we learn from the survivors’ accounts. Attuned to the actuality of the Lager (and confounding our expectations) the art of internment blurs such distinctions – between a durational before (in the assertive foreshadowing of images of death by gas in First World War trenches) and the compelling actuality of an impending now summoned in acts of ‘spiritual resistance’ whether in the Lager or from the remote imaginary of an elective or enforced exile – eliding the strategies of memory with evidentiary sources then and after.2 Lea Grundig’s print cycle, Under the Sign of the Swastika (etched in 1936, between her first and second imprisonment) is an early indictment and powerful warning of the Nazi’s coercive methods at Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Malva Schalek drew the idle pastimes of the Terezín ghetto’s elderly population from within, awaiting deportation to unknown destinations, a sense of foreboding and helplessness etched on their faces. Artist-émigré Lasar Segall consigned his Visions of War to a sketchbook between 1940 and 1943, from an elective exile in São Paulo. Amid first reports of the genocidal murder of Polish Jews, Ludwig Meidner, in detention in ‘enemy alien’ camps at Liverpool and the Isle of Man, embarked on his suite of drawings Massacres in Poland with prophetic zeal. Within days of his liberation Corrado Cagli drew the naked and misshapen corpses strung along the perimeter fences at Buchenwald, eliding his witness with army press corps photographs of the event. Interned at Dachau in 1944, Zoran Music drew the mountains of corpses, returning to these

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images in 1971, in the cycle We are not the Last, as the memory of the event returned to haunt him.3 In the Lager, time itself ceased to provide a reliable framework for anchoring behaviour or resisting the self ’s dissolution such that ‘estrangement from the empirical self became a silent weapon against the system of terror …’.4 Amid this ‘sudden frenzy of murder’, the commonplace abuses, senseless routines and collapse of all moral boundaries, an economical line sketch, a preliminary draft consigned to memory or clandestinity could, for brief moments, shore up the self, resist its decline and pierce the perpetrator’s lies. For survivors, emerging from their ordeals and rebuilding their lives after, the insidious return of the past and the disturbing force of dreams threatened to overturn a tenuously constructed normalcy in the present, its fragile fabric undermined by the explosive and refractory force of those memories. Artist’s drawings made in the vast network of forced labour, concentration and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War reveal their maker’s awareness of danger with intimations of mortality – hidden under floorboards, sewn into the linings of threadbare garments, or passed on from one hand to another. Made on scraps of paper (or on the backs of official forms secreted for this purpose), they record the daily humiliations, the queuing for meagre rations, the rampant killing of fellow-prisoners by their Nazi tormentors. Of course, such products of the visual imagination were not unique to Auschwitz. Other extemporary expressions flourished in clandestinity, forcible and indiscriminate detention in British internment camps; in remote gulags and psychiatric prisons in the former Soviet Union; in the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in Burma and Singapore; and more recently, in Serbian run camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina; and in makeshift churches, a last safe-haven during the Rwandan massacre. Yet the drawings produced at Auschwitz, here synonymous with the brutality of the ‘concentrationary universe’ as a whole, afford glimpses of the exterminatory fact, painstakingly assembled, their quotient of truth (now equated with the historians’ prosaic account and the still camera),5 a bulwark against later revision or denial. While these drawings offer no immutable standard of objectivity, they remain viable and complex forms of representation that, with other individual responses (diaries, chronicles, letters) today inform an enlarged historiography of the Shoah. The task of fixing in memory the constraining geometry of the Lager, with its gates, turrets and narrow precincts – when words failed, faced with grievous loss or a welling up of emotions – required strategies other than those of the trained artist, the topographer or the surveyor. For those outside the camp’s perimeter, drawing afforded a coming to terms with, a means of formulating a response to the number and severity of the reports of mass killings that reached the West after July 1942, this after no yet subsumed into the larger retrospective account. In the discussion that follows, I have departed from an earlier, generalized account of the art of the Shoah that assumed a shared denominator of experience, to explore the particulars of an individual subject, his singularity resisting the Lager’s relentless drive toward extinction.6 Building a causality between the factual account of internment and the artists’ interpretative method is a consuming aim of this

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and of a more extensive study that together link the language of conjuncture and disjuncture, the before and after.7 In enlarging on the voice of a single survivor, the singularity of whose memory is expressed in graphic signs – both word and image – I attempt to draw lines across a seemingly unbridgeable abyss that lies somewhere between the disturbing force of those events, their insidious terror, and the clear inferences of a historical consciousness that emerges after, still daring to aspire to a Jewish ‘becoming’. When within days of his ‘liberation’, not yet 16,8 Yehuda Bacon took to recording his memories of internment – and of the ‘conveyor-belt’ system of extermination at Auschwitz-Birkenau – with pencil and paper, he did so without recourse to technical manuals, photographs or other corroborative sources and, it seems, with no other motive than, as one fellow survivor maintained, the telling itself which by this time had ‘taken on the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs’.9 The correlation between the events and their telling is an arresting one since survival itself often hinged on this most ‘elementary need’. The act of witness could, we are told, usurp the Lager’s narrow wager with death. If Bacon’s youthful drawings of the undressing room, the gas chamber and crematoria buildings at Auschwitz-Birkenau manage to convey his sense of the infamous workings of the death camp, with an eye to facticity and incriminating detail, he wished also to tell us something about the relationship he perceived between truth and history, atrocity and witness. Yet such willing subordination to the imperative of observed detail would soon give way to a realization of drawing’s expressive possibilities. To this end, Bacon adapted the narrative devices of dreams and memory – free association, dissociation, fragmentation, disorientation, flashback – combining them with a knowledge of Biblical, homiletical and aggaditic (oral and non-juridical) sources, folk tales, and canonical exemplars from a European Old Master tradition to address the materials of history and turn ‘the knowing into the telling’, fashioning the unspeakable into ‘assimilable structures of meaning’.10 Typically, artists drawings produced in the vast network of forced labour concentration and extermination camps, prisons and sealed ghettos from 1933 until their collapse in Spring 1945 – at Majdaneck, this occurred earlier – counter the complicitous record of Nazi propaganda and misinformation with clear intimations of the victim’s lives and their suffering. Others produced in the regime’s last hours, with the arrival of the liberating forces, assume the form of a reckoning, a recapitulation. They stand back from the events, looking in, a view normally denied the victims. These works employ a multitude of figures to invoke the collective experience for the victims, turning their helplessness and isolation into an empowered, if premature, assertion of knowing, long before the physical, emotional or psychological scars of their imprisonment could be addressed. An ability to reckon with and give adequate account of the representational limits of the Lager owed as much to the artists’ formative experiences – family background, education, political or ideological orientation – as to their artistic training and the stylistic and representational tools at their disposal. In Behind the Wire, 1945 (National War and

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Resistance Museum, Overloon) (7.1), Dutch painter and graphic designer Henri Christiaan Pieck (a member of the Communist Party and a Soviet spy) presents us with a defiantly gritty and self-mocking image of the ragged prisoners at Buchenwald in a collective expression of solidarity wrought in adversity. Much less is known of the political, ideological or artistic motives that drove Hellmut Bachrach-Barée to record the progress of a death march from Dachau to Bad Toelz in April 1945, but a delicately hewn, sympathetic portrayal of the group of emaciated (and no less ragged) prisoners gleaned through the barbed wire mesh of Women’s Camp, c.1945 (Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem) (7.2), attempts no such characterization: their individual countenances evince a resilient self-awareness.11 Both Pieck and Bachrach-Barée survived the war, the former celebrated for his resistant message, the latter in obscurity. Pieck published his drawings (derived in some instances from photographic sources) as large-scale, colour lithographs that were widely circulated. Bachrach-Barée abandoned the objective reporting manner of his war-time drawings returning to the genre scenes, landscapes and still-lifes that were the stock-in-trade of an academic training in pre-war Munich and a family tradition, passed down to him by his father, the regional painter, Emmanuel Bachrach-Barée.12 For a Jew such as Yehuda Bacon interned in Ghetto Theresienstadt in September 1942 (at age 13), then at Auschwitz (until January 1945) and a succession of other camps, lacking the most elementary means of survival, to possess the tools of paper and pencil was unthinkable and to write, an offence punishable by death.13 His pictorial and scriptorial accounts of internment are of the retrospective kind; they could not be otherwise.14 As one of a group of 89 youths employed in the Rollwagenkommando, Bacon gained privileged access to ‘no-go’ areas of the camp including the gas chambers and crematoria, as we learn from the transcripts of his deposition in the trial of Adolf Eichmann vs the State of Israel held in the Jerusalem District Court on 7 June 1961: Our tasks were quite varied. Sometimes we had to collect papers, sometimes we had to transfer blankets, sometimes we had to go to the women’s camp to which other people did not have access. With the Rollwagenkommando we went through all the camps of Birkenau, A, B, C, D, E and F, as well as the crematorium.15 Bacon’s spare line drawings of the topography and workings of Auschwitz camp, made in May 1945, shortly after his release from Günskirchen (a satellite of Mauthausen), and the unembellished language of his oral account (in response to calls from the remnant post-war Jewish Community in Prague, and countless others) portend a single purpose – to testify truthfully.16 Yet closer inspection reveals how testimony in response to official or institutional enquiry elicited one language, while his diary, begun in June that year and mostly unaffected by such demands, produced another. One was framed by the requirement for a clearly balanced, orderly précis; the other acknowledged the flaws inherent in such formulation, delving instead into the dark materials of the psyche and the ‘unaccountable’ trauma of sudden, massive loss.17

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7.1

Henri Christiaan Pieck (1895–1972), Behind the Wire, 1945, charcoal, pastel and ink, dimensions unknown, National Oorlogs en Verzetsmuseum, Netherlands.

7.2

Hellmut Bachrach-Barée (1898–1964), Women’s Camp (Frauen – K.Z.), c.1945, pencil on paper, 180 × 214mm, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.

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Summoning his strengths in the weeks following his rescue and slow-paced recovery, Bacon turned his hand to a subject that continued to haunt him, a condition of the body long imprinted in memory. In the camp’s jargon, as in the post-war literature of the Shoah,18 this human subject was known as a Muselmann, identified by his emaciated physical condition and apathetic state, invoked in the title of Primo Levi’s master-narrative of the Lager, If This Is A Man: If I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen.19 The subject provided Bacon with a convenient foil for the infirmity and devastation that years of internment in ghetto Theresienstadt, at Auschwitz-Birkenau and later in Blechhammer, Mauthausen and Günskirchen inflicted on his own body.20 A sober image of this devastation is Muselmann, Spring 1946 (7.3) – his deathly pallor, drained of all life-blood, and stilled expression manage nonetheless to affirm a resilience.

7.3

Yehuda Bacon (b.1929), Muselmann, 1946, ink and gouache on buff paper, 300 × 218mm, Beit Lohamei Israel Haghetaot.

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Gossamer layers of China ink and tempera applied with a brush on to paper precipitate and distil this quintessential image of the Lager. Yet, search as we might for the attributes of Bacon’s singular countenance in Muselmann, we are repeatedly denied such a reading. Here, as on numerous occasions in the course of the next 60 years, Bacon performed a visual synecdoche whereby the singularity of his own subject becomes the face not of one but of all prisoners in the concentrationary universe. Antelme referred to this as the ‘collective, anonymous face’ of the Lager. For survivor and author Imre Kertész, interned at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the Muselmann’s ‘sallow face and large burning eyes seems vaguely familiar …, but then, equally, everyone here had a sallow face and large burning eyes.’21 By such means the image of the Muselmann became a recurring trope in the art and literature of the Shoah. Bacon spoke with horror of the moment when, shortly after his release – one hesitates to speak of liberation – he became aware of the ghostly spectre of himself reflected in the mirror: What I saw sickened me, quite literally … Of course, I had seen other people who looked liked that – I’d been surrounded by them. But it had never occurred to me that I too could look like that.22 The realization that his own image was ineluctably bound up with that of the camp’s other, the untouchable, the Muselmann, stripped bare, head shaven, drained by dysentery and starvation, and drifting in and out of consciousness, produced a sudden shudder. He returned to this moment in an extended group of self-portrait studies begun in January 1947 that acknowledge both his encounter with the brutality of the Lager and progressive return to ‘normalcy’, as if this serial reworking of his salient features could alone restore his place among the living. In a further instance of this malaise and temporal disjuncture, Bacon confided the following note to his diary in April 1948. He recalled the clandestine preparations for the Passover festival in Birkenau camp four years earlier and asked: ‘What sort of holiday will this turn out to be … Is life worth living?’ The arrival of the Terezín transports to Auschwitz, the stockpiled goods in vast depots known as Kanada, the meagre rations, swollen feet and the memory of his bunkmate in the Männerlager (BIId), Kalmín Fuhrman, are each invoked. He notes with relief that SS Obersturmführer Johann Schwartzhuber ‘no longer shits on us’, but ‘all that is long gone …’. Suddenly, the sound of live ammunition is heard at the precise moment when Bacon’s landlady, Mrs Meyer-Taraboulous, appears at his door. Outside ‘they’re shooting away, the Jews are attacking Katamon, sometimes you can hear the whistling of the bullets’. The boy who had so assiduously struggled for his life faces renewed danger in a besieged city, Jerusalem. And, in a scenario powerfully reminiscent of his earlier ordeal at Auschwitz and Mauthausen he remarks: ‘Bread rations are down to 15 or 20 grams a day’ (instead of the usual 25 grams) and records his weight loss (8 kilos).23 Such observations lay bare the complexities of witnessing and of the retrospective account.

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In an insightful essay reflecting on the Muselmann, political philosopher Giorgio Agamben described him as a ‘limit figure’ in whom ‘dignity and respect [and] even the very idea of an ethical limit lose their meaning’.24 Agamben also lays bare the response of post-war critics, such as sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky, for whom the Muselmann represented ‘the triumph of power over the human being … In the configuration of their infirmity, as in organized mass murder, the regime realizes its quintessential self.’ For survivor Jean Améry, this extreme figure was ‘a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions’,25 his devastated frame depicted in Léon Delarbre’s heartrending sketch Le lendemain de la libération: trop tard!, 16 April 1945 (Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, Besançon) (7.4). Delarbre reminds us that for the resigned and broken subject of this sketch, as for most, liberation came too late. ‘One hesitates to call them living’, was one survivor’s response, while another referred to them simply as ‘living dead’.26 Former prisoners Zdzislaw Ryn and Stanislaw Klodzinski offer a most authoritative account of the Muselmann’s progressive decline, his physical dereliction and loss of agency: … His gaze became cloudy and his face took on a sad, mechanical expression. His eyes became covered by a kind of layer and seemed deeply set in his face.

7.4

Léon Delarbre (1889–1974), Le Lendemain de la libération: trop tard! (The morning after Liberation: too late!) Bergen-Belsen, 1945, pencil and black chalk, 260 × 280mm, Musée de la résistance et de la déportation de Besançon.

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His skin took on a pale grey colour, becoming thin and hard like paper … His head became longer …. He breathed slowly, spoke softly and with great difficulty … they became indifferent to everything happening around them [and to] all relations.27 The passage closes with the startling observation: ‘Seeing them from afar, one had the impression of seeing Arabs praying’. Their remark, echoed at the margins of a post-war European literature by the authors Tadeusz Borowski, Eugen Kogon and David Rousset, among others, restores this Muselmann (in Arabic, the word ‘Muslim’ denotes one who submits unconditionally to the will of God) to a centrality as the Lager’s ultimate cipher, a symbol of the regime’s inimical power over the individual. To their certain physical ruin was added the certainty that, as Agamben affirms: ‘with a kind of ferocious irony, the Jews knew that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews’.28 This radical loss of selfhood and of all other signs of an identity elicited the following observation: There is nowhere to look in a mirror … our appearance stands before us in a hundred livid faces, in a hundred miserable and sordid puppets.29 In reckoning with this limit figure, Levi added: ‘our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man’ and concludes, ‘we had reached bottom’. The image of atrocity is never innocent, and language too is troped.30 Implicit in this expression, to ‘reach bottom’, is that other image of the abyss, synonymous with the ‘fall of man’ that for Levi conjured an image of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno with startling, if revelatory, consequences.31 In Aldo Carpi’s vivid chronicle of the Lager, Diario di Gusen, and in a suite of related drawings we are confronted not only with a crisis of language at the limits – Levi’s ‘our language lacks words to express this offence’ – but a crisis of the visual.32 The ragged prisoners gathered at the centre of Carpi’s The Famished, Mauthausen, 1944 (Beit Lohamei Haghetaot), struggle to regain some semblance of the human in spite of the babble of tongues and general decrepitude. Language does injury to the afflicted. But for David Rousset, author of L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris, 1946), the ill-clad appearance of prisoners at Buchenwald reminded him of the characters in Alfred Jarry’s play: ‘King Ubu inspires the camps. Buchenwald lives under the sign of a monstrous humour, a tragic buffoonery’, he exclaimed.33 To their persecutors, prisoners were known only as Figuren, faceless puppets, mere shapes or ‘trinkets’, never by their names. And since the entire population of the camp could at any moment drift into the insensitive state of the Muselmann – at Ravensbrück, women prisoners were known as Muselweiber – they were universally avoided; they did not bear thinking about, they were in some sense invisible: ‘No one wants to see the Muselmann’, Carpi remarked.34 Bacon and Carpi were not alone, of course, in addressing the Muselmann with the strategies of the visual. The subject also commanded the attention of Boris Taslitzky, Léon Delarbre and Zoran Music at Buchenwald, Belsen and Dachau. But

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while these artists responded with blunted pencil and ‘in the heat of the moment’, Bacon summoned the memory of the Soup line at Mauthausen or Carrying the dead to the Crematorium (Beit Lohamei Haghetaot) with eidetic clarity after. History or memory? While the recurring signs of internment – Muselmann, chimney stack and barbed-wire – assume a shared denominator of experience in the art and literature of the Shoah, the difference between what is actually remembered and what is received is often more difficult to establish. Cultural historian Alessandro Portelli reminds us that ‘memory is not a passive repository of the past, but an active process of creation of meanings’. The manner by which memories are shaped into narrative structures reveals the fundamentally different ways survivors recalled their experiences in later years, pointing not to one but to many individual stories: What matters is not what my past actually was, or even whether I had one; it is only the memories I have now which matter, be they true or false.35 For survivor and author Jorge Semprun, writing in L’écriture ou la Vie (Literature or Life) in 1994 (half a century after Buchenwald), the memory of the Shoah would be preserved not in public monuments or anniversary ceremonies but ‘through the artifice of a work of art’ meaning a work of fiction, ‘narratives that will let you imagine even if they cannot let you see’.36 Hebrew scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi offered the following response in Zakhor, Jewish History and Jewish Memory: The Holocaust has already engendered more historical research than any single event in Jewish history, but I have no doubt whatever that its image is being shaped, not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible …37 Reflecting on his ordeal in Autumn 1948, Bacon returned to the subject of the Muselmanner that in the late 1940s remained taboo in Israeli society, bent on replacing the image of the Jew as victim with one of resilience and invincibility. The subject elicited a range of visual responses: an oil panel, a full-size study or cartoon, a tempera sketch and the intense wood-engraving, Muselmann and the Angel of Death, 1948 (Yad Vashem Art Museum) (7.5) that in recent years has become something of a talisman, hence a focus of this discussion. Its main lineaments and emotional register – the Muselmann’s elongated head inclined towards the viewer, the rounded shoulders, the raised, gesturing forearm and hand, the intensity of light-dark contrasts – were present in the earliest of the studies (7.6), suggesting the subject was already fully formed in Bacon’s mind before work had begun. A number of proofs taken from the original block show small adjustments to the intensity of the inked surface, as Bacon struggled to arrive at a definitive image. In the retrospective account of internment – factual or fictive – the very idea of a ‘definitive image’ comes in for question. The wood-block was never editioned.

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7.5

Yehuda Bacon (b.1929), Muselmann and the Angel of Death, 1948/49, woodengraving, 100 × 75mm, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.

7.6

Yehuda Bacon, Study for Muselmann, 1948, pencil, ink and wash, heightened with white tempera on buff paper, 151 × 102mm. © Yehuda Bacon 2013.

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With its deft execution and darkened ground, Muselmann and the Angel of Death attests to the example of his teacher Jakob Steinhardt’s illustrations for the Passover Haggadah (read at the Passover meal, the seder) and the group of nine wood engravings for the Book of Yehoshua Eliezer ben Sirah, 1929 (7.7),38 a ringing assault on the values and moral decay of contemporary society and a startling vision of Gottesdammerung, the End of Time, that marked a high point in German Jewish book illustration. The medium of wood-engraving, so closely associated with the art of the book, released Bacon from an earlier response through the lens of historical facticity, instead employing allegory or poetic form to address the extremity of his subject, aware of its possible significance within a continuous tradition of apocalyptic references in the century – from Berthold Feiwel’s impassioned account of the victims of the Kishinev pogrom, Die Judenmassakers in Kischinew von Told, 1903, to Marc Chagall’s tapestry of Jewish history and catastrophe, Fallen Angel, 1933/1947 (Kunstmuseum, Basle). Bacon wished to raise the image of the Muselmann from a mere datum in the historical record to that of symbol. The wood-engraving, tempera study, charcoal sketch (cartoon), and an oil panel locate the tenuous web of private meanings and accompanying feelings of devastation with which Bacon invested his subject within the broader public and historiographical accounts of the Shoah.

7.7

Jakob Steinhardt (1887–1968), Illustration for the Book of Yehoshua Eliezer ben Sirah (Plate I) 1929, woodcut and letterpress, 280 × 195mm, Private Collection, London.

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In the wood-engraving, the angel of death, in Hebrew, malach ha’mavet – inscribed with rich narrative associations, as one who precipitates death and brings relief – swoops down with open arms in a consoling gesture of embrace or mute exchange, echoed in the Muselmann’s raised arm and tilted head, while the gaping eyes register alarm. Bacon invokes both the heightened reality of the camp and, more widely, a tradition of demons, dybuks and vampires brought to life in the Jewish oral or aggaditic tradition, a fascination with the supernatural that runs counter to the Deuteronomic prohibition of magic and the occult. The inscription Golem (Hebr., zombie, and in Yiddish a term of abuse) at the lower edge of the full-size study (or cartoon) – a reference to the lifeless, homuncular clay figure associated with the creation story (Genesis 2:6–7) and other sources39 – invokes as it challenges the Halachic prohibition of images and idol worship.40 In Bacon’s hands, the Golem (notably, the Muselmann) becomes an apt metaphor for the transforming power of art – clay amulet to living agency – while pointing indexically to the artist’s double, his doppelgänger or unredeemed self. Just as Bacon wished to locate Muselmann and the Angel of Death within the broader discourses of catastrophe, ancient and modern, so its social and art historical underpinnings extend and elucidate the work’s meanings. It comes as a surprise to discover that Bacon painted this small, seminal oil panel Muselmann

7.8

Yehuda Bacon, Muselmann, winter, 1948–49, oil on board, 495 × 315mm, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.

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(Yad Vashem Art Museum) (7.8), on the reverse of a plein-air study, Landscape with Rooftops and Cypresses (7.9). The latter’s luminous palette, made up of deep indigo and cerulean blues, viridian, brick red and pale ochre, owes much to the influence of Bacon’s first teacher in Prague, the painter Willi Nowak (whose instruction is extolled in the pages of his diary: ‘100 minutes of pleasure and learning with Prof. W. Nowak’), while its vigorous handling recalls Maurice de Vlaminck’s views of the Paris suburbs that in turn invoke the proto-Cubism of Georges Braque’s Houses at L’Estaque, 1908 (Rupf Foundation, Bern) and Paul Cézanne’s studies of trees in the Bibémus quarry painted in the 1890s. Bacon made a number of pencil and charcoal studies ostensibly, in preparation for the Landscape in the difficult months of June to November 1948 during Israel’s War of Independence when, as a ward of Aliyat Hanoar, he was evacuated with other young people to homes on the outskirts of Jerusalem beyond reach of the shelling and out of harms way.41 (The wooded glade bounded by low walls and roofs are signs of an encroaching urbanization – today, Beit ha’Kerem forms part of West Jerusalem.) The precise chronology of these charcoal ébauches and specifically of (7.10) Outdoor Tree Study, 1948 (British Museum) locates Bacon’s return to the subject of Muselmanner to the resumption of his studies at the New Bezalel Art School in October 1948.42 The panel’s recto and verso reveal the competing pressures that vied for his attention. If on one side Bacon garnered a progressive view of European painting current half a century earlier, on the other he addressed far more pressing concerns, as the past continued to encroach on the present with insidious force. If the decision to turn the unworked surface of Landscape with Rooftops and Cypresses to use (when painting the pale, seated Muselmann) was prompted above all by pecuniary circumstance, its implications were both radical and far-reaching, auguring a departure from the accepted repertory of motifs to expose the prejudice and misunderstanding that afflicted survivors of the Shoah and rank outsiders like himself in Israeli society. While the mute encounter of two figures in the woodengraving Muselmann and the angel of Death, may acknowledge the difficulty for the survivors of speaking when overcome by grief, the oil panel confirms his isolation: alone, ignored and misunderstood. In the silence of the Muselmann Bacon conjures a parable of the survivor’s predicament when faced with an incredulous world after, in an echo of the Nazis’ nihilistic claim: ‘… if some of you should survive … the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed’.43 In forging a synecdoche of the camp Muselmann, Bacon took stock of historical exemplars (most of these available to him in reproduction), among them, the work of the Spanish tenebristas whose ever-expanding repertoire of saints and martyrs provided a model of conspicuous or extreme emotion. (Hand gestures too were as much a part of the commerce of everyday life as of the pictorial representation of the nineteenth-century Eastern Jew.) Here, as elsewhere in his oeuvre, we find a recurring identification with the works of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who remained for Bacon the Jew, a model of untiring invention. In Muselmann and the Angel of Death, we find a stillness reminiscent of Picasso’s ‘quintessential blue period image’ The Frugal Repast, 1904 (Musée Picasso, Paris) likewise indebted to El Greco,

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7.9

Yehuda Bacon, Landscape with rooftops and cypresses, Beit ha’ Kerem, 1948 oil on board, 495 × 315mm, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.

7.10

Yehuda Bacon, Untitled, Tree study, Beit ha’ Kerem, 1948, charcoal on newsprint, 505 × 305mm, Trustees of the British Museum, London.

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leading one art historian to remark on the weirdly long, tapering fingers and ‘taut outline that makes shoulders and elbows as gaunt as the faces of the miséreux’.44 This stylization of hands, limbs and languid poses conferred on the Spaniard, the title painter of misfortune.45 The Expressionist painter Edvard Munch’s recollection of an afternoon walk under a ‘coagulated, blood red sunset’ elicited that icon of existential despair (7.11) The Scream, 1893 (Munch Museet, Oslo) – with gaping mouth and hollowed eyes – that, with its pendant lithograph became a staple of a suffering century’s troped language of extremity. The skull-like head, gaping mouth and skeletal hands (raised as if to shut out the shrill cry), like the unremitting pattern of an encroaching northern sky and fjord, and the receding diagonals of narrow boardwalk and balustrade, confirm his imperilled state.46 Comparison of Munch’s lithograph with Bacon’s (7.12) Head of Muselmann – his delicate features and vacant expression ‘on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen’ – reveal the ground shared by forms of physical and psychological terror. A more immediate and poignant connection with Munch’s lithograph is established by an undated, near monumental drawing Large Head (7.13). Memory here takes the form of a ‘perpetual troping of the event’ – his deathly pallor and bulbous, doll-like head

7.11

Edvard Munch (1863–1944), The Scream, 1895, lithograph, 352 × 251mm, Munch Museet, Oslo. © Munch Museet, Oslo/Munch-Ellingsen Group/ DACS London 2012.

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7.12

Yehuda Bacon (b.1929), Head of Muselmann, 1948, woodcut, 65 × 50mm. © Yehuda Bacon 2012.

7.13

Yehuda Bacon, Large Head, undated, black and white chalks, 480 × 385mm. © Yehuda Bacon 2013.

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framed by a pair of symmetrically disposed, skeletal hands, are the markers of an ‘injurious repetition’.47 His dark-rimmed eyes (a powerful subject to which the poet Paul Celan would return repeatedly) recall the strange appearance of the child Hurbinek described by Primo Levi in The Truce: … his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness … the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency.48 The analogy forged by David Rousset at Buchenwald between the Muselmann and Jarry’s King Ubu ‘under the sign of a monstrous humour, a tragic buffoonery’ brings to mind an eighteenth-century exemplar for Bacon’s panel Muselmann in the derisory, pale-faced and somnolent figure of Gilles, the sad clown in Antoine Watteau’s enlarged shop-sign (Musée du Louvre, Paris). But for the specific compositional device of the near seated and distant figures in Muselmann and the Angel of Death, across an unbridgeable spatial and etymological divide – an event with or without meaning, of this world or otherworldly – Bacon could have turned to Picasso’s rose period Young Acrobat on a Ball, 1904–05 (Pushkin Museum, Moscow) and the Spaniard’s depiction of peripatetic actors, street walkers and other destitutes, with whom Bacon identified in a reflection of his own marginality. Crucially, through an identification with Steinhardt, Picasso and Munch, Bacon was able to confront the risks and challenges of his own dark subject. Realism or rhetoric? In her illuminating study On Photography, critic and essayist Susan Sontag recalled her encounter with the ‘photographic inventory of ultimate horror’, the image of atrocity that issued forth from Second World War death camps, describing her experience as a ‘negative epiphany’ and a ‘prototypically modern revelation’, views she returned to some years later when writing in Regarding the Pain of Others: ‘Ever since the camera was invented … photography has kept company with death.’49 The image of atrocity that emerged from Majdanek, Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen (the work of skilled photographers and filmmakers, unprepared for such encounters), shaped the postwar reception of Nazi crimes and their prosecution in the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials and the Auschwitz Prozess, precursors to latter-day war-crime tribunals.50 The liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British Army on 15 April 1945 produced a crop of still photographs and documentary footage that – widely disseminated and immediately recognizable – symbolized the brutality and evil of the ‘concentrationary universe’. Captain Edward Malindine, of the Army Film and Photographic Unit, employed a medium-format still camera to record this image of the inmate (7.14) within hours of his ‘liberation’, seated on bare earth against an open gutter and barbed-wire fence, seemingly unaware of the camera.51 The caption (provided by the war-time Ministry of Information in London) suggests as much: ‘A prisoner, too weak to move as a result of starvation and with an expression of agony on his face, sits by the wire fence.’ The singularity of this subject is wrested from the teaming

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Captain Edward G. Malindine (1906–70), Prisoner, Bergen-Belsen, 17–18 April 1945, photograph, 60 × 80mm negative, Imperial War Museum, London.

mass of prisoners that crowds our imaginary of Belsen, restoring his visibility to our incredulous gaze. At Belsen, Malindine and his team set about recording the liberation that for many came too late (in an echo of Delarbre’s Le lendemain de la libération: trop tard!), the chaos and the lawlessness, the mounds of decomposing bodies, ambling prisoners – Jean Améry calls them ‘walking corpses’ – subjects that stymied the newsmen’s first reports. In the cruel conjunction of the mechanical seeing eye of the camera and the inmate’s cry, his averted gaze, the reader or onlooker enters into an unusual complicity with the subject, that of passive observer or bystander. When Malindine’s photograph appeared on the cover of (7.15) Le Monde Illustré on 5 May 1945, accompanied by the headlines, ‘Berlin, Cradle and Grave of Germany’s Pride’ and (left) ‘Tortured for three years by the Nazis and exhausted, this unfortunate reaches the threshold of Liberty’, the rhetoric of this declamatory language had sullied the photograph’s radiant power to transform. The photograph too had become a ‘safe referent, interposed between the reality of those dreadful events and ourselves’.52 It had ceased to be the ‘numinous emanation’ that in the words of the structuralist critic Roland Barthes, ‘touches me with its own rays’,53 becoming part of a pattern of citation – now reversed to echo the text’s left-to-right orientation, and hopelessly compromised – the Muselmann’s distress-call directing the reader to the news stories within. Bacon returned to the subject of Muselmänner with renewed force a decade later, in the suite of six larger-than-life heads entitled Prisoner 168194 (7.16 and

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7.15

Le Monde Illustré (cover), 5 May 1945, Caption: Camp de Bilsen, Torturé pendant trois ans par les nazis, ce malheureux arrive épuisé au seuil de la Liberté (Tortured for three years by the Nazis and exhausted, this unfortunate reaches the threshold of Liberty). British Library.

7.16

Yehuda Bacon, Prisoner 168194, I, 1961, monotype with over painting 595 × 423mm. © Yehuda Bacon 2013.

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Yehuda Bacon, Prisoner 168194, III, 1961, monotype, 640 × 475mm, Inscr. 168194. © Yehuda Bacon 2013.

7.17) – the number tattooed on his left arm.54 These works, now dispersed, extend his preoccupation with the recurring private and public demands of witness, selfexamination, disclosure and self-invention first seen in the group of grisailles selfportrait studies begun in January 1947, when adjusting to his new surroundings in eretz yisrael. Their serial iteration – in an echo of the mug-shots of political prisoners and common criminals routinely employed during the prisoners’ registration at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and other camps – record his own and his subject’s changing physical appearance, invoking their alterity and extremity.55 The suite Prisoner 168194 confirms Bacon’s abiding interest in the expressive possibilities of the human head as a locus of artistic invention. Reflecting on the deep welling up of emotions that preceded each new attempt, he remarked: The human head is often the focus of the strongest emotional response in my work. There I give vent to feelings of compassion or anger, joy or despair.56 Aptly, the monotype technique Bacon employed on this occasion allowed him to rework the vestigial traces left on the plate’s inked surface after each successive impression swiftly and without the laborious preparation that lithography required (the graining, degreasing, wetting and inking of the stone or zinc plate). Together, the suite of six images provided a vehicle for self-disclosure and a window into his

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own shadow-self, in turn unleashing in the viewer a process of transference and counter-transference. As a study in human physiognomy and extreme states, Prisoner 168194 parodies a tradition of grotesque heads from Leonardo’s (and his pupil Francesco Melzi’s) studies of youth and old age to Charles Le Brun’s illustrations for The Passions of the Soul (in a suggestion also of the sculpted torsos of deranged and psychotic patients by the eighteenth-century Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt), while their ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ transformation, conceived as a progressive distillation from dark into light recalls the Expressionist film sequences in Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1920 (in an echo of Bacon’s earlier incursion into the language of Expressionism in Muselmann and the Angel of Death), and that other iconic image of the nursemaid with mouth agape in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, 1925, that so profoundly affected Bacon’s generation.57 Stripped of particular referents, conceived in serial order, the suite Prisoner 168194 counters portraiture’s concern with the singularity of its reported subject and, as with the earlier Muselmann, 1946 (7.3), performs a synecdoche, his own image that of all the prisoners of Auschwitz. Their commanding frontality and matter-offact appearance – black on white – give these works a declamatory, even rhetorical presence rarely seen in Bacon’s oeuvre before or after. At age 31, he saw the need to employ a more assertive visual language, briefly abandoning a trademark virtuosity of line. That he did so in the closing months of 1960, in the full glare of publicity, as he and other witnesses prepared to give evidence in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, suggests how the struggle to regain a subjective selfhood continued long after the ordeal itself ended.58 In the darkest of these images (7.16) – of crazed appearance – Bacon portrays himself as a victim of torture and other abuses, round his neck, a twisted ruff or hangman’s noose. (Abolished in 1954, capital punishment remained on the statute books for those convicted under the 1950 Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law under which SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann was tried and executed.) Paradoxically, it is the victim, not the perpetrator of the crime who faces the garrotte and the viewer’s – and by implication, the bystanders’ – incriminating silence. Primo Levi calls this National Socialism’s most demonic crime, the ‘attempt to shift onto others – specifically the victims – the burden of guilt, depriving them of even the solace of innocence’.59 In the light of the heightened visibility experienced by the community of survivors in the lead up to the trial, an alternative reading of Prisoner 168194 might acknowledge the binding obligations and other burdens placed on them by the State. Hence the noose or collar, skilfully reworked in subsequent images (7.17) to recall a monk’s habit, his gleaming forehead intimating an acquired spirituality and resolute calmness in a reprieve from earlier extremes of suffering. This transformation is portrayed as a cleansing (an experience shared by Levi who, in the ‘telling’ sought to ‘purge the Auschwitz poison from his veins’),60 a distillation, or ritual purification, with its complex associations in the burnt offerings – holocaust – of the Israelites’ temple. We might also see in this progressive distillation, the ‘artist’s struggle to redeem himself ’ in Hebrew scholar Gershom Scholem’s words, ‘to purify

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the Golem’. Set in a doctrinal tradition that sought to prohibit graven images, Bacon’s figures recall the banished idols of the goyim (Gentile nations). Uncompromising in their relation to the viewer and unyielding in their frontality, they are a remnant of the ‘human race’, Robert Antelme’s espèce humaine.61 Terror-stricken, they stand accused: their eye sockets blackened, hollowed or drawn inward, in a gesture of denial that relinquishes the survivor’s witness and all eye-contact. Whereas philosopher and former prisoner Paul Ricoeur reminds us of the ‘absolutely irreducible signification of one’s own body … the limiting reference point of the world’,62 Bacon’s Prisoners – as a configuration of the totalitarian state’s inimical power over the individual – cease to be human and are threatened by their own inevitable dissolution and almost certain death. Their vacant expressions suggest hollowness, a loss of agency typical of the camp Muselmänner. These works conjure a model of reality akin to if not directly bound by norms of European Realism, a trend Bacon would eventually eschew in favour of an art of abstraction rooted in the imagination.63 Yet, in a rare concession to the public reception of his work and of himself as a Kazet Kunstler (a term derived from the abbreviation ‘KZ’ for Konzentrationslager), Bacon strayed momentarily into the language of French Realism of the 1940s and 1950s, invoking the hard cloisonné of Bernard Buffet, about whose work the art critic Claude Roger-Marx once observed: The distress in these monochromatic compositions, the emptiness which translates all that the heart lacks, the elongation of verticals and horizontals, the nervousness of evil lines of force, lightly scratching the thin paint, all proclaim a painter fit to assume like Kafka, Kierkegaard, Sartre, the insecurity and deprivations of his childhood … a style at once violent and frozen, cynical and caressing, naïve and full of tension.64 With these words, Roger-Marx conjured the memory of the mass round-ups of deportés, the notorious rafles that still hung in the air over a divided French nation in 1958. Prisoner 168194 marks a critical moment in Israeli society’s ‘coming to terms’ with a community of some half-million survivors that came to occupy positions of prominence in most areas of national life. It reflects on the damage which such attention inflicted on a community whose interests the State purported to champion – turning their private grief into acts of public, official remembrance. The trial itself was not the ‘beginning of a process’ but as historian Hannah Yablonka affirmed, ‘its climax’. Its repercussions were felt long after the trial ended.65 Hannah Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as a thoughtless and ‘banal’ cipher of totalitarian rule and of the proceedings as a ‘show trial’ provoked a fierce controversy over Jewish history and Jewish memory.66 What critics failed to find in Arendt’s argument was ‘an unambiguous and transparent Holocaust narrative’; they accused her of subsuming the Shoah into a ‘morally ambiguous narrative’ lacking any ‘redemptive idea of history’.67 The trial unleashed a profound sense of guilt on all sides of the

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controversy over the ‘unmastered past’. Now at last, everyone could acknowledge the burden of feeling that the subject elicited. The survivor’s voice Artistically speaking, 1961 proved an annus mirabilis for Bacon.68 On 29 April (with the trial in full session), an exhibition of his work opened at the Nora Studio Gallery and ran for a month; the art critic Bruria Gerzberg published a glowing review in the daily Ha’Poel Ha’Zair a day before Bacon’s appearance in the trial. In the days that followed, the eminent Czech-Jewish philosopher Samuel Hugo Bergman paid tribute to Bacon at the opening of a second exhibition held at Beit Ha’Omanim (Jerusalem Artists’ House). A third opened later that year at Israel’s first memorial to the Shoah, Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (Ghetto Fighters’ House).69 Yehuda Bacon, Exhibition of Paintings was organized by the Municipality of Holon and the Histadrut (the Federation of Trade Unions, at the time, a prominent player in Holocaust education), touring widely to affiliated schools, community halls, cultural centres and the kibbutz movement.70 While Bacon acknowledged the good will shown by the Histadrut he questioned their motives, adding wryly: ‘They made an example of me!’71 The exhibition opened in November, prompting a closer examination of Bacon’s role as witness and establishing his reputation firmly as an artist of Holocaust themes. Yet he found himself ostracized by those state-funded museums that espoused institutional modernism. With titles such as ‘Paintings from Hell’ and ‘From Painter of Death to Teacher of Art’, press coverage served only to cement the public perception of Bacon as a Kazet Kunstler (lit., concentration camp artist), one he tried unsuccessfully to disown.72 In January 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps,73 Bacon took part in a second exhibition at Ghetto Fighters’ House, alongside the Israeli artists Naftali Bezem and Kuba Laval, the Italians Josef Gourski and Regina Lichter, Zinovi Tolkechev (USSR), Karel Wisser and Gunther Ben (Netherlands), Peter Peri (Hungary), Polish émigré Marek Szwarc and School of Paris members Pablo Picasso and Edouard Pignon. Bacon was represented by a total of 13 works, by far the largest single contingent of works.74 Of these, six appeared in the exhibition handlist with the title ‘Memories of Auschwitz’, while the suite Prisoner 168194 was described as ‘Survivors of the Persecution’, the latter recalling his own family name (an acronym for Bnei Kedoshim v’Nirdafim, Descendants of the Holy Ones and the Persecuted), indicating both their Levite origins and the severe tribulations suffered in their history. The widespread use of such titles in the annals of Holocaust Art lend these works a spurious legitimacy when produced long after the event, often without direct recourse to them. Anyone, it seems, could now assert a claim to the ‘memory’ of the Shoah. The graphic depictions of Nazi atrocity – the beatings, rapes and executions – that proliferated in post-war fictional accounts, on book-jackets and cinema posters, verge on the voyeuristic, startling the viewer with their licentiousness and ambiguity. By contrast, in Bacon’s works, the biographical self is consistently invoked and aspects of the authentic are explored. These youthful flourishes, often on scraps of paper made with lines of uneven emphasis offer a redeeming immediacy, allowing

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us to come closer to some historical truth. Their precarious materiality and incipient knowledge of events, peoples and places (corroborated by the accounts found in Bacon’s diary), enjoin us to reflect on the responsibilities of witnessing and on the dilemmas and complexities of the retrospective account. In his search for a distilled ‘poetics of the visual’, Bacon would eventually eschew all literal references to the Shoah – an achievement comparable to that of Paul Celan’s in literature.75 Like Celan, Bacon’s drawings evoke a powerful sense of loss. In the absence of a body, burial mound, graveside or memorial stone, drawing itself becomes the locus of remembrance – cultural historian Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire – an idea that shaped some of Bacon’s most accomplished works.76 He shares with fellow-survivor and Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld the conviction that: to write things as they happened means to enslave oneself to memory, which is only a minor element in the creative process … The materials are indeed materials from one’s life, but ultimately, the creation is an independent creature.77 Such remarks shed light on the delicate balance that artists and writers sought to restore to their accounts of the Shoah acknowledging both the unremitting actuality of those events, and of language to transcend what Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘the blind power of facts, the tyranny of the actual’.78 While Muselmann and the Angel of Death succeeds in invoking the silence of remembrance at the intersection of the personal and the collective, Prisoner 168194 warns of the dangers of the public to overwhelm the private and the subjective, even as Bacon sought to assert the singularity of his voice, his story, amid the clamour of other voices and other stories.

8 NAMELESS BEFORE THE CONCENTRATIONARY VOID Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? Oder Theater? 1941–42 ‘After Gurs’ Griselda Pollock

If I can’t enjoy life and work, I will kill myself … It was summer. There were trees and sky and sea. I saw nothing else. Only colors, paintbrush, you, and this. People, everyone, became too much for me. I had to go further into solitude, completely away from all humanity. Then maybe I could find what I had to find: namely, myself – a name for me. And so I began Life and Theater. Charlotte Salomon1 So wrote the Jewish-German artist Charlotte Salomon (1917–43) in an excluded postscript, nevertheless appended to the single massive artwork that she created between 1941 and 1942 and titled, with double interrogatives, Leben? Oder Theater? (henceforward Life? or Theatre?). This would seem to suggest a performative work on subjectivity or identity. Why would creating over 1,000 and then selecting 769 gouache paintings, many hundreds with transparent overlays bearing a chorus-like commentary, some dialogue as well as indications of the musical tunes to which these should be sung, produce a name? Why was a name necessary? Was Salomon seeking an author name as her identification as artist? Or had this young woman experienced the political effacement of singular identity carried in the proper name by her encounter with a fascist assault on humanity in a concentration camp? Why would a ‘name for me’ be synonymous with a self and with ‘finding myself ’: in what ways had the self been lost? Fellow refugee Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) wrote of the stateless condition of what the French name l’apatride: ‘When I had to depend upon identity papers, I ceased to feel as if I quite belonged to myself.’2

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The work of Charlotte Salomon was first exhibited in Amsterdam in 1961. Yet it only became the object of extended art historical analysis during the last decade of that century. In 1992, Claire Stoullig and Luc Lang curated an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. This was followed by Salomon’s inclusion in an ensemble of marginalized twentieth-century artists, Inside the Visible, curated by Catherine de Zegher in Boston and London in 1996. Monica Bohm-Duchen curated the largest monographic show at the Royal Academy in London in 1998. The exhibition travelled to Boston and New York and set in motion a rolling series of exhibitions in Amsterdam, Paris, Hanover, Berlin and Jerusalem during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These events focused exclusively on the single but massive work that the artist had, however, named musically as a Singspiel – an operetta – to produce a visual exploration of German Jewish life, death, femininity and masculinity, between 1913 and 1940, now conserved in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. Life? or Theatre? is a unique combination of visual, textual and musical engagement with what I have called, pace Adorno, the era ‘before Auschwitz’; the work is founded in, and comments upon, the experiences of a Berlin Jewish family between World War I and the rise of fascism, with its assault on European Jewry up to July 1940. Is it a personal narrative of self-exploration or a politically conditioned historical work? After the exhibition in 1961 Salomon acquired limited cultural recognition, not as a modern artist so much as the tragic victim of the Holocaust. Living in hiding in the south of France, she had been betrayed and arrested in September 1943, and was deported from France and murdered on arrival at Auschwitz on 10 October 1943, aged 26. Her artwork has often been approached as a result as autobiographical testimony and shown in Jewish historical museums and Holocaust memorial sites as a visual complement to works such as the Diary of Anne Frank.3 While it is clear that memory constitutes a central thematic in the project that became Life? or Theatre?, I am not certain how we should classify the nature of the memory with which it deals. Charlotte Salomon’s death in Auschwitz in 1943 does indeed fall under the shadow of Holocaust memory, soliciting our grief and outrage. At the same time, this vast and unique painting cycle with text and musical cues invites many interpretations, offering itself to art historical readings of narrative modernism, to studies in life-narrative and autobiography, soliciting Jewish and feminist analyses of subjectivities, touching upon issues of feminine melancholia, hysteria, suicide, trauma, while also offering testament of Jewish life and death in the face of Nazism. Recently a new piece of evidence has come to light that has radically challenged all of us who study her work by seeming to reveal a completely different purpose underlying the creation of the work: the indictment of the artist’s grandfather for the crime of sexual abuse for which she wills, and imagines, his death. This is the topic of a longer study I am currently preparing in a full-length monograph. Here I want to offer a reading of Salomon’s remarkable single artwork, Life? or Theatre? through the prism of concentrationary memory. My purpose is not to explain the work through this singular frame of analysis, for the work clearly defies such categorization. I seek instead to catch up, as one of its many determinations and inflections, the tracing of the artist’s encounter with the concentrationary universe.

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If the issue of personally experienced sexual abuse might be grasped as a kind of murder of the self perpetrated in the unwitnessed zone of the family, the encounter with the camp functions as another kind of attempted destruction of the conditions of personhood that belongs, alongside several other life experiences such as persecution, exile, and statelessness, to the space of history and the zone of the political. The argument I shall make is, however, somewhat paradoxical. It is historically based on the artist’s incarceration in a French concentration camp at Gurs, in southwestern France between June and July 1940.4 Yet as a camp, Gurs does not appear in any form in all the elaborate imaging that constitutes Life? or Theatre? Thus it might be argued simply that this indicates that the experience was insignificant in the larger purpose for which the work was undertaken and completed. That may well be the case. But the historical thread within this work is sufficiently strong to make me suspicious of instant dismissal. The absence is not because the camp was unrepresentable or unrepresented. There is a rich archive of visual artwork produced by concentrationary internees from French camps and from Gurs itself which even resonate with some features of Salomon’s. Salomon’s biographer Mary Felstiner notes that once the Red Cross and other aid agencies were allowed to visit Gurs, provisions were delivered for drawing and painting that produced what she calls l’École de Gurs, or even the ‘miracle of Gurs’.5 Gurs inmate Hanna Schramm wrote later: ‘The extraordinary thing … was the numerous works of amateurs, both artists and artisans … One felt the joy of creating, the joy of fabricating an impeccable product, as the artisans of old must have known it.’6 Few of these works are serious artworks. Nicely drawn sketches capture aspects of daily life and sometimes its privations. There were also professional artists who were interned in French camps. Artists who made work in response to their internment in French camps include other Auschwitz victims such as Felix Nussbaum (8.1) as well as survivors such as the abstract painter Hans Reichel (1892–1958). Des Milles, a camp in a former brickworks, opened in 1939 in a factory building near Aix-en-Provence (Cézanne’s home town) ‘hosted’ the writer Lion Feuchtwanger and the artists Hans Bellmer, Max Ernst, Robert Liebknecht and Wols, the last-named leaving us some remarkable drawings of life in the camp, including portraits of fleas. The internees also painted an internationalist mural painted in the central hall.7 What is unique, and hence what allows me to suggest that Salomon’s work is also a form of concentrationary memory, is that the theatre of memory which she invented in her combination of words, music and images and bound as a vast book, was precipitated by a camp experience that this work retrospectively blotted out. Such a void constitutes, I am suggesting, a structuring absence. The camp’s negative presence in her historical narrative produces counter-memory to the encounter with the concentrationary. By not registering immediate experience or despair in relation to the camp, Salomon’s artwork, created ‘after Gurs’ acquires an additional effect: aesthetic defiance of all that her brush with the concentrationary universe, in its provisional and still primitive French-based form, revealed to her about the nature

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Felix Nussbaum (1904–44), Self-Portrait in the Camp, 1944, oil on plywood, 52.5 × 41.5cm. Neue Galerie, New York.

of the concentrationary process. In its aftermath, Hannah Arendt, a fellow Gurs inmate in 1940, would brilliantly distil what that process was from many other camp survivors’ writings. She theorized it as a systematic assault on the complex nature of social and personal humanity. Neither a representation of a camp’s topography, nor a testimonial to its daily wretchedness, such as we find in many prisoner drawings, Life? or Theatre? obliquely creates its form of concentrationary memory by its very refusal of description of a place or testimony to the experience. More significantly, I shall argue that it performs concentrationary memory through its interrogation of what it would mean to choose life (rather than suicide) in the face of what the camp revealed, at that date, as the concentration of the fascist assault on human life. In order to make what is both an indexical and a political argument, I need to work back to this paradox from the immense shadow of the artist’s ultimate destruction in an extermination camp. I shall do so through two themes: names and lists. Not having a culturally recognized ‘name’ and hence being nameless was a considerable factor in the ultimate destruction of Charlotte Salomon. Had she been ‘someone’, had she had a ‘name’, her encounters in Gurs might have become her lifeline, because Gurs played an important role in the story of the rescue of European artists and intellectuals caught up by internments in France firstly in 1939,

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for the men, and in 1940, for the women. Names are, however, linked with the sign of both dehumanization and salvation within this system: lists. Lists One of the scenes in Claude Lanzmann’s epic film Shoah (1985) that has always riveted me is an interview with the historian Raul Hilberg.8 Hilberg holds in his hand a document. It is Fahrplananordnung no. 587, a requisition and timetabling for one ‘special’ train: a Sonderzug. In the language of the Third Reich the adjective sonder was the deceptive signifier that prefaced other key terms such as Sonderhandlung: Special Treatment.9 This stood for the undeclared project of Vernichtung: annihilation, to make into nothing. Sonderhandlung was a synonym for extermination, a term with a different Latin root that means to drive out completely, to go beyond, to place outside – ex – the terminus, i.e. beyond the boundary stone. So Sonderhandlung means being taken beyond the absolute limit of the human community by being placed beyond the limit of life: rendered into nothing. In a thesaurus we find suggestions for related terms: extinction, liquidation. Hilberg holds in his hand a piece of paper, banal in its ordinariness and, strangely, given its contents, without even the aura of secret status. According to Hilberg, this document must have been sent to a dozen or so recipients to facilitate the passage of trains listed on it along short journeys across rural Poland, and keeping it ordinary would minimize attention or suspicion of what these planned journeys signified. By deciphering the mundane information offered on a typed page of numbered trains and tediously detailed sequences of departures and arrivals, its cryptic annotations of 50 loaded and then empty goods wagons moving fairly short distances through Grado to the Warsaw district to Malkinia, the station next to Treblinka, Hilberg declares: ‘There may be 10,000 dead Jews on this one plan.’ The scene exemplifies the appalling relation between one bureaucratic document that timetables the movements of trains and the mass death that it indexes without any registration of that annihilating reality in what it actually states. Moreover, Hilberg sees a curious relation between the material indexicality of the piece of paper itself and the rendering invisible of its import: When I hold a document in my hand, especially an original, I hold in my hand exactly what the bureaucrat held in his hands. It is an artefact, and it is the only left over there is. The dead do not return.10 The piece of paper can persist, passed from the bureaucrat’s hands to the historian’s so that the distance between past and present seems dissolved by the material persistence of the artefact. The document offers a mute testimony as well as legible evidence that can be deciphered to prove that if this 50-wagon goods train regularly moved back and forth between Malkinia and its other destinations loading up and emptying, a terrible destruction of the unnamed human freight must have occurred at the destination where the ‘freight’ disappeared. But what is so much more distressing

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is that the paper survives in its cold, indifferent factuality becoming the uncanny and dreadful trace that alone bears witness to the last hours of 10,000 murdered people. The dead do not return, say Hilberg. This is true. Those who die ordinary deaths are, however, usually marked in some way so that their memory is engraved in stone or their names are inscribed for the living to recall. Yet if the only remnant or marker of 10,000 people is the schedule for the train that delivered them to their deaths, what is the nature of the artefact? What kind of memory does it represent? Something of this same order of indexicality and the paper that Hilberg handles brings us to the sole documentary trace that remains to mark the existence on one such death train of a certain woman, Charlotte Salomon, for whom this document would be the last, fatal inscription into a recoverable documented history. The document in question is a passenger list for Transport no. 60, leaving the station Bobigny, near the transit camp at Drancy, in northern suburbs of Paris on 7 October 1943 with 1,000 persons being deported to Auschwitz. It was a long journey that took three days. Having arranged for the deportation of most of the Jewish world of Thessalonniki to Auschwitz, SS Officer Alois Brunner had been put in charge of the French transit camp at Drancy on 1 July 1943, removing the horseshoeshaped northern Paris apartment block that had been used as holding camp from the administrative control of the French police. Sixty-four transports left Drancy, 61 destined for Auschwitz and three for Sobibor, totalling a deportation of 61,000 Jewish people from France. On 30 September 1943, Brunner telexed Eichmann asking permission for a convoy on 7 October. On 1 October Eichmann confirmed his permission, sending a commando to escort the train from Stuttgart. Transport no. 60 left at 10.30 am on 7 October and, after three days and three nights, on 10 October, Auschwitz Commandant Hoess telexed Roethke at Drancy to confirm the arrival at 5.30 am of 564 men and 436, women. Of these 108 were under 18 years of age. On arrival 340 men were selected and sent for slave labour to Buna-AuschwitzMonowitz. Only 169 women were selected and numbered as 64711–64879. Hence 491 people were immediately murdered. In 1945, 39 survivors of these numbers were found, of whom only four were women. This information is all that can be gleaned from any documentary sources and it is from Serge Klarsfeld’s Le Calendrier de la Persécution des Juifs en France 1940–1944, published in 1993. From Klarsfeld’s other monumental work, Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, the first to write a biography of Charlotte Salomon, gleaned a typed list of names for Transport no. 60 (8.2a).11 Just after the family Naftulovici, a junk dealer and his wife and two daughters, both tailoresses, we find Alexander Nagler, born 25 August 1904, prisoner no. 5570, listed as a bookkeeper and Charlotte Nagler, born 16 April 1917, prisoner no. 5571, listed as Zeichnerin, graphic artist or draftswoman. A short review of this list reveals how few women had a profession to offer up to their captors in the hope of seeming possibly useful. Ohne – without profession – occurs more often for older women and for mothers. The significance of this document for me as art historian does not assuage the grief it inspires to find Charlotte Salomon’s name – admittedly her married name – on so horrific a document of the administered procedure for mass murder. Art

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List for Transport no. 60 Drancy-Auschwitz. Courtesy: Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Paris.

historically, however, this list is very important in a different way. It functions as the only public document upon which, during her lifetime, Charlotte Salomon is inscribed as an artist. The reason this matters is that the discipline of art history admits as artists those who have public acknowledgement, who are exhibited in galleries and museums, have been commissioned to make works, have dealers, have works bought and sold, and have reviews and catalogues, interviews and obituaries. A range of documentation supports the recognition and historical analysis of an artist’s life, work, career, reputation and practice. In their complete absence, Charlotte Salomon does not, cannot, have an author-name. It is perversely this document that affirms her artistic profession. Yet even this is equivocal. She named herself an artist on this list – but a useful one with graphic skills – Zeichnerin not Kunstlerin – because it had perhaps become known that the SS made use of such skills. Naming herself thus was bargaining with her killers for a tiny thread of hope to enter the concentrationary universe that existed side by side with the extermination process of the gas chamber. Salomon’s self-declared vocational identity on the document that transported her to death strikes me cold, linking my art historical search for an affirmed artistic identity with the erasure of the right to life in one documentary space typed by the clerks. Thus in my Hilbergian moment, there is a terrible paradox. The transport list becomes the only affirmation Salomon ever made of what we now wish to convince ourselves: she was an artist. What remains, beside this paper, are the ‘papers’ she had

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painted up to 1942. They function not merely as the artwork of an artist at the time without a name, but as an index of her having lived. In hiding in a villa in the hills that rise steeply from the sea in Villefranche, just round the coast from Nice, denounced to the Gestapo and arrested together on 23 September 1943, Alexander Nagler and Charlotte Salomon Nagler were taken to the courtyard of the infamous Hotel Excelsior where SS Officer Alois Brunner had his notorious and terrifying headquarters before marching the prisoners down the street to the station to transport them north to Drancy. Nagler and Salomon had sought refuge in the villa of an American rescuer, Ottilie Moore, to whom Life? or Theatre? was protectively dedicated. They had hidden in her villa, L’Hermitage, since their marriage on 17 June 1943 at the Town Hall in Nice, licence no. 762. This document, also brilliantly discovered by the tenacity of Mary Felstiner, tells us more interesting things (8.2b). Like the poet Paul Celan and the painter Avigdor Arikha, Alexander Nagler was born in Czernowitz, Romania to Leibisch Nagler and Serka Brancia Nagler. He defined himself on this occasion as the director of a children’s home. His former lover, Ottilie Moore, had taken in orphaned and stateless children. Charlotte Salomon, born in Berlin, daughter of Albert Salomon, medical doctor domiciled in Amsterdam and Françoise Grunwal(d), deceased, elsewhere, is here, however, sans profession, as are the two witnesses, Dr Georges Moridis and Odette Moridis, domiciled in Villefranche (the doctor to whom Life? or Theatre? was given for safekeeping in 1942 as the property of Ottilie Moore). The four sign the register that offers us the only surviving full signature of Charlotte Salomon – the paintings in Life? or Theatre? are signed with the ungendered and ethnically-dissembling initials CS (8.2c).

8.2b

Wedding Registry, Nice Town Hall, June 1943.

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Wedding Registry, Nice Town Hall, June 1943: close-up of signature.

At the time of this dangerously public wedding of two Jewish refugees living in Nice, the Côte D’Azur was under Italian control. During the summer of 1943 a plan, organized by an Italian, Angelo Donati, was hatched to rescue up to 30,000 Jewish refugees in the region by transporting them in ships across the Mediterranean to North Africa. Eisenhower and the Allies scuppered this plan. The Germans moved in and Brunner went south with his 12 SS henchmen to ‘clear the Jews out of the Riviera’. Setting up headquarters at the Excelsior Hotel, Brunner’s gang arrested all they found and paid for tip-offs for those in hiding. Alexander Nagler and Charlotte Nagler née Salomon appear on a list of 24 September 1943 identifying the 1,820 people being sent to Drancy. Felstiner quotes an eyewitness: ‘the human hunt on the Côte D’Azur in the autumn of 1943 surpassed in horror and brutality everything of this kind previously known at least in Western Europe’. 12 I have held neither the transport list nor the wedding registry in my hands. None the less, they acquire meaning not merely because of the historical information they provide for the biographer, but because they frame the absence that follows: an absence that alone allows us to glimpse Charlotte Salomon’s otherwise unrecorded and unwitnessed death. On arrival at Auschwitz, Alexander Nagler was registered and tattooed with the number 157166. His number appears in a list for admission to the camp infirmary, and, on 1 January 1944, his number is entered in the Register of the Dead. As Felstiner coldly reports of Charlotte Salomon: ‘[h]er name was entered nowhere in the records of the camp’.13 This requires explanation. German-speaking, blonde and blue-eyed, no small child, able-bodied, young, skilled in calligraphy, calling herself a draftswoman, Charlotte Salomon Nagler’s death sentence on the ramp was, we believe, the result of this single fact: she was five months pregnant. Of those who arrived at Auschwitz, less than half of 1 per cent survived. Felstiner analyses these figures to expose a deeper underlying, gendered jeopardy. She concludes: ‘On the ramp the primary secret purpose of deportation was finally acted out: “to deprive Jewry of its biological reserves”… “to obliterate the germ cell of a new Jewish revival”.’14 She declares: ‘Genocide is the act of putting women and children first. Of all the deceptions a death camp settled on, this one went down the deepest. This was the hard core of the Holocaust.’15 Younger women were invited to own up to pregnancy with the promise of extra rations, only to have the information used as an immediate death sentence as bearers of a Jewish future. Charlotte Salomon, born in Berlin in 1917 and killed on 10 October 1943, left behind her own paper trail in the form of portraits, landscapes and drawings, which have recently resurfaced and many of which are now in Yad Vashem’s Holocaust Art Museum. But the trail includes the single work titled Life? or Theatre? A Musical

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Operetta, signed with a monograph CS. Hidden after 1942 by Dr Moridis, to whom this post-Gurs work was confided by Charlotte Salomon when she had finished it, the packages containing Life? or Theatre? were handed over by Ottilie Moore to Charlotte Salomon’s surviving parents. Her father, Albert Salomon, a surgeon, and her step-mother, Paula Lindberg-Salomon, an opera singer, had managed to escape from Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands where they had been held after being arrested in the Netherlands whither they had fled from Berlin in 1939. They had survived in hiding, believing their daughter safe in the South of France. The bereaved parents showed Life? or Theatre? to another surviving and bereaved parent, Otto Frank. He had been inspired to do something with his own daughter’s surviving papers. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank was first published in 1947. Charlotte Salomon’s papers remained in the family until 1960, when another Holocaust survivor, Willem Sandberg (1897–1984), then Director of the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, arranged for his curator Ad Peterson to create the first ever exhibition of Life? or Theatre. Thus, 18 years after their completion, Charlotte Salomon’s papers were presented to the world as modern artworks. Such unequivocal aesthetic acknowledgement did not survive long. Charlotte Salomon was not immediately admitted to the canon of pre-war modern art. Instead, her paintings were cast as a visual ‘diary of a young girl’ and although much exhibited around the Jewish world from Israel to the US largely in Jewish historical museums and increasingly in Holocaust memorials, they were generally treated as documents of a lost girlhood and as a visual form of Holocaust testimony. Not as testimony to what would destroy her, the creation of her artworks on paper was shaped in part, and was also generated, by Salomon’s encounter with a form of the concentrationary universe in which she had been, mercifully, but briefly confined in June–July 1940 on French soil. As a result of the German defeat of France and the capitulation of the Vichy Regime to the Reich, all ‘German’ refugees were concentrated in camps. Initially at the outbreak of war in 1939 men were rounded up, but in May 1940 this order was applied to women as well. All ‘Germans’ irrespective of their political relations to the Reich were ‘concentrated’ in Frenchrun camps. Thus German Jewish refugees were incarcerated alongside faithful adherents of the National Socialist regime who found themselves on French soil at the outbreak of war. The camp to which Charlotte Salomon was sent in June 1940 was called Gurs, near Pau in southwest France (8.14). Namelessness In his 1994 monument Passages, commissioned by the German and Catalunyan governments, a memorial to Walter Benjamin at Port Bou, where he died on 26 September 1940, Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan created a deep staircase carved into the rocky cliffs that fall from the platform on which the Catholic cemetery is built (8.3). Lined by rusted corten steel plates reminiscent of Richard Serra’s equally freighted works, the visitor descends a precipitous and seemingly open-ended staircase to the churning waters below. We are only protected from falling directly

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Dani Karavan (b.1930), Passages-Walter Benjamin, Port Bou, Catalunya, Spain, 1994. Courtesy Atelier Dani Karavan.

onto the rocks and sea by a plate glass window across its gaping mouth on which are etched Walter Benjamin’s own words: Schwerer ist es, das Gedächtnis der Namenlosen zu ehren als das Berühmten. Dem Gedächtnis der Namenlosen ist die historische Konstruktion geweiht. [It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.] In 1940, Charlotte Salomon was effectively nameless as well as stateless. But the link between Benjamin and Salomon hangs on more than this. There is a striking visual resonance between the aesthetic shaping of the monument to Walter Benjamin by Dani Karavan with its play of rocks and water, rusted red steel, and the blues of the Mediterranean sea and sky, and the final painting Charlotte Salomon placed at the end of Life? or Theatre? This painting shows a sun-tanned young woman, dressed in a simple modern bathing suit, sitting on the rocks beside the sea with her legs tucked under her body like a Copenhagen mermaid (8.4a). She appears to be beginning to paint one of her sheets, which is strangely transparent, allowing the sea and sky to be seen through its framing edge. Her first painted stroke in dark colours will blot out

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Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. Final painting JHM no. 4925. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

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Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, transparent overlay for JHM no. 4925. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

the blue of the Mediterranean and transport the painter back through time to a night in the city of Berlin in 1913: the painting she will place as the opening scene of her vast narrative cycle. The curious resonance between this painting of 1941–42 and the browns and blues of the monument of 1994 lies in the absolute incommensurability between the ludically touristic and the artistic trope of the Mediterranean and the link that Karavan’s monument and Salomon’s image forging between the tropes of modernism or elite leisure and deadliness of fascism and mass murder originating in far-away Germany. In the image, the painting woman is not beginning to paint a testimony or even her own memories. With this single brush stroke the painted painter initiates the first painting of the series, transporting the viewer back in time to a moment before the artist’s birth in 1913, and to a night in Berlin where a young woman, also named Charlotte, the artist’s never-known aunt, will drown herself in inky dark waters of Berlin’s pleasure lake, the Schlachtensee, not very far from the infamous but equally beautiful Wannsee. This rhyme between a suicide in pre-war Germany and a suspended moment in a no-where and a no-time, fabricated with references to French modernism of Matisse and Dufy, declares that the artwork of Charlotte Salomon will turn away from the present of its own sun-filled and avant-gardist location to reconstruct a passage through images, texts and music back to this 1913 moment. The moment of the beginning of this travel through time is being painted by a person transformed into a new kind of subject ‘after Gurs’.

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To a series of suicides tracked through the narrative cycle, the work poses the question of life followed by question mark: life? Through a painted theatre of memory the past may be researched, and indeed reinvented, to form a bridge over what the artwork, which will now be produced, effectively obliterates from the immediate memory of the painter’s avatar in her work – historical characters in her family circle are given Brechtian names as a kind of distanciation and fictionalization; the artist becomes Charlotte Kann (Charlotte Able) – so as to arrive again at the moment at which this undertaking is beginning as both question and affirmation of the decision in favour, it would seem, of life. Leben in German is the noun ‘life’ and leben the verb ‘to live’. Salomon’s work, created after the camp experience, absents, therefore, the traumatic experience of the actual concentration camp, the immediate past and the epicentre of the oppressive present. Symptomatically, whatever else is the work’s conscious project, Life? or Theatre? does not merely suspend the boundaries between past and present, but almost suspends the present that was momentarily abolished under the sign of the camp. Life? or Theatre?, therefore, becomes a form of counterwork to witness, interesting for its refusal of testimony, and avoidance of direct representation of the mere place or scene. This voiding sets this work apart from the compulsive use of all manner of inscription and visualization that characterizes the work of many contemporaries who shared some of that experience of the camp and felt the need to witness by ‘documenting’ the outward signs of its daily hideousness or the struggle to maintain daily life despite the odds. They did not represent and aesthetically resist, however, what the encounter with camp meant, unlike Salomon who, I am arguing, effectively did just that by making a theatre of memory in that place at that time. Gurs and the concentrationary Salomon’s artwork was generated beyond and before the industrial murdering carried out systematically on Polish soil that has become identified with the heart of the Holocaust. Her work extends the geography of terror by including the Mediterranean coast, where it becomes linked with another kind of witnessing – escape and survival in relation to a less well-known moment of the concentrationary that took place neither in Germany nor Poland but in France. In arguing this, I am perhaps only extending biographer Mary Felstiner’s suggestion in 1994 that Gurs shaped Salomon’s work. Felstiner argues that to make an artwork about a family history was itself a gesture refuting the initial and deadly blow inflicted by entering the concentrationary universe: As soon as the inmates followed the officers’ first order – This way to the women’s camp, that way to the men’s camp – they took in the primary code: identity is formed at conception, untouched by personal history. This code was used even before France’s anti-Jewish laws of October 1940 taught exiles their racial caste. Against it, an individual had to assert a singular past. If CS’s paintings looked unswervingly at private history, this was because they took shape after Gurs.16

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Astutely, Felstiner interprets what Hannah Arendt had delineated as the fundamental act of the concentrationary universe in its aim of destroying the entire armature of human singularity: namely the erasing of judicial identity – name, passport number and other markers – to collectivize, anonymize and depersonalize before voiding the conditions of moral personhood by making the struggle for daily survival so extreme, and finally by making physical life itself almost untenable. The supreme goal of all totalitarian governments is not only … global rule, but also the never-admitted and immediately realized attempt at the total domination of man. The concentration camps are the laboratories in the experiment of total domination, for human nature being what it is, this goal can be achieved only under the extreme circumstances of a human-made hell … The creation of specific locations called camps aims not merely at incarceration but experimentation in destruction: This disintegration of personality is carried through different stages, the first being the moment of arbitrary arrest, when the judicial person is being destroyed, not because of the injustice of the arrest but because the arrest stands in no connection whatsoever with the actions or opinions of the person. The second stage concerns the moral personality and is achieved through the separation of the concentration camps from the rest of the world, a separation which makes martyrdom senseless, empty and ridiculous. The last stage is the destruction of individuality itself and is brought about through the permanence and institutionalizing of torture.17 In 1940, under French police administration, Gurs did not yet practise the extremities of hardship experimentally perfected by the SS-run camps in Germany; structurally, however, it shared these immediate effects and swiftly reduced the conditions of life to bare life: no beds, no heat or protection from heat, mud, lack of sanitation or privacy and almost no edible food. In painting her vast narrative cycle in the months or perhaps the year after her release, Salomon seems to be countering the concentrationary experience with her theatre of invented memory that might sustain life after the encounter with the attempted dehumanization in the camp. Through the prism of concentrationary memory, we can read Charlotte Salomon’s work as an instance of aesthetic resistance to exposure to campness: to the assault on human dignity and the destruction of conditions for anything but bare life. In conjunction with other traumatic assaults, this event is the political shadow that also placed the question of life and death before the painting subject.

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Life? Or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon was required to go to Gurs from Nice at the end of May 1940. The fact was sufficiently important for her to paint the notice into the epilogue of her work: ‘Toutes les ressortissantes allemandes sont tenues de quitter sans délai la ville et le département [Notice: All female German nationals are required to leave the town and département without delay]’ (8.11). According to Felstiner, the round-up of men had taken place in September 1939. We know that Walter Benjamin was in fact arrested in Paris on 3 September 1939 and was sent for ten days to Stade Colombes and then to an abandoned chateau at Vernuche where he remained in fragile health. As part of his attempt to earn an armband that enabled brief exits from the camp for better food, Benjamin initiated a Bulletin de Vernuche: Journal des Travailleurs du 54e Regiment, now held in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, which forms a critical document on the manner of life and of the fact of imaginative resistance in such an internment camp which attempted to document the creation of a life out of the nothing. It was never published. Benjamin remained at Vernuche until 20 November when the indefatigable bookseller Adrienne Monnier supported by the British writer Bryher, through the international writers’ organization, PEN, secured his release along with that of Siegfried Kracauer, interned in another camp. The round-up of women refugees took place only in May 1940. On 26 May 1940 the Nice newspaper carried the announcement obliging all women to present themselves at Gurs. In the course of her investigation of the time of history that came before Gurs, the artist undertook visually, narratively and acoustically, to summon a series of characters whose living, loving, doing and dying she needed to examine in this moment of crisis and catastrophe. I have elsewhere named this project an Orphic journey to an invented underworld of dead women (aunt, mother, grandmother) and missing loved ones (step-mother and lover). In passing, and as a complement to this intense psychic journey, Charlotte Salomon painted a minor visual history of the rise and impact of fascism in Germany, registering the concurrent political menace to Jewish and feminine subjectivities. In her many-threaded narrative, CS implanted a series of ‘historical’ paintings about life for Jewish Germans after 1933. Indeed the current historical exhibition at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem uses Charlotte Salomon’s paintings as illustrative elements of its multimedia displays about the rise of fascist persecution in Germany. (8.5–8.9) This subset of politically attuned representations of contemporary events might constitute in themselves a narrative of that significant moment in Jewish history that could be called ‘before Auschwitz’ that left Salomon to become a painter ‘after Gurs’. It starts with the victory parade of the brownshirts (Sturmabteilung (SA)) on 30 January 1933 (8.5) and anti-Semitic placards in the street (JHM 4305) and is followed by the expulsion of her surgeon father from his hospital job and shrieks of ‘Raus [Out]’ at a concert where her stepmother sings (JHM 4306–08); then comes a long series of images of the negotiation with Josef Goebbels for the Jewish Cultural Organization (JHM 4310–17) that would sustain so many suddenly unemployed performers and musicians while a painting, where wallpaper turns to swastikas registers the beginnings of persecution at school (JHM 4318). Prefaced by

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8.5

Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. 30 January 1933 JHM no. 4304. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

8.6

Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. Der Angriff JHM no. 4761. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

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Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. Pogromnacht JHM no. 4762.Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

8.8

Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. Prof. Salomon in hard labour at Sachsenhausen rejected painting JHM No. 4885 verso. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

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8.9

Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. Jewish shops being attacked, 9 November 1938 JHM no. 4903 verso rejected painting. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

8.10

Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. 10 May 1940 JHM no. 4913. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

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Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 × 32.5 cm. AVIS 1940 JHM no 4914. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

8.12

Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), Leben? Oder Theater?, 1941–42, gouache on paper, 25 by 32.5 cm. Train JHM no. 4915 recto. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

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a dramatic image of Der Angriff (8.6) and Der Sturmer’s incitement of fury against the Jews, there are paintings of Pogromnacht, also known as Kristallnacht, on 9 November 1938 (8.7) and its aftermath: the arrest of her father and his near-death in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen from which the ceaseless efforts of his wife finally liberated him (8.8). Later reused for paintings of the epilogue, there are paintings of assaults on synagogues and the campaign against Jewish shops, all of which the painted avatar Charlotte Kann solemnly witnesses (8.9). It will include awful scenes of listening to Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda on the radio (JHM 4791 and 4841), reports of atrocities against Jewish Germans and finally a representation of the bombing and invasion of France in May 1940 (8.10), and the orders for all refugee women to go to camps (8.11). This series that begins with the faecal tide of SA men marching in victory in the streets of Berlin in 1933 concludes with one painting whose meaning is difficult to decipher (8.12). It marks either the point of entry or the moment of return from the camp: framing what I am naming the structuring void, itself indicating the traumatic impossibility of including an image of the camp between the summons to go there and the release from it. In addition, Salomon painted many other scenes of the indignities imposed on Jewish Berlin dwellers that, however, she excluded from the final selection of gouaches but which she preserved none the less by reusing their verso for other included paintings, notably of the epilogue that details events leading up to the deportation to Gurs. The image on which I wish to focus forms the conclusion of this mini-political narrative. It is the painting of a group of people washed in dismal browns and blues, hunkering in a waiting room or a railway carriage without seats but with exceptionally large windows (8.12). The image and the accompanying text make no sense. The text suggests it is a painting produced to mark the departure from the camp: Charlotte Salomon was released to care for her elderly grandfather in July 1940, a period of confusion in the camp’s history when the French authorities were uncertain whom to contain and whom to release as the Germans’ control of all of France tightened. This is the only trace in the work that touches albeit obliquely on the camp experience. It places the artist and her elderly and now crushed grandfather in a railway car with French refugees fleeing from the interior of the country, thus westwards towards the Atlantic coast, or perhaps they are fleeing South, and thus intersecting with the released pair attempting to make their way back to Nice. Yet we know they were not allowed to take the train back to Nice and had to walk much of the way. It reads: Overlay: Mr Knarre and Charlotte have spent the last few days in a railway car crammed with thousands of exhausted people. Driven from the interior of the country by air raids, these people have had to leave all their possessions behind in order to escape with their bare lives.

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View of Gurs, 1941–41, photograph, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jack Lewin.

Charlotte: [painted on the painting] I’d rather have ten more nights like this than a single one with him. The statement by ‘Charlotte’ evidences the thread of incestuous abuse to which it appears she was being subjected by the grandfather, who had presumably also used his own daughters in the same way, precipitating, Salomon’s work suggests, their depressions and suicides. On her scale of trauma, it rates worse than the effects of having been in the camp. In this painting we glimpse how that deep theme of her work, her rageous indictment of her grandfather, is folded into the specific psycho-political experience of ‘camp’. Filthied by it, now submerged in that faecal coloration, reduced to squatting on the floor, the crushed bodies are the visual sign of the camp’s assault. Gurs was an internment camp established by the French in 1939 to house refugees from the Spanish Civil War after the fall of Catalunya; they interned the fleeing republicans so as not to anger the Franco regime At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, all German and Axis power citizens were likewise interned by the French authorities and Gurs was one of the key centres to which Germans, irrespective of their political or ethnic relations to the fascist Reich were sent. With the Armistice in June 1940 after the German defeat of France the camp became a concentration camp specifically for foreign Jewish folk and anyone considered dangerous to the Vichy regime. Three hundred and eighty-two cabins were built on 28 hectares of land with 30 cabins in each parcel, îlot, divided from each other by barbed wire (8.13). Cabins

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were basic wooden constructions with tar, no windows, no insulation, no ventilation, no protection from cold or heat. Bedding was straw packages on the ground; there were no water closets, no running water, no formal sanitation. Positioned very close to the Atlantic, the camp was subject to constant rainfall. The ground was made of clay and the constant rain turned it into dangerously deep mud; inmates struggled to place stones and planks as provisional walkways through what was often merely a treacherous bog in order to avoid drowning in it. Not electrified, and not watched over by gun-slinging guards, the atmosphere was not as terrifying as such camps in Germany or Poland, but the conditions of living were truly appalling and were aggravated by scarcity of food. Over the entire period of the camp’s history 64,000 people were interned there. Ehud Loeb was one of a group of German-Jewish families uniquely transported from Baden-Baden in Germany to Gurs in October 1940. He recalls: Everything changes at Gurs – because of Gurs, right after Gurs and since Gurs. My grandmother died there, my parents were led from Gurs to their deaths in Auschwitz, and my childhood died at Gurs when I was seven years old. It was impossible to retrieve it. Later he wrote: I was six and a half years old and helped build the stone paths in the oozing mud. I remember each stone that we found and put in place – I, my mother and the women who lived with us in the cold, wet barracks … Everything was gray and cold. The rain never ceased and I was forced to sleep on a pile of wet straw which served as a bed. Mother obtained a little wool and knitted a pair of gloves that she exchanged for small amounts of milk for me. From the first day at Gurs, I did not stop missing Mother and Father’s bed. At Gurs, I began to realize that my life had become more than I could bear, a living hell.18 Ehud Loeb was eventually taken to a children’s home when an organization for the rescue of children, OSE, was allowed to save lone children in the camp. He survived by being hidden by a series of French families. We know a lot about life for women in the camp at Gurs from some of its more renowned inmates. These included the Walter Benjamin’s sister Dora, the philosopher turned social activist Hannah Arendt and Lisa Fittko, who would guide many refugees on the journey over the Pyrenees to safety. Fittko was indeed the guide under whose direction Benjamin himself made his last journey to Port Bou, where on 26 September 1940 he died in circumstances that have never been finally established. Fittko has written a memoir of her experiences including the time in the camp.19 Hannah Arendt commented on the round-up of the refugees; expelled from Germany as Jews, interned in France as boches, retained in camps as Jews, they represented a new fact of contemporary history which has created ‘a new kind of

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human beings – the kind that are put into concentration camps by their foes and into internment camps by their friends’.20 In this essay about being a ‘refugee’, Arendt recalls her own experience at Gurs in relation to despair and the possibility of suicide. She made the distinction between experiencing its horrors as a collective event, hence an event for which one was not personally responsible, and taking it on as a personal and individual accident, the former leading to a more collective will to live despite all attempts to reduce all life, while the latter could well reassert itself once the individual, released from the camp, was once again on her own. In a letter to Kurt Blumenfeld, written on 6 August 1952, Arendt admitted that at Gurs she had herself posed the question of suicide.21 Lisa Fittko’s memoirs provide us with a vivid account of the shocking conditions in Gurs, but also provide evidence of the manner, and the will, in which it was possible to organize and ultimately to escape. Activist political German and German Jewish women, many from left-wing organizations – which accounted for their exile in France – sent delegations to the French camp Commissaire (de Police) demanding better conditions, asking to be separated from the Nazis and fascists with whom the anti-fascists and Jewish refugees were mixed under the undifferentiating concept of ressortissantes allemandes: ‘German refugees’: boches. The German invasion and victory in June 1940 undid the camp’s fragile order. Panicked by the imminent arrival of the Germans, the camp Commissaire needed to be able to sort out the fascists – formerly undesirables, now in need of good treatment so as to bargain with the invading Germans. In this chaos, one of Fittko’s colleagues managed to steal certificates of release from the Commissaire’s office. Forging his signature, she prepared false documents for a group of known inmates who felt that, as marked Jewish and communist undesirables, taking their chance outside the camp would be infinitely better than awaiting the Germans in the camp. A list was drawn up which included Frau Feuchtwanger (novelist Lion Feuchtwanger’s wife) and Fittko and her colleagues remembered Hannah Arendt, renowned at this point only as socialist refugee Heinrich Blüchler’s wife, living in a nearby îlot.22 We do not know in which block Charlotte Salomon spent her months at Gurs. Perhaps she met Hannah Arendt or Lisa Fittko. She was not, however, one of the 60 women who, armed with these false papers, walked out of Gurs and took their chances in the uncertain world beyond its fences. She was in fact released when a German commission arrived on 12 July to review the prisoners’ papers. Charlotte Salomon was sent away apparently as a carer for her elderly grandfather also released because of his age, we think. It makes no sense. But it was a chaotic, pre-Gestapo period. Had Charlotte Salomon had a ‘name’ beyond the merely judicial identity erased by the collective punishment of internment as a foreign refugee – ressortissante allemande on French soil – had she been known as an artist, for instance, her ‘name’ might have been included on the list drawn up by the politicos who managed this mass exodus from Gurs, a flight that opened the way for escape from Europe itself. As Salomon was a stateless exile in France, her artwork, therefore, touches on a less-studied but challenging dimension of the concentrationary universe installed on French soil that forges a link between her unremembered, uninscribed destruction and the terrible

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possibility that, had she had a public author name that anyone knew, the name with which we have since endowed this artist posthumously, she might have had a chance to survive, because many such ‘names’ – artists, writers, musicians and thinkers – were sought out and aided in successful escapes from Gurs and ultimately from Europe. Many of the Gurs escapees rejoined partners and families and made eventually for Marseilles, there to become part of one of the great rescue operations staged by the man known as the American Schindler. American journalist Varian Fry (1907–67) arrived in Marseilles in August 1940 with $3,000 and a list of names of threatened intellectuals and artists. He formed an Emergency Rescue Committee that set up a rescue mission which saved about 4,000 people.23 In fact he saved some of the most renowned intellectuals of his generation: the list includes Hannah Arendt, Jean Arp, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Hans Habe (Janos Békessy), Siegfried Kracauer, Wilfredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, Wanda Landowska, Lotte Leonard, Jacques Lipchitz, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Hans Namuth, Max Ophüls, Anna Seghers, Victor Serge, Sophie Taeuber, Franz Werfel, Wols and Kurt and Helen Wolff. This, only partial, list secured the passage to the USA of a whole generation of European intellectuals and artists. Arendt, like many stateless persons, was given Fry’s affidavits in lieu of a passport that alone enabled her to traverse the border, get through Spain and Portugal and there obtain a visa to travel on to the United States. Gurs has become a little-known episode in French concentrationary history even while it played a role in the lives and indeed the survival of those we do recall, such as Hannah Arendt. Blotted out by even those who were there, it is remembered for two quite specific visual responses. One is a Haggadah – the liturgical and narrative text used during the Passover Seder/Meal – created in the Jewish year 5701 (Roman calendar 1941) by the inmates of Gurs, by then largely Jewish, and under the conditions of a German concentration camp.24 This serves as evidence of the work of a group of German rabbis sent to this camp with their German companions. The rabbis instituted a Central Assistance Committee within the camp, recreating the habits of former Jewish ghetto life in Europe when the Kehillah, the community, took responsibility for social welfare and cultural and religious life. Barracks were set aside for a library, a synagogue and a cultural venue. Three hand-written copies of the Haggadah, the story of the Exodus and the order of service for the Passover festival, were produced laboriously from memory. When time ran out a Romanlettered typewriter was used to create some of the song sheets and the community was allowed to hold its communal Seder outside the camp perimeter, which one surviving watercolour appears to record. This dedication to maintaining Jewish ritual life is relevant because Life? or Theatre? also includes, side by side with its obvious invocation of Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera and popular culture of the musical, a mournful affiliation to Jewish ritual in the manner in which it opens. The fourth page of the hand-painted text preliminaries is a gorgeous recreation of a Hebrew manuscript complete with imitation gold leaf and the invocation of Psalm 144 used in the Memorial Service of Yom Kippur. I have

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Horst Rosenthal, Mickey Mouse at Gurs. Courtesy: Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Paris.

elsewhere also been tempted to see the vast and illustrated work as its own modern Haggadah, a narrative complete with questioning children and an exploration of the conditions of redemption into life in the face of both death as a choice and dying as something menacing one’s every breath under the new terror of totalitarianism.25 This modernization of ritual forms, however, is actually the opposite of the Gurs Haggadah’s hopeful loyalty to the tradition. Charlotte Salomon’s work does not imagine a divine hope: it faces a human foe and knows that the choice to live must be taken by the individual herself in the face of the sort of knowledge she gained in Gurs. It is thus situated in contemporary history and in its politics of life and death. This links the work with a more congruent resistance from Gurs that relates to the acid use of humour: an Arendtian laughter, however. Art historian Pnina Rosenberg has documented another perplexing surviving artefact from this period: a booklet created by an artist named Horst Rosenthal titled Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp (8.14).26 Rosenthal came to Gurs from another French concentration camp, St Cyprien, which has been made more renowned through the paintings done there by an already reputed German-Jewish artist, Felix Nussbaum (1904–44). Born in Osnabrück, Nussbaum was already a recognized artist with a formal art training from Hamburg, Berlin and Rome when the Nazis forced him from the Berlin Academy and drove him into exile. He fled to Belgium, where the

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fall of that country to the German invasion found him rounded up and sent to a concentration camp of St Cyprien in the South of France in 1940. Associated with the New Objectivity Movement, Nussbaum created a dramatic image of his hunted, exiled, racially-identified self in his Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card (1943, oil on canvas, 56 × 60 cm, Osnabrück Felix Nussbaum Haus) while also painting searing images of ‘bare life’ at St Cyprien such as Camp Synagogue (1941, oil on plywood, 49 × 65, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Art Museum) and St Cyprien: Prisoners (1942, oil on canvas, 68 × 138 cm, Osnabrück Felix Nussbaum Haus). In one painting he combined a self-portrait with a view of the interior of this camp Self-Portrait in the Camp (8.1). Under a menacing steel grey sky two wooden shacks frame a distant view to the tangled barbed wire fence within which the prisoners are confined. A halfnaked man shits into a large tub while a pale and ghostly figure of an emaciated man teeters on spindly legs, unmoving but seemingly swaying. In the shadow of another hut two men huddled in rough blankets sit at a knocked-together wooden table. Dominating the foreground and bleakly yet fiercely staring at the viewer stands the artist in a woollen brimless cap and tattered, patched brown shirt. Unshaven, eyes dark-circled, this man contemplates himself against this landscape of desolation: colourless sand with scattered bones. Skilled as a painter, Nussbaum conveys a powerful image at once true to the ruthless gaze of New Objectivity and charged with a Boschian terror that would turn into full-scale apocalyptic magic realism in his post-camp works. Created on a site that lay between the land and the sea, placing prisoners in the exposed space of mere sand without access to the water beyond the barbed wire or the shelter of the trees behind them, the camp was built between the town and the sea so that its inmates sweltered in summer and froze in winter, cut off from cooling water while chilled by winds off it. Their living conditions are presented in a manner derived from the works of Hieronymous Bosch that Nussbaum had no doubt seen during his brief period of refuge in Belgium before his arrest in 1940 as an enemy alien after the invasion by the Germans. At his own request he was transported to Germany from St Cyprien, but managed to escape back to Belgium, where he lived with his wife, also an artist, Felka Platek. They painted in hiding until July 1944 when he and his wife were discovered and sent on 2 August to Auschwitz where he lived for one week before being murdered, seven months after his parents died in the same way. No member of his family survived. Nussbaum’s images are important here as they show that something in the existing resources of western pictorial tradition provided the means to picture key aspects of the horrific reality of these French camps. Horst Rosenthal was sent to Gurs on 28 September 1940 because St Cyprien camp had been washed away in a storm. Rosenthal left three little booklets. Two others are also satirical: A Guide to the Camp and Day in the Life of Resident. But the Mickey Mouse comic book interests me most (8.14). It starts: One day in the year II of the national revolution I was strolling calmly somewhere in France.

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Clearly referring to the ‘National Revolution’, the official ideological self-naming of the Vichy Regime under Maréchal Pétain established in July 1940, ‘year II’ also evokes the French Revolutionary Calendar restarting in 1789 whose political legacy Vichy aimed to reverse. The phrasing has echoes in Charlotte Salomon’s work. In the hand-written statement or preface that follows the title page, the dedication, the playbill and then the memorial text, the artist declares: ‘The creation of the following paintings is to be imagined as follows: A person [Der Mensch] is sitting beside the sea. He is painting. A tune suddenly enters his head ….’ The passage ends and is signed: Der Verfasser St Jean August 1940 [changed to] 41/42 or Between heaven and earth beyond our era in the Year I of the new salvation. [Jahr Eins neuen (added) Heiles.] Indicating Salomon’s political awareness and ironizing of the French fascist regime, Year I would be 1940–41, indicating an initial beginning for the work in the months after Vichy’s establishment even if it was finished in 1942. On her gouache, it looks to me as if the original date is 1940. This was corrected to ‘1941’ by over-painting with a touch of red, the same that seems to underlie the addition of ‘42’. It is, therefore, possible to summon considerable evidence documenting the French topography of the French concentrationary antechambers of Auschwitz, which allows me to fill in aspects of Charlotte Salomon’s days missing from any other record. The existence of such visual and literary representations of Gurs points up the significance of the absence of any reference to Gurs itself in Life? or Theatre? even as I attempt to create this extended context for her work. The fact that those interned found both the materials and the will to represent the French camps makes it all the more remarkable that of all the artists who passed through such places and battled their psychological as well as physical destructiveness, an artist so attuned to landscape and character as Charlotte Salomon left no representation of the camp. Invoking the work of her contemporaries functions all the better to outline the shape of the void in her vast work made in its aftermath about everything that led her to the camp and from it. From this contrast I am drawing a distinction between art made as testimony and documentation and Salomon’s indirect production of an image-text that can be read as concentrationary memory. Salomon’s contribution to aesthetic resistance to totalitarianism through concentrationary memory does not involve representing the appearance of the camp. It arises through an oblique work that all the better revealed her understanding of the nature of the concentrationary experiment as that which, blotting out the individual, had to be blotted out by another kind of work that claimed individual authorship of self and history, even one traumatized by sexual abuse against which the work is also being made as protest and, it seems, a confession. Sometime after being released from Gurs, in the summer of 1940 or more probably in the summer of 1941, living in a hotel room at St Jean de Cap Ferrat, paid

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for by the American Ottilie Moore, in order to escape the continued sexual menace of the grandfather, Charlotte Salomon began a project the like of which does not exist elsewhere. Small comic books like Rosenthal’s, sketches, a work on abstract drawing by Hans Reichel and the Gurs Haggadah – these are the artifacts produced at Gurs or by Gursians. No one else, however, undertook to create a vast historical project of 769 selected from a total of 1,325 paintings, complete with 250 tracing paper overlays to create visually a historical journey back to a night in 1913 and forward through a Thomas Mannian family saga of life and death under Nazism, to arrive at the point of going to the camp, being released and beginning the painting cycle in the aftermath of the experience of Gurs. The epilogue (the work is divided into three parts: Prologue, Main Part, Epilogue) touches on the recent past since 1939, the shaping conditions for the making of this work of memory. It begins as it ends with the figure not of the modernist nymph, but a young woman painter, the blue Mediterranean sea and sky and then poetic evocation of the Verlainean pepper trees (JHM 4836) under which leisurely meals are taken in the open air with elderly survivors of another age and another war (JHM 4837). September 1939: War is declared. The sound of the news report blaring from the radio turns into phalanxes of marching figures (JHM 4841). The older woman tries to commit suicide. Therapy is applied. It involves singing about nature: encoded best in Beethoven’s choral setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy. This attempted suicide leads to a revelation that the artist’s mother killed herself: a story told over pages of repeated drawings of a speaking masculine head. The young woman is stunned by the knowledge: she thought her mother had died of influenza. Desperate attempts are made to forestall another suicide attempt by the older woman, the grandmother; the painter is taken to the limits of her own rapid, intense and agitated painting to represent the extremity of a subject hovering at the borderline of life and death. Colour is smeared across the whole page, where bodies strive in vain to meet and comfort; time ceases on long vigils at the bedside of a possessed and desperate old woman who eventually jumps out of a window to her death, leaving her attendant granddaughter to stand mournfully at the empty window and then to gaze upon the broken body, remembering, and now seeing, how her mother might have looked in a crushing death she has only just discovered was such a suicide. The longing for a similar escape is charted in paintings of desperate nights struggling with overwhelming psychic forces. Letters from Amsterdam arrive and then Mai 1940 has its own page, with aeroplanes like crosses dropping their shitty bombs long before Nancy Spero discovered the crossover. The Avis (8.11) and then the scene in the crowded train: does the image conflate the conditions going to Gurs and the aftereffect, returning from Gurs (8.12)? Then there follows a strange pair of pages. The text reads: A little love, a few laws, a young girl, a big bed. That’s life and those its joys, after so much pain, so many dead. A little education, a few laws, and inside a vacuum (written on the body) – that’s what’s left, all that’s left. That is what has become of the human being of this time.

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Overleaf a conversation … Charlotte: You know, grandpapa, I have a feeling the whole world has to be put together again. Grandfather: Oh go ahead and kill yourself and put an end to all this babble: [Geklöne] Then no more images. Text takes over and tells us: ‘This took place in July 1940 en route from a little town in the Pyrenees (namely Gurs) to Nice.’ One year later, July 1941, …during which the world fell ever more apart, the spirit of this strangely twinnatured creature was ever more crushed by the proximity of her grandfather … and she found herself having to face the question of whether to commit suicide or to undertake something wildly eccentric … We are told that Der Mensch, the human creature, who began the work and in the Prologue signed itself Der Verfasser, saw all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew – she had to vanish from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create the world anew out of the depths: ihre Welt neu zu schaffen. And from this came Das Leben Oder Das Theater? We have had this phrase painted without interrogatives on the painting artist’s bronzed back in the final image (8.4a), which differs from the titling. The overlay now emphatically places three question marks after the entire phrase (8.4b). Thus the project is not a documentary, not a work of witness, not a testimony to what Charlotte Salomon saw, lived through and died from. It involves the creation of the world anew ‘out of the depths’ by means of an Orphic journey into an underworld of suicided women and an artistic sphere of two singers, one of whom is her step-mother, the famous alto soprano Paula Lindberg, who actually performed the role of Orpheus in the performances organized by the Jüdischer Kulturbund that initiated a ‘renaissance’ of Jewish creativity following the Nazi ban on all Jewish creative participation in Aryanized German culture.27 In its wonderful operatic sweep or a visual novel, the story of a family broken by two wars and infected by the horror of incestuous sexual abuse, uplifted by art, music and Nietzsche, Charlotte Salomon’s work stumbles, perplexingly, at the gates of the camp. The camp does not represent the ultimate horror that would consume her. It stands for what she endured yet would not reproduce because even its existence put all life into question. So I am asking, what does it mean that we have images, stories and artworks from Gurs and camps like it from many artists, but that Charlotte Salomon, who produced the most elaborated and massive artwork amongst the entire refugee community who passed through Gurs, would not touch the place in her art?

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She could paint bloodied suicides, abusive sexual assault, attempted rape, escape, solitude, and even pose the question of killing herself. But she would not bear witness to what she had seen in Gurs. We might conclude that it was an insignificant hiatus in the real story she was telling. Either it was so insignificant or its significance was such that it was necessary completely to blot it out from even a narrative cycle of historical-dramatic paintings of Jewish life in and beyond Germany. To do so, she cleansed herself by painting beside the sea the story of other lives and other deaths, and of the preceding historical events shaping the very moment of her interrogation of life or theatre. It is my tentative suggestion here, following Mary Felstiner’s initial insight, that Salomon’s work be considered as an aesthetic witnessing ‘in the negative’ that cannot or will not allow the hell-hole of Gurs, where identity was engulfed in literal mud, into its created theatre of memory. Its refusal might be the indexical sign of a traumatic expulsion or of a conscious decision to create an aesthetic counter-memory that delineates the concentrationary by means of creating images of life (art and music), and even of other kinds of death. When Charlotte Salomon was arrested by the SS Officer Alois Brunner in September 1943 she had already experienced arrest, transportation and induction into a camp – but not at the hands of the Germans nor at the hands of the SS nor those of Eichmann’s specially trained protégée, the sadistic Brunner. She feared a known terror but was killed – I am recalling Charlotte Delbo’s words – in the unthinkable.28 Of that moment in Salomon’s life, only the paper – the transport list – remains as mute evidence bearing her will to live that is affirmed by her placing beside her name a self-designated artistic profession made real by what she had completed in the years 1940–42. Not merely the evidence of her destruction in the genocide that bears the name Holocaust, that assertion of her profession was only possible because, ‘after Gurs’, after the encounter with the concentrationary universe, Charlotte Salomon had, in an Arendtian gesture given herself a name: CS thus refusing both deadly markers of gender and ethnicity. She had found herself, by becoming, in her own eyes, an artist even in a history that she had glimpsed already planned her Vernichtung. Her work as concentrationary memory hangs continuously suspended in its own moment, after Gurs and before Auschwitz, attempting, amongst the many levels on which this complex work of indictment and confession operates, to set its own sense of meaning, memory and subjectivity against the fascist forces that were seeking to eradicate them all, forces that entwine both the political space of the camp and the unseen spaces of domestic sexual abuse.

9 ANIMATING MEMORY Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir Claire Launchbury

A pack of errant dogs chases through a rain-soaked city, halting traffic and, as they charge through a café terrace, send chairs flying chaotically. A terrified mother squeezes her child tight close to her. Vengefully, the slavering, teeth-baring animals stop at a building, baying for blood, and a nervous figure appears at a window above. The awakening from what is now shown to have been a dream acts as a generating motive for the animated documentary to follow, when Boaz Rein-Buskila and writer and director Ari Folman meet in a bar and Boaz relates the story of his repeating nightmare. As a soldier during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he was sent ahead of his patrol to shoot the dogs which, alerted to the presence of the soldiers, would bark, waking the residents of the town or village as they approached. Haunted by the 26 dogs he shot dead, Boaz’s dream – and its position as the opening sequence of the film – already suggests multiple interpretations. Is this sequence also the figuration of the brutality of an invading army or symbolic of bloodthirsty revenge? Are the dogs military aggressors in fabula or the symbols of a repressed trauma seeking to make itself conscious; the symptom of a hidden narrative ‘that pushes and wants to come into the world’, to cite Genet’s formulation?1 Are the menacing dogs an initial confrontation with a collective failure of memory, which the film, in its quest to remember, threatens to recover, alongside repressed positions of victim and perpetrator? Waltz with Bashir traces Folman’s experience as a conscripted soldier in the Israeli Defence Force during the invasion of Lebanon under the direction of the then Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon in 1982. Following brief leave where Folman is confronted by life continuing as normal in Tel Aviv, he returns to Lebanon and to the occupation of West Beirut following the assassination of president-elect, Bashir Gemayel. Folman’s repetitive traumatic and importantly foreshortened dream,

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which appears at several intervals during the film, is revealed at the conclusion to be associated with the massacres perpetrated by Christian Phalange militia under the surveillance of the Tsahal and culminates in the reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Chatila which took place on 14–17 September of the same year. By the time the situation at Sabra and Chatila is reached, the film has shifted away from personal remembering, relying on the testimony of external witnesses, rather than Folman, his friends and former comrades. Testimony is sought from a news journalist, Ron Ben-Yishai, a former Israeli army officer, Dror Harazi, and finally through the use of news footage itself.2 Although it is a project that seeks to reanimate, both in its representation and purpose, it is, I argue, still an evasive text that confounds or represses explanatory paradigms as much as it exposes first-hand witness and takes the stand as testimony to the reconstruction of a forgotten past. In this chapter, then, the politics of Folman’s personal memory, as both conscripted soldier and as someone in possession of a post-memory of the extermination camps of the Second World War, are investigated. This is then expanded to consider, on a broader level, how in particular Waltz with Bashir presents a polyphony of witnessing positions – abstracted, animated and represented – but that, in their reworking of memory, point ultimately to a silence that resists simple interpretation. This is not simply evidence of complicity, for example, but marks, more fundamentally, a confrontation (indeed challenges the limits of such a confrontation) between the concentrationary and post-Holocaust memoir. Testimonial identity It is, indeed, the symptoms engendered by Folman’s unremembered past trauma that force into a present narrative a personal voyage of discovery that passes from repressed memory to its fragmented recovery, achieving its reconstruction through consultation with, and in close relationship to, other soldiers, therapists and journalists. Although a personal story, the radiation of these personal memories into the collective consciousness and political context engages with questions about state culpability, torture, conscription, bureaucratic systems and camps – all elements of the concentrationary universe as outlined by David Rousset.3 Furthermore, the particular traumatic lapses mediate a broader public confrontation with participation in the invasion of Lebanon that challenges the way in which Holocaust memory, specifically, can function to exonerate actions taken by the state in self-defence. The intergenerational legacies of trauma haunt not just Folman’s individual explorations of dynamic memory but, unavoidably, the responses to action, disavowal and sensitivity. In their filmic presentation, they reach beyond the autobiographical frame to confront Israeli society at large with this traumatic past through representative figures undertaking compulsory national service and their collective implication in the perpetration of the massacres. In this respect, then, the kaleidoscopic elements of traumatic European and colonial history are shaken up and reconfigured in a ritournelle of testimonial identity that waltzes from victim to perpetrator, perpetrator to victim, witness to violent delinquent, or voyeur to voyou and voyou to voyeur. The

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instability of the position of victim and perpetrator renders the journey back to the political primal scene a point of discovery for the viewers of the film (implicated in the text) as their own position becomes one of disavowed witness-perpetrator. Such a position is dramatically exposed by the switch from the closing animated dream sequence, signalled aurally at first, to the harsh sounds of lamentation and news footage of the atrocious scenes of massacred bodies at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila. In Claude Lanzmann’s benchmark film about testimony and witness, Shoah (1985), the witnessing positions are broadly categorized into three types: victims and survivors were Jewish, perpetrators were Nazis and bystanders were Polish. Lanzmann’s project is to interweave these different perspectives, particularly since the incommensurability of these three stances and the chasm between their cognitive positions is so vast. If we consider Waltz with Bashir in the context of the tradition established by Lanzmann, it could be argued that Folman’s film is concerned with representing the testimony of conscripted soldiers of an army engaged in the invasion of a neighbouring sovereign state. As a result it must necessarily represent witnesses with fluid testimonial identities. So, in comparison to the Lanzmann project, the lines are not so clearly drawn; testimonial perspectives are negotiated by witnesses who are simultaneously (if sometimes passively) perpetrators, victims, and bystanders.4 The war in Lebanon is situated, then, within the memorial history of young, teenage men barely out of adolescence, conscripts to their national service and, as such, consciously or unconsciously victims of the fragmenting mechanism identified clearly by Zygmunt Bauman as: (t)hat curious and terrifying socially invented modern contraption which permits the separation of action and ethics, of what people do from what people feel or believe, of the nature of collective deed from the motives of individual actors.5 It is precisely this confusion of conflicting witnessing positions created by the separation of conscripted duty and its subsequent actions and individual trauma which lies at the root of the crisis of memory that Folman’s work tries to expose. Such a crisis is signalled through the attempt the project makes to search for both personal responsibility – it is Folman’s autobiographical quest in one sense – and confronting contentious collective responsibility by positioning the exposition of recovering memory in the public arena. This is achieved through the employment of established documentary practices – interviews with individuals and experts – which fixes the agents of memory as two-dimensional drawings while letting their voices speak and deliberately invokes an aesthetic dimension rejected by Lanzmann’s project. Indeed, this combination of animation and documentary gives Folman’s project a mesmerizing quality that calls us, the spectators, to account as we are invited to identify and to see according to the terms of these shifting witness positions. This is achieved both by employing familiar documentary methods such as expert and witness interview and also by exploiting the potential of animation to show dream

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sequences or interpolated passages which resemble video games. These moments, in particular, which rely on aestheticized representation, enter into a complex play of texts that have the events at Sabra and Chatila at their heart and which play upon the intersection between documentary or journalistic account and a need to draw on a creative imaginary. Jean Genet’s powerful and complicated text ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’, written in the aftermath of the massacre, points to the inadequacy of photography or television pictures in fully representing any truth of the situation by employing literary strategies that allude to a need to go beyond simple retelling and invoke memory work and a rich imaginary in order to fulfil the obligation of the text as witness statement.6 Similarly, Monika Borgmann’s documentary Massaker (2004), in which former Phalangist militia (perpetrators of the atrocity) recount their testimony to the event, is all the more compelling in the manipulation of the images which focus on the hands or the naked torso of the men.7 Writing of Shoah, Shoshana Felman argues forcefully that there is a power in Lanzmann’s film as a work of art which is evident in the subtlety of the philosophical structure and the complexity of the creative process it engenders. Truth, Felman states, ‘does not kill the possibility of art – on the contrary, it requires it for its transmission, for its realization in our consciousness as witnesses’.8 In Folman’s film, different hallucinatory sequences foreground the aesthetic of the film and its animation and are set apart from other levels of representation in operation, such as conventional interviews, transition passages that function like video games accompanied by ironic ‘war’ songs (a Lebanon love song and a version of ‘I bombed Korea’), and nonhallucinatory scenes of recollection. However, it is the potential created by animation that permits the possibility to represent the otherwise inaccessibly unconscious – the uncanny and dangerous traces of traumatic memory – in a manner which conveys a spectral haunting quality. In fact, the recounted hallucinatory passages – sequences in which there is psychoanalytical (or analysable) content – number just three: Boaz’s opening dog dream, Folman’s repeated dream of the massacre, and the dream of Carmi Cna’an discussed below. The link between these dreams and autobiographical utterance is simultaneously undermined and reinforced by the fact that, apart from Folman’s individual testimony, the figures of Carmi and Boaz, at their request, were disguised and their testimony read by other people to avoid identification. The dynamics of memory A liminal blur between dream sequence, recollection and witness testimony is established from the very beginning of the film and enhanced through the processes of animation. Two-dimensional representations are seemingly brought to life but in a manner that imposes, simultaneously, a distance and an unsettling proximity of the film’s participants in relation to contemporary audiences habitually inured to the impact of television footage and what have become conventional styles of documentary presentation. The graphic-novel style presentation helps to reinforce the memorial imagery and dream-like quality that constitute the textual material of the work as testimony by distancing the representation. It also enacts a re-animation that goes far beyond the act of drawing – since it documents Folman’s reviving of

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hitherto unremembered traumatic experience and is presented as a part of his working through in a clinical sense. However, the authorial identity and effectively the witness identity is not fixed but fragmentary and discontinuous, an effect embedded into the text stylistically through the animated presentation and, moreover, in the sequences that mark the transitions between scenes. Folman’s testimony, presented via drawn images, helps to reinforce the breach between the witness now and the person who experienced the events at the time, particularly since the animated images of people in the film in the past are the product of imagination in a way that the contemporary present images, derived from film first, and then animated, are not. Indeed, people who appear in photographs of the past are deemed unrecognizable in the present. Even though there is an expectation that the witness is one and the same person, there is a significant difference between the witness at the moment of recollection and the same witness present at the original event. One cannot – now – replace the other; as Derrida outlines in his essay on Maurice Blanchot, the witness ‘has a memory of what he no longer knows’.9 Confronting the self as other is provoked, in particular, by Folman’s encounter with a former soldier who, when showing him a portrait photograph of his former comrade, is unrecognizable both to his friend and to Folman. This is then supported by a scene with his therapist who provides him with the example of patients who, when presented with a fabricated photograph of their childhood selves at a fairground, invent the memory of a happy day they spent there with their parents: ‘Memory is dynamic’, his therapist states. The apparent failure to recognize, or to falsely recollect, in fact marks an emancipatory move in which meaningful content is permitted to be at work in silences and unuttered judgements. While this might be seen as the point at which this project founders in its attempt to fully reveal the truth, because something always remains undisclosed, it is arguably the case that any claim to truth in this film lies specifically in the dream sequences or those situations where silence is retained (and plenty of silence is retained): deferring responsibility to the spectator to breathe life into the flat images that flicker on the screen.10 Fragmentation Waltz with Bashir is ultimately a fragmentary text that attests to a failed return and the attempted mastery of this failure.11 Freud’s theoretical analysis of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), influenced by the cases of soldiers during the First World War, establishes how an overwhelming trauma cannot be assimilated into the fulfilment of desire and, instead of the encounter with death becoming symbolic, the repetitive dreams and the fright associated upon waking from them ‘are endeavouring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis’.12 As a post-traumatic response, Folman’s repeated dream takes him back to the location of trauma but remains enigmatic and incomplete, displacing the Freudian sense of recurrent return in order to anticipate with anxiety the shock of the foundation trauma. It is possible still to establish that the fear of death engendered by the atrocity is so overwhelming that ego is split and, while one part is dismembered in an attempt to hold on to life,

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the other becomes fragmented. In the attempt to recover memory, the patient must recollect – as Folman is advised to do here – through piecing together the fragments of other people’s testimony or evidence in order to reconstruct his own narrative. The patient must face taking the risk that the traumatic memory might overwhelm him once more when reconstructed into its whole.13 Although the previously mentioned temporal gap outlined by Derrida prevents this from happening, it does not prevent the fear – prevalent in this text – that one might still discover something that is intolerable. It is here, then, by introducing the desire to revisit or return, that a historical imperative becomes allied to the working through of trauma patients. The broader narrative of Waltz with Bashir thus concerns the presentation of the advent of knowledge – the testimonial event. If Lanzmann spoke of his film not as something historical, but as an incarnation, a resurrection, then the spirit of the letter of Folman’s Waltz is similar.14 Truth for a witness, as Dori Laub outlines, is often revealed as something that attests to the breaking of a psychological frame while acknowledging the borders of the silence of what the witness did or could not know: ‘Knowledge in the testimony is … not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right.’15 Temporal fragmentation is also at work in the act of witnessing – an interruption in time and therefore in history, that Freud refers to as ‘eine andere Lokalität’, another scale of time and space.16 There are several participants in the film whose testimony fits within this frame, but I want to focus on the figure of Cna’an because, although among all Folman’s former comrades he features most frequently and it is his testimony which contributes considerable narrative momentum, nevertheless, as shown below, he is the witness who ultimately remains the most ‘historically’ undisclosing. Carmi Cna’an Carmi is the first witness to whom Folman turns after his meeting with Boaz and his therapist in his quest to reconstruct his experience. Unable to recall anything of the massacre itself, Cna’an’s text remains secretive. Participating beyond his own testimony, Carmi features as one of the key people in Folman’s repeated dream which closes short of revealing the massacre. It is interpolated at regular intervals throughout the film and forms the lynchpin of Folman’s recovered memory when it becomes integrated with archive footage at the very end. It operates within the ‘nonhabitual estranged conceptual prisms’ that Felman and Laub outline to describe the attempt to apprehend what our pre-existing frames of cultural reference have failed to account for in contemporary history.17 A friend of Folman’s from his schooldays, Carmi emigrated to Holland shortly after the war in Lebanon and has been resident there for the last 20 years, seldom if ever returning to Israel. Living in a substantial property with a child, he has made his fortune selling falafel. In the terms outlined by Omer Bartov writing of the Jew in cinema, when Carmi states ‘That all stopped twenty years ago’ he can be read as someone who has taken on the ‘paradigmatic image’ of the Zionist anti-hero – the Diaspora Jew.18 As Folman and Carmi arrive in the wintry landscape of his home, the car stops abruptly far from the house as the road runs out. Folman remarks

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that everyone – their friends, families – had had high hopes for Carmi, predicting that he would make a career as a nuclear physicist and win a Nobel prize. With some bitterness, Carmi indicates that what ultimately remains undisclosed about his conduct during the invasion of Lebanon is that which halted him in his tracks and ambitions. Carmi’s powerful sequence of reminiscence takes place on a pleasure boat, which he refers to as a ‘love boat’, brightly lit and festive, on which young men are drinking and dancing. Folman illustrates the incongruities in the conflation between the adventurous holiday spirit of young men, barely out of adolescence, and the feeling of going to war. The pleasure boat is phantasmagorical, of course, as is the party. But Carmi, who had already identified his distance from his peers as someone good at maths and chess, explains that he had ‘masculinity issues’. He is found at the other end of the boat suffering either from seasickness or fear, perhaps a mixture of both, or even revulsion, but not drunkenness. As his system shuts down, he falls into some kind of semi-conscious state and dreams that a woman takes him ‘for the first time’, initially like a baby and then as a sort of mother or lover figure who swims away as he watches the boat explode. Fear re-coded in this way as issues of sex and violence is a form of trauma-related dream and this scene animates the atavistic return as Carmi seeks ‘to find himself ’ in the giant mother/lover figure. The transition frames that open this sequence – airborne visuals of snow-covered trees transferring to this ‘love boat’ en route to Lebanon on the Mediterranean Sea – are a particularly effective illustration of the spatial and temporal distance from the memory and its retelling which is enhanced through the process of animation. Making a purposively intertextual reference to Hiroshima, which potentially hints at the use of a thermobaric bomb in Lebanon on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing on 6 August 1982, the film uses OMD’s track ‘Enola Gay’ (dating from 1980). The music provides not just a sense of the contemporary soundworld but points to the inscription of sexist military imagery as well as the mixture of sexuality and destruction in reference to the giant mother of the devastatingly explosive ‘Little Boy’, the name given to the Hiroshima bomb, depicted in Carmi’s dream. The sequence in which the plane that flies over the boat unleashing its cargo is rapid in the film itself. (9.1) In the graphic novel publication that issued from the film, however, David Polonsky, the art director, frames a large bomber unleashing an unmistakably penis-shaped cargo which destroys the boat and Carmi’s fellow soldiers while he lies atop (and within) his swimming lover. The empty circle If, in Genet’s witnessing to the aftermath of the massacres mentioned above, he gives testament to an archival imaginary in which past events need to be reconstructed from present traces, this not only reinforces the temporal vicissitudes of what it means to interpret evidence in this context but the role of the (fictional) imagination in its reconstruction. The ability of the human memory to exist as a dynamic force in the reworking of absences, in its desire to make conscious, works to reconfigure testimonial truth; and what this imaginary fails to identify it replaces. A lack of the

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Carmi’s Dream, Waltz with Bashir (2008, Ari Folman).

‘substance’ of the imagination has been identified in the cases of second-generation trauma victims. This has been described by Dori Laub as an ‘empty circle’, and it is with this concept, and the stuttering, fragmentary discourses that attempt to account for it, that I conclude my reading of Folman’s film.19 While Folman overtly acknowledges his descent from parents who had survived the camps, the inclusion of this fact in a film that seeks to use personal narratives as mediating collective ones legitimizes, in my view, Laub’s concept in relation to a complex confrontation between the concentrationary trope of conscription and perpetration and the function of intergenerational Holocaust memory. The ‘empty circle’ is a term that ‘symbolises the absence of representation, the rupture of the self, the erasure of memory, and the accompanying sense of void that are the core legacy of massive psychic trauma’.20 It is ‘a trauma-induced condition of ego regression, mediated by the death instinct to a state of inner objectlessness’ where the foundation trauma is not directly experienced by the subjects themselves but, instead, has taken the form of legacy transmitted by their parents manifesting itself, often with paralysing results, as ‘wounds without memory’.21 In this way, the massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut exist in an awkward constellation of identity formation that takes its root in the memorialization of both death camps and Jewish survivors of concentration camps. Waltz with Bashir stages, perhaps unknowingly, a series of potential resonances within this framework of different forms of camp, particularly through a sense of the obligation of conscription, the displacement of refugees and as a witness implicated in a massacre. Laub specifies that this often results in subjects being unable to have a family of their own, which reinforces the relevance of Folman’s decision to pursue this

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documentary at a time when he was himself about to become a father. Indeed, the historical framing of the filmmaker’s background and the creation of the film can be almost perfectly divided into generational sequences: Folman and his friends were born in the early to mid-1960s, 20 years after their parents’ survival. His generation then goes to war in their late teens or early 20s in 1982, and the film was made over a period of four years from 2004, as Boaz’s opening dream sequence began its repetitions 20 years after the conflict.22 Is it the case, then, that Folman’s memories, and moreover his post-memories, are rendered retrievable, and to some limited extent narratable, by witnessing the repetition of a camp massacre as a form of political primal scene? His ‘actual neurosis’ had been ‘the impenetrable wall within the subject which opposes the historicization of some sectors of his existence … what may remain in him, present and unintegrable, of the pure trauma’.23 In recovering, or reanimating, his own memory of being present at Sabra and Chatila, Folman confronts a trauma complex in which he, through passively following military orders, was not simply a bystander but a passive contributor to a massacre that targeted its victims on the grounds of difference. While responsibility can be passed up a chain of command – Sharon and his commanders permitted something to occur that was within their military power to prevent – Folman’s realization is that, as neither specifically victim, nor perpetrator, nor bystander, he must recognize in himself the compliance with orders that was also the hallmark of what made the Holocaust possible (initially symbolized by the repeated dream sequence) in an unsettling coalescence with the recovery of its intergenerational memory. The symbolism of Folman and his comrades encircling the camps both agitates and drives the project, as well as providing the most horrific psychological confirmation of the traumatic contents of his empty circle; a content literally illuminated by flares fired in complicity with the enactment of an atrocity: an intergenerational primal scene of annihilation that had potentially been latent in his own unconscious. Yet, it is Carmi’s testimony, or the absence of it, that leaves the film ultimately open-ended and unresolved and the position of disavowed witnesspassive perpetrator is inherently so. Carmi’s anxiety dream on the boat indicates that, at his young age then, he had neither encountered the non-codifiable violence of the massacre nor, until that moment, been restricted in his success or development in any unusual way. It is not the revisited trauma of Boaz or Folman’s repetitive hallucination. Carmi’s departure from Israel, choosing a life of falafel instead of nuclear physics, and his silence and reluctance to talk or to represent, must ultimately speak for his experience: we cannot know if the empty circle is part of his postmemorial psychical operation. For Folman, however, the confrontation of both the concentrationary (and his ambiguous position of complicity within it) and the intergenerational memory of the Holocaust places personal trauma in the centre of a conjunction of multi-layered collective accountability.

10 ISN’T THIS WHERE …? Projections on Pink Floyd The Wall: Tracing the Concentrationary Image Benjamin Hannavy Cousen

Concentrationary memories surface in unexpected ways and in surprising places. They exhibit, however, a negative dimension that is related to a failure of the conscious or critical dimension usually ascribed to memory work. It is possible to define concentrationary memory as exercising its criticality through an aesthetic structure of resistance to the ease with which urgent matters can be softened by passing time and human forgetfulness or sentimentalized and fetishized by monuments and rituals. This means we can also discern a less considered, even thoughtless haunting of the post-war cultural imaginary, in my case-study, in Britain, by the concentrationary as image. In this chapter, I offer a series of readings of a collaboratively created British film, Pink Floyd The Wall, based on the lyrics written by Roger Waters for a for a concept album and spectacular stage show by the British group Pink Floyd. My readings track hauntings, returns, citations and masquerades that invoke troubling memories of war, death, loss and heroism while equally anatomizing the contemporary crisis of a drug-crazed and exhausted pop singer emblematic of his own socio-cultural moment. What is significant is that both dimensions of this story of Britain and its men are haunted by the momentary eruptions of materials evocative of the concentrationary universe known through circulating, iconic images oscillating between the victims and the perpetrators. An opening shot Pink Floyd The Wall (MGM, 1982, Dir. Alan Parker) occupies an unusual, not to say uneasy place in any terms of classification. After all, in many respects, as the film of the album it may be seen as more of a hugely extended music video (predating and anticipating MTV), particularly as it has no easily discernible narrative structure other

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than that provided by the dominant driving force of the music and that it contains barely any dialogue. It is (or was at the time) an unusual cultural product in that its concept was first an album and a highly theatrical rock stage show. This uneasy ambivalence is deeply rooted in all aspects of The Wall, from its formal aspect – the use of both experimental film techniques and the insertion of 20 minutes of Gerald Scarfe’s animation to depict a variety of flashbacks or memories or hallucinations (it is rarely clear which) – to the history of the deeply divisive process of the movie’s creation. This last aspect is recorded in various television documentaries as well as in interviews with the three men behind the movie – Parker (a fiercely anti-auteurist filmmaker), Roger Waters, Pink Floyd bassist and ‘creator’ of The Wall as a concept and Scarfe, artist and political cartoonist. Parker himself spoke of it being the product of ‘three megalomaniacs in a room’.1 This is attested to in an even drier tone by John Coleman in his damning New Statesman review of May 1982: Now accompanied by angst ridden publicity about how frightful they found the experience of working in troika, there is ‘an Alan Parker film’, ‘by’ Roger Waters, ‘designed’ by the redoubtable Scarfe.2 That the movie is so deeply infused with disharmony is pertinent to the thesis I wish to develop around and through an analysis of The Wall. First though, it is worth noting that this ambivalence seeps through to the subjective judgement of the film’s quality as a cultural product. Although obvious, I wish to raise this point in connection to The Wall which might easily be read (and not necessarily in error) as a series of banal, blatant un-thought-through adolescent expressions of whining angst. The fear when writing of such a text is that it slips beneath the elusive, provocative benchmark of what might be worth talking about in the sense delineated by Theodor Adorno, that there is no such thing as bad art, simply that which ‘sinks beneath the apriori of art’.3 Returning to Coleman’s review, we find the kind of criticism of the film that would suggest that the undertaking of further study is not a worthwhile exercise: There is a tedious literalness here that won’t bear repetition. And, far, far worse, there is an egregiously mindless assumption passim that one kind of violence, pain, suffering is qualitatively very like another; that there is therefore no kind of spiritual coarseness in equating the self pity of a burned out hophead with the anguish of bodies on the battlefield.4 Similarly, Alan Briern wrote the following for The Sunday Times, though there is a hint of admiration in his words: … [the film is] an extraordinary amalgam of a kind rarely attempted on the screen and unlikely to be much imitated … the literalism of the imagery is often stupefying … [there is] a disturbingly obsessive fear of woman as Venus fly trap.5

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Amongst many other reviews, Ian Christie in The Daily Express called the film ‘[i]ntellectually foolish’ with nothing to say about contemporary society.6 I cite these opinions since they catch something of the unease one senses in watching the film, which nevertheless retains a certain fascination, a certain feeling that its limitations are not all it consists of. And the reviews were by no means all so negative.7 Derek Malcolm in the Guardian seems to have a more balanced appreciation of what the filmmakers were trying to do: It is a very carefully constructed shambles, as it was intended to be – a chaotic pointer to chaotic times, hyped up beyond the point of no return so that you finally accept that almost any enormity is possible.8 I intend to bring to bear a certain amount of critical thought upon The Wall from within my own unease about it as a movie, as a message and as an experience, whilst at the same time acknowledging a sneaking suspicion that teenage angst (like kicks) may sometimes have something to be said for it. Certainly, the formal language of the film is worth some consideration – its ‘careful’ construction being augmented by many extremely effective elements that make up its formal language – including Peter Biziou’s evocative lighting and the montage construction effected by Gerry Hambling’s editing. Indeed, the criticisms outlined above may confuse what the film shows with what the film does. It is entirely possible to make a reading of the film from which everything that we as spectators see is going on in Pink’s head, in his imagination or hallucinatory state as he sits in ‘perfect isolation’ in his hotel room. He exists in an ever present triad of armchair, lamp, TV set whilst the landscape seems to change around him through childhood memories, the insertion of his childhood self into his present, to nightmarish animated visions and non-animated projected ‘memories’ of his father’s death at Battle of Anzio (1944). ‘The film represents for the viewer both Pink as a depicted character and also the products of this character’s

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Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink with standard lamp and TV in surreal landscape. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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imagination, and the two are constantly overlapping. I intend to discuss this in terms of the concentrationary imaginary, a designation which I shall examine in the first part of this chapter in and through the film before moving on to some close analysis of certain sections and aspects of the movie. Thus, in Pink’s imaginary consciousness, women are of three types: the smothering obese mother, the seducing groupie or the unfaithful wife whose metamorphoses into a kind of praying mantis is desperately countered by Pink’s own transformation into inhuman fascist dictator.9 In her foreword to Klaus Theweleit’s discussion of the volunteer armies the Freikorps in Germany in the 1920s, Male Fantasies, Barbara Ehrenreich talks of the misogyny of the Freikorpsman and also their classification of women which mirrors that found in The Wall:

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Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink with Mantis Wife. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink being (s)mothered; mother as wall. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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In the Freikorpsman’s life, there are three kinds of women: those who are absent … and generally unnamed … the women who appear in the imagination … as ‘white nurses’ … and, finally, those who are his class enemies – the ‘Red women’ …10 The film displays a crisis of masculinity, one that is also a constituent part of the movie and as such it is a manifestation of a particular historicity. It has an oblique and complex relationship to the feminist movement, a relationship that is not as obvious as the nature of the surface images presented in The Wall might lead one to suspect.11 By virtue of this nature it seems that the masculine subject has only three main positions (images) in and through which it is possible to exist – two of these are at opposite ends of a scale but they constantly threaten to collapse into one another: man is either a helpless ‘frightened one’, a rag doll, almost an embryo, or he is a violent all-powerful dictator. The third option also seems ultimately to feed back into one of these – to escape through drugs or the expenditure of rage through anarchy. All of this happens within the film and is separate from what the film does, a facet of which is to show these aspects. I will, however, argue that the film cannot ultimately rise above its subject matter, that it both succeeds and fails to provide the kind of art concentrationnaire (or Lazarean art) that resists the concentrationary universe called for by camp survivor Jean Cayrol and that this again raises an area of ambivalence or an aporia wherein I wish to explore the ‘concentrationary imaginary’. This imaginary is constituted by something infantile, by simplistic designations, by banality, by a poverty of images and thought, by a degradation and misunderstanding of the human and by utter cowardice. To expound further on this idea of the concentrationary imaginary I will use some terms found in the following observation by Adorno: ‘every artwork, even the hermetic work, reaches beyond its monadological boundaries by its formal language. Each work, if it is to be experienced, requires thought …’.12 I will look at the ‘thought within’ and the ‘thought without’ The Wall, the distinction being, as I hope to make clear, that the ‘thought without’ (i.e. that which we apply in critical analysis as well as in experiencing the work) might be to some extent free of the monadological nature that necessarily makes up the artwork, and which particularly inhabits The Wall and perhaps all works partaking of and exhibiting a ‘concentrationary imaginary’. To make this clear, I am making a counter-reading (a reading that is specific to the idea of the concentrationary imaginary) of the idea of the monad to that proposed by Walter Benjamin in his seventeenth thesis on the philosophy of history: Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock by which it crystallises into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad.13

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For Benjamin, such monad moments contain a progressive, revolutionary potential, they are epitomized in the concept of the dialectical image (this nature to be realized in the Arcades Project) which would ‘blast apart’ the continuum of history.14 There is, however, potentially a warning here within Benjamin’s language itself, reminiscent as it is of Wyndham Lewis’s proto-fascist Vorticist movement and its publication Blast, itself a British answer to Marinetti’s Futurism. I would note that there is room for a comparative study of some of the aesthetics of The Wall, particularly the animations of Scarfe such as the ‘marching hammers’ with that of the Futurist and Vorticist aesthetics. However, Benjamin’s ‘monadological crystallisations’ are quite different from the crystallizations of the concentrationary imaginary, which also involve an arresting of thought, but here this is the cessation of thought in the manner that Hannah Arendt found at the trial of Adolph Eichmann: He merely … never realised what he was doing … this lack of imagination … he was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.15 The monadological crystallizations of this kind of thought – in the sense of the monad being the starting point of this thoughtlessness, are centred around the banal symbols of bureaucratic forms, or the symbols of unquestioning loyalty, such as the crossed hammer arm band in The Wall or the Nazi salute (as well, of course as the assumption of concepts such as homophobia and anti-Semitism) and these may be seen as their Symbolic crystallizations.16 Ironically, these kinds of negative monadological moments are the crystallizations that come out of certain impoverished thought processes, they are created by this thought process (albeit that this leads to a thought-lessness). It is possible to think and reason one’s way

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Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink as Dictator – the crossed arm salute. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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into fascism and as such Arendt’s ‘call to thinking’ is not a simplistic one. Benjamin’s monadological moments come instead, not out from but from outside and thus, requiring the potential of openness, they have the potential to disturb the inevitability of the thoughts that lead to thoughtlessness and which have a connection with the image and imagination. The Wall shows us the latter imagination at work – Pink’s mind driven to a state of concentrationary consciousness is locked into points of crystallized significance or over-significance, reducing him to the poverty of imagery whereby the wife is always a mantis (and engulfing genitalia), the mother always smothers, and the school institution always turns into a mincing machine. He is stuck in the ‘stupefyingly literal’, in a kind of symbolic world that shores up his imaginary existence. Pink, unshielded, cracks up in the face of all this – and one thinks of the stock phrases and language codes employed by the SS in implementing ‘The Final Solution’ – and adopted as protection from the fact that what they were imagining was very real. Avery Gordon expresses the ‘quickening’ nature of Benjamin’s concepts: Benjamin’s materialist historiography depends fundamentally on animation, on being able to demonstrate to others the moment in which an open door comes alive and stops us in our tracks, provoking a different kind of encounter and recognition. And for that, the quickening experience of haunting is essential.17 The concentrationary imaginary and its concomitant crystallizations may be recognized as a deadening rather than a quickening – the recognition is not one of a haunting in the sense that justice can be done. Justice has been irrevocably undone in the concentrationary world and it is the paradox that this world of dead thinking and which was ordered around death, is actually alive in the ‘concentrationary imaginary’. The imaginary itself disables the quickening capacity of haunting – it becomes difficult to describe Pink as being ‘haunted’ by his memories because they serve to feed into and propagate the circularity of his concentrationary/totalitarian thinking.

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Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), The masses reflect back. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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We may also say that the concentrationary imaginary does arrive ‘from outside’ when we find it in moments of popular culture. It arrives from the past, in the form of a certain type of memory, in seemingly indelible moments that exist because the concentrationary universe existed. Such an imprint is made clear in The Wall especially in the sequence which I shall discuss later wherein the young Pink and his friends are playing on the railroad tracks and the ordinary steam train which passes Pink becomes a transportation train with the faceless ones inside clawing through the gaps in the side of the cattle trucks. The bureaucratic consciousness that set these original cattle trucks in motion, and which is itself very much a facet of the concentrationary imaginary, is satirized and exposed in many cultural productions, including Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), where it is perhaps most fully realized, and this is a part of a kind of ‘Orwellian’ tradition or imaginary, normally seated in an ideology of resistance to what they depict. This is a common theme in cultural productions, from the 1960s cult television series The Prisoner to the emergence of such concerns within Harry Potter. And what they depict is exactly the sustained moment or moments when thought has been surrendered to the system (to the people with the power), to a system of inhuman givens. The concentrationary imaginary exists when certain human faculties are surrendered, including the ability to recognize the other as human – something made explicit in The Wall. The Wall as a film does seem to think about the process of becoming nonthinking, albeit through using the rarefied (and pathological) state of rock stardom to do so. Implicit in it is the simplistic nature of its statements, and this is because the film contains its own complicitly ‘fascist’ dimension, which it never quite escapes. We may also turn to Adorno again: ‘The expression of an unadulterated feeling is always banal. The more unadulterated, the more banal. Not to be banal requires effort.’18 The Wall is in many ways the expression of unadulterated feeling but, in terms of the concentrationary imaginary, this is the point. The film itself, a product of some effort, is not banal; it does not want things to be this way. Thus in some ways the bewilderingly simple developmental processes and conclusions Pink seems to spiral through and that result in his seemingly inevitable megalomania evoke the same feeling one gets if one reads Mein Kampf or the autobiography of Rudolph Hoess. In the face of this kind of ridiculousness (again Brazil brilliantly highlights the same and we might also think of survivor David Rousset’s ‘tragic buffoonery’19 of the camp world) Arendt says the only response at the end of all other resistance is to laugh – to realize and make real one’s own humanity, even if, she says, they are leading you to the gas chambers. She makes this point most clearly in her television interview with Günter Gauss.20 It is here that we can understand Rousset’s contention in The Other Kingdom: The concentrationary universe shrivels away within itself. It still lives on in the world like a dead planet laden with corpses. Normal men do not know that everything is possible … The concentrationees do know.21

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It is clear that everything is possible, any violation justifiable for the degraded mind caught up in the concentrationary imaginary (or that has become this imaginary) – and it is possible to do anything to anyone else, however inhuman these actions might clearly be from the outside. This is what The Wall attempts to show when Pink’s imaginary ascendancy into megalomania reaches its zenith and he supposedly, through some further revelation or breakdown realizes this potential and cries ‘Stop’ whilst crouching in a toilet cubicle.22 The Wall, then, can be read as an attempt to smash the internal secret of what drives one to totalitarianism. Pink’s path follows the Arendtian trajectory of progressive isolation. Pink begins to get stuck in a mental world wherein all logic is circular and any possibility of dialectical progression always gets bounced back by a wall to start again and return to the same monadological points (lack of a father, schooldays and so on).23 He also consistently finds and positions himself in a state where it is impossible for him to have any possibilities. Bernard Bergen, in his discussion of Hannah Arendt and The Final Solution, talks of the influence of Kierkegaard. In doing so he highlights for us the areas of impossibility for Pink who does not question the coherency of his experience or apply any serious questioning at all, rather he is swept up in his own imaginary thus negating any possibilities: For Kierkegaard and Arendt, identity is the condition for being a human who exists in time as possibility. Serious reflection by an individual on his own possibilities, however, must question the coherency of his own experience of who he is as possibility. It is when this question is posed seriously that the experience of being an individual emerges as the paradox Kierkegaard first made visible in a serious way.24 The only way out is a kind of liberating explosion (again here we get close to the Benjaminian ‘releasing’ monad and also the desires of Futurism and Vorticism), symbolized in the film by the incessant presence of The Dam Busters (a film which, like The Wall, is all tension leading up to a final demolition) and also by the ambivalent ending when Pink’s ‘wall’ is torn down by the judgement that he is to be ‘exposed before his peers’. The Wall is an extraordinary exposure of a kind of simple imagining of subjectivity; it is an exemplary display of what thought can produce, when thought leads to its own circularity. It is the explicit rendition of a symptom. But this symptom is very real and needs to be addressed. If we are to ask why Pink, or anyone else, might be driven to a concentrationary consciousness, this would be explained if we agree with what Giorgio Agamben (and also Paul Virilio) so often point out; that the concentration camp has never really gone away, and in this light the ‘memory’ of the concentrationary universe, as exemplified in Pink’s cattle truck scene, is not so much a memory as an ever present reality: … the camp … is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognise in all its

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metamorphoses into the zones d’attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities.25 Led by this statement, a study of the ‘spaces’ and ‘non-places’ (to use Marc Augé’s phrase)26 in The Wall would be fruitful – situated as it is in many kinds of no-man’slands; hotel rooms, station platforms, alleyways and so on. Where the film may fail is where it effects to be the cure or to answer the question – it has far too tight a grip on its subject matter and thus it partakes of the faults of the same. It provides answers to questions it barely manages to ask. In this sense the film makes the mistake of constantly attempting to resolve itself and ends up exhibiting a kind of ‘narrative fetishism’ despite its attempts to dissolve narrative. Narrative fetishism is the term employed by Eric Santner to describe: ‘… the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place’.27 The Wall at some levels fails to work through its trauma and ends up just restating it. In Dominick La Capra’s terminology, the failure to ‘work through’ gives way to an unhealthy ‘acting out’.28 This is partly because it has an aspect of ‘failed dissonance’ and this is mostly because of the elegant suturing of the music with the images. It moves seamlessly through animation and ‘memory’, and this is part of the allure of the movie but in a way this counteracts the resistance effect that a more dissonant approach would have. Scarfe’s animations, though surreal, are particularly seductive, but Parker was also aware of the danger: I hope to God people don’t go and do likewise because they think we’ve said it’s justified. What we were showing was the effect of rock n’ roll on a mindless audience … I honestly believe that a rock n’ roll Nuremberg could happen. We can’t be blamed for the notions expressed, but perhaps we have a responsibility of thinking a little more deeply. I have no easy answer.29 Perhaps the greatest problematic of The Wall, is not that it does not have any answers or that those it inadvisedly provides are inadequate, but that it fails to consistently ask the question – this is the question that is perhaps the pivotal moment of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), which is an example of the resistance art concentrationnaire (although, as John Mowitt has pointed out, it is also not unaware of its own complicity).30 The question is: ‘Who is responsible?’ According to The Wall or, perhaps, Pink in The Wall, the answers are simple and pre-given: state institutions (school), the war and so on – it is locked in a kind of fatal earnestness at these points. The wider ethical and responsible implications of this question are thereby bypassed and it is not a true question. There is, one feels, a fine line between the satirical parodying drive of the film and the actual result. Finally, the film perhaps undermines itself in a manner astutely pointed out in one of those original reviews by David Castell of The Sunday Telegraph; speaking of Alan Parker he states: ‘He sometimes seems incapable of making things look unattractive, of resisting the final coat of cosmetic varnish.’ 31

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The fact that the film looks so good is also a point at which Pink’s error and the film’s error coincide. Aaron Kerner makes a contention about Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will using Julia Kristeva’s study of abjection. He claims that the film is ‘rooted in abjection’ in so far as its whole project is to purge abjection and reach for purity: Through the choreography of the camera, we are sutured into the Nazi ideological project … In its pageantry, Triumph of the Will purges impurities … Hitler’s body, through the disembodiment in the camera, becomes hyperpure; it is so pure that it doesn’t even have a form; without form it is in a sense incorruptible … The film, like the subject who confronts abjection, is ‘A tireless builder’, that, in an effort to preserve the supposed purity within, must constantly demark space.32 This desperate drive towards purity is symbolically realized by Pink both when he smashes the hotel room up and then rebuilds it in a strange diorama of detritus (which is uncannily like an aerial photograph of Auschwitz) and immediately afterwards where he begins his metamorphosis into dictator by shaving off all his body hair – perhaps the most painful scene for the spectator to watch. However, the film itself, in what it shows, somewhat revels in abjection. There is a lot of dripping blood as well as frequent close up shots of writhing maggots, not to mention the animations of exploding brains and a graphic sexuality that seem determined to produce shock or at least upset the delicate sensibility. These symbolize what is happening in Pink’s mind and constitute what he is trying to purge as well as being the very edifice of the concentrationary imagination. The very first image of the film involves a vacuum cleaner in the hotel and the spectator’s view is effaced by its pedal. During the final ‘Trial’ scene, the entire courthouse edifice is made up of worms (which morph into

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Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink builds what looks like an aerial view of a camp out of the detritus of the destroyed hotel room. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), The law is an arse. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

a structure of bones), whilst the judge is literally an arse (two of the many strokes of brilliance within the movie). In the background of the Trial sequence on the album a cry can be heard: ‘Go on judge … shit on him!’, exposing the terror for the subject of the utter humiliation of an abject punishment. Survivor accounts from the concentration camps make clear the kinds of defecatory punishment internees were made to suffer as part of a politics of humiliation and dehumanization and ultimate separation. Both Pink’s and the Nazi project of purity partake of a basic error in misunderstanding what it means to be a human being. To be a human being is to realize that one cannot have a pure experience of oneself; Pink’s mistake is to try. Perhaps it may be better to say that a pure experience of oneself would involve acknowledging and accepting one’s impurity or blurred nature and realizing that one can be bodily or psychically free neither from the abject nor the ambivalent. Such a realization would be a release. Perhaps some of the uncomfortable reactions to The Wall are a result of this ambivalent nature between its slick and well-crafted cinematographic values and the abject and sometimes horrifying images that it consists of. This generates an area of ambivalence that may be seen as offering resistance to the attempted purity and effacement of the concentrationary imaginary. I shall discuss these weaknesses as well as the strengths or insights of the movie further when I come to analyse specific sections. But before turning to these I want to deal briefly with the problematic and complex term ‘imaginary’ as it appears in our designation ‘concentrationary imaginary’ and how this relates to the position I wish to take on The Wall. The distinction should be made between the images we see and which we are persuaded to take as Pink’s consciousness (if we follow Jean Paul Sartre’s definitions in L’Imaginaire), and the imaginary of the film itself. The images we see are to be taken as being Pink’s consciousness but we, and the film, are in a privileged position to look at these images without their being our consciousness. This is also the privileged position of the cinema and the point where it can offer resistance to the concentrationary imaginary. Films which do not take on this exterior consciousness can fail to resist by not offering a position from which the images

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can be viewed reflexively and critically. I would contest that much of Hollywood’s output falls into this error. In Lacanian terminology, the Imaginary is intertwined with the mirror stage of a child’s development – the point of arising subjectivity and the recognition of both difference and identification. These are of course themes of The Wall. Frederic Jameson cautions that Lacan’s use of the word ‘Imaginary’ is in ‘a relatively narrow and technical sense …’.33 He goes on to define the Imaginary as a ‘pre-verbal’ register that precedes the accession of the Symbolic in ‘the development of the psyche’34 before making the point that the Imaginary and Symbolic orders are inextricably entangled and cannot necessarily be easily identified and separated (itself an observation that marks the antithesis of the concentrationary mind). Cornelius Castoriadis also makes this point clear: The deep and obscure relations between the symbolic and the imaginary appear as soon as one reflects on the following fact: the imaginary has to use the symbolic not only to ‘express’ itself (this is self evident), but to ‘exist’, to pass from the virtual to anything more than this … conversely, symbolism too presupposes an imaginary capacity.35 In this sense of ‘Imaginary’ (and its ambivalence), the concentrationary has a particular impoverishment and involves a fundamental struggle of identification and disidentification – it desires clarity (and it is always disappointed in this desire which leads to its rage). In fact, the concentrationary is particularly suited to being stuck in the ‘Imaginary’: ‘We will … come to learn that this process of definition by binary opposition is itself profoundly characteristic of the Imaginary ….’36 The concentrationary Symbolic order which comes to dominate and mark out this Imaginary is similarly built on binary oppositions and divisive signs – we return again to the crossed hammer, the Swastika, the shaved body, the wall itself. It is pathological by its very nature, and the twist in The Wall might be seen in the fact that Pink is really turning to a symbolic world (with his outsized cartoon-like symbols) in order to escape his imaginary one but his impoverished imagination means that the symbolic route he chooses only serves to lead back to that very same imaginary state. I also wish to think about the terms imagination and imaginary in a different sense from that of Lacan. Sartre’s phenomenological approach in L’Imaginaire provides some insights into Pink’s state of mind as it is presented to us. Much of Pink’s mind is hallucinatory and obsessive, itself a pathological state according to Sartre: ‘Modern Psychologists are agreed concerning the poverty of hallucinating material … the hallucination presents itself as the intermittent reappearance of certain objects ….’37 Not only is Pink’s imagination a pathological hallucinatory one, but so too was the Nazi imagination. The German people experienced, to use Bernard Bergen’s phrase, a ‘delirium of loyalty’ that resulted in ‘a flight from the real to the imaginary’.38 This complements Sartre’s observation about the characteristics of the ‘morbid dreamer’ who prefers to inhabit an imaginary world. In Sartre’s reasoning, because the image is essentially impoverished and has no meaning other than that one gives to it, to prefer the imaginary world is to prefer the safety of a world of one’s own design:

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… it is not only an escape from the content of the real (poverty, frustrated love, failure of one’s enterprises, etc), but from the form of the real itself, its character of presence, the sort of response it demands of us, the adaptation of our actions to the object, the inexhaustibility of perception, their independence, the very way our feelings have of developing themselves.39 This is what I meant above by saying that the concentrationary imaginary has a trait of cowardice. It is also (and this is interesting with regard to cinema itself) the failure to realize that the image presents itself as nothingness ‘… we cannot destroy the immediate awareness of its nothingness’.40 The concentrationary imaginary believes, with tragic consequences, that it is real and is rooted in reality. Another aspect of ‘Imagination’ I wish to mention is that which is involved with the creative process. It is the type of imagination that can make a film about the impoverished imaginary but itself draws on a fund of richness. This is the imagination involved in creating the artwork. It is sometimes involved in The Wall. There is no room here for a full analysis of The Wall in the terms I have outlined above; instead, what follows is a brief look at some sequences and themes in the film. These are: young Pink playing on the train track; The Dam Busters and the Second World War, and: Gerald Scarfe’s animations and other transformations. Young Pink playing on the train track This scene opens with one of the very few touches of more evident humour in the film, albeit slight. Young Pink and two friends are messing around on the rail track; on the way down the hill to the track, Tubs, the fat one, falls over. As with much of the film there is an element of the stereotype here; the slow Tubs is also the cautious one: ‘Don’t do anything dangerous Pinky’, he says. Pink is already marked out as an outsider, an over-reacher and a leader of the weak (the third child has ‘ginger’ hair, thus marking him out as a probable object for bullying at school). Pink enters the

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Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), A hallucinatory image of deportation occurs in the train tunnel. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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rail tunnel alone when the others are too timid to do so and he places a bullet on the rail track. This bullet is one he found in a box of ammunition amongst his father’s effects. There is a certain amount of tension as the train gets closer; ‘Get off the line you bloody idiot!’ cries Tubs. Pink leaps back to the tunnel wall and the train hits the bullet, which explodes. There is a series of close up shots of the train wheels going from left to right and close ups of Pink’s face. The train then seems to change into a transportation vehicle and the carriages become cattle trucks, this time going from right to left and with grasping hands coming out. Pink looks up to see a series of featureless masked faces looking back at him and then we hear the cry of the teacher who appears at the entrance to the tunnel: ‘You, yes you … Stand still laddie.’ Pink’s face also becomes a mask and the sequence moves into the song The Happiest Days of Our Lives as a prelude to the hit single (and Christmas number one 1980) Another Brick in the Wall Part Two. This train is the counter image of the other iconographic train – that which brings the demobbed soldiers home to a bunting covered station. The insertion of the imagery that recalls the concentration camp demands consideration. It is possibly a kind of hallucination within a hallucination (if the adult addled Pink is thinking all of this). It might also be possible that the young Pink had seen images of the concentration camp in the liberation footage that played in cinemas after the war. In terms of the film, the reversal of the direction of the train is an acknowledgement of the shift from reality to imagination or hallucination. It shows that here we have an inserted thought which is further signified by the strange red colouration of the cattle trucks that echoes the closed door seen at the beginning of the film, against which the unknown masses heave and threaten to burst through. It is as if the use of the relic of the war, the bullet used in an illicit way, has somehow produced or conjured up a guilty vision of the worst crimes of that war, which, in its turn, evokes the authority figure of the teacher who appears to find Pink guilty and mete out punishment. This is clearly high artifice at the level of the filmmaking

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Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Young Pink becomes faceless as a reflection of the faceless ones in the cattle trucks. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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and the surreal aspects are heightened by the contrasting use of only natural light by lighting director Peter Biziou. On one level I suggest this sequence effectively shows the un-worked-through presence of the crimes of the concentration camp and in the shift from this vision to the whole discourse on education it implies a sense of a continuation of the crime that quite literally follows Althusser’s model of the institutional, ideological interpellation. Through the interesting use of the mask as literally mass effacement (a quite different use of the mask, always a potentially ambiguous symbol, to the mass liberation use it is put to in V for Vendetta, Dir. James McTeigue, 2005), the individualistic ideology of Pink is pitted against the unifying one of institutions. The equating of the school with the concentration camp is obviously a very problematic gesture but it is not so far from some of the theories of Agamben and Virilio, not to say Althusser. The whole sequence seems to be an illustration of Primo Levi’s assertion: ‘We are the slaves of the slaves.’ 41 This iconography of the concentration camp in the form of the transportation train forms one of those crystallizations of thought that become part of the concentrationary imaginary. At the level of the film’s discourse, this shows how the historical frame of reference for someone of Pink’s generation is locked into this moment. In 1982, the memory of ‘The Holocaust’ was much more repressed culturally than it became in the 1990s. It arises in the form of a haunting but without the ‘quickening power’ that Gordon finds in Benjamin’s monadological moments. It is a moment which is ‘thought’ into the film (it is not a memory as such) and neatly sutured into the film’s structure by the skill of the filmmakers. At the level of discourse that follows Pink’s mental decline, it serves to drive him back into more circular moments of individual repression and reinforcing the limited nature of the binary oppositions of the concentrationary imaginary.

The Dam Busters and the Second World War Much of The Wall is about the shadow cast by the Second World War, individually and collectively – indeed in some of the sequences depicting the bridgehead at Anzio it becomes a war film. The shadow of the war is mediated by the other cultural productions that have come out of the war. The most prevalent is the British war film, and this genre forms a one of the subtexts of The Wall. Interestingly, in the album it is The Battle of Britain (Dir. Guy Gibson, 1969) that fulfils this function with snatches of dialogue (‘Where the hell are you Simon?’) to be heard beneath the music. In the movie of The Wall it is Michael Anderson’s The Dam Busters (1955) upon which Pink is fixated as it plays on his hotel room television, which is perhaps more apt thematically, as I have mentioned, for the mutual desire to smash down walls (but, of course, all Pink can do is repeatedly smash his television set). Such films played an important part in forming the British cultural memory of the Second World War in the 1950s and 1960s; they have their own imaginary, signifying a plucky spirit of some kind. It is in this imaginary that Pink seems to want to absorb himself and to which he wishes to cling. James Chapman, in War and Film, highlights the argument that films like The Dam Busters were films about repression rather than repressed films, and it is interesting to see how opinion at the time regarded the

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movie, as The Times of 17 May 1955 claimed: ‘… with The Dam Busters it would seem that the last word has been said. Here is a full statement, final and complete…’.42 Certainly, there is the simplicity of binary opposition in The Dam Busters, and a sense of order that Pink so craves. He does not find completion however; he just finds and dwells on repeated loss and it is whilst watching The Dam Busters that he transforms into his dictator self. It is worth noting that in the construction of The Wall, The Dam Busters on Pink’s television twice appears as a close up so that at those moments it is as if we, as spectators of The Wall, are in fact watching the 1955 movie. Both times are to do with the only moment of true grieving that is displayed in the film – the build up to and the aftermath of the death of Commander Gibson’s dog Nigger. Pink is looking for a way to mourn but his capacity to do so has been repressed and so he descends into a pathological melancholia reinforced by isolation. Sue Harper has written on the reception and nature of popular films in Britain during and after the Second World War. Speaking specifically of The Dam Busters and other such films of the 1950s she writes: Film culture had come to operate as a fulcrum of the recent past. It had become the gatekeeper of mass memory. But mass male memory perhaps. One way of reading popular film is that it is part of the nation talking to itself, explaining to its fellows (here the word is used advisedly) that which is unspeakable in everyday discourse … The 1950s war films … might also be interpreted as fathers speaking to sons about themselves and their experiences …43 Pink is still searching for a father to speak to him in 1982 and he is staring at the film that refuses or is unable to provide him with a father’s voice at the moment a groupie

10.10 Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), A set of false fathers: Pink watches a sequence from The Dam Busters. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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fails to elicit an amorous respons. At this moment a tear falls down Pink’s cheek before he erupts into destructive rage. The mass memory served up in the 1950s is shown to be inadequate – and it is inadequate because it fails, amongst many other failures, to really provide an answer for the cattle trucks of faceless people and the piles of bodies in the trenches at Anzio. And it is inadequate for Pink at the levels of affect and experience. The re-emergence of a concentrationary imaginary through Pink may be seen then as a kind of warning in The Wall of what happens when the concentrationary universe has been subsumed in culture and memory. The lack of working through of all kinds of trauma here results in the repetition of the darkest side of humanity. Gerald Scarfe’s animations and other transformations It is beyond the scope of this chapter to do justice to the animated sequences and the conceptual designs by Gerald Scarfe which appear in The Wall. In many ways however, these sequences are exemplary of the images of the concentrationary imaginary, fully entwined with the Symbolic as I have shown. The images of ‘the frightened ones’ imagine human beings as cowering animals whose faces are gas masks; Scarfe’s animations show how the ‘wall of capitalism’, made of cars and stereos and other objects of material desire, is met by a sea of naked humanity. Many of the sequences show processes of metamorphoses (a baby with a rattle becomes a jackbooted killer, the mother’s arms literally become walls). These are posited as products of Pink’s imagination whilst his own actual transformation into a cocoon like slime from which he emerges as a slickly uniformed Nazi-esque figure (a nightmare butterfly) is posited as actually happening (in that it is not animated but is acted out by Bob Geldof). There is an element of danger in these depictions in that they show the emergence of totalitarianism as a surreal rather than a banal process. That said, the surreal (the unbelievable, the laughable in Arendt’s terms) and the banal are intertwined in the concentrationary universe.

10.11 Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), Pink as blob – the larva of a fascist. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters.

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10.12 Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982), The emergent subject. Reproduced courtesy of Roger Waters. What Scarfe’s animated metamorphoses seem to show is a kind of spontaneity of forms. As such they seem to show us Pink’s consciousness (Sartre describes consciousness as ‘unconditional spontaneity’).44 As Sartre also asserts, the image teaches nothing: ‘no matter how long I may look at an image, I shall never find anything in it but what I put there …’.45 Pink is stuck in the impoverishment of his mental images (even enriched as they are by Scarfe). We, however, as spectators of the film have an element of being able to perceive the film as well as receiving it as purely an imaginary signifier: ‘In the world of perception every “thing” has an infinite number of relationships to other things.’46 Therefore both the creativity of Scarfe (which operates at an external level to the subject matter he is illustrating) and the relationship of the spectator to the film have the possibility of creating new relationships which have the potential of liberating one from the concentrationary bind. Whether or not this occurs is another question. The end The Wall does not quite end with the ambivalent explosion towards the camera of the wall itself. Instead there is a sequence showing children clearing up the rubble and mess that might be left over from any one of the numerous riot scenes in the movie. There is a poignant note as the toy dumper truck is loaded up with the detritus that result from adult behaviour. Even more so, the movie’s final shot is a freeze frame as one of the children sniffs at a Molotov cocktail and pours the petrol out onto the ground. It is a rather obvious message of potential renewal and hope, providing, if one were looking for it, a neat note of closure. Such is not the overriding achievement of The Wall, however; I regard it instead as a site wherein it is possible to see that which constitutes the concentrationary imaginary and to that extent it can act as a counter to it and a place in which to explore it. At the same time the movie to some extent partakes of that imaginary and it is through detecting this element that it may be possible to begin to discern where the concentrationary imaginary is in existence in other areas of popular cinema and culture.

11 MEMORY WORK IN ARGENTINA 1976–2006 Laura Malosetti Costa

This chapter addresses the case of concentrationary memories in Argentina, where the last dictatorship (1976–83) put into practice a technology of state terrorism: kidnapping and ‘disappearing’ (that means systematically hiding the killing of 30,000 people by the armed forces). Unlike memories of other moments of totalitarian terror, I want to point out that memory work in Argentina not only aims to agitate culture and society in the constant fight for democracy against total domination but also still to look for truth about the final destiny of the disappeared and to establish the real identity of hundreds of children appropriated and still missing. While Holocaust memory is a paradigm for mourning an exceptional event, Concentrationary Memory is an anxious awareness of the political menace of the totalitarian that can take new and other forms. Hence the discussion of concentrationary memories is a conceptual form (in plural, and with no capital letters) appropriate for looking at memory work in Argentina in context. How can people whose deaths were never revealed by the perpetrators be mourned? Concentrationary memories in Argentina not only take the form of activism aimed at preventing future forms of totalitarian violence (Nunca más/ Never More, has been the claim) but function as a still active weapon in order to find the truth about the identity of almost 500 kidnapped babies (today young men and women) as well. Political terror is an unforgettable experience for those who suffered it. But it is difficult for new generations who were born after the return of democracy to understand. It is a crucial task for human rights activists to sustain the awareness of the dimensions of state terrorism and its consequences in recent Argentine history. On the other hand, new trials are going on, new evidence is being found and concentrationary memories play a crucial role in this process. This chapter addresses the role of the images and the artistic projects in the construction of public awareness about concentrationary memories in Argentina during the 30 years

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from the coup d’état to the commemoration of the Year of Memory in 2006, during the presidency of Néstor Kirchner. This study deals with the period up to 2006, the initial focus of my research. Since that date there have been new interventions that have changed the memory landscape but which I cannot analyse in this chapter. In March 2001, 25 years after the 1976 coup d’état, the Argentinian literary supplement Radar libros called on various artists and writers to recount their recollections of the event. On this occasion, art critic and artist Roberto Jacoby evoked the overwhelming sense of confusion he experienced during the coup: The truly abysmal thing about terror probably does not lie in the risk of capture by the enemy, but in not knowing who is friend and who is foe. In the deepest recesses of terror lies uncertainty. Darkness … The technology of ‘disappearance’ takes uncertainty to the point of paroxysm. There are no faces, no bodies. Nothing happens. All is doubt and suspicion – invisibility and helplessness.1 The year 2006 was declared the Año de la Memoria or Year of Remembrance in Argentina. It was the first time since the end of the previous military dictatorship, from 1976 to 1983, that such a commemoration of and homage to the 30,000 victims of state terrorism had been faced up to by the Argentinian state. The commemoration updates the debates about whether the musealizing and monumentalizing of the memory of state terrorism is desirable – or even possible. Since the end of the dictatorship, barring the first term of Raúl Alfonsín’s postdictatorship government – when the uppermost echelons of the armed forces were publicly tried and condemned to life imprisonment – there had been no more interventions by the political powers-that-be regarding human rights in Argentina. Obediencia Debida or the Due Obedience Law, and Punto Final, or the Full-Stop Law, pushed through by Alfonsín himself, and later on the pardon bestowed on the military top brass by Carlos Menem, signalled the establishment of a climate of impunity. This was a serious obstacle to the investigations underway to find the abducted children and to ascertain the fate of the desaparecidos – the disappeared. Thanks to public and legal protest, investigations by relatives’ organizations (firstly, the Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo – the Mothers and Grandmothers of May Square) and human rights groups, as well as official investigations through the CONADEP (National Committee for Disappeared People) and those by the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (the EAAF, or Argentinian Forensic Anthropology Team) we soon possessed quite a number of the fragments of a truth that continued to be denied by the culprits. Yet, despite all this, Argentinian society was still living with thousands of unsolved crimes and with criminals walking its streets. Uncertainty is perhaps the worst scar left by the genocide in Argentina. The machinery of the national state was used for kidnapping and extermination, while it attempted to leave no trace of its actions, and to this day refuses to give any account of them. ‘They are neither alive nor dead’, declared de facto president, Jorge R. Videla on television, indicating with a wave of his hand that they had vanished into thin air. ‘They are

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desaparecidos [disappeared], they have no legal entity.’ He also suggested they may be in hiding abroad. The dictatorship kidnapped pregnant women and newborn children. The babies born in captivity and the children of the disappeared parents had their identities stolen; they were secretly passed on to other families or kept by their captors. Hundreds of young people remain missing in Argentina today and their families are still trying to find them. The trauma affected an entire generation of Argentinian youth between the ages of 30 and 35. The Grandmothers’ organization received daily queries from young people who were suspicious or convinced that their parents were not their real parents – that they had been secretly adopted or were children of someone who was disappeared. Given this brief summary of the events and the incomplete commemoration as well as investigation of the crimes of the dictatorship against its own population, I want now to analyse the specific nature of memory work in Argentina, and to explore the role of the images within them. In the context of a politically-targeted genocide, effected through disappearance, ‘appearing’ – i.e. making public a suppressed presence – functions as a political act. Thus making visible the invisibilized has always been one of the main strategies of the resistance and protests for truth and justice. Women Much has been written about the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, those ‘mad women’ who during the worst years of the dictatorship kept on meeting each other in the queues forming at the doors of Argentina’s police stations and jails, government departments, churches and courtrooms, as they desperately tried to find their children. Little by little, in spite of the evasion and disinformation they were given, they began to suspect that they would never get their children back. So they embarked on an obstinate and militant course of resistance that continues until this day. Its motto is Aparición con vida – Appearance Alive. Every Thursday since the early years of the dictatorship the Madres have marched around the Monument to the Republic in the Plaza de Mayo outside Government House in Buenos Aires. Soon after the protest began, they identified themselves by donning white headscarves – one of their children’s nappies – on which they embroidered their children’s names and the date they had been kidnapped. The Madres’ and Abuelas’ [Grandmothers’] white headscarves started as a means of identifying fellow mothers and grandmothers who were ‘bereaved’ in the crowd at religious processions, where they sought support for their search. The visual and emotional impact of their protest and their sign, taking place in full view in urban space, grew and grew. It has now come to symbolize the defence of human rights in Argentina and other parts of the world. The white headscarf encapsulates their condition as Madres/Mothers, but above all it bears witness to their unshakable persistence in maintaining not memory but a refusal to allow this constant grief and unsolved crime to become mere memory. Their presence is a constant agitation of the contemporary culture. Even when they were kidnapped, tortured and murdered, the Madres never stopped marching or pressing

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home their protest in every sphere, national and international. The white headscarf embroidered with the name of her beloved child and the dates, and worn by an elderly woman, inspires the greatest respect. It is a public image of the perseverance of those who, having lost what they most loved in the world, were not afraid to speak out. Their presence embodies a different kind of work of memory that is not mourning; it is a refusal to allow the culture to mourn what it has not yet faced (11.1). Silhouettes In the fight against the policy of disappearing people and erasing all traces of the crime, appearing was thus a decisive strategy of political resistance. The support the organizations of relatives and human rights received from abroad brought them much greater visibility. Each of us has one of those meaningful gestures indelibly engraved on their memory. Even those who were not yet born when this happened have now a sense of international recognition of the struggle for human rights. My children admiringly claim that Holland did not win the 1978 World Cup because Johan Cruyff – they tell me he was the best player in the world at the time – refused to travel to Argentina, where human rights violations were taking place. Whenever representatives from international human rights organizations or delegations visited

11.1

Adriana Lestido, Madre e Hija de Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires/ Mother and Daughter on the Plaza de Mayo 1982.

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the country, the Madres did their level best to appear, to stage events that would be shown on television and that would generate disturbing images not just for those in power who sought to hide the facts, but also for those who did not realize what was going on, or could not believe it, or hid from it, or were too afraid. After 1981, the Madres periodically organized a symbolic taking of the Plaza de Mayo, which they would occupy for 24 hours. This they called Marcha de la Resistencia, or Resistance March. On the third Resistance March in September 1983, shortly before the end of the dictatorship, the Madres were approached by a group of artists (Julio Flores, Guillermo Kexel and Rodolfo Aguereberry) with a new proposal: to turn the march into an image factory of the disappeared by outlining the demonstrators’ bodies on pieces of paper and pasting them on the walls, thus reproducing the volume and extent of the absent bodies and making them also visible. This is what Julio Flores recalls: In order to give the absentee an image, we had to present a body that is not there or, at least, the space occupied by that body or all the bodies … The images had to be different but the same, because they had all suffered the same thing without being an anonymous mass.2 Men, women and children volunteered as models for the silhouettes. They drew, they painted, they pasted. The idea, Flores says, had come to them from a poster by the Polish artist Jerzy Spasky. Spasky had written in the Correo de la Unesco a few years earlier: On each print there were drawings of as many figures as died per day at Auschwitz. There was also an epigraph that read, ‘Every day 2,370 people died at Auschwitz, the precise number of figures reproduced here.’ The Auschwitz concentration camp was operational for 1,688 days, the exact number of copies printed off … The aesthetic concept was based on numerical dimensioning. And the number of disappeared in Argentina was a long-standing unknown (eight, twelve, fifteen, twenty-six thousand?) So we began to follow a different reasoning: if an average adult has an average surface area of 1.75 metres by 0.60 metres, what surface area do 30,000 people occupy? Standing side by side they would stretch 18km … and 52.5km laid down in a row head to toe … That was when the idea began to be take formal shape: we’d make all the disappeared. Conceptually, it would be a spatial dimensioning that would help get across the magnitude of the event.3 The silhouettes made a great impact. Those empty figures – mere outlines that nevertheless enabled different individualities to be made out (pregnant women, children, adults, the tall, the short) – fixed their absence in images. Spectre-like, for hours or even days at a time, they looked on, quizzing the hurrying workers of the political and business centre of Buenos Aires. The artists who hatched the idea

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Juan Travnik, Buenos Aires, 1985.

say they simply transferred to political practice an exercise often performed by art teachers with children in class. But their disturbing visual proximity to the silhouettes drawn by the police around corpses at a crime scene was not lost.4 This was not that the only time that the marches of the Madres and Abuelas and other human rights organizations used the silhouettes in their demonstrations (11.2). But there was another way of making the disappeared appear. Although perhaps lacking quite the impact of the silhouettes, photography proved to be more effective as a means of agitating cultural memory so that it could not forget, while creating a space for memory of those who had disappeared. Photography Ever since its foundation in May 1987 the Argentinian daily Página/12 has published free notices with photographs of the disappeared on every anniversary of their kidnapping. Their presence gives a clear indication of the assiduousness and scope of the ‘operations’, sometimes kidnapping dozens of people in a single night. These images always surprise the onlooker. It is impossible to get used to them even when the same photographs are encountered again and again, year in, year out. Those tiny notices that combine word and image in the pages of one of the highest circulation newspapers in Buenos Aires are multidimensional. They signify the continuity of the search and function as calls for help in finding them, but they

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11.3

Página/12, 27 May 2006.

11.4

Página/12, 15 April 2006.

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are also obituaries – fathers, mothers, children, friends, all pay tribute to loved ones who are mourned ‘as if ’ they were dead (11.3). By 2006 the photographs were between 30 and 35 years old. They were in general of very young men and women, taken either from identity documents or family celebrations where they are happy and smiling. They are accompanied by their names, dates of birth and disappearance, poems, short letters, expressions of affection and grief from friends and family, and the caption Continúa desaparecido – Still Disappeared. This caption is an obstinate, militant gesture calling for Appearance Alive. But it is also more than that. It entails a vital question that tells of authentic uncertainty – uncertainty that upholds the love of Madres and fathers, children, brothers and sisters, and friends, against all reason and the arguments of logic. In these photographs, the historically frozen faces, haircuts and clothes of the disappeared appeared in the pages of the newspaper. They questioned the viewer now with their gaze, at times with their carefree light-heartedness, or strike the reader with their tender years. Above all, they shocked with their familiarity. Photographs are also the most regular presence of the disappeared in the streets. The Resistance Marches plastered the walls or the monument in the Plaza de Mayo with them on more than one occasion. Demonstrators carried placards showing the disappeared faces. The walls of secret detention centres were plastered with them, and they were displayed on large sheets – always in black and white, always a little blurred, but unmistakable, always identified by their names and the dates of uncertainty. It is well known that the absence of a body prevents the rituals of mourning. In order to create some degree of certainty for the relatives of the millions of soldiers disappeared in modern warfare, the lords of war have designed supposedly indestructible identifying tags. The practices of visitors to the memorial to US soldiers killed in Vietnam in the Mall in Washngton DC express the trauma of the absence of bodies buried in common graves, ‘disappeared’ in a distant war, somebody else’s war, on the other side of the world. The virtue of the monument was to carve ‘all the names’ in stone with a volume that provides a bodily linkage between the absent bodies and their relatives. Such practices include stroking the name with the fingertips, tracing it onto a piece of paper, sticking small flowers next to it with a piece of adhesive tape, placing some offering on the ground beneath the name. The physical presence of the names invites people to participate in these public and private ceremonies of mourning. The bodies are not there, but that endless list of names offers one certainty: the state reassures the families that these people died in Vietnam and assumes the responsibility for their deaths. But the absence of certainty in death, the lack of information from those who should have protected the population but instead practised systematic annihilation without taking responsibility for it, does not allow death to be accepted. This operates in the realm of affect, quite independently of any rhetoric of political resistance. As Hebe de Bonafini, the president of Madres de Plaza de Mayo, put it in 1988:

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I think very few of us really did realize the full extent of the horror of what was happening. We all nurtured hope: they’ll put them in jail, we’ll find them, at the police station, in jail or in the army.5 In 1997, when the government offered him financial compensation for the (presumed) loss of his daughter, Héctor Ciocchini wrote this poem in reply: The rescue of a body whose last resting place you do not even know – hideous violation – can be symbolized by some coins whose cowardice bears the name of peace. Another generation of murderers prepares the welfare of the evil ones for a degraded republic. There is a justice that never will be satisfied.6 Ciocchini was an Argentinian philologist and poet who for several years lived and worked in London at the Warburg Institute. The library he had pieced together in Bahía Blanca was broken up and destroyed, his Institute closed and he was personally persecuted. His youngest daughter, María Clara, was kidnapped along with other secondary school pupils in the city of La Plata when she was 18, after organizing a demonstration to protest about the student issue. One of them miraculously escaped through a window and lived to tell the tale of one of the darkest episodes of the years of the terror. This is now referred to as La noche de los lápices, or Night of the Pencils. The story of these young people was reconstructed in detail early on thanks to its only survivor. Statements were taken, books were written, and a movie was even made about the adolescents’ horrifying fate. The worst was suffered by María Clara Ciocchini, as she was delicate and beautiful, and was systematically raped and tortured until the day – we have to suppose – they transferred her to be killed. Her father could never bring himself to accept the evidence. He could not bear to do so. He once confessed to me that, against all logic, he was still hoping that she had been in hiding abroad and that one day she would open the door and walk in, radiant. How do you accept such a terrible fate for what you love most in the world when there is even a minimal margin for doubt? The photographs of the disappeared are, therefore, complex. They represent frozen time and embody nostalgia, as has been said so often in the past. ‘Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art’, wrote Susan Sontag. ‘All photographs are memento mori.’7 But, in the context of concentrationary memory in Argentina, they have become images both of uncertainty and of hope – of searching. ‘If you have seen him in a detention centre, if you have any knowledge of his whereabouts, please get in touch with his family,’ reads the caption at the foot of many of the photographs published in the press (11.4).

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Collective exhibition: Identidad, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 1998. Photo: Archivo CCR.

Unlike the images of the survivors barely alive and the unburied dead from European concentration camps, these disturbing photographs of the victims of the Argentinian concentrationary universe stop time before the horror. I have often stopped to search these faces for some sign of what would happen not long after. Some of them wear defiant expressions. Others have the rigidity of the mugshot, taken as they have been from identity documents. But it is hopeless. You cannot help contemplating them as an explosion of frozen life waiting to be recovered. Also unavoidable is the pain of what we know. Soon after these photographs were taken, these faces were taken from their houses at gunpoint, hoods were put over their heads by civilians in cars with no registration, and they were taken to concentration, torture and extermination camps. Survivors have identified hundreds of such camps and we know their names: the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada or ESMA (the Navy Mechanics School), Automotores Orletti (or Orletti Motors), El Olimpo (or the Olympus Garage), La Escuelita (or the Little School), El Pozo de Banfield (or Banfield Well), La Perla (or the Pearl), names that for Argentinians are as sinister as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald or Dachau. In 1998 a group of 13 outstanding artists in active collaboration with the Grandmothers held an exhibition at the Recoleta Cultural Centre called Identidad

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(Identity).8 They made no personal intervention as artists other than to hang on the gallery walls photographs of the disappeared of both sexes, children who are still being sought. Between the photographs they placed mirrors, so that viewers could compare their own faces. Again, this was an operation dense with meaning. It was intended to activate memory of the past as an agent in the present. The photographs were there as unique documents, irreducible to words. A face cannot be described. The installation generated different affects: seeing and comparing, seeing if you look like one of them, seeing if you could be their lost child, seeing the passing of time in yourself as their mother or father or brother, or seeing your face today, at the same age they would be. Imagining their presence and seeing your own face there. These are complex memory works when the people in the photographs are still being sought. Photographs produce a disturbing collision between the privacy of family memories and the will to make them public, as public as possible, to let people know and try to find out more. The tactics of disappearance tried to leave no evidence, to erase faces, bodies. But they did leave traces. Apparently, one of the most frequent practices in disappearing people was to throw prisoners – trussed up, drugged and still alive – out of planes into the River Plate, in what were called vuelos de la muerte, or death flights. Many of the bodies were later washed up. The newspapers published the stories and photographs of the ‘mysterious’ bodies found on the shores of the River Plate. There were photojournalists who captured fleeting glimpses of kidnappings on the street. News filtered out. There were articles in the press. One of the most active in the protest and search for stolen babies in those years was The Buenos Aires Herald, which, as an English-language daily, was relatively protected from censorship. The artist, León Ferrari, produced a series of collages with materials from this and other newspapers, which he exhibited on several occasions under the ironic title Nosotros no sabíamos – We Didn’t Know. In 2006 it was one of the exhibitions at the Recoleta Cultural Centre in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the coup d’état. But possibly the most disturbing images of the disappeared are the few known to have been taken of their arrival at secret detention centres. The armed forces continue to deny there were any records. Through the accounts of survivors and certain files that were overlooked, however, we know meticulous records of the genocide were kept. These have also disappeared. Victor Basterra is a photographer who was disappeared at the ESMA for several years and, like other prisoners, was used as a slaveworker to produce counterfeit documents and photographs of officers, amongst other things, for various purposes. One by one, Basterra smuggled out negatives, pictures and documents in his underwear. He risked his life to prove that the place had been a centre for torture and extermination. Among the pictures he smuggled out are some of prisoners who are still disappeared. Those faces bear the marks of suffering and torture, glassy, tired, terrified eyes. Some of the photographs were touched up to ‘demonstrate’ that the prisoners were not there, but somewhere else, supposedly kidnapped by terrorists. One of the young people photographed – barely a teenager – was Fernando Brodsky. His image causes me indescribable pain. His brother, Marcelo Brodsky, also

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a photographer and artist, had been the prime mover of some of the most interesting and controversial aesthetic initiatives and proposals in terms of memory work in Argentina (11.6). Preserved and protected from the distracted or untroubled gaze by eight completely black initial pages, his brother Fernando’s photo stands at the head of the opening series of his book on the controversy over the fate of the ESMA: a row broke out in March 2004, when President Néstor Kirchner announced that the building would be transformed into a Museo de la Memoria – a Museum of Memory. Marcelo Brodsky’s book contains a section of photographs of the disappeared from the ESMA, another of groundplans and photographs of this symbol of state terrorism, another of essays and testimonies, bringing together opinions about its fate as a Museum, and another of works – ideas, proposals, memory places created by visual artists.9 One of the Remembrance Exhibitions held in 2006 was organized by Brodsky and based on this section in the book, Memoria en construcción – Memory Under Construction. Photographs are the most powerful means of ‘appearing’ the disappeared while also preventing the photograph from ‘containing’ memory. The reappearance in these frozen moments in projects such as Identity keep the horror in the present, transgressing the boundaries between then and now because ‘disappearance’ so radically prevents release for the bereaved and closure for the society in whose midst this happened. The pairs of photographs exhibited by Gustavo Germano in his series Ausencias, show – precisely – the absence reconstructing the same scene with the survivors, 30 years later (11.7a and b).

11.6

Marcelo Brodsky – Opening page of Memoria en Construcción, with the photograph of his brother Fernando in captivity. Buenos Aires, 2006.

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a)

1969: Gustavo Germano, Guillermo Germano, Diego Germano, Eduardo Germano

b)

2006: Gustavo Germano, Guillermo Germano, Diego Germano

11.7

Gustavo Germano, Two photographs of the series Ausencias.

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So far I have only dealt with art tangentially. Drawing on Adorno’s thesis prohibiting art from comforting and redeeming the culture that produces genocide, I want to reflect on the place of the aesthetic in these memory work, and in the controversy surrounding the musealization of the memory of the Argentina’s recent past. Art Art: poetry, painting, sculpture, theatre, film, music, all the arts have in one way or another been instruments of resistance as well as constructing memory places – fragile, movable spaces infused with the imperative search for both information and justice. But perhaps photographs and silhouettes have been the most effective images in keeping alive the practices and rites of this restless and unconfined memory precisely because they are not artistic images, even though they were proposed and staged by artists. In the case of both the silhouettes and the use made of photography on marches or in exhibitions, artists decided to take a back seat in order to produce images that avoided the label of art. The 1998 exhibition Identidad was emblematic of this (11.5). Something seems to have changed, however, in 2006. Numerous art exhibitions took part in the official commemoration of the Año de la Memoria – The Year of Memory. One of these was the one organized by Marcelo Brodsky which I have already mentioned. It brought together paintings, sculptures, installations, records of street actions, photographs and objects that, taken as a whole, set out an idea about the construction of memory that was both collective and multiple. The exhibition 30 años/30 artistas (30 Years/30 Artists) operated even more openly. ‘We understand memory as an everyday critical first person exercise, an exercise that does not dwell on a closed past but aspires to action in the present’, wrote its curators, Ana Longoni and Juan Carlos Romero, in their introduction. The curators invited 30 artists from different generations and places in Argentina to evoke what was most significant about the years of the dictatorship and state terror in terms of their individual experiences. The result was a highly intimate exhibition, where it was at times more interesting to read the short texts with which the artists accompanied their works than to look at the works themselves. Cuerpo y materia (Body and Matter) at IMAGO, curated by Maria Teresa Constantin, was altogether different. It presented an overview of what critical artists were doing during the years of the terror – either in Argentina or in exile. A shared strategy was apparent, despite there being no practical connection between them. That strategy involved a retreat from the kind of avant-garde experiments that had taken politics onto the streets in the 1960s, a return to figurative painting, to the trade, and to metaphor and critical figuration to say the unsayable and beat the censor. A particularly powerful exhibition was that of Franco Venturi at the Centro Cultural Recoleta. Venturi was one of the artists disappeared. His works – drawings, caricatures and paintings – were hidden, preserved and now exhibited for the first time by his widow. What was powerful was to find this disappeared oeuvre organized

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into a narrative; the scattered, hidden, deteriorated fragments of his work reunited and made visible. It had an unexpected apparition-like presence. Another of the exhibitions that most caught the public’s eye in 2006 was the one organized by the Argentinian Government’s Department of Culture at the Salas Nacionales de Exposición (the National Exhibition Halls). There you could see, amongst other things, a major selection of photojournalism recording the street violence during the dictatorship, as well as caricatures from the front covers of the satirical magazine HUMOR, which had a running battle with the censors in the last years of the dictatorship and had real political effects week in, week out. Many of the artistic expressions exhibited in museums or cultural centres in the Year of Memory (2006) were in fact records of street art actions, such as those by groups like the GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero/Street Art Group), Etcétera or Arde Arte (literally ‘Art Burns’), designed to reinforce the actions of HIJOS (the organization of children of the disappeared) – generally escraches or small demonstrations outside the houses of criminals at large – and human rights marches. In other words, there was in these exhibitions also the memory of ephemeral, street-based, conceptual, instantaneous aesthetic actions, as well as disturbing installations such as the one held by these groups, entitled 1888 (1,888). Computer paper was displayed in a corridor of the Recoleta Cultural Centre. On it was the record of 1,888 disappearances under the democratic governments up to the date of the exhibition (2006). ¿Quién se hace cargo de estos desaparecidos en democracia?: ‘Who takes responsibility for these disappearances under democracy?’, they asked in a large poster on the opposite wall. Art occupies no less a place in memory work, and nowhere was this more apparent than in Buenos Aires in 2006. The variety and density of exhibitions also testified to the fact that different generations of artists and the viewing public were doing active work on the trauma of recent history, a trauma that is far from being elaborated, despite the efforts of successive governments somehow to put an end to pending tensions and protests. The exhibitions were well attended by parents with children, friends, couples, several generations who saw in these works and installations the scars on their own memory. There was considerable public interest, magnified by the media. More importantly, the relationship between art and politics was discussed in critical terms, as occurs whenever the state takes up the initiative of commemoration. In the art magazine Ramona, the artist Luis Lindner, for example, spoke of a victory for the military dictatorship, maintaining that: ‘we contemporary artists can howl and shriek all we like, plaster the cities with vituperative collages, and amplify and refine the aggressiveness of our language; none of it will affect the Torturer’.10 Consideration of the images circulating in different environments past and present – urban space, the art circuit, newspapers – in their particular political inscription, is inescapable. It is this aspect that has been discussed and analysed more than any other, even to the extent of repeating the word ‘memory’ ad nauseam. These images also have a historical dimension as documents of a recent past but, as importantly, of the present and, as such, they must be subjected to a critical historiographical approach. But above all, these gestures and images created lieux de

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mémoire: memory places in Pierre Nora’s sense of the phrase: ‘We must not confuse memory with history’, he stated in a recent interview. Memory is by nature affective, emotive, open to all sorts of transformations, unaware of its successive transformations, vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation, prone to remain latent for long periods and to awaken abruptly. Memory is always a collective phenomenon, despite being experienced psychologically as an individual one. History, on the other hand, is always a problematic and incomplete construction of what has ceased to exist but what has left traces.11

11.8

Marcelo Brodsky, Sara Brodsky observa el nombre de su hijo desaparecido, Fernando, en el Monumento a las Victimas del Terrorismo de Estado, Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires [Sara Brodsky observes the number of her disappeared son at the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism, Park of Memory Buenos Aires].

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Monuments The political decision-making by Kirchner’s government on human rights seems to have brought about a sea change in memory work in Argentina (11.8). Even the Madres decided that 2006 would be their last Resistance March. Had the time now come to build memorials and monuments, or place these images in museums? As Andreas Huyssen has observed, Nowhere do the politics of public trauma manifest themselves more intensely than in debates about concrete interventions in the built urban environment. Once embodied in monuments or memorial sites, remembrance of traumatic events seems less susceptible to the vagaries of memory.12 The controversy was already well-established by 1998, towards the end of the Menem government. That year, under the initiative of various human rights organizations, the Buenos Aires city government designated a 14-hectare site by the River Plate for the building of a Parque de la Memoria – a Park of Memory. A competition was held to design a Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado – a Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism. It was won by a project of the Baudizzone, Lestard, Varas Studio and the associated architects, Claudio Ferrari and Daniel Becker. An international sculpture competition was also held and there were plans to build a multipurpose hallspace for conferences, symposia and exhibitions. As the official website explains, it is ‘a public space designed to keep alive our collective memory … a public space for our society, in confronting the memory of the horrors committed by Argentina’s last military dictatorship, to become aware that Nunca Más – Never Again – must there be human rights violations’. Despite finding the Park of Memory ‘persuasive and moving’, and stating that it offers a splendid example of efficient memorial art, while putting it on the global map in the same breath as the Holocaust Memorials in Europe and Israel, Andreas Huyssen also recognized in 2001 that the use the Buenos Aires public would put such a controversial space to in the future is uncertain: The creation of an urban memorial site to a national trauma such as the Parque de la Memoria is a residue and reminder of a shameful national past and a political intervention in the present … Still one might ask: how can there be a memory consensus about a national trauma that pitted one segment of society against another, that divided the national body into perpetrators and victims, beneficiaries and bystanders? The task just seems too daunting.13 The sculpture competition was held in 1999. Six hundred and sixty-five projects were presented from 44 countries. The jury chose eight sculpture projects as competition winners, and gave four special mentions.14 There were also six noncompeting guest artists. Of these, three sculptures had been executed at the time of writing: one of the winning projects (Dennis Oppenheim), a project by one of the guest artists (Roberto Aizenberg) and the Second Mention (William Tucker).15 The

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Monument is an irregular, zigzagging wall with gaps symbolizing the wound opened by the slaughter and bearing the names of the 30,000 disappeared. When I first began work for this chapter in 2006, eight years after the law that brought it into existence, the Park of Memory was still under construction.16 I agree with German counter-memorial artist, Horst Hoheisel about the inescapable sense of failure when confronted by the rather derelict, almost constantly deserted site. It stands next to the river at one edge of Buenos Aires. It had been argued in favour of the location that it would fulfil the dual role of paying tribute to the disappeared who were thrown into the river, while also contributing to the new desire of town planners and developers to link the city up with the river. The Park of Memory would also be located relatively near the ESMA, the emblematic detention centre that has been declared a Museum of Memory by the government. The fact remains that the Park is poorly attended and, lying between the airport and the university campus, is difficult to reach. For now, it is an inhospitable place and one apparently doomed to considerable public indifference – even when it is not complete and debate shows no sign of going away. The project of the Monument to the Disappeared in the Park of Memory belongs in some degree to a long line of contemporary memorials based on the names of victims: the aforementioned monument to the veterans of the Vietnam War, but also the immense Yad Vashem Memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem bearing the three million identified victims’ names, and many others.17 In Argentina and its concentrationary memories, however, let us not forget, uncertainty weighs heavy. The Park of Memory is near the River Plate as a supposed grave, but – more significantly – it is far from the Plaza de Mayo, the traditional place of protest in Buenos Aires where a weekly embodiment of a refusal of commemoration and a demand for recognition takes places. At this point, the people of Argentina are still dealing with the scars and agitating memory of a recent history; they are still seeking a means to achieve any resolution. Relief from the trauma suffered by our society still seems a long way off. The debates have been reactivated, starting with the initiative to turn the ESMA into a Museum of Memory. In 2005, the German artist, Horst Hoheisel, launched a defiant proposal that many have taken on board: he suggested doing nothing. Not for the time being anyway. Instead, we should spend at least ten years debating what to put there. In the meantime we will have given the memory of the disappeared time, and prevented it from being reduced to a fund of political capital for one or even two terms in office. We should bring to fruition projects that are capable of coexisting, there and elsewhere in Buenos Aires – projects that for the time being are movable and vital, though for how much longer is anybody’s guess. Hoheisel’s suggestion is a warning: depositing memory in a specific, fixed place is apparently, to a great extent, a matter of getting rid of it altogether. Thus the debate about concentrationary memory in Argentina, itself impossible to confine to the past, locate, and symbolically bury, would become a model for allowing the difficulty of memory of such a trauma as state terror and politically targeted genocide to remain urgent, agitating, unsettling and a vivid warning in the present.

NOTES

Series Preface 1 David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire [1946] (Paris: Hachette/Pluriel, 2008), p. 181; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1976), p. 141. 2 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 441. 3 Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (London and New York: Berghahn, 2011). 4 Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Basil Blackell, 1978), p. 312. 5 ‘What radical evil is I don’t know, but it seems to me it somehow has to do with the following phenomenon: making human beings as human beings superfluous (not using them as a means to an end, which leaves their essences as humans untouched and impinges only on their human dignity; rather making them superfluous as human beings). This happens as soon as all unpredictability – which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity – is eliminated. And all this in turn arises from – or, better, goes along with – the delusion of the omnipotence (not simply of the lust for power) of an individual man’, Hannah Arendt, ‘Letter to Karl Jaspers’, 4 March 1951, in Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner (eds), Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926–1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace International, 1992), p. 166.

Introduction 1 David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions de Pavois, 1946; reprinted Paris: Hachette/Pluriel, 2008); translated as The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947). The book is based on a series of articles Rousset wrote in 1945 for Maurice Nadeau in La Revue Internationale. The English translation was reissued in 1951 as A World Apart. Rousset was the first to use the term ‘Gulag’ in French to introduce the Stalinist labour camps to French public awareness in the 1950s. In 1949 he had instituted, with other survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, the International Commission Against Concentration Camps. Also cited by Hannah Arendt as epigraph to her essay, ‘The Concentration Camps’, Partisan Review XV/7 (1948), p. 743. 2 See Kay Gladstone, ‘Memory of the Camps: The Rescue of an Abandoned Film’, in Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2011), pp. 71–83.

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3 Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 4 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience’ [1949], Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), p. 7, n. 4. 5 Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, p. 181; The Other Kingdom, p. 168. 6 Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, pp. 178–79; The Other Kingdom, p. 167. 7 Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, p. 182; The Other Kingdom, p. 169. 8 Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, pp. 186–67; The Other Kingdom, p. 173. 9 Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, p. 187; The Other Kingdom, pp. 172–73. 10 Eugen Kogon, Der SS Stadt: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (Munich: Alber, 1946) trans. as The Theory and Practice of Hell (Berkeley: State Publishing, 1998); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich] 1996). 11 Between 1904 and 1908 there were five Konzentrationslagern, as they were named in reports, in German South West Africa, with a mortality rate of 42.5 per cent. They were set up to defeat the Herero people’s revolt and functioned effectively as genocide. David Olusaga and Casper Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and The Colonial Roots Of Nazism (London: Faber, 2010). 12 Nikolaus Wachsmann, ‘The Dynamics of Destruction: The Development of the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945’, in Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds), Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 17– 43. 13 Wolfgang Sofksy cites the calculations by G. Schwartz in his Die nationalsozialistischen Lager (Frankfurt, 1990 (pp. 221–22)), that, taking into account all forms of camps (including ghettoes, labour-education, labour, forced labour, and special detention camps) across the German Reich and its territories, there were about 10,006 (The Order of Terror, p. 292). See also Jo Reilly, David Cesarani, Tony Kushner and Colin Richmond (eds), Belsen in History and Memory (London: Frank Cass, 1997) for a documentation of the impact of the liberation of Belsen on British cultural memory. They write ‘Although Nazi camps of a far more murderous nature were liberated before Belsen, the scenes recorded at Belsen by soldiers, journalists, photographers, broadcasters and film crews were perhaps the most gruesome images of all relating to the Nazi atrocities’, p. 3. 14 Sofsky, The Order of Terror, p. 43. 15 Timothy Snyder, ‘Holocaust: The Ignored Reality’, New York Review of Books, 16 June 2009. 16 Snyder, ‘Holocaust: The Ignored Reality’. 17 Snyder, ‘Holocaust: The Ignored Reality’. 18 Snyder, ‘Holocaust: The Ignored Reality’. 19 Two million Jewish and 250,000–500,000 Romani Europeans were murdered in death camps. The other four million were killed outside these industrialized installations. Auschwitz-Birkenau, functioning between mid 1942 and October 1944, accounts for 1.1 million people killed by gassing. 20 Jacques Rancière, ‘Are Some Things Unrepresentable?’, in The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso Books, 2007), pp. 123–30. 21 Primo Levi, If This is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1988); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).

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22 Primo Levi, Collected Poems, trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (London: Faber & Faber, 1992). 23 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1989), p. 38. 24 The Romani people suffered losses on a comparable scale to the Jewish people. They were the only other people named for destruction in a supplementary protocol, like that which was signed at Wannsee on 21 January 1942 which initiated the Final Solution of the Jewish People. There has, however, been no comparable work of commemoration or acknowledgement of the Romani Holocaust, that they name Porrojamos. See Janina Bauman, ‘Demons of Other People’s Fear: The Plight of the Gypsies’, Thesis Eleven 54 (1998), pp. 51–62. 25 See David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (eds), After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2011). 26 This is the topic of a future volume entitled Concentrationary Imaginaries: Imaginaries of Violence. As we write this, the terrible events of the massacre of innocent teenagers on 21 July 2011 in Norway vividly score into our consciousness the potency of the annihilatory response to the confrontation with difference and social change fashioned out of the still-burning embers of neo-fascist cults of Nazism. 27 See for instance Brett Ashley Kaplan, ‘“The Bitter Residue of Death”: Jorge Semprun and the Aesthetics of Holocaust Memory’, Comparative Literature 55/4 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 320–37, which concerns a novel about transportation to a concentrationary camp by a Spanish political deportee from France. 28 This issue will be taken up again in Concentrationary Imaginaries in relation to programmes like the BBC’s The Promise (2011). 29 Lacan, ‘The Mirror Phase as Formative of the Function of the I’, p. 6. Translation modified. We wish to thank Benjamin Hannavy-Cousen for his reading of this text as part of our research seminars that initially drew this to our attention. 30 Lacan, ‘The Mirror Phase as Formative of the Function of the I’, p. 6. Translation modified. 31 Lacan, ‘The Mirror Phase as Formative of the Function of the I’, p. 7, note 4. 32 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, Partisan Review XV/7 (1948), p. 761. 33 Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, p. 762. 34 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). 35 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 437 36 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 438. 37 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 438. 38 Debarati Sanyal, ‘A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism’, Representations 79 (2002), pp. 1–27. 39 Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Camp as “Nomos” of the Modern’, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [1995], trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 166. 40 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 26. 41 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 26. 42 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1976), p. 280. 43 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 44 T.W. Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 133–57; Sigmund Freud, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (trans.

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James Strachey from the German original Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse [1921]) Standard Edition, vol. XVIII (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981), pp. 67–143. 45 Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Allen Lane, 2000); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 46 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 5.

Chapter 1: The Memory of Politics Where references are to German texts, translations are the contributor’s own. 1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), p. 430. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. viii. 3 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. ix. 4 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 430. 5 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. 437. 6 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Hole of Oblivion’, Jewish Frontier 14/7 (1947), pp. 26, 23; Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. 437. 7 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 438. These original ‘Concluding Remarks’ were replaced in subsequent editions by the essay ‘Ideology and Terror’. 8 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. 438. 9 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 438–39; quoting William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (New York: Random House, 1948), p. 193. 10 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 439; quoting Acts 16: 28. 11 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. 441. 12 Arendt, ‘The Hole of Oblivion’, p. 23. 13 Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation [1929], reprint edn (Hildesheim: Olms, 2006), pp. 32–33; cf. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 48. 14 Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, p. 46; Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann, 2 vols (Munich: Piper, 2002), p. 104. 15 See Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief, 2nd edn [1922] (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2005), pp. 476, 521 and Martin Buber, I and Thou [1922], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970), e.g., p. 62. 16 See, e.g., Heidegger’s lectures from Summer Seminar 1925. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), esp. sections 9, 21, 23–24. 17 See, e.g., Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [1927], trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 54. 18 Moreover, ‘encounter’ has by this point for Heidegger lost most of the centrality that it had had for him a few years earlier, giving way to ‘disclosedness’. See Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 328. Indeed, Arendt’s contravening emphasis at this point might be taken as a suggestion that actual encounter was never really very important for Heidegger – but ought to have been. 19 See Arendt, ‘What Is Existential Philosophy?’ [1946], in Essays in Understanding: 1930– 1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994), p. 178. Arendt’s favourable portrayal there of Jaspers’s thought as, in contrast to Heidegger’s, oriented to ‘the shared life of human beings inhabiting a given world common to them all’ provides a hint of the critical

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20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27

28

29 30 31

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distance to Heidegger that Arendt would seem to have already developed at the time that she left Marburg to write her dissertation with Jaspers at Heidelberg (p. 186). Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, p. 6; Love and Saint Augustine, p. 7. Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, pp. 28, 69, 79; cf. Love and Saint Augustine, pp. 42, 94, 101–2. Carl Schmitt, ‘Der Begriff des Politischen’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 58/1 (1927), pp. 1–33. Schmitt would subsequently expand the article into a book. Arendt described Schmitt in the German edition of Origins as ‘without a doubt the most important man in Germany in the area of constitutional law and the law of nations and who made the utmost effort to do right by the Nazis’; he would become known in the post-war world primarily for the latter. Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, 2nd edn (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1958), p. 506n53. Schmitt: ‘Der Begriff des Politischen’, p. 12. The theoretical target of Schmitt’s criticisms was the ‘pluralistic theory of the state’ of Harold Laski. Carl Schmitt, ‘Die Wendung zum totalen Staat’ [1931], in Positionen und Begriffe: im Kampf mit Weimar – Genf – Versailles, 1923–1939 (Berlin: Duncker, 1940), p. 155. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty [1922], trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 37. Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, p. 28. (Cf. the opening sentence of Political Theology, likely Schmitt’s best known formulation: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception [Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet]’. Schmitt: Political Theology, p. 5.) In the English translation, completed c.1963 and partially revised by Arendt but then published for the first time in 1996 in a version reworked by its editors, the reference to Schmitt is obscured. See Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, p. 42. For the evolution of Schmitt’s thinking on the ‘total state’ and its possible forms, from initial wariness to subsequent enthusiasm, see ‘Die Wendung zum totalen Staat’, pp. 146– 57, and ‘Weiterentwicklung des totalen Staats in Deutschland’ [1933], pp. 185–89, in Schmitt: Positionen und Begriffe. Schmitt would soon have to rethink the status of the German state in relation to the Nazi movement; Arendt would draw on Schmitt’s analysis, recognizing that the totalization at stake was now of the movement and, as Schmitt would too, that the movement had effectively superseded the state in importance. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, pp. 265–66. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk: Die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933). Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, 1st comp. edn, ed. Liliane Weissberg, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Cf. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüdin aus der Romantik (Munich: Piper, 1959). This work drew on Schmitt’s analysis in his Political Romanticism [1919], trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). See also Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, pp. 167–70. In the German edition, which included a much more extensive discussion of political romanticism than the English version, quoting heavily from Schmitt, Arendt described Schmitt’s book as ‘even still the best work on the subject’. Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, p. 258n17. Hannah Arendt, ‘Antisemitism’, in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), pp. 46–121. Arendt, ‘Antisemitism’, p. 47. Arendt, ‘Antisemitism’, pp. 57, 59. Arendt would continue this argument in Origins, in her various ‘Jewish writings’ that appeared in multiple publications in the 1930s and 1940s (see The Jewish Writings), and in her much-misunderstood Eichmann in Jerusalem. Throughout these writings, Arendt sought to convey that the combination of the

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50 51 52

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES assumption of eternal antisemitism with the dream of an autonomous politics was uniquely suited to preclude Jewish encounter with others – etwa als Freund oder Feind – and thereby to effectively block engagement in politics, in any meaningful sense of the word. Then and now, this argument fell largely on deaf ears. See, e.g., Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963), p. 8. Arendt, ‘Antisemitism’, p. 99. Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, p. 258. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. 336. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, pp. 465–66. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, pp. 469, 477. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, pp. 473–74. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. 465, emphasis added. In the concluding paragraphs of the first edition of Origins, Arendt clung to the possibility of pre-political rights to become newly effective as the ‘prepolitical foundation of a new polity, the prelegal basis of a new legal structure’ (p. 439); this suggestion did not survive, at least not in this explicit a form, in subsequent editions. On the insufficiency of laws and memory to guarantee anything more than a world’s pre-existence, i.e., the need for ongoing encounter and interaction to keep every world in existence, see Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 190–200. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 439. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 434. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. 301. This discussion from the section on ‘the Perplexities of the Rights of Man’, which closes Part II of the book, remained unchanged between the first and subsequent editions. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 430. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. 302. Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, p. 37; cf. Love and Saint Augustine, p. 54. Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History, trans. and intro. Ramon J. Betanzos (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 234. Heidegger initially treated the ‘self-world’ in his lectures during WS 1919–20. See Kisiel: The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, pp. 104, 118–21. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, pp. 66–67; Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, p. 43. Hannah Arendt, ‘Love and Saint Augustine’, ms. p. 033310, The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress, Books – Love and Saint Augustine – Drafts – Set II (Series: Speeches and Writings File, 1923–1975, n.d.). Cf. Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, p. 51. In the discussion of Jaspers that Arendt presented as a critical answer to Heidegger in 1946, she described the space of this human creation as the ‘island of human freedom … marked by the border situations in which man experiences the limitations that directly determine the conditions of his freedom and provide the ground for his actions … Existence can develop only in the shared life of human beings inhabiting a given world common to them all’. Arendt, ‘What Is Existential Philosophy?’, p. 186. Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’ in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, enl. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 167. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. ix. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn, p. 441. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, pp. 48, 23; cf. Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, pp. 33, 15. See Arendt, The Human Condition, ‘The Frailty of Human Affairs’, p. 189. For further discussion of the role of memory in the ‘agonism’ of Arendt’s mature political theory, see John Wolfe Ackerman and Bonnie Honig, ‘Agonalität’, in Wolfgang Heuer, Bernd Heiter

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and Stefanie Rosenmüller (eds), Arendt-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), pp. 341–47. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, p. 67; Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, p. 43. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 8–9. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 198–99. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 207–8. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1965 edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 220. The lengthier German version of this footnote to the passage just cited is clearer on this point than the English one. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 320n4; Hannah Arendt, Über die Revolution, 1974 edn (Munich: Piper, 1994), pp. 396–97n4. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 432. Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 104.

Chapter 2: Migration and Motif 1 See, for instance, the website devoted to ‘Icons. A portrait of England’, www.icons.org. uk/. 2 Taken on 8 June 1972 by Nick Ut. 3 See the essays collected in Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida – Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 4. 5 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Where Were you When …’, PMLA 118/1 (January 2003), pp. 120–2. 6 See, for instance, Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (eds), MediaSpace: Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2004). 7 Errol Morris, ‘The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock’ (7 parts), The New York Times, 18–24 October 2009. 8 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 9 Landsberg: Prosthetic Memory, pp. 20–1. 10 Landsberg, quoted and paraphrased also in Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), p. 105. 11 Landsberg: Prosthetic Memory, p. 21. 12 Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (London: Sage, 1999). 13 There are several book-length studies of this single photograph, its problematic provenance, the identity of the boy, and the uses the photo has been put to: Frédéric Rousseau, L’Enfant juif de Varsovie: Histoire d’une photographie (Paris: Seuil, 2009) and Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press 2004). See also the extensive discussion of the photo as a ‘fake’ by a self-described holocaust denier: www. holocaustdenialvideos.com/littleboy/. 14 ‘The debate that ensued proceeded as follows: while researching for the War Crimes trial on the Bosnian war, a German journalist, Thomas Deichmann, discovered that the barbed wire in the photograph was attached to the poles from the inside. He then argued in an article in Living Marxism in 1997 that the Muslims were not standing behind a fence but in front of one and that Trnopolje was not a prison or concentration camp but a refugee camp that the Muslims themselves created. ITN responded with (and won) a libel suit against Living Marxism. According to the courts, the photograph was incontestable evidence of concentration camps in Europe. Further, Deichmann argued that the photograph was clearly intended to render Trnopolje visible as a camp which

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CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES in turn set the stage for NATO’s intervention. Roused by the pictures, British Prime Minister John Major summoned cabinet colleagues back from holiday for an emergency meeting. Shortly afterwards, his government announced that British troops would be sent into Bosnia. In the USA, where the 1992 presidential election campaign was in full swing, Democratic Party candidate Bill Clinton and running mate Al Gore used the ITN pictures to demand that president George Bush should take military action against the Bosnian Serbs. In Brussels, meanwhile, NATO staff responded by planning a military intervention in the Balkans (Deichmann)’ (from Auschwitz and After file: Thomas Deichmann, ‘The Picture that Fooled the World’, Serbian Network (republished from Living Marxism, February 1997), www.srpska-mreza.com/lmf97/LM97_Bosnia.html. As to the factual background to Sterne, the following quotation might help to clarify the situation of the Greek Jews in Bulgaria: ‘During the war, German-allied Bulgaria did not deport Bulgarian Jews. Bulgaria did, however, deport non-Bulgarian Jews from the territories it had annexed from Yugoslavia and Greece. In March 1943, Bulgarian authorities arrested all the Jews in Macedonia. … In all, Bulgaria deported over 11,000 Jews to German-held territory’ (website, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005451). A photograph exists of one of these transports of Greek Jews from Bulgaria, which was circulated widely at that time, and which bears a remarkable resemblance to the opening images of Sterne. ‘Interview mit Konrad Wolf ’, in Ulrich Gregor (ed.), Wie sie filmen: Fünfzehn Gespräche mit Regisseuren d. Gegenwart (Gütersloh: S. Mohn, 1966), p. 336. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Histoire palimpseste, mémoires obliques: A propos de Sterne de Konrad Wolf ’, 1895 58 (2009), pp. 10–29. The history of the making of the Westerbork film has to be pieced together from different sources, including various Wikipedia entries, the websites of the Joods Historisch Museum Amsterdam (www.jhm.nl/personen.aspx?naam=Breslauer,%20Rudolf %20Werner) and of the Aktion Reinhard Camps (www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/ dutchcamps.html (see also below)). ‘[SS-Obersturmführer Gemmeker was] the third and last commandant of Westerbork, responsible for the composition of the list of names for the weekly transport. The exact number to be included for each transport was passed on to him by a sub-division of the Sicherheitspolizei in the Hague. Gemmeker would call a meeting of the Jewish camp elders, instructing them to compose the list of names and finalize the transports, which two days later, mostly on a Tuesday, would leave for Eastern Europe. After the names of the people were selected, the transport list was made up. The day before the dreaded departure rumors would fly in the barracks. Fear intensified, and usually panic followed. The night before departure the barrack elders would call off the names of the unfortunate ones in alphabetical order’, www.cympm.com/agemmeker.html (accessed 12 April 2009). nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Breslauer (accessed 12 April 2009). ‘Qu’elles aient été voulues (et parfois mises en scènes) ou simplement autorisées, les séries de Westerbork et d’Auschwitz offrent ainsi la seule part visible du réel, enregistrée à l’initiative des bourreaux. Et c’est contre eux qu’elles se retournent in fine par la violence dissimulée de l’événement, par le rapport qu’elles entretiennent avec leur contexte et leur hors-champ. … Resnais pratiqua une découpe et un insert dans les séquences de Westerbork en y intégrant deux plans, d’origine polonaise, d’un vieil homme avançant lentement sur un quai, en compagnie de trois petits enfants. Par ce geste, le réalisateur inquiète la fausse tranquillité des scènes de Westerbork au sein desquelles il introduit

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un élément étranger, trouvé au Studio des films documentaires de Varsovie.’ Sylvie Lindeperg, Nuit et Brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), p. 62. 22 When analysing the moving image, not only can we track movement; time, too, leaves an indexical trail, which can be synchronized, as is commonly the case with surveillance tapes, when tracking suspects after an offence, for instance, after the London bombings in July 2005. 23 Aad Wagenaar, Settela: het meisje heft haar naam terug (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1995), p. 5. 24 On Dorothea Lange’s photographs, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007). For a summary of the history of (and controversy around) the ‘Migrant Mother’ photos, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Florence_Owens_Thompson.

Chapter 3: The Two Stages of the Eichmann Trial 1 We conducted research in New York and Rochester in October 2006 and June 2007. Our research was made possible by a grant from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and, in the case of Sylvie Lindeperg, by a research leave granted by the scientific board of Université Paris III. We are grateful to these two institutions. Many thanks also to Tom Hurwitz. 2 The expression is Annette Wieviorka’s in The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Cornell University Press, 2006). 3 This question is broached in Rony Brauman and Eyal Sivan, Éloge de la désobéissance (In Praise of Disobedience, a book based on their film The Specialist: Portrait of a Modern Criminal) (Paris: Éditions Le Pommier, 1999); Christian Delage, La Vérité par l’image, de Nuremberg au procès Milosevic (Paris: Denoël, 2006); Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment, Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2001) and Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches. Televising the Holocaust (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The last mentioned also studies how these images were broadcast and how they were received in the United States. 4 A note from the company’s marketing department dated 11 January 1961, now held in the Fruchtman dossier in the Israel State Archives, made it clear that publicity should be shunned: It is certainly in the interest of Ampex to make it known that Ampex recorders are being used in this coverage, since it will be another in a long series of exclusive utilizations of Ampex recorders in special events coverage … It is then the utilization of these recorders that Ampex will want to publicize: in the same manner that utilization was publicized in the Winter and Summer Olympics and the Democratic and Republican Conventions. It is, however, very important that in publicizing the utilization of these recorders extreme care be taken not to involve Ampex in the subject matter of the trials; that the utilization be publicized exclusive of the nature of the event insofar as possible … Because of the incredible nature of the trial, publicity that is in the least bit crassly commercial, i.e., “Ampex, the official recorder of the Eichmann Trial” … would offend a large segment of the public … Although it seems inconceivable that anyone is on Eichmann’s side, a certain segment of the German population is … of the opinion that his acts were committed as a state official acting under orders … There are those who might find nothing in Nazi Germany or Eichmann that affects them one way or the other, but have a violent dislike towards Israel as a state. The United Arab Republic, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have an active boycott

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6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES of firms that either establish a plant in Israel or act in a manner that gives aid and comfort to Israel. This boycott has been put into force towards over 20 U.S. and other firms … These countries, which are large purchasers of Ampex Professional Audio equipment and potential video customers, would certainly react offensively towards publicity along the line of “Ampex recorders help the nation of Israel show the crimes against the Jewish people by Adolph Eichmann.”’ This information can be found in a text of Fruchtman’s ‘Address to US National Association of Broadcasters’, February 1963, Fruchtman collection, Eichmann Trial TV coverage, preparations and general, Israel State Archives. Our thanks to Florence Heyman (CRFJ), who carried out the research for us in the State Archives, where a vast collection on the Eichmann trial is preserved. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 326. Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, trans. Ora Cummings with David Heman (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), pp. 30–46. For example: Le Dossier Eichmann et la solution finale de la question juive (Paris: CDJC, 1960); Lev Gourevitch, Agents secrets contre Eichmann (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), with Stephane Richey; Victor Alexandrov, Six millions de morts. La vie d’Adolf Eichmann (Paris: Plon, 1960); François Montfort, Adolf Eichmann, levez-vous! (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1961); Moshe Pearlman, The Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963); R.L. Braham, The Eichmann Case: a Source Book (New York: World Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1969); J. Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (New York: Macmillan, 1965); Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Record: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann for His Crimes Against the Jewish People and Against Humanity (New York: Knopf, 1963); Peter Papadatos, The Eichmann Trial (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964). Engineer of Death: The Eichmann Story (dir. Paul Bogart, USA, 1960); Memo to Eichmann (dir. Bernard Euslin, USA, 1961); Operation Eichmann (dir. Robert G. Springsteen, 1961). On these questions, see Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: the Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). They were Charles Anderson, Ray Dolby, Charles Ginsburg, Shelby Henderson, Alex Maxey and Fred Pfost. This information comes from the internet site www.ampex.com. Our thanks also to Jean-Michel Briard (INA). The debate was broadcast by the three major American television networks on 25 July 1959. A newsreel covering highlights of the debate is available on YouTube Wikiquote. A condensed version (in print) is available on TeachingAmericanHistory.org, and a more complete version from Turner Learning, a division of CNN. This at least is what he recalls in ‘Address to US National Association of Broadcasters’, text quoted. Ben-Gurion, in a letter published in Le Monde, 28 May 1960. In this text we do not consider these crucial aspects of the trial, regarding which we refer the reader to Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann and Annette Wieviorka, Le Procès Eichmann (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1989). In addition to the legal columnist of Le Monde, Jean-Marc Theolleyre, the French sent Frédéric Pottecher, Roger Vaillant, Joseph Kessel and others. Letter of 20 December 1960, quoted in Amos Elon’s introduction to Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. xi. Unlike the transcripts of the Nuremberg trial, they were not immediately published. In due time the English transcripts were made available by Microcard Edition, Washington,

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25 26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33

34 35

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DC, in 65 microcards. They were published in nine volumes by Rubin Mass Ltd, Jerusalem, and are available on line on the Nizkor Projet (www.nizkor.org). The Israel State Archive. The operation did not show any profit and the question of why Capital Cities became involved remains cloudy. Its directors may have thought that such an operation would generate tremendous publicity for their company, which was much less well-known than the major networks. The prohibition against filming in the US and France alike is the result of turmoil caused by cameras and movie cameras at the trials of Lindbergh (1934) and Dominici (1954). Antoine Garapon, ‘Mise en images de la justice: À défis nouveaux, garanties nouvelles’, Images documentaires 54; ‘Images de la Justice’ (2nd quarter 2005), p. 82. After Hurwitz died, his heirs gave all his archives to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. For this document: Hurwitz Archives, Rochester, carton C040. See Richard M. Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992). Heart of Spain (dir. Herbert Kline, 1937); People of the Cumberland (dir. collectively by Elia Kazan, Ralph Steiner, Erskine Caldwell, Alex North, Earl Robinson, Sidney Meyers, Jay Leda and Helen Van Dongen, 1937); China Strikes Back (dir. Harry Dunham, 1937); Native Land (dir. Leo Hurwitz, Paul Strand, narrator Paul Robeson, 1938–42). Many thanks to Peter von Bach, who obtained copies of these films for us. Letter of 3 June 1944 from Leo Hurwitz to Georges Wilner, Rochester Archives, George Eastman House, Motion Picture Study Collection, carton C045. Interview of Leo Hurwitz by Barbara Hogneson, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, no. 6, 22 January 1981, p 281. Videotaped interview of Leo Hurwitz by Susan Slyomovics, April 1986. We watched the long version of this document at the Jewish Museum of New York, which houses the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting (NJAB) and we express our gratitude to Andrew Ingal. The short version of the interview was provided to us by Susan Slyomovics, whom we also thank. Note, however, that on the narrow path he chose, Hurwitz encountered difficulties throughout his professional career. During World War II he had tried to join the Office of War Information team and he experienced disappointments in particular on the project of a film entitled Bridge of Men, which was abandoned in 1943 despite its advanced state of preparation. Hurwitz Archives, Rochester, carton C045. Interview of Leo Hurwitz by Barbara Hogneson, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, no. 6, 22 January 1981, p 281. Videotaped interview of Leo Hurwitz by Susan Slyomovics, April 1986 In addition to the Capital Cities crew there were Marconi engineers from England, Ampex technicians from the US and five Israeli projectionists (see below). His very first experience probably goes back to 1932, when, at the request of the Communist party, together with Leo Seltzer he filmed the hunger march from Boston to Washington. The two men filmed in 35 mm, experimenting under difficult conditions with a hand-held camera, taking turns using each other’s back or chest (interview of Leo Hurwitz by Barbara Hogneson, 3 June 1981, no. 1, Oral History Columbia University) On this occasion Hurwitz also filmed the Scottsboro court where the first trial had taken place in March 1931 (interview with Tom Hurwitz, New York, October 2006). According to a typed note entitled ‘Videotaping the Eichmann Trial’, dated 11 April without mention of the year, in all likelihood written shortly after the end of the trial (Hurwitz Archives, Rochester, carton C040).

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36 Hurwitz Archives, Rochester, ‘Videotaping the Eichmann Trial’, dated 11 April, carton C040. 37 The same one Hannah Arendt was to move into several weeks later. 38 Hurwitz Archives, Rochester, ‘Videotaping the Eichmann Trial’ dated 11 April, carton C040. 39 Letter from Leo Hurwitz to Jane Hurwitz, 5 March 1961, Hurwitz Archives, Rochester. 40 The crew of projectionists included Fred Csasznik, Jakub Jonilowicz, Rolf Kneller and Emil Knebel. A fifth projectionist, Jacob Kalach, is also credited, probably as a substitute cameraman (his name is not mentioned in those of Hurwitz’s working notes we had access to). In his work notebooks Hurwitz mentions that Jonilowicz had been deported. 41 Roy Sharp for sound and Ron Huntsman for image. 42 Copy of Leo Hurwitz’s letter to Commander Koppel, 6 April 1961, Hurwitz Archives, Rochester, carton C043. 43 Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Corps à corps dans le bureau du juge’, Images documentaires, p. 20. 44 Comolli: ‘Corps à corps dans le bureau du juge’, p. 20. 45 Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 292. 46 Agnès Tricoire, ‘À propos des procès filmés’, interview in Images documentaires, op.cit., p. 50. 47 Hurwitz’s notebooks, Rochester Archives, C043. 48 Document entitled ‘Schedule for opening of trial 11.4.61’, Rochester, Hurwitz Archives, carton C043. 49 Point 11 of the memo of 9 April, entitled ‘Eichmann’s entrance’. 50 Not counting the later hearings pertaining to the sentence. 51 Comolli, ‘Corps à corps dans le bureau du juge’, p. 20. 52 Garapon, ‘Mise en images de la justice: À défis nouveaux, garanties nouvelles’, p. 82. 53 Comolli, ‘Corps à corps dans le bureau du juge’, p. 20. 54 This quotation is taken from the collection of Joseph Kessel’s reports on the Pétain, Nuremberg and Eichmann trials Jugements derniers: Les procès Pétain, de Nuremberg et Eichmann (Texto, Tallandier, 2007), p. 204. 55 Quoted in Garapon, ‘Mise en images de la justice: À défis nouveaux, garanties nouvelles’ p. 76. 56 Named after the filmmaker Lev Koulechov, who carried out the following experiment: he selected a shot showing the actor Mosjoukine looking out towards the edge of the frame; he placed it next to three other shots in succession: the shot of a bowl of steaming hot soup, the shot of a young girl resting in a coffin, and the shot of a nude woman lying on a couch. On the three identical shots of the actor’s face, spectators thought they could see, in succession, expression of hunger, sorrow and desire. 57 Comolli, ‘Corps à corps dans le bureau du juge’, pp. 54–55. 58 Leo Hurwitz, ‘One Man’s Voyage: Ideas and Films in the 1930s’, Cinema Journal 1 (Fall 1975), p. 4. 59 Rough draft of a letter to Jack Gould, undated, Hurwitz Archives, Rochester. 60 Videotaped interview of Leo Hurwitz by Susan Slyomovics. 61 Videotaped interview of Leo Hurwitz by Susan Slyomovics. 62 Letter to Gould. Here one can assess the difference in ultimate purpose and temporality between this recording and that of the Barbie/Touvier/Papon trials, underscored by the director Philippe Labrune, who was in charge of the Papon trial: ‘at the time I was filming, in 1998, it was out of the question that these images be aired on television. That was not the purpose and so it wasn’t carried out in the conditions of a television programme. These images were supposed to be seen 50 years later. A document for

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65 66

67

68 69 70

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history and that’s all. Therefore I did not try to produce any effect of style or special effect’ (in Images documentaires, p. 70, our emphasis). The film archives of the Eichmann trail can be seen in the following places: National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting, Jewish Museum, New York; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC; Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archives, Jerusalem. Most of these videos may now be viewed on YouTube. Referring to this event 20 years later, the filmmaker emphasized the confrontation between the witnesses and the accused several times: ‘They were all face to face with Eichmann … It was quite an extraordinary thing of these people who I was told were “soap” – facing the person who had symbolized their victimization, and talking through him to people who would listen with this extraordinary passion and clarity’ (Columbia interview). Session 55, 30 May 1961. The filmed documents we viewed are the ones in the Steven Spielberg Archives in Jerusalem. One can in fact advance the hypothesis that Eichmann’s twitch and his compulsive writing may have been over-represented in the videotapes of the trial, the producer having had a tendency to choose camera two at the least sign of physical expression shown by the defendant. This frustration sometimes caused the members of the crew to fantasize about Eichmann’s reactions. In his memoirs, the assistant Alan Rosenthal tells that he was in the control room during the session of 8 June 1961, when the film of the images of the Nazi period and the liberation of the camps was screened; when the shot of the bulldozer in Bergen-Belsen came on the screen, Rosenthal thought he saw the Nazi’s ‘monstrous laugh’. The recording showed him later that it was just Eichmann’s twitch. (Alan Rosenthal, in Jerusalem, Take One! Memoirs of a Jewish Filmmaker (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).) For the analysis of the filming of this screening session, see Sylvie Lindeperg, Nuit et Brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007). In the documents dating from 1961 as well as in later interviews, the producer expressed his conviction that Eichmann knowingly composed a mask for himself and that his full attention was focused by the desire to prevent the least movement of spontaneous expression. Comolli, ‘Corps à corps dans le bureau du juge’, p. 46. Note on the division of tasks assigned to each of the major networks and on expenses; Israel State Archives. Such as Joel Brand. At the National Jewish Archives of Broadcasting in New York, we viewed the WABC programme of 7 July 1961 and the NBC programme of 23 April 1961, which are also analysed by Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches, pp. 100–4, as well as certain Norddeutscher Rundfunk programmes that Ronny Löwy obtained for us and for which we are grateful. See Shandler, While America Watches.

Chapter 4: Running the Film against the Reel 1 Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro: the Marlboro Press, 1992), p. 5 2 Jean Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, Jean Cayrol, Oeuvre lazaréenne (Paris: Seuil, 2007), p. 816. All the translations from the French are my own unless otherwise stated. 3 Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, p. 801.

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4 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema2, the Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 2005), p. 22. 5 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 192. 6 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 475. 7 Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, p. 803. 8 Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, p. 816. 9 David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946), p. 181. 10 René Prédal, Alain Resnais (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1996), p. 104. All translations from the French are my own unless otherwise stated. 11 Jean-Luc Alpigiano, ‘Un film “lazaréen” La Jetée, Chris Marker (1962)’, Cinémathèque 12 (1997), pp. 44–52, p. 46. 12 Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, p. 818. 13 Alyssa O’Brien, ‘Manipulating Visual Pleasure in Muriel’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17 (2000), pp. 49–61, p. 49. 14 Jean Cayrol, Muriel, scénario et dialogues (Paris: Seuil, 1963), p. 115. All translations from the French are my own unless otherwise stated. 15 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 6. 16 Jean-Luc Alpigiano, ‘Un film “lazaréen”’, p. 46. 17 Cayrol, Muriel, p. 55. 18 Cayrol, Muriel, p. 61. 19 Celia Britton, ‘Broken Images in Resnais’s Muriel’, French Cultural Studies 1 (1990), pp. 37– 46, p. 40. 20 René Prédal: Alain Resnais, p. 106. 21 Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, p. 821. 22 Cayrol, Muriel, p.73. 23 O’Brien, ‘Manipulating Visual Pleasure’, p. 51. 24 O’Brien, ‘Manipulating Visual Pleasure’, p. 50. 25 As I will demonstrate, Barthes develops this argument, in part at least, in La Chambre claire. Bellour develops his idea of a ‘spectateur pressé’ in an essay entitled ‘Le Spectateur pensif ’. 26 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 55. 27 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 81. 28 Britton, ‘Broken Images’, p. 37. 29 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 235. 30 Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-Images, p. 76. All translations from the French are my own unless otherwise stated. 31 Cayrol, Muriel, p. 63. 32 This can in fact be confirmed through the writing in the notebook itself. 33 Daniel Oster, Jean Cayrol et son Œuvre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), p. 37. 34 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p. 13. 35 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 3. 36 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema1, the Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 5. 37 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 5. 38 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), pp. 240–57, p. 245. 39 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 5.

NOTES 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

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Raymond Bellour: L’Entre-Images, p. 119. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p. 191. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p. 184. Prédal, Alain Resnais, p. 103. Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, p. 810. Cayrol, Muriel, p. 115. Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, p. 813. Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, p. 816 Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, p. 817. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 55. Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 41–62, p. 44. Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning’, p. 58. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 475. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p. 194. Jean Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, p. 816. Cayrol, Muriel, p. 89 Cayrol, Muriel, p. 90. O’Brien, ‘Manipulating Visual Pleasure’, p. 59. Alyssa O’Brien notes one other such possible collision; ‘the three shots of the phallic Moorish tower coincide with the moment in Bernard’s narration when the soldiers strip Muriel of her clothes and presumably begin to sexually assault her’, ‘Manipulating Visual Pleasure’, p. 54.

Chapter 5: Symbol Re-formation 1 Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 168. 2 Delbo was a member of the French resistance who was arrested by the police in Paris in 1942. She was deported to Auschwitz as a political prisoner in January 1943. Delbo was then transferred to Ravensbrück in January 1944 where she was to remain until near the end of the war. 3 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 168. 4 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 70. 5 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p.70 6 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 145. 7 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 70. 8 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 71. 9 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 71. 10 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 31. 11 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 49. Emphases in the original. 12 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 142. 13 Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams, Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz (forthcoming 2014). 14 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 72. 15 Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory, trans. Rosette Lamont (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 3. 16 Delbo, Days and Memory, p. 3

256 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 75. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 239. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 239. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 71. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 255. Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (London: Tavistock /Routledge, 1991), p. 38. The depressive position refers to a period of psychic life starting at around three months old when rather than splitting experiences into good or bad part objects, as occurs in the paranoid-schizoid position, the infant begins to integrate these experiences into a whole object with good or bad aspects. For a discussion of both positions see Julia Segal, Melanie Klein ((London: Sage, 1992), pp. 33–44. Hanna Segal, ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’, in Segal, The Work of Hanna Segal, Delusion and Artistic Creativity and other Psychoanalytic Essays (London: Free Association Books, 1986), pp. 49–65; p. 57. Segal, ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’, p. 49. Segal, ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’, p. 50. Emphases in the original. J. Allan Hobson, The Dreaming Brain (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 245. Delbo’s dream of the sensations that accompany eating a segment of orange occurs in Auschwitz and After, p. 75. It is noteworthy that the dream privileges proximate senses thereby demonstrating how the horrific conditions of the camps led to highly unusual mental functioning. Melanie Klein refers to both the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ and ‘depressive’ as positions rather than stages to emphasise that the subject never grows out of them but rather occupies one or the other throughout psychic life. See Julia Segal, Melanie Klein, p. 33. See Hanna Segal, ‘Melanie Klein’s Technique’, in The Work of Hanna Segal (London: Free Association Books, 1986), pp. 3–24; p. 11. Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (London: William Heinemann, 1964), p. 12. Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, p. 12. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 252. Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, p. 12. W.R. Bion, ‘A Theory of Thinking’, in Bion, Second Thoughts (London: Maresfield Library, 1984), p. 112. Bion, ‘A Theory of Thinking’, p. 111. Bion, ‘A Theory of Thinking’, p. 112. Hanna Segal, ‘Phantasy and other Mental Processes’, in The Work of Hanna Segal, pp. 41– 48; p. 42. Segal, ‘Phantasy and other Mental Processes’, p. 42 In this context an idea is not a thought but a zone of sensation felt to be either good or bad. Objects that are phantasized as loci of frustration or satisfaction, zones of pain or pleasure, are ideas in this sense. Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, p. 22. Segal, ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’, p. 52. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro: The Marlboro Press, 1992), p. 114. Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, p. 23. Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, pp. 17–18

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46 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, trans. Ilse Lasch (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 40. 47 Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, p. 12. 48 Hanna Segal, ‘Reflections on Truth, Tradition, and the Psychoanalytic Tradition of Truth’, in Segal, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 69–78; p. 73. 49 Segal, ‘Klein’, in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, pp. 178–88; p. 183. 50 Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 70. 51 Sofsky, The Order of Terror, p. 70. 52 Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 30. 53 Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 4. 54 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 142. 55 Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art, p. 48. 56 Hanna Segal, ‘Projective Identification’, in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, pp. 124–29; p. 127. 57 I have previously endeavoured to analyse this bridging through Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. See my chapter on Delbo in Auschwitz and Afterimages (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011), pp. 93–117. 58 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 75. 59 The therapeutic motivation for Delbo’s writing is neglected in some recent analyses of her oeuvre such as, for example, Elizabeth Scheiber’s ‘Car cela devient une histoire: Representation of the Holocaust in the Imaginative and Collective Memoirs of Charlotte Delbo’, in Aukje Kluge and Been E. Williams (eds), Re-Examining the Holocaust through Literature (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2009), pp. 3–28. 60 Nicole Thatcher, A Literary Analysis of Charlotte Delbo’s Concentration Camp Re-Presentation (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). The insights Delbo’s particular literary style affords into the experience of the camps is also examined at length in Lea Fridman Hamaoui, ‘Art and Testimony: The Representation of Historical Horror in Literary Works by Piotr Rawicz and Charlotte Delbo’, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 3/2 (1991), pp. 243–59. 61 Chare: Auschwitz and Afterimages, p. 69. 62 Celan was actually interned in a series of horrendous forced labour camps rather than a concentration camp during the war. 63 Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 144–45.

Chapter 6: A New Visual Structure for the Unthinkable 1 Roland Penrose was a British artist, a collector and promoter of modern art closely associated with the Surrealist movement. In 1947 he co-founded with Herbert Read, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. 2 See Letter from David Scherman to Antony Penrose, dated 23 September 1993, cited by Katharina Menzel-Ahr, Lee Miller, Kriegskorrespondentin für Vogue: Fotografien aus Deutschland 1945 (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2005), p. 156. 3 In 1944 and in the first months of 1945, the Nazi concentration camps were liberated by the different Allied troops. For example, Majdanek (24 July 1944), Auschwitz (27 January 1945), Gross-Rosen (13 February 1945), Sachsenhausen (22 April 1945) and Ravensbrück (29 April 1945) by Soviet forces, Ohrdruf (4 April 1945), Buchenwald (11 April 1945) Dachau (29 April 1945) and Mauthausen (6 May 1945) by the American forces and Bergen-

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19

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES Belsen (15 April 1945) by British forces. Therefore, their press coverage depended greatly on the nationality of the liberating forces. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1990), p. 19. See Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), pp. 10–3. Menzel-Ahr, Lee Miller, p. 159. Lee Miller, cited by Antony Penrose, Lee Miller’s War: Photographer and Correspondent with the Allies in Europe, 1944-45 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), p. 189. Lee Miller, cited in Penrose: Lee Miller’s War, p. 189. Letter from David Scherman to Antony Penrose, dated 23 September 1993, cited in Menzel-Ahr, Lee Miller, p. 156. Margaret Bourke-White, cited by Susan Moeller, Shooting War (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 209. Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), pp. 259–60. Oven from the Crematorium, Buchenwald, mid-April 1945, LMA 54–32. See www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/ [accessed 10 June 2011]. Captions from Dachau, p. 1, Lee Miller’s Archives, cited in Menzel-Ahr, Lee Miller, pp. 160–1. Letter to Audrey Withers, kept at the Lee Miller’s Archives, cited in Menzel-Ahr, Lee Miller, p. 156 (the emphasis is Miller’s). Mathausen, Identification Services, Dead Kapo Trapped in Barbed Wire Fence, Spring 1942. Emaciated Male Prisoners behind Barbed Wire Fence at Buchenwald Concentration Camp, April 1945. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press: 1998), pp. 108–18: ‘Placement: The decision of where to place evidence of atrocity in a photo created a layering between the atrocity photos’ foreground and background. Witnesses and bodies were depicted in many of the images, and one was used in the context of the other. Number: A second practice of composition had to do with the numbers of people who were depicted in atrocity photos. The photos oscillated between pictures of the many and pictures of the few. Pictures of the many portrayed mass graves … pictures of the few portrayed single individual bodies frozen in particularly horrific poses … On the whole, the press presented collective images of atrocity more frequently than it did those of individuals … Groups images tended to be less graphic than those of individuals … Images of other kinds of groups – survivors, German civilians, German perpetrators, and official witnesses – also proliferated, each displayed with repeated visual characteristics. Groups of witnesses were always portrayed at one side of the frame, looking sideways at corpses that were either inside or outside the field of the camera … Thus, in each case framing the depiction as an act of collective, not individual contemplation reflected a need to collectively address and understand the atrocities. Gaze: Yet a third compositional practice had to do with the gaze of those being depicted. The gaze of emaciated, near-dead survivors, whose eyes seemed not to comprehend the target of vision, tended to be frontal and appeared to signify frankness … Other photos portrayed the unseeing eyes of the dead … In composition, then, the published photos depicted a level of horror that went beyond one specific instance of brutality so as to present it as a representative incident.’ Jon M. Bridgman, The End of the Holocaust: the Liberation of the Camps (Portland: Areopagitica Press, 1990), p. 62. In his book Convoi de la mort: Buchenwald-Dachau (7–28 April 1945). In

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Notre devoir de mémoire (Pau-Brezano: Editions Héraclès, 1999), François Bertrand gives another estimate of 5,080 occupiers, of whom only 816 survived. Menzel-Ahr, Lee Miller, p. 185. Menzel-Ahr, Lee Miller, p. 186. Published in American Vogue, June 1945, with the following caption: Punishment: SS guards who tortured prisoners beg mercy on their knees, are beaten by ex-prisoners, Buchenwald, Germany, 1945, LMA 54–20. Defiant SS prison guard in cell, Buchenwald, Germany, 1945, LMA 54–20. Lee Miller, cited in Penrose: Lee Miller’s War, p. 165. Lee Miller, cited in Penrose: Lee Miller’s War, p. 165. Concentration Camp Dachau, ‘Buchenwald Train’, 30th April 1945, LMA 76–85. Dead ‘Wachpersonal’, Concentration Camp Dachau, 30th April 1945, LMA 76–83. LMA 76–80. Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 261. Clément Chéroux, Représenter l’horreur, Art Press, hors série, May 2001, 35. ‘Dans l’histoire des représentations, les images des camps nazis marquent, en effet, le franchissement d’un certain nombre de seuils, au sens où ce terme définit à la fois le lieu d’un passage et la position la plus basse de ce passage … La découverte des camps correspond en somme au premier enregistrement photographique de la mort de masse, à l’invention tragique d’une véritable “photogénie” du charnier.’ Photogénie is a term introduced into film and photography history by Jean Epstein to describe the transformative power of the photographic or cinematic image. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, p. 132. Clément Chéroux, ‘Du bon usage des images’, in Clément Chéroux (ed.), Mémoire des Camps: Photographies des Camps de Concentration et d’Extermination Nazis (1933–1999) (Paris: Mazal, 2001), pp. 18–9. Chéroux, ‘Du bon usage des images’, pp. 18–9. Edna Woolman Chase, Always in Vogue (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1954), p. 310. Audrey Whiters, cited in Burke: Lee Miller, p. 265. Woolman Chase, Always in Vogue, p. 354. ‘SURREALISME, n. m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale.’ André Breton, ‘Manifeste Surréaliste (1924)’, in André Breton, Manifestes Surréalistes (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962), p. 40. Translation: André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans, Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 26. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Photographie et Surréalisme’, in Rosalind Krauss, Le Photographique: Pour une Théorie des Écarts (Paris: Macula, 1990), p. 106. Erich Schwab, Dead Prisoner in a carriage, Dachau, April 1945. ‘Le mot “convulsive”, que j’ai employé pour qualifier la beauté qui seule, selon moi, doive être servie, perdrait à mes yeux tout sens s’il était conçu dans le mouvement et non à l’expiration exacte de ce mouvement même. Il ne peut, selon moi, y avoir beauté – beauté convulsive – qu’au prix de l’affirmation du rapport réciproque qui lie l’objet considéré dans son mouvement et dans son repos.’ André Breton, ‘La Beauté Convulsive’, in L’Amour fou (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), p. 15. Translation: André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 10. ‘Une telle beauté ne pourra se dégager que du sentiment poignant de la chose révélée, que de la certitude intégrale procurée par l’irruption d’une solution toujours excédente, d’une

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49 50

51

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CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES solution certes rigoureusement adaptée et pourtant très supérieure au besoin.’ André Breton: ‘La Beauté Convulsive’, 21. Translation: André Breton: Mad Love, p. 13. This photograph was taken in the Town Hall of Leipzig earlier that same month, where the major, his family and closest collaborators committed suicide by poison. One of the dead was the major’s daughter, lying on a sofa. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000), pp. 23 and 25. Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 149–50. James T. Chiampi, ‘Testifying to his Text: Primo Levi and the Concentrationary Sublime’, Romanic Review 92/4 (November 2001), p. 492. Chiampi, ‘Testifying to his Text’, p. 492. Primo Levi, If this is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Penguin Books, 1996), pp. 32– 33. ‘Des peuples rencontrés de tous les peuples, de toutes les convictions, lorsque vents et neige claquaient sur les épaules, glaçaient les ventres aux rythmes militaires, stridents comme un blasphème cassé et moqueur, sous les phares aveugles, sur la Grand-Place des nuits gelées de Buchenwald; des hommes sans convictions, hâves et violents; des hommes porteurs de croyances détruites, de dignités défaites; tout un peuple nu, intérieurement nu, dévêtu de toute culture, de toute civilisation, armé de pelles et de pioches, de pics et de marteaux, enchaîné aux Loren rouillés, perceur de sel, déblayeur de neige, faiseur de béton; un peuple mordu de coups, obsédé des paradis de nourriture oubliées; morsure intime des déchéances – tout ce peuple le long du temps.’ David Rousset, L’Univers Concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions du Pavois, 1946), pp. 12–13. English translation is to be found in The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), pp. 28–9. Chéroux, Représenter l’horreur, p. 35. Unearthed in 1506 near the site of the Emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome, the socalled Laocoön Group is a monumental marble sculpture, dated between 160 and 20 BC and kept at the Vatican Museums. The group represents the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons’ punishment, being entangled by two snakes sent by Athena after having warned his fellow Trojans about the ruse of the Trojan Horse. Since its rediscovery the Laocoön group has undergone numerous interpretations, particularly on the expression of pain by art historians (Johann Joachim Winkelmann, William Blake, …) and philosophers (Friedrich Schiller, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, …) alike. ‘Kant asserted in the sublime the sovereignty of reason. Both Schiller and Kant asserted the autonomy of moral nature over sensual pleasure. Taking the example of the Laocoön, Schiller delivers a precise account of the pathetically sublime, which infers resistance. The freely suffering of the priest provides sensual pleasure to the spectator, which calls in question the positioning of Holocaust-Memory in terms of Sublime.’ Zachary Braiterman, ‘Against Holocaust-Sublime: Naïve Reference and the Generation of Memory’, History and Memory 12/4 (Fall 2000), consulted online on http//:lion.chadwyck. co.uk [accessed 13 February 2009]. Braiterman, ‘Against Holocaust Sublime’, p. 11. ‘Les hommes normaux ne savent pas que tout est possible. Même si les témoignages forcent leur intelligence à admettre, leurs muscles ne croient pas.’ Rousset, L’Univers Concentrationnaire, p. 181. English translation in David Rousset, The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), p. 168.

NOTES Chapter 7: Muselmann

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1 Tadeusz Borowski, This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentleman, trans. B. Vedder, J. Kott (London: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 119. 2 The term ‘art of internment’ is used here to describe the work of visual artists interned in the Second World War forced labour, concentration and extermination camps. 3 So haunted was Music by the memory of human corpses piled on the bare ground that he returned to them after a 25-year hiatus, in the suite of paintings, drawings and prints Nous ne sommes pas le derniers (‘We Are Not The Last’). 4 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Terror and Dream: Methodological Remarks on the Experience of Time during the Third Reich’, in Future Past, On the Semantics of Time, trans. K. Tribe (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1985), p. 224. 5 In the Lager, cameras were used for a variety of purposes. The so-called Auschwitz Album documents the arrival in summer 1944 of half a million Jews from Hungary and Carpathian-Ruthenia to Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and the notorious selektions that followed. Unbeknown to their Nazi tormentors, Mendel Grossman and George Kadish (Zvi Hirsch Kadushin) photographed life in the Lodz and Kovno ghettos during the Occupation. The Spanish Republican, Francisco Boix, kept a clandestine record of the photographic negatives made by the Nazi SS at Mauthausen, thus ensuring an extant record of atrocities there. 6 For a generalized account of the art of internment see, S. Milton and J. Blatter (eds), Art Of The Holocaust (New York: Orbis, 1981); M. Novitch, L. Dawidowicz and T. Freudenheim, Spiritual Resistance, Art from Concentration Camps, 1940–45 (Western Galilee: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot and New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981); Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (Oxford: Pergamon, 1993); Glenn Sujo, Artists Witness the Shoah, Camp Drawings from the Collections of Lohamei Haghetaot and Yad Vashem (Sheffield: Graves Art Gallery, 1995); Glenn Sujo, Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory (London: Imperial War Museum and Philip Wilson Publishers, 2001); D. Mickenberg, C. Granoff and P. Hayes, Last Expressions: Art from Auschwitz (Chicago: Northwestern University, Block Museum of Art, 2002). 7 This discussion builds on some of the themes explored in Chapter II, ‘Internment and After’ in Glenn Sujo, Yehuda Bacon, Disseminating Memory: Lines Across an Abyss, University of London: Courtauld Institute of Art (PhD Thesis, vols I, II, III), 2009; in preparation for publication. 8 By the end of that year he had anglicized the family name from Bakon to Bacon (pron. Back-on). 9 Primo Levi, If This Is A Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 15; Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi editore, 1958), 2nd edition; originally published in 1947. 10 Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn, ‘Knowing and Not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory’, The International Journal of Psycho-analysis 74/2 (1993), p. 288; Hayden White, ‘The value of narrativity in the representation of reality’, Critical Enquiry 7 (1980), pp. 5–27. 11 Henri Christiaan Pieck (1895–1972) was arrested on 9 June 1941 for resistance activities and spent the latter years of the war in captivity, first at the Oranjehotel, a detention centre for Dutch POWs, then at Buchenwald. In recognition of their sustained power of address, Pieck proceeded to turn his drawings into colour lithographs. For a discussion of his drawings see Sujo, Yehuda Bacon, I, pp. 33–34. For a detailed discussion of Hellmut Bachrach-Barée (1898–1964) see Glenn Sujo, ‘The Drawings of Hellmut Bachrach-Barée:

262

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES Chronology of a Death March’, in Mickenberg, Granoff and Hayes, Last Expressions, pp. 50–57. Lengthy enquiry has yielded only spare details of Hellmut Bachrach-Barée’s circumstances during World War II. Yet, one factor is undeniable: his account of events is neither dispassionate nor neutral. After the war, he retired to life on a remote farm. He died in Munich. Few Sonderkommando members survived, even if their written accounts, known as the ‘Scrolls of Auschwitz’ (interred for safety in the ground between Crematoria II and III), would eventually come to light. See forthcoming study Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams, The Scrolls of Auschwitz (2013). The few youthful works produced in Ghetto Terezín are now lost. Bacon’s earliest extant works may date to as early as June 1945. Israel Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 1992, vol. 3, pp. 1247. Yehuda Bacon, ‘First Draft of a Deposition to the Jewish Community in Prague’, in Sujo, Yehuda Bacon, II, pp. 38–39, 120. A more complete draft was presented to Dokumentační Akcie on or after 5 November 1945. A rare family photograph taken in Mährisch-Ostrau in the summer 1932 shows Yehuda on his third birthday, surrounded by 17 other members of the Bacon family. Of these, only his sister Rivka (also known as ‘Rella’), Isaac Bakon, later Dean of Yeshiva University, New York, and Shlomo Backon, later Cantor of the Adath Yeshurun Synagogue in Yeoville, South Africa, survived. I have mostly employed the Hebrew Biblical term Shoah, when referring to the genocidal killing of six million Jews in Europe during the Second World War, lacking the specific etymological connotations of the word Holocaust for ‘a burnt offering’. Levi, If This Is A Man, p. 96. Published in 1947, a wider readership awaited its second publication in 1958, in a renewed wave of interest coinciding with the publication of texts by Elie Wiesel, André Scwhartz-Bart and Piotr Rawicz. Bacon’s internment lasted 32 months, from September 1942 until May 1945. Imre Kertész, Fatelessness [1975], trans. Tim Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 181. Anton Gill, The Journey Back from Hell, Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors (London: Grafton Books, 1988), p. 445 (my emphasis). Yehuda Bacon, A Jerusalem Chronicle, 14 June 1948 (unpublished manuscript) in Sujo, Yehuda Bacon, II, pp. 44–49. Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Muselmann’ (Chapter 2), in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), pp. 41–86 (63). Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplation of a Survivor of Auschwitz and its Realities [1966], trans. Sydney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 9. Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. W. Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 294; Aldo Carpi, Diario di Gusen (Turin: Einaudi editore, 1993), p. 17; in Agamben, ‘The Muselmann’, pp. 41, 54. Zdzislaw Ryn and Stanslaw Klodzinski, An der Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod. Ein Studie über die Erscheinung des ‘Muselmanns’ im Konzentrationslager, Auschwitz-Hefte, vol. 1 (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1987), in Agamben, ‘The Muselmann’, p. 43. Agamben, ‘The Muselmann’, p. 45 (my emphasis). Israeli author Oz Almog remarks on another, unexpected dimension to the double-identity of the Muselmann, writing that: ‘The

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tendency to look down on the “bowed heads” and “bent backs” of Holocaust [survivors in Israeli society further] dulled the sensitivity to the suffering of the Palestinian refugees.’ Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, trans. Haim Watzman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 206. Levi, If This Is A Man, p. 32. For a discussion of ‘The image of atrocity is never innocent’, see ‘Preface’ in Sujo, Yehuda Bacon, I, p. xvii. The passage from Dante is recalled by Levi in Chapter 11, ‘The Canto of Ulysses’: ‘Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance your mettle was not made; you were made men to follow after knowledge and excellence ….’ It was the moment when Levi understood and embraced the responsibilities of witnessing. Levi, If This Is A Man, pp. 115–21. A lengthy and highly insightful analysis of this passage is found in Carole Angier, Primo Levi, The Double Bond (London: Viking, 2002), pp. 330–4. Arrested for anti-fascist activities in 1944, Aldo Carpi (1886–1973) was interned at Mauthausen and Gusen camp. This experience is recorded in his post-war diary. David Rousset, A World Apart, trans. Y. Moyse and R. Senhouse (London: Secker & Warburg, 1951), pp. 2, 36–40 (L’Univers Concentrationnaire, Paris, 1946). The fact that there were far fewer images of women than of men is another noteworthy aspect of this invisibility. Carpi: Diario di Gusen, p. 33. H.H. Price, Thinking and Experience, 1969; in Richard I Cohen, Jewish Icons, Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life (New York: Viking Books, 1997), pp. 126–27. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor, Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 98. Jakob Steinhardt, Book of Yehoshua Eliezer ben Sirah, foreword by Arnold Zweig (Berlin: Soncino Society, 1929). Perhaps the earliest recorded instance of the golem, the formless, embryonic mass of earth (Hebr., adamah) intimately associated with the creation story, occurs once in the Hebrew Bible, in Psalm 139:16. From this stems a long etymological discussion of the relationship of God, earth and man. See Gershom Scholem’s ‘The Idea of the Golem’, in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), pp. 158–204. The Jewish golem as a physical manifestation of the sealed ghettoes’ collective psyche has been widely, if less reliably, linked to Rabbi Judah Loew Ben Bezalel (1525–1609), a Talmudic scholar and leading rabbi of Prague, known also as the Maharal (Hebr. acronym, Moreinu ha’rav Loew), who popularized Kabbalistic ideas and exerted influence on other Jewish thinkers. (See Alan Unterman, Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Legend (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 86.) A more recent and vivid description is found in Jakob Grimm’s romantic story Journal for Hermits, 1808, for which Grimm drew on Johann Jakob Schudt’s antiSemitic study, Judische Merkwur-digkeiten (Jewish Marvels) (Frankfurt, 1718). Perhaps the best known of all modern incarnations of the legend is Gustav Meyrink’s novel The Golem, 1915. Bacon would doubtless have known this and Paul Wegener’s Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920, a masterpiece of the silent cinema. Halachah (Hebr., law) – the juridical interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and other texts. Bacon resided at a number of different addresses during this tense period. Sujo, Yehuda Bacon, I, 209, fn. 65. He may well have done so with the encouragement of his teachers Mordechai Ardon and Jakob Steinhardt at the New Bezalel School.

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43 The words of an SS officer; in Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us (London: Heinemann, 1967); Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1996), p. 1 (I Sommersi e i salvati (Turin: Einaudi editore, 1986). 44 John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1881–1906 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), pp. 300–1; Tim Hilton, Picasso (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), pp. 39–41. 45 P. Daix and G. Boudaille, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Period (Greenwich, CN: Georges Boudaille, 1967), p. 51; in E.A. Carmean Jr, Picasso: Les Saltimbanques (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1980), p. 27. (exhibition catalogue). Bacon knew Picasso’s Le Repas de l’Aveugle (The Blindman’s Meal), 1903 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), reproduced in Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. I (Paris: Cahiers d’art, 1932), p. 168. 46 Bacon’s wood-engraving attests to an awareness of graphic traditions from Albrecht Dürer to the German Expressionist print revolution. 47 Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies’, New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 26 (1995), p. 537. 48 Primo Levi, The Truce (London: Abacus, 1987), pp. 197–98. 49 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 24. 50 The Auschwitz Prozess was held at Frankfurt-am-Main from 20 December 1963 to 10 August 1965. 51 The role of Malindine and the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) is discussed in Toby Haggith, ‘The Filming of the Liberation of Bergen Belsen and its Impact on the Understanding of the Holocaust’. in S. Bardgett and D. Cesarani (eds), Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives (London and Portland: Imperial War Museum and Valentine Mitchell, 2006), pp. 89–122. 52 Cornelia Brink, ‘Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps’, History and Memory 12/1 (Spring/Summer 2000), pp. 135–50. 53 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), pp. 80–1; Brink: ‘Secular Icons’, p. 140. 54 The six extant monotypes are reproduced in Sujo, Yehuda Bacon, III, 2.801–2.806. Yehuda Bacon in conversation with the author, 21 April 2004. 55 For a discussion of the use of the ‘Bertillon system’ to capture prisoners’ serial profile, face and three-quarter views see Michael Berkowitz, ‘Criminal Photography and the Jews at Auschwitz’, in The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 94. 56 Yehuda Bacon in conversation with the author, 23 April 2004. 57 ‘It was a film I saw almost before I started to paint, and it deeply impressed me – I mean the whole film as well as the Odessa Steps sequence and this shot.’ Francis Bacon in David Sylvester, Interviews, 1962–1979 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 34. 58 The trial was held in Jerusalem’s Beit Ha’am (The People’s House) from 11 April to 14 August 1961. Eichmann was sentenced on 12 December. Bacon gave testimony on 7 June 1961. His copy of the day’s proceedings (Yehuda Bacon Archive) shows two sketches drawn in blue ballpoint of State Prosecutor Gideon Hausner and the defendant wearing earphones. 59 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 37. 60 Angier, Primo Levi, pp. 442–43. 61 Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957); The Human Race (Vermont: The Marlboro Press, 1992). 62 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 54; in Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk; Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Biography (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 6.

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63 Bacon could have consulted Picasso’s works in reproduction. Ziva Amishai Maisels cites Picasso’s Concentration Camp Prisoner, 1955 (Fédération Nationale des Deportés et Internés Résistants et Patriots, Paris) as one possible exemplar though Bacon required no other authority when addressing the subject of the Muselmänner. See Ziva Amishai Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993), p. 109, fig. 278. 64 Bernard Buffet (1928–99) – French painter active during the Occupation. He took part in the first exhibition of the L’Homme témoin group about which, critic Jean Bouret wrote: ‘Painting exists to bear witness and nothing which is human can be foreign to it.’ Bacon spent a year in Paris, from July 1957, becoming acquainted with French Art. Claude Roger-Marx, Cent Tableaux de 1944 à 1958 par Bernard Buffet (Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 1958); in Aftermath: France 1945–54, New Images of Man, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 3 March–13 June 1982, p. 49 (exhibition catalogue). 65 See Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, trans O. Cummings and D. Herman (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), p. 155; Richard I. Cohen, ‘Breaking the Code: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and the Public Polemic: Myth, Memory and Historical Imagination’, in Michael: On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora 13 (Tel Aviv University; Tel Aviv, 1993); Anson Rabinbach, ‘Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy’, October 108 (Spring 2004). 66 The serialized account of the trial appeared in The New Yorker from 16 February to 16 March 1963. Current references taken from: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Books, 1977). 67 Rabinbach, ‘Eichmann in New York’, pp. 101–2. 68 Judging from the large number of articles and reviews that appeared in the Israeli press in this year. 69 Bruria Gerzberg, ‘Ta’Aruchot Yehuda Bacon be Galleria Nora, Yerushalaim’, Ha’ Poel Ha’ Zair, Tel Aviv, 6 June 1961. 70 Most of the 35 works exhibited were on paper, including Phantasmagoria, 1957, and an early state of Large Composition with Figures: Crucifixion, 1957 (artist’s collection). 71 Yehuda Bacon in conversation with the author, 25 April 2004. 72 ‘Paintings from Hell’, Haolam Hazeh, 17 May 1961; ‘From Painter of Death to Teacher of Art’, Youth Aliyah Review (Summer 1961). 73 Three months before the opening, on 30 October 1964, Bacon testified in the Auschwitz Prozess. 74 The prominence given to Bacon in the exhibition reflects his enhanced stature, following the trials in Jerusalem and Frankfurt. The exhibition handlist offers a reliable early source for such titles as: Escape from Auschwitz (1945), Food Distribution or In the Soup Line at Mauthausen (1945), The Angel of Death (1948) and Memorial Candle, I (1950). Bacon participated in print biennales in Tokyo, Osaka, Paris and Ljubljana at around this time. 75 The two met on the occasion of Celan’s only visit to Jerusalem in October 1969, less than a year before his death. On this occasion, Celan dedicated a copy of his Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppies and Remembrance) to Bacon, adding the dedication: ‘For Yehuda Bacon in Jerusalem, in Swedish* Paul Celan 4.10.69 *or also, at least in Danish’, a reference to Celan’s work as a translator and possibly to Bacon’s recent tour of Scandinavian countries. 76 See for instance Bacon’s In Memory of the Czech Transport – To the Gas Chamber, July 1946 (Yad Vashem Art Museum). Pierre Nora usefully coined the term when formulating the distinction between memory and history, Gedächtnis and Geschichte, in ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire’, Représentations 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7–24.

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77 Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair, Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth, trans. J.M. Green (New York: Fromm International, 1994), p. 68. Bacon’s economical line drawings for Appelfeld’s collection of stories, In the Wilderness (Jerusalem: Ah’ Shav, 1965), attest to their shared artistic aims. 78 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations II, 1873; in R.J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 160.

Chapter 8: Nameless before the Concentrationary Void 1 Charlotte Salomon, ‘Postscript’ to Leben? Oder Theater? (Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, call no. 4931), translated and introduced by Julia Watson, Signs [Gender and Cultural Memory] 28/1 (2002), p. 428. Since this chapter was first written in 2012 as part of my long-term research for a monograph on Charlotte Salomon and research on Concentrationary Memories, a document has been put indirectly in the public domain by a documentary film by Frans Weisz, Leven? of Theater? (2012). The document is a transcript of the missing part of an incomplete ‘letter’ not included in the redaction of Life? or Theater? but appended to it by the artist and thus preserved alongside the numbered works: namely this so-called Postscript. This ‘letter’, painted like the other texts included, appears to include a confession to the poisoning of the grandfather. Longterm scholars working on Charlotte Salomon’s work who have explored many avenues of analysis are left somewhat stunned and challenged by such a revelation. What is the status of this document? What is the nature of the confession? Is the crime imagined, willed, attempted, or potentially real? Most scholars have not publicly recognized the probable ground for the painted ‘avatar’s’ desire to murder the old man: sexual abuse of his daughters and granddaughter, signs of which are inserted across Leben? oder Theater? This document and what it does to interpretations of Salomon’s work requires its own careful analysis which will be part of my forthcoming monograph, The Nameless Artist: Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater? (Yale University Press). I still consider it valid to present Salomon’s text in its polyvocal and polysemic function as an artwork not confined to the intentions of its author, were we to take the ‘letter’ at face value. Works of art always need to be read closely for their internal evidence and logic; the ‘fiction’ that they produce as painting and literature cannot be identical to the person constructed as the historical subject of biographical research, which itself is also subject to generic and tropological representation. I do not know what Charlotte Salomon did. I do argue here that the work, Leben? oder Theater? may have been marked by the historical exposure of its author to the concentrationary universe in a manner that makes its absence from the work culturally significant. I argue for the work as a multi-levelled act of resistance to personal tragedy but also to a historical trauma culminating in incarceration in a camp prior to beginning this project. This chapter is offered as a testing out of a hypothesis that links Leben? oder Theater? in one of its many dimensions to the form of memory this collection elaborates as concentrationary. (Note added in 2013.) 2 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (New York: Viking Press, 1943: reprinted Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. vi. Cited in Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, To Paint Her Life; Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 129. 3 For instance the first publication was titled Charlotte: A Diary in Pictures by Charlotte Salomon with a preface by Paul Tillich (New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book for Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1963).

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4 On Gurs see Claude Laharie, Le Camp de Gurs 1939–1945: Un aspect méconnu de l’histoire de Vichy (Biarritz: Atlantico, 1993); Claude Laharie, Gurs 1939–1945: Un camp d’internement en Béarn (Biarritz: Atlantico, 2005). 5 Felstiner, To Paint Her Life, p. 122; Hanna Schramm and Barbara Vormeier, Vivre à Gurs: Un camp de concentration français 1940–1941 (Paris: Maspero, 1979), p. 12. 6 Cited in Felstiner, To Paint Her Life, p. 122, citing Schramm and Vormeier, Vivre à Gurs. 7 Des Peintres au Camp de Milles septembre 1939–été 1941 (Hans Bellmer, Max Ernst, Robert Liebknecht, Leo Marchütz, Ferdinand Springer, Wols), Galerie d’Art Espace 13 Aix en Provence (Aix en Provence: Actes Sud, 1997). Pnina Rosenberg, ‘Mickey Mouse in Gurs: Humour, Irony and Criticism in Works of Art Produced in Gurs Internment Camp’, Rethinking History 6/3 (2002), pp. 273–92 also mentions the names of several women artists in Gurs. 8 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews [1961], 3 vols (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985). Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (France, 1985, 9 hours 36 mins). The interview occurs in Part II of First Era. Claude Lanzmann, SHOAH: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), pp. 59–60. 9 Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady (London: Athlone Press, 2000). 10 Hilberg in Lanzmann, SHOAH, p. 60. 11 Felstiner, To Paint Her Life, p. 213. 12 Felstiner, To Paint a Life, p. 188, citing Léon Poliakov and Jacques Sabile, Jews Under Italian Occupation (Paris: Editions du Centre, 1955), p. 43. 13 Felstiner, To Paint a Life, p. 203. 14 Felstiner, To Paint a Life, p. 207. 15 Felstiner, To Paint a Life, p. 208. 16 Felstiner, To Paint a Life, p. 121. 17 Hannah Arendt, ‘Social Science and the Concentration Camps’, in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), p. 240. 18 Ehud Loeb, cited in Pinhas Rothschild, ‘Passover in the Gurs Camp 5701/1941’, in Bella Gutterman and Naomi Morgenstern (eds), The Gurs Haggadah: Passover in Perdition (Jerusalem: Devora Publishing and Yad Vashem, 2003), p. 21. 19 Lisa Fittko, Escape Through the Pyrenees, trans. David Koblick (Evanston: Northwestern Press, 1991). 20 Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, Menorah Journal 31 January 1943, reprinted in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 265. 21 Elisabeth Bruehl-Young, Hannah Arendt, For the Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 154. 22 Fittko, Escape Through the Pyrenees, p. 49. 23 Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand [1945] (Boulder, CO: Johnson Books, 1997). 24 Bella Gutterman and Naomi Morgenstern (eds), The Gurs Haggadah: Passover in Perdition, facsimile (Jerusalem; Devora Publishing and Yad Vashem, 2003). Karl Schwesig (1898– 1955), Portrait of Osias Hofstatter (1905–1994) Gurs Camp 25 February 1941, 1941 Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, painted in 1953. 25 Griselda Pollock, ‘Theatre of Memory: Trauma and Cure in Charlotte Salomon’s Modernist Fairy Tale Leben? Oder Theater? 1941–42’, in Michael Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen (eds), Reading Charlotte Salomon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 34–72.

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26 Pnina Rosenberg, ‘Mickey Mouse in Gurs: Humour, Irony and Criticism in Works of Art Produced in Gurs Internment Camp’, Rethinking History 6/3 (2002), pp. 273–92. 27 Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 28 Charlotte Delbo, ‘They do not know that there is no arriving at this station. They expect the worst – not the unthinkable’, Arrivals, Departures, the opening poem of None of Us Will Return [1946], trans. Rosette C. Lamonte in Auschwitz and After (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 4.

Chapter 9: Animating Memory 1 Jean Genet, Un Captif amoureux (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 320. 2 An International Commission investigated the events at Sabra and Chatila and Israeli participation in them including assessment of its violation of the international laws laid down at Nuremberg. Reports of such violations of international law and the Geneva Convention were upheld. See ‘Israel in Lebanon: Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during its Invasion of the Lebanon’, Journal of Palestine Studies 12/3 (Spring 1983), pp. 117–33. No prosecutions for war crimes ensued, however, and a BBC Television Panorama documentary entitled ‘The Accused’ revisited the circumstances of the massacre and was aired in July 2001, garnering considerable controversy in the process, the dismissed Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon being now in post as Prime Minister of Israel. Israel’s own ‘Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut had recommended that Sharon should be removed from post. Richard Aren’s review of the ‘Israel in Lebanon’ which reads the Israeli report in the light of the International Commission’s findings is particularly critical. See ‘Israel’s Responsibility in Lebanon’, Journal of Palestine Studies 13/1 (Autumn 1983), pp. 102–8. A corroborative study of the reports’ descriptions of events and those depicted in Ari Folman’s film – beyond the scope of this study – would be a valuable exercise. 3 David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Minuit, 1965). 4 Shoshana Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (ed.), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 208. 5 Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 195. 6 Jean Genet, ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’, Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes 6 (1 Jan 1983), pp. 3–18. Also published as ‘Four hours in Chatila’, trans. Daniel R. Dupêcher and Martha Perrigaud, Journal of Palestine Studies 12/3 (Spring 1983), pp. 3–22. 7 Monika Borgmann and her husband Lokman Slim are responsible for the UMAM Documentation and Research project based in Beirut (see www.umam-dr.org/). Borgmann organized a private screening of Waltz with Bashir in Beirut in January 2009, despite the film being officially prohibited due to a sanction on all Israeli products. 8 Shoshana Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 206. 9 Jacques Derrida, Demeure, Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998), p. 84. [p. 66 trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg]. And thus, in a certain way, he no longer knows, he has a memory of what he no longer knows. In other words, he testifies for a witness, in a different sense this time, in the place of the witness he cannot be for this other witness that the young man was, and who is yet himself.

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10 On the ‘unstated’, see Salah D. Hassan’s article ‘Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon’, PMLA (Special Topic: ‘Comparative Racialization’), 123/5 (October 2008), pp. 1621–29. 11 Cathy Caruth, ‘Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival’, in Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (eds), Between the Psyche and the Polis: Refiguring History in Literature and Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 77–97, pp. 89–90, gives a reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 12 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII (1920–22): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, pp. 1–64, p. 32. 13 Nanette C. Auerhahn and Dori Laub, ‘The Primal Scene of Atrocity: The Dynamic Interplay between Knowledge and Fantasy of the Holocaust in Children of Survivors’, Psychoanalytic Psychology 15 (1998), pp. 360–77‘ pp. 361–2. 14 An Evening with Claude Lanzmann’, 4 May 1986, Yale University’, quoted in Felman: ‘The Return of the Voice’, p. 213. 15 Dori Laub, Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening in Felman and Laub, Testimony, pp. 57–74, p. 62. 16 Caruth, ‘Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival’, pp. 77–97. 17 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. xv. 18 Omer Bartov, The Jew in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 249. 19 Dori Laub, ‘The Empty Circle: Children of Survivors and the Limits of Reconstruction’, JAPA 46/2 (1998), pp. 507–29. 20 Laub, ‘The Empty Circle’, p. 507. See also Laub and Auerhahn: ‘The Primal Scene of Atrocity’ and idem ‘Knowing and not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74 (1993), pp. 287–302. 21 Laub, ‘The Empty Circle’, pp. 525 and 509. 22 Folman is the same generation as Art Spiegelman, whose celebrated reconciliation with his father’s experience, but moreover his inherited memories and testimony of the Holocaust, are also expressed in the two-volume graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale 1. ‘My Father Bleed History’ and 2. ‘And here my trouble begins’ (New York: Pantheon Press, 1986, 1991). 23 Madeleine Baranger et al., ‘The Infantile Psychic Trauma from Us to Freud: Pure Trauma, Retroactivity and Reconstruction’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 69 (1988), p. 124.

Chapter 10: Isn’t this Where …? 1 Cited in Ray Connelly, ‘Climbing the Wall’, Sunday Times Magazine, 27 June 1982. 2 John Coleman, ‘Bad Trips’, New Statesman, 16 July 1982, p. 28. 3 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 217. 4 Coleman, ‘Bad Trips’. 5 Alan Briern, ‘Ego Trip to Inner Space’, Sunday Times, 18 July 1982, p. 30. 6 Ian Christie, Daily Express, 16 July, 1982, p. 29. 7 The film is much revered indeed as a ‘cult classic’, sutured into the consciousness of the vast global Pink Floyd fan base where there is often a disturbing reverence for all things to do with the band. Bret Urick, the creator of www.wallanalysis.com, for example, has produced an extensive analysis of the movie. 8 Derek Malcolm, ‘Parker Pots Pink, Clint Plays Red’, Guardian, 15 July 1982, p. 9.

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9 In the DVD commentary (Sony Entertainment, 1999), Gerald Scarfe and Roger Waters acknowledge the internal misogyny of the imagery in The Wall. One never gets the feeling that the misogyny is entirely confined to a representation of such in the imagination of the characters in the film. 10 Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘Foreword’, in Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History [1977], trans. Stephen Conway (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. xiii. 11 A fruitful reading of The Wall might be made alongside the project of the Achilles Heel Collective in the 1970s which attempted ‘to sustain a balance between anti-sexism that became rigid moralism and a vision of men’s liberation that could so easily dissolve a recognition of the larger relationships of power and subordination within which men and women related’ (Victor J. Seidler, ‘Men, Sexual Politics and Socialism’, in The Achilles Heel Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) p. xiii). I would argue that The Wall is a partly knowing acknowledgement of an impossibility of such ‘larger relationships’ and is a demonstration of the dangers of any form of ‘rigid moralism’ which, in the ‘concentrationary’ sense, may be profoundly amoral. 12 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 444. 13 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ [1940], in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 254. 14 Cited in Susannah Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), p. 241. 15 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1964), pp. 287–8. 16 One finds this kind of crystallization whenever one comes across someone who prefaces their statement with something like ‘As a Deleuzian …’, a label which will colour and fix the rest of the statement even though the very spirit and tenor of what being a ‘Deleuzian’ would actually mean, were it possible to be one, would scream out against any such labels. 17 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 67. 18 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 221. These sentiments are neatly summed up for a later popculture generation by the band Radiohead: ‘Don’t get sentimental / It always ends up drivel.’ Radiohead, ‘Let Down’, on OK Computer (Parlophone, 1997). 19 David Rousset, The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), p. 29. 20 Hannah Arendt ‘“What Remains? The Language Remains”: A Conversation with Gunter Gauss’, in Peter Bachr (ed.), The Portable Hannah Arendt, trans. J Stambaugh (New York: Viking, 2000) pp. 3–22. 21 Rousset, The Other Kingdom, p. 18. 22 The film is mostly sympathetic to Pink, to a fault in fact. He is consistently portrayed as wounded victim and he only ‘dabbles’ with megalomania until his true nature cries out against it. His cry of ‘If I had my way / I’d have all of you shot’ is rather pathetic than actually frightening. This facet is probably due to the rather self-serving autobiographical nature of The Wall from the point of view of Roger Waters. Artistes and rock stars are, after all, surely, not meant to be fascist at heart. 23 Here a quick note on my title. At the end of the album ‘The Wall’, a faint voice can be heard saying ‘Isn’t this where …?’. Listening carefully to the beginning of the album, the circle and the nightmare become complete – the voice can be heard saying: ‘… we came in?’, displaying a reflexive awareness of its own circularity.

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24 Bernard Bergen, The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and the Final Solution (Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), p. 57. 25 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazan (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 175. 26 Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 1995). 27 Eric L. Santner, ‘History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma’, in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 144. 28 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). 29 Cited in ‘Breaking down The Wall’, Sunday Express Magazine, 11 July 1982, p. 27. 30 John Mowitt, ‘Cinema as Slaughterbench of History: Nuit et Brouillard’, Journal of Communication Inquiry 9 (1985), pp. 62–75. 31 David Castell, Sunday Telegraph, 18 July 1982, p. 14. 32 Aaron Kerner, Representing the Catastrophic: Coming to Terms with ‘Unimaginable Suffering’ and ‘Incomprehensible’ Horror in Visual Culture (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) pp. 43–4. 33 Frederic Jameson, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject’, Yale French Studies (1972), p. 351. 34 Jameson, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’, p. 353. 35 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society [1975], trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 127. 36 Jameson, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’, p. 350. 37 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imaginaire [1940], trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1978), p. 178. 38 Bergen, The Banality of Evil, p. 34. 39 Sartre, L’Imaginaire, p. 169. 40 Sartre, L’Imaginaire, p. 13. 41 Primo Levi, If This is a Man The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 78. 42 Times, 17 May 1955, cited in James Chapman, War and Film (Trowbridge: Reaktion, 2008), p. 68. 43 Sue Harper, ‘Popular Film, Popular Memory: The Case of the Second World War’, in Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997), pp.172–3. 44 Sartre, L’Imaginaire, p. 180. 45 Sartre, L’Imaginaire, p. 6. 46 Sartre, L’Imaginaire, p. 6.

Chapter 11: Memory Work in Argentina 1976–2006 1 Roberto Jacoby, ‘31 de diciembre de 1976’, Radar Libros. 25 años de golpe, Buenos Aires, 25 March 2001. 2 Julio Flores, Siluetas, mimeo, 2006. Partially published in the catalogue of the exhibition Silueteadas 83–84. Una gesta popular – Fotografías inéditas de Guillermo Kexel Documentación actualizada de Julio Flores (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural de la Cooperación, March/April 2006). 3 Flores, Siluetas. 4 Roberto Amigo, ‘La Plaza de Mayo, Plaza de las Madres. Estética y lucha de clases en el espacio urbano’, in Ciudad/Campo en las Artes en Argentina y en Latinoamérica. 3as. Jornadas de Teoría e Historia de las Artes (Buenos Aires: CAIA, 1991), p. 94.

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5 Lecture given by Hebe de Bonafini on the 6 July 1988 at the Plaza de Mayo. Reproduced in Historia de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 2006), p. 22. 6 Héctor Ciocchini, Elegos, in Los usos de la tierra (Buenos Aires: Endymion, 1999), p. 58. 7 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 15. 8 Identidad [Identity] was an exhibition held for the first time in December 1998 at the Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires) organized by the artists Carlos Alonso, Nora Aslán, Mireya Baglietto, Remo Bianchedi, Diana Dowek, León Ferrari, Rosana Fuertes, Carlos Gorriarena, Adolfo Nigro, Luis Felipe Noé, Daniel Ontiveros, Juan Carlos Romero and Marcia Schvartz. Since then it has been itinerating around the world. 9 Marcelo Brodsky (ed.), Memoria en construcción. El debate sobre la ESMA (Buenos Aires: La Marca Editora, 2005). 10 Lux Lindner, ‘Gorilas en la niebla (1976–2006)’, ramona 61, June 2006, pp. 8–21. 11 La Nación, Buenos Aires, 15 March 2006. 12 Andreas Huyssen, ‘El parque de la Memoria. The Art & Politics of Memory’, DRCLAS News (Winter 2001). 13 Huyssen, ‘El parque de la Memoria’. 14 Made up of Carlos Alonso (artist, Argentina), Ennio Iommi (sculptor, Argentina), Estela Carlotto (President of the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, Argentina), Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (Nobel Peace Prize, Argentina), David Elliot (art historian, England), Lilian Llanes (curator, Cuba), Paulo Herkenhoff (curator of the Museo de Bellas Artes de San Pablo, Brazil), Fabián Lebenglik (art critic, Argentina), Marcelo Pacheco (curator, Argentina) and Françoise Yohalem (specialist in public art, USA). 15 The eight winning projects are: Pietá de Argentina [Argentina Pietá] by Rini Hurkmand (Netherlands), Retrato de Pablo Miguez [Portrait of Pablo Miguez] by Claudia Fontes (Argentina), Pensar es un hecho revolucionario [Thinking is a Revolutionary Event] by Marie Orensanz (Argentina/France), Monumento al escape [A Monument to the Escape] by Dennis Oppenheim (USA), Huaca [Inca Shrine] by German Botero (Colombia), Carteles de la memoria [Posters of Memory] by the Street Art Group (GAC, Grupo de Arte Callejero, Argentina), La casa de la historia [The House of History] by Marjetica Pötrc (Slovenia), and Olimpo [Olympus] by Nuno Ramos (Brazil). The four special mentions are: 1) Memoria espacial [Spatial Memory] by Per Kirkeby (Denmark), 2) Victory by William Tucker (Egypt/ Great Britain), 3) 30.000 [30,000] by Nicolás Guagnini and 4) Untitled by Clorindo Testa. The six guest artists were Juan Carlos Distéfano, Jenny Holzer, Leo Vinci, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Norberto Gómez and Roberrto Aizenberg. 16 The Park’s construction was approved in 1998. In October 2006 a ramped path flanked by commemorative sculptures was constructed. There are 18 sculptures, 12 chosen through competition. 17 The monument to the victims of the repression in Montevideo, for example. Also in Buenos Aires, a half-finished spontaneous memorial guards the memory of another crime pending justice, namely, the bombing of the Jewish Mutual Society (AMIA, Asociación Mutual Israelita de Argentina) in 18 July 1994, whose perpetrators have never been found or brought to trial. The AMIA has been rebuilt – the empty space has not been preserved as a memorial – but trees with plaques bearing the names of the victims have been planted for several blocks, and over the façade the black mud wall has been kept on which an anonymous hand wrote in calligraphy the victims’ given names in no particular order.

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Pearlman, Moshe, The Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichmann (New York: Simon and Schuster 1963). Penrose, Antony, Lee Miller’s War: Photographer and Correspondent with the Allies in Europe, 1944–45 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005). Pollock, Griselda and Max Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Memories: Aesthetics as Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) (London and New York: Berghan, 2011). Prédal, René, Alain Resnais (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1996). Rabinbach, Anson, ‘Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy’, October 108 (Spring 2004). Rancière, Jacques, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso Books, 2007), pp. 109–38. Raskin, Richard, A Child at Gunpoint (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press 2004). Rawicz, Piotr and Charlotte Delbo, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 3/2 (1991), pp. 243–59. Reilly, Jo, David Cesarani, Tony Kushner and Colin Richmond (eds), Belsen in History and Memory (London: Frank Cass, 1997). Richardson, John, A Life of Picasso, 1881–1906 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991). Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Robinson, Jacob, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (New York: Macmillan, 1965). Roger-Marx, Claude, Cent Tableaux de 1944 à 1958 par Bernard Buffet (Paris: Galerie Charpentier, 1958). Rosenberg, Pnina, ‘Mickey Mouse in Gurs: Humour, Irony and Criticism in Works of Art Produced in Gurs Internment Camp’, Rethinking History 6/3 (2002), pp. 273–92. Rosenthal, Alan, Jerusalem, Take One! Memoirs of a Jewish Filmaker (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). Rothberg, Michael, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). ——, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Rothschild, Pinhas, ‘Passover in the Gurs Camp 5701/1941’, in ed. Bella Gutterman and Naomi Morgenstern, The Gurs Haggadah: Passover in Perdition (Jerusalem: Devora Publishing and Yad Vashem, 2003). Rousseau, Frédéric, L’Enfant juif de Varsovi: Histoire d’une photographie (Paris: Seuil, 2009). Rousset, David, The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947). ——, A World Apart, trans. Y. Moyse and R. Senhouse (London: Secker & Warburg, 1951). ——, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Minuit, 1965). ——, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions de Pavois, 1946; reprinted Paris: Hachette/Pluriel, 2008).

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CONTRIBUTORS

John Wolfe Ackerman will receive his PhD from Northwestern University (Illinois) in political theory in 2013. In his doctoral thesis, he reconsiders the relevance of political theology for democratic theory and law through an intertwined re-reading of the works of Franz Rosenzweig, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. His current research expands this work to situate Weimar German-Jewish contributions to debates on political theology in relation to historical and present-day interpretations of the Jewish legal tradition. From 2012 to 2013 he was Junior Research Fellow at the TU Dresden (Germany), affiliated with the Transzendenz und Gemeinsinn (Transcendence and Common Sense) Collaborative Research Centre/SFB 804. Nicholas Chare is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Auschwitz and Afterimages (I.B.Tauris, 2011) and After Francis Bacon (Ashgate, 2012) and co-editor of Representing Auschwitz (Palgrave, 2013). Isabelle de le Court is an art historian and lecturer at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), Beirut. She completed her doctorate in History of Art at the University of Leeds on art and conflict in 2012. Entitled ‘A Tale of Two Cities: PostTraumatic Art in Post-War Sarajevo and Beirut in Cross-Cultural Perspectives’, the thesis focused on the relationship between war and art by examining post-conflict site-specificity in the production of art in two cities. She also curated the exhibition Moving Worlds in Berlin in 2011. Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam and since 2006 Visiting Professor at Yale University. Among his recent books as author are: European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2005), Terror und Trauma (2007), Hollywood Heute (2009) and Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2010, with Malte Hagener). Benjamin Hannavy-Cousen is a cultural analyst who completed a doctoral thesis in 2011 at the University of Leeds as part of the AHRC-funded research project on Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation. The thesis is titled ‘The

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Seeping and Creeping of Haunted Memory: Tracing the Concentrationary in Post War Cinema’. He is interested in cultural memory as it is transmitted through all areas of visual culture and previous publications include an article on Picasso titled ‘Memory, Power and Place: Where is Guernica?’, Journal of Romance Studies 9/2 (2009), pp. 47–64. Matthew John completed a doctorate in French Studies at the University of Leeds in 2012 as part of the AHRC-funded research project Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation. Using Alain Resnais’s 1955 film Nuit et brouillard as a point of departure, his thesis, ‘Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics and the Camps’, uses Jean Cayrol’s notion of concentrationary art as means of critically re-examining a number of cinematic works produced under Anatole Dauman’s production company Argos Films. Claire Launchbury is a specialist in comparative approaches to French literature, music and thought. She was awarded her PhD in music and French studies at Royal Holloway, University of London and is an honorary research associate in the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures. She has taught in universities in France (Paris-Sorbonne, Nanterre) and at Royal Holloway. She recently completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in French at the University of Leeds working with Max Silverman. Her research focuses on francophone discourses of memory in postwar Lebanon through film, music, literature and visual cultures. Sylvie Lindeperg is a historian and professor at Paris I–Panthéon Sorbonne University. Her major publications include Les Écrans de l’ombre. La Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le cinéma français (CNRS Éditions, 1997), Clio de 5 à 7. Les actualités filmées de la Libération (CNRS Éditions, 2000), Nuit et brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire (Odile Jacob, 2007) and Univers concentrationnaire et génocide: Voir, savoir, comprendre, in collaboration with Annette Wieviorka (Mille et Une Nuits, 2008). She is the coauthor of the film by Jean-Louis Comolli, Face aux fantômes (Ina et Ciné-Cinéma, 2009). Laura Malosetti Costa is Professor in Art History and Cultural History at the National University of San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, Argentina, Researcher of CONICET (National Council for Scientific and Technological Research) and Director of the Graduate School of Latin American Art History in IDAES (Graduate Institute for Social Studies) UNSAM. She is author of many books and articles, including Los primeros modernos. Arte y sociedad en Buenos Aires a fines del siglo XIX (2001), which was awarded a prize by the Association for Latin American Art in 2003, Pío Collivadino (2006), which was adjudged the book of the year by the Argentine Association of Art Critics and Cuadros de viaje. Artistas argentinos en Europa y Estados Unidos (1880–1910), in 2008. She has received fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, ARIAH (Association of Research Institutes in Art History), SSRC (Social Sciences Research Center), University of Buenos Aires and the Post

CONTRIBUTORS

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Doctoral Fellowship J. Paul Getty Foundation, among others. She has been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Paris (UPEC), Berlin (Freie Universität), Mexico (UNAM and Iberoamericana), Chile (UAI and Univ. Chile), Venezuela (Univ. de Los Andes) and Uruguay (UDELAR) and various Universities in Argentina, Visiting Researcher of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris (2012) and Visiting Fellow at the Centre CATH (Cultural Analysis, Theory and History), University of Leeds (2004). Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. Known for her major feminist interventions in cultural theory and visual analysis and work on trauma, aesthetics and psychoanalysis she has published extensively in cultural studies and art history. Major recent publications include Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (2007), Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the Image (2010, with Anthony Bryant), Bracha L. Ettinger: Art as Compassion (2011, edited with Catherine de Zegher), After-affects/After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation, (2013) and Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (2011 with Max Silverman), which won the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Best Book on the Moving Image 2011. Forthcoming is From Trauma to Cultural Memory: Representation and the Holocaust and The Nameless Artist and the Invention of Memory: Charlotte Salomon’s Orphic Journey in Life? or Theatre? 1941–42. Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. His most recent work is on post-Holocaust culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and cultures, and questions of memory, race and violence. He has just completed a book on connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary entitled Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Berghahn, 2013). His co-edited book with Griselda Pollock, Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, was published in 2011 (Berghahn) and won the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Best Book on the Moving Image 2011. Glenn Sujo achieved international recognition as a visual artist, educator, author and curator with a specialist interest in the expressive, analytical and imaginative tools of drawing. He completed formal studies in fine art and the history of art at the Slade and Courtauld Institute of Art where, in 2010–11, he was Wingate Post-doctoral Research Fellow. He contributed to the recovery of drawing language in art polemics and higher education through practice-led research, exhibitions and publications including: Drawing on these Shores, A View of British Drawing and its Affinities (Brighton Festival and tour), as founding faculty member of the Prince’s Drawing School in London,and convenor of the mind-spirit-body-matter: drawn to the human workshops at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge. Research into the imagination in internment in WWII camps and ghettos resulted in several major exhibitions and publications

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including: Artists Witness the Shoah (Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 1995) and Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory (Philip Wilson Publishers, London, 2001) and Last Expressions: Art from Auschwitz (Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Chicago 2002). A monograph, diaries and an exhibition of the life and work of the Czech-born, Israeli artist and survivor Yehuda Bacon is in preparation. Annette Wieviorka is the Director of Research at CNRS (Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique). She has been a pioneer in the study of memory of the genocide of European Jewry with her book Déportation et génocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (1992) and on which she has published numerous works notably L’Ère du témoin, translated as The Era of the Witness (2006). She has also worked on the judicial trials of Nazism: Le procès de Nuremberg (1995) and Eichmann de la traque au procès. She has written the biography of the couple directing the French Communist Party, Maurice et Jeannette: Biographie du couple Thorez (2010). Her intellectual itinerary was the basis of a series of interviews with Séverine Nikel, L’heure d’exactitude. Histoire, mémoire, témoignage (2011). With Sylvie Lindeperg she is the author of Univers concentrationnaire et génocide. Voir, savoir, comprendre (2008).

INDEX

Figures in italics indicate captions. 9/11 (September 11, 2001 attacks) 48 30 años/30 artistas (30 Years/30 Artists) exhibition (Buenos Aires, 2006) 236 Abakanowicz, Magdalena 272n15 abjection 213, 257n57 absence, aesthetics of the representation of 9 Adorno, Theodor xvii, 20, 160, 204, 207, 210, 236 aesthetic(s) Futurist 208 poetic 122 political xv, xvii, 21 of resistance 26 Surrealist 116, 125–28, 130 Vorticist 208 of The Wall 208 Agamben, Giorgio xviii, 17–19, 140, 211–12, 218 aggaditic tradition 135, 145 Aguereberry, Rodolfo 227 Aizenberg, Roberto 239, 272n15 Akademie der Künste, Berlin 174 Alfonsín, Raúl 224 Algeria, French involvement in 24, 85 Algerian war 99 Aliyat Hanoar 146 Alonso, Carlos 272n8, 272n14 Alpigiano, Jean-Luc 86 Althusser, Louis 218 American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences 61

American Communist Party 251n33 International Labor Defense 66 American National Exhibition, Moscow Trade Fair 61 Améry, Jean 140, 151 Ampex Corporation 59, 61, 249–50n4, 251n32 Anderson, Michael 218 anonymity 84–88, 94–95, 97, 99 ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part Two’ (song) 217 Antelme, Robert 2, 85, 139 L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race) 83, 84, 110, 155 antisemitism 33, 36, 174, 208, 246n31, 263n39 anxiety acute 110 created by concentration camp conditions 107–08 generating 17 and the social bond 14, 15 vigilant xvi, 3 Anzio, Battle of (1944) 205, 218, 220 Appelfeld, Aharon 157 Arde Arte (‘Art Burns’) 237 Ardon, Mordechai 263n42 Aren, Richard 268n2 Arendt, Hannah xvi, xvii, 11, 12–13, 21–23, 209, 210, 211 analysis of evil xv concentrationary memories/representing encounter after totalitarianism 40–43

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on the concentrationary universe 173 on destruction of the human in the living human being 11 and Eichmann Trial 62, 70, 79, 80, 155, 208 eliminating encounter (origins of totalitarianism) 36–38 encountering the neighbour (love and Augustine) 34–36 Gurs inmate 162, 181, 182, 183 and Jaspers 244–45n19 and the laughable 210, 220 philosophical reflections on friendship and love 23 refounding a common world 38–40 saved by Varian Fry 183 works: ‘Antisemitism’ (manuscript) 36–37 ‘The Concentration Camps’ (essay) 15 Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil 23, 80, 245n31 The Human Condition 12, 40 ‘Ideology and Terror’ (essay) 37 Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (The Concept of Love in Augustine) 33–36, 39, 40 On Revolution 39, 40, 41 The Origins of Totalitarianism xv, 5, 13, 16–17, 22, 31–38, 40, 42–43, 85 ‘We Refugees’ 181–82 ‘What is Existenz Philosophy?’ 35 Argentina 77 abducted children 223, 224, 225, 233 art 236–38, 238 concentrationary memories 223–24, 231, 240 coup d’état (1976) 224 the desaparecidos (the disappeared) 27–28, 223–26 ESMA 10, 28 memory work in 223–40 monuments 239–40 photography 228, 229, 230–34, 232, 234, 235, 236 politically targeted genocide 28, 224, 225, 233, 240 silhouettes 226–28, 228 women 225–26, 226

Year of Memory (Año de la Memoria, 2006) 224, 236–37 Argentinian Government: Department of Culture 237 Arikha, Avigdor 166 Army Film and Photographic Unit 150 Arp, Jean 183 art in Argentina 236–38, 238 monitoring of totalitarianism xvii and politics 237 art of internment 261n2, 261n6 Arts and Humanities Research Council of England xv Aslán, Nora 272n8 atrocious sublime 129 Augé, Marc 212 Augustine, St 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 42 Auschwitz Album 261n5 Auschwitz Prozess 150 Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and labour camp, Poland 10, 24, 52, 53, 103, 181, 213, 232 arrival of Jews from Hungary and Carpathian-Ruthenia 261n5 Bacon’s internment 25, 136, 138 Breslauer murdered in 56 and Buchenwald xv crematoria in 1, 135, 136 Delbo in 24–25, 103, 104, 255n2 and depressive position 108 and the disappeared of Argentina 227 discovered by the Red Army 8 Dutch Sinti and Roma sent to 57 gas chambers 136 Jews’ loss of selfhood in 141 labour camp and death factory 6 liberation of 257n3 murder of French Jews on arrival (October, 1943) 164 number of people killed by gassing 7, 242n19 Nussbaum murdered 185 prisoners’ registration 153 soccer matches 18–19 state museum 65 sublimity and the subliminal at stake 129 as symbol of the Holocaust 6–7, 12

INDEX thirst in 103, 104, 112 transport to 54, 55 authenticity 23, 47, 48, 49 automatic image 116, 126 automatism 126 Automotores Orletti (Orletti Motors), Argentina 232 Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (film) 49 Bachrach-Barée, Emmanuel 136 Bachrach-Barée, Hellmut 136, 261–62n11, 262n12 Women’s Camp 136, 137 Backon, Shlomo 262n17 Bacon, Rivka (‘Rella’) 262n17 Bacon, Yehuda 262n17, 265n63, 265n64, 265n74, 265n75 artistic annus mirabilis (1961) 156 Auschwitz survivor 25, 136, 138 in besieged Jerusalem 139 drawings recording his internment at Auschwitz-Birkenau 135 education 146 eschews all literal references to the Shoah 157 evacuated during War of Independence 146 and the Golem 145 influence of Willi Nowak 146 interest in Muselmann 138–39, 142, 144, 145, 146, 151, 153 interned in Ghetto Theresienstadt 136 Kazet Kunstler label 155, 156 self-portrait studies 139 spare line drawings of Auschwitz camp 136 testified at the Eichmann Trial 26 and the wood-engraving medium 155 works: Carrying the dead to the Crematorium 142 Head of Muselmann 148, 149 Landscape with Rooftops and Cypresses 146, 147 Large Head 148, 149, 150 Muselmann [1946] 138–39, 138, 154 Muselmann [1948-49] 145–46, 145 Muselmann and the Angel of Death 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 154, 157

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Prisoner 168194 series 151, 152, 153–57, 153 Soup line at Mauthausen 142 Study for Muselmann 142, 143 Tree Study, Beit ha’Kerem 146, 147 Bacon family 156, 262n17 Baglietto, Mireya 272n8 Bahía Blanca, Argentina 231 Bakon, Isaac 262n17 Band-Aid concert (1984) 52 barbed-wire fence 119, 142, 150 Barbie, Klaus 72, 73 trial (1987) 72, 73, 75, 80, 252n62 Baron, Salo 59 Barth, Karl 34 Barthes, Roland 20, 24, 48, 88–89, 151 La Chambre Claire 88, 92 ‘The Third Meaning’ 95 Bartov, Omer 198 Basterra, Victor 233 The Battle of Britain (film) 218 Battleship Potemkin (film) 154 Baudizzone, Lestard, Varas Studio 239 Baudrillard, Jean 20, 48 Bauman, Zygmunt 16, 20, 86, 195 Bazin, André 72 Becker, Daniel 239 Beethoven, Ludwig van 187 Beirut 27, 193, 200, 268n2, 268n7 Beit Ha’am (House of the People), Jerusalem: Eichmann Trial (1961) 62, 66, 72, 79, 264n58 Beit ha’Kerem, West Jerusalem 146 Beit Ha’Omanim (Jerusalem Artists’ House): Bacon exhibition (1961) 156 Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (Ghetto Fighters’ House), Western Galilee 1965 exhibition 156 Yehuda Bacon, Exhibition of Paintings (1961) 156 Belgium, fall of (1940) 185 Belgrade, US bombing of 52 Bellmer, Hans 161, 183 Bellour, Raymond 88, 90, 93 Belzec extermination camp, Poland 7, 8 Ben Bezalel, Rabbi Judah Loew 263n39 Ben, Gunther 156 Ben-Gurion, David 59, 60, 61, 62

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Ben-Yishai, Ron 194 Benjamin, Dora 181 Benjamin, Walter 84, 168, 169, 174, 181, 207–08, 218 The Arcades Project 95–96, 208 materialist historiography 209 ‘Small History of Photography’ 92 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ 207 Bentham, Jeremy 62–63 Bergen, Bernard 211, 215 Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Hanover, Germany 5, 124, 141, 253n66 iconic images 8, 9, 150–51, 151, 152 liberation of 55, 150, 151, 242n13, 257–58n3 Berghof, Obersalberg, Bavarian Alps 118 Bergman, Samuel Hugo 156 Berlin Wall, fall of 48 Bertillon system 264n55 Bethune, Dr Norman 65 Bezem, Naftali 156 Bianchedi, Remo 272n8 Bibémus quarry, near Aix en Provence 146 Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht 25 ‘A Theory of Thinking’ 108 Biziou, Peter 205, 218 Blanchot, Maurice 197 Blast 208 Blechhammer concentration camp (Auschwitz IV), Poland 128 Blüchler, Heinrich 182 Blumenfeld, Kurt 182 boches 181, 182 Boer War, Second (1899–1902): British use of concentration camps against the Boers 5 Bohm-Duchen, Monica 160 Boix, Francisco 261n5 Bonafini, Hebe de 230–31 Borgmann, Monika 268n7 Borowski, Tadeusz 133, 141 Bosch, Hieronymous 185 Bosnia ethnic cleansing 48 faked image of an emaciated man behind barbed wire 52 Bosnian war 247–48n14

Boston-Washington hunger march (1932) 251n33 Botero, German 272n15 Bourdieu, Pierre 17 Bouret, Jean 265n64 bourgeoisie 37 Bourke-White, Margaret 118, 119 Braiterman, Zachary: ‘Against Holocaust Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory’ 130 Brand, Joel 77 Brandt, Willy 47 Braque, Georges: Houses at L’Estaque 146 Brauner, Victor 183 Brazil (film) 210 breast as a fulfilling object 108–09, 111 Brecht, Bertolt: Three-Penny Opera 183 Breslauer, Rudolf 56, 57 Breslauer, Ursula 56 Breton, André 116, 183 L’Amour Fou 127 and convulsive beauty 127–28 defines Surrealism in his first Manifesto (1924) 126 Nadja 127 Bridge of Men [abandoned film] 251n29 Briern, Alan 204 Britton, Celia 87, 89 Brodsky, Marcelo 234–35, 236 Sara Brodsky observa el nombre de su hijo desaparecido, Fernando, en el Monumento a las Victimas del Terrorismo de Estado, Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires (Sara Brodsky observes the number of her disappeared son at the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism, Park of Memory, Buenos Aires) 238, 239 brownshirts (Sturmabteilung; SA) 174 Brunner, SS Officer Alois 164, 166, 167, 189 Bryher 174 Buber, Martin: Ich und Du 35 Buchenwald concentration camp, Germany xv, 2, 5, 25, 85, 129, 141, 150, 232, 257n3, 260n48, 261n11 Bourke-White’s visit 118 Cagli’s drawings 133

INDEX crematorium 118, 119 designated for Vernichtung durch Arbeit (destruction through labour) 117 Kapos in 117 liberation of (11 April 1945) 117 medical experimentation 117 Miller’s photographs of corpses 119, 120, 121–23, 122, 123 Miller’s photographs edited by Vogue 125 number of internees and deaths 117 prisoners’ registration 153 Rousset as a survivor xv, 2, 85, 130 SS in 116, 117, 121, 122 timing of Miller’s visit 115, 117 war correspondents’ photographs as evidence 116 Buenos Aires, Argentina 225, 228, 228, 237, 240 Plaza de Mayo 225, 226, 227, 230, 240 Buenos Aires Herald, The 233 Buffet, Bernard 155, 265n64 Bulgaria, transport of Greek Jews from 54, 248n15 Bulletin de Vernuche: Journal des Travailleurs de 54e Regiment 174 Buna-Auschwitz-Monowitz concentration camp (Auschwitz III), Poland 129, 164 Bush, George H. W. 248n14 Cabinet of Dr Caligari (film) 154 Cagli, Corrado 133 Capa, Robert 49 Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation 24, 61, 62, 63 capital punishment 154 capitalism economic and social foundations of 4 wage-system of 19 ‘wall of capitalism’ 220 and ‘wasted lives’ 16 Carlotto, Estela 272n14 Carpi, Aldo 263n32 Diario di Gusen 141 The Famished 141 Castell, David 212 Castoriadis, Cornelius 215 Catalunya, Spain 169, 180 catharsis 78–79

295

Cayrol, Jean 20 calls for concentrationary universe 207 concentrationary art xvi, xix concentrationary disease xvi Lazarean protagonist notion 83–99 Mauthausen concentration camp survivor xv, xvi, xix, 2, 84 and Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour xix, 24 scriptwriter for Night and Fog xvi, xvii, xix surrealist poet xix works: Jean Cayrol: Œuvre lazaréenne xix Lazare parmi nous xix, 85 Les premiers jours 85 Je vivrai l’amour des autres 84–85 On vous parle 85 Cayrolian literary universe 83, 85, 86, 88, 91 CBS 65, 79 Celan, Paul 113, 150, 157, 166, 257n62, 265n75, 265n76 Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, Paris 62 Cézanne, Paul 146, 161 Chagall, Marc 183 Fallen Angel 144 Challenger disaster 48 Chapman, James: War and Film 218–19 Chase, Edna 125 Chatila see Sabra and Chatila Chelmno extermination camp, Poland 7, 8, 9 Chéroux, Clément 130 Représenter l’horreur (Representing Horror) 123 Chiampi, James: ‘Testifying to his Text: Primo Levi and the Concentrationary Sublime’ 129 Chile: secret prisons and stadia 10 China, and International Committee against Concentration Camps 3 China Strikes Back (film) 65 Christian Phalange militia 194, 196 Christianity 39 Christie, Ian 205 cinema 50 Barthes’ view of 24, 88–89, 92 cinematic culture of spectacular violence xviii

296

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES

mainstream cinema as a prime cultural site 49 moment of stasis at the heart of 92 popular 221 Ciocchini, Héctor 231 Ciocchini, María Clara 231 citizenship 3 civil rights 65 Clinton, Bill 52, 248n14 Cold War 33 Coleman, John 204 collective memory 21, 23, 26, 47, 49, 50, 131 colonial imaginary xviii colonialism 13, 21 concentrationary disease xvi–xvii Columbia University: oral history programme 77–78 common memory see memory, intellectual common world, refounding a 38–40, 43 Communists 5, 117, 182 Comolli, Jean-Louis 69, 72, 73 competitive memory 21 CONADEP (National Committee for Disappeared People) 224 concentration camps admission statistics 6 in the Boer War (1899–1902) 5 change of function 5 and concentrationary memory 1 death statistics 6 distinguishing between them and extermination camps 5–9 existence as a warning 4 expansion and contraction of 5, 6 experiment of total domination 173 German camps transformed into gardens of memory 1 Himmler leases to the state 5–6 ‘holes of oblivion’ 32, 38 Holocaust did not happen in 6 images of the opened camps xv, 2, 6, 8, 9, 25 introduced on German soil (1933) 5 invented by the Spanish in Cuba (late nineteenth century) 5 journalistic reportage 8 liberation of 117, 118, 123, 124, 130, 217, 257–58n3

in Namibia against the Herero (1904–08) 5 notorious camps 5 number in Germany by 1945 2, 242n13 publication of the photographs 123–25 purpose and legacy of 11 a sign of the disease of the whole body politic 3–4 slow and agonizing decay of body and mind 83 still functioning after 1945 2–3 testimony of prisoners/survivors xv, 3, 5, 28 transport train iconography 218 varied population 8 concentrationary 201 as an adjective 15 art, Cayrol’s proposal xvi, xix the camp as its locus and symbol 10 coined by David Rousset xv, 2, 17 confrontation with post-Holocaust memoir 194 four aspects of xvi a historically-situated term 3 and the Imaginary 2, 14, 215 a novel (anti-)political form 9–10 Concentrationary Art xv, xix Concentrationary Cinema xvi, 10 concentrationary disease (‘la peste concentrationnaire’) xvi–xvii Concentrationary Imaginaries: Imaginaries of Violence 243n26 Concentrationary Imaginaries xv, xvii–xix concentrationary imaginary xviii–xix, 206–10, 214, 216, 218, 220, 221 Concentrationary Memories and the Politics of Representation (research project) xv concentrationary memory, memories xvi, 20–22 an agitated, agitating, anxious memory 1 in Argentina 223–24, 231, 240 and concentration camps 1 the concept of 21 counter-force to concentrationary system 2 creation of 131 defends and promotes democratic justice and freedom 2

INDEX defined 203, 223 and democracy 1 erosion of divisions between past and present 1, 4 failure to agitate the present xvii features of 10–11, 116 and Holocaust memory 9–14 as monitory 11 role of 21 and Salomon’s work 160, 161, 162, 173, 186 and Surrealist aesthetic 125 concentrationary sublime 25, 116, 128–31 concentrationary terror xvii, 28 concentrationary threat 83–86, 99 concentrationary universe 139, 210, 211 aim of 3, 9, 173 brutality and evil of 150 called for by Cayrol 207 and concentrationary memory 116 continued threat of xvii and the cultural imaginary xviii defined xvi, 5 introduction of a new visual structure of horror 25 lack of awareness of its presence xvii Levi on 129 and Pink Floyd The Wall 203 production of living corpses 15 psyche of life within 113 Rousset’s term xv, xvi, 3, 194, 210 Salomon’s encounter with 160, 161–62, 165, 168, 182–83, 189 signs of normalization in everyday life xix spreading 38 surreal and banal intertwined in 220 system of total domination xvii and The Wall 27 concentrationnaire 2, 14, 15, 207, 212 concept of the political (Schmitt) 35 consciousness 14, 42, 51, 214 bureaucratic 210 collective 194 concentrationary 211 imaginary 206 of Pink 214, 221 conscription 194, 200 Constantin, Maria Teresa 236

297

convulsive beauty 116, 127–28 érotique-voilée (veiled-erotic) 127, 128 explosante-fixe (fixed-explosive) 127, 128 magique-circonstancielle (circumstancedmagic) 127 Correo de la Unesco 227 creativity 2, 106 Jewish 188 of Scarfe 221 Cruyff, Johan 226 Csasznik, Fred 252n40 Cuba: concentration camps run by the Spanish (late nineteenth century) 5 Cuerpo y material (Body and Matter), IMAGO, Argentina (2006) 236 cultural memory of genocide 23 of the Holocaust 8 Holocaust memory and concentrationary memory 9–14 impact of Belsen liberation on British cultural memory 242n13 and photography 55, 228 and reality status of images 48 of the Second World War 218 cultural resistance xvi, xix Czernowitz, Romania 166 D-Day Landings 49 Dachau, Germany 117 Dachau concentration camp, Germany 2, 5, 9, 25, 124, 141, 232, 257n3 gas chambers 118–19 liberation (29 April 1945) 117 Miller’s photographs edited by Vogue 125 Music’s artwork 133–34 Nazi coercive methods 133 role of 117 SS in 116, 117, 119, 121–23, 123, 127 timing of Miller’s visit 115, 117 war correspondents’ photographs taken as evidence 116 Dachau-Bad Toelz death march (April 1945) 136 Daily Express, The 205 Dam Busters, The (film) 216 Dante Alighieri: Inferno 141 de Zegher, Catherine 160

298

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES

death cult 20 death drive 14 death instinct 107, 200 death-world 106, 111, 113 Decatur, Alabama 66 DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) 54 defamiliarization techniques xix dehumanization xvi, 15, 19, 27, 86, 163, 173, 214 Deichmann, Thomas 247–48n14 Delarbre, Léon 141–42 Le lendemain de la libération: trop tard! 140, 140, 151 Delbo, Charlotte 21, 189 concentration camp survivor 24–25, 103, 104, 255n2 works: Auschwitz and After 24, 25, 103–13 Days and Memory 25, 111 Deleuze, Gilles 84, 92, 93 democracy and concentrationary memory 1 defence of 4 fought for in Argentina 223 Western liberal 33 depersonalization 83, 84, 85, 91, 94–95, 97, 173 depressive position 106, 108, 110, 112, 256n23, 256n29 Derrida, Jacques 197, 198 Des Milles camp, near Aix-en-Provence 161 Deuteronomy 145 Diana, Princess, funeral of 48 Diaspora 62 difference(s) 12, 15, 17, 22, 32, 33, 35, 37–41, 106 digital technology 24, 84, 93 dignity, human 1, 116, 130, 173 Dilthey, Wilhelm 39 Distéfano, Juan Carlos 272n15 Donati, Angelo 167 doppelgänger 145 Dowek, Diana 272n8 Drancy transit camp, Paris, France 78, 164, 166, 167 dreams 106–07, 113, 193–99, 200, 201 Duchamp, Marcel 183

Due Obedience Law (Obediencia Debida) 224 Dufy, Raoul 171 Dutch National Centre for Information (Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst; RVD) 56–57 Eastwood, Clint 49 Edel, Uli 49 ego 107, 108, 110, 111 Ehrenreich, Barbara 206–07 Eichmann, Adolf 164, 189 arrest of 60, 61 his compulsive writing 253n66 execution 154 pleads not guilty 70 recorded during his trial 66, 71–74, 77, 264n58 sentenced to death 70 his twitch 77, 253n66 Eichmann Trial (1961) 13, 23–24, 26, 59–81, 136, 150, 154, 208 complete recording of 59 events leading up to the filming 60–64 how Fruchtman hit upon the idea 60 negotiations 60–64 historical framework of 59 Hurwitz in Jerusalem 64–69 from ultra-left films to televised news 64–66 preparations 66–68 training 68–69 judicial ritual and televised dramatic art 69–75 the role of editing and the status of the media 73–75 stage, off-stage, off-screen 72–73 legacy 80–81 location of film archives 253n63 the main stylistic device of Hurwitz’s dramatic art 75–80 televised staging 79–80 profound sense of guilt unleashed by 155–56 sets out to offer a lesson in history 59 television broadcasting worldwide 59 venue 62 Eisenhower, Dwight 167 Eisenstein, Sergei 95, 154 Eisler, Hanns xvi, 53

INDEX El Greco 146 Elliot, David 272n14 Elsaesser, Thomas: German Cinema - Terror and Trauma since 1945 50–51 Emergency Rescue Committee 183 encounter (Begegnung) 244n18 eliminating 36–38 encountering the neighbour 34–36 ‘Enola Gay’ (song) 199 Epstein, Jean 259n30 Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF; Argentinian Forensic Anthropology Team) 224 Erla work camp, East Germany 118 Ernst, Max 161, 183 Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, Buenos Aires (ESMA; Navy Mechanics School; later a Museum of Memory) 10, 28, 232, 233, 234, 240 La Escuelita (the Little School), Argentina 232 Esquivel, Adolfo Pérez 272n14 Etcétera 237 Ethiopia, droughts and hunger in 48, 52 ethnic cleansing 48 European Realism 155 European union of television companies 61 ‘everything is possible’ xv, 3, 11, 16, 32, 85, 131, 210–11 evil Arendt’s analysis of xv of totalitarianism xvii Existentialism 20 Expressionism 148, 154 extermination camps 55, 135 created by SS 8 distinguishing between them and concentration camps 5–9 ‘holes of oblivion’ 32, 38 murder of Jews 7, 8 number of Jews and Romani killed in 242n19 Polish camps destroyed by mid-1943 8 post-memorial re-working of 27 post-memory of 194 victims subjected to immediate death on arrival 11

299

Fahrplananordnung no.587 163 Farocki, Harun 56 fascism 21, 77, 78, 208–09 ‘fascinating fascism’ xviii fascist group manipulation 20 French resistance to 5 mass followers of 20 Nazis aim to eradicate opponents of 5 rise of 160, 174 Salomon’s response to French fascist regime 186 Faulkner, William 32, 33, 42 Feiwel, Berthold: Die Judenmassakers in Kischinew von Told 144 Felman, Shoshana 196, 198 Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal 161, 164, 166, 167, 172, 173, 174, 189 femininity 160 Ferrari, Claudio 239 Ferrari, León 233, 272n8 Feuchtwanger, Frau 182 Feuchtwanger, Lion 161, 182, 183 Figuren 141 film culture 219 Film Polski 65 filmic fragment 95 Final Solution of the Jewish Question 8, 54, 60, 61, 77, 81, 209, 211, 243n24 Fittko, Lisa 181, 182 Flags of Our Fathers (film) 49, 55 Fliegende Kolonnen 56 Flores, Julio 227 Flossenbürg concentration camp, near Nuremberg, Germany 5 Folman, Ari 27, 193–201, 268n2 Fontes, Claudio 272n15 forced labour camps 6, 135, 257n62 Foster, Hal 131 Compulsive Beauty 128 fragmentation 197–98 France anti-Jewish laws (October 1940) 172 Armistice (June 1940) 180 capitulation of Vichy Regime 168 Fry assists European intellectuals and artists escape to USA 183 German defeat of 168, 180, 182

300

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES

involvement in Algeria 24 Jews deported from 164, 165 plan to rescue Jewish refugees from Côte d’Azur 167 resistance to collaboration and occupation 5, 25 France Press Agency 124 Franco, General Francisco 180 Frank, Anne 13, 52 The Diary of a Young Girl 160, 168 Frank, Otto 168 Frankfurt: trial of Auschwitz personnel (1963–65) 80 Frankl, Victor 110 freeze-frame 92, 93 Freikorps 206–07 French Ministry for Information 124 French Realism 155 Freud, Sigmund 20, 49 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 197 Psychopathology of Everyday Life 51 Frontier Film 64–65 Fruchtman, Milton 24, 60, 61, 63–66 frustration 103, 108–12 Fry, Varian (‘American Schindler’) 26, 183 Fuertes, Rosana 272n8 Fuhrman, Kalmín 139 Full-Stop Law (Punto Final) 224 Futurism 208 GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero/Street Art Group) 237 Gandesheim concentration camp, Germany 2, 110 Garapon, Antoine 64, 72 gaze, the 119, 121, 258n18 of the Argentinian disappeared 230 averted 151 incredulous 151 oblique 131 ruthless gaze of New Objectivity 185 Geldof, Bob 220 Gemayel, Bashir 27, 193 Gemmeker, SS-Obersturmführer Albert Konrad 55–56, 248n19 Genet, Jean 193, 199 ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’ 196

genocide of Argentinian political activists 28, 224, 225, 233, 240 cultural memory of 23 at the heart of Nazism’s atrocities xv occurring within totalitarian terror xvi and pregnant Jewish women 167 racialized xv, xvi, 7, 10, 11, 13 German Democratic Republic (East Germany) 10 German romanticism 36, 37 German South West Africa see Namibia Germano, Diego 235 Germano, Eduardo 235 Germano, Guillermo 235 Germano, Gustavo 235 Ausencias series 234, 235 Germany admission of guilt for war crimes 47 concentration camps introduced on German soil (1933) 5 concentration camps used against the Herero in Namibia (1904–08) 5 decomposition of German society 4 defeat of France 168, 180, 182 fall of Berlin Wall 48 fascist 2 Nazi xv, xvi, 5 overthrow of Weimar constitution (1933) 5 television stations 61 Gerzberg, Bruria 156 Gestapo 2, 166 ghettoes 25, 135 death toll in 6 the golem as a manifestation of the sealed ghettoes’ collective psyche 263n39 Theresienstadt 136, 138 Gibson, Guy 218 Gilbert (psychologist) 77 Gilberte 105, 108 Gilliam, Terry 210 Gilroy, Paul: Between Camps 21 Glicksman Real Estates Interests 79 Godard, Jean-Luc 58 Histoire(s) du Cinéma 51–52 Goebbels, Josef 174 golem 145, 155, 263n39

INDEX Gömez, Norberto 272n15 Gordon, Avery 209, 218 Gore, Al 248n14 Gorriarena, Carlos 272n8 Gottesdammerung (the End of Time) 144 Gould, Jack 74, 75 Gourski, Josef 156 Grass, Günter 210 Grimm, Jakob 263n39 Gross-Rosen concentration camp, near Wroclaw, Poland 5, 124, 257n3 Grossman, Mendel 261n5 grotesque heads, tradition of 154 Ground Zero 48 Grundig, Lea: Under the Sign of the Swastika 133 Grunwal(d), Françoise 166 Guagnini, Nicolás 272n15 Guardian 205 gulags 11 historical origins of the concentrationary in xviii and Rousset 3, 241n1 Gulf Wars 48 Günskirchen concentration camp, Austria 136, 138 Gurs concentration camp, near Pau, France 26, 161, 162–63, 180, 188 Arendt’s incarceration in 162, 181, 182, 183 becomes a concentration camp for foreign Jews 180 described 180–81 effect on Salomon’s work 172–73, 184 established by the French (1939) 180 and European artists and intellectuals 162–63 Gurs Haggadah 183, 187 a key centre to which Germans were sent 180 mass exodus from 182, 183 number of internees 181 Salomon’s incarceration in 161, 168, 174, 179 unrepresented in Life? or Theatre? 161, 186, 188, 189 Habe, Hans (Janos Békessy) 183

301

Haggadah 144, 183, 184, 187 Halacha 145 Hambling, Gerry 205 Ha’Poel Ha’Zair daily newspaper 156 ‘Happiest Days of Our Lives, The’ (song) 217 Harazi, Dror 194 Harper, Sue 219 Harry Potter series 210 Hausner, Gideon 62, 70, 74, 76, 77, 264n58 Heart of Spain (film) 65 Hegelian murder 14 Heidegger, Martin 34–35, 39, 244n18, 244–45n19 Being and Time 34 Heidelberg Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 35 Henry VIII, King 47 Herero people 5, 242n11 Herkenhoff, Paul 272n14 L’Hermitage, Villefranche, France 166 HIJOS (the organization of children of the disappeared) 237 Hilberg, Raul 80, 163, 164 Himmler, Heinrich 5–6 Hiroshima 199 historicity 49, 207 history the continuum of 208 family 172 Jewish 155, 174 and memory 47–48, 51, 238, 265n76 traumatic European and colonial 194 twentieth-century political 5, 52 Histradrut (Federation of Trade Unions) 156 Hitler, Adolf 5, 13, 17, 60, 70, 115, 213 Mein Kampf 210 Hochschule für Politik, Berlin 35 Hoess, Rudolph 164, 210 Hofbrauhaus, Munich 59 Hogenson, Barbara 77 Hoheisel, Horst 240 Holbein, Hans 47 Holocaust defined 8 did not happen in concentration camps 6 Dutch icon of 55 literature 13

302

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES

location of 8 and modernity 86 as racially-targeted mass murder 8 studies 13, 21 testimonial works on xvii and works of fiction 142 Holocaust (1979 TV series) 13 Holocaust Art 156 Holocaust memory xvi, 2, 5, 19, 21, 26, 194, 200, 223 and Charlotte Salomon 160 and concentrationary memory 9–14 defined 21 specificity of 21, 22 Holon, Municipality of 156 Holzer, Jenny 272n15 homiletical sources 134 L’Homme témoin group 265n64 homophobia 208 horror of the camps 4 compartmentalizing 4 the deadly proximity of horror and the everyday 10, 19 and Miller 116, 119, 125 new visual structure of 25 and photographs of the Argentinian disappeared 234 politics of the representation of 9 Hotel Excelsior, Villefranche 166, 167 human condition 16, 17, 20 human relations objectification of 20 utilitarian destruction of 20 human rights 3, 223–26, 228, 237, 239 humanity xix, 162, 210 concentrationary assault on 26 concept of 12, 22 crimes against 6, 10, 11, 21, 23, 28, 80 destruction of humanity in a person 11, 15 domestic corruption of German society as a lesson for 4 extinction of human identity 17 global 38 HUMOR magazine 237 Huntsman, Ron 252n41 Hurkmand, Rini 272n15

Hurwitz, Jane 66 Hurwitz, Leo 23, 24, 64–80, 251n29, 251n34 Hurwitz, Tom 66 Huyssen, Andreas 239 hyper-reality 48 I, the 14 iconic motif 51 iconicity versus authenticity 23 identity authorial 197 at Gurs 189 judicial 173, 182 testimonial 194–96 witness 197 ideology 37, 38 individualistic 218 national-socialist 60 racialized 11 of resistance 210 images authenticity 47, 49 automatic 116, 126 cinematic 51, 89 condensation of multi-layered meanings 48 contraction of complex events 48 credibility 49 dialectical 96, 208 filmic 49, 92 iconic 48, 49, 52–53, 154 migration of 51, 52, 58 moving 23, 48, 51 paradigmatic 198 performativity of public images 50–51 photographic 90, 90, 92, 93, 96, 99, 130 still 23, 49, 51 stilled 48, 51, 52, 92, 95 imaginary creative 196 cultural xviii, 203 and Lacan 215 relation with the concentrationary 2, 14 use of the term in the cultural field xviii imagination 47, 103, 113, 129, 130, 133, 155, 197, 199, 200, 206, 208 concentrationary 213

INDEX involvement in the creative process 216 Nazi 215 imperialism xv, 4, 13, 21, 33 individuality 16, 173 Indonesian tsunami 48 Inside the Visible exhibitions (Boston and London, 1996) 160 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London 257n1 International Commission Against Concentrationary Regimes 241n1 International Committee against Concentration Camps 3 International Military Tribunal 62 Iommi, Ennio 272n14 Iran and Israel 249–50n4 Mullah’s Islamic Revolution 48 Iraq, and Israel 249–50n4 Ish-Shalom, Mordechai 62 Isle of Man ‘enemy alien’ camp 133 isolation 34, 37, 84, 86, 87, 94, 95, 99, 135, 146, 205, 211, 219 Israel boycott of firms dealing with 249–50n4 lack of television when Eichmann Trial filmed 61, 63 legal system 70 national identity 61–62 War of Independence (1948) 146 Israeli Defence Force 193 Israeli government 61, 63 Israeli war 27 ITN 247–48n14 Jacoby, Roberto 224 Jameson, Frederic 215 Jarry, Alfred: King Ubu 141, 150 Jaspers, Karl 244–45n19 Jerusalem 139, 146 Eichmann Trial 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 77, 80 Jerusalem District Court 136 Jewish Cultural Organization 174 Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam 160 Jewish Mutual Society (AMIA, Asociación Mutual Israelita de Argentina), bombing of (1994) 272n17

303

Jews Balkan 54 Bulgarian 248n15 deportation from France 164, 165 Dutch 52, 57, 58 East European 6, 7 fascination with the supernatural 145 Final Solution of the Jewish Question 8, 54, 60, 61, 77, 81, 209, 211, 243n24 genocide of xv–xvi, 6, 7–8, 10, 13–14, 23, 50, 59, 60, 80, 133, 242n19, 262n18 Greek 54, 248n15 loss of selfhood in Auschwitz 141 marginalization of the specificity of Jewish suffering 13 Operation Reinhard 7, 8 Orthodox 7 persecution of German Jewish men (November 1938) 5 Polish 7, 133 role of the Jewish soldier in uniform 27 Soviet 7–8 West European 6, 7 JFK (film) 49 Jonilowicz, Jakub 252n40 Jordan, and Israel 249–50n4 Joriman, Louis 124 Jüdischer Kulturbund 188 Kadish, George (Zvi Hirsch Kadushin) 261n5 Kafka, Franz 155 Kalach, Jacob 252n40 kaleidoscope 87, 87 Kanada depots 139 Kant, Immanuel 260n51 Critique of Judgement 129 Kapos (trustee inmates) 117, 119 Karavan, Dani: Passages-Walter Benjamin 168–69, 169, 171 Karpathi, Geza 65 Kazet Kunstler (concentration camp artist) 155, 156 Kehillah (Jewish community) 183 Kennedy, President John F., assassination of 48, 49 Kerner, Aaron 213 Kertész, Imre 139

304

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES

Kessel, Joseph 62, 72–73 Kexel, Guillermo 227 Khrushchev, Nikita 61 Kiekegaard, Søren 155, 211 Kirchner, Néstor 224, 234, 239 Kirkeby, Per 272n15 Kishinev pogrom (Bessarabia (now Moldova)) (1903) 144 ‘Kitchen Debate’ 61 Klarsfeld, Serge: Le Calendrier de la Persécution des Juifs en France 1940–1944 164 Klein, Melanie 256n29 Kleinian psychoanalysis 113 Kline, Herbert 65 Klodzinski, Stanislaw 140–41 Knebel, Emil (known as Millek) 69, 252n40 Kneller, Rolf 252n40 Knesset, Israel 60 Kogon, Eugen 141 Der SS Staat 5 Kollek, Teddy 62 Konzentrationslagers 2, 11, 20–21, 155, 242n11 Koppel, Commander 69, 71 Koulechov, Lev 252n56 Koulechov effect 73, 252n56 Kovno ghetto, Lithuania 261n5 Kracauer, Siegfried 174, 183 Krauss, Rosalind 126 Kristeva, Julia 213, 257n57 La Capra, Dominick 212 La Plata, Argentina 231 Labrune, Philippe 252n62 Lacan, Jacques 17, 19, 20, 215 ‘The Mirror Phase as Formative of the Function of the I’ 2, 14–15 Lagers brutality of 133, 139 Levi’s master-narrative on 138 Muselmann as the Lager’s ultimate cipher 141 Lam, Wilfredo 183 Lamba, Jacqueline 183 Landau, Judge 70 Landor, David 62 Landowska, Wanda 183 Landsberg, Alison 49–50 Lang, Luc 160

Lange, Dorothea 58 Migrant Mother 47 Lanzmann, Claude 9, 163, 195, 196, 198 Laocoön Group 130, 260n50 Laub, Dori 198, 200 Laval, Kuba 156 Lazarean art xix, 207 Cayrol’s term xix, 24 Lazarean protagonist 83–99 Lazarus xix, 85 Le Brun, Charles: illustrations for The Passion of the Soul 154 Lebanon 199 occupation of (1982) 27, 193, 194 Lebenglik, Fabián 272n14 Leipzig town hall, East Germany 122, 128 Leonard, Lotte 183 Leonardo da Vinci 154 Less, Avner 80 Letters from Iwo Jima (film) 49 Leven? of Theater? (film) 266n1 Levi, Primo 13, 18, 141, 154, 218 The Drowned and the Saved 11–12 If this is a Man 129–30, 138 Shemà! 11, 13 The Truce 150 Levinas, Emmanuel 73 Lewis, Wyndham 208 libido narcissistic 14 sexual 14 Lichter, Regina 156 Liebknecht, Robert 161 Life Magazine 116 life-world 17, 106, 112, 113 Lindberg-Salomon, Paula 168, 188 Lindeperg, Sylvie 56 Lindner, Luis 237 Lipchitz, Jacques 183 literary universe, Cayrolian 83, 85, 86, 88, 91 Liverpool ‘enemy alien’ camp 133 Living Marxism 247n14 Llanes, Lilian 272n14 Lodz ghetto, Poland 261n5 Loeb, Ehud 181 Loeb, Ezard (‘Wim’) 56, 57 Loiret region camps, France 78 London Blitz 124

INDEX loneliness (Verlassenheit) 37 Longoni, Ana 236 loss 106 of agency 140, 155 of the common world 39 of contact 108 grievous 134 of human dignity 130 of name 26 of power 121 repeated 219 of self/selfhood 104, 135, 141, 159 sense of 157 trauma of 136 Lyotard, Jean-François: Lessons of the Analytic of Sublime 128–29 McCarthyism 65 McTeigue, James 218 Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers and Grandmothers of May Square) 28, 224–28, 226, 230, 232 Majdanek extermination camp, Poland 7, 135, 150, 257n3 Major, John 248n14 Malcolm, Derek 205 Malindine, Captain Edward 150–51 Prisoner, Bergen-Belsen 150–51, 151, 152 Malkinia, Poland 163 Man with a Movie Camera (film) 92 Männerlager (BIId) 139 Marcha de la Resistencia (Resistance March) (Argentina) 227, 230, 239 Marconi 61, 68, 251n32 Marinetti, Filippo 208 Marseilles 183 martyrdom 15, 173 Marx, Karl: Capital 19 masculinity 160, 207 Massaker (documentary) 196 Masson, André 183 masturbation 106, 107 materialist historiography 95, 96, 209 Matisse, Henri 171 Matta, Roberto 1834 Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, Austria xvi, 2, 5, 6, 84, 119, 136, 138, 141, 153, 257n3, 263n32

305

Mbembe, Achille 21 mediaspace 49 medical experimentation 117 Meidner, Ludwig: Massacres in Poland 133 Meir, Golda 62 meisje, het 52, 53, 53, 54, 56–58 Melzi, Francesco 154 memorialization 21, 22, 28, 33, 40, 41, 200 memory as an active process of creation of meanings 142 attempting to recover 198 crisis of 195 deep 25, 106 dynamic 194, 197, 199 dynamics of 196–97 and history 47–48, 51, 238, 265n76 Holocaust see Holocaust memory intellectual 25, 106 Jewish 155 mass 219, 220 media 51, 58 mutidirectional 21 parapractic 23, 51, 58 performativity of 51 political 32, 33, 34, 43 popular 49 post-production of 49, 50, 51 prosthetic 50, 51, 58 repressed 194, 218 reworking of 194 theatre of 26, 161, 172, 189 traumatic 196, 198 visual creation of 26 Memory of Justice, The (film) 80 memory politics 27 memory work 27, 58, 196, 203 in Argentina 223–40 Menem, Carlos 224, 239 Menzel-Ahr, Katharina 117, 121 Messerschmidt, Franz Xaver 154 Meyer-Taraboulous, Mrs 139 Meyrink, Gustav 263n39 military photographers 115 Miller, Lee 115–31 account of fighting in Normandy 115 apparent fascination for photographing corpses 116, 117–18

306

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES

and horror 116, 119, 125 ‘Lee Miller, Kriegskorrespondentin für Vogue: Fotografien aus Deutschland 1945’ 117 reports from Hitler’s house in Munich 115 and Siege of Saint-Malo 125 Surrealist movement 25, 115, 116, 126 war reporter for Vogue magazine 25, 115, 119, 124, 125, 131 witnesses liberation of Paris 115 works: Believe It 125, 126 The Bürgermeister of Leipzig’s Daughter Suicided 122, 127, 127 Dead SS Guard floating in the canal beside camp, Dachau, Germany 1945 122–23, 123, 128 Pile of Prisoners’ bodies, Buchenwald, Germanhy 1945 121 Prisoners Scavenge on the Camp Rubbish Dump, Dachau, Germany, 1945 120 Suicided SS prison guard, Buchenwald, Germany, 1945 122 see also under Buchenwald; Dachau Ministry of Information, London 150 Minotaure surrealist periodical 127 misogyny 206, 270n9 Mittelbau-Dora labour camp, Germany 5, 8 modernism 156, 160, 171 modernity 24, 83, 84, 86, 99 Modernity, post-war 20 modernization 5 monadological crystallisations 208 Le Monde Illustré 151, 152 Monnier, Adrienne 174 Montevideo repression, Argentina: monument to the victims 272n17 Monumento a las Victimas del Terrorismo de Estado, Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires (Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism, Park of Memory, Buenos Aires) 238, 239–40 monuments, in Argentina 239–40 Moore, Ottilie 166, 168, 187 Moridis, Dr Georges 166, 168 Moridis, Odette 166 Mosjoukine 252n56

mourning coping strategies 49 and the disappeared 223, 226, 230 Mowitt, John 212 MTV 203 Mulvey, Laura 84, 92, 93 Munch, Edvard 150 The Scream 148, 148 Munich 59, 117, 136 Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (film) xix, 24, 83–99 from celluloid filmstrip to digital technology 93–99 Jean Cayrol and the Lazarean figure 84–89 a Lazarean reading of the photographs in the film 89–93 Muselmann 11, 25, 263n28 Bacon’s interest in 138–39, 142, 144, 145, 146, 151, 153 described 140–41 and the Golem 145 image as a recurring trope in the art and literature of the Shoah 139 limit figure 140, 141 silence of 146 taboo in Israeli society 142 typical loss of agency 140, 155 Muselweiber 141 The Museum and the Fury (film) 65, 66 Music, Zoran 141–42 We are not the Last 133–34 Nacht und Nebel [Night and Fog] decree (7 December 1941) 6, 28 Naftulovici family 164 Nagler, Alexander 164, 166, 167 Nagler, Charlotte 164 Nagler, Leibisch 166 Nagler, Serka Brancia 166 Namibia (previously German South West Africa): concentration camps used against the Herero (1904–08) 5 Namuth, Hans 183 narcissism, primary 14 nation-state xv National Socialist party 5, 36 see also Nazism nationalism 12, 13

INDEX Native Land (film) 65 NATO 248n14 Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, France 5 Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law (1950) 60, 154 Nazi Germany xv, xvi, 249n4 Nazi salute 60, 121, 208 Nazism 65, 160, 187 and the burden of guilt 154 deep roots in European imperialism 12–13 genocide xv, 13, 50 Nazi atrocity 6, 9, 13, 116, 156, 242n13 neo-fascist cults of 243n26 neo-Nazis 60 nihilistic claim 146 prosecution of Nazis 150 purity project 214 rise to power 12 NBC 60, 79 negation 26, 129 neighbour, encountering the 34–36 Neuengamme concentration camp, Hamburg, Germany 5 New Bezalel Art School, Jerusalem (Bezalel Academy of Art and Design) 146 New Objectivity Movement 185 New Statesman 204 New York Review of Books, The 6 New York Times 74 Nice, France 166, 167, 179 Town Hall 166, 166 Nietzsche, Friedrich 157, 188 Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) (film) xvii, 23, 27, 53–54, 212 a commemorative study of the experience of political deportation xvi criticism of xvi, 10 deadly proximity of horror and the everyday 10 influences Sterne 54–55 politics of representation in 10 study of (Concentrationary Cinema) xvi Nigro, Adolfo 272n8 Nixon, Richard: Kitchen Debate 61 Noche de los lápices, La (Night of the Pencils) 231

307

Noé, Luis Felipe 272n8 nomos 17, 18 Nora, Pierre 50, 238, 265n76 Lieux de memoire 49, 157 Nora Studio Gallery, Jerusalem: Bacon exhibition (1961) 156 Norddeutscher Rundfunk 61 Nordhausen concentration camp, Germany 124 Normandy, fighting in 115 Norway: massacre of innocent teeagers (21 July 2011) 243n26 Nowak, Willi 146 Nuremberg prison 77 Nuremberg tribunals 6, 15, 62, 66, 70, 150 Nussbaum, Felix 161, 184–85 Camp Synagogue 185 St Cyprien: Prisoners 185 Self-Portrait in the Camp 162, 185 Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card 185 Nykino 64 O’Brien, Alyssa 88 Ohrdruf labour and concentration camp, Germany 119, 257n3 Olimpo, El (Olimpo Garage), Argentina 232 OMD 199 Ontiveros, Daniel 272n8 Operation Barbarossa 8 Operation Reinhard 7, 8, 9 Ophüls, Marcel 80 Ophüls, Max 183 Oppenheim, Dennis 239, 272n15 Oranienburg concentration camp, Germany 5 Oranjehotel detention centre, Netherlands 261n11 Ordnungsdienst 56 Oresanz, Marie 272n15 ‘Orwellian’ tradition 210 OSE 181 Oster, Daniel 91 Ostjuden 7 Pacheco, Marcelo 272n14 Página/12 newspaper 228 Palestinian refugee camp massacre, Beirut see Sabra and Chitala

308

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES

Palestinian refugees 263n28 Papon trial (1998) 75, 80, 252n62 paranoid-schizoid position 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 256n23, 256n29 parapraxis (Fehlleistung) 51, 52, 55, 58 Paris liberation of 115 Walter Benjamin’s arrest 174 Parker, Alan 27, 203, 204, 212 part objects 107, 110, 256n23 Passover 68, 139, 144, 183 Paul, St 33 PEN international writers’ organization 174 Penig concentration camp, Saxony, Germany 119 Penrose, Antony 117 Penrose, Roland 115, 257n1 People of the Cumberland (film) 65 performance, Argentina 28 performed presence 49 Peri, Peter 156 Perla, La, Argentina 232 personality disintegration of 173 moral 173 Pétain, Philippe (Marshal) 186 Peterson, Ad 168 photogenie 117, 130, 259n30 photographic indexicality 48 photographic signifier 126–27 photographs atrocity 258n18 authenticity 23 historical 49 iconic 23 long-exposure 92 as memento mori 232 publication of photographs of the camps 123–25 photography advent of 47 Argentina 28 and Argentina 28, 228, 229, 230–34, 232, 234, 235, 236 and automatic image 126 Barthes prefers photography to film 24, 88–89, 92

and cultural memory 228 and Surrealism 126–27 Phuc, Kim 47 physical disfigurement 85, 91, 95, 98, 99 Picasso, Pablo 146, 150, 156, 265n63 The Frugal Repast 146, 148 Young Acrobat on a Ball 150 Pieck, Henri Christiaan 136, 261n11 Behind the Wire 135–36, 137 Pignon, Edouard 156 Pink Floyd 27, 269n7 Pink Floyd The Wall (film) 27, 203–21, 270n9, 270n11, 270n22 constantly attempts to resolve itself 212 The Dam Busters and the Second World War 218–20, 219 Gerald Scarfe’s animations and other transformations 220–21, 220, 221 an opening shot 203–16, 205, 206, 208, 209, 213, 214 reviews of 204–05, 212 Young Pink playing on the train track 216–18, 216, 217 Platek, Felka 185 pluralism 35, 36 plurality 1, 2, 16, 17, 20, 22, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42 Poland lists timetabling train movements and mass death 163–64, 165 mass murder of Jews in 7, 8 mass murder of Romani in 8 polis, the 41 political aesthetics xv, xvii, 21 political foundings 40, 41 political prisoners, Nacht und Nebel [Night and Fog] decree (7 December 1941) 6 political terror xvi, 1, 223 political theology 34, 36 politics after totalitarianism 31 and art 237 destruction of 37 Jewish 37 politics of representation 8, 9, 10, 21, 22, 28 Pollock, Griselda 116 Polonsky, David 199

INDEX Pompidou Centre, Paris: Salomon exhibition (1992) 160 popular culture 23, 27, 183, 210, 221 Porrojamos (Romani Holocaust) 243n24 Port Bou, Catalunya, Spain 168, 169, 181 Portelli, Alessandro 142 Pötrc, Marjetica 272n15 power 3 human 32 Nazism’s rise to power 12 total 15–16 totalitarian 32, 155 Pozo de Banfield, El (Banfield Well), Argentina 232 Prédal, René 85–86, 87 presence 48–49 press photographers 115 primitive phantasies 109 The Prisoner (cult television series) 210 projective identification 110 propaganda 50, 51, 63, 135, 179 psychoanalysis 20, 27 Kleinian 113 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 73 Film Technique and Film Acting 73 racism 21 against Black Americans 65 search for total domination rooted in xv Radar libros (literary supplement) 224 Radiohead 270n18 Ramona art magazine 237 Ramos, Nuno 272n15 Rancière, Jacques 9 Ravensbrück concentration camp, near Berlin, Germany 5, 25, 52, 103, 257n3 Delbo in 24–25, 103, 255n2 women prisoners known as Muselweiber 141 Ray, Man 25, 116 Read, Herbert 257n1 Recoleta Cultural Centre, Buenos Aires 1888 installation 237 exhibition of 2006 commemorating the coup d’état 233, 236 Identidad (Identity) exhibition (1998) 232–33, 232, 234, 236, 272n8 Venturi exhibition (2006) 236–37

309

Red Army 8 Red Cross 161 regression 109, 110, 112 ego 200 psychic 107 Reichel, Hans 161, 187 Reitlinger, Gerald 80 remembrance in Augustine 41 bodily 25 collective 21 drawing as the locus of 157 future 42 painful 7 self-sustaining 41 sites of disappearance and remembrance 28 repression films about 218 of memories 194, 218 resistance 129 aesthetic 26, 28, 173, 186, 203 cultural xvi, xix French 5, 25 ideology of 210 of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo 225 political 226, 230 politics of 27, 28 spiritual 133 Resnais, Alain 57 directs Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour xix, 24 directs Night and Fog xvi, xvii, 10, 23, 27, 53, 54, 55, 212 see also Night and Fog Respite/Aufschub (film) 56 responsibility 32, 237 adult 20 and the Argentinian disappeared 230 of the cinematic spectator 197 collective 183, 195 and het meisje 52 passed up a chain of command 201 personal 195 and Pink Floyd 212 social 50 and Vietnam War 230 ressortissantes allemandes 182

310

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES

Ricoeur, Paul 155 Riefenstahl, Leni 59, 213 Rockefeller Foundation 62 Roger-Marx, Claude 155 Rollwagenkommando 136 Roma 57, 58 Romani 58 genocide of xv–xvi, 8, 13–14, 242n19 marginalization of the specificity of Romani suffering 13 named for destruction 243n24 Romani Holocaust see Porrojamos Romanian troops 7 Romero, Juan Carlos 236, 272n8 Rosenberg, Pnina 184 Rosenthal, Alan 253n66 Rosenthal, Horst 184, 185, 187 Day in the Life of Resident 185 A Guide to the Camp 185 Mickey Mouse at Gurs 168, 184, 184, 185–86 Rothberg, Michael: Multidirectional Memory 21 Rousset, David 10, 85 Buchenwald concentration camp survivor xv, 2, 85, 130, 141 coins ‘concentrationary’ concept xv, 2, 5, 17 ‘the concentrationary universe’ xv, xvi, 3, 194, 210 discovers camp systems still functioning after 1945 2–3 ‘everything is possible’ xv, 3, 11, 16, 85, 131, 210–11 forms International Committee against Concentration Camps 3 and Jarry’s King Ubu 141, 150 Les Jours de notre mort [The Days of our Death] 2 ‘tragic buffoonery’ 141, 150, 210 L’Univers concentrationnaire [The Concentrationary Universe; translated as The Other Kingdom and A World Apart] 1, 2, 3–4, 85, 129, 131, 141, 210 Royal Academy, London: Salomon exhibition (1998) 160 Ryn, Zdzislaw 140–41

SA (paramilitary arm of National Socialist party) 5 Sabra and Chatila massacre (Beirut, Lebanon, 1982) 27, 194, 195, 196, 200, 201, 268n2 Sabras 62 Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Berlin, Germany 5, 133, 176, 179, 257n3 sadism 3, 19 sadistic voyeurism 9, 14 St Cyprien concentration camp, France 184, 185 St Jean de Cap Ferrat, France 186 Saint-Malo, Siege of (1944) 125 Salas Nacionales de Exposición (National Exhibition Halls), Buenos Aires: exhibition (2006) 237 Salomon, Albert 166, 168 Salomon, Charlotte (Charlotte Salomon Nagler) 26, 52 artistic identity (Zeichnerin) on transport list 164–65, 165, 167, 189 betrayed and arrested while in hiding 160, 166 and concentrationary universe 160, 161–62, 165, 168, 182–83, 189 first exhibited (1961) 160 incarcerated in Gurs 26, 161, 174, 179, 184 Leben? Oder Theater? (Life? Or Theatre?) 26, 266n1 epilogue 179, 187–88 and concentrationary memory 161, 162, 173 creation of the world anew ‘out of the depths’ 188 dedication 166, 186 effect of Gurs on the work 172–73 first exhibition (Stedelijk Museum) 168 Gurs unrepresented in 161, 186, 188, 189 hand-painted text preliminaries 183 hidden by Dr Moridis and handed to Charlotte’s parents 168 and indictment of artist’s grandfather for sexual abuse 160 JHM no. 4304: 30 January 1933 174, 175

INDEX JHM no. 4305: anti-Semitic placards in the street 174 JHM no. 4306-08 174 JHM no. 4310-17 174 JHM no. 4318: persecution at school 174 JHM no. 4761: Der Angriff 175, 179 JHM no. 4762: Pogromnacht [Kristallnacht] 176, 179 JHM no. 4791: anti-Jewish propaganda 179 JHM no. 4836 187 JHM no. 4837: September 1939: War is declared 187 JHM no. 4841: anti-Jewish propaganda 179, 187 JHM no. 4885: Prof. Salomon in hard labour at Sachsenhausen rejected painting 176, 179 JHM no. 4903: Jewish shops being attacked, 9 November 1938 177, 179 JHM no. 4913: 10 May 1940 177, 179, 187 JHM no. 4914: AVIS 1940 178, 179, 187 JHM no. 4915: Train 178, 179–80, 187 JHM no. 4925: final painting 169, 170, 171, 188 JHM no. 4925: transparent overlay 171, 188 Prologue 186, 188 signed with initials 166, 168 a single massive artwork 159, 187 theatre of memory 161, 172 visual, textual and musical engagement with era ‘before Auschwitz’ 160, 171 Yad Vashem exhibition 174 marriage 166–67, 166 murdered on arrival at Auschwitz (1943) 160, 162, 167, 189 namelessness 162–63, 169 Pompidou Centre exhibition (1992) 160 pregnancy 167 released from Gurs to care for her grandfather 179, 182, 186–87 seeks a ‘name for me’ 159

311

sent to Drancy 167 sexual abuse 160, 161, 186, 187, 188, 189 statelessness 169, 182 salvation 103, 163 Sandberg, Willem 168 Santner, Eric 212 Sartre, Jean-Paul xvii, 155, 221 Being and Nothingness 14 L’Imaginaire 214, 215–16 Sartrean existentialism 14 Saudi Arabia, and Israel 249–50n4 Saving Private Ryan (film) 49, 55 Scarfe, Gerald 27, 204, 208, 212, 216, 220–21, 270n9 Scarry, Elaine 104 Schalek, Malva 133 Scherman, David 116, 117–18 Schiller, Friedrich 130, 131, 260n51 Ode to Joy 187 Schlachtensee, Berlin 171 Schmitt, Carl 33–37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 245n22, 245n27 Scholem, Gershom 154–55 School of Paris 156 Schramm, Hanna 161 Schudt, Johann Jakob 263n39 Schvartz, Marcia 272n8 Schwab, Eric 124 Schwartz, G.: Die nationalsozialistischen Lager 242n13 Schwartzhuber, SS Obersturmführer Johann 139 Scottsboro Boys 66 Scottsboro court 251n34 ‘Scrolls of Auschwitz’ 262n13 Segal, Hanna 25 Dream, Phantasy and Art 106 Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein 109, 110 ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’ 106–10 Segall, Lasar: Visions of War 133 Segev, Tom 60–61 Seghers, Anna 183 self, selfhood childhood 205 confronting the self as other 197 loss of 104, 135, 141, 159 racially-identified self 185

312

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES

and sexual abuse 161 struggle to regain a subjective selfhood 154 unredeemed self 145 self-presence 48, 49, 51 Seltzer, Leo 251n33 Semprún, Jorge: L’écriture ou la Vie (Literature or Life) 142 Serge, Victor 183 Serra, Richard 168 Servatius, Dr 64, 70, 74, 76 sexual abuse 160, 161, 180, 186–89 sexuality 199, 213 Sharon, Ariel 193, 201, 268n2 Sharp, Roy 242n41 Sheridan, Alan 2, 15, 20 Shoah 110, 138, 139, 142, 144, 146, 155, 156, 157, 262n18 Shoah (film) 9, 163, 195, 196 ‘shoot and edit’ concept 74 shot/reverse shot technique 76, 77 Sicherheitspolizei 248n19 sight, and the infant 111 Silverman, Max 116 simulacrum 48 Sinai Campaign (1956) 61 Sinti 57, 58 Six-Day War (1967) 63 Slim, Lokman 268n7 Slyomovics, Susan 74 Snyder, Timothy 6–8 Sobibor extermination camp, Poland 7, 8, 9, 52, 164 social alienation 88 social rights 65 society/societies American 21 Argentinian 28, 223 bourgeois 5 British 27 camps indicative of 3, 10 contemporary 144, 205 decomposition of 3 democratic 11 failure to honour the memory of the camps 12 German 4 Israeli 142, 146, 155, 194

modern 17, 19 post-colonial French 86 post-war 20, 28 totalitarian 37 world 4 Sofsky, Wolfgang 2, 6, 140, 242n13 The Order of Terror 111 Sonderhandlung 163 Sonderkommando 18, 19, 262n13 Sonderzug (‘special’ train) 163 Sontag, Susan xviii, 89, 116, 231 On Photography 150 Regarding the Pain of Others 150 South Africa: townships 10 Soviet Union gulag archipelago 3 and International Committee against Concentration Camps 3 mass murder of Jews in 6, 7–8 search for total domination xv Spain and International Committee against Concentration Camps 3 invents concentration camps (in Cuba, late nineteenth century) 5 Spanish Civil War 180 Spasky, Jerzy 227 spectatorial witnessing 48 spectatorship 50, 84, 89, 89, 93 Spero, Nancy 187 Spiegelman, Art 269n22 Spielberg, Steven 49, 50 Spijkenisse, Netherlands 57 spontaneity 2, 15, 16, 17, 20 SS 1, 4, 53 Auschwitz soccer match 18–19 and concentration camps 5, 6 Einsatzgruppen killings of Jews in Soviet Union and the Baltics 7–8 and extermination camps 8, 11 guards and officers as prisoners in Buchenwald 116 hunt for Jews in the Riviera 167 implementing ‘The Final Solution’ 209 and prisoners with graphic skills 165 suicide of former SS guards 25 see also under Buchenwald; Dachau Stade Colombes, near Paris 174

INDEX Stalin, Joseph 3, 10, 13 Stalinism xvi–xvii statelessness (l’apatride) 159, 161, 169 Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam 168 Steinbach, Anna Maria [Settela] 53, 57, 58 Steinhardt, Jakob 144, 150, 263n42 Illustration for the Book of Yehoshua Eliezer ben Sirah 144, 144 illustrations for the Passover Haggadah 144 Sterne [Stars] (film) 54–55, 248n15 Stone, Oliver 49 Stoullig, Claire 160 Strand, Paul 65 Strange Victory (film) 65, 66 Street Art Group 272n15 Sturmer, Der 179 subjectivity xviii, 19, 20, 48, 50, 55, 159, 189, 211, 215 feminine 174 Jewish 174 social 19 sublimation 129 Sublime 260n51 subliminal, the 129 sublimity 129, 131 suicide 14, 25, 121, 122, 122, 127, 127, 128, 160, 162, 171, 172, 180, 182, 187, 188, 189, 260n42 Sunday Telegraph, The 212 Sunday Times, The 204 Surrealist aesthetic 116, 125–28, 130 Surrealist movement 115, 257n1, 259n37 Surrealism defined by Breton 126 survival instinct 15 Swastika 174, 215 symbol formation 106–10, 111–13 symbol proper 106, 107, 110–13 symbolic equation 106, 107, 109, 110, 113 Symbolic, and The Wall 208, 215, 220 symbolon 112 Szwarc, Marek 156 Taeuber, Sophie 183 Taslitzky, Boris 141–42 Tel Aviv 193 television 50, 54

313

and the Eichmann trial 59, 64, 79–81 Eichmann’s arrest 61 ‘Kitchen Debate’ 61 lack of television in Israel 61, 63 witnessing of historical events 48 tenebristas 146 Terezín ghetto, Czech Republic 133, 139 terror anti-political, anti-democratic regimes 20 Boschian 185 geography of 172 insidious 135 as an object in the concentration camp 11 political xvi, 1, 223 political logic of 11 radical xvii state 240 total 37 totalitarian xvi, 223 terrorism, state 223, 224 Testa, Clorindo 272n15 testimonial identity 194–96 Thatcher, Nicole 113 theatre of memory 26, 161, 172, 189 Thessalonniki 164 Theweleit, Klaus: Male Fantasies 206 Third Reich concentrationary disease xvi–xvii established as a dictatorship 5 fall of xvii murder statistics 6 social conditions giving rise to 4 thirst 103–04, 111–12 Times, The 219 Todtmann, Heinz 56 Tolkechev, Zinovi 156 torture 21, 116 death as an escape from 12 in Muriel 85, 87, 98, 99 of political dissidents in the ESMA 27–28 Scarry on 104 total domination xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 1–4, 9, 11, 14, 16, 31, 37, 173, 223 total state 36, 37, 245n27 totalitarian mind-set xviii totalitarianism 12, 22 aesthetic resistance to 186

314

CONCENTRATIONARY MEMORIES

belief that everything is possible 32 ‘claim to global rule’ 38 effects a loss of the common world 39 military 27 monitored by art xvii Nazi 13, 19 new terror of 184 ongoing threat to politics 41 persistent threat 24 politics after 31 power of 32, 155 religious 27 state 27 total domination of ‘men’ xv, 16 and The Wall 211 Touvier trial (1994) 75, 80, 252n62 trade unionists 5 trauma(s) 160 of birth 108 collective 27 individual 27 of loss 136 national 239 and prosthetic memories 50 psychic 200 public 239 repressed 79, 193 and The Wall 212 Travnik, Juan 228 Treblinka extermination camp, Poland 7, 8, 9, 163 Tricoire, Agnès 70 Triumph of the Will (film) 59, 213 Trnopolje concentration camp, Bosnia and Herzegovina 247–48n14 Tsahal 194 Tucker, William 239, 272n15 Turkey, earthquakes in 48 UMAM Documentation and Research project, Beirut 268n7 unconscious 201 cultural xviii uniqueness 2, 15, 20 United Arab Republic, and Israel 249–50n4 United States founding of 40 racism against Black Americans 65

renewed attention to popular memory and public commemoration 49 struggle for civil and social rights 65 unknown soldier 52 urban cultures xviii US Army 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, US 6th Armored Division 117 42nd Armored Division 117 43rd Armored Division 117 Third Army 117 V for Vendetta (film) 218 Vaihingen (aka Wiesengrund) concentration camp, Germany 5 Varnhagen, Rahel 36 Vel d’Hiv round-up (Paris, 1942) 78 Venturi, Franco 236–37 verbalization 112 Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Germany’s coming to terms with the past) 54 Vernichtung durch Arbeit (annihilation by labour) 6, 163 Vernuche, France 174 Vertov, Dziga 92 Vichy Regime 168, 180, 186 victimhood xv Videla, Jorge R 224–25 Vietnam War 47, 48, 49, 230, 240 Villefranche, France 166 Vinci, Leo 272n violence cinematic culture of spectacular violence xviii historical 24, 84, 99 state political 21 Virilio, Paul xviii, 211, 218 Vlaminck, Maurice de 146 Vogue magazine 25, 115, 119, 124–25, 131 Voice of Israel 63 Vorticist movement 208 vuelos de la muerte (death flights) 233 Wagenaar, Aad 56, 57 Wagner, Crasa 57 The Wall (album) 203, 204, 214, 218, 270n23 Waltz with Bashir (film) 27, 193–201, 268n7 Carmi Cha’an 198–99

INDEX the dynamics of memory 196–97 the empty circle 199–201 fragmentation 197–98 testimonial identity 19406 Wannsee, Berlin 171 Wannsee conference (Berlin, 1942) 8, 243n24 War Crimes trial on the Bosnian war 247n14 Warburg Institute, London 231 Warsaw, Poland 7 Warsaw ghetto 52 Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, Poland 47 Waters, Roger 27, 203, 204, 270n9, 270n22 Watteau, Antoine: Gilles 150 Weimar, Germany 117 Weimar Republic 5, 35, 37, 42 Weissmann, Bella 56 Weisz, Frans 266n1 Weizmann, Vera 62 Wellers, Georges 78 Werfel, Franz 183 Westerbork transit camp, Netherlands 23, 52–57, 53, 168, 248n19, 248n21 White, Margaret Bourke 116 Wiene, Robert 154 Wiener Library, London 62 Wiesengrund concentration camp see Vaihingen Wiesenthal, Simon 62 Wisser, Karel 156 Withers, Audrey 125 witnessing positions abstracted 194

315

animated 194 conflicting 195 Jewish victims and survivors 195 Nazi perpetrators 195 Polish bystanders 195 represented 194 shifting 195 Wolf, Konrad 54, 55 Wolff, Kurt and Helen 183 Wols (Alfred Schulze) 161, 183 Workers’ Film and Photo League 64 World War I 34, 133, 197 World War II 13, 27, 38, 47, 59, 65, 80, 180, 194, 216, 218, 219, 262n18 writing and the depressive position 108 therapeutic role 105–06 Wyschogrod, Edith 106 Spirit in Ashes 111 Yablonka, Hanna 61, 155 Yad Vashem, Jerusalem: Holocaust Art Museum 167, 174, 240 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim Zakhor, Jewish History and Jewish Memory 142 Yohalem, Françoise 272n14 Yom Kippur 183 Yoselewska, Rivka 78 Zapruder, Abraham 49 Zelizer, Barbie, Remembering to Forget 119, 121, 124 Zionism 37 Zweig, Stefan 159

NEW ENCOUNTERS Arts, Cultures, Concepts Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis Ed. Griselda Pollock, 2007 The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference Ed. Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey Sauron, 2007 Bluebeard’s Legacy: Death and Secrets from Bartók to Hitchcock Ed. Griselda Pollock and Victoria Anderson, 2009 Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the Image Ed. Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock, 2010 Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures Ed. Griselda Pollock, 2013 Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance Ed. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, 2013

New Encounters Monographs Helen Frankenthaler: Painting History, Writing Painting Alison Rowley, 2007 Eva Hesse: Longing, Belonging and Displacement Vanessa Corby, 2010 Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation Nicholas Chare, 2011

Forthcoming

Beyond Competing Narratives: Memory, Racism, and Culture in Germany Annette Seidel-Arpaci