Claude Lanzmann Research Articles

Jan Karski by Yannick Haenel

Upon reading the text, the reader soon comes to understand that this is no ordinary dictionary, for the definitions of the words cannot be separated from the uniquely unorthodox and intensely subjective perspective of the nameless narrator . The overwhelming diversity and unusual complexity if not baroque aspects of the thematic fabric, together with the discontinuity of thought, often give the text an illusiveness and an obscurity which make precise comprehension and intelligibility difficult. In addition, many of these definitions, being grounded not only in an astonishing erudition but also in a poetic prose that, in its dazzling imagery and in its flashes of eroticism, can be at times challenging for the reader to work through. But the reader is likely to be disconcerted less by these seeming obstacles than moved and inspired by what the narrator has poured into these definitions. Some of the subjects included are poignant anecdotes of his tumultuous past, isolated incidents of a childhood characterized by great sadness but also by a compulsive interest in and by a compelling fascination for the outer galaxies, meditations at once philosophical and psychological in nature, scientific reflections on cosmology, illuminating observations (often conveyed in maxims) on mankind, on the inadequacy of language and on the hypocrisy of societal conventions , rhapsodic words describing his desire to find a lost love, etc. Yet a profound pessimism and skepticism both in thought and in tone pervade these definitions. Very little is sacred to the narrator who tends to overtly negate and rebel against human values and institutions and reject most forms of idealization. Nonetheless, a sense of hope does manifest itself in the narrator’s belief in the power of love: “Aimer est le seul mystère, sans doute. Tout le reste est trafic d’aveugles” (106). He knows that he has loved. This is his one truth, the memories of which, however fleeting and even fantastical, sustain him: “Car enfin, j’ai aimé, j’aime une femme, sans même savoir ni où je l’ai connue, ni qui elle peut être” (129). The density of these definitions would work against any rapid review or analysis. Suffice it to state that, from multiple perspectives, many of them are brilliant, original, and above all, marvelously poetic. Remarkably, these definitions have the potential to startle the reader, to challenge old beliefs and concepts, and perhaps even encourage the reader to reflect upon and to reexamine if not transform his own reality. Haddad’s literary genius shines throughout this novel. University of Southern Maine Lucia A. DiBenedetto HAENEL, YANNICK. Jan Karski. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. ISBN 978-2-07-012311-7. Pp. 187. 16,50 a. Yannick Haenel’s protagonist, Jan Karski, was a Catholic Pole who worked for the Polish resistance as a secret agent to publicize the plight of the Jews and mobilize international aid. The novel vividly depicts the frustration of a man who witnessed one of the greatest human tragedies and was unable to stop it. Throughout the novel, Haenel explores conceptions of time and memory. Haenel, fascinated by Karski’s telling of his visit to the Warsaw ghetto in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film, Shoah, analyzes the interview in the first chapter of his book. He describes Karski’s initial reticence and emotional break-down. After recovering, Karski begins the story in the past tense, and then shifts into the present. Although he says “I will not go back,” he does, as if he cannot recall the story without returning to the past. Reviews 419 The first chapter also highlights Haenel’s experiments with notions of perspective and narrative viewpoint. In this chapter, we have Karski, quoting the two Jewish leaders who guided him through the ghetto in 1942, being filmed by Lanzmann in 1985, being watched by Haenel, who is writing about it in 2009. In the second chapter, the prism of perspectives narrows. Haenel narrates the story in the third person, summarizing Karski’s autobiographical text, Story of a Secret State, published in 1944. The third chapter’s perspective is even more direct, as Karski himself emerges as the fictional first-person narrator. This is the voice that highlights the case of Poland, which Karski feels was forgotten...

Simone de Beauvoir by Ursula Tidd

88o Reviews While Paul Smith understandably makes out a quite proper case in his intro duction for considering this collection as a conceptually unified project, its interest might rather be found by readers to lie precisely in itsversatile diversity, and in the centrifugal impulse of the ideas and connections it throws up. For this reader, such an impulse came often from the cross-currents relating tometadiscursive strategies and in particular tomultiple rewritings. This latter is richly evident in the careful study of Perec's choice and reuse inLa Vie mode d'emploi of quotations from Rabelais, who may in turn be quoting Pliny or Lucian, just asMontaigne re writes Plutarch before being rewritten in turnby Celine. This highly self-conscious awareness of and play with earlier writing seems particularly to characterize the periods juxtaposed here, and the reminder of how exciting that kaleidoscope of reference can be isnot the least of the virtues of this stimulating volume. University of St Andrews David Gascoigne Simone de Beauvoir. By Ursula Tidd. (Critical Lives) London: Reaktion. 2009. 187 pp. ?10.95. ISBN 978-1-86189-434-2. This book is part of a series of critical lives' which sets out to explore the lives of 'leading cultural figures of themodern period' (p. 2) and relate them to their major works, and this is exactly what Ursula Tidd does. The series already numbers twenty-one volumes, but Simone de Beauvoir is the firstwoman to be included. The book is aimed at the educated reader who wants to gain an overview of Beauvoir's lifeand work, not the specialist. Notes are kept to aminimum, works are quoted inEnglish, and thebibliography ishighly selective. Tidd, however, does not simplify Beauvoir's thought and does not shun presentation of her philosophical ideas. The text is short (166 pages ofmain text) and is illustratedwith thirty-sixphotos, most of these being of Beauvoir at various ages. The task of presenting a major thinker and prolific writer in such a short space cannot have been easy, but Tidd has done itvery well. She has synthesized a lot of information and presented it in a clear narrative. Her text ismainly descriptive?she isnot defending a thesis?but she expertly weaves together Beauvoir's life and themajor historical events of the twentieth century and shows what impact these have had on her thinking and writing. Tidd has adopted a dual structure,mainly chronological but also thematic, di viding Beauvoir's life into seven periods that correspond to seven themes, such as 'The Birth of an Intellectual' or 'Becoming aWoman'. The topic of the Other is one that Tidd highlights in her presentation. In her chapter 'The Problem of the Other' she looks at the relationship between Beau voir and Jean-Paul Sartre and their famous pact, the tragedy of her friend Zaza's death, and the role played by Olga Kosakievicz both in Beauvoir's life and in her work, since Xaviere inVlnvitee is based on her. At that point in Beauvoir's life theOther was something to be eliminated, as Francoise does inVlnvitee. In MLR, 105.3, 20!0 881 the following chapter, 'The Discovery of History, Tidd shows how the Second World War prompted Beauvoir to become involved politically; how, rather than suppressing theOther, shewas going to discover theOthers of her contemporary society. Beauvoir, as everybody knows, was to denounce in Le Deuxieme Sexe the oppression of women in patriarchy, but also, which is less well known, she was to expose in La Vieillesse the ways elderly people are badly treated in a society geared towards productivity and youth. Tidd also narrates Beauvoir's involvement with her significant Others, mainly Sartre and Nelson Algren, but also Claude Lanzmann, and Sylvie Le Bon. She relies, of course, on Beauvoir's autobiographies, but also on more recently published letters and diaries, as well as critical studies. Tidd discusses all of Beauvoir's major works and even some of her lectures, such as those she gave in Japan, summarizing the argument or the plot and highlighting themain ideas. She signals too what kind of reception some of the essays and novels had. Beauvoir emerges as a formidable figure, perhaps more of a philoso pher...

Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture

Reviewed by: Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture Michael A. Chaney (bio) Woolfork, Lisa . Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. Argumentatively compact yet refreshingly eclectic in its use of evidence, Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture offers an original contribution to scholarship on the cultural legacies of slavery. As a whole, Woolfork's six chapters argue that representations of bodily responses to the trauma of slavery in African American popular culture reveal a type of knowledge, a corporeal knowledge of traumatic experience that runs counter to the elusive trauma of much literary theory on trauma. Rather than the predominantly psychic domain of Freudian trauma, which is available only through oblique reference, the texts investigated here propose a distinctly diasporic trauma that is imaginatively available to bodily experience. Through fictional and performative devices of time travel, contemporary black bodies return to the slave past in the novels, films, and tourist sites [End Page 578] that Woolfork cogently describes. As explained by the anecdotal refrain from the introduction, they "go there to know there." The value of Woolfork's study comes in the variety of texts that encode such time-traveling journeys back to the knowable "there" of slavery—Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Haile Gerima's film Sankofa (1993), Phyllis Perry's Stigmata (1989), the reformatory films Brother Future (1991) and The Quest for Freedom: The Harriet Tubman Story (1992), debates surrounding Colonial Williamsburg's 1994 slave auction, the ritual reenactment of the Middle Passage The Maafa Suite: A Healing Journey, and comedic representations of slavery in Chappelle's Show. If there is a weakness in Woolfork's selective staging of conventional notions of trauma, it is made up for by the book's rich description and insightful re-situating of such texts as bodily types of epistemology. The result is an expanded understanding of vernacular theories of memory and traumatic knowledge. The introduction does a fine job of articulating the scope and purpose of the book: to consider bodily epistemology—a "representational strategy that uses the body of a present-day protagonist to register the traumatic slave past" (2)—as a means to challenge the principle of latency in much trauma theory. Referencing the work of Cathy Caruth, Walter Benn Michaels, Claude Lanzmann, Michael Rothberg, and others, Woolfork makes the case that most theories of trauma are anti-representational. They posit an essentially elusive trauma that prefers psychic registration over physical or corporeal responses and an indirect rather than direct experience of the originary trauma. In Woolfork's view, a contrary theory underwrites such works as Butler's Kindred, one of the primary subject texts of chapter one, as the novel imagines the protagonist not allegorically engaging with the traumatic past as Freudian theory would have it, but directly engaging with the past and as a result critiquing the implicitly racist mind-body split espoused by current invocations of trauma in literary theory. Still, Woolfork's positioning of a heterogeneous array of contemporary trauma theory into the role of the straw-man (so unvarying that a whole paragraph from the introduction on this trend in trauma theory is repeated verbatim in the first chapter) may leave some readers disenchanted. Nevertheless, the force of Woolfork's argument centers less on bodily epistemology's difference from Freudian trauma than on the differences (often gendered) between one textual deployment of it and another. A comparative methodology, in fact, appears as an organizational strategy within each chapter. Thus, whereas Butler's novel produces not only a supernatural opportunity for the present-day Dana to experience slavery directly, but also an intellectual remove from the collapse of past and present in which Dana is able to contextualize her experience using knowledge derived from historical texts, Mona, the protagonist of Gerima's Sankofa, is forced to lose her pre-time travel consciousness, becoming the vessel of the actual slave whose consciousness overtakes her body. Characterizing this difference as dual approaches to empathy, Woolfork embarks in the second chapter to consider the novel Stigmata as a reconciliation of the two. According to Woolfork, the bodily referents and quilting aesthetics in Perry's novel "open up a space to rethink the antirepresentational...

Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century by Warren Motte

MLR, 105.3, 20!0 881 the following chapter, 'The Discovery of History, Tidd shows how the Second World War prompted Beauvoir to become involved politically; how, rather than suppressing theOther, shewas going to discover theOthers of her contemporary society. Beauvoir, as everybody knows, was to denounce in Le Deuxieme Sexe the oppression of women in patriarchy, but also, which is less well known, she was to expose in La Vieillesse the ways elderly people are badly treated in a society geared towards productivity and youth. Tidd also narrates Beauvoir's involvement with her significant Others, mainly Sartre and Nelson Algren, but also Claude Lanzmann, and Sylvie Le Bon. She relies, of course, on Beauvoir's autobiographies, but also on more recently published letters and diaries, as well as critical studies. Tidd discusses all of Beauvoir's major works and even some of her lectures, such as those she gave in Japan, summarizing the argument or the plot and highlighting themain ideas. She signals too what kind of reception some of the essays and novels had. Beauvoir emerges as a formidable figure, perhaps more of a philoso pher than a fiction writer, since Tidd puts the accent on her ideas. Tidd obviously respects Beauvoir, and this is reflected in the tactful handling of some of themore controversial aspects of her life. This is an excellent introduction to Beauvoir's work, life,and myth. Swansea University Catherine Rodgers Fiction Now: The French Novel in theTwenty-First Century. ByWarren Motte. Champaign, IL, and London: Dalkey Archive Press. 2008. 237 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-1-56478-503-9. Although byWarren Motte's own avowal this accessible volume isnot intended to provide a comprehensive survey of the extreme contemporain, it defies perennial pronouncements of the terminal crisis of the French novel. Concentrating on the Metropolitan French novel that is his area of expertise, and by taking a series of what he describes as 'soundings' (p. 10), Motte seeks to put the range and diversity of the French contemporary critical novel on display' (p. 33). While the descriptor critical' remains somewhat opaque, the opening chapter identifies a personal preference forwriters who situate themselves questioningly in relation to literary tradition and to the cultural and political challenges of the turn of the twenty-firstcentury. With their self-reflexivemetaliterary strategies and a concern for certain kinds ofmarginality (though questions of gender and sexuality tend to be elided), forMotte, 'they share a crucial will tomake French fiction new' (pp. 13-14). The fictions featured (together with a helpful list of authors who were also candidates for inclusion) are for themost part published by Minuit and P.O.L. Each chapter operates discretely as a comprehensive introduction to recentworks by eightwriters: JeanEchenoz, Christian Gailly, Gerard Gavarry, Patrick Lapeyre, Helene Lenoir, Christine Montalbetti, Marie Redonnet, and Lydie Salvayre. Ar ranged from best to least known, this ordering arguably risks the occlusion of the 882 Reviews less familiar writers bymore established figures (Echenoz, Gailly, Redonnet, and Salvayre). Single works of fiction are situated in the context of the author's oeuvre and, to a lesser extent, the field of cultural production, although the chapter on Salvayre surveys the author's output since 1990. Each chapter is a lively and artful mix of description and analysis, which gives the reader a clear sense of narratives at once in terms of form, content, and the relationship between the two, though unfortunately, and no doubt due to editorial pressures, quotations are given only inEnglish. Accessibly, if sometimes fleetingly,Motte draws on critical perspectives includ ing those ofMarc Auge, Michel de Certeau, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Guy Debord, Jacques Derrida, Gerard Genette, and Emmanuel Levinas (plus be yond this francophone frame of reference, Gerald Prince, Edward Said, Tvzetan Todorov, and several contemporary critics of recent French fiction). There is, for example, productive reference to Derrida on hospitality as a way of discussing Marie Redonnet's Diego (Paris: Minuit, 2005), though amore predictable recourse toAuge undercuts the claims for originality ofGerard Gavarry's Hop-Id! Un deux trois (Paris: P.O.L., 2001). None the less,Motte's account of Gavarry's inventive metalinguistic perspectives on life in the banlieue otherwise lives up to his...

Film sound and American cultural memory: Resounding trauma in Sophie’s Choice

One of the most dynamic discussions in memory studies concerns memory’s infusion with phantasy, which Freud also referred to as fantasy. This article examines how memory and fantasy intermingle in ways analogous to the ambivalent human experience of sound: sounds and musical cues can both trigger memories and be active in repressing them by encoding them into fantasmatic ‘counter memories’. Taking Alan J. Pakula’s film Sophie’s Choice (1982) as a case study, I examine how the three principal characters are traumatized by intruding sounds, but use music to repress or reconfigure the memories these sounds trigger. Sophie’s memories of Auschwitz are signalled by Hamlisch’s flute, which provides the soundscape of her fantasy-infused flashbacks; her companion Nathan’s delusional ‘memories’ of the war are safely repressed when the oboe supplies him with his ego’s anthem; and sounds from the narrator Stingo’s childhood rupture the nostalgic soundtrack of violins accompanying his fantasy-inflected narrative. The relevance of Pakula’s melodrama to the social memory of the Holocaust lies in its challenge to the polarized debate between modernist refusals to represent the past ‘directly’ (as in Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah) and realist attempts at ‘total representation’ (Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List). In Sophie’s Choice, acts of individual memory, infused with fantasy soundscapes, are analogous to broader processes of social memory, which are always instilled with our fantasies of what might have been.

Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust

Susan Sontag said that ‘shooting’ a subject and shooting a human being (the camera and the gun) are ‘congruent activities’. Libby Saxton takes this dictum seriously in her treatment of the Holocaust and the ethics of film-making and spectatorship to produce a work of immense maturity and sensitivity on the topic. She approaches some of the classic films on the Holocaust – Nuit et brouillard, Shoah, Schindler's List – and some of the heated critical debates in France in recent years about the representation of atrocity, not to take sides (as is so often the case) nor to moralise on interdictions and prohibitions, but to consider the ‘ethical dynamics’ of different strategies of film-making and spectatorship. She disentangles polemical pronouncements from actual works to show that, despite the apparent opposition between the anti-representational stance of Claude Lanzmann and the belief in the historical and testimonial power of the image expressed by Jean-Luc Godard and Georges Didi-Huberman, Lanzmann's Shoah and Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma have more in common than one might think. Central to Saxton's argument is the view that responsible forms of witnessing atrocity involve making absences speak and, as Jacques Rancière says, ‘mak(ing) manifest the invisible’ by revealing the image's eternal gesture to an elusive elsewhere (hence the title ‘haunted images’). In this sense, Lanzmann's staged incarnations of trauma through affectively-charged gestures in the present and Godard's staged encounter between cinema and suffering through a dizzying montage of images both represent, in their different ways, an ethical encounter with horror by exploring the ambivalent process of witnessing catastrophe and loss. Saxton's careful and nuanced approach also dismisses the opposition between Nuit et brouillard and Shoah (advocated largely by Lanzmann himself according to the use or non-use of the archive) to show a common concern with material traces in the present and the ethics of spectatorship. For Saxton, film becomes ‘a site of ethical reflection’, no matter what filmic strategy is employed, when it refuses to aestheticise the real and to trap the other within a screen of the same, and self-consciously dramatises its own blindness. Serge Daney's famous critique of ‘le travelling’ in Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo serves as a timely reminder of the frontier between responsible and irresponsible filming. Drawing also on Agamben's discussion of the Muselmann in the camps and, more importantly, Levinas's writing on ethics and the alterity of the ‘visage’, she concludes with a fascinating analysis of the face in the early films of Resnais and Marker to show how the gaze in their works is transformed from spectacle into an exchange of glances without closure. This is responsible witnessing because, in refusing the voyeuristic impulse and asserting the primacy of non-seeing, these film-makers stage film's response to history not as an alignment of the camera and the gun but as ‘a series of missed encounters’. Written in lucid prose, and combining philosophical insight with brilliant film criticism, this book will be the leading statement on ways of seeing the Holocaust for years to come.

The Illiterate Reader: Aphasia after Auschwitz

On the bases of discussions of Art Spiegelman's Maus and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah , as well as of Charlotte Delbo's, Jean Améry's, and Primo Levy's memoirs, Fred Wander's The Seventh Well , John Felstiner's translation of Celan's Todesfuge , and Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader , this paper presents a model for reading the Holocaust structured around the ideas of “illiteracy” and “aphasia,” the opportunity to transform linguistic disability into a means of access to what seems “beyond the word.” Rather than precluding insight, verbal insufficiency serves as a form of “negative capability,” the potential to dwell in a space with no complete answers, no security, respecting the terms upon which victims of the event had to read their own experience. Using specifically language-related terms emphasizes the difference between knowing about an event through representation and knowledge from direct personal exposure, not to detract from the limits of understanding outlined by trauma theory but to decouple the experience of trauma itself from reading about it. Our belatedness, reading “after Auschwitz,” carries the ethical obligation to recognize the distinction between then and now, between illiteracy as inability to derive meaning from an event without context and a willful blindness that chooses to deny, between aphasia from immediate injury and aphasia from posthumous grief. The Nazi genocide of the Jews leaves a legacy of semantic abuse, yet the voice of the witness also persists, allowing us to turn linguistic breakdown into insight. To read with insightful illiteracy, to recognize our aphasic limitations, is not merely a strategy for coming to terms with the Holocaust but an ethical necessity.

Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays, Stuart Liebman, ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), xi + 253 pp. + 20 halftones, cloth $99.00, pbk. $30.00.

Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays, edited (and, in part, translated) by Stuart Liebman, is an important collection that will prove indispensable to scholars and students of Lanzmann's monumental film. More broadly, it will appeal to anyone interested in Holocaust cinema and this seminal moment in its history—a film that Liebman terms “a cultural achievement of the greatest magnitude” (p. 4). In his introduction, Liebman points out the filmmaker's groundbreaking accomplishment in premiering Shoah in 1985, when few eyewitness accounts had reached broad audiences and videotaping projects were in their infancy. While there had been significant films on the Holocaust, none, according to Liebman, “had faced the awful facts of the Jewish genocide head on, without political distortion or mystification” (p. 6). Indeed, Lanzmann's signal achievement was his refusal to transform, instrumentalize, mythologize, or otherwise mitigate the horrors on which he focused. Nor did he wish to give a causal explanation or even memorialize in traditional terms. Rather, by insisting on the “moral proximity of the Shoah”—on its immediacy—Lanzmann made the past present for viewers “without adulteration, and with its ironies and horrors intact in all their grisly complexity” (p. 9). This immediacy is effected through the use of testimonial fragments that Lanzmann describes as constituting “an incarnation, a resurrection” (quoted on p. 13); as viewers of the film well know, the filmmaker concentrates on the mechanics of mass murder without any recourse to archival film clips, whose truth value he suspected. Liebman notes that “a firm principle thus anchors Lanzmann's film: mimesis, the pictorial reproduction of the awful circumstances in which the Jews met death, is not essential for—indeed, is a hindrance to—anamnesis, the calling to mind of the process of their destruction” (p. 14). Such anamnesis (really a different type of memorialization, perhaps without sentimentality) is assisted by Lanzmann's other innovation: the staged cinematic return of principal witnesses to the landscapes of their suffering. While by now this has become a common trope in Holocaust film (and other media), it was not as common in 1985. Altogether, Liebman's incisive introduction focuses on the enduring and disarming immediacy of Lanzmann's film and its argument against sense-making abstractions of the Holocaust, including those embodied in the use of the name itself. In creating a work of imposing length and in his refusal to present an all-encompassing narrative of the Shoah, in projecting disjunctures and pauses and long silences, Lanzmann “imposes an uncommon burden on the spectators of Shoah, one that requires commitment, sharpened attention, and reflection” (p. 17).

“A Scandalous Woman”? Beauvoir in Paris, January 2008

Simone De Beauvoir, France's most famous woman intellectual, was born in paris on 9 January 1908. Exactly one hundred years later, Paris gave her a birthday party: an international conference presided over by another famous woman intellectual, Julia Kristeva. The conference, held during 9–11 January in the remains of a Franciscan convent that the city bequeathed to the University of Paris, attracted a large crowd despite the rainy weather and the drafty Gothic hall, where you had to sit in your winter coat. At the opening and closing sessions, two of Nicolas Sarkozy's female ministers made an appearance; in between, the speakers included celebrities who had known Beauvoir (most notably the maker of the film Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, who was her young lover in the 1950s and who now edits the journal she and Sartre founded, Les temps modernes), well-known writers and journalists, activists in the women's movement who had worked with Beauvoir in the last years of her life, and old friends, who shared their reminiscences, as well as translators of her works and scholars young and old from all over the world. Beauvoir's adopted daughter and literary executor, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, was in attendance throughout the proceedings; all in all, more than fifty people participated in the program. The first Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women's Freedom was awarded to two women writers known for their courageous critiques of Islamic fundamentalism: the Somalian Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Bangladeshi Taslina Nasreen, who could not be there in person but who sent greetings. There were film screenings in the evenings, a “cocktail” at City Hall, and a concluding banquet at La Coupole, where Beauvoir had lunched with Sartre every day for many years.

The Special Case of Four Auschwitz Photographs

The Special Case of Four Auschwitz Photographs Susan A. Crane (bio) Review of: Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Paris, 2001: an exhibition that commemorates the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of the Holocaust stirs up a vehement public debate. Georges Didi-Huberman, a critic and unconventional art historian of Jewish descent who has written on European painting and the depiction of hysteria in photography, contributes an essay to the exhibition catalog highlighting four particular photographs from the exhibit, which prompts further outrage.1 More outrage, one might wearily note, than information about the camps had caused at the time the photographs were made; but less, perhaps, than was caused when the first atrocity images of the liberated concentration camps appeared in Western newspapers and news reels in 1945. What is it about these photographs, after all these years of exposure and all our familiar outrage regarding their subject, that still prompts intense polemics? Didi-Huberman's contributions to this debate have now been translated into English. The translation includes the original exhibition catalog essay (Part 1: "Images in Spite of All") and Didi-Huberman's response to critics (Part 2: "In Spite of the All Image"; originally Images malgré tout, 2003). The oddly old-fashioned, elaborately detailed table of contents will make no sense to anyone who hasn't already read the book; this questionable editorial choice appears to indulge the author, as does the decision not to present the other side of the debate, which appeared in the pages of Les temps moderns (March-May 2001), in columns by Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux. The book would have benefitted from a translation of these articles, since Didi-Huberman engages in frequent exegesis with them. Clearly, without these provocations, the second half of this volume would not exist. But the choice to translate Didi-Huberman is timely. While the debate has distinctively French concerns, the larger problematic of the (limits of) representation of the Holocaust remains a fraught subject for Western scholars, and Didi-Huberman's polemic takes the discussion in a new and productive direction. The controversy over the Parisian exhibition focused on four famous photographs from Auschwitz, taken at the height of the Final Solution in 1944. The photographs were taken by members of the so-called "Sonderkommandos," Jewish victims who were forced to participate in the genocide of their own people by removing the Nazis' victims from the gas chambers and destroying the corpses through fire or mass burial (sometimes, in response to wartime stringencies, both). The identity of the photographer/s is uncertain; surviving records left by members of the Sonderkommandos indicate the names of those involved in making the images. These records also show that they were able to smuggle the camera into the camp and the film out again, in a toothpaste tube, with the assistance of the Polish Underground (10-11). These are the only surviving images that show any aspect of the gas chamber operations, and because they represent an act of resistance by victims of genocide, they have retained an exceptional status among Holocaust sources. However, their exhibition in Paris was considered by some to be a provocation-either to Holocaust deniers, who would challenge the veracity of these admittedly poor images, or to more sophisticated viewers who expressed affinities with Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker, whose remarkable documentary "Shoah" (1985) proscribed the use of archival images in favor of eyewitness testimony and film shot at the scenes of the crimes in the 1970s-80s. Holocaust deniers, of course, have never depended on actual evidence to promulgate their delusions. On ethical and aesthetic grounds, the second set of criticisms is more substantial and reflects a peculiarly French concern with a kind of Bilderverbot (prohibition of religious images). Wajcman accused Didi-Huberman of fetishizing these images in a perversely Christian fashion ("the passion of the image" 52). The exceptional status of the Sonderkommando photographs thus opens up debate about the memory and visual representation of the Holocaust in a nation which has not yet come to terms with its "Vichy syndrome," to apply Henry...

INTERPRETING THE VISIBLE TRACES OF THERESIENSTADT1

Starting from the citation of a notorious Nazi propaganda film about Theresienstadt in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, this article proceeds to inquire into that film itself and then into Un Vivant qui Passe, Claude Lanzmann’s filmed interview with the official representative of the International Red Cross, who filed a report in 1944 verifying the conditions in Theresienstadt. Not only because the Nazi propaganda film was made with the participation of a Jewish director, but also because the Jews in the film had to perform their daily lives for the cameras, it is difficult to make conclusive statements about the attitudes of the persons depicted; there are a number of obstructions to coming to terms with the visual evidence. With reference to the work of Giorgio Agamben, Primo Levi and others, this article addresses the question of how this filmed document complicates traditional tendencies in readings of Holocaust images.

The challenge of film considered as historical research: Claude Lanzmann's approach to the Shoah - constructing history in dialectical time-images

The challenge of film considered as historical research: Claude Lanzmann's approach to the Shoah - constructing history in dialectical time-images

The Anti-Archive? Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and the Dilemmas of Holocaust Representation

The Anti-Archive? Claude Lanzmann's <i>Shoah</i> and the Dilemmas of Holocaust Representation

Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains

Reviewed by: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains. By Todd Samuel Presner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xl + 368 pages + 29 b/w illustrations. $45.00. The photo on the dust jacket of Presner's book, abandoned railroad tracks ending amidst gravel, grass, and birch trees, is suggestive of the destination of the "mobile modernity" with which European Jewry has become associated—at first as its initiating force and ultimately as its victim. Although not envisioned as a foreseeable end point, as some interpreters would have it, Auschwitz looms large in this publication. The cover image contains familiar motifs of Holocaust history, literature, and film, just to mention the works of Raul Hilberg, Claude Lanzmann, and Ruth Beckermann, names that do not occur in the publication at hand. Ironically, the dust cover photo of Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains was not taken at a Nazi death camp but at the ruins of Berlin's famous Anhalter Bahnhof, a site highly emblematic of the fateful synchronicities of modern Central European history, as Presner argues. Evoking Auschwitz by way of a destroyed Berlin landmark signifying modernity corresponds to the postmodern assumptions upon which rest the insights conveyed in the book at hand. In the course of his seven thematically interconnected essays Presner tries to establish a synchronistic web featuring the Anhalter Bahnhof as a major site of modernity and the site of mass transports of Jews from Berlin to the East during the Nazi era as the geographic epitome of Nazi Germany's defeat because of the vicinity to other momentous sites, and of Berlin as a divided and reunited city. In the first essays, the Anhalter Bahnhof—as a remnant of all these layered pasts, memories, and associations—frames the discussion of oppositions, dialectics, and paradoxes. Early on the author questions the "necessity of chronology," arguing that the past is "always subject to present legibility and recognizability" (17). Referring to Greenblatt and Moretti, he sets forth the concept of a "geography of cultural studies" to develop an alternative approach to the past in the absence of notions of historical realism or progress. Presner's central concern is the interactive dialectic of Jewishness and Germanness, Jews and Germans, revealed by way of multi-leveled comparative analyses involving historical personalities and literary/philosophical bodies of text. Foregrounded are familiar names: Celan and Heidegger; Heine and Hegel; Heidegger and Arendt; [End Page 590] Freud and Sebald. The theoretical underpinnings of discussion of these figures are suggested by references to Benjamin, Freud, Adorno—the original texts largely unmediated by critical scholarship. Associating personalities and discourses with global sites, Presner suggests connectivities arising from the mobility of people, the transport of cultural information, and responses to both. Claiming a new approach with new analytical categories, Presner, bold as Canetti in by-passing intellectual predecessors, by and large ignores the research and critical debates that shaped the current discussions about German-Jewish history and culture—Gay, Reinharz, Gilman, Herf, Zipes, Rosenfeld, Alter, Bilski, Diner, just to name a few—and relegates other important critics, Sorkin and Brenner, to footnotes. The most glaring omission in his essays is the category of gender, without which a discussion of issues of modernity, mobility, and intercultural contact or conflict lacks credibility; the time when the experience and insights of Hegel, Heine, Celan, or Heidegger could be passed off as universally applicable and male paradigms were assumed to be the norm has passed. Quite aside from the fact that Presner's couplings to explore Jewishness and Germanness may seem arbitrary, the omission of German Jewish and non-Jewish women intellectuals is a glaring shortcoming of this otherwise rather stimulating book. Hannah Arendt as the lone token female discussed in the absence of feminist scholarship will simply not do. Keeping the obvious gender bias or gender blindness in mind, Presner's book does present thought-provoking insights, for example in the Heine-Hegel essay. Likewise, introducing geography and the concept of mobility studies to German Cultural Studies is an intriguing enterprise, even though Presner's topical approach and the connections he tries to establish, especially in conjunction with the motif of the Anhalter Bahnhof...

The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival, and: Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating Traumas of Political Violence (review)

Reviewed by: The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival, and: Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating Traumas of Political Violence Michael Bernard-Donals (bio) The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival. By Michael G. Levine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xii + 236 pp. $21.95 (paper). Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating Traumas of Political Violence. By Stevan Weine. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006. xxiii + 181 pp. $29.95 (paper). In 1991, in a book entitled In an Era of Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Shoshana Felman called the current era "an age of testimony, an age in which witnessing itself has undergone a major trauma" (105). She did so in the context of describing Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah, and had in mind the way the film calls into question the relation among testimony, representations of atrocity, and the ethical demands those relations place upon the eyewitness in the context of the Holocaust. Testifying to something we've seen with our own eyes is difficult enough—time and memory intervene between the moment of seeing and the moment of saying, and the extremity of the event may stand in the way of description altogether—but matters become even more complicated when trying to account for the secondhand witness, the one who was not there on the spot but who has seen or "remembered" events nonetheless, either through listening to other's testimonies, or by seeing representations of those events (film, television, and video-recorded testimonies to name only three). But while the Holocaust may remain a watershed atrocity (and while it certainly remains a watershed event), there are fewer and fewer survivors, those who were there on the spot, to whom we can turn to help us understand how, as Felman says, "witnessing has itself undergone a major trauma." It might be fair to say that now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century—a full sixty years since the end of the Second World War—we live in an era of secondhand witnessing, in which what Marianne Hirsch has called post-memory (the recollection of events of which we don't have first-hand experience) has vastly complicated the relation among events, our experiences of them, and the testimonies and other discourses that result. That so many witnesses to the events of September 11, 2001—millions of whom saw the events unfold in real time on television—said that the images were "like a movie" is only the most obvious sign of this complexity, suggesting that witnessing has [End Page 340] become so mediated as to make us unsure of where testimonies end and representations of events begin. Michael Levine and Stevan Weine's books attempt to deal with the problem of the secondhand witness, each in different ways. What, they ask, is the obligation of those who witness the eyewitness testifying? In Weine's case, the secondhand witness is the psychoanalyst or the psychiatrist specifically charged with understanding the nature of trauma that lies at the heart of testimonies of atrocity, and with helping the victim work through that trauma. There are three basic concerns for the secondhand witness: "How to relieve suffering? How to create cultures of peace and reconciliation? How to document histories?" (Weine, xxii). For Weine, psychotherapists have tended to treat survivor testimonies as "one-dimensional clinical trauma stories [and as such] they may become closed and isolated from the broader expanse of human experience and interaction to which they truly belong" (xviii). Analysis must involve taking the survivors' testimonies as valuable in and of themselves as narratives, narratives that not only tell what happened but provide a glimpse of what is unavailable to the witness and certainly invisible to representation. Levine is also concerned that we lend an ear to what is mimetically unrepresentable but which may be audible as "excess" (in Emmanuel Levinas's terms, as "inflexions of forgotten voices" [Otherwise than Being, 26]). Such excess is only available "in the very process of speaking toward another in the fluid space of transmission opened between the precariously fluctuating positions of the witness and the witness to the witness" (4...

The Search for Legitimacy in Post-Martial Law Poland: The Case of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

This article focuses on the motives and aims behind the exploitation of the Polish-Jewish past undertaken by the communist establishment in the context of the lack of legitimacy of General Jaruzelski's government, its rivalry with the Catholic Church and democratic opposition, and the economic crises of the 1980s. Using the communist regime's response to Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah in 1985 as a case study, the article examines the military regime's attempt to employ the Poles' perception of the Second World War and their heroic and martyrological vision of the past as a means via which to respond to challenges presented by the reality of post-martial law in Poland.

The Difficulties of Verbalizing Trauma: Translation and the Economy of Loss in Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah"

The Difficulties of Verbalizing Trauma: Translation and the Economy of Loss in Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah"

Ida Fink's Scraps and Traces: Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives

Ida Fink's Scraps and Traces:Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives Ruth Ginsburg "Ja, Das ist der Plaz" ["Yes, this is the place"]—Simon Strebnik, the survivor of the Chelmno extermination camp, identifies, in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah,1 a site of innocent "nothing," covering up and silencing an act of annihilation, an act of eradication. A site of absence like this, where you see nothing because you see "nothing," a place that arrests a time of disappearing, of vanishing into nothing, is what I would tentatively call a "negative" chronotope. And "Yes, of course she recognizes it. Why shouldn't she? That was their last ghetto" (135).2 Yes, this is the place the nameless survivor in Ida Fink's story "Traces" identifies in an old photograph as "their last ghetto," reduced "in the last stage . . . to this one little" snow covered "street" (136). There are traces of footsteps in the snow in the foreground. Reduced, voided, silenced and covered up, the place stores the time of extinction. The woman, and the reader, are made to look into a void, into a "non-transcendent emptiness," an emptiness that is not a spiritually charged, capitalized "Nothingness," nor a nothing that encapsulates the Human Condition. Neither does it indicate an endless speculation of a deadly serious language-game. It is simply empty. This empty place is an ambivalent space that is and is not itself. It is that "nothing" that has not "been able to fill, or even cover over, the gaping pit."3 It marks its radical difference from its own past. It is a trace of itself. Here, again, [End Page 205] is a "negative" chronotope. In this case too, it structures a narrative that attempts to capture the moment of disappearance in a place charged with "not," a place under erasure (cf. Baer 20, 23). One could choose from a vast number of terms for that which was and is no more, to distinguish it from that which has never been. The concepts negating presence, from absence to disappearance, from emptiness to void and nothingness, have a long history of philosophical and theological discourse behind them, from the Fathers of the Church to Sartre and Heidegger.4 Yet the experience of Simon Strebnik and the survivor of "Traces" resists conceptualization. Made to confront and identify the deceptive, self negating empty stage of the theater of death, they can only look, perceive, and assert its placeness. They can only see the spatial materiality of an index with an abyss at its center; a setting delineating an excruciatingly long but fleeting moment of dying. I This collection of essays is about narrative as a way of thinking. Trauma, by expert definition, is anything but a way of thinking. However, for narrators and characters, as well as for readers and writers, narrative is not merely a way of thinking—it may be a way of perceiving, of remembering, and perhaps, above all, of (re)experiencing living and dying. For writers, it may be a way of surviving, even; for some "surviving" writers—a way of speaking the truth of an experience of "not being," of becoming "nothing." For apart from the many psychological needs to narrate, apart from the inner urgency to shape experience for whatever reason or purpose, some writers have expressed their conviction that fictional narrative is the only way through which the truth of an ineffable "negative" reality, which otherwise eludes comprehension, may be apprehended and transmitted. Fiction, for them, becomes reliable testimony. At least, this is what Jorge Semprún felt when writing of his experience in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald in the form of a fictional autobiography: "Only the [End Page 206] artifice of a masterly narrative will prove capable of conveying the truth of the testimony . . . would help reality to seem real, and truth to be believable" (Suleiman 4). Like Semprún in his autobiographical texts, Ida Fink, the Israeli-Polish writer, aspires in her stories to convince us of the reality of the inconceivable, and to "narrow the fissure between the truth of experience and its literary representation" (Wilczinski 27). Even if fictional, it is all real: "Everything...

Staging Memory and Trauma in French and Italian Holocaust Film

Reading Memory in French Documentary and Italian Fiction Film The lapses of trauma are conjoined with tendency compulsively to repeat, relive, be possessed by, or act out traumatic scenes of past ... In this sense, what is denied or repressed in a lapse of does not disappear; it returns in a transformed, at times disfigured and disguised manner. (10) --Dominick LaCapra History and Memory after Auschwitz This essay is about enactment of and trauma in !our films on Holocaust, two French documentaries--Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1984)--and two Italian fiction films--Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful (1997) and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1973). A comparison between French and Italian Holocaust cinema is not an obvious one in that filmmakers from both countries have approached subject in quite disparate fashions. In such films as Shoah, Night and Fog, The Sorrow and Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969), Weapons of Spirit (Pierre Sauvage, 1988) and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophuls, 1988), France is well-known for its documentary treatment of Shoah, representing at times banal or bureaucratic side of evil. (1) Italian directors, however, have produced various fiction films centered on grey areas of survival. This is case of Kapo (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1959), Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller, 1976), The Night Porter and The Damned (Luchino Visconti, 1969), in which survival is often connected with sexual deviance. (2) Despite their apparent differences, both genres deal profoundly with staging trauma and memory; that is, representing protagonists who relive past event, thereby accentuating impossible gap between narrative present and past. In History and Memory after Auschwitz Dominick LaCapra discusses sites--Pierre Nora's well known lieux de memoire--in terms of their connection to trauma. LaCapra contends that sites are usually also trauma sites, and degree to which trauma affects individual is marked by the extent to which has not been effective in coming to terms with [trauma], notably through modes of mourning (10). Mourning, however, came with difficulty, as post-war European society appeared to obtain a certain mask of normality. The economic booms all over Europe were of course one crucial factor in these delayed reactions to Holocaust experiences. Many survivors, it seemed, were not ready to enter into trying course of remembering, reliving and commemorating their pasts. Memory came later, and, as argued by Henry Rousso in The Haunting Past: History, Memory and Justice in Contemporary France, we are now living in an age of memory as relationship with painful past has been repeatedly fore-grounded in survivor's accounts, fictional films and novels, historical works, and so on. The basic premise of this article is that, in these four films, remembering Holocaust recalls original trauma, as wound is by no means healed. Trauma does not belong exclusively to past, and these films make explicit how trauma perpetually re-represents itself in present. Dori Laub in Bearing Witness, or Vicissitudes of Listening discusses incomplete nature of traumatic response. She argues that, as event never came to completion, survivors perpetually live with truncated versions of their past, and for survivors, trauma continues into present and is current in every respect (69). Traumatic response is also connected to how several characters or interviewees in these films assess their own survival in that many, both historical (Shoah) and fictional (Life is Beautiful and The Night Porter), have yet to come to terms with machinations of their continued existence. Cathy Caruth points out a critical parallel between trauma and survival in introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory. …

Gary Weissman. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 288 pp.

This is a compelling, meticulously argued, subtle, and literate book on an important subject—although the question of what that subject is remains oddly open. Gary Weissman interprets a number of authoritative and popular representations of the Holocaust (principally those by Elie Wiesel, Lawrence Langer, Stephen Spielberg, and Claude Lanzmann) as evidence of their—and presumably their audiences'—post-Holocaust “efforts to experience the Holocaust” and somehow to recapture that horrific reality in feeling. These efforts, Weissman shows in a measured discussion that contrasts with the high-pitched register of much Holocaust writing, encounter what he sees as fundamental difficulties—and not only because of Primo Levi's chilling reminder that if direct experience is a requirement for authenticity, the only true witnesses of the Holocaust are not those who survived but those who died. The difficulties he identifies vary in the works discussed, and his book's concluding chapter, in which he ends up questioning the warrant for any “fantasies of witnessing,” provides only a brief conspectus. He thus leaves his readers to make their own way back to the Holocaust from the post-Holocaust—from which, when the survivors are gone, everyone will set out.