Essay
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week10alecture-documentingtheholocaust_1.pptx
Week 10a Lecture:
Documenting the Holocaust
Questions:
How do writers and artists represent the unrepresentable, blunt force of trauma?
What are the qualities and aims of the documentary film?
General Notes from the USHMM [www.ushmm.org]
Holocaust Definitions and Overview:
“systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived ‘racial inferiority’: Roma, the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples [Poles, Russians, and others]. Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.”
Total: 11 million
Holocaust: January 30, 1933 – May 8, 1945 [holos/kaustos = whole/burnt]
Final Solution: Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942, Berlin]
Paul Celan and Holocaust Poetry
Historical Notes:
Musical circles at Auschwitz [Block 24]
Paul Celan and Holocaust Poetry
“Death Fugue” [Paul Celan, 1948]
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined.
He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance
Paul Celan and Holocaust Poetry
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink you and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith
Paul Celan and Holocaust Poetry
Structural Notes
Based on Bach’s fugue [Latin: fugere]
A B C D
x A B C
x x A B
x x x A
Refrains
“black milk of daybreak”
Margarethe [Germanic; Faust]
Shulamith [Jewish; Song of Songs]
Anselm Kiefer &
Mixed Media Art
Your Golden Hair Margarethe [1981]:
Mixed media painting
Impasto technique
European landscape
Golden hair and singed hair coexisting
Anselm Kiefer &
Mixed Media Art
Shulamite [1981]:
Mixed media painting
Impasto technique
Impossible witnessing
Alain Resnais & the
Holocaust Documentary
Historical Notes:
Night and Fog Decree of December 1941
Jean Cayrol as scriptwriter
Genre: documentary
Observes life and history
Makes arguments
Questions as You Watch:
What of the Holocaust does the film observe?
What point does the film make about the Holocaust? How does it make that point?
Alain Resnais & the
Holocaust Documentary
What does the film observe?
“Rationality” of camp system
Strange sense of the ordinary
Emptiness of slogans: Arbeit macht frei / Jedem das Seine
Image of the “monster”
Political enemies criminals homosexuals Jews
Alain Resnais & the
Holocaust Documentary
What point does the film make about the Holocaust? How?
Art is essential to survival
Prisoner art
Resnais film
“But man is resilient. Hands wrapped in bandages labor on. They make spoons, puppets to be hidden away. Monsters. Boxes. They manage to write, make notes. Keep their minds sharp and their dreams alive.”
Alain Resnais & the
Holocaust Documentary
What point does the film make about the Holocaust? How?
Full comprehension of the Holocaust is impossible
Editing and repetition reproduces disorientation
Alain Resnais & the
Holocaust Documentary
What point does the film make about the Holocaust? How?
Memory is not direct
Absences
Disjunctures
“The Muslim”
Alain Resnais & the
Holocaust Documentary
What point does the film make about the Holocaust? How?
Past invades the present
Censored Pithiviers shot [French deportation center]
“And here we are, with all good intentions, looking at the ruins today as if the old concentration camp monster were dead and buried beneath the debris…we pretend to believe that all this happened only once, at a certain time and in a certain place…”
Alain Resnais & the
Holocaust Documentary
What point does the film make about the Holocaust? How?
A violence in looking?
Guards: Tracking shot of bunks
Tourists: Camera pan from observation tower
Alain Resnais & the
Holocaust Documentary
“By emphasizing the inherent animalism of human nature…[the film] stunned observers with the suggestion that they, not the Nazis, were actually responsible for the horrors.”
-- Eugène Archer, New York Times Magazine, 1962
Auschwitz as Museum
Auschwitz as Museum
The Holocaust and
“Trauma Tourism”
Museumification of Holocaust memory
Do exhibits and
tours “trivialize” the
Holocaust?
Postmemorial anxieties
Shoe Exhibit
Etgar Keret: “Shoes” [2004]
How do children connect to the Holocaust?
“I was the only one with a grandfather who died in the Holocaust…I did touch one picture, made of cardboard, showing a thin, pale man who was crying and holding a sandwich in his hand…my partner, Orit Salem, said she would tell the teacher that I touched it. I said I didn’t care…It’s my Grandpa and I’m touching whatever I want.”
“Every time you see German products, whether it’s a television set or anything else, you should always remember that underneath the fancy wrapping there are parts and tubes that they made out of the bones and skin and flesh of dead Jews.”
