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1 Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film Author(s): Margaret Olin Source: Representations, No. 57 (Winter, 1997), pp Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: Accessed: :39 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations.

2 MARGARET OLIN Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film C'est unfilm a ras de terre, unfilm de topographe, de geographe I Ce n'est pas unfilm idealiste quej'aifait. Pas de grandes questions, ni de reponses Wdeologiques ou metaphysiques. C'est unfilm de geographe, de topographe.2 THE MYSTERIOUS POWER OF SHOAH, Claude Lanzmann's 1985 interview film about the Nazi Holocaust, is the outcome of a visual act of self-denial: its almost religious respect for the unrepresentability of horror and death leads to an abstention from the use of images of the past. In place of historical photographs and footage it offers present-day geography. Guided by on-screen interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, nine and a half hours of "traveling shots" and "pans" repeatedly traverse a small number of sites: former extermination camps in Poland and their surrounds, highways in Germany, railway stations, fields and rivers where atrocities occurred or were planned. These shots replace the piles of bodies, bulldozed and filmed by liberating armies, that comprise the "raw" material of many other films of the Holocaust. Shoah's refusal to visualize the past has inspired thoughtful reflection on the limits of representation, the problematics of witnessing, and the presence of the past through its traces in individual hearts and the industrial world.3 Some readings have also touched on the places of the past, not lieux de me'moire, or repositories of the past, but charged pieces of earth where the events happened.4 These places of memory constitute the "geographe" of Lanzmann's film. These are not the only places in Shoah, however. While the images consistently refer the survivor's narratives back to the places where they occurred, Lanzmann painstakingly situates most of the interviews themselves in the far-flung places where the interviewees found refuge, chiefly Israel and the United States. Furthermore, the film itself has a place of enunciation, a place from which it emanates. The literature on Shoah has devoted little attention to the places from which the survivors return to their past, and still less to the place of Shoah the film. In part this neglect may be due to the immensity of the film, its length a metaphor for the immensity of the event itself. Difficulto grasp as a whole, Shoah, like a novel, invites one to look at it piecemeal, to analyze its motifs and its characters. Yet also like a novel, Shoah has a plot, and its plot relates not only to the places of the Holocaust but also to the places of enunciation. The present essay examines REPRESENTATIONS 57 * Winter 1997 C) THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

3 the construction of the plot according to this wider "topography." Not surprisingly, my essay about geography also has a plot, whose structure becomes apparent only in its telling. But it is important to locate its enunciation at the outset. The authorial location from which I begin my journey through the geography of Lanzmann's Shoah is the United States, and from a part of that country often termed the "Jewish community." It may be that only an American Jew would wish to read Lanzmann's Shoah in my particular way. Yet the geographical determinism that makes my confession necessary is the subject, and the problem, of this essay. For my aim is more than an exercise in genre studies. Topography, I will try to show, is directly related to the power and the verisimilitude of the film; but this topography raises disturbing questions. To locate the disturbing aspects of Shoah's topography, we will have to tour this cinematic map and that of other Holocaust films, making our way through places of extermination, places where extermination was planned, places of refuge, and places that are left blank. Places of Extermination, Places of Refuge, Blank Places Beginning with an evocation of pastoral beauty, Shoah proceeds into the heart of evil. The first image of Shoah is a lovely "establishing shot," which sets the scene for the action to follow.5 We see a river; a boat comes into view guided by a standing boatman; and we hear a Polish folk tune about a "little white house." The passenger of the boat is the forty-seven-year-old Simon Srebnik reenacting the daily trips he took as a boy down the Ner River, near Chelmno, his feet chained, singing in his sweet soprano voice at the order of Nazi guards. We have been informed of all this in great detail by titles, which have also told us that the film director has persuaded Srebnik to revisit the site of the camp. His unprepossessing appearance and his voice, no longer that of a young boy, mark him as "real," undermining the look of a fictional film that the scene otherwise evokes. The scene is not merely pastoral. It is mythological. A mysterious standing Charon figure with his back toward us steers a flat-bottomed boat down the river, conveying the "enfant chanteur" as though on a return voyage to Hades, a place from which he has miraculously emerged once before. His Orpheus, one of only two prisoners to return alive from that Hell, is now to cross the forbidden river once more. If topography is the subject of Shoah, the territory to be mapped is Hell. The transformation of the pastoral into the infernal happens again as the camera moves from one site of destruction to another, from one witness to another, pursuing the description of the disposal of bodies in the Polish landscape that occupies the first section of the film. "Schwer zu erkennen" [difficulto recognize], Srebnik says when he reaches the peaceful clearing in the woods where 2 REPRESENTATIONS

4 bodies were once burned. Walking the length of the field, he describes what happened there, his on-site testimony corroborating that of other witnesses or survivors, some of them in Israel or Switzerland, who speak of burials, exhumation, and incineration in different camps. We hear about bodies in the forest of Sobibor, for example, where we discover that the trees whose beauty we see on the screen were planted to conceal evidence of the camp. Toward the end of this section of the film we return to Srebnik, who relates how he helped carry the ashes of the bodies to the river, where the current washed them away. At this moment, the camera is close to the surface of the water, moving downriver like the ashes. We hear Srebnik's voice once more, singing his Polish folk tune. The very river on which he sings we now know to be filled with human ash. This pattern has a cumulative effect. Indeed, we almost watch the survivors and witnesses transform one gentle, pastoral scene after another into the landscape of Hell. The very soil appears to be implicated in mass murder. By the time images of Germany appear on the screen, the sheer length of the film has begun to weigh upon the viewer's sense of place. In the several hours since the film began, the tainted nature of Polish soil has been established. When we reach the secret interview in Germany with the former camp guard Franz Suchomel, it is as though we have traversed several outer circles of Hell and have reached the center. Indeed, in discussing the film, Lanzmann has used the term circles of Hell to describe the movement of his narration.6 We cannot even look at Suchomel directly: like the sight of a solar eclipse, the sight of him necessitates precautions. We see him on a video monitor via the technical virtuosity of two cameramen in a van parked outside an apartment building. But in Germany the Holocaust is not confined to the apartments of former concentration camp guards. We find it everywhere. Camera-shy Nazis still find work as bartenders in Munich, for example. In the Danzlokal in Berlin, where Jews were rounded up for deportation, an elderly German couple dances to a song whose telling refrain is "Immer das gleiche Lied" [Always the same song]. The startling sequence that ends the first of Shoah's two films conveys an overpowering sense of tainted ground. Srebnik has just referred to death in the Lodz Ghetto as a mundane, everyday occurrence to which he became accustomed as a young boy. The camera tracks swiftly down a deserted dirt road in Chelmno as he recalls his assumption that if he survived he would be the only person in the world. Immediately we find ourselves traveling down a very different kind of road: a busy highway in an industrial area identified as the Ruhr. A voice, which we recognize as that of Claude Lanzmann, reads an industrial memo concerning modifications necessary to vans ordered from a company named Saurer. The bureaucratic language is as banal as the industrial scenery. As the requirements of the design involve increasingly grisly details, however, we recognize that the chargement (cargo) is composed of Jews, that verarbeitet (processed) and traits Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film 3

5 (treated) mean exterminated, and that the vans themselves are gas vans in which Jews were murdered.7 At the end of the memo, the camera closes in on the shiny new van following "our" car. It carries the label "Saurer." The effect is overwhelming. We feel not merely as though a trace of the past lives on in the present but also as though Jews are being exterminated in the very van behind us as we drive. The only possible reaction at this point is to wish to put the maker of the van out of business, burn its factories to the ground, and wipe its name off the face of the earth. The industrial area we are traversing appears to be hopelessly tainted with Jewish blood because German industry has failed to exterminate the company that exterminated Jews. It is impossible to see present-day Germany as anything but the place of the Holocaust. Because the film so relentlessly remains in the present, we come to see Polish and German soil as tainted. In showing that the Holocaust continues to live in these places, Lanzmann shows thatjews do not belong there. As we see in a famous scene in front of a church where Srebnik listens to Poles blaming the Holocaust on the Jews, his return to Poland can only result in his renewed victimization. As viewers, our attention is often drawn to the contrast between the places where survivors took refuge and those where the Holocaust occurred. Although the survivors of Vilna see similarities between the Israeli forest where they are interviewed and the Ponari forest where they experienced the Holocaust, the viewer sees and is told that the forests are different: the trees are smaller in Israel, the forest is less dense.8 Indeed, when we move to the dense forest of Sobibor we are ready to believe that the Israeli forest is sparse compared to the seductively beautiful forests of Eastern Europe. While experience has made it impossible for survivors of Vilna to see in any forest anything but the Ponari forest, we see that they are not in Ponari, that the fire in the background is not burning bodies. The disjunction between past and present shows the continuity of the survivors' memory, just as the continuity between past and present in Germany, whose complicity we have perhaps forgotten, returns us sharply, via the name Saurer, to our own consciousness of the Holocaust. A disjunction also occurs in the barber shop where Abraham Bomba testifies. The experience, scissors in hand, of cutting hair in Tel Aviv, takes him back to the foyer of the gas chamber in Treblinka. But at the same time that we recognize the overpowering nature of memories that can transform a clean Israeli barber shop into Treblinka on the strength of a mere pair of scissors, we also see the distance between the gas chamber where Bomba cut the hair of hundreds of women in minutes and the Tel Aviv salon in which he trims the hair of only one man during his entire testimony.9 SimilarlyJan Karski, a Polish courier taken byjewish leaders on a tour of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, "goes back" (S, 183; SO, 167) to the Ghetto in a pristine and spacious modern living room; the historian Raul Hilberg speaks 4 REPRESENTATIONS

6 from a house on a beautiful Vermont road far from the Warsaw Ghetto whose history he tells. But places of refuge are not entirely safe, perhaps. The topography of Shoah widens with the evocation of the silence of the outside world. While Karski tells of his mission, the camera pans around Washington D.C. as though to underscore the futility of his effor to persuade the allies to direct their combat strategy not merely to defeating Germany but to preventing further extermination of Jews as well. We are also given to understand that within occupied Europe the resistance was often unfriendly to Jews. In Warsaw the resistance refused to supply Jews with arms, while resistance within the camps was aimed only at saving its own members (S, 214, 180; SO, 196, 165).10 The Jews stood alone. Although some of the narrative recounting the failed efforto find help comes from Karski, a "righteous gentile," it suggests that Jews cannot expect help from friends in Europe or in America. Some of the spaces in the topography of the Holocaust in Lanzmann's Shoah are blank. These omissions are not due merely to the necessary choices that any filmmaker must make. Shoah could not have been intended as a complete survey of the Holocaust. Yet there are some absences that are presences, silences that speak loudly, subjects whose avoidance brings them into the center. The most obvious absence is not from the map but from the sound track. It is that of female survivors. Female testimony is not completely suppressed in Shoah, but it is scarce and limited mostly to the words of bystanders. While Polish and German women testify, only four Jewish women speak, each one only briefly. All but one of their testimonies, in a section about an abortive revolt in Auschwitz, have an elegiac note." Two witnesses, Paula Biren and Inge Deutschkron, speak of their estrangement from their old homes in Poland and Germany, respectively. The words of the last women to appear are not translated: at the end of the first section on the Warsaw Ghetto, after Raul Hilberg describes Adam Czerniakow's death and before the Ghetto warriors enter the film, two survivors of the Ghetto, Gertrude Schneider and her mother, sing together, the mother stopping frequently to cover her face. Their Yiddish song of regret for lost love is not translated in the film (S, 212; SO, ),12 but it communicates a feeling of yearning and sorrow that gives the pair, whom we meet in no other context, the role of keening women in a classical tragedy. They are like the limp women contrasted to the erect warriors in Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii or, more appropriately, like the two sides of Nathan Rapoport's monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. 13 Otherwise, female survivors or victims are evoked in their absence, not addressed or heard. As a participant in a seminar at Yale pointed out during a visit by Lanzmann, the memory of a woman in Shoah is often the stimulus to breakdown Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film 5

7 by a male witness: Filip Muller breaks down while recalling female Czech acquaintances, for example, who had convinced him to leave the gas chamber where he was planning to die with his fellow Czechs; Abraham Bomba finds himself unable to continue his testimony when he recalls the moment when his friend's wife and sister entered the gas chamber.'4 In the course of his response to the participant, Lanzmann discussed the stimuli that enable his witnesses to reach a breaking point and evoked the power of absolute innocence to overcome emotional barriers. 15 It is as though Lanzmann meant to suggest that women are inherently innocent or, a point he himself would vehemently deny, as though there could be guilty victims. If women indeed are inherently innocent in Shoah, this innocence is probably tied to their Otherness. 16 The significance of Otherness is perhaps best explained by Lanzmann's own experience; for him it was not women who triggered a breaking point. It was the Jews of Corfu who touched him most profoundly.'7 They were his Other. These Jews were different from other survivors in the film for another reason, however. To some of them, Lanzmann could speak in his native language, French, which he otherwise used only in speaking to translators. The French language invokes the other blank space on Lanzmann's map, his native country. France could, of course, have been included. French peasants could be held just as responsible as the Polish peasants. Although they did not witness exterminations, they witnessed, and frequently helped, with deportations. The role of France during the Holocaust has only begun to be explored; the release of a long documentary film on the subject was one of the events that prompted this exploration.'8 It is easy to argue that France was slighted, like other occupied countries, because of Lanzmann's desire to concentrate intently on the areas of extermination in Poland and Lithuania and on the perpetrators of that destruction in Germany. One could argue further that there was no more reason to focus on France than on other occupied territories, such as Hungary, Austria, or Czechoslovakia. Yet, while Hungarian and Czech Jews are frequently mentioned (as the cargo of a particular transport, for example), French Jews are conspicuously absent. 19 Indeed, survivors from many different countries were interviewed (although rarely in their native languages), but we hear from no French survivors. Censorship may have been responsible for the absence of France in Shoah, which was made, after all, with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture.20 But Lanzmann's insistence that the French would never have allowed concentration camps to be located on French territory suggests that conviction, not censorship, was responsible.2' The French presence was censored from at least one previous film, Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955), whose initial release included a concentration camp guard in a French uniform.22 Whatever the cause, the effect of the erasure of France from Shoah is that one can look at the film in its country of origin without having to master the past. Unlike the Germans or Poles, whose 6 REPRESENTATIONS

8 response is often antagonistic and overly defensive, the French can feel as good about Shoah as they can about Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). "Enemy territory" need not look like one's own. But unlike the absence of Austria or Hungary, that of France speaks loudly. Its effect is not erasure. France's absence is made glaring because everything in the film is filtered through the French language. It echoes in every translation from Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. If one is seeing the film in France, it runs along the bottom of the screen in subtitles. Lanzmann's own German, English, and Italian are all heavily accented in French. The testimony and the questions are translated before us into French. Even English-speaking viewers, who see English subtitles instead of French ones, are in a position to see French as the language of translation because French translators assist whenever a witness speaks a language Lanzmann does not understand. The words of the translator, not the words of the witness, are subtitled. Language functions here to position the viewerjust as it does in many fictional films about the Holocaust. In U.S. films, for example, only Nazis have accents; at least they have stronger, or less appealing, accents than the other protagonists. The concentration camp commandant in Schindler's List, for example, has an accent that sounds almost like a speech impediment, as does the lawyer who becomes a Nazi active in the extermination process in the U.S. television series Holocaust (1978). The effect is to make the Nazis "them," the Jews and sympathetic German speakers "us." Similarly in Shoah, French, as the language of translation, is neither the language of extermination nor the language of refuge. It is as though, in French, the Holocaust could be experienced only vicariously, through translation. French is the language of consciousness through which the events of the film are filtered in another sense as well. According to the Hebrew translator, Lanzmann purposely did not indicate to her the nature of the testimony she would be translating, so that her immediate reactions would register simultaneously with her translation.23 Thus the reaction reaches us at the same time as the French language. Indeed, French is the language of reaction, and the translator is the figure who acts as our consciousness in the film. She is equivalent to the repoussoir figure in the foreground of a Renaissance altarpiece, who adores the Madonna in our stead. The effect distances us from the language of the survivors: we cannot expect to share their experience directly. However, the procedure also sets French apart as the nonimplicated language in which reactions to and judgments about events that took place elsewhere, in other languages, are permitted. As visible as Lanzmann and his team make themselves in the film, as much as he seems to lay himself on the line, the repression of France turns French into the only medium undistorted by complicity with the events that pass through it. Whether or not the omission of French survivors is an effect of censorship, the omnipresence of the French language gives Shoah the look of transparency. Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film 7

9 Redemption and Return: Shoah as a Holocaust Escape Film C'est en Israel queje 1'ai dcouvert. J'ai convaincu Penfant chanteur de revenir avec moi a Chelmno. Ii avait 47 ans (S, 17; SO, 4).24 With these words, which end the opening title sequence, we find out where the action of Shoah will begin, and that it will begin with a return. Indeed, the framing "plot" of Shoah is that of voyage and return. In the opening voyage, down the Ner River in Chelmno, Poland, Simon Srebnik returns to Poland from Israel. Israel has always played a central role in Holocaust discourse. Many narratives of Holocaust survivors end with the moment of emigration to Palestine, sometimes several years after liberation.25 In films of such memoirs, which form a genre of "Holocaust escape films," Israel is often the destination of the plot, just as it was at least the initial destination of many survivors in the years immediately following the war. These endings provide the plot with closure, but often they are assigned another function as well. Israel is often tied closely to the documentary verification of the action, the place where the film asserts its claim to truth. We have come to expect documentary interpolations in narratives of the Holocaust. They have the rhetorical function of a metonym or index, seeming to ground a narrative in reality by displaying some real object directly connected with that reality. They frequently serve the purpose of narrative closure, occurring, as they often do, at the end of a narrative. In at least three films the closing documentary verification of the action takes place in Israel. Agniezka Holland's film Europa Europa (1991) is particularly instructive because there the documentary verification is tied directly to the linchpin of the plot. Themes of credulity and identity dominate the film, which tells the story of how a young man, Schlomo Perel, poses as a Volksdeutschen named Jup to escape the Nazis. His ruse is so successful that he finds himself attending an academy for the most elite Hitler Youth. The masquerade depends on Schlomo/Jup's ability to hide the circumcision that would reveal his Jewish identity. The film evokes its theme of incredulity and the plot device of the circumcision simultaneously at the outset; after a title asserting that "what follows is a true story," the narrator begins: "No one ever wanted to believe me... that I would one day remember my circumcision."26 The theme of the unfixing of identities is explicitly addressed throughout the film. For example, Jup asks a sympathetic homosexual German soldier, who in civilian life is an actor, whether it is difficulto play someone else. "Much easier than to be oneself," the soldier answers, and, knowing how Nazis felt about the rights of homosexuals, we understand. The theatrical style of the film and its intertextual, parodistic allusions to the likes of Leni Riefensthal's Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will reinforce the allusion to role-playing and 8 REPRESENTATIONS

10 accentuate the destabilization of identity and truth. Such devices seem to place us in the volatile realm of poststructuralist discourse. But we do not float in indeterminacy forever. Role-playing has its limits. Even for the gay soldier, "playing" and "being" are different activities.27 The Jews in Europa Europa do not see their identity as a role, for they inscribe it on the very bodies of their men soon after birth in the age-old rite of circumcision. Although it is a Nazi that we see swimming as though in birth water before the opening title, it is a Jew that is nevertheless born in the first moments of the film. Squarely in the middle of the frame, a bearded elder confirms the hoary solemnity of this scene of group identity. When the Rabbi pauses to insert the name, Schlomo, into the ongoing liturgy, the individual, represented only momentarily, is inserted into communal history. The ending of the film confirms the identity imprinted on the flesh. While we watch Schlomo's reunion with his brother Isaac after the liberation, the voiceover ends all role-playing and resolves the film: "From that moment I decided only to be a Jew. I left Europe, emigrated to Palestine." At this point we are startled to hear the voice of an elderly man whom we shortly see, the real Schlomo Perel singing in Hebrew. The sound of his off-key voice, followed by his unprepossessing appearance in a bare landscape, serves as an unexpected intervention of the real in the context of this acted, largely fictional, story.28 In appearance he is far more Jewish than the character Jup as played by the young actor Marco Hofschneider.29 Moreover, the words of the familiar Jewish song Perel softly sings, from Psalm 133, are translated in the subtitles, "How sweet it is to sit surrounded by your brothers." Beyond the reference to Schlomo's reunion with his brother, the subtext suggests his happy reflections on the goodness of living with fellow Jews.30 All Jews, perhaps, are brothers, and the solution to Perel's identity crisis is to decide to be a Jew and to live among Jews in a Jewish nation-state.3' The ending serves as a return to the beginning, even the origin, as well, since behind the opening credits we heard Perel humming the same tune along with the whimpering of the soon to be circumcised baby. In the film, authenticity depends on the existence of a true Jewish identity and Perel's ability to embody it. With the documentary image of Perel, the film interjects subtly and simultaneously the assumption of a Jewish identity and a state to match.32 Other Holocaust escape films might not seem as urgently to need documentary validation as does Europa Europa. But many of them contain suchjustification all the same. Peter Lilienthal's David (1979), based on a memoir by Joel Koenig (Ezra BenGerschOm), also ends in Israel with a validating reference to documentary. Rather than film the writer of the memoir in Israel, perhaps because he no longer lived there, the ending of David is filmed in sepia, with an archival look that endows the scene with a sense of authenticity. Documentary footage is included that shows men dancing on the Palestinian shore, presumably after the arrival of David's boat. An early Zionist dance melody on the soundtrack per- Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film 9

11 meates the entire narrative. The spontaneous, nonprofessionalook of the dance, like Perel's off-key singing, heightens the sense of verisimilitude. In both films, the link between the validating documentary motif and the closing move to Palestine suggests redemption.33 There is no move to Palestine in the plot of the most elaborate of such "documentary interventions," Steven Spielberg's recent Schindler's List. But the film ends in Israel all the same. There, a procession of Jews from the "List," accompanied by the members of the cast who portray them, deposits memorial pebbles on the grave of Oskar Schindler in Jerusalem. Even without documentary intervention, the Holocaust film often ends in Israel. The sole surviving member of the ill-fated family of the television drama Holocaust, for example, is headed there in the last scene. Andrzej Wajda's 1990 film Korczak (whose screenplay was written by Agniezka Holland, director of Europa Europa) provides a more subtle example: in the final scene the children of Janucz Korczak's orphanage, who died in Treblinka, are seen making a pilgrimage through the mist. Their leader carries a flag resembling the Israeli one, emblazoned with the Star of David.34 The formula of ending the Holocaust narrative in Israel has taken such a strong hold that its redemptive purpose may not even be obvious to all the directors who use it. In every case, however, the ending's closure is fictional, whether documented or not. In Europa Europa, the validating document confers on the play of identities a fictional closure that never happened in life. Perel has attested that he did not cease to be Jup merely by moving to Israel.35 At several points in BenGerschom's memoir, David, the author expresses an awareness that Israel/ Palestine is not only a Jewish but also an Arab country.36 The documentary ending of Schindler's List is a staged ceremony unrelated to the plot.37 Regardless of accuracy or even relevance, however, Spielberg uses the documentary image to validate the Israeli ending along with the truth of the story, and does so with all the ease of a scholar who introduces the most controversial argument with the adverb "clearly." It may seem inappropriate to include a discussion of Holocaust escape films in an essay about Shoah. Lanzmann's interlocutors must have "escaped" death in the Holocaust, or they would not have been able to take part in the film. But they do not testify about their escapes.38 Their testimony concerns the ordeals they endured and witnessed in the camps. Shoah is, moreover, not a fictional(ized) narrative film, like Europa Europa, but a documentary that uses traditional documentary methods: talking heads-and only a few singing ones. Indeed, Lanzmann has voiced fervent opposition to fictionalized film narratives of the Holocaust.39 Shoah's structure, however, shares something with Holocaust escape films: its concern for documentary validation. Shoah, in other words, could be viewed as the nine-hour validating closure of a Holocaust escape film that was never made. 10 REPRESENTATIONS

12 Indeed, Shoah alludes to such a film in its opening, but does so less in the manner of a film, with images, than in the manner of a book, with words. The titles begin not with credits but with acknowledgments. The "filmmaker"(or perhaps author?) thanks those who supported him, stood by him, and, significantly, jeopardized their personal safety "in times of danger" to help make the film. The design of the title Shoah as we see it on the screen, complete with an epigraph from Isaiah, would not look out of place between hard covers. Further titles, more solidly within the realm of film convention, credit the director, editor, and producer and state the place and time where the "action" begins (the English version uses the word "story"), specifically "in our days" in Chelmno-sur-Ner, Poland.40 But the action does not begin. The printed preamble embarks on a narrative about the past. It provides statistics about the gassing of Jews in Poland and finally tells the story of a boy who miraculously survived a Polish death camp. This narrative contains as many spine-tingling plot elements as any Holocaust film: a young boy who holds death at bay through his sweet singing voice and his athletic abilities, a miraculous escape from certain death, a period of hiding in a pigsty, rescue by a farmer, and, of course, emigration to Palestine. The end of the titles brings us back to the present. "It is in Israel that I found him. I persuaded the boy singer to return with me to Chelmno. He was forty-seven years old" (S, 17; SO, 4). We have been reading in silence for over four minutes. An exciting film could have been devoted to the story of the boy Simon Srebnik. But Shoah is not that film, and we have seen that it is not, for these titles, far beyond the usual scope of film titles, make us aware of the visual pleasure we have been denied: that of seeing Simon Srebnik's miraculous escape realized in images. The effect is reinforced by the beautiful pastoral shot that begins the film; it would have made a splendid opening for a Hollywood film about Srebnik's life. Implicitly, the narration tells us not to expect to see the past embodied visually in strikingly realistic reconstruction. By providing us with a narrative Other, Shoah invalidates Holocaust escape films we have seen, while keeping their memory at the forefront of our minds. Shoah's invocation of a conventional plot only to erase it is the first of many strategies for conveying the austere reality of the film. It lets us know that Lanzmann and his crew risked their lives for something more serious and more real than fiction: they wished to chart the unvisited territory of the Holocaust. Topography in Shoah substitutes for plot, truth for fictional reconstruction. But the engaging Hollywood film that was not made remains in the back of our minds to remind us that we are watching the truth. By removing Srebnik's story from the past and placing the forty-seven-yearold "boy singer" in a boat, we discover disruptive, disturbing elements that are omitted from the narrative to which the titles allude, elements we would not have discovered had his story been reenacted with a young hero in costume. When he falls silent and the camera holds on a close-up of his face, for example, we hear voices of townspeople who remember him from forty years ago. The narratives Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film 11

13 they construct about the young man whose singing they remember are as sentimental as his song of a little white house, or as the film that might have been ("He sang, but his heart wept," S, 19; SO, 5).41 But we soon find that the latent anti- Semitism that caused the Holocaust has not vanished. The mood, which began with a nostalgic pastoral, has become almost nightmarish by the time we see the river in effec turn to ashes and hear from people who still enjoy the use of property stolen from deported Jews, who blame the Holocaust on Jews, and who repeat, with a sadistic smile, a throat-cuttingesture they say they made to "warn" Jews already consigned to death. Everything we hear or see, whether from victims, perpetrators, or bystanders, is in the present. Just as there is no opportunity to dramatize or sentimentalize the past, there is also no opportunity to banish it from the present. It would seem that mythology has been banished. The film is a performance or ritual of presentation that replaces the mythological story with its traces. Rather than fit the bits and pieces of vivid memory into an independent narrative, as does Europa Europa, Shoah seeks to revitalize the fragments themselves as fragments, as though cinematically picking up the pieces. Instead of re-membering the pieces, linking them to one another, it dis-members the coherent narrative it could have made. As historians, we tend to use whatever indexical reminders of the past we can find to construct a narrative of it. Lanzmann uses traces of the past not to construct a story of the past but of the traces themselves. The traces are the story, or, rather, the story is the fact that there are traces-traces of the circumstances that caused the Shoah in Germany and Poland. There are only traces-for the Nazis concealed most traces of their work, and European Jewry, too, has nearly disappeared. But these dismembered pieces, while they may not be linked to one another, can be linked to our present life and to the "action" that begins in the present. Indeed, Lanzmann's struggle to exhibit indexical reminders of the Holocaust is an attempt to bring it into the present. Beginning where other films end, leaving the narrative behind, Shoah seeks to find closure in us, not in a "story." To deny closure in the past, therefore, is not to deny closure altogether. There is closure in the present, and an examination of Lanzmann's frame shows us where to find it. We recall that the "action" of the film begins when Lanzmann goes to Israel and brings Srebnik back to the site in Poland where the first Jews were gassed. Although the action begins in the same place as the Holocaust, the action cannot be the Holocaust itself. Rather, it coincides with the act of returning, which is characterized, like the Holocaust, as dangerous. Bomba returns to cutting hair in order to find again the emotions felt at Treblinka, where he practiced his trade in the gas chambers. Jan Karski refuses to "go back" to the Ghetto in his memories, but then forces himself to find the courage: "Now I go back... No I do not go back. I am ready" (S, 183; SO, 167). Paula Biren refuses to return to Lodz. Srebnik 12 REPRESENTATIONS

14 expresses wonder that he has gone back: "I do not believe I am here again" (S, 18; SO, 6). The ending of the film effects another return, although it is not obvious at first. Following Karski's testimony, we hear an exhaustive account of the Warsaw Ghetto, ending with details of the uprising and final destruction. The last words of the film are a former Ghetto warrior's recollection of returning there after the Uprising had been put down. "I am the lastjew," Simha Rottem (known as "Kajik") remembers saying to himself, a statemen that recalls Simon Srebnik's conjecture toward the end of the first film that, if he survived, he would be the last person in the world. Rottem, the former warrior, recalls his resolve: "I will wait for morning; I will wait for the Germans," and we watch him for a long moment, arms folded, waiting (S, 220; SO, 200). A shot of a train going past as though leaving to take him to Treblinka ends the film. We have now heard of the destruction of European Jewry down to the last Jew. Running in counterpoint to Rottem's return to the Ghetto, however, is an entirely different return. While we hear of the destruction of the Jewish people, that is not what we see. During the former resistance fighter's account, the camera pans through modern Warsaw. A long tracking shot finds for us Bunker 18, the headquarters of the Jewish defense organization for which our narrator, Rottem, worked. The camera then pans across a bleak section of Warsaw, past a construction hut on a square, to reveal Nathan Rapoport's monument to the Warsaw Uprising. It is partially covered by two-by-fours, and workmen are tending to it. A small, motley band of people watch arm-in-arm. We track in close. Then the camera tracks out again to reveal that our scene has shifted to a replica of the monument in Jerusalem, uncovered and pristine. As the camera backs away we see that it is attended by a group of Israeli soldiers. Without stopping, the camera tracks out once more to reveal the broad square for which the monument is the focus and continues panning in the same direction, as though completing the journey it started in Warsaw. Finally, the city ofjerusalem appears, shining on the hill. A cut to a mid-shot of the speaker follows, and he completes his story indoors. We recall the opening visuals of lush Polish rivers and forests that contrast with our first image of Israel: a scraggly, sparser forest with smaller trees than those of Sobibor. The view of Jerusalem gives closure to the dialogue between Israel and Poland. The beauty of the city drowns out the ugliness of urban Warsaw that we have just seen. By the time the closing shot of the train reminds us of the Polish death camps, the film, which began by leaving Israel, has come home. The ending of Shoah conforms to an official Israeli discourse that understands the Holocaust primarily in its role as the foundation of the Israeli state. This discourse places Yom HaShoah, a day commemorating the Holocaust, strategically in the calendar to make it a link in an unbroken chain that links Passover, which both celebrates the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and marks the beginning Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film 13

15 of the Warsaw Uprising, to the Israeli Day of Independence.42 Until recently, Israeli literature tended to appropriate the Holocaust for the struggle to gain and sustain the Jewish state by focusing on Ghetto fighters and intensifying differences between Sabras (native Israelis) and Europeans.43 Israeli soldiers, like those who attend the monument to the Uprising, are encouraged, partly through such visits, to emulate the Ghetto fighters. The story we see, then, is not the same as the narration of destruction we hear. It is the story of return, not only to Palestine from the site of destruction in Europe of the 1940s but also to the modern state of Israel from the Holocaust mentality of present-day Europe. The train represents this still-living mentality just as it was represented by the Saurer van at the end of the first film.44 But perhaps we have not only seen this narrative of return but heard it as well. For although Rottem remembers wishing to wait for the Germans, the Hebrew in which he says so reflects a disjunction between that past resolve and the choices he has made since. Rather than wait in Europe, speaking Yiddish or Polish, he went, like Schlomo Perel, to Israel, where he relates his experience in the modern language of the Sabras. The elegiac and untranslated Yiddish song the two women sing at the end of the preceding scene has set the stage for the warriors, Zuckermann and Rottem, to turn to Hebrew. The juxtaposition suggests the discourse of tongues through which Israeli nationalist ideology was filtered. Hebrew was the language of brave Zionists, Yiddish of decadent Europeans.45 An Israeli discourse is already operative before the first images appear. The title of Lanzmann's film, Shoah, is the Hebrew word used in Israel for the destruction of European Jewry, as opposed to the term Holocaust favored in many languages, or the religiously oriented Churban.46 From the beginning, this name determines the standpoint from which we are to comprehend the Holocaust, and to which we will return to find closure. The phrase Lanzmann uses as his epigraph, "I will give them an everlasting name," comes from Isaiah The same verse contains the expression Yad Vashem, from which the official Israeli memorial to the Holocaust takes its name. Lanzmann's epigraph is, in fact, contained in the motto of the memorial Yad Vashem.47 Shoah's ending in Israel is not a surprise. It has been carefully prepared by the topography of the film. That Germany is unlivable for Jews has already been established when the speaker who introduces the German part of the film, Inge Deutschkron, begins her testimony in Berlin by saying, "This is no longer home, you see" (S, 63; SO, 50). The camera pans around Berlin as she discusses the roundups. When she finishes her testimony, we are watching modern trains pull out of the station whence the transports once left. Her testimony has prepared us for our first look at a real Nazi, SS Unterscharfiihrer Franz Suchomel, whom 14 REPRESENTATIONS

16 Lanzmann interviews. Germany is still home to Nazis, but it cannot be home to Jews. The same is true of the tainted soil of Poland, to which Paula Biren, a survivor of Auschwitz living in Cincinnati, can never return. To Lanzmann's question "You never returned to Poland since?" she answers that she could not face the prospect (S, 27; SO, 16). Her refusal to return confirms the enormity of Srebnik's decision to do so, while her reason, that she has heard of plans to level the cemetery where her grandparents are buried in Lodz, hints of continuing annihilation. At the end of her testimony, the camera pans in silence across the deserted Jewish cemetery in Lodz. The sequence, which acts as a bridge to the following section about the effacement of the traces of prewarjewish life and the insensitivity of Polish townspeople, turns Poland definitively into a landscape that continues to confer death even on those who are already dead.48 Places of refuge are also differentiated one from another. Even the information provided about the present location of survivors is relevant to the theme of flight from central Europe and return to Israel. The film does not mention, for example, that Filip Miller continued to live in Czechoslovakia, although another Czech, Richard Glazar, is identified as living in Switzerland.49 Abraham Bomba is filmed in Israel. The film does not mention that when Lanzmann met him he lived in New York.50 The testimony of Inge Deutschkron begins with her statemen that Germany is "no longer home" and ends with a title stating that she "now lives in Israel." The title (which in the published text precedes her testimony) implies that she has given thought to where home is; presumably it is in Israel (S, 63; SO, 50).5' The course of Lanzmann's film, then, is the performance of the ritual of return. After encountering traces of the genocide, we return to the country of origin, Israel, with a renewed understanding of our purpose (t)here. The film, which began by leaving Israel for Poland and whose evidence there is presented in Polish and German, ends back in Israel in Hebrew. Shoah has depicted the Holocaust and its traces as leading inevitably to a (re)turn to Israel. When we see the final German train heading toward us it is with a renewed recognition of the continuing threat of a Holocaust in Europe and a reaffirmation of the redemptive mission of Israel.52 The Limits of Topography Like that of other Holocaust escape films, Shoah's topography is an intimate part of its documentary validation. This can be seen by contrasting Shoah's topography with that in another documentary of the Holocaust. Night and Fog is not an escape film, but it invites comparison to Shoah, with which it shares Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film 15

17 the motif of trains and the landscape of present-day Auschwitz. Like Shoah, Night and Fog also omits the role of France, although, in this case, official censorship has been documented. Night and Fog has been contrasted with Shoah because it uses the kind of archival footage that Shoah eschews. In addition, far from ending redemptively in Israel, it fails to point out explicitly that the overwhelming majority of the Nazis' victims were Jewish, despite the yellow Stars of David visible on the clothing of the deportees.53 Shoah, by contrast, concentrates on Jews to the exclusion of other victims of the Nazis, occasionally condemning, if only implicitly, the non-jewish resistance.54 The fundamental difference between Shoah and Night and Fog is in their attitudes toward the devices of documentary verisimilitude. This difference is evident, for example, in the sound track. The sound track of Night and Fog is composed of music and a narrative technique known as the voice-of-god, in which disembodied narration attends the visuals. We do not suppose that the author of the text, Jean Cayrol, a former inmate of Auschwitz, pronounces his own words, and certainly not that the narrator accompanies the tracking camera in Auschwitz. The contrast between black-and-white historical footage and color scenes of present-day camps makes palpable the difference between then and now, increasing the elegiac effect, which is heightened as well by Hanns Eisler's music. The lack of ambient sound and the fact that the location of the camp and the identity of the victims remain vague gives the film an almost abstract effect. Night and Fog, then, is patently constructed and does not pretend to be anything else. Shoah is less forthright about its artificiality. In fact, in Shoah we are so used to hearing only ambient sound that when we hear a voice, we are moved to localize it. We generally read the narrative as a voice-over only once we have localized the voice, as in passages where a witness we know to be in Switzerland or Germany describes a scene in Poland that we see on the screen. As a result, we interpret many voice-overs as ambient sound, even when we know better. For example, we may imagine that Srebnik, while floating on the water, is listening to villagers recall their memories of him. We can sense the strength of this device if we return to the scene, discussed above, in which Lanzmann reads a letter concerning modifications in the design of gas vans. The scene's force comes from the extent to which, as in Srebnik's description of the Lodz Ghetto, we have accepted the trip through the industrial landscape as banal and everyday. The full effect depends on our presence in the car traveling behind the Saurer van. This presence is firmly established by the sound track. The camera tracks along a highway in the industrial Ruhr Valley, and behind Lanzmann's voice-over we hear the noise of traffic, which brings to mind the subject of the memo. We know that we are listening to a voice-over added to the sound track, but, because the voice reads a document that itself has a voice, corroborated by the signature of the memo's author, "Just," the reading does not 1 6 REPRESENTATIONS

18 seem to be a typical voice-of-god narration. Indeed, since we recognize Lanzmann's voice and hear traffic noise behind it, we imagine that he is reading the document aloud during the trip in the car, and thus imaginatively place ourselves in the vehicle with him. This reading of a document in a real place, with real ambient sounds, gives the scene its verisimilitude. The seeming connection between image and sound spills over into the connection between the meaning of the spoken words and the content of the images, in this case the Nazi document and present-day German industry. The past has been brought uncomfortably close to the present, made almost inseparable from it. If we had read Lanzmann's voice as an anonymous voice-over, we would have been more aware of it as a didactic attempt to determine the meaning of the visuals. Like other aspects of Lanzmann's explicit participation as an actor in Shoah, his voice on the sound track exposes the film's construction, yet acts to mask its rhetoric. The strength of Shoah's verisimilitude comes from its notion of what constitutes a document, for, while Shoah eschews historical footage, it embraces other kinds of evidence. While an iconic representation is not valid for Shoah, a written document is, as is an index, an image caused like a footprint by the thing it represents. Archival footage is only an iconic, that is, metaphoric picture of reality, not a part of it.55 But the index is metonymic: it is a piece of what happened. The tactile sense is evoked when Hilberg holds in his hand a train schedule (perhaps a photocopy of one), lingering over the reality of the piece of paper and its significance as a trace of the Holocaust. Lanzmann reads more than one document, and charts and maps abound. These have as tactile a presence as the ground. The power of an index is immense. Its metonymic force transforms an object into the evil it signifies. We think we are seeing the truth directly and miss the signs that an argument is being made. We do not think to ask about the history of the Saurer company, or Germany's industrial success, because we have seen their guilt.56 The differences between Night and Fog and Shoah make Shoah the more effective film for our time. The historical footage of Night and Fog, it could be argued, would have had an effect in 1955 that is now lost because it has since been overused and made familiar. Indeed, since music and voice-overs in documentaries were not problematized in the 1950s as they would be later, Night and Fog's verisimilitude might have been more convincing then. The propriety of the use of the kind of historical footage shown in Night and Fog has only recently been questioned.57 The desire to recapture the truth may be the motivating factor that draws viewers to both films. It cannot, however, have been the only aim of the films themselves, and it is certainly not the only effect. A careful reading of the narration of Night and Fog, for example, provides evidence that the distancing effect achieved by the contrast between the historical and the modern-day footage was intended to prevent the film from doing the same job that it accuses the Nazis of Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film 17

19 doing. The film's ending suggests that its vagueness about the victims' identity is linked to an attempt to undercut the metonymic force of its own detail. Over visuals of the ruins of Auschwitz, the narration reads: "Who is on the lookout from this strange tower to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?... There are those of us who sincerely look upon the ruins today, as if the old concentration camp monster were dead and buried beneath them. Those of us who pretend to believe that all this happened only once, at a certain time and in a certain place, and those who refuse to see, who do not hear the cry to the end of time."58 The narration warns us against closure. But linking this lack of closure to the very ground, it warns us as well that the traces of injustice are not injustice itself. If we take this lesson to heart, we know that we cannot escape injustice by moving to an innocent land.59 Whether or not Resnais and Cayrol wished to evoke the crisis in Algeria, as has been suggested, in the closing moments of Night and Fog they tell us that injustice can happen anywhere, to anyone.60 This conclusion is bound up in the film's efforto deflect the subtle power of its own document, the ruins of Auschwitz, a power that would lead to topographical closure. Night and Fog avoids fetishizing the earth. The metonymic strength of Shoah, then, is also a danger. The Nazi propaganda film The EternalJew uses a map on which arrows move from east to west to compare the migration of disease-spreading rats from their Mediterranean origins throughout Europe with a migration following the same route by Jews. The topography evoked by Shoah is not dissimilar, except that the arrows of its plot run in the opposite direction, from west to east to place the Jews where, according to the Nazi film, they originated. If Nazi discourse contrasted the decadent East to the young and vigorous West, Shoah holds up the East as the place of refuge from and defense against the decadent West.61 In this day when "'cultures' and 'peoples' cease to be plausibly identifiable as spots on the map," it is time to stop proliferating such maps.62 Notes I would like to thank Dan Sharon of the Asher Library of Spertus College of Judaica for his invaluable assistance in obtaining bibliographical materials, Anton Kaes for early encouragement, and Katie Trumpener and Saul Friedlander for their perceptive readings of the manuscript at various stages. 1. Claude Lanzmann, "Le lieu et la parole," in Michel Deguy, ed., Au sujet de Shoah: Le film de Claude Lanzmann (Paris, 1990), Claude Lanzmann, "Les non-lieux de la memoire," in Deguy, Au sujet de Shoah, Among the most significant analyses of Shoah are Shoshana Felman, "The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah," in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, 18 REPRESENTATIONS

20 Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York, 1992), ; Gertrud Koch, "The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable: Notes on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah," October 48 (1986): 15-24; Gertrud Koch, "The Angel of Forgetfulness and the Black Box of Facticity: Trauma and Memory in Claude Lanzmann's Film Shoah," History and Memory 3 (Spring 1991): A number of significant readings of Shoah are reprinted in Deguy, Au sujet de Shoah. 4. Pierre Nora uses the term lieux de memoire to refer to the repositories of the past that are the subject of his massive collaborative work Les lieux de memoire (Paris, 1984-). See Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les lieux de memoire," Representations 26 (Spring 1989): Establishing shot is the cinematic term for a distant shot that sets the scene. Establishing shots are frequently used to begin films or to signal a change in the location of the action. 6. With the gesture of cutting his throat with his finger made by the locomotive driver at the entrance to Treblinka, "We are passing in another circle, call it whatever you want, of hell"; "Seminar with Claude Lanzmann 11 April 1990," Yale French Studies 79 (1991): This passage appears in the French edition, Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (Paris, 1985), , hereafter abbreviated S; and in the English edition, Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York, 1985), 103-4, hereafter abbreviated SO. The English edition is generally much less reliable than the French. References to the film's transcript in the text are to both editions, with the French edition (S) first. Translations, unless otherwise identified, are my own. Passages originally in English are from the English language edition. 8. Andre Pierre Colombat's perceptive analysis of this section of the film makes some similar points; Andre Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film (Metuchen, N.J., 1993), In response to a question, Lanzmann acknowledged that the gender of the client was a factor in creating the distance necessary for Abraham Bomba to testify successfully; Lanzmann, "Seminar with Claude Lanzmann," Lanzmann refers to the latter passage, and its message about the non-jewish resistance, in "The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann," American Imago 48, no. 4 (1991): Ruth Elias testifies from Israel about her arrival in Auschwitz as part of a family camp that no one believed would be exterminated (S, ; SO, ). On women's role in Shoah, see also Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, "Gendered Translations: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah," in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton, 1993), The song is translated only in the published English edition of the text. In the French edition it remains anomalously in the original language. 13. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993), Lanzmann, "Seminar with Claude Lanzmann," Ibid., The problematic nature of the mystique of the "innocent victim" is currently familiar to us from AIDS literature. But there, the "innocent victim" is the victim who is not Other, i.e., not gay. 17. Lanzmann, "Seminar with Claude Lanzmann," The film was Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity (1969). On its significance, see Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film 19

21 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), Only a few stray comments refer to the presence of French prisoners (S, 46, 74; SO, 35, 60). 20. See the film titles; neither the French nor the English published text makes reference to this assistance. Abraham Brumberg cites Polish accusations that "Shoah was a deliberate attempt to deflect French attention from their own history of complicity with the Nazis and from the 'current wave of racism that is sweeping France"'; Abraham Brumberg, "What Poland Forgot," New Republic, 16 December 1985,47. Brumberg does not give the source of the quotation. 21. "Lanzmann told his Oxford listeners flatly that it would not have been possible to locate extermination camps in the countryside of France, for example. The French peasantry would not have tolerated them." Neal Ascherson, "The Shoah Controversy," SovietJewish Affairs 16 (1986): 58. Tzvetan Todorov contests Lanzmann's statement by arguing that French bystanders were as bad as Polish ones; Tzvetan Todorov, Face e l'extreme, 2d ed. (Paris, 1994), Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, Rousso also comments on the fact that Shoah focuses on Polish anti-semitism when it could have focused on that of the French but does not attribute the absence of France from the film to censorship (238). 23. Francine Kaufmann, "Interview et interpretation consecutive dans le film Shoah, de Claude Lanzmann," Meta 38, no. 4 (1993): This passage is not in verse in the English edition. 25. Some examples are Ezra BenGersch6m, David: The Testimony of a Holocaust Survivor (1967), trans. I. A. Underwood (Oxford, 1988); Saul Friedlander, When Memory Comes, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York, 1979); Salomon Perel, Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon, trans. Brigitta Restorff (Munich, 1993). 26. All translations from the sound track of Europa Europa are my own. 27. There is more than one reason why it may be difficulto be oneself. The soldier may stand for us all, or he may find it difficulto be himself only because that self is an oppressed minority, such as homosexuals. 28. Sander Gilman's contribution to a panel discussion on Shoah and Schindler's List held at the University of Chicago, 16 February 1995, alerted me to the significance of Perel's tonal lapses. 29. Jup fails to look Jewish even in the suspenseful moment when his teacher of racial science analyzes his features before the class. It is hard to imagine that the presentday Perel would pass this test as easily as does Jup. The photographs in the German edition of Perel's book, cited above, make his story all the more astounding. 30. Perel is alone in the scene, however. 31. Even "us all," the gender-free translation of the song usually provided in songbooks, still distinguishes implicitly between an "us" and a "them." The words also recall the words of an official in the Hitlerjunge: "Unser neuer Komerad wird sich tiberzeugen, dab der Fuhrer eine Gemeinschaft geschaffen hat, in der wir Deutschen alle Bruder werden." The comparison is not meant to suggest that Europa Europa advocates that Germans and probably all other nationalities and subnationalities, as well as all religious and perhaps special interest groups should have their own nation-states. J. Hoberman, "Doing the Nazi," Village Voice, 25 June 1991, recognizes the Zionist message of the ending. Agniezka Holland, director of the film, however, expressses reservations about the ending, quoted in Amy Taubin, "Woman of Irony," Village Voice, 2 July 1991: "My feelings are ambiguous, and I'm not sure it's good to speak about it. It's difficult 20 REPRESENTATIONS

22 to judge from the outside. But if they suffered so terribly and then just finish as a state-the same as any other state-you must ask if that's not a betrayal of the reason for being a Jew." She does not explain what the reason for being a Jew is, but given the context, it probably has something to do with the ability to empathize with the oppressed. 32. Leaving Europe is an important part of the equation. The title Europa Europa is derived from Elia Kazan's America America, which, according to Solomon Perel, lecture presented at Spertus College of Judaica, Chicago, 15 April 1992, referred to a mythical land of cannibals. The (re)turn to Israel, then, acquires the sense of a return to a pure, more innocent, origin. Susan Linville, however, makes a highly intelligent argument that the slippage of identities that problematizes Europa Europa's ending pervades the film up to that point. More analysis of the film would be needed to settle the issue; Susan Linville, "Europa Europa: A Test Case for German National Cinema," Wide Angle 16 (1995): Via the semiotic route traced by Roland Barthes, the use of documentary footage also suggests the validity of the ending. See Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1987), The presence of the flag, although not the escape (from a boxcar destined for Treblinka), has been explained as a historically motivated reference to a play the children had performed. But the choice to use it, or to use the scene at all, was, of course, open. 35. Perel, lecture at Spertus College of Judaica. I am grateful to Jeremy Rosenschein, formerly of the Asher Library, Spertus College of Judaica, who was Perel's translator from Hebrew on the occasion, for assisting me in interpreting Perel's lecture. 36. He buys a "teach yourself Arabic" manual, for example, when leaving for Palestine. In a postscrip to the English translation, he espouses the necessity for mutual understanding between Arabs and Jews in order to achieve peace. BenGersch6m, David, ; The procession is perhaps a reference to the funeral procession in Jerusalem that ends the novel Schindler's List. Like the films we have discussed, the novel is punctuated by photographs of Oskar Schindler and other personages of the story, even though the usual disclaimer identifies it as "a work of fiction"; Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List: A Novel (New York, 1993), 397 and copyright page. 38. One interlocutor, Rudolf Vrba, mentions his escape from Auschwitz, primarily in reference to the failed attempt at an uprising that led to his decision to escape (S, ; SO, ). According to Lanzmann, the decision not to discuss escape was part of his plan to make Shoah a film of death, not survival. See Claude Lanzmann, "Holocauste, la representation impossible," Le Monde (Paris), 3 March This is referenced in a discussion of Schindler's List. 39. In several contexts, among them Claude Lanzmann, "De l'holocauste a Holocauste ou comment s'en debarrasser," in Deguy, Au sujet de Shoah, , and Lanzmann, "Holocauste, la representation impossible." 40. Only the last of these titles is included in the published text of the film (S, 15; SO, 3). 41. The translation here is that of the English-language edition. 42. See the excellent accounts in Young, Texture of Memory, See also Saul Friedlander, "Memory of the Shoah in Israel: Symbols, Rituals, and Ideological Polarization," in James E. Young, ed., The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York, 1994), ; and Yael Zerubavel, "The Death of Memory and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors," Representations 45 (Winter 1994): Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film 21

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