Kappler: “Why can’t I die in my own country, revisiting the places that were dear to me and which have been constantly in my thoughts during all these years of prison ?”

Yes, why can’t he?

Rome, March 25, 1944. The city is occupied by German troops. In the late afternoon hours a killing squad of 74 SS + Gestapo officers start shooting 335 Italian civilians, all of them men, many of them Jewish, in a cave of the catacombs at Via Ardeatina. The killing is known as the Ardeatine cave massacre. It was ordered, led and organized by Herbert Kappler.

Kappler: “I calculated the number of minutes necessary for the killing of the 320. I had the arms and ammunition computed. I figured the total amount of time I had. I divided my men into small platoons, which would function alternately. I ordered that each man shoot only one shot. I specified that the bullet enter the victim’s brain from the cerebellum in order that there be no wasted firing and that death be effected instantaneously.” (Katz, The Battle for Rome)

Kappler also sees to it that a generous supply of cognac would be brought to the site — as fortification for the killing Germans.

Germany, March 12, 1976. The liberal weekly DIE ZEIT supports Kappler’s release in an article titled The Merciless Ones (Die Gnadenlosen):

“Those who mercilessly banish human beings for several decades behind the walls of dungeons, act in the same remorseless way as the murderers themselves.”

Rome August 15, 1977. Herbert Kappler is wheeled out of Celio Hospital hidden in a large suitcase. With the help of a Carabinieri his wife Anneliese Kappler loads the valise in the trunk of her red Fiat 132 and drives off. The next day the couple safely arrive in the West-German town of Soltau where Ms. Kappler has a home. Protected by German police guards and the government’s refusal to extradite Kappler to Italy or confine him in a military hospital, he dies in his own home on February 9, 1978. “The more they hate Herbert Kappler, the more I love him. He was only obeying orders,” Anneliese Kappler tells reporters upon her husband’s death.

Munich 2010. Thirty-three years after Kappler’s escape and the German government’s refusal to take legal measures against him, Germany has undergone a change of mind. As shows the ongoing trial of bedridden 90-year-old John (Iwan) Demjanjuk, charged with assisting the murder of 27,000 Jews at Sobibor, German courts have not only learned to distinguish between perpetrators and victims — even if the perpetrator is a victim too — they have also learned that there is no such thing as a man’s right to die at home.

Judging from a recent photograph of Demjanjuk the trial seems to have a rejuvenating effect. With his sunglasses he reminds me of a Jack Nicholson character ready to get up and…

On A Man’s Right to Die at Home originally appeared on unguided tour on May 25, 2010.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

“Is this film meant as an apology?” an elderly lady wants to know.

“I hope not. The criticism is there. I’m presenting different perspectives.  You have to read between the lines,” Sánchez Lansch explains. “The facts and the people speak for themselves.”

“If anything,” another member of the audience jumps in, “the Berlin Philharmonic is a case of benign Nazism. Compared to the Vienna Philharmonic, where everyone was a party member, the Berliners are harmless. Furtwängler [the orchestra's chief conductor] loved music — and he loved women. That’s all.”

Let’s read between the lines then.

The facts. In 1933 the renowned Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, then a private GmbH not a state sponsored organization, agreed to work under the direction of the Ministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda led by Joseph Goebbels. Between 1933 and 1945 the Reichsorchester celebrated National Socialism and dedicated itself to Führer worship. Its members were exempt from military duty and enjoyed considerable material and physical privileges. Until the end of the Third Reich the orchestra’s loyalty to the Führer never wavered. Every year on April 21, the Reichsorchester officially honored Hitler’s birthday with a rendition of Beethoven’s Symphony No. Nine (Ode to Joy!). The orchestra played at the opening of the 1936 Olympics and at important party events. Outside of Germany it served as ambassador of National Socialism.  The Reichsorchester, the friendly face of the Holocaust — except that the reality of the Holocaust is absent from this documentary.

Sánchez Lansch has unearthed heretofore unseen and unheard archival footage of the orchestra’s performances, he has conducted long interviews with the two surviving members of the Reichsorchester as well as with family of deceased musicians, and he has created a narrative in which word and image complement one another — which makes it hard to read between the lines.

The people.  Two elderly, soft-spoken gentlemen, former members of the Berlin Philharmonic, talk about their memories of the Reichsorchester. In the comfort of their homes the Nazi era is cast into a mild light. They don’t deny that for twelve years they served National Socialism, represented Nazi Germany abroad, enjoyed many privileges that ordinary Germans did not have access to – and yet, neither sees himself as a Nazi. They had no choice, they say; they had to follow orders. “With one leg one always stood in prison,” one of them explains.  They see themselves as victims,  resistance fighters even, because after all they did not become party members, or so they say. (It is a well known fact of German post-war amnesia that only very few were able to remember that they did join the NSDAP.) Most importantly, they were musicians, not politicians.  Is that why in 1933 they willingly provide proof of their ‘Aryan’ descent? Is that why they do not protest when their Jewish colleagues were forced to leave — first the orchestra and then the country? Is that why they give their best when they play in honor of the Führer? What was it like to play the Ode to Joy every year at Hitler’s birthday while at the same time six million Jews were gassed, shot or worked to death in concentration camps? How could they continue practicing their art after the war when it had been put to such murderous aims? Perhaps they would have liked to speak about all of this. They are not to blame that the film maker decided not to ask.

Those in the audience who have little knowledge of what life was like under Nazism  — the enforcement of racial laws, the daily violence against Jews and other “un-Germanic’ people, the dispossession of their property, the deportations, the Holocaust  — will remain ignorant. Those who have chosen to forget will not be reminded. It is here that the film maker’s supposedly impartial perspective reveals itself as complicit with the lie Germans have told themselves and the world since the end of the Third Reich: I didn’t see anything, hear anything, know anything. I was just following orders. I am a victim myself.

If there are people in the audience who ‘read between the lines,’ they do it not because of Sánchez Lansch’s film but despite of it. There is no such thing as impartiality. Anyone who maintains that a documentary is just presenting ‘the facts’ is being disingenuous.

Both formally and thematically “Das Reichsorchester” is similar to another recent documentary from Germany: Felix Moeller’s “Harlan: Im Schatten von Jud Süß” (Harlan: in the shadow of Jew Suess), a film about Nazi film maker Veit Harlan, director of the infamous “Jew Suess,” and one of the most important Nazi film makers, who after the war continued his career in West-Germany.  Shown at Film Forum in March, “Harlan” is by far the superior film precisely because the film maker examines the presence of the past instead of treating the past as history, finished, shut off from the present. Moeller is preoccupied with the question what it meant for Veit Harlan to continue making films after the Third Reich, after having collaborated with a murderous regime by making a film that legitimized anti-Semitism and justified the Holocaust. Moeller raises the question of moral accountability. Even if Veit Harlan believed that a film maker was just an artist and not a politician, is it justifiable to hold on on to this opinion after  he learned that his films were instrumental in executing genocidal politics? Moeller doesn’t offer Harlan’s children an easy way out. He insist on one question: What does it mean to have a father who helped in the execution of the Holocaust? Moeller does not provide answers, he achieves something far more important, he keeps the past alive.

No such concerns are raised in “Das Reichsorchester”. There’s not one sequence, not a single scene in which the film contests the implicit propaganda that in order to qualify as a Nazi one had to have killed at least one Jew with one’s own hands. Germany a country of innocents, the Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra of resistance fighters. A convenient myth — or shall we call it a lie?

If the Berlin Philharmonic’s involvement with the Nazis can be regarded a case of benign Nazism, it because “Das Reichsorchester” makes us see it that way.

Was Hitler a Nazi?

———————————————————————————————

Kino! 2010. New films from Germany at Moma, April 24 through April 30.

Das Reichsorchester (Enrique Sánchez Lansch, Germany 2007, 102 min)

Harlan: in the shadow of ‘Jud Süss‘ (Felix Moeller, Germany 2008, 99 min)

Benign Nazism originally appeared on unguided tour on April 25, 2010.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

While 90-year-old John (Ivan) Demjanjuk was flown in from the U.S. to face trial in Munich, 95-year-old Erich Steidtman, another Nazi war criminal, lives in the German town of Hannover — unchallenged and undisturbed. But things could change. Please see Christoph Cadenbach’s and Bastian Obermayer’s excellent  Der lange Schatten der Schuld, an article in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung on Steidtmann, former SS-Hauptsturmführer, involved in the killings at the Warszaw Ghetto, and head of a company belonging to the infamous Hamburger Polizeibatallion 101 responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Polish Jews in Lublin on November 3 and 4, 1943.

Thanks to the article in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung the prosecutor’s office will re-open investigation into his case. Bravo Christoph Cadenbach and Bastian Obermayer!

————————————————————–

Here’s an article published yesterday in the New York Times.

The rest is silence? — On Demjanjuk 3 originally appeared on unguided tour on April 23, 2010.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

If anything, the ghastly presence of John Demjanjuk — charged with murder of more than twenty-seven thousand Jewish prisoners at Sobibor — in a German courtroom proves that regarding the Holocaust the law has little power over the conscience of perpetrators. No judge, no lawyer will make them break their silence. They didn’t speak much of their crimes in Nuremberg and they remained mostly silent in Frankfurt, and so far we haven’t heard a word from Demjanjuk in Munich either. Deeds without doers. Genocide without perpetrators. A German way of life.

The law may fail to make the perpetrators admit their crimes, perhaps because it doesn’t always need their collaboration. In all likelihood, Demjanjuk will be convicted based on circumstantial evidence. But there are ways to end the silence. Why did it never occur to anyone to travel to Ohio where Demjanjuk lived for decades? Not to interrogate. Just to talk, to ask a few questions, to begin a conversation. Isn’t that what civilized people do?

The question is a rhetorical one, of course. For more than six decades Germans have been more than reluctant to talk with former Nazis — and who of my grandparents’ generation wasn’t one? — about their deeds and motives outside of the tightly regulated discourse defined by the law. What is true for the Holocaust is also true for the infamous State Security (Stasi) of East-Germany — which, by the way, had several thousand West-Germans on their payroll. While other countries emerging from a dictatorship have installed Truth Commissions to help resolve conflicts between victims and perpetrators, Germany  has sponsored memorials.

Freedom means the right to remain silent. Silence can be therapeutic, purifying. But silence is also a form of aggression — directed at oneself and at the other. Often silence provokes aggression: the desire to hurt, to crush, to elicit a reaction through the infliction of pain.

In the 1970s Germany defeated the terror of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). Why should Germans change their minds now?  Because very soon, when the last perpetrator will has passed away, the silence will be that of a graveyard. And then what?

Der Rest ist Schweigen?

The rest is silence — On Demjanjuk 2 originally appeared on unguided tour on January 23, 2010.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

The victims who remember fall into the void.

And the descendants of the perpetrators? — We’ve become tourists in everyone else’s past.

Could it be otherwise?

The Silence originally appeared on unguided tour on January 17, 2010.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

This photograph of John (Iwan) Demjanjuk being wheeled into a German courtroom in Munich reminds me of my grandfather shortly before he died: an old man, ill and barely conscious; an old Nazi who lived a full life, had children, grandchildren, a nice house in the suburbs; a perpetrator who saw himself as victim; a typical “Mitläufer” who for fear of his and his family’s life joined the NSDAP,  avoided resistance,  hung a photograph of Hitler in his living room, and somehow forgot to take it down when the Nazis no longer officially ruled Germany — that’s how I remember my grandfather.

My grandfather died in 1983. He is not affected by the proceedings in the German courtroom, he doesn’t care about the outcome of the trial. To my grandfather the trial of John Demjanjuk doesn’t mean a thing. To me it means a lot.

If Iwan Demjanjuk the perpetrator may no longer hide behind John Demjanjuk the victim, I can no longer hide my grandfather the perpetrator behind the invented figure of the innocent “Mitläufer.” I look at the photograph of Demjanjuk and I see my grandfather. I look the photograph of my grandfather and I see a perpetrator. I look in the mirror — I’m glad I resemble my grandmother.

————————————————————————-

++ Heinrich Wefing writes in DIE ZEIT on Germany’s reluctance to put non-German Nazi criminals to trial (in German)

++http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/01/nazi-death-camp-accused-trial

++http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/01/john-demjanjuk-trial-sobibor

++http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/world/europe/01trial.html?ref=world

++http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2009/12/01/demjanjuk-survivant-de-l-holocauste-plaide-l-avocat_1274501_3214.html#ens_id=1273811

Of Victims and Perpetrators — Demjanjuk 1 originally appeared on unguided tour on December 1, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

Monuments are sites of symbolic exchange.

Last week Granada’s monument to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder + leader of the anti-republican, fascist Falange party, was decorated with a laurel crown, the symbol of victory and invincibility. Thus decorated the monument speaks about the future (rather than the past or the present) for Primo de Rivera was neither victorious nor invincible — found guilty of anti-republican conspiracy and insurrection he was sentenced to death and executed on Nov. 20, 1936.

Today someone left a reply.

"Granada será la tumba del fascismo," (Granada will be the grave of fascism), monument to Josè Antonio Primo de Rivera, Nov. 26, 2009

Granada 19 (the grave of fascism) originally appeared on unguided tour on November 26, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

I’m sensing your resistance, reader.
Don’t set me straight.
I dream. I sing. I woo. I’m not you.

You don’t believe me. You want to be faithful to the story, consider me a rhetorical effect. You say my lover is myself, you who knows nothing of the other.

Evasion, perversion, death. “In all the pride of blooming youth I die,” — that’s how the story ends in your book — not in mine. I believe in revision & inversion. Your ending is my beginning.

Listen.

It’s cold. I’m alone. But, mind you, not defenseless. I’ve learned to parry blows, even invisible ones, speaking a language that is not mine. How to utter my complaint? You say, you’re tolerant. (Oh, how I hate that word.) I say, I’m not a patient and anyway my wounds are nothing to you. Whom should I court? Nowhere left to turn but myself, I kindle up the fires by which I burn.  All that is lovely in myself I love. If I don’t admire myself, will you? How gladly “would I from myself remove and at a distance set the one I love.” But will you let me? Your tolerance scares me. And your impatience, too.

Imagine.

The pool, the fountain, the looking glass. My refuge, my temple, my inspiration. And let it be fantastick! A shadow, a fleeting shade; shifting shapes in a pool of light, silver-clear and bright, an art like no other, a thing of life to love. Magic. I wrap my glance around the form I see, the form that gives me joy.

And when I bend to join my lips to hers, she fondly bends to mine. She burns with equal flames. And when my arms I stretch, she stretches hers. Your eyes with pleasure on my face you keep. You smile when I smile and when I weep, you weep. Your well-turned neck and shoulders; your spacious forehead and your sparkling eyes, your mouth dreaming in sweetness, your slow hands, your flowing hair. Stay with me that I may see thy lovely form, stay with me that I may hear thy lovely voice, for though I may not touch thee, I shall feed my eyes & ears and soothe my wretched pains.

In the dark I can be two. Me and her. Day and night. Ghost and family. Past and future. Strong & weak. Old & young. Angry & sad. Challenged & embarrassed. We fight and we argue. She makes me uncomfortable, but she speaks my language. In the dark — where we’re all strangers.

And when she leaves, I’ll be heart-broken. And when they kill her, I weep just as everyone else. In the dark.

You may say she’s not the real thing, a gay delusion — the the moment I avert my gaze, I’ll lose her. You may say she’s a creature of the underworld who shall not stand the test of bright sunlight — she’ll melt like ice, dissolve like wax. What do you know about us?

Those pretty flowers in your vase? Not me.

I’m falling in love with her.

Narcissus originally appeared on unguided tour on October 31, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

I’m allergic to roots, eradication is my profession.
If life means inscription and reduplication;
if Aristotle is suspect and meaning postponed,
who are my parents?

Deconstruction is my pleasure, my shield, my disguise. A stranger to joy, I have an answer to every question, a question to every answer.

Everything is text, everything is under control. With the unconscious in exile, Heidegger never seemed so much fun. Who cares that he was a Nazi?

Sophocles is passé. And so is Freud. With the word at my disposal, I’m your blind king, cracking nutshells. I am your prophet. I see what I want to see. The desolation of your town: small minds, big cars; short people, fat lives,  real estate agents.

Why did you ask me to live among you if you won’t invite me to your home, your dinner table? Alone, eating my words, I’m feasting on contempt, disdain, repugnance, scorn — recipes from the cookbook of my secret wound. I shall finish you off. Wash you down with the rash power of my anger. Every time I arrive at a crossroads, I force you to yield.

Such unremitting rage…, so dire a feud.

Let me start over, will you?

I’m a female Oedipus locked in myself. “’Tis thus the mind would fain, find peace, self-prisoned from a world of pain.” Say it again. “There is joy in isolated thought sealed off from a world of sorrow.” In the hospital of my study no one shall uncover me against my will. What I do to myself brings me most pain. For my disease infects no other but me.

So fine to look at, so corrupt inside.
What splendour rotted by the worm within.

What keeps me from revealing the details of my birth, my childhood?
This dreadful mark of shame! No family photographs to prove a caring glance, a loving memory. Father, can’t you see I’m burning? Mother, what can I love?

Who will nurse me if not myself?
Who will punish me if not myself?
Who will cast myself out if not myself?
Quick. As quickly as I can.
“Oh, pain; pain and woe! Whither? Whither?”

I’m not going to be revered for  my self-pity, my self-inflicted suffering, my vile rage.
He is a blind hero. I am an angry woman.

The sphinx is dead. Did I kill her? And why?

Oedipus originally appeared on unguided tour on October 26, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. … I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity and genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block… (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory)

I’m sorry you feel that way. Try and look at it with my eyes.

You don’t know me. But you know of me. You don’t invite me into your house. So I visit you in your sleep. You don’t love me. But you desire me, sometimes. You need me. But you’re too embarrassed to admit it.

I’m not who you think I am. I’m not your sleep Nazi, your Stasi dream spy, the MacCarthy of the unconscious. I don’t betray and I don’t kill. I’m not the messenger of bad news. I don’t possess superior knowledge of your future.  I don’t demonstrate and insinuate. I’m not the problem. Freud, Jung, Lacan — they are your acquaintances, not mine.

I’ll treat you gently. You have nothing to fear. I sing to you in my sweetest voice, dance for you, act for you. I’ll be who you urge me to be. I can make you laugh, I can make you cry. My performances are sublime, some say uncanny. I’m your secret wish fulfilled. Rely on me, I’m discreet. More discreet than you will ever be. No one can know about our affair.

I don’t care about your sexual preferences or how much money you make. You don’t bother with the correct pronunciation of my name or where I come from.

Intimate strangers, that’s who we are.

Morpheus originally appeared on unguided tour on October 20, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

All’s well that ends well? I still think it would be a good idea for the city of Nuremberg to acquire the gnomes and put them up for adoption.

Verboten 2 originally appeared on unguided tour on October 15, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

“Wrong. We have to struggle towards it, forward, forward, word by word, to find this past. In other words, I have to tell you, if I want to find out what happened to me.

(Robert Kelly, The Book from the Sky)

We think the past is behind us originally appeared on unguided tour on August 29, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

5′1 originally appeared on unguided tour on August 27, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

here’s looking at you, kid originally appeared on unguided tour on August 27, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

The SPIEGEL reports that

Earlier this year, Hörl, who has been president of the Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts since 2005, displayed 700 of the Nazi gnomes in the Belgian city of Gent — where they were seen by over 40,000 people — and the Italian region of South Tyrol. The exhibition, entitled “Dance with the Devil,” received no official complaints in either country and garnered postive feedback from the Jewish community.

Verboten or not, here’s a suggestion. The city of Nuremberg — where the Nazi party had its headquarters and staged spectacular rallies attended by hundreds of thousands of supporters — acquires all 700 Nazi gnomes and gives them to 700 Nuremberg families. One for each family. The hosts must agree to adopt the gnome for six months. At the end of the probationary period they can either keep it or return it to the city council. Hosts must also agree to document their interaction + experiences with the new family member. The documentation (photos, letters, journals, tapes, songs, videos, etc.) shall be exhibited at the Rathaus (town hall), along with any gnomes that may have been returned.

Ottmar Hörl, Garden Gnome, photo: Daniel Karmann dpa/lby (16.07.2009), (c) dpa - Bildfunk

See also my essay on remembering the Holocaust.

Verboten originally appeared on unguided tour on July 18, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

Although we don’t know what it was Tisa learned to forgive — death camps, mass murder, the Holocaust are never mentioned in this article — Kimmelman offers forgiveness (a notoriously vague and elusive concept bordering on forgetting) as an answer to the “complexities of families, not least German ones, aristocratic or otherwise.” To give an example of those “complexities” Kimmelman writes,

“In later years she would recall that her father, despite his anti-Semitism, always treated [her Jewish husband] with respect. The love of a father for a daughter could transcend prejudice, Tisa realized. Forgiveness must be reciprocated.”

In passing Kimmelman also whitewashes one of Germany’s most influential aristocratic families, the von Weizsäcker’s. In a quote from an interview with Kimmelman, former German President Richard von Weizsäcker, during the war a loyal Nazi and officer in the Wehrmacht, who knew von Schulenberg, comes across as a resistance fighter. Who needs guilt by association? Let’s make heroes by association! What Kimmelman neglects to mention is that right after the war Weizsäcker, a lawyer by training, defended his father Ernst von Weizsäcker who was charged with crimes against humanity at one of the Nuremberg War Crime Trials. Among other atrocities Ernst von Weizsäcker, secretary of State under foreign minister Ribbentrop, was responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Auschwitz. Richard defended his father’s phoney claim that as secretary of state he did not know that Auschwitz was a death camp. In Richard’s view Ernst von Weizsäcker who believed deportations would make life easier for Jews, was a resistance fighter. This, Mr. Kimmelman, is another interesting story about “the complexities of families, not least German ones, aristocratic or otherwise.”

As every catholic knows, forgiveness doesn’t require much. It’s easy, says Tisa’s grand-niece Elisabeth Ruge who is a friend of Kimmelman’s.

“Tisa knew that to criticize the weaknesses of others you’ve got to understand your own weaknesses.”

The Holcaust as weakness?
There’s a German word for articles like Kimmelman’s: Freundschaftsdienst.

A Weakness for the Holocaust originally appeared on unguided tour on July 16, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

The state legislature may think otherwise but to me it is an offense to one of America’s most distinguished Jewish theologian and civil rights advocate. “In a free society some are guilty, all are responsible.”

More on the Autobahn originally appeared on unguided tour on July 7, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

In January 2009 the Springfield unit of an American Nazi group called National Socialist Movement adopted a stretch of Highway 160 near Springfield (Missouri). (The New York Times reported.) Sponsorship involves cleaning the highway four times a year in exchange for an “adopt-a-highway sign” prominently featuring the group’s name. In an attempt to respond to the group’s xenophobic and anti-semitic agenda the Missouri state legislature in conjunction with the Jewish Community Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee proposed to re-name the same stretch for the late Abraham Joshua Heschel, revered Rabbi, distinguished Jewish theologian and civil rights advocate who marched with Martin Luther King. Should the provision succeed Heschel who narrowly escaped the Nazis in 1938 — most of his family was killed in the Holocaust — will once again be subjected to Nazi ideas of cleanliness and order.

Not a good idea, objects Heschel’s daughter, Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, who criticized the re-naming as “vulgar” and “inappropriate”. “I don’t think that my father would have felt honored by this.”

As a German I am appalled by the proposition. I don’t mean to doubt the state representatives’ good intention, but sometimes intention is just not good enough. What exactly is being commemorated by re-naming the stretch of highway sponsored by a Nazi group “Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway”? That Jews and Nazis belong together? That Nazis will always have a Jew to trample on? That Jews are dead while Nazis are alive?
It is the vagueness that bothers me. If the re-naming “is about making sure that we stand against bigotry and hatred,” as State Representative Sara Lampe, a Springfield Democrat who supports the provision, insist, why not speak out against racism and anti-Semitism in precise, unambiguous words? Turning to Judaism and Jewish Americans in order to remedy anti-Semitism sends the wrong message. In a pluralistic society based on equality and freedom the struggle against racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia concerns everyone.

There is a much more effective way to respond to the hateful politics of white supremacists: generously funded public education committed to building a society in which Nazi ideology is not an option.
Even though Americans spend a huge amount of time in their cars, the highway cannot replace the classroom.

Autobahn originally appeared on unguided tour on June 26, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

Liliana Cavani’s controversial 1974 movie The Night Porter has been labeled “Nazi chic” (Roger Ebert). For some critics the film is a shamelessly pornographic fantasy of the Holocaust, a “sentimental idyll … exalting romantic love between victim and victimizer, against the brute reality of Nazi violence,” (Marga Cottino-Jones) using the Holocaust as a mere “backdrop to the erotic/sadomasochistic misadventures of Max and Lucia, Nazi and victim” (Rebecca Scherr); a “despicable attempt to titillate [the viewer] by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering.” (Ebert)
I’m not convinced.

It’s true, there is something despicable in the deadly, compulsive  & sadomasochistic relationship between Holocaust survivor Lucia Atherton (Charlotte Rampling) and former SS officer Maximilian Aldorfer (Dirk Bogarde). During the Third Reich Max, a doctor at a Nazi concentration camp, forced Lucia, a prisoner, to become his mistress and sex slave. When years later Lucia arrives in the fancy hotel in Vienna, where Max now works as night porter, they resume their relationship.

But does showing a despicable relationship make the film itself despicable? Can we understand the films ‘content’ (the story), without considering its form? Can we talk about what The Night Porter shows (and doesn’t show) without paying attention to how it is shown?

The film privileges Max’s point of view, his perception of Lucia (then and now), his memories of the concentration camp. Perpetrator memories. Repulsive memories of forced sex, of perverse sexual fantasies. Memories that many former Nazis share. Hidden memories, secret fantasies of the past.

Memories are not a matter of fact. Memories are private, subjective, intertwined with wishful fantasies. Often wish and memory are indistinguishable. Consider for instance the fantasies, (erotic or otherwise) Nazi perpetrators never acted on, perhaps never even shared with anyone. Does that mean the fantasies disappeared when the Third Reich fell apart? They did not. They became memories.

Memories are like dreams. They require a body; they are experienced by real people; they are inscribed in the mind of individuals, they must be worked through on a personal level. If we want to understand the satisfaction and enjoyment Germans + Austrians derived from being Nazis, every memory matters, every fantasy counts.

We may not want to see it, but for Max, the perpetrator, Auschwitz was and is a backdrop, a titillating setting, a turn-on.

Lucia’s/Rampling’s exquisite, if extreme, thinness — almost unbearable to look at — is less a “signifier of the real starvation actual prisoners suffered” (Scherr) than an indication that in the film’s reality (Max’s reality) she has no ‘content’, no story of her own. Lucia’s audible presence is as thin as her body. She remains silent for most of the film. Everything about Lucia suggests the presence of an absence. She is a ghost, a memory. Max’s memory.

That’s why I don’t see “exploitation of memories” in The Night Porter. I see performance and repetition. The Night Porter doesn’t ‘deal’ with the memory of the Holocaust. It is less a film about memory than a film as memory.

To expect The Night Porter to offer a realistic and truthful image of suffering in a concentration camp is to misunderstand the film’s formal concerns: to re-enact a memory, to re-evoke the sexiness of camp life as remembered by Max, the Nazi, the perpetrator.

The Night Porter made me reconsider the neatly drawn boundaries between memory and fantasy. “False memory” is a misleading term. It suggests that memories ought to refer to facts, contain the trace of some indisputable, definitive truth. When I remember something that never happened,  from the point of view of a historian my memory may seem false. But it is a true memory nonetheless.

More often than not the perpetrator’s memories lie dormant. They are reviled before they are revealed. Since they must not be repeated, the crimes whose traces they preserve cannot be mourned. I wonder, how long can an individual, how long can a society postpone grieving before it becomes delusional, denying the difference between the dead and the living?

Art can help me understand how memory works, but art cannot remember for me.
- – - – - – — – - – - – — – -

Liliana Cavani, The Night Porter (Italy 1974, 118 min., color)

On remembering the Holocaust in Germany see my essay “Voids”.

Sources:
Marga Cottino-Jones, Marga. “‘What Kind of Memory?: Liliana Cavani’s Night Porter.” Contention 5.1 (1995): 105- 111.
Roger Ebert: The Night Porter (review), in: The Chicago Sun-Times, February 10, 1975
Rebecca Scherr: The Uses of Memory and the Abuses of Fiction: Sexuality in Holocaust Fiction and Memoir, in: Other Voices, v.2, n.1 (February 2000).
Nora Sayr: Review in: The New York Times, October 2, 1974.
Susan Sontag: Fascinating Fascism, in: The New York Review of Books, Volume 22, Number 1, February 6, 1975.

A Note on “The Night Porter” originally appeared on unguided tour on June 7, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

Ost-Tirol, Großvenediger seen from Lasörling

I’m in Ost-Tirol (Easter part of Tyrol). Surrounded by snowy Alpine mountains. Look! This is Großvenediger. And over here; this is where we’re going! And look…

Between 1938 and 1945 Jews try to flee Nazi persecution on an escape route across the Alps from East Tyrol in Austria (which was part of the Third Reich) to South Tyrol in Italy. Many of the refugees are denounced by local farmers, then caught and killed on the spot or deported to concentration camps.

After 1945 Nazi war criminals use the same escape route to avoid prosecution for the crimes against humanity they commited. They know they’re safe. Who would want to denounce them?

Vienna 8 (trip to the Alps) originally appeared on unguided tour on May 30, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

Where imagination is lacking death becomes a morbid fascination. Once in a while male students would tell me “true stories” of local women who had disappeared into the mountains leaving not even a single trace behind. I could tell from the look on their faces (grinning slyly) that they hoped to frighten me with these stories. When a female graduate student in my department was raped in her own home by another student, she too disappeared. No-one ever mentions her; I don’t remember her name. The rape has rendered her persona non grata. I wonder how long it will be before she becomes part of their collection of disappeared women.

Pennsylvania has the highest concentration of Nazi Organizations in the U.S. Inevitably some members showed up in my classes hoping I shared their admiration for Hitler and all things Nazi, perhaps even provide first hand knowledge of the Third Reich. In email messages they asked me to be less critical of the Holocaust.

After a while I began imagining things. My mind was always somewhere else: roaming the streets of some city or other; constructing angry exchanges with colleagues I rarely talked to.

happy valley originally appeared on unguided tour on April 10, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes