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Introduction: Screening German Perpetration BRAD PRAGER, COLUMBIA, MO MICHAEL D. RICHARDSON, ITHACA, NY In an attempt to piece together the mindset of a Holocaust perpetrator, the Austrian-born journalist Gitta Sereny interviewed Franz Stangl, who had been a death camp commandant at Sobibor and Treblinka. She writes that she aimed to approach Stangl «with an open mind,» and to assess matters «not from our point of view, but from his» (13). The document she produced, a book entitled Into that Darkness, was based on extended conversations with Stangl while he was incarcerated. It is undoubtedly invaluable. No one had talked with a man like Stangl for as long as Sereny did, and aspects of his selfpresentation come across as diabolical, in that he enjoyed aspects of his work and asserts that his conscience is clear; yet they were also quite ordinary, given that he was an accomplished mass murderer. He had a typical family life and ambitions; he neither breathed fire nor did he smell like sulfur. Sereny ’ s effort to understand the perpetrator thus yields a «both/ and» conclusion. She summarizes her interviews in contradictory terms: they are «a demonstration of the fatal independence of all human actions, and an affirmation of man ’ s responsibility for his own acts and their consequences» (15). Before setting out to film Shoah (1985) the French director Claude Lanzmann read Sereny ’ s account. He distinguishes his approach from hers. According to Lanzmann, Sereny wanted to think about evil, «to understand how a husband and father can calmly take part in mass murder» (420), but he, by contrast, took a position that was predicated on a refusal to comprehend; for Lanzmann, the crimes committed were not something with which one could, through any amount of reasoning, come to terms. He writes accusatorily that Sereny later fell for the charms of Albert Speer, and that this was, to his mind, a foreseeable extension of an approach that surrenders moral authority and rectitude in the name of understanding. «Carried along by the niceties proper to psychology,» he explains, she wrote another massive book «as a tribute» to Speer and his family. He complains, «She understood everything. She understood too much» (420). Lanzmann ’ s position is, in certain respects, unsurprising for a filmmaker. Unlike a psychologist, Lanzmann is willing to work from a position of righteousness and with a presupposition of guilt. For him, cinema need not play by the rules of psychological science. Film is not always suited to explore the dark corners of the mind: it depicts surfaces - especially faces and voices - and, as a rule, it leaves viewers to speculate about its subjects ’ inner lives. Given this limitation, each one of the perpetrator-related problematics explored in the films that are analyzed in the following pages is compounded and made more intricate by ambiguities that stem from their status as film. The filmed image is capable of bringing us closer to a speaking subject, but also of alienating us as it objectifies that same subject; cinematic images can seem static - especially when they linger on photographs - thereby opening the past to protracted and quasi-scientific scrutiny, yet they also trade on their fleeting, ephemeral character; the sounds of cinema can correspond to a given scene or sequence, heightening an emotional response, but they can simultaneously undermine those same feelings. Thus while cinema is capable of stripping away the surface of its subject in an attempt to find a core, in doing so it also tends to present additional layers of ambivalence. It is not simply the problems of the past - that is, the German responsibility for genocide and its history of working through the past - but also the paradoxes that attend cinema as a medium, which enrich the analyses in this special issue. The authors included in this issue have concerned themselves with cinematic engagements with perpetration, and the constellation of problems described in the following pages would be knotty and daunting enough on its own, even without the added dimension of cinema ’ s intrinsic ambivalence. This additional element of complexity is, in this case, neither a reference to the unrepresentability or ineffability of the Holocaust (that is, the widely recognized Bilderverbot connected with the depiction of Holocaust atrocities), nor does it refer to the conspicuous problem of Nazi representation per se. 1 Films such as Der Untergang (2004) merit attention for their ostensibly taboo-breaking nature, their willingness to engage directly with the Nazi past and represent Hitler directly, but they have become objects of academic study in large part because of their claims to authenticity (i. e., their meticulous recreation, based on historians ’ accounts, of their wartime milieu) and because of how they position the contemporary viewer with respect to the direct and indirect complicity of the German populace of the Nazi era. Although that film treads on hazardous ground, it was less concerned with the question of what cultural influences create a perpetrator, whether there is such a thing as an innocent Nazi bureaucrat, and whether families ever outlive a Nazi legacy, and more concerned with reclaiming emotional engagement as a potentially productive, if not entirely unproblematic aspect of historical understanding. 2 Those former questions and their answers are less well defined than the contrasting red and black in 148 Brad Prager, Michael D. Richardson banners bearing the swastika; they are nebulous and are best approached indirectly. Indirect approaches of this sort are analyzed in the essays that follow. These seek to answer a range of questions: Whether it is worthwhile to isolate social causes of perpetration (that is, whether violent perpetration can be rooted in repressive cultures of childcare), as critics felt Michael Haneke tried to do in Das weiße Band (2009); whether one can judge the inner lives of Nazi leaders on the basis of what they say about themselves in their diaries, as taken up by, for example, Das Goebbels-Experiment (2005); how justice was sought by Fritz Bauer in Germany prior to the 1960s and to the student movement, when Germans refused to avow guilt for war crimes or to even look at the evidence, as depicted in Fritz Bauer: Tod auf Raten (2010); whether guilt, shame or both are invariably handed down from one generation to the next, as was the concern of filmmaker Malte Ludin while working on his film about his father, 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2004); and, finally, where an interviewer can position himself - honestly or dishonestly, objectively or from a position of anger and resentment - vis-à-vis the appalling perpetrators interviewed in Lanzmann ’ s monumental Shoah. The essays in this special issue are not necessarily concerned with pursuing the truth about the causes of perpetration. That task is an overreach for even the most seasoned historians. These essays are concerned specifically with cinematic representations, and they return to certain tendencies throughout. Where cinematic technique is concerned, the key issue rarely concerns identification. It is less about whether, in a Brechtian vein, one sympathizes with the perpetrator and would be inclined to assess matters from his or her perspective. Rather, the tendencies that come to the foreground here, one after the next, have much more to do with how cinema as a medium establishes temporal and spatial distance from its subjects. In his filmmaking - and in his remarks about his filmmaking - Lanzmann was always concerned with whether viewers would mistake the crimes of the Holocaust for crimes committed in another (distant) time and in another (distant) place. The films examined here manipulate our proximity to that past, moving between distance and nostalgia, on the one hand, and immediacy and contemporaneousness on the other. In the interpretations that follow, there is a consistent engagement with a number of themes: 1. The employment of sound. Erin McGlothlin, citing Shoshana Felman, points out in her essay that for Lanzmann the «echo» is an essential heuristic. In Shoah, it denotes the reverberations of the past in the present, but also rerepresents the language - the individual, decontextualized words - associated with perpetration both to the perpetrators and the film ’ s audience. In Malte 149 Introduction: Screening German Perpetration Ludin ’ s film the music, particularly the near comedic sounds of brass instruments that accompany the images of his father, Hanns Ludin, underline the awkwardness of his memories and the embarrassment that goes along with excavating his family ’ s shame. Finally, in Lutz Hachmeister ’ s documentary about Josef Goebbels, Kenneth Branagh ’ s voice-over - enacting or embodying the voice of Goebbels - humanizes a figure otherwise viewed as an inhumane monster, by ostensibly offering viewers (listeners) unmediated access to his interiority. 2. The uses of color in opposition to those of black and white. The terms of this discussion could be called a Schindler ’ s List (1994) problem. In that film Spielberg not only used grayscale cinematography, either to meet, partway, the expectations of audiences that have come to know the Holocaust through black and white images, or because color would have perhaps brought Holocaust images too close, too proximate, made them too real. He also famously inserted color, where the young girl with the red jacket appears, perhaps solely with the intention of manipulating the emotions, with the aim of making her victimhood more visceral. Lanzmann, who has scornfully commented on Spielberg ’ s approach, rejects archival footage, a rejection that can, in this way, also be seen as a rebuke against black and white. It may be, for him, associated with a mode of nostalgia - a deliberate and even pleasurable distancing. It is, in the terms of that argument, the opposite of making things present. But perhaps for this reason, owing to the stylization and the artifice, Haneke chose - as Jennifer M. Kapczynski points out in her article - to refer viewers to black and white photographs by August Sander; his film, in some ways, reproduces our aesthetic absorption with images of that past. 3. The question of performance. A mainstay of Holocaust filmmaking is the witness seated before the camera, who provides testimony directly to the lens. To what extent can one describe such testimonies as performance? Initially it seems inappropriate to label witnesses ’ accounts in this way, but under what circumstance does one naturally speak to a camera? Holocaust documentaries are never strictly observational; the circumstances under which they are made are always special, artificial, and often stylized. In the essays that follow, this question is taken up with particular interest where Michael D. Richardson examines Das Himmler-Projekt (2000). Why does the film and television actor Manfred Zapatka not attempt to embody Heinrich Himmler in a convincing or authentic way? Why did he and director Romuald Karmakar not have him wear a Nazi uniform? And to what extent does this selfconscious foregrounding of the performative moment of the film, the reading of Himmler ’ s speech, reduce rather than increase spectatorial distance? The question arises again in viewing 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß, 150 Brad Prager, Michael D. Richardson especially at the point when we hear Malte Ludin reading his father ’ s letter. The director stages his disquiet, and in particular his awareness that, as the son, he unwillingly embodies his father; he needs to find a way to establish distance where there is mainly uncomfortable proximity. And, finally, there is Claude Lanzmann, who pretends to keep the fact of the interview under wraps and keeps his camera hidden, occasionally, as McGlothlin points out, pretending - that is, performing - his imperfect German language skills. His performance is geared toward deceiving the perpetrators in the image, with the aim of eliciting some other truth, but it deceives the viewers as well. We may not always know, under such conditions, how to separate the genuine from the false. And that is, in some ways, the problem. Representing the perpetrator involves depicting both that which is most evil and that which is least explicable. The fact that these two attributes are in this case inseparable makes film a uniquely apt medium for this subject; film is defined by the tension between projected surface and imagined depths. Even today, in an age in which designations such as good and evil are often circumscribed by moral relativism, that is, they are used not as absolute moral judgments but as judgments within a particular moral system, there is a reflexiveness in designating Nazi perpetrators as evil, particularly when they are portrayed in film. But the follow-up question - «How did they get this way? » - comes just as instinctively. The contributions to this volume make no claim to providing an answer to that question, but rather explore the interplay between these two critical, intellectual moments as it is enacted in a number of films about German perpetrators. In doing so, the essays investigate how cinema can enable its audience to reflect on their own investment in this dynamic, as well as how this specific array of films directly engages with the limits of cinematic representation. Notes 1 On the Bilderverbot see Ball 162 - 64. The depiction of Nazi perpetrators in cinema has been taken up most recently by Frölich, Schneider and Visarius as well as by Hake. 2 See esp. von Moltke 40 - 43. Works Cited Ball, Karyn. «For and against the Bilderverbot: The Rhetoric of ‹ Unrepresentability › and Remediated ‹ Authenticity › in the German Reception of Steven Spielberg ’ s 151 Introduction: Screening German Perpetration Schindler ’ s List.» Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. Ed. David Bathrick, Brad Prager and Michael D. Richardson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. 162 - 84. Frölich, Margrit, Christian Schneider and Karsten Visarius, eds. Das Böse im Blick: Die Gegenwart des Nationalsozialismus im Film. Munich: Edition text + kritik, 2010. Hake, Sabine. Screen Nazis; Cinema, History and Democracy. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2012. Lanzmann, Claude. The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir. Trans. Frank Wynne. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Sereny, Gitta. Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. von Moltke, Johannes. «Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion.» New German Critique 102 (Fall 2007): 17 - 43. 152 Brad Prager, Michael D. Richardson Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding in Michael Haneke ’ s Das weiße Band JENNIFER M. KAPCZYNSKI W ASHINGTON U NIVERSITY IN S T . L OUIS Michael Haneke ’ s Das weiße Band commonly has been received as a parable for National Socialism ’ s origins. The critically-acclaimed film - with literally dozens of nominations and awards, including the 2009 Palme d ’ Or at Cannes, the 2009 New York Film Critics Circle Award for cinematography, and, in 2010, an astounding eight German Film Awards in Gold - is a historical thriller centered on a series of unexplained crimes that take place in the months preceding the First World War. Haneke sets the film in the fictional northern German town of Eichwald, melding, as reviewers have noted, the infamous names of Eichmann and Buchenwald (not to mention Waldheim, probably just as resonant for the Austrian director), evoking at once the perpetrators and spaces of the most terrible crimes in the country ’ s subsequent history. 1 From the opening moments of the film, the narrator (performed by Ernst Jacobi) further fuels speculation that Das weiße Band concerns itself with the Nazi past, as the voice-over narrative channels the perspective of the aged schoolteacher who witnessed firsthand the events to be relayed and who now reflects on their significance from the vantage of his dotage: Ich weiß nicht, ob die Geschichte, die ich Ihnen erzählen will, in allen Details der Wahrheit entspricht. Vieles darin weiß ich nur vom Hörensagen und manches weiß ich auch heute, nach so vielen Jahren, nicht zu enträtseln, und auf unzählige Fragen gibt es keine Antwort. Aber dennoch glaube ich, dass ich die seltsamen Ereignisse, die sich in unserem Dorf zugetragen haben, erzählen muss, weil sie möglicherweise auf manche Vorgänge in diesem Land ein erhellendes Licht werfen können. The monologue is accompanied by the first light in the film - enacting, as Fatima Naqvi notes, the very godlike power of the narrator, even as he undercuts this authorial control with protestations regarding how much of the story remains obscure and his uncertainty regarding his own accuracy (135). Although the narrator ’ s language remains vague - he introduces «die Geschichte,» suggesting a particular story but no specific historical period, and he admits to having more unresolved questions than answers - , the reference to the tale ’ s meaning for «manche Vorgänge in diesem Land» invites the audience to consider the relationship between the happenings in this small village and the larger course of national history. Emphasizing this line in particular, critic Stuart Klawans argues that «despite Mr. Haneke ’ s avowed determination to leave viewers free to interpret, associations between the crimes committed in the movie on the cusp of World War I and the far greater crimes of 1933 to 1945 seem inescapable» from the outset of the film. (Indeed, as Klawans comments, the «biggest off-screen presence in The White Ribbon [is] the impending Nazi era» [n. pag.].) Klawans is concerned with the reception of Haneke ’ s film at the New York Film Festival, and it could be argued that the reception of the film there (as well as in its copious US reviews) is colored by an American tendency to reduce contemporary German history to the Nazi period. But German critics also were quick to link Haneke ’ s depiction of Eichwald to the National Socialist era. Writing for Der Spiegel, Christian Buß characterizes the small town as a monstrous «breeding ground» for subsequent atrocities, its youthful main characters «fascist prototypes,» «soldierly» in their tendency to fuel sadism with sublimation (n. pag.). Die Zeit critic Peter Kümmel reaches similar conclusions, viewing the film as a portentous tale of family legacies gone horribly wrong, with the coming war framed as a «collective failure and derailment, a process by which the children complete the course first laid out by their parents» (n. pag.). Seen in this light, the film becomes a meditation on Nazism as the final culmination of generations of violence. That the film ends without real closure - although Haneke ’ s narrator becomes convinced that the town ’ s adolescents are the most likely perpetrators, the film offers no definitive answer - only encourages viewers to think beyond the diegetic frame and consider the future of the particular past depicted in Das weiße Band, and specifically the fates of the film ’ s hauntingly disaffected young adults. Moreover, we could connect the narrator ’ s compulsion to tell (his words are: «erzählen muss») with multiple generations of writing, filmmaking, and scholarship driven by the imperative not only to come to terms with the past, but also to come to terms with the larger already existing German intellectual tradition of coming of terms with the past. In evoking the conventions of both oral history and the psychoanalytic talking cure, Haneke ’ s film suggestively puts us - and the diegetic world in Das weiße Band - on the couch in ways that inevitably echo larger cultural discourses around Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Given this array of «clues» (however indirect), it thus comes as little surprise that audiences and numerous critics have been quick to seize upon Das weiße Band as a film about Nazism, and little else. In a negative - but in this respect nevertheless typical - review for the New York Times, A. O. Scott dismisses the film as a «guilt trip down memory lane,» and accuses it of 154 Jennifer M. Kapczynski «mystifying the historical phenomenon it purports to investigate. Forget about Weimar inflation and the Treaty of Versailles and whatever else you may have learned in school: Nazism was caused by child abuse» (n. pag.). Garrett Stewart (favorably, in this case) characterizes Das weiße Band as a «heritage film with a vengeance,» in which «social pathology marks the path to National Socialism» (40). The question of the film ’ s historical referentiality forms a central strand of existing criticism and scholarship on the film. While most interpreters (à la Scott) hold that the film comments upon the rise of National Socialism in Germany, other writers offer an alternate view that argues for understanding the film as a more general exploration of the preconditions facilitating extremist behaviors. Assertions about the historical period and scope of the film beg the question: to what extent does it matter, in fact, whether the film represents a meditation on National Socialism, another moment in German history altogether, or - as is most plausibly the case, an amalgam of these? As Klawans reflects: It might be fair, then, to ask how faithfully The White Ribbon prefigures Nazism. Does Mr. Haneke shed much light on the events that happened later? Or does the film ’ s allusion to those events serve mostly to give force and meaning to the filmmaker ’ s imagined world? Such questions often arise when a movie deals with history - but they may be especially urgent when a film as expertly made as The White Ribbon touches on a matter of such gravity. Where might one locate the reasonable limit of an artist ’ s freedom to select, to shape, to generalize, to invent, and the beginnings of his responsibility toward the subject he raises? (n. pag.) Indeed, the film itself, in obliquely alluding to but never directly addressing the rise of German fascism or the Holocaust, and instead placing its emphasis on patterns of authoritarian behavior commonly associated with that rise, seems to pose the question, in the spirit of Sinclair Lewis ’ s 1935 novel It Can ’ t Happen Here, whether totalitarian regimes and actions might indeed flourish in other historical and cultural contexts. Thus, as Klawans suggests, Haneke ’ s film may be interested in fascism less for its historical details than for its enormous evocative power - as a metaphor for something more general in the human capacity for cruelty and violence. In a broader sense, the film might be viewed as a speculative answer to the question of what makes a perpetrator. Haneke himself has professed a wish for such a reception, remaining coy on the subject of whether Das weiße Band should be read in light of National Socialism ’ s emergence. On the one hand, he readily admits a desire to direct his audiences to contemplate the genesis of German fascism. When asked by Klawans in an interview «whether viewers of ‹ The White Ribbon › would find thoughts of fascism unavoidable,» Haneke «broke into laughter» and replied 155 Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding « ‹ I hope so! › » (n. pag.) On the other hand, Haneke insists that his film tackles more than National Socialism alone: in numerous interviews, he stresses that his film takes up the violent ideological rigidity that can emerge in all radical groups, often citing the examples of the Baader-Meinhof group and Islamic fundamentalism as potential parallels. 2 In the same conversation with Klawans, he declared, «the film doesn ’ t refer specifically to German fascism. It ’ s only because of the setting of the film, the place and the time that it occurs, that the spectator has these associations» (n. pag.). In a characteristic exchange with a British interviewer, Haneke elaborated: It ’ s not a coincidence that I chose this period of time in which to present the story. This is the Nazi generation, but I didn't want the film to be reduced to this example, to this specific model. I could do a film about modern-day Iran and ask the same question: how does fanaticism start? That's the core of the film. In places where people are suffering, they become very receptive to ideology because they ’ re looking for something to clutch hold of, a straw that will take them out of that misery. (Day n. pag.) His handling of the film ’ s subtitle is indicative: in the version for international distribution, the line that follows the title, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, intentionally has been left untranslated. According to the director, this decision was made in order to prevent audiences from mistaking the narrative for a matter merely of German relevance, presumably by encouraging them simply to look past or overlook altogether the kind of national and historical specificity that readers of the original language are prompted to recognize (Andrew 16). At the same time, Haneke ’ s stated ambition to invoke universal patterns of zealotry helps us to place Das weiße Band - whose historical subject and look at first glance seem like a departure from the director ’ s contemporary-themed films (e. g., Funny Games [1997, remade in a US version in 2007], Die Klavierspielerin [2001], and Caché [2005]) - into dialogue with his larger cinematic project to explore the human propensity to violence. Several subsequent assessments of Das weiße Band have sided with Haneke on the issue of historical open-endedness - that is, that the film seeks to take on a time period and a set of issues much larger than German fascism alone. James S. Williams argues eloquently that the film offers a case study in formal opposition. After recounting the various ways in which the film «transports us back to Haneke ’ s Austrian context with its still far from exorcized Nazi past and ongoing process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung,» Williams asserts that «Haneke is also working at a more subtle and universal level than this by exploring the potential of cinematic form to convey the capacity for resistance in human and historical experience» (50). Williams highlights the problematic 156 Jennifer M. Kapczynski quality of the voice-over narrative, the frequent contrast in information conveyed at the visual and acoustic planes, and several key abrupt editing choices. Collectively, in his reading, the film «can thus be read as a form of resistance to absolutism and the order represented by both the narrative and brutalizing morality» (55). For Williams, the film ’ s form, marked by ruptures and breaks rather than seamlessness, effectively countermands teleological accounts of history. Roy Grundmann has written more generally about the open structure of signification that characterizes the director ’ s larger project: in his words, «leaving things out is a standard modus operandi in Haneke ’ s work - there are gaps and then there is a spine» (8 - 9). Fatima Naqvi has argued in equally compelling but very different ways for the multiple histories of Das weiße Band - making the case that the film masks itself as an «adaptation-fake» which upon closer examination yields what she terms a «stereoscopic effect,» (129 - 30) achieved through a strategy of overlain disparate temporal moments, which she likens to what Michael Rothberg has indentified as «multidirectional memory» (132). Naqvi undertakes a careful explication of the director ’ s citation of seventeenththrough nineteenth-century German pedagogical texts, first collected by Katharina Rutschky in the 1977 anthology Schwarze Pädagogik. According to Naqvi, «sein Film kreist also um das Thema autoritäre Erziehung in einem erweiterten historischen Kontext,» with roots extending deep into the history of German society and letters (136). She interprets the Baroness ’ s declaration to her husband, «Du begreifst überhaupt nichts,» as Haneke ’ s warning to his viewers: beware of any monocausal reading of the filmic narrative as leading inexorably to National Socialism (133). Without ruling out the possibility that Das weiße Band can be read as a reflection on the makings of totalitarian societies beyond the case of Nazism, this article argues for the wisdom of reading this film with the grain rather than against it, and for maintaining a skeptical stance toward Haneke ’ s own claims about the openness of his work - first, because regardless of the director ’ s intentions, the film has led myriad viewers and critics to understand it precisely as a film about Nazism ’ s rise (and as such, this phenomenon constitutes one of the film ’ s legitimate cultural meanings), and second, because even if that rise is not the exclusive concern of the film, it clearly comprises an essential element of its project. In other words, it argues for the need to take seriously Haneke ’ s portrait of the conditions facilitating the rise of National Socialism in Das weiße Band. Whatever allegorical resonances the film may provide, it remains important to investigate the terms of its core narrative, and ask just how Haneke seeks to explain the origin story of a 157 Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding generation that would later go on to play a key part in the nation ’ s genocidal plans. In particular, I take up the question of formal and narrative openness in Das weiße Band as it relates to the film ’ s characterization of German history, asking to what extent it suggests that the emergence of National Socialism was inevitable. Focusing on Haneke ’ s depiction of the fictional Eichwald as a community quite literally bred to violence, I suggest that Das weiße Band betrays a troubling reliance upon the dual notions of environmental and inherited characteristics, deploying these as mutually reinforcing explanatory models for historical development. In focusing on this aspect of the film, which thus far has been overlooked by existing scholarship, I aim to elucidate the ways in which Haneke thereby undercuts his own stated project to invoke multiple sociohistorical scenarios, offering instead a disturbingly narrow and deterministic view of the growth of National Socialism. For alongside the central topic of Erziehung - education or childrearing - Haneke ’ s film deploys a range of biological motifs that evokes questions of Züchtung, or cultivation. In the process, Das weiße Band plays with the possibility that fascism ’ s origins were not only man-made, but also organic. Presenting a community shaped by «breeding» in both senses of the term (nature and nurture), Das weiße Band hints that Eichwald harbors evil at the level of both schoolroom and soil. Looking closely at the film ’ s narrative structure, visual code and editing, I argue that the film ’ s discourse on pedagogy relies heavily on a body of problematic theory, first advanced in the 1960s but influential to this day, that sought to explain National Socialism as a function of physical and sexual repression. At the same time, the director ’ s extensive use of various biological metaphors threatens to naturalize the emergence of German fascism, construing the movement as a kind of dark biopolitical destiny particular to that nation. In emphasizing the logic of the biologic, Haneke ’ s film thereby echoes in alarming ways the rhetoric of National Socialism and at the same time seems to suggest that the seed of fascism might be traced to the level of genetic code - a biological potential, if not quite fate, that serves to flatten out historical complexity and cuts against any multidirectionality implied by the film ’ s general narrative openness or its skillful overlapping of references from diverse periods. In concentrating the emergence of German fascism in a small German village and at the same time playing upon the possibility of its biological roots, the film ultimately presents Nazism as a localized outbreak - or, phrased differently while remaining with the genetic metaphor, as an isolated mutation rather than a common feature of human DNA. Eichwald is a rural community organized around the local baron ’ s Gut, ruled by the rhythm of the seasons, crop timetables, and calculations of timber 158 Jennifer M. Kapczynski yields. At numerous points in the film, the narrator ’ s voice-over overlays static long shots of the local landscape: fields of waving grain, a copse of trees standing bare and stark against a snow-covered expanse. These sequences underscore the town ’ s spatial isolation and lend the film a sense of temporal suspension as well, feeding the feeling that this story takes place in a time «before,» a pre-cataclysmic lull. At the same time, they reinforce the ways this community seems veritably locked into the cycles of the natural world. As Buß notes, while cinematographer Christian Berger frames the film ’ s interior spaces as claustrophobically enclosed, the move to exterior shots offers little relief: «[W]enn die Kamera dann doch mal in die Totale gehen darf, bewegt sich darin fast nichts. Sonderbar eingefroren wirkt diese Landschaft, selbst wenn das Korn in der warmen Sonne wogt» (n. pag.). The result is a feeling of complete stultification, of deadly circularity. The film ’ s first narrative climax falls on the day of the local harvest festival, which serves as the occasion for two key crimes, one against property, another one against a person. A young farmer whose mother, a harvest worker, died after a fall in an unsafe barn, seeks revenge upon the baron: looking every bit the grim reaper, he takes his scythe to a field of neatly planted cabbages. His father has earlier forecast the boy ’ s impetuous act, dismissing his son ’ s rage and sarcastically declaring that the boy could behead the foreman with his scythe, but it would not bring his mother back to life. The scene of the farmhand attacking the cabbage with determined force is oddly brutal. The vengeful impetus behind his deed, coupled with the very word Kohlköpfe - their neat, round rows resembling so many human heads while also subtly evoking the uncanny physical similarities between the film ’ s numerous child characters - render the act a symbolic mass beheading. The reaction of the baroness upon the discovery of the crime heightens the sense of violence behind this destructive but otherwise relatively harmless action: she turns away from the scene in patent disgust, deeming it «widerlich,» and then withdraws to her bed for the remainder of the day. The ominous quality of the young farmer ’ s attack is further heightened by a far crueler deed perpetrated that same day: someone lures the baron ’ s slight, effete and clearly sheltered son, Siggi, into a nearby mill, strings him up by his ankles and brutally canes him, leaving him gravely injured and mute with trauma. Although the precise reason behind the attack against Siggi remains unclear, the play upon the natural and retaliatory harvest underlying both acts is unmistakable, a literalization of the Biblical pronouncement «for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.» Haneke overlays notions of the natural and spiritual, of reward and retribution. While the film, highly critical of a brutal morality enacted in the name of religion, does not endorse this punitive world view, in 159 Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding linking the harvest to the growth of violence it does plant the seed, as it were, that there is something amiss at the very root level of this diegetic world - that the cruelty behind these actions springs from the very soil. This same cycle of ritual violence will come to the fore in the film ’ s second violent act against a child. Here the victim is the young son of the local midwife: Karli, who suffers from Down syndrome, is abducted, severely beaten, and tied to a tree. Next to him a note reads: «Denn ich, der Herr, dein Gott, bin ein eifriger Gott, der da heimsucht der Väter Missetat an den Kindern bis in das dritte und vierte Glied,» a version of a line in the opening text of the Ten Commandments warning against the worship of false idols. The emphasis here is not on the sin of false idolatry, however, but rather the generational consequences of paternal misdeeds, invoking biblical notions of begetting as well as inheritance. While the crime committed against Karli does not invoke the concept of natural harvest per se, it aligns with the film ’ s larger constellation of violence and succession, appearing as the latest chapter in a cruel legacy passed on in linear progression through the generations. The brutality of the parental generation is omnipresent in Das weiße Band, meted out by an array of ironfisted fathers paired with mothers who support their absolutist domestic regimes. Indeed, the film presents a perfect patriarchal trifecta in its three most dominant male authority figures, each known simply by his title: der Baron, der Arzt, and der Pastor. The motif of paternal physical abuse is most clearly embodied by the figure of the local pastor. He instructs the local children in preparation for their confirmation, thereby playing a critical role in their path to maturation in both the church and the larger community. And it is he who implements the most draconian measures to school his own children in proper conduct, caning them regularly for small infractions, sending them to bed without supper, and withholding even the smallest gesture of affection. He makes their shame public, forcing his two eldest to don white ribbons as a visual admonishment to live up to the virtues of purity and innocence. He, too, devises the plan to bind his son ’ s arms to his bed frame - an act meant to prevent his son from masturbating, but which reads as an act of bondage, even torture. In its emphasis upon the exercising of a false and domineering morality by the parental generation upon its children, Das weiße Band marshals now familiar arguments that read fascism as the byproduct of sexual repression - a theory perhaps most famously associated now with the work of Klaus Theweleit, but which, as Dagmar Herzog has so fruitfully shown, proved generally characteristic of the 68er critique of the perpetrator generation and postwar society. As Herzog argues, the New Left and sixties liberals «shared [the conviction] [. . .] that the Third Reich had been at its core sex-hostile and 160 Jennifer M. Kapczynski that the Holocaust was the perverted product of sexual repression» despite the fact that, as she carefully explicates in her book, this interpretation of sexuality under Nazism denied the very ways in which the movement appealed to some populations precisely through a politics of sexual license (156). Part and parcel of the 1960s-era ’ s new sexual politics, which equated «liberated sex with progressive politics,» was the Kinderladen movement, a collectivist childrearing concept designed in direct reaction to older models of parenting deemed authoritarian (155). In particular, the movement championed new attitudes toward childhood sexuality, with permissive views on sexual exploration and masturbation, and aggression, holding that children should learn to direct their anger at parental and other figures of authority. 3 If sublimated as in the past, according to this view, children would inevitably direct their aggression «toward those more vulnerable [. . .] ‹ hippies, Negroes, yesterday Jews and today Arabs › » (171). The concept was clear: repression fed a culture of racism and genocide. Yet the Kinderladen model was troublingly inadequate to explain such sociopolitical phenomena as anti-Semitism. It is thus all the more striking how much Haneke ’ s film reads like a primer of 68er views on earlier pedagogical beliefs, playing further into the film ’ s suggestion that the world of Eichwald does, indeed, give rise to a subsequent culture of atrocities. As historian Jeffrey Herf remarks with skepticism regarding Haneke ’ s film and the repression hypothesis underlying it, «Klaus Theweleit made a persuasive case that fear of their own sexuality, of women and of Jews contributed toward the movement of some young men toward right-wing extremist politics after World War I. But there are people all over the globe who are sexually repressed. Why is it that this particular repression took the form of National Socialism? » (cited in Klawans n.pag.). Indeed, even Haneke ’ s choice to cite extensively from Rutschky ’ s 1977 anthology Schwarze Pädagogik could be seen in the light of 1960s-era pedagogical critiques. Rutschky, and following her, Haneke, selects materials published from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, cut and juxtaposed to suit a 1970s argument about the authoritarian nature of older forms of parenting. Rutschky never directly expresses a concern with fascism, but her book begins with a quote from Adorno and Horkheimer ’ s Dialektik der Aufklärung, and in the spirit of the Frankfurt School she undertakes a critique of Enlightenment-era pedagogy that serves the larger project of interrogating German culture ’ s progression from putatively progressive thinking to barbarism. The anthology ’ s organizational rubrics map well onto contemporary critiques of traditional parenting patterns as fostering the development of authoritarian subjects, with chapters on topics including: instilling fear in children; the denial of parental love; the pedagogue ’ s demand 161 Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding for absolute subjection, self-abnegation, and the suppression of sexual urges; and the total rationalization of the child ’ s body. Regarding her own process, Rutschky declares she was compelled «rücksichtslos gegen die expliziten Absichten der Autoren [zu] verfahren» «um die verdrängten und verleugneten Konflikte, die diese Geschichte mitbestimmen, der Wahrnehmung zugänglich zu machen. [. . .] Die Texte wurden ihrem ursprünglichen Zusammenhang entrissen, jeder Autor wird tendenziös zitiert» (xv, cited in Naqvi 137). As Naqvi notes, there is a violence to Rutschky ’ s method - one that Haneke duplicates when he excerpts her abstracts for the dialogue in his film (136 - 37). This is not to suggest that the pedagogical tracts Rutschky and Haneke cite are not authoritarian; rather, I would emphasize that the author ’ s and director ’ s shared mode of citation deploys these older texts to generate a particular image of traditional parentage that, in the context of 1960s and 1970s West German debates about childrearing, was specifically indicted as having produced a totalitarian society capable of committing genocide. Read in this light, what Naqvi interprets as a multidirectional gesture by Haneke attains a troubling degree of teleology. Like Rutschky, Haneke offers a deliberately strong reading of the historical record that, although it gestures toward the deep roots of National Socialism ’ s origins, nevertheless continues along an alarmingly familiar trajectory that begins in a culture of abusive pedagogy and ends in the Holocaust. The sense that Eichwald harbors the seed of future genocide is only heightened by the film ’ s representation of the town ’ s adolescent population. In selecting his corps of young actors, Haneke reports having previewed images of literally thousands of candidates with an eye to projecting historical accuracy through their physical appearance: «People look different now and it took a lot of work finding people with the right sort of face. We looked at over 7,000 children; they not only had to look like they belonged to the era, they had to be able to act! » (Andrew 15) A primary inspiration for Haneke was the Weimar-era photography of August Sander, famous for his efforts to capture a wide range of German physiognomies in the years preceding the racial exclusionism of Nazism, as in the 1929 photo series published as Antlitz der Zeit, which included sixty portraits derived from his larger documentary project Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Sanders suffered severe limitations on his artistic and personal life during the Hitler years after the Nazi regime deemed his work inimical to its aims. While the reference to Sander is unmistakable in the framing and costuming of the film ’ s figures as well as the film ’ s general aesthetic (shot in color and then transferred to black and white, a first for the director), Haneke departs from the photographer ’ s project in two 162 Jennifer M. Kapczynski notable ways. Haneke tends to privilege group depictions rather than the sorts of individual portraits Sander favored, thereby downplaying the typological qualities Sander emphasized and instead foregrounding the figures ’ place within a social constellation. Additionally, where Sander sought to depict a wide range of social classes and positions, grouping his works into rubrics such as «Der Bauer,» «Die Frau,» «Die Künstler,» and «Die Großstadt,» Haneke and cameraman Christian Berger tend to linger on the strikingly blond and mercilessly scrubbed faces of the town ’ s youth, suggesting not so much interest in issues of class as in physiognomy - a kind of selective citation of Sander ’ s work that focuses less on a broad spectrum of German society than on a particular subset that, significantly, will go on to constitute the nation ’ s racially privileged population. The importance of Haneke ’ s emphasis on these young adults derives not only from the film ’ s historical setting, which sets their maturation on pace with the emergence of National Socialism and hence positions them as potential future perpetrators, but also because the figure of the child played a foundational role in National Socialist ideology and propaganda. Indeed, even more strongly than Sanders ’ s portraiture, the children of Das weiße Band evoke a host of wartime-era cinematic representations of Nazi youth in both proand anti-fascist works, from films celebrating the youth contribution to fascism, like Hans Steinhoff ’ s Hitlerjunge Quex (1933) or Leni Riefenstahl ’ s Triumph des Willens (1935), to lurid condemnations of child indoctrination of the sort found in such films as Edward Dmytryk ’ s Hitler ’ s Children (USA, 1943), the Walt Disney animated short Education for Death - The Making of the Nazi (USA, 1943), as well as more standard fare like Frank Capra ’ s US government-sponsored Why We Fight - Prelude to War (USA, 1942). Even more striking is their resemblance to the evil offspring in Wolf Rilla ’ s British sci-fi/ horror classic Village of the Damned (1960), which melds images of National Socialist racial superiority with the specter of Communist contagion to explore the dangers posed by the «bad seeds» of totalitarianism. 4 Regardless of whether these references are conscious on Haneke ’ s part, the very fashion in which the child figures in this film evoke these cinematic predecessors both encourages viewers to see Das weiße Band in a trajectory of representations of National Socialism and to reflect on the various real and figurative ways in which these children themselves harbor a menacing reproductive potential. Whether striding through the streets of Eichwald or lurking just outside closed windows, the village ’ s band of children appear in carefully orchestrated groupings (Fig. 1). Invariably at their lead is the towheaded Klara, daughter of the local pastor. Klara is presented as a disturbingly clever child. Gifted in the 163 Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding art of sycophancy when called upon to explain her actions to adults, she is the sole figure whom the film conclusively shows as capable of abhorrent cruelty toward the weak: after her father humiliates her before the communion class, she steals into his study and crucifies his pet song bird with a pair of scissors (an act that her father strikingly declines to punish). The formation patterns in which the children move suggest the seed of a mass, suggestively echoing the larger-scale constellations later choreographed under National Socialism, with Klara standing in as their charismatic instigator. Fig. 1: From Das weiße Band (2009). Directed by Michael Haneke. 164 Jennifer M. Kapczynski The duplicative quality of the child characters is further augmented by Christian Berger ’ s camerawork, which adopts a highly regulated framing regime that frequently suggests the interchangeability of the various figures in the film. Consider, for example, a series of squarely frontal shots depicting the pastor ’ s family around the dinner table (Fig. 2). While the shots recall the traditions of portraiture as well as the physiognomic study and even the flipbook, allowing us to study the features and expressions of the characters, their juxtaposition emphasizes issues of similarity and variation, further calling to mind the interplay of genotype (that is, inherited characteristics) and phenotype (or the variations in expressed character that result from the influence of both genetic and environmental factors). As the graphic matches align face after face, our inevitable search for commonalities prompts larger questions about which precise traits these progeny will share with their parents. Indeed, although it is unclear whether Haneke researched the question of inheritance, it is noteworthy nonetheless that the concepts of genotype and phenotype were first introduced in 1906 by Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen and made available to German readers in 1909 (i.e., roughly around the period the film is meant to take place) with Elemente der exakten Erblichkeitslehre - the book that coined the term «gene» and became a foundational text for the field of genetics. Fig. 2: From Das weiße Band (2009). Directed by Michael Haneke. Berger ’ s linking frames are not restricted moreover to the individual family, but conjure resemblances across generational and familial lines. The overall result is a kind of infinite multiplication - one that, on the one hand, hints at the 165 Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding transposable fates of Haneke ’ s figures, particularly the women, and that, on the other hand, conjures the paranoiac spectacle of the clone. The very substitutability of the figures in this film renders even the small world of the village a disturbing potential mass with unlimited capacity for multiplication - fertile ground for a more widespread movement. Although Garrett Stewart does not concentrate on the issue of biological discourses in Das weiße Band, his wording is fortuitous when he describes the film as resembling «hacked diagnostic fragments on a dissecting table, cross-sections of a systemic malady» (40). Along similar lines, reviewer Joe Morgenstern concludes, «the village ’ s disease [. . .] is the German disease, and the human disease as well» (n. pag.). Permeating Haneke ’ s film, as both writers note, is a sense that fascism functions much like an illness, capable of spreading through a community and infecting its members - a trope that, as I have argued elsewhere, since the early postwar period has carried widespread resonance, but that remains disturbingly reliant upon dichotomies of health and illness that proved instrumental in Nazi rhetoric and genocidal policies (Kapczynski). The peculiar similarity in the children ’ s appearance - which seems to hint at an uncanny capacity for biological regeneration as well as ideological spread - further invokes a cinematic tradition linking Nazi biopolitics with the science of replication. Indeed, a common trope in anti-fascist propaganda was the characterization of the indoctrinated as clones or hydras, bespeaking both a critique of and deep-seated anxiety about the authoritarian quest to foster a master race defined by genetic purity as well as political conformity. In the postwar era, the frightening specter of the fascist replicant has informed a wide range of «what-if» films - among them David Bradley ’ s They Saved Hitler ’ s Brain (USA, 1966) and Franklin J. Schaffner ’ s The Boys From Brazil (UK/ USA 1978) - that explore the possibility that Hitler ’ s genetic material, if not his body, has been kept alive through perverse scientific experimentation. At stake in these and similar films is never simply the maintenance of the fascist dictator ’ s biological traits, however, but rather an assumption of a link between these traits and the political ideology for which he stood. To be sure, the Nazis themselves blurred this line explicitly in their program to cultivate the «Aryan race»; however, these later representations continue to collapse the distinction between nature and nurture, suggesting that political views might be embedded at the level of one ’ s genes (even when, as in The Boys from Brazil, those genetic traits are brought to expression by reproducing specific sociocultural conditions along with those genes). In echoing this longer cinematic tradition, albeit absent the campiness that characterizes the postwar films, Haneke ’ s Das weiße Band presents audiences with a child population 166 Jennifer M. Kapczynski fearsome not only for its potential for base and wanton violence, but also for its capacity to produce literal copycat crimes - a sense underscored by the suggestion in the film that the child perpetrators act in concert but without any clear coordination, as if their transgressions are the consequence of spontaneous and contagious cruelty born out of a deep interconnection. The director ’ s play upon the replication of physical and character traits in his youthful characters once more suggests an intimate link between biology and behavior, hinting that their misdeeds may not simply be learned, but also constitute a form of genetic expression. The subtext of the biological emerges again through the film ’ s implicit and explicit treatment of incest and the inevitable questions of inbreeding and heredity it raises. The subject twice enters the film. The first occasion arises out of a moment of suggestive editing. The scene unfolds in the claustrophobically cluttered bourgeois confines of the pastor ’ s study, as the cleric methodically tends to his canary and with increasing force interrogates his eldest son, Martin, about masturbation. Listing a litany of frightening symptoms supposedly caused by onanism that culminated in the death of a boy from a nearby town, the pastor compels his son to «confess» the true reason for his own apathy and exhaustion. The scene is striking for its cruelty - the pastor nurtures his pet while systematically dismantling his own child ’ s psyche - as well as for its foregrounding of sexual transgression as a highest order sin in the world of Eichwald. This is in marked contrast to the violence that underlies Klara ’ s cruel killing of the same bird in that very space just a short while later, which the pastor never acknowledges, much as he refuses to countenance the schoolteacher ’ s suggestion that the town ’ s youth might be to blame for the series of mysterious crimes. Once more echoing the core tenets of 68er critiques of fascism, the film suggests a link between the cultures of repression and aggression. At the same time, this scene is crucial for the film ’ s larger exploration of violence as the byproduct of both learned behaviors and inherited characteristics. Specifically, the scene hints at connections between sexual repression and sexual abuse. Throughout the scene, Berger makes frequent use of over-the-shoulder medium shots that position either father or son with much of their backs to the camera. While this is a standard convention in continuity editing, serving to connect the two figures and the space they inhabit, the strategy plays a key role in what follows. Immediately after the boy ’ s weakly uttered «ja» seals his forced admission of guilt, a hard cut to the next scene, set in a similarly overcrowded interior, reveals a medium shot of a man ’ s hunched back. His movements and guttural utterances make clear that he is having sex, but his large frame crucially obscures the identity of his 167 Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding partner. Within seconds, that partner will be revealed as the local midwife, and the back as belonging to the doctor. But for a brief moment, because the hard cut might as easily indicate a temporal as a spatial shift (or possibly both), we are led to believe that we are viewing the delayed conclusion of the pastor ’ s interrogation: as «punishment» for the confession of masturbation, the pastor subjects his son to rape. The move certainly unsettles audience expectations in a fashion typical for Haneke, and may also signal the director ’ s intention to counter a long tradition of queering fascism (since after all, this turns out to be a consensual, if unpleasant, heterosexual encounter and not a case of gay pedophilia). At the same time, the juxtaposition of these shots suggestively links the community ’ s draconian morality to sexual cruelty and a general claustrophobic «inwardness» in the direction of its energies. The disclosure that the back belongs to the physician, moreover, does little to undo the implications generated by the appositive images of the pastor ’ s relentless inquiry and the copulating pair. First, the doctor ’ s relationship with the midwife is characterized by his callous and at times craven meanness, and the sex that the viewer witnesses, if not rape, is nevertheless so devoid of caring and basic respect that it reads as another symptom of the town ’ s culture of misogyny and brutality. More important still, however, is the brief scene that immediately precedes the pastor ’ s interrogation, in which the doctor returns home after a lengthy absence. Standing at the spot of the accident that inaugurated the town ’ s crime wave and cost him a badly broken collarbone, when a thin wire strung between trees near the approach to his house toppled both the physician and his horse, the doctor turns to gaze intently at his pubescent daughter, Anna. In a medium close-up we see the doctor ’ s eyes sweep up and down her maturing young body, asking «Wie alt bist du? » At her answer, fourteen, he turns away and mutters: «Seltsam, wie sehr du deiner Mutter ähnelst.» The exchange concludes there, but the suggestion is clear that the doctor ’ s absence has granted him a new appreciation of his child ’ s sexual development, as he sees in her the outline of her deceased mother, and in so doing, seems to contemplate her readiness as a surrogate spouse. Considering this and the later episode as bookends to the pastor ’ s domestic inquisition sheds new light on the larger constellation of sex, violence, and abuse in Das weiße Band, foregrounding the various ways in which Eichwald ’ s children are subjected to and rebel against an adult system that simultaneously punishes and exploits their emerging sexualities. Thus even as the film flouts our first impressions when it cuts abruptly from the pastor to the doctor, the deliberate confusion generated by the edit does not undo our impression that abuse provides the hidden link between the film ’ s various familial and narrative lines. Indeed, the cut, in connecting these two scenes and stories, holds the 168 Jennifer M. Kapczynski power to impel viewers to imagine scenes not shown, encouraging a feeling that the pastor could have done the same, even if the film never offers concrete evidence of it. Although the confounding cut in this way expands the film ’ s chain of signification beyond the frame, it does not necessarily foster an aesthetics of resistance as Williams suggests. Rather, the gesture of the hard edit may be understood as yet another formal expression of the film ’ s motif of replication, suggestively multiplying the fates onscreen through the intimation of their interconnection. Fig. 3: From Das weiße Band (2009). Directed by Michael Haneke. Incest enters the narrative explicitly a short while later in the film, in a scene in which the doctor ’ s young son Rudi stumbles upon his father and sister in a compromising encounter that appears to confirm the earlier suggestion that the physician is molesting his daughter. Wandering through the pitch-black halls of the family home after he discovers Anna is not in bed, Rudi hears muffled cries behind the closed door of his father ’ s office. The film cuts to a point-of-view shot, the camera positioned just over the boy ’ s shoulder as he slowly opens the door to reveal his father ’ s back once more, this time only partly obscuring the object of his attention: Anna is seated upon the exam table with her nightdress hitched up around her thighs, her thin, bare legs dangling and slightly parted (Fig. 3). Cut to a static medium shot of the interior, as Anna reassures her little brother through suppressed tears that their father was only piercing her ears. Shyly tugging down her garment to cover her knees, her father comments «Die Schönheit hat zu leiden - so sagt man, ja oder? » As if in reply, the girl, her face shifting between an expression of abject misery and 169 Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding embarrassment, explains the timing of her father ’ s intervention: having not worn earrings in a long while, her holes had closed up, but now she will be able to wear the pair that had once belonged to their mother - «die schönen, weißt du? » - in time for the approaching Whitsun holiday. The suggestive quality of the two figures ’ physical positioning and dress, the scene ’ s language of physical penetration, emphasis on suffering as the price of beauty, and invocation of the earrings all indicate that the doctor has compelled his daughter to serve as the sexual substitute for his dead wife. A subsequent argument between the doctor and the midwife cements our suspicions, when she acknowledges having stood by silently despite the knowledge that he was abusing his daughter. Once more, the film plays on the theme of replication, suggesting the interchangeability of its central characters as well as the particularly gendered fate awaiting the young women of Eichwald. At the same time, the confirmation of molestation, when considered alongside the earlier sequence of the interrogation, leads viewers to consider whether incest has resulted in the literal (in)breeding of violence in the community of Eichwald. In the wake of that argument between the doctor and midwife and the vicious attack on Karli - who may or may not be the result of the midwife ’ s affair with the doctor - the physician and his family abruptly leave town without notice, and a short while later, the midwife and her own child disappear as well. We are not given any reason for their departure, but the narrator informs us that village gossips soon suspect that the doctor and midwife bear the blame for all of the local attacks. A far more plausible scenario, of course (since the two have no discernible motive), would suggest that the doctor leaves to avoid disclosure of another crime altogether: his sexual abuse of his own daughter, with its potential for producing yet another telltale pregnancy. This risk becomes doubly apparent when the villagers explain Karli ’ s disability as the result of a botched abortion meant to hide the doctor and midwife ’ s adultery. Contemporary audiences know this to be false, of course, but this bit of local wisdom compels the viewer to consider the genetic forces at play in any act of procreation and that take on a particular urgency in cases of incest and inbreeding, precisely because the parties ’ close similarities in DNA increase the rate at which recessive traits - among them, disabilities - appear. If we follow this analogy and link it to the film ’ s discourse on brutality as a «natural» by-product in Eichwald, the film appears to suggest a kind of exacerbated biological predisposition to violence shaping the culture of the village. When considered alongside the film ’ s visual foregrounding of the physiological similarities between its youthful figures, which heightens the impression of their incestuous resemblance and uncanny capacity for 170 Jennifer M. Kapczynski reproduction, and the film ’ s editorial strategies, which suggest deeper underlying connections between these figures and their fates, a picture emerges of a society both born and raised to violence. It remains unclear whether Haneke ’ s film functions as a broader meditation on fanaticism and the conditions of its emergence, not to speak of the desirability of using the case of pre-Nazi Germany as the medium for such reflection. In the end, this probably must remain within the subjective purview of the viewer and his or her associative faculties. As this article has sought to demonstrate, however, Das weiße Band does provide multiple lines along which to read the history of early twentieth century German culture as the breeding ground for National Socialism. As such, the film ’ s account of that history bears close examination. Scholars like Williams and Naqvi have argued compellingly for the openness of Das weiße Band, pointing toward its obvious narrative seams and its larger temporal frame of reference. However tempting, these analyses are ultimately unconvincing, particularly when brought to bear on Haneke ’ s treatment of youth violence in the film. In a fashion anything other than open, Das weiße Band suggests that the film ’ s young generation - that population that will come of age with National Socialism and hence play a seminal part in supporting and perhaps also participating in the crimes of the regime - commits egregious acts of cruelty against the weak out of a sadism cultivated through both learned behavior and inborn predisposition. One could make the case that Haneke hereby inverts the biopolitical logic behind the Nazis ’ «master race» rhetoric, constructing a culture of brutal conformity shaped not by superior genetic selection, but rather incest and inbreeding, with their attendant associations of inwardness, backwardness, and deformity. This would be to miss the point, however, that such an argument in the end relies upon much the same theoretical structure as National Socialists themselves employed; rather than undoing the biopolitical logic of German fascism, it simply inverts the content of the categories of the normal and the pathological. Moreover, Haneke ’ s suggestion that nature as well as nurture created the conditions for Hitler ’ s rise to power effectively restricts his narrative to a narrow reading of history as the inevitable outcome of a very particular historical and sociopolitical constellation - one that does not lend itself easily to applications outside of an early twentieth-century German context. The director himself has expressed a certain amount of disinterest in the insights of current historical research on the preconditions that facilitated the Third Reich and Holocaust. In the interview with Klawans, informed « ‹ that some historians see only a weak link between the world of The White Ribbon › and the development of Nazism, Mr. Haneke said there is ‹ a vast spectrum of opinion on this question, › which he 171 Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding would prefer not to address.» He elaborated: « ‹ When I offer explanations or commentary, I limit the possible views of the spectators › » (Klawans n. pag.). Yet while Haneke here shows an admirable respect for his viewers ’ interpretative inclinations and acumen, his statement belies the very manner in which his film, through a series of narrative and formal gestures, actively forecloses multiple readings and instead depicts the fictional community of Eichwald as a template for a nation ’ s biopolitical destiny, its future set on a locked course toward violence, fanaticism, and genocide. Notes 1 See Buß and Kümmel. Kümmel is cited in Naqvi (130). 2 See for example Klawans. 3 On the Kinderladen movement see Herzog 162 - 74. 4 Both Scott and Andrew make this observation as well. Works Cited Andrew, Geoff. «The Revenge of Children.» Interview with Michael Haneke. Sight and Sound 19.12 (2009): 14 - 17. Buß, Christian. «Monster im Dorf.» Der Spiegel, 14 Oct. 2009. 23 July 2012. <http: / / www.spiegel.de/ kultur/ kino/ oscar-kandidat-das-weisse-band-monster-im-dorf-a -654825.html>. Day, Elizabeth. «Michael Haneke: ‹ There is as much evil in us as there is good › .» Interview with Michael Haneke. The Observer. 25 October 2009. 23 July 2012. http: / / www.guardian.co.uk/ film/ 2009/ oct/ 25/ interview-michael-haneke-white-rib bon>. Grundmann, Roy. «Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke.» Cineaste (Dec. 2009): 8-13. Herzog, Dagmar. Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Kapczynski, Jennifer M. The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. Klawans, Stuart. «Fascism, Repression and ‹ The White Ribbon › .» New York Times, 30 Oct. 2009. 23 July 2012. <http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 11/ 01/ movies/ 01k law.html? pagewanted=all>. Kümmel, Peter. « ‹ Das weiße Band › im Kino. Von diesen Kindern stammen wir ab? » Die Zeit, 15 Oct. 2009. 23 July 2012. <http: / / www.zeit.de/ 2009/ 42/ Das-weisse- Band>. 172 Jennifer M. Kapczynski Morgenstern, Joe. «Germany ’ s ‹ White Ribbon › is a Blue-Ribbon Exercise in Evil ’ s Essence.» Wall Street Journal, 8 Jan. 2010. 23 July 2012. <http: / / online.wsj.com/ article/ SB10001424052748704130904574644150518333002.html>. Naqvi, Fatima. Trügerische Vertrautheit. Filme von Michael Haneke. Vienna: Synema, 2010. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Rutschky, Katharina. Schwarze Pädagogik. Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung. Berlin: Ullstein, 2001. Scott, A. O. «Wholesome Hamlet ’ s Horror Sends a Jolt to the System.» New York Times, 29 Dec. 2009. 23 July 2012. <http: / / movies.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 12/ 30/ movies/ 30white.html? src=me&ref=movies&_r=0>. Stewart, Garrett. «Pre-War Trauma: Haneke ’ s The White Ribbon.» Film Quarterly 63.4 (2010): 40 - 47. Williams, James S. «Abberations of Beauty: Violence and Cinematic Resistance in Haneke ’ s The White Ribbon.» Film Quarterly 63.4 (2010): 48 - 55. 173 Raising Cain? The Logic of Breeding Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.francke.de · E-Mail: info@francke.de Der Band versammelt kritische Beiträge zu Leben und Werk Arthur Koestlers. Durch Ausleuchtung mannigfacher Aspekte seines umfangreichen literarischen und politisch motivierten essayistischen Werkes sowie der wissenschaftstheoretischen Schriften und Rezeptionsgeschichte ergibt sich eine überblicksartige Zusammenschau des Koestlerschen Œuvres. Untersucht werden dabei Facetten seiner von der Erfahrung des Totalitarismus und des Exils geprägten, turbulenten Lebensgeschichte; die literarische Verarbeitung der Rußlandreise bzw. der kommunistischen Jahre in der Trilogie Die Gladiatoren, Sonnenfinsternis, Ein Mann springt in die Tiefe; die Autobiografie sowie jene theoretischen Schriften, die nicht nur Koestlers Interesse an Psychologie sondern auch seine Kritik am Reduktionismus der modernen Wissenschaft widerspiegeln; und nicht zuletzt die Arbeiten zur Parapsychologie, mit der er jenen reduzierenden Verabsolutierungstendenzen entgegen zu wirken versuchte und deren Förderung er sich am Ende und gleichsam als letztes Ziel seines Schaffens widmete. Der Band wird abgerundet durch komparatistisch angelegte Studien, die u.a. Koestlers Beziehung zu Manès Sperber, aber auch seine Nähe zu dem Werk Hermann Brochs hervorheben. Robert G. Weigel (Hg.) Arthur Koestler: Ein heller Geist in dunkler Zeit Vorträge des Internationalen Arthur Koestler-Symposiums der Universität Auburn 2007 Edition Patmos, Band 13 2009, 223 Seiten, €[D] 39,00/ SFr 66,00 ISBN 978-3-7720-8312-9 056109 Auslieferung Mai 2009.indd 11 09.06.2009 7: 39: 17 Uhr Reenacting Evil: Giving Voice to the Perpetrator in Das Himmler-Projekt and Das Goebbels-Experiment MICHAEL D. RICHARDSON I THACA C OLLEGE Film has long been a vital, if controversial means for, on the one hand, memorializing the atrocities of the Holocaust and, on the other, representing and understanding the enigmatic forces that led to the Nazis ’ eliminationist policies. In the first years after the war, documentaries were prevalent among cinematic depictions. Films such as Billy Wilder ’ s Die Todesmühlen (1945) and Alan Resnais ’ s Night and Fog (1955) relied extensively on archival footage, particularly on footage taken by Allied forces shortly after the liberation of the death camps. With ignorance - or feigned ignorance - of the atrocities of the Holocaust still widespread, the primary purpose of such films was the dissemination of visual evidence of the death camps. With the assumption of access to the event that these images provided, documentary film and photography served as verification of events that seemed to exist outside of comprehensibility. Film represented a rejoinder to German denials of knowledge and attempts at rationalization. Thus, documentary films, or rather their screening, took on a pedagogical character in occupied Germany, particularly in the U. S. zone of occupation, where Todesmühlen was shown together with newsreels and other selected documentaries as part of an effort at «reeducating» the German civilian population. 1 While documentaries such as Night and Fog have continued to be screened as part of Holocaust education in Germany (a practice depicted in films such as Die bleierne Zeit (Margarethe von Trotta, 1981) and Die innere Sicherheit (Christian Petzold, 2000)) throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, narrative film has emerged alongside documentary as a means for engaging in discussions about the war and the Holocaust in Germany. Certainly, from an international perspective, the feature film was introduced relatively quickly as a complement to the documentary as filmmakers sought to make use of film as a means not only to «show» the Holocaust, but also to engage viewers emotionally in a narrative about the Holocaust, utilizing the particular mechanisms of film form. While the war was not completely absent from German screens in the 1950s and early 1960s, the historical narratives told by war films were fairly well circumscribed, focusing almost exclusively on Wehrmacht soldiers who exhibited no discernible political tendencies other than an allegiance to a sense of duty and to their fellow soldiers. It was only in the late 1960s, with the emergence of New German Cinema, that film became more directly engaged with the ideological underpinnings of the Nazi era and degrees of German complicity, both civilian and military. Although New German Cinema directors such as Rainer W. Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff and Helma Sanders-Brahms were clearly aware of how film as a medium could create as much ambiguity as clarity, one could argue that, like postwar documentaries, they were also produced with an urgency derived from a fear of historical forgetting as a response to the amnesia about the Holocaust and Second World War that settled over West Germany during its postwar reconstruction. The post-Wende period, however, saw a convergence of the narrative and the documentary in German cinema. A steady stream of documentaries focusing on Nazi perpetrators, such as those produced by Guido Knopp - Hitlers Helfer (1996), Hitlers Krieger (1998), Hitlers Kinder (2000) - flooded television airwaves. Similarly, German narrative cinema moved towards direct portrayals of the major figures of the Third Reich in films such as Der Untergang (2004) and Speer und Er (2005). What these films share in addition to the thematic focus on perpetrators, is their effort to situate contemporary viewers along a continuum of guilt (ranging from perpetrator to bystander) by restaging the past in order to allow viewers to align themselves with a German civilian population that is either ignorant of Nazi crimes or at least powerless to stop them. It is also notable that they tend to be much more concerned with reenacting the final stages of the war rather than its beginnings; such narratives thus not only provide audiences with a cathartic and definitive ending to the Nazi era, but they allow for a forward-looking orientation, in which the past is reinterpreted through the standpoint of a contemporary subjectivity. On the level of form, the critical engagement with cinematic representations of the Holocaust and German perpetrators has centered around two basic questions: the possibility of adequately and accurately representing what many see as an essentially unknowable event, and the role that affect plays in facilitating or hindering the transmission of meaning. Narrative films are, predictably, subject to scrutiny for how they fictionalize events and employ affect as a means to engage audiences. In both their form (i. e., through the use of hand-held cameras and the use or mimicry of archival footage) and content (by asserting the historical and even psychological accuracy of their portrayals of people and events) filmmakers such as Max Färberböck and Oliver Hirschbiegel often go to great pains to position their films as factual accounts that, despite being highly melodramatic, are grounded in historical under- 176 Michael D. Richardson standing. Indeed both Hirschbiegel ’ s Der Untergang (2004), which draws on, among other sources, the memoirs of Hitler ’ s secretary Traudl Junge, Albert Speer, and Ernst-Günther Schenck, and Färberböck ’ s Anonyma: Eine Frau in Berlin (2008), which takes as its primary source text an anonymous diary written during the Soviet Occupation of Berlin, privilege first-hand accounts of the fall of Berlin, regardless of the potential for a subjective and arguably self-serving recollection of the period. Given its focus on Hitler, who had been absent from German film, though not from the German screen, Hirschbiegel ’ s film in particular was aggressively marketed as meticulous in its adherence to facts. Hirschbiegel insisted that «Man kann da von Interpretation nicht wirklich sprechen» (anon. Kultura-Extra), while producer Bernd Eichinger claimed that «Wir machen keine Soap-Opera und auch kein Doku- Drama» (153). In so doing, such films sought to immunize themselves from the sorts of objections lodged against narrative historical films, namely a privileging of melodrama over reality, excessive use of affect and empathy, and a desire to provide closure in the form of a happy ending. Positioning them on the continuum of fictional and factual accounts closer to the documentary form may give such films an appearance of authenticity, but it overlooks the fact that documentaries are not immune to questions regarding the limits of filmic representability of the Holocaust and the role that audience identification and the generation of affect should play, particularly when it comes to the manipulation of historical material. The reception of Knopp ’ s various documentaries attests to this. Writing in Die Zeit, Peter Kümmel notes that Knopp approaches his documentaries with the «Behagen des Autorenfilmers» and that, while Knopp does not falsify historical dates and events, «Er zeigt die Vergangenheit als Director ’ s Cut. Er ist ein Historiker des Schneidetischs.» His manipulations are designed to engage the audience in an emotional investment, one that elides larger questions of guilt as they pertained to a German civilian population and that offers them closure. Although Knopp ’ s documentaries stand out for their unabashed adoption of melodramatic style in order to evoke an emotional response on the part of the audience, this employment of affect is not necessarily outside the realm of the documentary. As feature films strive for a legitimacy via a notion of «authenticity,» documentary films have often followed nearly an opposite trajectory. In his seminal study of the documentary film, Bill Nichols outlines an evolution of the documentary form, delineating six different modes of engagement, beginning with what he terms an «expository» mode, which features «voice-of-God commentary» and emphasizes verbal commentary and argumentative logic (32). Other modes recognize and even valorize the filmmaker ’ s direct engagement in the documentary, culminating in a «per- 177 Reenacting Evil: Giving Voice to the Perpetrator formative mode» in which the subjective nature of the documentarian as well as the subjective position of the audience are emphasized, and emotion and affect are afforded a central role. While Nichols ’ s account of the linearity of this evolution of documentary form is problematic, as is the implication that these forms do not coexist in a single work, his categories are useful, particularly with respect to Holocaust documentaries. 2 Die Todesmühlen can certainly be understood as expository, while Night and Fog, whose voice-over commentary was written by Paul Celan, embodies characteristics of both the expository and the poetic modes. The most well-known example of a documentary in the interactive mode is Claude Lanzmann ’ s nine-and-one-half hour film Shoah (1985). Breaking with traditional documentaries about the Holocaust and the Nazi period, which typically feature extensive use of archival footage, Lanzmann famously omitted any material from the time of the Holocaust in favor of oral interviews and staged scenes, arguing that his film was not a documentary - indeed was not even representational - describing it instead as «a fiction of the real» (301) that was nonetheless meant to be an «incarnation of the truth» (Jeffries). This is not to suggest that all Holocaust documentaries subsequent to Lanzmann ’ s Shoah have carried on in an entirely similar vein, although given the enormous impact of that film, it would not be entirely incorrect to suggest later films must deal with Lanzmann ’ s provocative statements regarding the limits of what film can, and perhaps should, represent, and its direct or indirect implications for Holocaust documentary. Two of Lanzmann ’ s claims in particular serve as touchstones for an analysis of tendencies among recent documentaries: Lanzmann ’ s assertion that the use of archival material «historicizes» the Holocaust, relegating it to the past, and his adherence to the dictum «here there is no why» (Lanzmann, «Hier ist kein warum» 279) to such an extent that he would argue that even asking the question of why is considered obscene. Both are useful points of departure for dealing with Romuald Karmakar ’ s Das Himmler-Projekt (2000) and Lutz Hachmeister and Michael Kloft ’ s Das Goebbels-Experiment (2005). By relying almost exclusively on archival materials, both films implicitly acknowledge the potential for historicization inherent in the use of such materials, but nonetheless attempt to demonstrate how such a historicization can be overcome. Hachmeister and Kloft ’ s film attempts to make the past present via a juxtaposition of a range of historical materials, while Karmakar ’ s approach takes an opposite tack, relying on a single archival source. These two are not Holocaust films in the strict sense of the word in that their focus is on the architects of the Holocaust, rather than on the events themselves, but both purport to offer viewers an unmediated glimpse into the horrors of Nazi 178 Michael D. Richardson ideology by presenting images and texts without commentary. 3 While Das Goebbels-Experiment relies exclusively on archival sources (nearly all of its visuals are drawn from German-directed feature films and newsreels from the Nazi period) and its audio track consists of passages from Goebbels ’ s diary (read by Udo Samel in the German release and Kenneth Branagh in the English-language one), Karmakar ’ s film eschews images almost entirely in that it consists of what appears to be a single camera trained on the actor Manfred Zapatka reading Himmler ’ s secret 1943 Posen speech on the extermination of the Jews in a dry, monotone voice. These two works use archival material as a means of re-staging the past and this re-staging engages the viewer in processes of identification, both with the perpetrator, whose words are the focus of each film, as well as with the intended audience of the perpetrator ’ s words. In re-staging the past, both films create a sense of temporal displacement, whereby the audience is forced to listen to or witness the events depicted in the films as if those events were taking place in the present. In this making-present of the past, the filmmakers, like Lanzmann, seek to provide an «incarnation of the truth.» They seek to provide access in an attempt to marshal an affective relationship with the material, to restage the past in such a way as to create a temporal displacement in which the perpetrator ’ s words are the focus of each film, and affect is mobilized in the interest of transmitting ostensible truths about the nature of Nazi ideology as reflected in the persona of a perpetrator. First available in their fullness to historians only in 1992, Goebbels ’ s diaries encompass twenty-two years (and 29 volumes to date) of entries. When Hachmeister and Kloft ’ s documentary appeared in 2004, it was one of two to focus on the then newly published material, the other being Andrea Morgenthaler ’ s three-part film television documentary Joseph Goebbels. 4 Like Morgenthaler ’ s documentary, Das Goebbels-Experiment uses the diaries as a means for developing a psychological rather than a political portrait of Goebbels, but while Morgenthaler adheres to a more traditional documentary form, intercutting between archival footage, excerpts from the diaries, and commentary from various eyewitnesses, Hachmeister and Kloft eschew verbal commentary entirely. Taking Goebbels ’ s diaries as the source text for the film ’ s narration brings with it certain connotations in the minds of the audience, particularly given the key role that the diary form plays in Holocaust representation, due, as Jaimey Fisher argues, to both the invitation to a strong affective investment by the reader or viewer and its ostensibly testimonial character, which appears to provide unmediated access to an individual ’ s reactions to historical events as they unfold (242). Certainly, much of the reception of the most famous 179 Reenacting Evil: Giving Voice to the Perpetrator «Holocaust diary,» namely The Diary of Anne Frank, reflects this notion of unmediated access. 5 But this assumption of truth is, in and of itself, already problematic. Fisher, citing James E. Young, notes that despite the expectation that the diary serve as almost «sacred» testimony, it remains a form of interpretative discourse, one that should be understood as a constructed narrative (Fisher 243). 6 In the case of Goebbels, this is doubly true. Believing his tomes to be of great historical significance, Goebbels began dictating his entries in 1941, storing them first in an underground vault in the Reichsbank in Berlin, then having them copied onto microfilm. It would thus be a mistake to treat Goebbels ’ s words as anything other than another form through which he fabricated a particular narrative of the Nazi era and of his own motivations. But it is not the diary entries themselves that prove to be particularly problematic, as they at least carry with them a notion of subjectivity: they were clearly written by someone, someone directly identified in the film, wellknown to the audience, and given substance in the form of Branagh or Samel ’ s voice-over narration. Rather, it is the visuals that accompany the narration of the entries that prove to be problematic. Their perceived status as an authentic account of the period is complicated because the source of these images is obscured. The film, which features clips from Triumph des Willens (1935), Olympia I and II (1938), Ohm Krüger (1941), and Kolberg (1945), treats newsreel and archival footage, Nazi feature films and propaganda films almost interchangeably, a tactic that would be more problematic if the archival footage could in fact be treated as non-fiction. Given the tremendous control the Nazis, and particularly Goebbels exerted over the image, over what was seen and not seen, perhaps the distinction here is moot. After all, Riefenstahl would insist that Triumph des Willens was a «pure historical film,» calling it «film verité,» and arguing that her film merely captured the reality that was taking place in 1934. 7 The result is the same - a film that privileges a Nazi vision of history, a vision that remains unchallenged from start to finish. The juxtaposition of two types of sources - the literary and the visual - has the potential for providing the audience with mutual insight into their interpretive nature, via a sort of contradictory juxtaposition. One scene in particular highlights the capacity of a film of this sort to generate an ambiguous relationship with its source material. An intertitle appears reading «Goebbels spricht,» followed by a shot of him giving a speech. Another intertitle appears, reading: «Kapitulieren? Niemals! » and the narration continues: «April 26, 1928: Gestern in Friedenau geredet. Scheissvornehmes Bürgerpublikum.» As this line is read, the image abruptly shifts from Goebbels speaking to a scene of a crowd storming what appears to be a palace gate. For several seconds, the voice-over narration drops out and the 180 Michael D. Richardson only sound comes from this crowd footage. When Samel resumes reading from Goebbels ’ s diary entries, he references the film clip directly: «Ich sehe Eisensteins Film, 10 Tage, die die Welt erschütterten. Zu stark forciert und deshalb um seine besten Szenen gebracht. Einige Massenaufnahmen sehr gut. Das ist also Revolution. Man kann von den Bolschewisten vor allem in anfachen der Propaganda viel lernen. Der Film ist zu sehr Partei. Weniger wäre mehr.» The editing here opens up the film to three different readings: initially the logic of the film leads the audience to interpret the scene as a straightforward illustration of Goebbels ’ s words, correlating his description of an angry audience with the shots of rioting crowds. But once the source of the footage is revealed, this association becomes more ambiguous. If the crowds storming the Winter Palace in Eisenstein ’ s 1927 film about the October Revolution stand in for the bourgeoisie, then Goebbels becomes aligned with Alexander Kerensky, a doubling that is inaccurate both from the perspective of ideology and that of the dynamic of authority and rebellion, thus undermining Goebbels ’ s rhetoric of revolution. Alternately, the audience can read the angry (Bolshevik) masses as parallels to the Nazis, rising up against a decadent Weimar government. While this remains an ideologically incompatible association, it would better coincide with Goebbels ’ s projection of the Nazis as a mass movement poised to overthrow the status quo. But given Goebbels ’ s explicit reference to Eisenstein ’ s film, it is possible to add a third reading, one in which the audience is aligned with Goebbels, seeing the footage and interpreting it from his perspective. Doing so permits a certain amount of irony, since his sentiment expressed here is at odds with the decidedly non-subtle Nazi propaganda footage that appears elsewhere throughout the film. The treatment of Riefenstahl ’ s film - and Riefenstahl herself - is an interesting one, particularly given how effectively Ray Müller ’ s documentary Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl (1993) undermines Riefenstahl ’ s exculpatory explanations for her films and the depth of her involvement in and awareness of Nazi war crimes, by intercutting between interviews with the filmmaker, shots from her films, and excerpts from other archival documents. To cite just one such moment: when asked what kind of relations she had with Goebbels, she responds with a laugh, «die schlechtesten, die man sich vorstellen kann! » explaining that when they first met before the war, she rebuffed Goebbels ’ s romantic overtures, which incensed him and led to such a breakdown in relations that she considered him «Beinah ein Feind.» The film ’ s narrator then reads an excerpt from Goebbels ’ s diary describing their close social relationship, thus contradicting Riefenstahl and sending her into a sputtering rage. A similar juxtaposition in Hackmeister and Kloft ’ s film 181 Reenacting Evil: Giving Voice to the Perpetrator occurs, when an excerpt from Goebbels ’ s diary, in which he speaks contemptuously about Riefenstahl - «Fräulein Riefenstahl macht mir ihre Hysterien vor. Mit dieser Wilden Frauen ist nicht zu arbeiten. Ich bin kühl bis ans Herz hinan.» - is followed by footage of a speech in which Goebbels awards her the German film prize and praises Olympia. But here the contrast is between Goebbels ’ s contempt for Riefenstahl as expressed in his diary, and his public speech extolling her film. All this juxtaposition reveals, however, is that Goebbels ’ s public persona did not always reflect his personal opinions. Moments such as these are the exception rather than the rule in the film: the juxtaposition of personal insights and archival footage is predominantly illustrative, and no attempt is made to undermine Goebbels ’ s descriptions of events. This is primarily due to the fact that the film effectively effaces the traces between the various types of footage used as visual material. In the shots immediately preceding Goebbels ’ s speech above, as the voice-over describes Goebbels ’ s relocation to Berlin, the film ’ s visuals shift from scenes excerpted from Walter Ruttman ’ s Berlin Symphonie einer Grossstadt (1927) to footage taken from a Nazi newsreel of Goebbels himself arriving at his new office. While there is a barely perceptible shift in the film ’ s quality in that the scenes featuring Goebbels are slightly grainier and slowed down, there is otherwise no indication that we have moved from one visual source to another. All of the film ’ s images, whether they are drawn from archival footage, features, or from the propaganda film Triumph des Willens are given equal weight as a form of visual documentation. The editing of these materials has the potential to provide a devastating and insightful commentary; instead, Hachmeister and Kloft seem to want the images to speak for themselves. But here proximity does not bring viewers any closer to an understanding of the original power of these images - it renders them hollow. As mere illustrations of a historical moment, illustrations that carry none of the emotional charge they once possessed, the images historicize the period, and themselves. 8 The burden that this places on the viewer is significant. Absent a thorough understanding of the events of the Holocaust, the viewers are left simply with Goebbels ’ s perspective; it is the viewers ’ affective relationship with him that determines their reactions to the events on screen. While Goebbels carries with him too many ideological associations for viewers to develop any real sympathy for him - indeed, viewers are more likely to see him as bombastic and slightly pitiable - the film ’ s uncritical use of Nazi-sourced visual material does little to undermine Goebbels ’ s account of the events described in the film. Thus, while the film positions itself as offering unmediated and unprecedented access to a «truth content,» namely the innermost thoughts of one of the major 182 Michael D. Richardson figures of the Nazi era, in seeking to delve into the psychology of Nazism, the directors recreate the psyche of one of its architects. In doing so, they give inordinate weight to his psychology as a means for explaining, or at least contextualizing major events from the Nazi period, which thus remain obscured rather than illuminated by Goebbels ’ s perspective. As a result, as with narratives that seek to explain Hitler ’ s anti-Semitism in terms of childhood trauma, the film reduces the Nazi ideology for which Goebbels was responsible to the pathology of a single individual, a move that generates, if not sympathy for Goebbels, then at least an understanding for his position and an emotional distance from the events themselves. One scene in which this becomes particularly clear is the sequence in the film that references Kristallnacht. Shortly before this sequence, Goebbels describes his depressed mental state, brought on by a dispute with his wife Magda. An intertitle suggests the reason for this dispute, namely Goebbels ’ s affair with the Czech actress Lída Baarová. Over visuals that depict a stonefaced Magda sitting for a formal portrait, Goebbels recounts: «Ein schwerer Tag. Am Abend noch eine lange Aussprache mit Magda, die für mich eine einzige Demütigung ist. Ich werde dies nicht vergessen. Sie ist so hart und grausam. Man soll auf dem Schmerz ganz aufkosten. Und sich von nichts feige zurückziehen. Ich durchlebe augenblicklich die schwerste Zeit meines Lebens.» As the final line of this entry is spoken, the visuals shift to footage from the Kristallnacht riots. After a momentary pause in which the only sound is the crackling of a fire, the narration continues: «In Kassel and Dessau große Demonstrationen gegen die Juden. Synagogen in Brand gesteckt und Geschäfte demoliert. Nachmittags wird der Tod des deutschen Diplomaten Rath gemeldet. Nun ist es aber gut.» While the narrator reads the rest of Goebbels ’ s entry for November 10, in which he speaks of Hitler ’ s command that the riots be allowed to continue, the visuals are more scenes from Kristallnacht, shots of Goebbels meeting with Hitler that night, the Oranienburger Synagogue burning, and footage of German civilians perched on steps and window-sills watching the events unfold. By linking these two moments - Goebbels ’ s turmoil in his marriage and Kristallnacht - through Goebbels ’ s line, «Nun ist es aber gut,» the film levels the difference between private crisis and a major political event, rendering the latter comprehensible only in terms of Goebbels ’ s narrow perception of it. 9 Hachmeister and Kloft frame their documentary as an attempt to engage the past with the present, by portraying Goebbels as «einen modernen News- und Medienmanager.» But the overall construction of their film only reinforces the historicity of its subject, both by giving it a particular and discreet historical trajectory - defined by the first and last entries from Goebbels ’ s diary - and by 183 Reenacting Evil: Giving Voice to the Perpetrator intersplicing into the archival footage video segments that provide a presentday view of a city or region mentioned in the diaries. These segments, the only ones not drawn from the Nazi period, are shots entirely devoid of people, however, as if their sole function is to confirm that the buildings or spaces referenced in Goebbels ’ s diaries existed, or continue to exist. Unlike so many Holocaust and Nazi documentaries, the film ends, not with images of the devastation of the war or footage of the liberated death camps, but with footage showing the dead Goebbels children and the charred corpse of Goebbels and his wife. The inclusion of the children is significant here: though the deaths of Goebbels and his wife, who has poisoned the children, are not likely to evoke a sympathetic response from viewers, the deaths of their children undercuts any viewer satisfaction with Goebbels ’ s ultimate demise. Instead of providing the sort of closure associated with the vanquishing of a film ’ s antagonist, the pathos of the children ’ s death complicates the audience response. Goebbels ’ s death in and of itself may not be tragic, but the consequences of his death are. 10 These are the only victims of Nazi ideology rendered visible here - the other victims of the Nazis and Goebbels ’ s policies are conspicuously absent from the footage used in the film. Even in the scenes illustrating Kristallnacht described above, the film only shows images of Germans, smiling as they survey the wreckage. What is interesting about the footage included here is its provenance. Despite the careful political staging of the events of November 9, Goebbels instructed the media to refrain from taking photographs and filming events. 11 The only existing film of that night came from amateur movies (Ebbrecht 44). Thus even the amateur quality of this footage can, in a sense, be understood as artificial: it was not that Goebbels did not want footage of burning buildings and destroyed storefronts, rather he wanted to preserve the illusion that these events unfolded spontaneously and as a result of public outrage. By forbidding official film and photography, he indirectly ensures that such footage becomes the only documentation. Given the volume of material to be drawn upon, it might seem picky to quibble over specific entries or dates, particularly given that Goebbels ’ s racism (he crows over the defeat of Joe Louis by Max Schmeling: «In der zwölften Runde schlägt Schmeling den Neger KO. Wunderbar! Ein dramatisch erregender Kampf. Der Weiße über den Schwarzen und der Weiße war ein Deutscher.») and anti-Semitism (referencing Emil Ludwig ’ s Mord in Davos, an account of the assassination of Wilhelm Gustloff, as «ein gemeines, echt jüdisches Machwerk. [. . .] Diese Judenpest muss ausradiert werden. Ganz und gar. Davon darf nichts übrig bleiben.») are not entirely elided in the film. Yet there is a way in which they remain hidden, invisible - entirely circumscribed by Goebbels ’ s narration and the images of the perpetrators. 184 Michael D. Richardson One could argue that this absence is a positive one, one in the spirit of Lanzmann ’ s unwillingness to show images of the Holocaust, but the absence is hardly noted by the writer-directors. It neither engenders a remembering in the viewer, attempts to recreate the trauma of loss, nor aids to understand an emptiness. Instead this absence, like the absence of Holocaust victims in Der Untergang, merely allows viewers to distance themselves from the consequences of Nazi ideology and position themselves as heirs to the true victims of Nazi ideology, an ideology that has run its course and should be seen as a historical aberration, one that bears no relationship to contemporary reflections on being German. The three-and-one-half hour speech that makes up the entirety of Karmakar ’ s Das Himmler-Projekt was the first of two secret speeches made by Heinrich Himmler to an audience of 92 high-ranking SS officers on October 4 and October 6, 1943 in the city of Posen in Nazi-occupied Poland. The speeches are unique in that they are rare evidence of a high-ranking member of the Nazi government openly discussing elements of the Final Solution. The speeches were recorded on wax discs and then also transcribed (and edited by Himmler) to be distributed to SS generals and filed in the SS archives. It is the audio recording and not the transcript that is the basis for the film. Significant differences mark these two versions. As Margit Fröhlich notes, the care given to preserving a «secret» speech given to an exclusive audience is somewhat paradoxical, but, just as Goebbels believed his diaries to be an important historical document, Himmler believed the contents of the speech worthy of preservation (78 - 79). Interestingly, only around five minutes of the speech concerns the destruction of the Jews - the rest centers on the situation on the Eastern Front and in Eastern Europe more generally - but the directness with which Himmler acknowledges the extermination of the Jews, and the centrality of this task for the greater success of Germany makes this a unique and horrifying document. Moreover, it provides confirmation not only of the Final Solution, but also of the widespread knowledge of the plan to exterminate the Jews. In many respects, Das Himmler-Projekt aspires to be the antithesis of the Holocaust documentary. It offers no voice-over or narrated commentary, no visuals, archival or otherwise, save the image of Zapatka shot against a black background and no additional sound save Zapatka ’ s speech. So exactly what sort of reenactment is this? On the one hand, Zapatka faithfully reproduces all of the imperfections audible in the wax recording of the speech - the mispronunciations, repetitions, and side comments, including an extended interruption during which Himmler insists that the kitchen staff be dismissed and an open doorway sealed with a mattress so that his speech cannot be heard 185 Reenacting Evil: Giving Voice to the Perpetrator by others. By relying on this recording rather than the edited transcript of the speech that was more commonly circulated, the film reclaims, as it were, the original text and the original experience of the speech, affording viewers insight into the thought process of Himmler as he delivered it. 12 On the other hand, Zapatka makes no effort to mimic Himmler, either in voice or in appearance, and eschews any attempt at creating the illusion of authenticity. 13 While the words of the speech are preserved, the presentation is new. Zapatka reads the speech freely in a Nachrichtensprecherstimme, but almost without emotion. He is neither enthusiastic nor monotonous. This refusal to imitate Himmler could be seen as the enforcement of a taboo of the sort that prevented the portrayal of Hitler in German cinema until recently. However, I would argue that it has two important functions. First, Zapatka ’ s dispassionate delivery inhibits viewers from being persuaded by the sheer force of his voice. Their reactions are determined, to the extent that this can be said, merely by their relationship to the content of the speech. As one reviewer noted, in the film ’ s refusal to imitate Himmler, «wird der Zuschauer mehr mit der kalten Sachlogik konfrontiert als in jedem anderen Film über den Nationalsozialismus» (Anon. die tageszeitung 15). Second, given that Himmler, like Goebbels, is well-recognized enough to evoke an immediate response, the absence of any sort of identifiable image of Himmler means, as Olaf Möller argues, that the film is free from the sort of clichéd perceptions that would inhibit an unmediated reception of the speech; instead, «gibt [es] nur Zapatka und das Textbuch» (Möller 94). Fig. 1: From Das Himmler-Projekt (2000). Directed by Romuald Karmakar. 186 Michael D. Richardson The image that fills the screen for three hours is a consistent one: after a medium shot establishes the set up of the film - Zapatka sitting at a nondescript table against a gray background - nearly all of the film is shot in closeups of varying degrees, with an occasional shot of Zapatka in profile, his table/ lectern partially visible, recalling perhaps unintentionally, the image of Eichmann sitting behind a table at his trial (Fig. 1). The effect that this image produces is unsettling. The viewer gets no respite from the image of Zapatka and the words of Himmler. There is no counter-shot, only a very rare intertitle to explain crowd reaction. Only the infrequent asides from Himmler (faithfully reproduced by Zapatka) give any indication of the contemporaneous audience ’ s response, if any, to the text of the speech. As a result, the ostensibly affect-less performance slowly induces in the viewer an unpleasant sensation. In contrast to Das Goebbels-Experiment which foregrounds the person of Goebbels, the historical Himmler seems to disappear as the threehour speech unfolds; it is his words and the image of Zapatka that dominate the screen. With no visual or aural markers to remind the audience that the speaker «is» Himmler, and with very little in the way of editing, spectators remains fixed - literally - on Zapatka throughout the film, and the words he speaks seem to become his words, not Himmler ’ s. Ironically, it is the semipublic speech, not the ostensibly private diary entries, that affords the viewer a more unvarnished and, one could say, more truthful set of observations. The absence of commentary in both films leaves viewers with no explicit or expressed moral orientation other than the words and images of the perpetrators. Yet unlike Hachmeister ’ s documentary, Karmakar ’ s reenactment of Himmler ’ s speech leverages this disorientation, forcing attention back on the words themselves, stripped of context, both historical and visual. The sort of orientation towards the unvarnished eliminationist rhetoric with which documentaries normally furnish viewers is utterly absent, leaving the audience to define its relationship to the speech on its own. The only subject position it creates, if it can be said to create one at all, is a decidedly unsettling one - that of one of the speech ’ s audience members. Admittedly, even if the historical setting were visually recreated in the film in any sort of meaningful way, the gulf between past and present is here too wide to truly locate the viewer in the moment of the speech. But perhaps it is not a question of transporting the audience to the past, but of bringing Himmler ’ s speech into the present. That is, the fact remains that the contemporary audience does become not only an audience watching a film about Himmler ’ s speech, but an audience to Himmler ’ s speech. Möller notes that Himmler had another reason for wanting to preserve and disseminate the speech, namely to make its audience culpable in the actions that would follow: «Es sollte daran erinnert 187 Reenacting Evil: Giving Voice to the Perpetrator werden, dass allen die begangenen Verbrechen bewusst und bekannt waren - sodass niemand später, nach dem Krieg, wie auch immer er ausgehen sollte, sagen konnte, er habe nichts gewusst» (93). Karmakar ’ s audience is similarly implicated in the knowledge of the events in Himmler ’ s speech, a speech that they have voluntarily agreed to hear. 14 Fig. 2: From Das Himmler-Projekt (2000). Directed by Romuald Karmakar. Karmakar ’ s film affords its viewers just one significant break from the series of close-ups of Zapatka. Early on in the speech, Zapatka looks up as if he has heard something off-screen and then steps away from his lectern as the camera pulls back to reveal the backdrop and camera equipment that had surrounded him (Fig. 2). As Zapatka exits the stage, as it were, the film cuts away to another camera and he begins reading again. This time, however, he reads not the speech itself, but a transcript of the conversation that took place after Himmler realized that sounds from the kitchen could be heard in the hall and vice-versa. The content of this exchange is banal, yet the interruption, both aural and visual, that it provides, only heightens the uncomfortable nature of the experience of viewing the film. Rather than historicizing the speech, it draws the viewer even more into the moment of its original performance. By revealing the artifice of the film, Karmakar paradoxically creates a greater sense of intimacy, an even more unvarnished portrayal of Himmler. Karmakar here plays with audience expectations. Because the narration that the film provides during Zapatka ’ s retreat from his lectern and the revelation of the sound stage is also derived from the recording of the speech, Zapatka, in a 188 Michael D. Richardson sense, does not break character, but rather performs a range of characters who are speaking not publicly; they are, in a sense, speaking privately. Thus, while this sequence remains a performance of the recording, it is one that creates the illusion of being outside of the recording. When Zapatka returns to his place behind a lectern and resumes his speech, the previous distance between audience and speaker is re-established. The extent to which the film ’ s lack of critical commentary destabilizes audience orientation and the concomitant usual transmission of meaning can be seen in the film ’ s reception by the media establishment, and its inability to secure a theatrical release for fear that the presentation of the material without an accompanying historical framework in the form of documentary narration would become a magnet for neo-Nazi groups. When it was finally broadcast on WDR and 3sat (to record audiences), it was immediately followed by a panel discussion that condemned the speech ’ s rhetoric and safely historicized it (Fröhlich 81). In contrast to industry fears, critics observed that it was precisely this lack of contextualization that gave the film its power to unsettle audiences and thereby force them to come to terms with the content of the speech themselves. 15 By way of a conclusion, I would like to offer two observations on how these films might contribute to a discussion of the issues raised by Lanzmann in his film. These films are not Holocaust documentaries (or, for that matter, even documentaries per se) in that they are focused so intently on the perpetrators; the victims of the Holocaust are almost entirely absent. But I would argue that the victims remain central to the reception of the films, albeit hidden from view. As such, it is worth reflecting on the two primary ways in which these films engage with the documentary practice of a film such as Shoah. The first concerns the prohibition on the use of archival footage. A critical comparison of these films shows that it is not necessarily the question of authenticity - an adherence to authentic documents or images as opposed to the re-creation or re-collection of the Nazi past - that provides the crucial distinction, but rather the difference between the visual and the aural, moving image and spoken word. By relying heavily on footage, both documentary and fictional, from the Nazi era and primarily shot by the Nazis, and, further, by allowing Goebbels ’ s diary entries to dictate how such images are to be interpreted, Das Goebbels-Experiment remains trapped within the perspective of the perpetrator. Karmakar ’ s film, by refusing to provide visual images drawn from the Nazi period, by even refusing to reproduce such images, focuses exclusively on the language used in Himmler ’ s speech. Like Lanzmann, Karmakar gives preference to the word over the image as a means for generating presence. 16 As thorough as the Nazi corruption of the German 189 Reenacting Evil: Giving Voice to the Perpetrator language was, the truth content of their words can be revealed in a way that that of their images cannot. While there is a language to be reclaimed in the Nazi rhetoric, the suppressed images of the Nazi era cannot easily be reconstructed from memory. At best, the juxtaposition of words and images in a film such as Das Goebbels-Experiment can point to the falsehood of the image, but not to a reality whose visual documentation has been obliterated. And at worst, it obscures that reality even further. Second, Lanzmann adheres to the dictum hier ist kein warum, arguing that asking this question is pointless, even obscene, since it is not the answer to the question why, but rather only the act of transmission that can be equated with knowledge, an act that generates affect through identification with suffering. Yet what a comparison of these films shows is that there is potential for knowledge of a different sort in the generation of affect through a focus on perpetrators - and, as LaCapra notes, even Lanzmann ’ s dictum, uttered by an SS-guard to Primo Levi upon his arrival at Auschwitz, can be read as an adoption of the voice of a perpetrator (LaCapra 237) - as long as that identification is not limited by a historicization that allows contemporary audiences to distance themselves from the perpetrator. Both of these films take a major figure of the Nazi regime as their focus, but while Hachmeister and Kloft ’ s film attempts to psychologize and thereby understand Goebbels, their efforts to recreate Goebbels and recreate the Nazi era obscure the relationship between the past and present. However viewers may understand Goebbels and his motivations at the end of the film, he remains a historical figure, belonging to an era far removed from that of their own. By contrast, Karmakar ’ s film seeks to make Himmler the person disappear, for it is not an identification with Himmler that can provide the sort of knowledge that Lanzmann privileges, but an identification with his intended audience. In short, Das Goebbels-Experiment seeks to explain that which resists explanation - Lanzmann ’ s why - while Das Himmler-Projekt confronts viewers with, but does not answer, the question of how: «Wie können hundert Leute sich millionenfache Verbrechen erklären und so zurechtlegen, dass sie noch mal Jahre weitermachen? » (Worthmann n. pag.). In offering a contemporary audience no choice but to align themselves with the position of the perpetrator, Karmakar challenges them to consider the question of how they, as Germans, have been able to continue on as well. 190 Michael D. Richardson Notes 1 Weckel notes that despite the recollections of many Germans, and even Billy Wilder, these screenings were almost never mandatory. She reads this false recollection as a means to reorient the discussion away from wartime guilt and towards Allied conduct. See Weckel 326. 2 In his book Kerner offers a thorough overview of Holocaust documentaries grouped according to four of Nichols ’ s categories: expository, observational, interactive, and poetic. See Kerner 177 - 242. 3 An interesting background text here is Eyal Silvan and Rony Brauman ’ s 1999 film The Specialist, which provides an account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. The film is comprised exclusively of archival footage taken from the original film of the trial, though it manipulates this footage extensively, both in terms of editing and via the addition of special effects. For a thorough analysis of the film with respect to the question of the impact of these manipulations see Buerkle. 4 The documentary first aired in 2005 and was broadcast on three succeeding Tuesday evenings. Each 45-minute episode of the documentary focused on a particular aspect of Goebbels ’ s career: «Der Scharfmacher» covered his early years, «Der Propaganda Chef» the first years of the Nazi regime, and «Der Einpeitscher» focused on his role during the latter half of the Nazi era as he foregrounded the Jewish Question and sought to rally the population. 5 As discussed above, feature films have similarly used the diary or memoir as prima facie evidence that their accounts are historically accurate. 6 Indeed, the constructed nature of the Anne Frank diary became clear when, in 1995, an unexpurgated version of her diary was published for the first time. It became clear that not only had Anne edited the diary as she wrote it, with an eye towards its future publication, but her father Otto Frank omitted certain passages, particularly those which were critical of her family or referenced her reflections on the onset of puberty and her sexual development. 7 Riefenstahl in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma (1965), cited in Sontag (82). 8 The film ’ s critical reception in Germany was decidedly negative. Daniel Kothenschulte likened it to «ein Reader ’ s Digest aus einer ebenso einzigartigen wie schwer zu nutzenden Quelle,» saying that it was a mistake to imagine that the range of archival sources from the period could simply be thrown together. The film ’ s approach, its «egalisierende Umgang mit dem Material, das seine Quellen nicht mehr preisgibt, macht es für den Betrachter aber weder nutzbar noch ästhetisch erfassbar» (n. pag.). Writing in die tageszeitung, Dietmar Kammerer dismisses the film as a «Nebenprodukt eines Promotionsvorhabens des Regisseurs zur Filmästhetik des Nationalsozialismus,» arguing that as a result of the film ’ s decidedly unexperimental style, «Die Bilder und Ansprachen, die damals fanatasierend gewirkt haben mögen, erscheinen heute nur lächerlich, die Gesten der Machhaber hohl.» 9 In the English-language version this connection is made even more explicit. The line here is translated as «But I am feeling better now.» 10 A similarly ambivalent moment occurs at the end of Der Untergang, which also depicts the murder/ suicide of Goebbels, his wife, and their six children. Here, the emotional evocation of this scene is clearly intentional. 11 See Ebbrecht 40. 191 Reenacting Evil: Giving Voice to the Perpetrator 12 Olaf Möller notes that Himmler gave his speech not from a prepared text, but rather spoke more extemporaneously, using notes consisting only of key words (94). 13 Karmakar notes that threading the needle in this way poses a significant challenge: «Der Darsteller muss versuchen, Himmler wortgenau wiederzugeben, darf ihn aber nicht spielen. Gleichzeitig muss er die gesprochene Sprache so lebendig wiedergeben, dass ein Zuschauer der Rede folgen kann. Und zwischen Nicht-Spielen und Nicht-nur-Ablesen gibt es nur einen schmalen Grat. Den muss man treffen, und Manfred Zapatka konnte das.» (Worthmann, n.pag.) 14 Möller also notes one significant difference between the original audience of the speech and the contemporary audience for Karmakar ’ s film, namely that the original audience members most likely knew each other and were committed to the same ideals, while that is not likely the case today. Still, he continues, «sollte nicht die anzunehmende demokratische Grundgesinnung eines heutigen, anonymen Publikums als ideal reichen? Wieder eine Karmakar ’ sche Frage in Konfrontationsform» (95). 15 See, for example, Rother and Josef Lederle, as cited in Möller (230). 16 In her analysis of Das Himmler-Projekt, Alexandra Tacke points to a quote from Karmakar that encapsulates his over-aesthetic approach, namely «wie Bilder hinter den Worten entstehen können, auch ohne die entsprechenden Szenen» (127). This sentence echoes Gertrud Koch ’ s description of Lanzmann ’ s strategy in Shoah: «whenever something is narrated, an image (Vorstellung) is presented, the image of something which is absent» (21). Works Cited Anon. «Film als Erinnerungsspur.» die tageszeitung, 2 Mar. 2000: 15. Anon. «Interview mit Oliver Hirschbiegel: Beauftragter im Sinne der deutschen Geschichte.» Kultura-Extra, 13 Sept. 2004. <http: / / www.kultura-extra.de/ film/ filme/ untergang.php#interview>. Buerkle, Darcy. «Affect in the Archive: Arendt, Eichmann and The Specialist.» Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. Ed. David Bathrick, Brad Prager and Michael D. Richardson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. 211 - 38. Ebbrecht, Tobias. «Bilder, die es nicht geben dürfte. . . . Film- und Fotoaufnahmen vom Novemberpogrom 1938 und ihre spätere Verwendung.» Filmblatt 15.44 (Winter 2010/ 11): 37 - 53. Eichinger, Bernd. «Ich halte mich an die Geschichte.» Interview with Bernd Eichinger. Der Spiegel 17, 19 Apr. 2003: 153. Fisher, Jaimey. «Home-Movies, Film-Diaries, and Mass Bodies: Péter Forgács ’ s Free Fall into The Holocaust.« Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. Ed. David Bathrick, Brad Prager and Michael D. Richardson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. 239 - 60. Fröhlich, Margit. «Perpetrator Research Through the Camera Lens: Nazis and Their Crimes in the Films of Romuald Karmakar.» New German Critique 102 (2007): 75 - 86. 192 Michael D. Richardson Jeffries, Stuart. «Claude Lanzmann on why Holocaust documentary Shoah still matters.» The Guardian, 9 June 2011. <http: / / www.guardian.co.uk/ film/ 2011/ jun/ 09/ claude-lanzmann-shoah-holocaust-documentary>. Kammerer, Dietmar. «Dem Bösen über die Schulter geschaut.» die tageszeitung, 16 Apr. 2005. <http: / / www.taz.de/ 1/ archiv/ archiv/ ? dig=2005/ 04/ 16/ a0260>. Kerner, Aaron. Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films. New York: Continuum, 2011. Koch, Gertrud. «The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable.» October 48 (1989): 15 - 24. Kothenschulte, Daniel. «Triumph des Wilderns; Lutz Hachmeister und Michael Kloft klauen selbst bei Disney: Das Goebbels Experiment.» Frankfurter Rundschau 14 Apr. 2005. Kümmel, Peter. «Ein Volk in der Zeitmaschine.» Die Zeit, 26 Feb. 2004. <http: / / www. zeit.de/ 2004/ 10/ Steam_Punk/ >. LaCapra, Dominick. «Lanzmann ’ s Shoah: Here There is No Why.» Critical Inquiry 23.2 (1997): 231 - 69. Lanzmann, Claude. «Le Lieu et la parole.» Au sujet de Shoah: Le Film de Claude Lanzmann. Ed. Michel Deguy. Paris: Éditions Belin, 1990. Möller, Olaf. «The Easy Way is Always Mined.» Romuald Karmakar. Ed. Olaf Möller and Michael Omasta. Vienna: Filmmuseum Synema, 2010. 11 - 130. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1991. Rother, Rainer. «Holocaust und Popularkultur: Mehr Verunsicherung tut gut. Wie soll man den Massenmord in Medien zeigen? » Die Welt, 30 Jan. 2001: 31. Sontag, Susan. «Fascinating Fascism.» Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. 73 - 105. Tacke, Alexandra. «Schreibtischtäter und Weltkonzernchef. Re/ Konkretisierungen der ‹ Banalität der Bösen › in Un Spécialiste und Das Himmler-Projekt.» Welchen der Steine du hebst. Ed. Claudia Bruns, Asal Dardan and Annette Dietrich. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2012. 121 - 33. Weckel, Ulrike. «22 March 1946: Screenings of Die Todesmühlen Spark Controversy over German Readiness to Confront Nazi Crimes.» A New History of German Cinema. Ed. Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. 321 - 27. Worthmann, Merten. «Dem Täter eine Chance. Ein ZEIT-Gespräch mit dem Filmregisseur Romuald Karmakar.» Die Zeit, 29 June 2000. <http: / / www.zeit.de/ 2000/ 27/ Dem_Taeter_eine_Chance>. 193 Reenacting Evil: Giving Voice to the Perpetrator Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Günter Butzer / Hubert Zapf (Hrsg.) THEORIEN DER LITERATUR VI Grundlagen und Perspektiven ISBN 978-3-7720-8491-1 Ecocriticism Citizenship Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past in Ilona Ziok ’ s Fritz Bauer: Tod auf Raten* STEPHAN JAEGER U NIVERSITY OF M ANITOBA The West German postwar society of the 1950s and 60s is marked by the complex tensions of a society that is silent about its Nazi past while it simultaneously seeks, especially in literature and film, ways to overcome this silence. It is also marked by a tension between efforts at denazification and the presence of former National Socialist officials who simply adopted the capitalist ideology of the new state and seamlessly transitioned into similar roles in the West German political, legal, and economic systems. It is a time in which West German society struggled to begin to acknowledge its war guilt and its responsibility for the Holocaust. When a twenty-first century film attempts to depict the atmosphere of this past, a challenge arises: Today ’ s historical consciousness is dominated by the perception of Nazi Germany as a criminal state, as well as a master narrative that sees the history of West Germany, and later reunified Germany, as an economic and political success story. Yet even the most novice student of West Germany ’ s postwar history is familiar with at least some aspects of the country ’ s difficulties with both denazification and its coming to terms with the Holocaust and Nazi past. For example: One can certainly discuss whether Tom Cruise as Graf Claus von Stauffenberg in Brian Singer ’ s 2008 feature film Valkyrie is simply a very ironic Hollywood interpretation of a heroic freedom fighter, forgetting Stauffenberg ’ s military and aristocratic convictions, yet the audience - whether in the U. S. or in Germany - presumably did not doubt that Stauffenberg could be cast as a heroic figure attempting to end Hitler ’ s dictatorship and consequently representing some kind of justice. It might therefore come as a surprise to a contemporary mainstream audience that in West Germany in 1952 it was not taken for granted that Nazi perpetrators could be criminally prosecuted or that resistance against Hitler still was widely regarded as treason. Fritz Bauer, after returning from his exile * I would like to thank the film director Ilona Ziok for providing me with a DVD copy of the film and particularly for the time she spent explaining her vision and project to me in two long phone conversations in June 2011. in Denmark and Sweden, was Attorney General for Lower Saxony between 1949 and 1956. In 1952 - 53 he led a trial against Otto Ernst Remer, commandant of the Wachbataillon Großdeutschland in Berlin, a unit which was instrumental in foiling the plot to assassinate Hitler. Remer had called the conspirators «traitors of the country,» and Bauer sued Remer for libel with the goal of legally declaring the Nazi state unconstitutional and rehabilitating the conspirators. 1 One could argue that the Remer trial was the, or at least one of the, biggest trials of postwar Germany in terms of the country ’ s attempt to deal with the past. 2 It is at this surprising split between today ’ s historical consciousness and the historical atmosphere of the 1950s that Ilona Ziok ’ s documentary film Fritz Bauer: Tod auf Raten (2010) sets out to narrate Fritz Bauer ’ s story. Bauer was born in Stuttgart in 1903. After studying law and completing a dissertation, he was given a probationary judgeship (the position of Gerichtsassessor) in 1927. Having briefly been imprisoned due to his political engagement in the SPD and his Jewish heritage, he emigrated to Denmark in 1935 and fled to Sweden in 1943. After once more residing in Denmark (1945 - 49) he returned to Germany in April 1949. From 1956 until his death in 1968 he served as the State Attorney General (Generalstaatsanwalt) of Hesse. 3 Ziok ’ s film ran in the Panorama program of the 2010 Berlinale and then toured through approximately 100 German cities as the German contribution to the Aktion Mensch film festival (Nov. 2010 - Nov. 2011). Tod auf Raten also opened the festival of ten international films in the Zeughauskino of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. The press reaction to the film was mixed. In general, reviews focused primarily on the story of the film and did not have much to say about its artistic aspects. 4 The positive reviews stated the importance of bringing Bauer ’ s story to a wider audience than just historians and legal experts (e. g. Seeliger) and pointed out that the film achieved a suspenseful, almost thriller-like effect on the viewer (Kothenschulte; Gutmair). The critical reviews, however, perceived any emotionalizing and dramatizing effects as a distraction from history and as inappropriate or at least unnecessary for representing a topic as solemn as the Holocaust. 5 Another criticism was directed at Ziok ’ s narrative use of Bauer ’ s death to express openness to the idea that Bauer might have been murdered or committed suicide. 6 The film generated a lot of interest with educators in Germany, and audiences - many Aktion Mensch screenings were followed by public discussions, often with Ilona Ziok present - were excited about the importance of Bauer as a principled civic role model. 7 A more nuanced analysis of the film can explain this uneven reception. The documentary does not present any facts or interpretations other than those 196 Stephan Jaeger that could already be found in historical and biographical research. 8 Neither does Ziok attempt to create a balanced, objective representation that aims at scholarly objectivity. Instead, she uses the contrast between today ’ s historical consciousness and the atmosphere of the postwar era in order to restage the atmosphere of the 1950s and 60s while simultaneously providing a model for social and human rights related activism. Whereas at first glance Ziok ’ s blackand-white portrayal of a still Nazified postwar West Germany on the one hand and Bauer ’ s principled humanistic idealism on the other could be characterized as a simplification of historical complexities, this essay will argue that it is precisely this simplification that is needed to steer the viewer emotionally so that she or he can gain access to the past through the (constructed) point of view of Fritz Bauer and experience the (simulated) historical atmosphere of the 1950s and 60s. It allows Bauer to be staged in a dualistic way, between heroic achievements and tragic failures, both as a hero and as a victim. Ziok ’ s feature film-like dramatization of Bauer ’ s story has all the hallmarks of a documentary film. It is almost exclusively assembled from interviews with historical witnesses and some footage from the Third Reich and the postwar era, which enables Ziok to create a historical space that conveys authenticity by steering the emotions of the viewer rather than by providing a historical analysis of proven sources. Most important, the perspective and convictions of the human rights advocate Bauer 9 are staged against the atmosphere of a society neither ready nor willing to come to terms with the past. The film, mostly without a narrator (with the exception of brief explanations of historical events), represents Bauer by two means. The first means is black-and-white footage of Bauer himself, mainly from the talk show «Heute Abend Kellerklub» by the Hessische Rundfunk filmed in Frankfurt in the 1960s, wherein Bauer talks with students about his ethical principles and about the German legal system ’ s method of dealing with National Socialism. The second means is the testimony by exclusively Bauer-friendly witnesses who describe and analyze his life, actions, and convictions. Tod auf Raten explicitly focuses on Bauer ’ s more humanist and universal statements on the talk show. The historical specifics are related by the witnesses rather than by Bauer. This shared workload approach highlights Bauer ’ s function of expressing universal human rights values. In contrast to these ideals, the film depicts a collective historical reality specific to West Germany in the 1950s and 60s that is characterized by the silence and disinterest of West German society in coming to terms with the Holocaust and National Socialism, and shows how deeply ensconced Nazi Germany still was in the Federal Republic to the point of influencing and manipulating its judicial and political systems. These two 197 Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past poles lead to a victimization of Bauer on the one hand, and to a heroization of him on the other. Tod auf Raten juxtaposes four storylines to achieve such an effect: the first is the continuous story of Bauer ’ s convictions concerning justice and human rights, his universal value system; the second the success story of Bauer ’ s trials; the third the tragic development of how Bauer ’ s endeavor fails in the anti-humanistic climate of postwar Germany; and the fourth the story of Bauer ’ s death. The universal ideal as seen from Bauer ’ s point of view is immediately established in the first scene. Bauer represents a principled humanism. 10 Right before the opening title, one sees his face in a close-up, while he says in a calm but persistent tone, accompanied by quiet piano music: «Ich möchte eigentlich wünschen, dass junge Leute heute vielleicht den selben Traum von Recht besäßen, den ich einmal hatte, und dass sie das Gefühl haben, dass das Leben einen Sinn hat, wenn man für Freiheit, Recht und Brüderlichkeit eintritt.» After a cut to the production firm ’ s name and the film title, underscored by dramatic, agitating music, Bauer is shown again, this time at the talk show of the Hessische Rundfunk (which becomes a thread linking various segments throughout the film) discussing the importance of Auschwitz as both a crime committed by the state as well as by all the people who participated in it. The contrast in music underscores the main contrast between idealism and historical reality in the film. The film ends with Bauer ’ s nephew Rolf Tiefenthal silently visiting Bauer ’ s grave while Bauer is shown in the same interview footage from the film ’ s beginning, citing an episode with his mother who could not answer his question of what God is, but who gave Bauer the advice that «Was du nicht willst, das man dir tut, das füge auch keinem anderen zu.» The film establishes its basic tone through the voice of Fritz Bauer as an ahistorical, universal one, defending human rights in general as well as the human value of loving your neighbor. The Bauer interview spliced into the film (twelve minutes of footage in the 100-minute film) has only a few historically specific references such as when Bauer addresses the lack of repentance among the defendants in the Auschwitz trial. It is centered on general human and ethical values that immediately speak to a diverse twenty-first-century audience. Parallel to the idea of human rights, the film emphasizes Bauer ’ s confidence in young people very early on (specifically in its second talk show scene). The Bauer seen in the film is presented as though he is talking to today ’ s audience promoting human values, which, from a Western democratic standpoint, seem fully up-to-date. How does the film become more historically specific? First, Ziok hardly uses a narrator in the film, but relies on the aura of authentic historical witnesses. The film consists primarily of a collage of testimonies by eye- 198 Stephan Jaeger witnesses interviewed in recent years. The film director is never seen; sometimes her voice can be overheard in some questions or comments while the witnesses are speaking, sometimes she gives a brief narrative comment or intervention to contextualize the witnesses ’ utterances. Ziok uses historical footage, photographs and filmed documents, and some comments that are often quotations read by several male and female voices. With the exception of footage that is sometimes shown for a few seconds while the eyewitnesses are speaking, voice and image usually correspond directly with one another. Second, the film creates historical specificity by establishing the atmosphere of the time. A good example of this is the representation of the arrest of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, which is selected as the film ’ s first important trial chapter. Bauer, circumventing the German legal system, had given decisive hints to the Mossad. He had never really talked about his involvement in the trial, a fact revealed in the first eyewitness account by journalist and author Ralph Giordano. 11 Consequently, there is no footage of Bauer talking about the trial and, as elsewhere in the film, eyewitnesses - here Giordano; author and film director Thomas Harlan; the chief of Mossad at the time, Isser Harel; and the executor of Bauer ’ s will, Manfred Amend - interspersed with film footage and narrated comments about the footage, start to remember and interpret Bauer ’ s specific role. Harel ’ s account that Bauer was afraid of a leak in the German public prosecutor ’ s office initiates the set-up of the whole film: that Bauer and a few friends were fighting against the Nazi-infiltrated German legal system, which would have certainly tipped off Eichmann. Amend speculates that this was the only way for Bauer to assure Eichmann ’ s prosecution, and Giordano concludes that Bauer contributed to Eichmann receiving his deserved and just punishment. After footage from the end of the trial, Harlan elaborates on how Bauer ’ s actions transcended specific national interests, and therefore the idea of nationality. In this chorus of eyewitnesses and authentic footage, the film has established not only Bauer ’ s universal principles, but also the atmosphere of collective resistance in the German legal system against which he had to fight in the name of human rights. As many small-scale TV documentations and film documentaries since the early 1990s have done in order to create an «aura of authenticity and a compelling narrative framework,» often circumventing the discussion of complex historical issues such as the guilt of German society in the Second World War (Kansteiner 154), Ziok fragments the voices of the witnesses by cutting eyewitness interviews into individual pieces and integrating them into the larger narrative arc of the film. Unlike Guido Knopp, the producer of highly popular retrospectives on German history such as Hitlers Helfer (1996), however, Ziok does not produce what Wulf Kansteiner has described 199 Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past as Gesamtkunstwerkeffekt, in which image, sound, speed, and scale are coordinated at the level of the film as a whole (162). Even more important, there is no single narrator who controls the story and the film ’ s message. Ziok uses the witnesses to represent Bauer ’ s point of view. Consequently, the criticism that she does not represent Bauer ’ s enemies (Platthaus, «Bauers Feinde») misses the aesthetic idea of the film. It does not use witnesses as emotionless and thereby reliable informants 12 but to establish the atmosphere around Bauer at the time in general and Bauer ’ s point of view in particular. It matters how Bauer felt, not whether the memory of the witnesses is accurate. Consequently, emotional accounts such as those by Thomas Harlan, Ralf Giordano, Rolf Tiefenthal, Bauer ’ s friends Heinz and Gisela Meyer-Velde, and many others, work perfectly towards the film ’ s expression of Bauer ’ s perspective and of the atmosphere of the time, not simply of its historical facts. Since the witnesses ’ function is the representation of Bauer ’ s story, rather than their own stories, the fragmentation does not undermine the authenticity of each witness. The eyewitnesses come together as a heteroglossia of many different voices and emotional registers, reconstructing the viewpoint of Fritz Bauer in the 1950s and 60s. In the typology of four types of witnesses by Aleida Assmann (85 - 92) the witnesses in Tod auf Raten function as historical witnesses who authenticate the past through their closeness to the historical events and persons - in this case, the life and activities of Fritz Bauer. They are neither witnesses in court - the film quotes the statement by Auschwitz trial defendant Hans Stark to give an impression of the defendants ’ rhetoric - since they are explicitly represented as partial witnesses, nor are they religious or moral witnesses. The last category is closely linked to genocide survivors in Assmann ’ s typology, but Ziok ’ s emotionalizing of the witnessing leads to the effect that her witnesses also give a kind of public testimony in the arena of a moral community (91). The film builds up to a climax as it relates Bauer ’ s successes in society - changing their chronological order for the sake of narrative structure - from Eichmann ’ s arrest and trial, through the Remer trial, and up to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. The last of these, which took place from 1963 to 1965, also marks the turning point in Bauer ’ s transformation into an increasingly persecuted victim of West German society himself. The film reaches its climax at the beginning of the Auschwitz trial. Bauer is shown quoting the first paragraph of the Grundgesetz that the «Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar,» followed by a montage that includes a brief eyewitness statement and historical footage of the trial and culminates in Bauer ’ s statement «Der Prozess soll der Welt zeigen, dass ein neues Deutschland, eine deutsche Demokratie gewillt ist, die Würde eines jeden Menschen zu wahren.» In its 200 Stephan Jaeger first half, the film has established the second story line of Bauer ’ s historical success story. The viewer is torn between reacting to the absurdity that something like putting Remer on trial - or even the Auschwitz trial, which is frequently cited as a turning point in the public consciousness of the German people as well as in West German historians ’ understanding of the scope of the Holocaust 13 - was so difficult to achieve, and the sense of accomplishment, the victorious feeling that Bauer achieved something by making these trials possible in such a difficult climate. The film enacts this tension formally by putting competing, heterogeneous narratives into play. At this point, the film has already established part of the third narrative story line: the resistance of the West German collective to dealing with or working through the past. One example before the narrative of the Remer trial can illustrate this in nuce. The publisher Christoph Müller-Wirth is shown remembering when Bauer was invited to give a talk for politically engaged students at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe about his work prosecuting Nazi crimes in Frankfurt while all of Karlsruhe ’ s legal professionals, as well as the city ’ s journalists, ignored the talk (and had never invited him to speak in Karlsruhe). The interview with Müller-Wirth is divided into three segments. After the first two, Bauer ’ s statements from the talk show are spliced in. First, Bauer reflects upon the task ahead in a society where all university faculties from Sociology to Philosophy needed to be cleared of Nazi perpetrators. For Bauer, Germans needed to stand together to fulfill the enormous task of working through the past. In the second segment, he reflects positively upon the new German democracy and its laws and institutions, before he concludes that all institutions, amendments of judgments, the Grundgesetz, and human rights would be in vain if they are not lived by the people. Müller-Wirth ’ s third statement notes that the judges from the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) in Karlsruhe all came from the Third Reich ’ s Imperial Court of Justice (Reichsgericht) in Leipzig, including the first and second presidents of the court. The film cuts to real footage of the Imperial Court of Justice, underscored by monumental music; then one sudden single note is struck like a whip crack, after which the music breaks off, so that a moment of silence is created, before it moves to the next episode. Here, numerous eyewitnesses tell the story of Hans Globke, the author of the commentary on the Nuremberg Laws and close aid to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer from 1953 to 1963, one of the most blatant examples of someone who was heavily involved in the judicial system of the Third Reich. He prepared the legal basis of the Holocaust, and then had a high-profile career in West Germany. The brief Karlsruhe episode shows precisely how the film establishes Bauer ’ s persona by narrative means as universal and heroic, while simulta- 201 Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past neously creating a historical world that allows the viewer to feel the atmosphere of the past and to understand the legal and moral absurdities of the time. This is a mutual process: the depiction of Bauer ’ s universal principles and the historical specificity of the episodes that show Bauer ’ s unending fight in a society that did not want to come to terms with the past are each intensified in relation to one another. Part of this technique is Ziok ’ s decision not to raise problems of specific interpretations. For example, the viewer could ask why the same «Nazi infiltrated» federal court felt obliged to grant Bauer ’ s request to assign jurisdiction for the Auschwitz trial to Frankfurt, which meant initiating a massive effort of working through the German past. The witnesses just reflect upon how it happened and how such an assignment was legally possible in the West German legal system. To express the interplay between Bauer and the West German society in the 1960s, the film deliberately shies away from an excess of meta-reflection; the story lines must be clear. However, the film does not leave all interpretative authority about the collective psychology of West German society to the witnesses. This means that it relies on an interactive mode of documentary, whether the witnesses were involved in the trial such as the attorney Joachim Kügler and the examining magistrate (Untersuchungsrichter) Heinz Düx, or whether they were analyzing the events as observers, such as Ralph Giordano and Thomas Harlan. The film also uses a hybrid of what Bill Nichols calls the «expository mode» and the «observational mode» in documentary filmmaking (32 - 44). For instance, the film employs an anonymous voice-over narrator, who provides what Nichols describes as a kind of factual «voice of God commentary» (34) when introducing the first defendant in the Auschwitz trial on whom the film focuses. This is the bookkeeper Wilhelm Boger, who invented the torture instrument known as the Boger-Schaukel, which is also known by the name «parrot ’ s perch.» 14 While the voice-over narrator is speaking, the film first shows a photograph of Boger; then a newspaper article detailing the torturing; then it zooms in on the picture of the Boger-Schaukel in the article. While the narrator finishes his description, the film shows German newsreel footage of Boger being escorted into the courtroom. Then the voice of the examining magistrate asks him whether he finally had anything to say in consideration of «these horrific accounts.» While the judge speaks - in audio footage of the trial - the film shows footage of the empty courtroom in the Bürgerhaus Gallus, 15 before it switches back to footage of the historical trial where, after a moment of silence, Boger notes that he has nothing say. The film then continues with footage of an interview with Boger ’ s wife who lived with him and their children in Auschwitz. She maintains in a 202 Stephan Jaeger monotone voice that she could not imagine her husband would have done anything like that: he was a very punctilious person, but he would not have murdered children because he had children of his own and was such a good father at home. 16 In this sequence, the film presents a snapshot of a perpetrator refusing to comment and of his wife ignoring any reality and retreating into platitudes, as did many Germans who said they did not know anything about the Holocaust. The viewer perceives Ziok ’ s hint about the silence of the German people both in Boger ’ s behavior and in his wife ’ s defense. The film intentionally leaves out that Boger, at other points after his imprisonment and during the trial, attempted to justify his torturing methods, 17 in order to highlight the silence that seems to evoke further frustration and disbelief in today ’ s audience. Ziok deviates from the expository mode to an observational one, conveying «the sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world» (Nichols 43). The viewer is led to feel that he or she perceives the essence of the trial and the issue in German society. At the same time, Ziok breaks the illusion of such an unmediated access, in particular through the footage of the empty courtroom that reminds the viewers of the distance between past and present. Consequently, Tod auf Raten is able to avoid the tendency of the public discourse about the Auschwitz trial in the 1960s to focus on the atrocities of individual monstrous and cruel acts (cf. Miquel 105). Its representational method, through the interplay of Bauer ’ s perspective and the gaze on the public discourse, functions to express the death machinery of the Holocaust as a systematic act that needed to be brought to public light at the time. While representing the Auschwitz trial, Tod auf Raten shifts from an idealistic tone to an increasingly disillusioned one. The film has established the collective psychology of the German perpetrators in postwar society, mirroring Bauer ’ s statement that Auschwitz goes deeply into the collective psychology «of us all,» i. e., of all Germans. Bauer, who was earlier presented as the one who convinced all juvenile offenders in his early years as a district court judge, immediately after the war, to confess and to show signs of repentance, notes: «Ich muss Ihnen sagen, seit dem Dezember 1963 warten die Staatsanwälte, dass einer der Angeklagten, also einer der unmittelbar Betroffenen, ein menschliches Wort zu den Zeugen und Zeuginnen findet, die überleben, nachdem ihre ganzen Familien ausgerottet sind.» Later in the film he continues: «Also ich muss Ihnen sagen, die Welt würde aufatmen, nicht bloß die Staatsanwälte in Frankfurt, ich glaube, Deutschland würde aufatmen, und die gesamte Welt, und die Hinterbliebenen der, die in Auschwitz gefallen sind, und die Luft würde gereinigt werden, wenn endlich einmal ein menschliches Wort fiele.» Here again, the film ’ s dual trajectories come to light: on the one hand, the film continues its narrative of universal ethics by 203 Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past pitching the idea of youth versus adult society and the accused in the trial; on the other hand, the film almost abandons its success narrative during its representation of the Auschwitz trial, because Bauer ’ s vision of universal values seems to fail. No «humane word» has ever been said to the survivors. The representation of the Auschwitz trial culminates in Ralph Giordano ’ s statement that Bauer ’ s tragedy was that Germany was not ready for a judicial working-through of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes. The film spends a considerable amount of time - through footage, music, and reflections by witnesses - representing the uniqueness of the Holocaust because of its status as administratively organized mass murder on an industrial scale. Here the film apparently departs from merely focusing on the 1950s and 60s. Instead, the witnesses provide the historical case about the atrocities of the Holocaust and its incomprehensibility. However, with a few brief exceptions, apparently footage from other films or the audio recordings of the trial, 18 Ziok does not interview or show actual witnesses from the Auschwitz trial, whether witnesses for the prosecution or witnesses for the defense. The film can therefore function as the expression of Fritz Bauer ’ s point of view and the reception of the Holocaust in the 1950s and 60s while avoiding the traumatization of victims through the visual representation of the atrocities which can be related to concepts of precarious witnessing and Traumatifizierung (Keilbach 153 - 66; Plato, «Vom Zeugen zum Zeitzeugen»). Eyewitness Holocaust survivors hardly received the opportunity to tell their full personal story in court, since they had to act as judicial witnesses to very specific acts in which the defendants were involved. 19 From today ’ s perspective, the film ’ s representation of the 1950s and 60s confirms widely accepted historical knowledge. Consequently, the film intensifies the disbelief of today ’ s viewers that Bauer ’ s investigation and the various Nazi trials could have gone the way that they did. Investigations, particularly Bauer ’ s plan for a final major trial against the former presidents of the higher regional courts as well as the attorneys general who did not resist the so-called euthanasia program at the infamous conference in Berlin in April 1941 (see Wojak, Fritz Bauer 448 - 49), failed or fizzled out. Another important episode that Tod auf Raten uses for expressing the tragedy of Bauer ’ s story is the case of the jurist Eduard Dreher, who was the leading prosecutor of the Special Court in Innsbruck during the Nazi era. In postwar West Germany, he drafted an apparently harmless bill, deceiving the Bundestag, which in combination with the statute of limitations made the punishment of Nazi criminals virtually impossible for the future. The film leaves open whether Bauer was aware of these developments in 1968, shortly before his death. 20 204 Stephan Jaeger Tod auf Raten culminates the absurdity of the NS trials in a staged representation of a 1962 trial against Obersturmbannführer «P.,» who in 1939 received the order to kill ten Polish people in a prison. The film uses two voice-over narrators, one male and one female, to document the case, mainly by their reading laws concerning murder. The court notices the blind obedience of P.; he killed his victims deliberately with his machine pistol. The female voice-over, accompanied by footage of a prison cell today and the paragraphs about murder, says «Mord, nein» before she reads § 211 from the German criminal law. 21 With the two narrators ’ staccato-like readings the film stages, and through its presentation also deconstructs, the verdict. The killing was neither perfidious nor cruel according to the Ansbach jury court at the time: it was not cruel, because - besides the announcement of the killing - the victims did not suffer any other pains; and it was not perfidious since the victims knew about the killings, so they were not unsuspecting. A prison cell is then shown, while the male narrator quotes the verdict, which also appears as text in the foreground on the screen. The verdict states that it had been possible that P. could have pointed out his intention of killing them right before the deed, so that, for example, the victims could have defended themselves with furniture or could have pled their case. The female voice explains that the defendant is not a murderer because of the lack of malice aforethought; consequently, it is only manslaughter, and since he was ordered to do it, he is only an accessory to the killing, leading to mitigation on various levels. The film stages this one case as exemplary of the whole judicial system. The viewer is emotionally manipulated to feel anger towards the system and consequently bonds even more with the victims and with the «tragic hero» Fritz Bauer. The fourth and final story line of the film - that of Bauer as a victim and the mysterious circumstances of his death - frames the whole work. Bauer was found in his bathtub on July 1, 1968. After the film sets the tone for Bauer ’ s universal values, it shows his nephew Rolf Tiefenthal noting that it is a speculation that Bauer took his own life, before Tiefenthal continues to ponder about how Bauer ’ s many enemies could have forced him to take his life or murdered him. The film clearly plays - intensified through the dramatic orchestra music contrasting the piano music that accompanied the first scenes with Bauer - on the mystery of Bauer ’ s death without forcing the issue. Manfred Amend, the executor of Bauer ’ s will, and the coroner Joachim Gerchow, describe the discovery of Bauer ’ s corpse and the investigation into Bauer ’ s death. The Frankfurt prosecutor Johannes Warlow points out that there were rumors that Bauer was murdered, though he seems to indicate that they were just the typical rumors in such a case. Warlow later also vigorously dismisses the idea of suicide. Amend is then shown again maintaining - as 205 Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past Tiefenthal before - that Bauer had enemies, though it was hard for Amend to understand, because Bauer was such a remarkable man. The film establishes the model prosecutor who can be honored and admired today against the one who had enemies and was persecuted himself because of his convictions. The film then returns to the idea of Bauer ’ s death much later after it has established German society ’ s and the German legal profession ’ s resistance to Bauer ’ s investigative efforts. Right before the chapter on the Auschwitz trial, Ziok discusses with Heinz Düx that Bauer carried a gun and received murder threats. Later several witnesses, including Bauer himself in the talk show footage, reflect upon the threats, hate mail, and anti-Semitic insults that Bauer received, particularly during the Auschwitz trial. Thus, Bauer becomes a victim of Nazi propaganda himself in the eyes of the viewer, mirroring the anti-Semitic past of the Third Reich in the 1960s. In its final part, the film returns to Bauer ’ s death. Amend reflects that when such a prominent and controversial figure as Fritz Bauer dies, there is usually a forensic autopsy, not just a clinical one. Then Gerchow ponders how unusual it was - especially since Bauer had been occasionally threatened - that the prosecution did not follow procedure. The film does not comment; it does not fuel explicit speculations besides letting its witnesses point out ambiguities and unusual events. Some journalists read the narrative of Bauer ’ s death as «frivole Verdächtigungen» and «Raunen von Tod und Freitod» (Platthaus, «Raunen»). Kothenschulte maintains that the film argues that the Dreher amendment to the criminal law had driven Bauer to suicide; yet Tod auf Raten simply expresses the tension and uses the rumors at the time to create suspense and leave an emotional gap that highlights the pressures in West German society in the 1950s and 60s. A clear murder or suicide thesis would undermine the film ’ s idea of making Bauer a victim and a hero at the same time. Otherwise, the film would have included the case of the federal court in Karlsruhe acquitting the judge of the Volksgericht Hans Joachim Rehse in April 1968 since any perversion of justice could not be proven (cf. Wojak, Fritz Bauer 373 - 74), to intensify the disappointment in the final year of Bauer ’ s life. Ziok uses the death narrative as a certain suspense frame for the film, but, more important, this narrative completes the representation of Bauer as a victim. The death story line emotionalizes the film ’ s narrative and consequently allows for a balance between tragedy and success story, between historical atmosphere and hope in Bauer ’ s universal value system and role model function. The exact circumstances of Bauer ’ s death do not matter for the narrative technique of the film. Instead it is important that Bauer serves as a tragic hero, a role model, and a universal figure for courage and human rights in opposition to the society of the 1950s and 60s. The murder plot sup- 206 Stephan Jaeger plements the process of victimization and intensifies this contrast. It links the two perspectives on universal rights for today ’ s generations with the atmosphere of silence, forgetting, and continuation of Nazi ideology during the postwar era that is so foreign to today ’ s viewers. This allows Ziok to combine generational remembrance from the twenty-first century perspective and the past. She does not represent a factual past of the 1950s and 60s, but uses stylization and streamlines the narrative to co-temporalize past and present. This contrasting technique between past and present also explains why the film intentionally streamlines history. Complexities of international positions, such as the involvement of the CIA in protecting former Nazis, are not mentioned. Neither are other people who resisted like Bauer, people who might have repented, etc., given any representation in the film. The film ’ s construct is deliberately a black-and-white picture: Bauer as the model fighter for universal values and human rights on the one hand, and the Naziinfiltrated West German society on the other. Since the twenty-first century viewer naturally identifies with Bauer ’ s established universal perspective and is naturally appalled by the postwar West German society, the film creates an affective response in the viewer that allows them to experience a simulated Nazi-stricken West German society. 22 The viewer presumably does not simply feel sympathy for Bauer, since Bauer is too strong a figure and role model. His victim status is paired with a heroic, exemplary, and universal narrative that makes him a tragic hero. Consequently, the viewer is made to identify with, i. e., apprehend and comprehend, Bauer ’ s situation and human rights mind-set in the sense of empathy (Breithaupt 10 - 11); she or he seems to watch with Bauer ’ s eyes and imagines heror himself in a similar fight for justice. This empathy cannot be transferred to any witness, but remains focused on Bauer, and it is an emotional empathy, ahistorical in the sense that the viewer is made to feel the force of Bauer ’ s ideas in tension with the reality of his time. The film only achieves this effect because it has established the historical atmosphere - the counterperspective to Bauer - as well. By making Bauer and his vision the focal point of the film, Ziok is able to blur the lines of victim, investigator, and perpetrator. The Nazis in West German society presented themselves as victims (which the film documents as the self-defense strategy of several of the Auschwitz trial defendants) although for the viewer they are clearly the perpetrators. Bauer investigates the crimes of National Socialism to improve society and achieve repentance by the perpetrators, but then becomes a victim of the collective hatred of the West German legal profession and in parts of West German society. Today ’ s perspective then reverses Bauer ’ s fate as a victim and makes him a role model 207 Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past or hero that opens up the narrative to a pedagogic and human rights activist message. Reading the film as a mostly factual representation of Bauer ’ s life and of the trials in the 1950s and 60s is clearly a misreading. The film has certainly a historiographical and educational mission to tell Bauer ’ s story and make him a figure of today ’ s historical consciousness again, but to achieve this, it must blur fact and anecdote, as well as history, memory, and myth. It creates three different effects of historical authenticity: The first one is the one of testimony, through the eyewitnesses and the historical footage. 23 Second, Bauer ’ s voice himself, used as the ethical point of view, adds historical and testimonial authority. Third, there is the simulated historical atmosphere of the time. This is supplemented by footage, yet it particularly comes into effect through the staging of the different story lines against one another. Consequently, the film ’ s main effect is not the presentation of factual detail. Rather, it first simulates the atmosphere of the past and, second, emotionalizes the present viewer through the various contrasts between past and present, allowing the tragic hero Fritz Bauer to become a universal role model. Here one can see why the film is successful in a pedagogical sense, but has been criticized as a historical misrepresentation. The film mirrors Bauer ’ s particular interest in youth by recreating him as a model for today ’ s youth. Thus, the past merges with the present and opens up to the future. This allows Tod auf Raten to cotemporalize past, present, and future. The disturbing effect of the simulated atmosphere of the West German past seems too strong for the viewer or the filmmakers to simply fall into moral complacency about knowing better in hindsight. Thus, the film has less an effect of catharsis on the viewer, but rather one of a constant warning that human rights cannot ever be taken for granted. The idea of simulating a struggle between the ideals of human rights and the historical atmosphere of the 1950s and 60s is consistent with the film ’ s effect through the last spoken words of the film by Rolf Tiefenthal, who says, spontaneously and in English: «I think all of the Germans [. . .] Nazis alive [sic] saw him as major enemy. They were afraid of him, yes. [. . .] But he won.» It is not the circumstances of Bauer ’ s death that truly matter, but the dichotomy between Bauer and his opponents. Tiefenthal ’ s subjective standpoint as a relative supports the film ’ s dramaturgy: despite becoming a victim himself, Bauer ’ s universal worldview is represented as successful in the end. 24 208 Stephan Jaeger Notes 1 See Bauer ’ s closing arguments in the trial in «Eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht» (Die Humanität 169 - 79). 2 For the historical context of the Remer Trial and a detailed summary of the trial ’ s course in court see Wojak, Fritz Bauer 265 - 84. It is apparent that the witnesses in Ziok ’ s film do not convey any new historical knowledge about the trial. Wojak ’ s historiographical approach to West German history can represent the Remer trial in its impact and in the context of other trials much more precisely than a documentary film. Yet a factual approach describing the difficulties and the public outrage, in Germany and abroad, about earlier judgments that marked political resistance as illegal so that political prisoners could not receive any compensation for their time in prison (see the case of the Social Democrat Georg B., Wojak, Fritz Bauer 278 - 79) cannot - unlike Ziok ’ s film - connect the past to the present and involve the recipient in any emotional way. Tod auf Raten needs a narrative stepping-stone. 3 For a full biographical take on Bauer, with an emphasis on legal questions, see Wojak ’ s biography Fritz Bauer 1903 - 1968, published in 2009. 4 The only review that discusses the film ’ s method in detail in a very positive way was written by Koep-Kerstin. He sees - similar to the film director Ilona Ziok herself in her oral reflections upon the method of her film - Tod auf Raten in the tradition of Marcel Ophüls und Krzysztof Kieslowski. The documentary resembles a feature film, structured in suspenseful and dense episodes. 5 There has been some criticism of the use of music in the film, particularly the closing song «My Way» sung by Frank Sinatra (e. g., Kothenschulte; Gutmair). Koep-Kerstin defends the film ’ s use of music, especially of the symphonic laments by Henryk Miko ł aj Górecki ’ s «Third Symphony» and Krzysztof Penderecki ’ s Auschwitz oratorio «Dies Irae.» He recognizes that the aesthetics of the film are based on a number of representational layers whereas most critics simply look for straightforward equations between story and representational method. 6 See in particular the most negative review of the film by Andreas Platthaus («Raunen»). 7 This corresponds to Ilona Ziok ’ s own descriptions of post-screening discussions and my own experience at a discussion in the Blackbox - Kino im Filmmuseum in Düsseldorf on July 17, 2011. The podium discussion with Ilona Ziok was moderated by Tim Engels from the Vereinigung Demokratischer Juristinnen und Juristen e. V., regional group Düsseldorf. The audience was intrigued by the film and Bauer ’ s function as a role model for the youth in the present. For press descriptions of the audience ’ s reaction to the film see Michels. For the effect of the film see also Naxos-Kino ’ s announcement of a second showing of the film in their theatres (Naxos-Kino). 8 See note 3. 9 See Bauer ’ s essay «Im Kampf um des Menschen Rechte» (1955) for his idea that criminal law needs to focus more on the delinquent, instead of merely on the offense (Bauer, Die Humanität 37 - 49). The volume Die Humanität der Rechtsordnung with a selection of Bauer ’ s essays, speeches, and interviews between 1955 and 1968 gives a good idea how Bauer wanted to transform the German criminal law and how this relates to working through the experiences of National Socialism and the Holocaust. 10 See Bauer ’ s search for a definition of justice in Auf der Suche nach dem Recht, in which he develops his idea of a modern criminal law that stresses rehabilitation and human rights. 209 Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past 11 See Wojak, Fritz Bauer 285 - 302 for the detailed facts of Bauer ’ s involvement in Eichmann ’ s arrest. 12 See Horn (237) for the idea of an objective witness («Zeitzeuge») in the pre-Knopp era of West German television. For a general critique of the uncritical use of memory fragments of eyewitnesses see also Blanke; for the role of experience and oral history as sources about National Socialism and the Holocaust see Plato, «Geschichte ohne Zeitzeugen.» 13 See Wojak, «Der erste Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß» 57. See also Atze 644 - 46 for the role of the media. For the reaction of German historiography to the Auschwitz trial see Frei. 14 See Wojak, ed. Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/ 63, 388 - 437 for a comprehensive documentation of the trial against Boger. For a comprehensive synopsis see Kingreen 52 - 53. 15 The trial began in the Römer, Frankfurt ’ s city hall, in 1963, but moved to the newly built Bürgerhaus Gallus in April 1964. 16 See Wojak, ed. Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/ 63, 395 - 96 for Marianne Boger ’ s statements in court. Ziok ’ s selection of interview footage highlights the absurdity and paradox of Boger ’ s wife claiming that she did not know anything and that Boger was a good human and father. 17 See Wojak, ed. Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/ 63, 401 where Boger downplays the torture effect of the swing. He also attempted to distance himself from the Holocaust, arguing that he was merely interrogating the Polish Resistance and Bolshevists, and did not participate in the Holocaust against the Jews (432). 18 For example when the activities of Josef Klehr, the head of the SS disinfection commando in Auschwitz, are described to intensify the idea of the silent and unrepentant perpetrators. 19 See Knellessen ’ s detailed analysis of witnesses from different postwar countries in the Auschwitz trial. While it is a consequent aesthetic decision to exclude traumatic testimonies by Holocaust victims so that Bauer ’ s point of view can be emphasized, this decision also runs the risk of reducing the specificity of the historical events of the Holocaust to a secondary, exemplary story. 20 Generally for the debate on the extension of the statute of limitations to Nazi crimes and Dreher ’ s amendment to the criminal law (§ 50/ 2) that came in effect in October 1968 see Miquel 109 - 10. 21 The German criminal law has historically not recognized the idea of mass murder (see Wojak, ed, Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/ 63, 271 - 73). For the legal context and a detailed discussion of the challenges to apply the murder paragraph to mass murder in the Third Reich see - by example of the Auschwitz trial - Wojak, «Mauer des Schweigens» 33 - 34. See also Perels who discusses the inseparability of criminal trial and effect on public consciousness (136), as well as Bauer ’ s essay «Genocidum (Völkermord)» (1965) in which he talks about the function of genocide trials to «re-educate» the perpetrators and create tolerance in society. Consequently, the criminal law focusing on the individual delinquent can only be a part of the necessary social education of society (Bauer, Die Humanität 61 - 75, esp. 74 - 75). 22 For the concept of simulating historical experience and atmosphere see Jaeger 92 - 95. 23 Pirker and Rüdiger (esp. 15) differentiate between two modes of historical authenticity: The first one is testimony which includes objects from the past, auratic places, eyewitness accounts, and historical sources. All of these manifestations of testimony suggest something original, a relic from the past that works through its authenticity. The 210 Stephan Jaeger second mode of authenticity is experience. This can be achieved through the viewing, handling, or creation of replicas, the reenactment of the past, and through the evocation of an authentic feeling that relates to the mood or atmosphere of the past. The point of view of Bauer simulated and represented in Tod auf Raten seems a hybrid of both forms. 24 As explained above, this positive development trumps any possible resignation of Bauer in the eyes of the film, so that the film neither advocates a suicide theory (Bauer lost hope) nor a theory of murder (conspiracy against Bauer and the ideals that he stood for). Works Cited Aktion Mensch. «Filmfestival.» 21 June 2012. <http: / / www.aktion-mensch.de/ filmfestival/ index.php>. Assmann, Aleida. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. Munich: Beck, 2006. Atze, Marcel: « ‹ . . . an die Front des Auschwitz-Prozesses › : Zur Zeitgenössischen Rezeption der ‹ Strafsache gegen Mulka und andere › .» Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/ 63 Frankfurt am Main. Ed. Irmtrud Wojak, on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institut. Cologne: Snoeck, 2004. 637 - 47. Bauer, Fritz. Auf der Suche nach dem Recht. Stuttgart: Franckh ’ sche Verlagshandlung, 1966. Bauer, Fritz. Die Humanität der Rechtsordnung: Ausgewählte Schriften. Ed. Joachim Perels and Irmtrud Wojak. Wissenschaftliche Reihe des Fritz Bauer Instituts. Vol. 5. Frankfurt: Campus, 1998. Berlinale. «Film File Fritz Bauer: Tod auf Raten/ Death by Instalments.» 21 June 2012. <http: / / www.berlinale.de/ en/ archiv/ jahresarchive/ 2010/ 02_programm_2010/ 02_Filmdatenblatt_2010_20106770.php>. Blanke, Horst Walter. «Stichwortgeber: Die Rolle der ‹ Zeitzeugen › in G. Knopps Fernsehdokumentation.» Geschichtskultur: Die Anwesenheit von Vergangenheit in der Gegenwart. Ed. Vadim Oswalt and Hans-Jürgen Pandel. Schwalbach: Wochenschau, 2009. 63 - 74. Breithaupt, Fritz. Kulturen der Empathie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009. CV Films. «Fritz Bauer: Tod auf Raten/ Death by Instalments.» 21 June 2012. <http: / / www.fritz-bauer-film.de/ ge/ index.htm>. Frei, Norbert. «Der Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess und die deutsche Zeitgeschichtsschreibung.» Auschwitz: Geschichte, Rezeption und Wirkung. Jahrbuch 1996 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust. Ed. Fritz Bauer Institut. Frankfurt: Campus, 1996. 123 - 38. Fritz Bauer: Tod auf Raten/ Death by Instalments. Dir. Ilona Ziok. CV Films, 2010. Gutmair, Ulrich. «Nein sagen ist der Kern jeder Ethik.» Taz, 16 Feb. 2010. 21 June 2012. <http: / / www.taz.de/ 1/ archiv/ digitaz/ artikel/ ? ressort=be&dig=2010%2F02 %2F16%2Fa0143&cHash=0d0b299b56>. Horn, Sabine. Erinnerungsbilder: Auschwitz-Prozess und Majdanek-Prozess im westdeutschen Fernsehen. Essen: Klartext, 2009. 211 Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past Jaeger, Stephan. «Historiographical Simulations of War.» Fighting Words and Images: Representing War across the Disciplines. Ed. Elena Baraban, Stephan Jaeger and Adam Muller. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 89 - 109. Kansteiner, Wulf. In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz. Athens: Ohio UP, 2006. Keilbach, Judith. Geschichtsbilder und Zeitzeugen: Zur Darstellung des Nationalsozialismus im bundesdeutschen Fernsehen. Münster: Lit, 2008. Kingreen, Monica. Der Auschwitz-Prozess 1963 - 1965: Geschichte, Bedeutung und Wirkung - Materialien für die pädagogische Arbeit mit CD: Auschwitz-Überlebende sagen aus. Pädagogische Materialien. Vol. 8. Frankfurt: Fritz-Bauer- Institut, 2004. Knellessen, Dagi. «Momentaufnahmen der Erinnerung: Juristische Zeugenschaft im ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess - Ein Interviewprojekt.» Zeugenschaft des Holocaust: Zwischen Trauma, Tradierung und Ermittlung. Ed. Michael Elm and Gottfried Kößler, on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institut. Jahrbuch 2007 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust. Frankfurt: Campus, 2007. 116 - 38. Koep-Kerstin, Werner. «Fritz Bauer - Tod auf Raten: Ein Film über den Generalankläger des Ausschwitz-Prozesses und Mitbegründer der HU.» Mitteilungen der Humanistischen Union 208/ 209.1/ 2 (2010): 18 - 20, 15 July 2010. 21 June 2012. <http: / / www.humanistische-union.de/ aktuelles/ aktuelles_detail/ back/ aktuelles/ article/ fritz-bauer-tod-auf-raten-ein-film-ueber-den-generalanklaeger-des-aussch witz-prozesses-und-mitbeg>. Kothenschulte, Daniel. «Aufklärung im Kellerclub.» Frankfurter Rundschau, 22 Nov. 2010. 21 June 2012. <http: / / www.fr-online.de/ film/ dokumentarfilm-ueber-fritzbauer-aufklaerung-im-kellerklub,1473350,4859784.html>. Michels, Claudia. «Das öffentliche Hinsehen: Niederschmetternde Dokumentation über den Aufklärer und Ankläger Fritz Bauer.» Frankfurter Rundschau 7 Feb. 2011: R7. Miquel, Marc von. « ‹ Wir müssen mit den Mördern zusammenleben! › NS-Prozesse und politische Öffentlichkeit in den sechziger Jahren.» «Gerichtstag halten über uns selbst . . .»: Geschichte und Wirkung des Ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses. Ed. Irmtrud Wojak, on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institut. Jahrbuch 2001 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust. Frankfurt: Campus, 2001. 97 - 116. Naxos-Kino. «Wiederholung des Films Fritz Bauer - Tod auf Raten am 7. Dezember in der Naxoshalle.» frankfurter info, 30 Nov. 2010. 21 June 2012. <http: / / www. frankfurter-info.org/ Nachrichten/ wiederholung-des-films-fritz-bauer-tod-auf-ra ten-am-7.-dezember-in-der-naxoshalle>. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Perels, Joachim. «Die Strafsache gegen Mulka und andere Ks 2/ 63 - Juristische Grundlagen.» Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/ 63 Frankfurt am Main. Ed. Irmtrud Wojak, on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institut. Cologne: Snoeck, 2004. 124 - 47. Pirker, Eva Ulrike and Mark Rüdiger. «Authentizitätsfiktionen in populären Geschichtskulturen: Annäherungen.» Echte Geschichte: Authentizitätsfiktionen in 212 Stephan Jaeger populären Geschichtskulturen. Ed. Eva Ulrike Pirker et al. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010. 11 - 30. Plato, Alexander von. «Geschichte ohne Zeitzeugen? Einige Fragen zur ‹ Erfahrung › im Übergang von Zeitgeschichte zur Geschichte.» Zeugenschaft des Holocaust: Zwischen Trauma, Tradierung und Ermittlung. Ed. Michael Elm and Gottfried Kößler, on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institut. Jahrbuch 2007 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust. Frankfurt: Campus, 2007. 141 - 56. Plato, Alice von. «Vom Zeugen zum Zeitzeugen: Die Zeugen der Anklage im ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess (1963 - 1965).» «Gerichtstag halten über uns selbst . . .»: Geschichte und Wirkung des Ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses. Ed. Irmtrud Wojak, on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institut. Jahrbuch 2001 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust. Frankfurt: Campus, 2001. 193 - 215. Platthaus, Andreas. «Wo sind Fritz Bauers Feinde geblieben? Ein Dokumentarfilm über das Leben des großen Gerechten.» Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 Feb. 2010. 21 June 2012. <http: / / www.faz.net/ frankfurter-allgemeine-zeitung/ feuilleton/ wo-sind-fritz-bauers-feinde-geblieben-1939584.html>. Platthaus, Andreas. «Raunen von Mord und Freitod.» Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2 Dec. 2010: 37. Seeliger, Anja. «Der Ungeehrte.» Außer Atem: Das Berlinaleblog, 15 Feb. 2010. 21 June 2012. <http: / / www.perlentaucher.de/ berlinale-blog/ 110_der_ungeehrte>. Wojak, Irmtrud, ed., on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institut. Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/ 63 Frankfurt am Main. Cologne: Snoeck, 2004. Wojak, Irmtrud. « ‹ Die Mauer des Schweigens durchbrochen › : Der erste Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess 1963 - 1965.» «Gerichtstag halten über uns selbst . . .»: Geschichte und Wirkung des Ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses. Ed. Irmtrud Wojak, on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institut. Jahrbuch 2001 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust. Frankfurt: Campus, 2001. 21 - 42. Wojak, Irmtrud. «Der erste Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß und die ‹ Bewältigung › der NS-Vergangenheit.» Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/ 63 Frankfurt am Main. Ed. Irmtrud Wojak, on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institut. Cologne: Snoeck, 2004. 53 - 70. Wojak, Irmtrud. Fritz Bauer 1903 - 1968: Eine Biographie. Munich: Beck, 2009. 213 Between Tragedy and Heroism: Staging the West German Past Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Volker Steenblock Philosophieren mit Filmen ISBN 978-3-7720-8481-2 Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past in Malte Ludin ’ s Documentary 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß* BRAD PRAGER U NIVERSITY OF M ISSOURI Malte Ludin ’ s family was deeply embroiled in Germany ’ s history of perpetration. He was born in 1942 in Bratislava, which at the time was known to the Germans as Preßburg. As the son of Hanns Ludin, a successful Nazi diplomat, his family «aryanized» a villa in 1941, legally but unethically taking it from the Slovakian Jews who were living there. Ludin examines his upbringing in the shadow of his father ’ s war crimes, as well as his family ’ s guilt by implication in his 2004 documentary 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß. The film is his means of dealing with the past, of rewriting its terms and engaging it in dialogue. But how does a filmmaker confront both his family and German history at the same time? Ludin uses filmic strategies to cut into the past, turning the ostensibly complete and closed narrative into which he was thrown and with which he was presented into a tendentious debate. He transforms his own memories and unanswered questions into newly opened wounds. From 1970 to 1974 Ludin studied at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (the dffb), and since that time he has been an independent author, filmmaker and producer. By 1979 he had already begun to write about how film should engage the past, publishing a critical essay on Joachim Fest and Christian Herrendoerfer ’ s film Hitler - eine Karriere (1977), which had been released 2 years earlier. Fest and Herrendoerfer ’ s film was a composite: it consisted mainly of footage filmed by the Nazis, thus reproducing and redistributing a large amount of wartime material with the intention of examining why ordinary Germans had been so enamored of Hitler. In their film Hitler is depicted as having been widely idolized and as having enjoyed the popularity of a rock star. The film itself drew on and imitated National Socialist propaganda films and its directors even added enhanced sound effects to amplify the impressions made by the images. 1 Some of their choices * For input on an earlier version of this essay, I am especially grateful to Laurie Johnson and the participants of the 2012 Midwest Symposium in German Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I also thank Lauren Bartshe for assistance with research. could have been interpreted as ironic or as an attempt at what Eric Santner affirmatively describes as a homeopathic remedy for Germany ’ s past ills, but there was little evidence, either in the comments made by the producers or in the film ’ s reception, that would have made such claims convincing. 2 Remarking on the editing of Hitler - eine Karriere Anton Kaes observes: «By using shot/ countershot, [Fest and Herrendoerfer] established the union between the Führer and the people as both pseudo-religious and erotic: masses of women listen raptly at the dictator ’ s feet as he exhausts himself, fulfilling their libidinous, ecstatic desire to submit themselves» (6). Through their editing the filmmakers aimed to recreate the erotic and quasi-erotic attachments many held for the Führer. Objections to the deliberate awakening of those problematic erotic investments were widespread, and numerous critiques reiterated this position vis-à-vis the film ’ s harmonizing depiction of its subject and his spectators, of Hitler and the German public. The editing was not intended to be dialectical, but it instead emphasized the process of identification and the feeling of adulation, all of which made their work little different, in the eyes of critics, from Leni Riefenstahl ’ s Nazi era films. Ludin added his voice to the critiques, asserting that despite the passage of three decades, the film advanced Nazi lies. His essay takes Fest and Herrendoerfer to task on many fronts. He asks, for example, why the filmmakers didn ’ t include other material or information that might have been retrieved in the course of their film-archival research. If one depicts a speech by the Führer, shouldn ’ t one show, using captions or other types of commentary, the violence that underlies such a speech? And, instead of enhancing the images with special effects, shouldn ’ t one try to rend those images from their sounds, sundering the false impressions created by Joseph Goebbels? («Nazi-Lügen» 48 - 49). Ludin ’ s analysis of the film squares with that of his contemporary Wim Wenders. The two filmmakers are of the same generation: Ludin was born in 1942 and Wenders in 1945. In a critical essay on the film titled «That ’ s Entertainment: Hitler,» Wenders writes, «in no other country have images and language been abused so unscrupulously as here, never before and nowhere else have they been debased so deeply as vehicles to transmit lies. And now a film comes along which, with an incomprehensible thoughtlessness, wants to sell exactly those images as the heart of the matter and as ‹ documentary footage › » (128). Wenders offsets the term «documentary footage» (Dokumentaraufnahmen) with quotation marks, already indicating his awareness that documentary is a contested category, that is, that Nazi propaganda films such as Triumph des Willens (1935) and Der ewige Jude (1940) had already done much to undermine the form ’ s privileged claim on 216 Brad Prager representing reality. More important, perhaps, was that the film was, from Wenders ’ s perspective, a monologue; it was one-sided, and it depicted the Führer from the standpoint of his visionary manipulation of the masses. It should instead have been turned into a dialogue, one in which the filmmakers disrupt rather than reproduce the legacy of the Nazi past. Wenders asserts that a filmmaker has a responsibility to «stop the flow of these images» (129) and a film of this sort should sit across the table from that era ’ s self-understanding and reject its authority. Why, as a filmmaker, would one permit his or her film to remain subordinate to the Nazis ’ vision? Wenders ’ s language of interruption is a valuable tool for thinking about Ludin ’ s essay. Ludin likewise views Hitler - eine Karriere as doctrinaire, asking why it depicts Hitler as a star and a superman who, with a bit more luck and without having been caught unawares by the unfortunate Russian winter, might have succeeded? Why, he wonders, do these directors show the German ecstasy but not the subsequent hangover, sublimity without debasement, dominance without resistance, and order without injustice? («Nazi-Lügen» 50). The major metaphor that guides Ludin ’ s film-formal critique has to do with the process of cutting into documentary material. Behind his argument, in other words, is a vision regarding the work and meaning of film editing. The central question running throughout both his and Wenders ’ s critical essays is how one turns monologic footage such as that of the Führer ’ s famous speeches, which were always intended to function as hermetically sealed showcases of sound and image, into dialogical depictions? How does a filmmaker tear into an aesthetic whole and permit a contemporary, critical perspective to enter into dialogue with history? Parallel questions arise for Ludin when he confronts his personal, familial past in 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß. He seeks to become a filmic interlocutor, intervening into both the cinema-historical images and into his family ’ s self-understanding of their father ’ s wartime deeds. The past is a wound that his film aims to reopen. The facts of the matter could be more or less agreed upon: Hanns Ludin, Malte ’ s father, was the highest-ranking representative of Germany in Slovakia from 1941 to 1945. He was a diplomat «first class» (Gesandter I. Klasse) who oversaw the deportation of large numbers of Slovakian Jews. Raul Hilberg documents that over 57,000 Jewish prisoners were deported on Ludin ’ s authority during the period from March to October of 1942 (785). Ultimately Hanns Ludin was executed for his crimes, and this history, from his involvement with the Nazi party, through the Night of the Long Knives, his service in Slovakia, and his postwar execution, becomes Malte Ludin ’ s cinematic subject. Seen from a filmic perspective and in light of Malte Ludin ’ s remarks about Fest and Herrendoerfer ’ s film, the need to take control by 217 Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past editing together - or by cutting into - his family ’ s narrative was analogous to the project of disrupting the Führer ’ s self-serving orations. Carrying both a cinematic legacy as well as a number of familial conflicts specific to the second generation into his film necessitated a varied approach; the many voices that echo throughout the documentary, specifically those of his mother, his siblings, and even the ghostly, reverberating words of his late father, form a polyphonic narrative. These multiple voices call for multiple modes of intrusion, and the choices he makes in cutting his film reflect the diverse wounds Hanns Ludin imposed on members of the family. When Malte Ludin asserted that Hitler - eine Karriere was a «surrogate film» that failed to sunder the past, or to draw attention to debasement, resistance, and injustice, he was likely thinking in Oedipal terms about his own history. Even his choice of the word «surrogate» (Surrogat) is revealing: Hitler - eine Karriere is not an Ersatz film, that is, it is not a fake one, but it is rather one that stands in for another film and for another filmmaker as though it were that earlier project ’ s deputy. The film ’ s real director was Goebbels, who had, after all, been responsible for the original footage. Fest and Herrendoerfer ’ s work serves as a deputy, representing Goebbels ’ s aims, and Ludin criticizes it as though it had been the story of his own father, who was himself a deputy - a surrogate - of the Third Reich. The concept of cutting into the past - of conceiving of film editing in terms of divisive incisions - is particularly significant insofar as German wartime crimes are frequently understood as inheritable wounds. Erin McGlothlin writes about legacies of perpetration as «a brand of perpetually present guilt that eludes resolution» (26), and her description is extraordinarily apt where 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß is concerned. 3 She observes that the inheritance of perpetrator guilt, akin to the mark of Cain («the sign of an unresolved criminal past»), may be bequeathed to the children of perpetrators. The legacy of German perpetration, however, «does not, as with Cain, take the form of an external stigma that immediately distinguishes [perpetrators ’ ] children visually. Rather, their inherited mark is figured as hereditary, an internal genetic flaw that is passed down from perpetrator parent to child, an identification that signifies how the child is bound to the parent ’ s criminal legacy» (26). Alexandra Senfft, Hanns Ludin ’ s granddaughter, describes the impact her grandfather ’ s crimes had on her mother, Erika, alighting, similar to McGlothlin, on the image of a «mark» or «sign»: «Mein Großvater ist aktiv an einem industriellen Massenmord beteiligt, dem größten aller Menschheitsverbrechen, und das in einem Milieu, das die Judenvernichtung zu jenem Zeitpunkt für selbstverständlich hält. Meine Mutter, noch keine zehn Jahre alt und vollkommen unschuldig, ist durch diese 218 Brad Prager Entwicklungen bereits fürs Leben gezeichnet» (80 - 81). In attempting to render the invisible past visible, Malte Ludin uses his film to engage in a familial archaeology. Many Germans were already familiar with Malte Ludin ’ s father, Hanns, from his appearance in Ernst von Salomon ’ s Der Fragebogen (1951). 4 Von Salomon ’ s book, which became a bestseller, was a response to denazification, and its framework is based on a denazification questionnaire distributed by the Allied military government. Von Salomon answers the inquiries in an overly elaborate way that, through its excesses, parodies the naïve perspective on culpability adopted by the Allies. It pokes fun at the process, but it also provides a detailed account of how von Salomon saw his own Nazi ideology develop over the course of his career, including the time he spent as a filmmaker during the war and as a prisoner afterward. As an unusually nuanced narrative concerning its author ’ s somewhat marginal complicity, the story avoids assigning guilt in black and white terms, which may have been the basis for its warm German reception. Toward the end of Der Fragebogen, von Salomon finds himself in POW camps, first at Natternberg and then at Plattling, where he encounters and becomes friends with his fellow prisoner Hanns Ludin. Throughout this last section of von Salomon ’ s book, the internment is depicted as an act of vindictiveness guided by contempt. The Germans, in particular Ludin, come off as more cultured than their captors. Richard Herzinger describes the dignified, even noble figure cut by Ludin in von Salomon ’ s account: «Ludin erscheint [. . .] als ein, wenn auch verführter, so doch grundehrlicher, gläubiger Mensch, der sich der Verantwortung für seine Taten nicht entziehen will, aber jede wohlfeile Reue ablehnt. [. . .] Wenn sich Ludin auch keinerlei Schuldbekenntnis abfordern läßt, so stellt er sich in Salomons Darstellung doch mit Würde seiner Verantwortung» (92). Hanns Ludin was executed in 1947 in Bratislava as a war criminal. He had been a lieutenant general (an Obergruppenführer) in the SA, but in von Solomon ’ s book he is depicted more as a committed representative of the Reich and Führer than as a committed anti-Semite. Von Salomon reports, for example, that when Ludin, while working as an ambassador, received the message that the Slovakian Jews were not settled elsewhere as arranged but instead were deported to extermination camps he exclaimed: «Das ischt [sic] eine bodenlose Sauerei! » (635 - 36). 5 He also provides insight into Ludin ’ s commitment to Hitler. Although one should treat the words of von Salomon ’ s book with appropriate skepticism, Ludin is purported to have maintained that what he had done was in the interest of the German people and in the service of a greater ideal. In Der Fragebogen Ludin is quoted explaining himself: «Ich beugte mich, nicht, weil ich [Hitlers] Gewalt fürchtete, sondern weil ich 219 Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past wirklich glaubte, er habe recht, und da, wo ich recht habe, müsse ich um größerer Dinge und Zusammenhänge willen, die ich nicht übersah, mich fügen» (661). Germans, in other words, may have known Hanns Ludin as someone who purportedly acted freely, and as someone who was unapologetically willing to defend his actions to the end. He is not presented as an anti- Semite, but instead as a paragon of stalwart German masculinity, who chose not to recant. His last words are said to have been «Long live Germany! » (Es lebe Deutschland! ). 6 All of this clearly had consequences for his children, not only because of the sense of responsibility they might have had toward the victims - their familial mark of Cain - but also because of the space that had been taken up by nationalism in their father ’ s heart. Ludin ’ s statements about his fealty to Germany during and after the war seem predicated on an affective relationship that may have, in the minds of his family, eclipsed his bond with them. According to von Salomon, Hanns Ludin said: «Ich konnte mir das Volk, dem ich zugehörte, nicht aussuchen, es war da, alles war da mit allen Fehlern und Schwächen. Wenn ich schuldig wurde, wenn wir alle schuldig wurden, so wurden wir aus Liebe schuldig» (662). He was, in this way, a believer, and he was not afraid to stand up for his actions. He even passed up an opportunity to escape the POW camp and avoid his inevitable sentence. As von Salomon, together with other POWs, was working on a stage production of Faust in Plattling, von Salomon offered Ludin a way out: the two men looked similar enough that Ludin could be released with von Salomon ’ s papers in hand, and von Salomon, who wanted in any event to stay and complete the production, would later indicate that there had been a mix-up and, according to plan, would protest that he himself had been not released at the proper time (667). Ludin declined von Salomon ’ s offer. It must have been difficult for Malte Ludin and the other siblings to read this widespread, bestselling account of their father declining a last chance to see his children again. And although Der Fragebogen depicts Hanns Ludin as longing now and then to be reunited with his family, he is, in von Salomon ’ s story, far more preoccupied with speaking about and assessing his postwar convictions about his homeland. Hanns Ludin ’ s attachment to Hitler and Germany cast a long shadow over his family. At one point in 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß Malte Ludin includes original sound recordings of his father speaking of the «Glück [s]eines Lebens» as his devotion to the cause of Germany ’ s freedom. When he subsequently refers to «Das Glück unserer Kinder» in his political speeches, he speaks not about his family, but rather in general terms about Germany ’ s impending glory. Malte Ludin underscores how alienating this was to him and his siblings by cutting from his father ’ s orations to testimonials in which his 220 Brad Prager sisters detail their conflicted childhood memories. Hanns Ludin ’ s love for Germany had, as a young man, driven him into the Reichswehr and also earned him a prison sentence for aiding Hitler in 1930. Moreover, he felt that Hitler had, with a god-like grace, saved his life after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934; although many party members were executed, Ludin recalled that Hitler had «sentenced» (verurteilte) him to continue living (661). 7 Ludin owed his survival to Hitler ’ s mercy, and his strong investment in the Führer and the fatherland takes the form of a preoccupation that appears to have exceeded his attachment to his family. Early on in 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß, Malte Ludin informs the viewer that he had long wanted to make this film, but that he could not do so while his mother Erla (née Erla von Jordan), who died in 1997, was still alive; the archaeological unearthing of incriminating material would have been too divisive, too painful. Alexandra Tacke sums up that in the course of the film, «60 Jahre nach Kriegsende öffnet Malte Ludin endlich den Deckel, versammelt sich und seine Verwandten, Schwestern, Schwager, Neffen und Nichten um die ‹ Kummerkiste › und konfrontiert sie mit ihrem Inhalt, bricht das Schweigen und verletzt dadurch ein Tabu der Familie» (192). The Ludin family is large: Malte was the second youngest of six children. Relying on earlier interview footage for his mother ’ s contribution, Ludin begins, subsequent to her death, to explore the dimensions of familial guilt and responsibility. He interviews his surviving sisters Ellen and Andrea, as well as his father ’ s most ardent defender, Barbara, who was born in 1935. Barbara is the oldest living sister. Malte ’ s brother, Tilman, passed away in 1999, a year after Erika, the eldest sibling, died by her own hand. Arguably, Malte ’ s disputation with his father is not only on behalf of the murdered Jews, but also on behalf of Erika, who can, owing to feelings of guilt and a legacy of perpetration, be counted among his father ’ s victims. She apparently suffered from depression, abused alcohol, and spoke frequently of suicide, now and again burdening her own children with threats that she would harm herself. At age 65, in 1998, she finally succeeded, nearly boiling herself to death in the bathtub, and subsequently dying of self-inflicted burns in the hospital. 8 Akin to many Holocaust documentaries, this one begins in an archive. Immediately following a short clip of a conversation between Malte and his sister, in which Barbara defends, in front of Malte and the camera, her right to remember her father as she wants to, the film opens onto a corridor full of records and files, a signal that things are about to be unearthed. We are then shown color photographs of a party rally - a Nazi Reichsparteitag in 1937 - and the strangeness of the color photographs is matched by the strangeness of the trombone sounds that Malte Ludin has chosen to accompany those images 221 Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past in which his father appears, sounds that do not ramp up the drama, but which can be said to undermine it insofar as they can be described as comic. The color in the photographs has a double edge: it inspires a sensation of heightened reality and the images appear to leap out at the viewer, but that same color also makes these images seem unreal. Because the preponderance of images from the Second World War are in black and white, the color images strike us as otherworldly, and this is likely why Ludin opens with them. It is as if he knew his father - a criminal who was executed when he was a toddler - only in the unreal space of a dream. The black and white or sepia pictures that are later integrated into the film create a sense of normalcy, even of nostalgia, but these color images signal one of the film ’ s chief dilemmas: how does the filmmaker come to terms with a remembrance that hardly seems real? His exploration of his father ’ s culpability begins with «archival» images - that is, images of archives - intercut with images of his father that recall Triumph des Willens. Then, Ludin ’ s title pops out from the base of a shelving unit in the form of graphic text; the words 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß slip out, as if by their own will, from their hiding place. They are text that refuses to be contained (Fig. 1). Fig. 1: From 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2004). Directed by Malte Ludin. Ludin ’ s title speaks volumes. It will be generally recognized as a reference to Godard ’ s 1967 new wave film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d ’ elle). Despite the fact that Godard ’ s film is famously known as an essay film, and is thus by implication directly associated with the voice of its cinematic auteur, it is a conscious attempt to be anti-monological: Godard ’ s film has a hybrid form, and the self-conscious legacy of the cinema essay, or the essay film, which developed and expanded throughout the 1950s and 60s, underscores a coupling of elements essential to documentary, autobiography, and fiction, producing something synthetic or a polyphony. Timothy Corrigan observes that Godard ’ s film was made «just after the period when Godard begins consistently to describe himself as a film essayist» (52). The form and its history are particularly appropriate to a film that cannot establish certain knowledge of its subject. An essay film such as this might be disputed as a documentary; it is not objective and is closer in style to probing 222 Brad Prager investigative journalism than it is to the purely observational style associated with archetypes of documentary filmmaking such as films made by Frederick Wiseman. 9 Ludin ’ s self-positioning can be viewed as a deliberately deconstructive stance in relation to a genre that is, owing to Riefenstahl and others, extraordinarily contested in the German tradition. In Godard ’ s film, the director approaches his subject - a French woman who makes her living doing childcare for prostitutes - just as Ludin approaches the memory of his father in imaginative bits and pieces and through the eyes of others. Godard ’ s film explores a woman ’ s life in contemporary Paris, examining how it was bound together with the city ’ s economy and even with the contemporaneous war in Vietnam. Corrigan remarks: «In Godard ’ s fictional documentary [. . .], the Paris of 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her becomes the doubled ‹ her › of the city and the character Juliette Janson [. . .]» (52). Along similar lines, in Ludin ’ s film familial and national histories are wrapped up in one another, and the same observation can be applied to its titular pronoun «ihm,» which refers as much to the director ’ s father as it does to the German nation and to its history of perpetration. As a director and a son Malte Ludin sets out to determine what kind of person his father was, and his pursuit of an enigmatic patriarch recalls a passage from von Salomon ’ s Der Fragebogen in which Hanns Ludin recollects his impression of Hitler: «Ich habe das Maß für [Hitler] noch nicht gefunden. [. . .] Manchmal habe ich ihn für ein Genie gehalten, manchmal wußte ich nicht, ob wir nicht doch von einem Wahnsinnigen geführt wurden. Manchmal hielt ich ihn für dämonisch, manchmal für krankhaft. Aber das ist alles nicht richtig, nicht richtig ist auch dein Ausdruck ‹ lemurenhaft › » (661). Hanns Ludin, however, protests too much: he proceeds to describe Hitler in terms that are truly lemur-like (lemurenhaft), adding, «Wenn ich versuche, ein gültiges Wort für ihn zu finden, so ist es das, er sei ‹ abseitig › gewesen, ein Mensch, der das Licht nicht vertrug, ein Mensch im Schatten, aus dem Schatten kommend und aus dem Schatten sprechend, und alles, was ans Licht wollte, auch wieder in den Schatten drängend» (661 - 62). In Roman myth, the lemurs were shades or spirits of the restless and malignant dead, and they may have been on Ludin ’ s mind at the time of his internment in Plattling because in the second installment of Goethe ’ s Faust drama, a version or portion of which the POWs were in the process of producing, a chorus of lemurs in the service of Mephistopheles dig Faust ’ s grave. The scene is climactic; it is bound up with the final fate of Goethe ’ s most famous character, who, not incidentally, has committed to a pact with the devil. Hanns Ludin, grappling with the debt he owed to Hitler and his lingering investment in the idea of the fatherland, now saw Hitler as someone who spoke to him from out of the shadows. How 223 Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past different is all this from the opaque, elusive image Malte Ludin had of his own father? More important, perhaps, than the influence of the French new wave, which has indeed had a longstanding impact on filmmaking at the dffb, is the reference in Ludin ’ s title to this uncertain knowledge. Owing to the many obscurities and willful occlusions - the parts of the past that remain in the shadows - his access to the truth about his father remains so obstructed that he cannot positively lay claim to having even two or three pieces of information. And what are these two or three «things»? Perhaps that part of the title refers to the key family members confronted in the film including his mother, his siblings - particularly Barbara, generally referred to as Barbel - and, to some extent, through documents and pictures, Hanns Ludin himself. Most discussions of 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß begin with Barbel. Nearly every account starts with her slip of the tongue during the first interview, the shots with which Ludin begins. In the film ’ s initial moments she is being questioned by her younger brother about her attitude toward her father, and she remarks: «Mein Recht ist es, meinen Vater [. . .] zu sehen, wie ich ihn sehen will, oder, wie ich ihn sehe, nicht wie ich ihn sehen will, wie ich ihn sehe.» She appears conscious - as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might also have been, had he made a similar slip - that there is, or rather that there ought to be, no difference between seeing something and seeing something as one wants to see it. If I truly believe, in other words, that the sky is blue, then it makes no sense to speak of the matter in terms of my beliefs; it is blue. Similarly Barbel recognizes that to want to see Hanns Ludin one way rather than another admits the possibility that things could be otherwise - it suggests doubt. Barbel thus catches herself, and Ludin begins his film with a slip of the tongue and a self-correction (an oder followed by a nicht). She seems to be in dialogue with herself, and no effort is required on her brother ’ s part to contradict or undermine her. At a later point in the film Malte visits Barbel in what may be her own art studio. The two of them have a set-to in front of a bulletin board on which a page has been clipped from the newspaper, one that features a reproduction of Caravaggio ’ s Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All, 1601 - 02) (Fig. 2). The painting depicts a winged personification of Amor treading over items associated with a variety of mortal undertakings including a violin, armor, compasses, and manuscripts. Amor, with his eagle-like wings, tramples them all just as Barbel ’ s loving devotion to her father allows her to run roughshod over historical fact. Her niece Alexandra summarizes Barbel ’ s devotion to her father and her assumption of the role of the eldest sibling in her memoir, writing that after the deaths of Erla and Erika, «hat nun Barbel bei den Ludins die Rolle der ‹ Stammesältesten › inne und sie spielt sie mit natürlicher Eleganz 224 Brad Prager und Entschlossenheit. Sie ist in den Fußstapfen Erlas getreten und kämpft um das Andenken ihrer Eltern» (335). Barbel strongly believes that her father did not know what was happening to the deported Jews, which is a claim the film roundly rejects. Malte Ludin juxtaposes any claims of this sort with footage of written documentation, typically bearing his father ’ s signature, containing words such as «totale Lösung» and «Liquidation.» He does not let Barbel ’ s claims stand, and the conversation between them is edited into a relatively fastpaced struggle, recorded with a handheld camera. Short exchanges are separated by jump cuts, which indicate the director ’ s openness about the fact that his film is a construction; the sequence would not be mistaken for unedited footage. Malte, because he cannot look at the matter objectively, exhibits no pretense of objectivity. Fig. 2: From 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2004). Directed by Malte Ludin. A number of Barbel ’ s responses to Malte ’ s questions are shocking: she normalizes the fact that the Jews were shot in large numbers (massenhaft getötet) by referring to them as «partisans,» and saying «well, that ’ s war» («Das ist eben Krieg, Maltechen»). Her diminutive use of her brother ’ s name, «little Malte,» makes light of his overall project as well. She condescends, as would a derisive older sister, mocking him when he asks whether she feels any shame. She describes his question as «albern» and then ventriloquizes what is apparently the position of a foolish person who would engage in her brother ’ s project of self-flagellation. She mockingly intones, «Ich schäme mich so» in a sarcastic singsong voice. Her defenses are overwhelming: she diminishes her brother ’ s excavation of the past, and she engages in a soft form of Holocaust denial insofar as she describes the murdered Jews as partisans. The sequence reveals the many mechanisms by which she has come to regard her father ’ s choices as normal and to defend herself against the painful incursion of the truth. As a consequence, and as a means of disrupting her otherwise coherent 225 Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past story of the past, Ludin edits rapidly. The result is a somewhat frenetic portrait of an older sister who would do anything not to tarnish her father. In certain respects Ludin is engaged in an act of deliberate cinematic decomposition where the women in this film are concerned. Erla, Ellen, Barbara, and Andrea are all quite composed, and Ludin sometimes depicts them - particularly his mother Erla and his sister Barbara - as they would not want to be seen. For viewers familiar with the probing interviews in Ray Müller ’ s 1993 documentary Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl, Erla ’ s appearance, diction and self-control may recall Riefenstahl ’ s, who was only three years older. In old photographs Erla can be seen at the beach in an athletic posture and with an outfit that recalls Riefenstahl ’ s signature style in Der heilige Berg (1926). In Müller ’ s documentary Riefenstahl, controlled and elegant, is confronted, sometimes indirectly, through editing that puts her in dialogue with earlier statements, diary entries, and undisputed facts. Erla seems similarly composed, and her son had to strategize to undercut the control she asserts. In order to do this he relies on the integration of older footage taken from an interview with Erla conducted for a television film entitled Die Frau seines Führers (1978) with more recent footage: an interview the director himself filmed in the 1990s, when Erla was 91 years old. In the 1978 interview Malte Ludin ’ s mother looks dignified. She conforms to the image of an officer ’ s widow who is still more or less impressed with her husband. She explains that Hanns Ludin made his choices out of conviction and never for the sake of his career. In the interview she seems candid, but disconcertingly unrepentant. She explains that after the Night of the Long Knives, her husband despaired, having just seen his friends executed, and she adds that if she had it to do over again, she would have encouraged him to hang in there (durchhalten), indicating that she would have used the idiom, «wo gehobelt wird, fallen Späne.» Oddly enough, this is precisely the expression reportedly used by her husband in Der Fragebogen when he explains to von Salomon that the idea for which he fought was right, but that many sacrifices had to be made. Hanns Ludin uses the phrase with some reservations, calling it ein verfluchter Satz (647), but the fact that his wife uses it in a similar context over thirty years later might indicate either that her husband has residual influence - she was, most likely, a reader of Der Fragebogen - or that her worldview, shared with her husband, remains largely unaltered, petrified since those days. Senfft writes about her grandmother Erla ’ s attitude: Meine Großmutter hat ihre sechs Kinder im Glauben an den guten Nationalsozialisten erzogen; sie hat ihnen beigebracht, nur seine guten Seiten zu sehen, und ein guter Mensch kann keine Verbrechen begehen. Alles, was in das makellose Bild nicht passte, durfte nicht sein, wurde verschwiegen, wegdiskutiert, schöngeredet. 226 Brad Prager Die Täter, das waren die vulgären Nazis, nicht wir, das können wir gar nicht sein, denn wir sind gebildet und kultiviert. (14) In the older interview, Erla also recounts meeting a woman who told her, for the first time, about Auschwitz, and how the Jews were being gassed there. She remembers not really understanding what was meant, and when she later inquired about it she was told that Auschwitz was a Rüstungsbetrieb. She and her husband believed this, and, upon being told it was an armaments factory, she considered the matter settled. With the addition of an audio effect - one that was presumably applied by Ludin, rather than by Christian Geissler, who was responsible for the 1978 film - her comment, «it was settled» ([es] war erledigt) echoes in postmemorial repetition. It indicates that phrases of this sort resonated for Ludin and his family insofar as he was stuck, for his lifetime, with dubious explanations. Fig. 3: From 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2004). Directed by Malte Ludin. As Ludin indicated, he waited for his mother to die before making this film, and his later interview with her is shot with what appears to be a hidden camera. She no longer looks as she once did; she is now wrinkled and blemished with age. He surrounds the image with a wide black margin, which has the effect of placing her at the end of a long tunnel - an attempt, perhaps, to take some distance from her. It also recalls the mediation involved in preparing this image; it de-naturalizes the shot. In the space of the portrait ’ s wide margin, he asserts the truth. It was a year before her death, he explains, that his mother told him something she apparently hadn ’ t before: a story about a thug from the SA, whom Hanns Ludin protected. This is, Malte Ludin makes clear, the story of the manslaughter of Hermann Stern, which his father helped to conceal. It happened on March 25, 1933 in Creglingen. During the course of a Pogrom, Stern was beaten and died. Ludin ’ s mother places the event during Kristallnacht, which she does not call by that name, rather preferring to say that it took place on November 9, 1938. Ludin corrects her errors in the image ’ s margins, in what may be his own handwriting (Fig. 3). Shown in fragments, she is at times only a talking and somewhat aged mouth at the top of 227 Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past the screen. Depicting her in this unflattering way is a means of exerting authority, as a director, over his mother - she appears here neither whole, nor as she would have wanted to appear. He fills in the information for her, undercutting that which he believes to be lies and self-deceptions with the facts of the matter. Malte Ludin ’ s willingness to subject his mother to scrutiny and to undermine her worldview corresponds, to some extent, with a well-known conversation between Fassbinder and his mother in the 1978 film Deutschland im Herbst. Ludin was clearly impacted by the French new wave, but because he was, like Fassbinder, a member of the generation of filmmakers born during or near the end of the war, his decision can also be understood in terms of New German Cinema and its specific, critical disposition toward the past. In Fassbinder ’ s sequence, the most well known in that omnibus film, the director can be seen yelling at his own mother across the table, accusing her of not having reconstructed her views, even decades after the war. Following a fair amount of give and take, some of which was likely prepared in advance insofar as his mother comes off as a very game participant, she remarks that, given the turbulence of the times and particularly the actions of the RAF, it would be best to have an authoritarian ruler, one who is good, kind, and orderly. With his fist pounding the table, Fassbinder looks Germany ’ s past, in the person of his mother, in the eye and says «no.» It is in this way tempting to see the common threads as based in generational conflict, and to look at matters in terms of how German filmmakers born in the 1940s see their parents ’ generation. On the other hand, Ludin ’ s camera angle, which suggests a hidden camera, also finds a parallel in Shoah, specifically in Claude Lanzmann ’ s famous hidden camera interview with the notorious SS squad leader and Treblinka perpetrator Franz Suchomel. 10 In that interview, akin to Ludin ’ s interview with his mother, Lanzmann makes clear that he is presenting the testimony of someone who is reluctant to provide it, and that only through concealing the camera could the interviewer elicit new information. Attending to the two different possible modes of reading Ludin ’ s stylized interruption - whether it is in the mode of New German Cinema and thus about German generational conflict, or in that of Lanzmann ’ s Shoah and thus specifically about perpetrators - highlights an ambivalence in the filmmaker ’ s own orientation. Malte Ludin, on the one hand, sees his mother as a passive participant, perhaps as Fassbinder saw his mother, yet he is, on the other hand, also willing to entertain the possibility that she could be presented as a true accomplice. The sequences that involve Barbel and Erla constitute two attempts to know something about Hanns Ludin, but where, one wonders, is Hanns ’ s 228 Brad Prager own voice in all this? He appears in photographs throughout the film - in color and in black and white - and his voice is heard several times in original recordings, ones in which he orates about the fate of Germany. At one point, however, the son takes the opportunity to deliberately disrupt his father ’ s sentences, using the occasion to intervene and thereby recast the past. The filmmaker himself reads aloud from a document, written by his father shortly before his execution, and Malte, in ventriloquizing his father ’ s voice, provides what could be referred to as testimonial performance: he enacts, stages, and appropriates the persona of the perpetrator in order to re-contextualize it for purposes of his documentary. Strictly speaking this is not «testimonial performance» insofar as it is not Hanns speaking his personal testimony, but it is instead something along the lines of «testimonial re-performance.» 11 Obviously there is a simple explanation for Malte ’ s decision: his father cannot read his own letter for the camera because he is dead. The decision, however, to perform his father ’ s sentences himself provides Malte Ludin with an opening to engage in indirect dialogue with his father. His tone is somewhat languid as he reads the opening sentence: «Der Herr Staatsanwalt will mir offenbar den Beweis ermöglichen, dass ich anständig sterben kann. Diesen Beweis werde ich, falls nötig, mit Bestimmtheit erbringen.» The camera then, in the following sentence, cuts to a corridor, presumably the one down which Hanns Ludin strode to his death, and, as it progresses along the hall, we hear Malte speaking his father ’ s words, saying that what he did was in the name of his children and «in the interest of the Slovakian people.» Here, at his father ’ s egregious exclusion of his true victims, Malte Ludin draws air in through his teeth and interjects a distressed and despondent, «ui, ui, ui.» He then stumbles over his father ’ s denial of his own guilt, «Nein, ich kann mich nicht schuldig erklären.» His father is engaged in a rationalization, similar to many of those made by Adolf Eichmann, that he acted according to orders, and Ludin attempts a number of different emphases to give the sentence a sense he can comprehend. He stresses the words «nicht schuldig» and then the word «kann,» but neither seems to enable him to make real sense of what he is reading. His staged interruption is a disruption in his father ’ s speaking body - first through dissolving his father ’ s speech into non-language («ui, ui, ui»), and then by breaking off and rejecting it. The performance is only a halfembodiment along the lines of Manfred Zapatka ’ s performance in Das Himmler-Projekt (2000), in which the actor reads the text of a speech by a perpetrator but is unwilling, perhaps for reasons of good taste, to create the illusion that he is that perpetrator. 12 Zapatka and the film ’ s director, Romuald Karmakar, prefer to leave those illusions to Hollywood-style films. Here, Malte Ludin does not want to create the illusion of his father ’ s presence; he is 229 Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past much more concerned with his personal relationship to his father ’ s words and the extent to which his re-articulation of them can be an opportunity for reassessment and reconstruction. A final editorial interruption comes when Ludin puts two of his subjects into confrontation with one another, at the point at which Ludin closely examines his family ’ s aryanization of a Jewish home. The villa in which the family lived had been appropriated from the Jewish family of a Slovakian brewer named Stein. Juraj Š tern, who had lived as a child in a neighboring household, is interviewed as surrogate for the Stein family. Š tern ’ s account of those times is edited in parallel with Barbel ’ s testimony. When he was a threeor four-year-old child, Š tern explains, his family home was also taken, and he had to hide in a stable to avoid arrest and deportation. He concealed himself in a feeding trough, and, covered in hay, he was entirely alone apart from the brief visits of a farmer, who came to bring him food and to reprimand him not to cry or scream. 13 Following this period of torment, Š tern explains to Ludin, he developed a substantial stutter that he did not overcome until he was 18 years old. He lost the power of speech and, quite deliberately, Ludin at that moment cuts to Barbel, who is recounting her joyful memories of singing in the Ludin household. She and her siblings had a voice, which was, for so long and as a consequence of trauma, denied to Š tern. Claude Lanzmann, in Shoah, rarely directly intercuts testimonies with one another, preferring to allow his subjects to recount uninterrupted versions of their stories, but he has described Shoah as a place of meeting in terms that apply to this sequence: «Nobody meets anyone in Shoah [. . .] but there is a corroboration in spite of this - I make them meet. They don ’ t meet actually, but the film is a place of meeting» (84). Ludin ’ s intercutting is more direct and aggressive. It undermines Barbel ’ s self-satisfied account, and indicates his willingness to use editing to turn his family ’ s testimony against them. Barbel, at a later point, says that she is participating in the film, which she was reluctant to do, on behalf of Erla, her father, and their deceased siblings. Conspicuously absent from her explanation are the victims, and for this reason Malte is sure to include in his film Š tern, along with the poet Tuvia Rübner, whose family was among those deported from Bratislava. The victims ’ voices cut through, interrupt, and contradict the family ’ s coherent story. Each one of these interruptions - the jump cutting in his sister ’ s interviews, the juxtaposition of older and newer testimony from his mother, the reperformance of his father ’ s letter, and the indirect interactions between Barbel and Juraj Š tern - constitutes a filmic strategy deliberately meant to cut into the past. Malte Ludin obstructs and revises in order to weave his own, new narrative, disregarding his family ’ s desire to keep matters neat and tidy. But 230 Brad Prager there is yet another means of viewing Ludin ’ s work as that of a self-reflexive filmmaker, whose project stands in a history of German disputations with the past. The final shot of the film lands upon Hanns Ludin ’ s grave marker in a cemetery in Bratislava on which the initials «H. E. L.» are written (Fig. 4). Ending in this way surely echoes Wolfgang Staudte ’ s 1946 Die Mörder sind unter uns, the DEFA film meant to confront the problem of perpetrators who seamlessly reintegrated themselves as industrialists in postwar Germany. By fighting back and weeding them out, ordinary Germans - particularly eastern Germans in the Soviet occupied zone, who, for the most part, understood themselves as victims of the war - were meant to move forward and rebuild. Staudte ’ s film ends with an image similar to the final one in Ludin ’ s film, a single cross marking a grave and meant to demand the remembrance of the martyred dead. 14 Fig. 4: From 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2004). Directed by Malte Ludin. Malte Ludin was familiar with Staudte ’ s film. He had written about Staudte, and his book-length biography, Wolfgang Staudte, details, one after the next, Staudte ’ s films. The connection between the final images is thus hard to overlook. The cross over Hanns Ludin ’ s grave bears his initials, and the Old Norse name it resembles, «Hel,» is related to the word Hell (Hölle) as well as to the verb verhehlen, referring to that which is concealed. It cannot remain so: the restless dead have done their work and the past has been unearthed. In writing about Die Mörder sind unter uns Ludin observes that the psychically wounded doctor at that film ’ s center, Hans Mertens, has «genau die Gemütsverfassung eines Großteils der Deutschen nach dem Krieg,» whose numbers include the disappointed or betrayed supporters of Hitler, the Flüchtlinge and Vertriebene, and the soldiers returning to civil society. For them, he writes, «waren Hitler und der Krieg kein von Menschen herausgefordertes Unheil, sondern eine von bösen Mächten verursachte Katastrophe, sie selbst deren 231 Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past Opfer. Sie vermieden es, sich der einigen Vergangenheit zu stellen, sie schwiegen und verschwiegen.» To this description, which could have been a sketch of his family dynamics, Ludin adds, «Regungen der Reue oder Beschämung, so es sie gab, wurden unterdrückt. Sie kannten kein Mitgefühl für die Millionen Toten, die sie durch die Wahl Hitlers, durch das Erdulden seiner Herrschaft, die Teilnahme an seinem Krieg mitverantworteten, keine Scham angesichts des mit deutscher Gründlichkeit und bürokratischer Konsequenz durchgeführten Völkermordes» (Staudte 36). How awful it must have been for Ludin to read in von Salomon ’ s book about his father ’ s lack of repentance and about his stubborn «Es lebe Deutschland! » In his description of Staudte ’ s film, one readily discerns the urge to awaken feelings of remorse or shame (Reue oder Beschämung). Here, in 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß Ludin gets to present his own adaptation of Die Mörder sind unter uns, not as a feature film with closure and a satisfying ending, but rather as a personal story, with all the messiness such stories entail. From start to finish, the author-filmmaker struggles against the tendency to deliberately or inadvertently make yet another surrogate film about the past. He attempts instead to tear apart a familial narrative and to enact a cinemahistorical interruption. Notes 1 Kaes observes that Fest and Herrendoerfer «took clips from the propaganda films, synchronized them with sound effects (boot heels clicking, bombs exploding in stereo), enhanced the visual quality of the images, and edited them according to modern conventions» (6). 2 Santer uses the term «homeopathy» when writing about Hans-Jürgen Syberberg ’ s Hitler - ein Film aus Deutschland (1977). See esp. 22 - 26. 3 Luhmann interprets the film along these lines. See esp. 121 - 26. 4 Malte Ludin references von Salomon ’ s famous book only once in 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß, referring to it not by its title, but only indirectly as an «in der Nachkriegszeit vielgelesenes Buch.» 5 The «ischt,» described as «die Mundart seiner badischen Heimat,» is as it appears in von Salomon ’ s account (635). 6 This is widely repeated and is also mentioned in von Salomon (668). Senfft adds more detail: «Der Anwalt sagt, kurz vor seinem Tod habe Hanns ihm noch zugerufen: ‹ Doktor, grüßen Sie mir meine liebe Frau. › Der anwesende Bischof indes will gehört haben, dass seine letzten Worte lauteten: ‹ Es lebe Deutschland. › Wahrscheinlich hat er beides gesagt» (44 - 45). 7 Hanns Ludin ’ s story, as von Salomon writes it, is as follows: «Ich wurde mit einer Reihe anderer SA-Führer auf offener Straße durch die entgegenkommende Kolonne des Führers angehalten. Wir mussten in einer Reihe antreten, und der Führer ging von 232 Brad Prager einem zum andern, jeden betrachtend, mit einem Blick, den ich zum ersten Male so empfand, wie er mir immer geschildert wurde, ohne dass ich beistimmen konnte, mit einem Blick, den ich nun auch als ‹ magisch › empfand. Hitler sagte kein Wort. Nur, als er bei mir angekommen war, sagte er, ohne Betonung und gleichsam in Gedanken verloren: ‹ Ludin › , - und ich wusste nicht, ob ich damit zum Tode oder zum Leben verurteilt war. . . Ich war zum Leben verurteilt» (661). Additional background is also provided by Senfft (61). 8 Senfft ’ s memoir processes her mother ’ s death in relation to the Nazi past. She talks specifically about that incident (9 - 16) as well as about the impact of her uncle Malte ’ s film (335 - 36). 9 The term «observational» is a reference to Bill Nichols ’ s «observational mode.» See esp. 38 - 44. 10 For more on this see Erin McGlothlin ’ s contribution to this special issue. 11 Noah Shenker uses the term «testimonial performance,» although he applies it to documentary performances in which subjects speak their own testimony, rather than that of another (44). 12 For more on this film, see Michael D. Richardson ’ s contribution to this special issue. 13 Š tern ’ s story is recounted in Kurlansky (121). 14 On this film, its management of the past, and its leveling of differences between the victims, see Kapczynski (75 - 117). Works Cited Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Herzinger, Richard. «Ernst von Salomon: Konservativ-revolutionäre Literatur zwischen Tatrhetorik und Resignation.» Zeitschrift für Germanistik ns 8.1 (1998): 83 - 96. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3 rd ed. Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Kaes, Anton. From ‹ Hitler › to ‹ Heimat › : The Return of History as Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. Kapczynski, Jennifer M. The German Patient. Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. Kurlansky, Mark. A Chosen Few. The Resurrection of European Jewry. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995. Lanzmann, Claude. «Seminar with Claude Lanzmann.» Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 82 - 99. Ludin, Malte. «Nazi-Lügen verbreitet: Zum Film Hitler - eine Karriere.» Neofaschismus: Die Rechten im Aufwind. Ed. Jan Peters. Berlin: Sozialpolitischer Verlag, 1979. 45 - 51. — . Wolfgang Staudte. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996. Luhmann, Susanne. «Filming Familial Secrets: Approaching and Avoiding Legacies of Nazi Perpetration.» New German Critique 38.1 (2011): 115 - 34. 233 Nazi, Interrupted: Cutting into the Past McGlothlin, Erin. Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1991. Santner, Eric L. Stranded Objects, Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. Senfft, Alexandra. Schweigen tut weh - Eine deutsche Familiengeschichte. Berlin: Claassen, 2007. Shenker, Noah. «Embodied Memory: The Institutional Mediation of Survivor Testimony in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.» Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering. Ed. Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker. New York: Routledge, 2010. 35 - 58. Tacke, Alexandra. «Zwei oder drei Dinge über Malte Ludins Film 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß.» Das Böse im Blick: Die Gegenwart des Nazionalsozialismus im Film. Ed. Margrit Frölich, Christian Schneider and Karsten Visarius. Munich: text + kritik, 2007. 191 - 203. von Solomon, Ernst. Der Fragebogen. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969. Wenders, Wim. «That ’ s Entertainment: Hitler.» West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices. Ed. Eric Rentschler. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. 126 - 31. 234 Brad Prager Listening to the Perpetrators in Claude Lanzmann ’ s Shoah ERIN MCGLOTHLIN W ASHINGTON U NIVERSITY IN S T . L OUIS One of the most notable aspects of Claude Lanzmann ’ s monumental film Shoah (1985), apart from its obsessive visual focus on the present-day sites of Holocaust atrocity, is the extraordinary multivocality that characterizes its soundtrack. Composed chiefly of the filmed interviews Lanzmann conducted with dozens of Holocaust-era witnesses, but also amplified by autobiographical utterances read aloud from letters and diaries, the film presents, over the course of over nine hours, an overwhelming polyphony of voices, each of which, in its own singular way, testifies to the experience of the Holocaust. On the level of cinematic experience, these many witnesses amass in choral accusation as if to give voice to a Polish landscape that itself remains resolutely mute about the murders of millions to which it was witness; as Micha Brumlik observes in his 1986 review in Der Spiegel, Die Poesie der Landschaft steht in striktem Gegensatz zu den Stimmen, die wir hören, und den Gesichtern, die wir sehen. Laute Stimmen, leise Stimmen, schluchzende, bittere und betont gleichmütige Stimmen. Sie berichten uns, während wir die Landschaft betrachten, was sich in ihr zugetragen hat. Millionenfacher, ausgeklügelter, abgefeimter Mord. (192) However, although the numerous witnesses function collectively to give shape to the events of the Holocaust - in particular, Lanzmann ’ s stated object of inquiry, the inner workings of the industrialized killing processes in the death camps - they do so from often radically different perspectives, namely those of the Jewish survivors, the non-Jewish German perpetrators and the non-Jewish Polish bystanders, three major groups that experienced the Holocaust in diametrically opposed ways. As Shoshana Felman argues in her powerful article about the role of witnessing in the film, these different subject positions have a cumulative metonymical effect but are in no way synonymous: «Because the testimony is unique and irreplaceable, the film is an exploration of the differences between heterogeneous points of view, between testimonial stances which can neither be assimilated into, nor subsumed by, one another» (207). Through these three major perspectives, which Felman identifies as not merely diverse but fundamentally incommensurate (207), Shoah attempts to find multiple entry points into an experience in the Holocaust to which no voice can attest, namely the ordeal of those who died in the gas chambers. In this way, the film functions as what Sue Vice terms «the cinematic triangulation of a vanished people, and their last hours» (Shoah 77). Although Lanzmann is able to achieve this triangular mapping of the Holocaust only by carefully presenting the event through the perspectives of these three major groups of actors, (relying for the greatest and most memorable part on the viewpoints of the survivors, especially those who found themselves in closest proximity to the death of the victims), critical attention has for the most part focused almost exclusively on the testimony of the survivors and the ways in which Lanzmann stages his interviews with them. In particular, the scenes featuring Abraham Bomba, who goes through the motions of giving a haircut in a Tel Aviv barber shop while he relates his experiences cutting the hair of the women about to be gassed in Treblinka, and Simon Srebnik, who stands among the Polish peasants in the village of Chelmno as they spew their anti-Semitic, trite understanding of what happened to their Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust, have been, to my mind, endlessly, almost obsessively analyzed. 1 This is of course understandable, given the stunning performative power of these scenes and their exemplary quality for critics who explore such issues as trauma, survivor testimony, and Lanzmann ’ s method of «reincarnation,» in which witnesses are induced to reenact performatively past traumas or attitudes during their interviews. 2 But striking in the critical reception of Shoah is the lack of attention given in the film to the testimonies of other survivors (in particular Richard Glazar and Rudolph Vrba), to some of the Polish bystanders, and to the former perpetrators. In particular, the latter group has been noticeably neglected by the scholarship on Shoah. Apart from discussions of the ethical issues raised by some of the interviews Lanzmann conducted with the German perpetrators (three of whom, Franz Suchomel, Franz Schalling and Walter Stier, were filmed without their knowledge and with a hidden camera) and brief references to particularly egregious moments in the scenes with Suchomel and Franz Grassler that attest to their «embarrassment, cowardliness or indifference» (Lichtner 169) with regard to their participation in the «Final Solution,» there have been no sustained analyses of the role that former perpetrators play in Lanzmann ’ s film. 3 This curious dearth of critical attention - one might go so far to term it «avoidance» - to an important element of the film can likely be attributed to a number of factors. The majority of the English-language scholarship on Shoah has been written by either Anglo-American scholars of the Holocaust or scholars of French literature and film, who concentrate on issues in the film that are of particular interest to them, such as survivor trauma, Lanzmann ’ s 236 Erin McGlothlin cinematic methodology and vocabulary, and the film ’ s place within the French documentary tradition. Moreover, the film ’ s extraordinarily complex linguistic composition makes it difficult (if not downright impossible) for any one critic to closely analyze all of the testimonies presented in the film. Lanzmann ’ s witnesses testify to their experiences in a number of languages (Yiddish, English, Polish, German, Hebrew and French), only some of which (English, German and French) are spoken by Lanzmann himself. For the interviews conducted in the languages not known to him, Lanzmann must rely on interpreters, and the cumbersome back-and-forth process of translation is generally included - in unedited form - in the film. Lanzmann ’ s own narration is conducted in French, as are the Holocaust-era letters that he reads aloud (which themselves have been translated from their original languages into French). Finally, the entire film is then subtitled for the language in which it is screened; in the English version, for example, all but those scenes conducted in English are subtitled. The result is an extremely complicated linguistic structure (survivor, memoirist and literary scholar Ruth Klüger - writing under what was, at the time, her married name, Angress - compares it to «the Babel of tongues that the camps often were» [254]), in which there are sometimes as many as two layers of linguistic translation and mediation. Most scholars who have written about the film in English are adept at perhaps one additional language (usually French) and must rely either on the interpreters in the film or the subtitles (both of which often present faulty, incomplete or otherwise problematic translations) for scenes conducted in other languages. Almost all of the English-language scholarship that addresses the role of the perpetrators in the film refers to the subtitles of interviews (whether in English or in French) rather than to the German in which the interviews were conducted. (A notable exception is an insightful review of the film by Angress, who comments on both the interviewees ’ statements and Lanzmann ’ s agility in German.) Perhaps because most of the critics who have written in English about the film do not seem to be fluent in German, they have not brought the degree of adept analysis employed with the scenes featuring other witnesses to bear on the interviews with the perpetrators. This is of course a problem that extends to analysis of the scenes with other witnesses, particularly the bystanders, who with the exception of Jan Karski, give their testimony in Polish, but also the survivors, who speak a number of languages. With these scenes, as with those featuring the perpetrators, critics who are not facile in these languages must rely on translation and thus are at a disadvantage in their attempts to analyze these testimonies closely. I suspect, however, that there is more to the critical neglect of the film ’ s perpetrators than a mere linguistic barrier, for if this were the case, one would 237 Listening to the Perpetrators expect to see more close analysis of the perpetrators ’ testimonies in the German-language reception and scholarship on Shoah, which, while significantly smaller in size than its English-language counterpart, has also concentrated chiefly on the scenes featuring survivors and has limited its discussion of the role of the perpetrators to Lanzmann ’ s performance in these scenes and the ethics of his practices. 4 Rather, I believe that other factors are more likely operative. Dominick LaCapra has suggested as much in his assessment of Lanzmann ’ s methodology of incarnation, which he sees as performatively reenacting trauma in a sort of transferential relationship to the film ’ s survivor witnesses (and, in an even more intense way, to the absent but continually evoked victims): «The question is whether Lanzmann in his more absolutist gestures tends to confine performativity to acting-out and tends even to give way to a displaced, secular religiosity in which authenticity becomes tantamount to a movement beyond secondary witnessing to a full identification with the victim» («Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 245). Lanzmann ’ s absolutism, which LaCapra defines as «his absolute refusal of the why question and of understanding» («Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 245), thus results in obsessive attempts to conjure the extreme experience of those survivors who were firsthand witnesses to mass murder in order to relive it - cinematically at least - with them. LaCapra goes on to connect Lanzmann ’ s identification with the trauma of the victims and survivors to the film ’ s stance with regard to the perpetrators, which demonstrates a similarly «absolutist» attitude in its refusal to endorse any sort of understanding of their actions or motives: Thus one has a crucial constellation that links positive, fully empathetic, transferential identification with the victim; absolute, noncomprehending distance from the perpetrator; a general refusal of the why question; obsessive, imaginary actingout or reliving of the traumatic past; the equation of the ‹ real › with holes in reality; and a hallucinatory reincarnation of the past in details of the present without appeal to archives. («Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 265). LaCapra implies here that Shoah, in its aesthetic approach and its historical methodology, while opening up avenues to full identification with the victims, erects a sort of barrier to the perpetrators and their experience, even as it includes and to a certain extent even gives prominence to their testimony. By inserting such a barrier that hinders transferential identification, the film is able on the one hand to present the testimony of the perpetrators, which is critical for Lanzmann ’ s attempt to reconstruct the machinery of death and the last moments of its victims, yet on the other hand it can control the viewers ’ connection to these perpetrator witnesses by foreclosing any attempt to understand their motives, memories and mindset - let alone to identify with 238 Erin McGlothlin them. 5 As Matthew Boswell argues, rather than provoking its viewers to consider the perpetrators and their actions historically and psychologically and thus, theoretically at least, within the dimensions of possible human subjectivity and agency, Shoah encourages its audience to relegate them (in particular, the Treblinka camp guard Franz Suchomel) to the realm of utter incomprehensibility: For while Lanzmann ’ s methodology seems flagrantly provocative and impious, there remains a total refusal to see any human continuity between Nazi criminals and our lives in the present. Suchomel is almost a caricature of the villainous Nazi, the black band that streaks over his eyes on the clandestine film marking him out as wholly ‹ other, › with no relationship to ourselves and no insight into his own actions. (157) With its refusal to psychologize the perpetrators or investigate their actions as stemming from explicable attitudes, ideologies or motivations, Shoah presents them as abstract, recondite, one-dimensional and resistant to any sort of identification or understanding. In short, they function in the film as the negative principle in what LaCapra identifies as an absolutist schema of «displaced secular religiosity» («Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 236) that figures the Holocaust as an ineffable, sacred, even mythical event and thus removes it to a space outside human history, accountability and agency. 6 LaCapra goes on to show how Lanzmann ’ s absolutist method is reproduced by critical analyses of the film, most notably that of Shoshana Felman, which, as he argues, «might almost be seen as the authorized reading of Shoah» («Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 245). According to LaCapra, Felman ’ s analysis mirrors Lanzmann ’ s method in its performative acting-out (he compares the extreme length of her essay and its obsessive, «interminable repetition compulsion» [«Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 249] with that of the film) and its extreme identification with the victims: «Felman ’ s approach to Shoah is one of celebratory participation based on empathy or positive transference undisturbed by critical judgment» («Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 246). Although LaCapra does not identify in Felman the flip side of the positive transference he finds in the film itself, namely an absolutist refusal to enter into the testimony of the perpetrators in the same manner in which viewers are encouraged to do with that of the survivors (he calls this «the film ’ s compulsive power over the empathetic viewer» [«Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 250]), I do believe that such a negative transference is operable in at least some of the critical reception of Lanzmann ’ s film that addresses (however briefly) the depiction of the perpetrators. In general, much of the scholarship follows Lanzmann ’ s own approach to the perpetrators, stressing their opaqueness and their resistance to conventional structures of comprehensibility and representa- 239 Listening to the Perpetrators tion, particularly with regard to Suchomel, whom critics have described as «normal yet inhuman» (Saxton 55), «alien» (Felman 274), and «clinical[ly] detach[ed]» and «emotionless» (Jacobowitz 14), but also in reference to Stier, a former bureaucrat for the Deutsche Reichsbahn, whom David Denby calls «ineffable» (76). 7 When the attitudes of the perpetrators represented in the film are considered in the scholarly literature, their characterization often seems to reflect critics ’ ideas about what the former perpetrators are feeling, beliefs that rely less on the perpetrators ’ statements or even their own behavior during the interviews and more on what the critics project onto these interviews. Several critics maintain that the former perpetrators feel nostalgic about their roles in the «Final Solution»; according to Timothy Garton Ash, «the executioners bask in the happy memories of Heimat» (145; referencing here Edgar Reitz ’ s 1984 film Heimat, which offered a depiction of everyday German life in the Third Reich but referred to the Holocaust only obliquely). Yet such assertions are called into question by the perpetrators ’ testimony and their manner during the interviews, which range from obstinate muteness about the past in the case of Josef Oberhauser to the nervous and defensive behavior of Franz Grassler, who in the first segment shown of Lanzmann ’ s interview with him attributes his difficulty recalling his wartime service to the unhappy nature of the memories: «Eindeutig, daß der Mensch schlechte Zeiten - Gott sei Dank! - leichter vergißt als schöne Erinnerungen. Die sind verdrängt, net» (DVD disc 4, chapter 8; German text of the film 246). (Arguments about the perpetrators ’ ostensibly happy relationship to their Holocaust past are made particularly with regard to Suchomel, who of all the perpetrators interviewed in the film seems the most comfortable about talking about his experiences at Treblinka; Giacomo Lichtner asserts that Suchomel «obviously enjoys the memory of those days» [169]; while Keith Moser writes that «The former officer ’ s enthusiasm as he is reliving his past ‹ glory › disturbs both Lanzmann and the viewer» [76]). Yet, as I shall argue later in this essay, Suchomel ’ s openness about his role in the death camp and his willingness to speak to Lanzmann about the minute details of the processes of murder reflect not happy, nostalgic memories of the past but rather a self-important understanding of his didactic role with regard to Lanzmann.) Critics ’ projections about the perpetrators ’ attitudes during their interviews are undoubtedly fueled by the myriad strategies of evasion, compensation, justification, circumlocution, attenuation, generalization, compartmentalization and trivialization employed by these witnesses and the rare (or - more prevalently - wholly absent) moments of open acknowledgement of their role in the Holocaust, which may appear initially to reflect «minds at peace» (Angress 258) or at least a sense of detached indifference to shocking details 240 Erin McGlothlin that emerge in their testimonies. Such strategies, however, are rather indicative of intricate psychological processes on the part of the perpetrators that complicate such simplistic characterizations. 8 The critical tendency to downplay the more complex elements of Shoah ’ s representation of the perpetrators and to project a monolithic interpretation of their relationship to their past is evidence, to my mind, of the same sort of absolutist attitude that LaCapra identifies in Shoah itself, namely the relegation of the perpetrators to the ahistorical, almost mythical realm of incomprehensible evil that bars identification with and indeed even discourages any sustained look - and with the word «look» I mean here to evoke attendant visual and cinematic associations - at the perpetrators themselves. This categorical refusal to regard (in both senses of viewing and understanding) is made possible, as Shoshana Felman argues in her analysis of the performative role of seeing in the film ’ s presentation of witnessing, by the visual barriers erected in the secretly filmed encounters with the perpetrators: «In the blurry images of faces taken by a secret camera that has to shoot through a variety of walls and screens, the film makes us see concretely, by the compromise it unavoidably inflicts upon our act of seeing, (which, of necessity, becomes materially an act of seeing through), how the Holocaust was a historical assault on seeing and how, even today, the perpetrators are still by and large invisible» (209). The tendency of some critics of Shoah to associate the perpetrators with an abstract notion of evil and their refusal to regard them with the same sort of attentive meditation they afford the survivor witnesses are reflected, for example, in Margaret Olin ’ s reaction to the ways in which the film stages Lanzmann ’ s encounter with Suchomel: 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. 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. (3) Olin ’ s comparison of Suchomel with a solar eclipse that one may behold only indirectly - that is, through the mediation of some sort of filter, in this case the filter provided by the shot of Suchomel being filmed secretly shown to the viewer on the van ’ s monitor, which receives the transmitted video footage - is an example, in my opinion, of the critical inability or unwillingness to see the perpetrators, a refusal to regard that the film itself encourages with its staging of them. Such critical disregard often translates as a lack of attention to the particulars of the perpetrators, which can be seen as a further manifestation of 241 Listening to the Perpetrators the tendency to look away. Daniel Listoe ’ s article, for example, twice mentions the film ’ s scenes with Franz Grassler - and twice misspells Grassler ’ s name, with two different spellings («Grasier» [56]; «Glasser» [64]). Lanzmann himself displays a similar tendency toward revealing error in his discussion of the perpetrators in the seminar he held on Shoah at Yale University, in which he describes his encounter with «the man of the German railroads,» clearly a reference to the former Reichsbahn official Walter Stier, whom he then goes on to identify as «Suchomel» («Seminar with Claude Lanzmann» 96). Such a conflation is at odds with Lanzmann ’ s otherwise insistent requirement for exacting historical detail: «I prefer that we avoid, if possible, generalities. Because I have spent my whole life fighting generalities and I think that Shoah is a fight against generalities» («Seminar with Claude Lanzmann» 82). The scholarship on Shoah has thus not adequately considered the representation of the perpetrators in the film, looking away when they appear on the screen or viewing them from behind the comfortable filter of an absolutist methodology that constructs them as one-dimensional or abstract figures. Critics, who, as Kathryn Robson argues, have accepted «Lanzmann ’ s own descriptions of his film unquestioningly, taking Lanzmann himself to be in a privileged position as witness to the Holocaust» (167), have assumed Lanzmann ’ s aesthetic and ethical approach as well, which holds that there is «an absolute obscenity in the project of understanding» the Holocaust and that the only possible attitude is to assume the condition of «blindness,» to put on «blinkers» in order to be able to behold an event that «is literally blinding» («Hier ist kein Warum» 51). In their willed blindness to the depiction of the perpetrators in Shoah, however, critics have conformed to a stance that is characteristic of literary and cultural scholarship on the Holocaust in general (although not, it must be stressed, of historical scholarship, which has been criticized for focusing too much on the perspective of the perpetrators). As I have previously argued, despite the fact that there are a great number of literary and filmic representations of Nazi perpetrators in various national literatures and cinemas, there has been astonishingly little scholarship that addresses how these representations function or how they contribute to a larger cultural understanding of the complex role that perpetrators play both historically and culturally («Theorizing the Perpetrator» 212 - 14). Critics ’ blindness to the perpetrators in Shoah thus reflects a greater blind spot in cultural analyses of the Holocaust and has important ethical implications. For one thing, since perpetrators play such a prominent role in the film, it is, in my opinion, grossly negligent to ignore, downplay or make blanket assumptions about their presence. Moreover, as LaCapra points out, given that processes of 242 Erin McGlothlin identification or transference are an inevitable outcome of viewing or interpreting the film, it is important to be aware of how they function differently with regard to the perpetrators than they do with regard to the survivor-witnesses: With respect to perpetrators, one may justifiably resist empathy in the sense of feeling or understanding that may serve to validate or excuse certain acts. In fact one may feel antipathy or hatred. But one may nonetheless argue that one should recognize and imaginatively apprehend that certain forms of behavior (that of the Einsatzgruppen or of camp guards, for example) may be possible for oneself in certain circumstances, however much the events in question beggar the imagination. One may even suggest that recognition is necessary for being better able to resist even reduced analogues of such behavior as they present themselves as possibilities in one ’ s own life. («Holocaust Testimonies» 220 - 21) LaCapra reminds us here that a refusal to regard the perpetrators in Shoah may reflect our condemnation of their crimes and our solidarity with their victims. At the same time, however, such unwillingness to «imaginatively apprehend» the perpetrators ’ experience can also imply that the perpetrators were not human agents who found themselves in very human - albeit extreme - situations in which they were forced to make ethical decisions, but rather mythically evil figures who were fated to fulfill their demonic destiny. By aligning ourselves so closely with the victims, we are thus able to distance ourselves from the human qualities we share with the perpetrators. For this reason, as I have argued, «it is important to remember that, save for a few exceptions, such as Ruth Klüger or Elie Wiesel, we as critics belong to neither the world of perpetrators nor that of the victims and survivors. By ignoring the perspectives of the one group, we imply that we somehow belong to the other, and this kind of identification with the victims is, at its extreme, as dangerous to our inquiry as identification with the perpetrators might be» («Theorizing the Perpetrator» 214). It is thus time for the critical discourse on Shoah to take off the blinkers that Lanzmann has imposed on it and to begin to consider the perpetrators represented in the film in a sustained way. After all, as LaCapra reminds us, «One need not always agree with Lanzmann ’ s interpretations concerning the nature of his film, and one may even see his own role in it as at times exceeding his self-understanding» («Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 233). My intent with this essay is to follow LaCapra ’ s lead and «disengage the film from [Lanzmann ’ s] view of it» («Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 233) in order to begin to reframe the discussion of the ways in which the perpetrators figure in Shoah, a project that in my opinion is long overdue. My goal is not to provide an exhaustive or authoritative reading of the scenes that feature interviews with perpetrators; for one thing, the sheer mass of 243 Listening to the Perpetrators material to be interpreted in the film on the one hand and the parameters of the scholarly article on the other prohibit such an extensive undertaking. My aim is rather to draw critical attention to these scenes so that we may begin to closely look at - and perhaps even more important, listen to - the complex interactions staged in them. In this way, I hope to thus provoke a new round of discussion on Shoah that demonstrates the richness of its inquiry. While I agree with LaCapra ’ s and Boswell ’ s assertions that Lanzmann, with his interview strategy, editing and structure of the mise-en-scène, constructs a representation of the perpetrators that bars or is at least resistant to attempts to understand their psychology, motivations and self-understanding, I argue here that Shoah offers a much more complex picture of the perpetrators than Lanzmann perhaps envisioned or that is maintained by his absolutist methodology. In other words, as I will demonstrate in brief readings of scenes with Grassler, Stier and Suchomel, the film presents moments that are to a certain extent at odds with its general «schematic» (Todorov 274) attitude with regard to perpetrators, a phenomenon that represents, as I see it, a breakdown of Lanzmann ’ s absolutist stance on the level of filmic practice. As I will demonstrate, the barrier or filter I posited earlier is maintained throughout these interviews, but at moments it proves itself to be somewhat porous, allowing for a more differentiated depiction of the perpetrators than claimed by most of the scholarship. However, as I will also argue, Lanzmann ’ s absolutist filter is punctured not so much visually, with the film ’ s mise-en-scène (which is perhaps why critics have remained blind to it), but rather on its linguistic level with the verbal exchanges between Lanzmann and his interviewees. These exchanges betray above all the perpetrators ’ fraught or at least ambivalent relationship to their past and the difficulties they experience trying to integrate a narrative of their own participation in violence into their memory and life story. Moreover, the deep subject of Shoah is the problem of knowledge on many levels 9 - the knowledge the victims purportedly had (or didn ’ t have) about the death that awaited them, the shocking realization on the part of the survivors of what was happening around them then (an awareness the Treblinka survivor Richard Glazar terms «eine fürchterliche Erkenntnis» [DVD disc 3, chapter 14; German text of the film 203]) and the traumatic knowledge they carry now, and the perpetrators ’ construction of an elaborate system of deception that prevented their victims from knowing until it was too late. As I will demonstrate, the scenes with Grassler, Suchomel and Stier also grapple with the problem of knowledge, revealing a complex dynamic that revolves around the refusal to know, the displacement of what one knows but will not acknowledge, and the issue of authoritative knowledge. 244 Erin McGlothlin Before I begin to look at the film ’ s scenes with the three former perpetrators, I ’ d like to briefly discuss the crucial role played by Claude Lanzmann himself in Shoah. As LaCapra implies, the interviews included in the film, whether with survivor, perpetrator or bystander, are in some ways as much about Lanzmann and his own transferential relationship to the interviewees as they are about the various «characters» (Lanzmann ’ s own word for the people who testify in the film [Chevrie and Le Roux 44]) and their experience of the Holocaust. After all, as Kathryn Robson reminds us, «The interviewees ’ testimonies are clearly and explicitly filtered through Lanzmann ’ s own viewpoint and agenda» (167). Lanzmann thus situates himself as one of the characters in his own film, and accordingly he quite consciously stages his performance in each interview. This strategy of performative production is, as Sue Vice claims (Shoah 66), particularly operative in the interviews with the former perpetrators; Lanzmann even goes so far as to create an alternate persona in his encounter with Walter Stier, presenting himself to the former Reichsbahn official as the French historian «Dr. Sorel.» Moreover, in the interviews with all five perpetrators in the film, Lanzmann is immediate as an active interlocutor (or even as an «interrogator,» as has been asserted by Listoe [56], LaCapra [«Lanzmann ’ s Shoah» 265], Boswell [156], and Joshua Hirsch [78]); in the scenes with Suchomel, Stier, Schalling and Oberhauser, the first three of which were filmed secretly with a camera operated remotely, he appears on-screen as part of the mise-en-scène. (Grassler is the only one of the five who agreed to speak about his experiences in the «Final Solution» on camera. As with the interviews with many of the survivors, the camera remains trained on Grassler ’ s face during the entire interview; we experience Lanzmann only aurally through his voice offscreen.) Because Lanzmann is materially present and active - whether just vocally or bodily as well - in all of the scenes with the former perpetrators, he plays a particularly interpositional role that, in contrast to some of the scenes with the survivors in which Lanzmann rarely intervenes (I ’ m thinking here of Filip Müller ’ s long monologues, for example), most forcefully makes clear his emphatically non-objective role in the film. One of the most noticeable aspects of Lanzmann ’ s method of interviewing the former perpetrators is his tenacious, often aggressive behavior, which has been commented on by a number of critics; according to Lichtner, «There is more than a small element of violence in Lanzmann ’ s insistent, forceful, provocative, prodding. His approach is violent not just towards the witness but the audience as well, which would surely like to rebel against his intransigence» (167). But perhaps even more striking is the performance he creates with his linguistic strategies. This is first and foremost evident in the 245 Listening to the Perpetrators ways in which Lanzmann employs German, the language spoken in all of the interviews with the former perpetrators. Although Lanzmann is not a native speaker of German, he is able to utilize the language to his advantage in his encounters with the perpetrators by self-consciously manipulating his linguistic otherness, which is quite evident to viewers fluent in German. Lanzmann ’ s speech in German is marked by a pronounced French accent and contains numerous errors in syntax, word order, and stress patterns, all of which contribute to his appearance in the interviews as an outsider to the German language and thus to German perspectives on the war and the Holocaust. Gabriela Stoicea claims that Lanzmann has «obvious difficulties in speaking German» (45), but I argue that this is precisely the effect that Lanzmann attempts to produce in his interviews and one that allows him, paradoxically, a certain degree of leverage in his interactions with his German counterparts. Lanzmann ’ s experience with the German language is perhaps more extensive than his performance in the film would indicate; he spent the years from 1947 to 1950 in Germany, first as a philosophy student at the Universität Tübingen, then as a lecturer of philosophy and literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. His language skills in German were thus not only well developed by the time he began to interview the German witnesses in the late 1970s, they were also honed in such a way that granted Lanzmann a certain facility in the expression and comprehension of sophisticated, abstract ideas. His faulty employment of German in the film is thus likely attributable to factors other than lack of fluency. Ruth Angress writes that «Lanzmann speaks German fluently and with complete disregard to the finer as well as the coarser points of grammar, as if the language merited only contempt» (255). While Angress ’ s suspicion about Lanzmann ’ s contempt for the language of the perpetrators is undoubtedly an operative factor in his linguistic performance in the film, I believe that a more likely explanation is that he selfconsciously stages his language ability in a posture of naïveté and feigned ignorance. With his imperfect language skills, he is able to construct a relationship of power in the interviews that disguises or redirects the impact of his often transgressive questions and allows his interlocutors to feel superior in both their intelligence and their sophisticated ability to express themselves. By provoking these heightened feelings of superiority on the part of his interviewees, he is able to draw particular attitudes out of them that would perhaps otherwise be unavailable. As Felman asserts with regard to his method of interviewing, Lanzmann ’ s tour de force as an interviewer is to elicit from the witness [. . .] a testimony which is inadvertently no longer in the control or the possession of its speaker. As a solicitor and an assembler of testimonies, in his function as a questioner 246 Erin McGlothlin but mainly, in his function as a listener (as the bearer of a narrative of listening), Lanzmann ’ s performance is to elicit testimony which exceeds the testifier ’ s own awareness, to bring forth a complexity of truth which, paradoxically, is not available as such to the very speaker who pronounces it. As a listener, Lanzmann endows the interlocutor with speech. It is in this way that he helps both the survivors and the perpetrators to overcome their (very different kind of) silence. (263) Felman ’ s claim is made with regard to Lanzmann ’ s role as a listening witness to the interviewees ’ testimony, but I believe that one could make the same case for his role as a speaker in the film as well, particularly in the interviews with the German perpetrators. His staged speech deficiencies are vital not only for his performance in the role of the ignorant Frenchman who comes to the interviewees seeking to learn about the war, but also for the perpetrators ’ assumption of the role of knowledgeable educator who transmits an authoritative narrative about the wartime years (a posture adopted in particular, as I shall argue, by Suchomel). Lanzmann makes exactly this point in a recent interview with the German journalist Max Dax: Um einen Nazi reden zu lassen, stottern Sie besser, so kann er Ihnen mit den gesuchten Worten aushelfen und Ihnen diese bei der Gelegenheit gleich auch noch ausführlich erklären. Wenn Sie so wollen, war dies eine Methode, die ich angewandt habe. Mit einem perfekten Deutsch hätte ich nie Aussagen jener Qualität von den Tätern bekommen, wie wir sie in Shoah zu sehen und zu hören bekommen. (285) Through his feigned incompetence in German, Lanzmann is thus able to interrupt the perpetrators ’ carefully rehearsed narratives and induce them to reveal, through their gestures of explanation and education, information about their past and present attitudes that was not intended for disclosure. 10 Lanzmann further employs the linguistic strategy of repetition to great performative effect in his interviews with former perpetrators, in particular with Suchomel. In these scenes, in addition to posing questions, he responds to the witnesses ’ statements by repeating words they have just uttered, which gives a sort of echo effect (albeit in a pronounced French accent) to the perpetrators ’ testimony. These repetitions are not merely reactions to the witnesses ’ words; according to Felman, they serve a particular purpose in the interviews: «The function of the echo - in the very resonance of its amplification - is itself inquisitive, and not simply repetitive» (221). Lanzmann ’ s repetition of his interlocutors ’ words is thus intended to elicit more information from the interviewees and in this way forms part of the dialogical interchange between interviewer and interviewee. However, these repetitions, which are phrased as questions, also punctuate particularly important phrases in the witnesses ’ testimonies; by this method, Lanzmann highlights discursively the language the perpetrators use to describe their experience. In 247 Listening to the Perpetrators the interview with Suchomel, for example, Lanzmann queries about the conditions at Treblinka when Suchomel arrived: Lanzmann: Und wie war Treblinka? Wie war Treblinka in dieser Zeit? Suchomel: Ja. Treblinka war damals im Hochbetrieb. Lanzmann: Hochbetrieb? Suchomel: Hochbetrieb. (DVD disc 1, chapter 55; German text of the film 78, altered to reflect Lanzmann ’ s actual syntax) In a scene that follows, a similar exchange occurs, when Suchomel gives Lanzmann his definition of Treblinka: Suchomel: Treblinka war ein zwar primitives, aber gut funktionierendes Fließband des Todes. Lanzmann: Fließband? Suchomel: . . . des Todes. Verstehen Sie? Lanzmann: Ja, ja. Aber primitiv. Suchomel: Primitiv. Zwar primitiv, aber gut funktionierendes Fließband des Todes. (DVD disc 2, chapter 1; German text of the film 91) In both these examples, Lanzmann picks up on Suchomel ’ s use of the language of industrial production to describe the process of murder in Treblinka. His echo of particular words in Suchomel ’ s testimony emphasizes the ways in which Suchomel frames his narrative with this vocabulary, revealing the extent to which he has distanced himself from his participation in mass murder by reducing it to the impersonal character of the factory assembly line. Lanzmann employs this strategy throughout the interviews to identify moments in which the former perpetrators employ particular National Socialist euphemisms, often unconsciously or without irony. By echoing this terminology in particular, he highlights for his audience the ways in which this language continues to structure the perpetrators ’ ideological framework and their narratives about the past. I ’ d like to begin my analysis of the scenes with three of the perpetrators in Shoah by listening to the one scene from Lanzmann ’ s covertly filmed interview with the former railway bureaucrat Walter Stier, which is placed in the second half of the film (DVD disc 3, chapter 10). Stier, whom Lanzmann calls «one of the most despicable Nazis to appear in Shoah» (The Patagonian Hare 457), gives perhaps what is historically speaking the most useless testimony in the film, for he can (or will) tell us almost nothing about the genocide of the Jews that occurred in the death camps near Krakow and Warsaw, the cities where he was posted during the war - or at least not once he realizes the nature of Lanzmann ’ s interest in his wartime activities. At the beginning of the interview, when Lanzmann asks him seemingly innocuous questions about how excursion trains are ordered and paid for (then and now), 248 Erin McGlothlin Stier is forthcoming about the organization of «Sonderzüge.» Although Stier at first does not seem to grasp the aim of Lanzmann ’ s query, we as viewers, after having watched long sequences of moving trains and heard testimonies from multiple perspectives about the horrific train journeys that brought the victims to the death camps, suspect the ultimate target of Lanzmann ’ s interest, which is not the wartime administration of holiday excursions for Germans but that of the trains that deported Europe ’ s Jews. However, once Stier catches on to the true object of the questions («Ich weiß schon, worauf Sie hinauswollen» [German text of the film 188]), his expert knowledge about the various ways in which the Reichsbahn organized group excursions is suddenly replaced with an insistence on a lack of knowledge («Das haben wir ja nicht gewußt» [German text of the film 188]). Stier claims not to have known about the people whom the many special trains contained («Als wir schon selber auf der Flucht waren von Warschau, da haben wir gehört, daß das Juden gewesen sein sollen, oder Verbrecher und dergleichen» [German text of the film 188]) or what happened in the places - Treblinka, Belzec, Auschwitz - to which he directed the trains. His interview presents a model case of evasion in the film; only Oberhauser, who refuses categorically to answer Lanzmann ’ s questions, claiming «Ich möchte nicht. Ich hab meinen Grund» (DVD disc 2, chapter 2; German text of the film 92), surpasses Stier ’ s prevarication, which takes a variety of forms. Stier claims that, because he never saw a train («Ich konnte vor lauter Arbeit von meinem Schreibtisch gar nicht fort» [German text of the film 186]), he only learned about the nature of the innumerable «special excursions» toward the end of the war, when he himself was «auf der Flucht» and could thus, in his mind at least, be regarded as one of the war ’ s many undifferentiated victims. Moreover, his profession to have first learned about the nature of the camps in late 1944, when the Aktion Reinhard program in which as many as two million European Jews had been exterminated at Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno and Belzec had long since been suspended, is significant; he effectively testifies here that his knowledge of the crime was obtained only well after it had been committed, not during the time in which his actions as a bureaucrat contributed to it, which would make him at worst an accessory after that fact. Even so, however, the knowledge that Stier admits to have had in late 1944 is at best partial; he claims he heard only that «Jews or criminals and the like» were sent to concentration camps, «und wer nicht ganz gesund sei, der würde das wahrscheinlich nicht überleben» (German text of the film 191), implying that the Jewish victims had, like «Verbrecher und dergleichen,» done something to deserve their internment and that those not ill or weak could expect to survive. Maintaining throughout the interview his total ignorance during the entire period of the Aktion Reinhard operation (an 249 Listening to the Perpetrators absence of awareness that, also throughout, he asserts in the first-person plural, displacing not only his lack of knowledge but also any culpability he feels Lanzmann is insinuating onto a collective «wir» that is never fully defined), Stier claims that he and his colleagues had absolutely no idea - «keine Spur» - what was happening with the trainloads of people delivered daily to locations only a short distance away. Stier ’ s phrase «keine Spur,» which he employs twice (German text of the film 191, 192), resonates with the viewer, for Lanzmann devotes the first hour of Shoah to documenting, through the testimonies of various Sonderkommando workers and Polish witnesses, how the Nazis attempted to erase the physical traces of the nature and scope of the industrial murder of millions in the death camps of Aktion Reinhard, for example by planting trees, as Jan Piwonski tells us, «to camouflage all the traces» of murder at Sobibor (DVD disc 1, chapter 9; English text of the film 6). Stier ’ s use of the words «keine Spur» reveals the extent to which, in his own act of linguistic camouflage, he actively covers over the traces of his awareness of the raison d › être of his incessant work («Wir haben doch Tag und Nacht gearbeitet» [German text of the film 186]) in occupied Poland. As the historian Raul Hilberg argues in the next scene, when he examines with Lanzmann a train order much like one that Stier would have prepared, such linguistic concealment allowed the perpetrators to deny to themselves and to the world the nature of the crimes they committed in plain sight and was essential to their ability to function during the Holocaust: «And the key to the entire operation from the psychological standpoint was never to utter the words that would be appropriate to the action being taken. Say nothing; do these things; do not describe them» (DVD disc 3, chapter 11; English text of the film 129). As with the measures to erase the physical traces of mass murder painstakingly undertaken by the Nazis, Stier ’ s method of linguistic erasure allows him to claim an innocence that denotes both a supposed absence of knowledge and the total emancipation from culpability that accompanies such ignorance. However, in a film devoted to carefully and methodically uncovering the traces of evidence of the crime, especially those buried in the bureaucratic euphemisms of the Third Reich, it is not surprising that Lanzmann is able to reveal similar traces not only of Stier ’ s role in the Final Solution, but also, perhaps more importantly, of Stier ’ s tacit or even unconscious acknowledgement of that role, which Stier strives so diligently to keep from sight. As Lanzmann intensifies the interview with a string of questions that tenaciously revolve around the question of what Stier did or didn ’ t know («Haben Sie gewußt,» «Wußten Sie,» «Sie haben gar nicht gewußt? » [German text of the film 189]), Stier responds with a shocked «Ach, um Gottes willen, nein! » [German text of the film 189], a phrase he repeats later in the interview 250 Erin McGlothlin [German text of the film 191]). Then, in an indignant manner, Stier discharges almost incoherently, «Woher sollten wir das denn . . . ich bin nie in Treblinka gewesen, ich bin nie in einem solchen . . . Ich bin aus . . . aus Krakau nicht herausgekommen, ich bin aus Warschau nicht, ich hab ständig an meinem Tisch gesessen, nicht» (German text of the film 189). Lanzmann picks up on the last line of this statement, which emphatically maintains Stier ’ s non-active role and his remove from the sites of killing, and hones in on the image of Stier at his desk: Lanzmann: Sie waren ein Schreibtisch . . . Stier: Ich war ein Schreibtisch . . . Lanzmann: Mann . . . Stier: Mann. Reiner Schreibtischmann. Lanzmann: Ja. Natürlich. (German text of the film 190, revised to reflect the actual dialogue in the film) Although this exchange is short, it represents a profoundly revealing moment in the interview. The English subtitle of this part of the dialogue has Stier claiming that he «was strictly a bureaucrat» (English text of the film 126), but this translation misses the historical import and rich irony of Lanzmann ’ s suggestion and Stier ’ s response. Lanzmann, who spent years reading about and researching the Holocaust before he began filming, is well aware of the idea of the «Schreibtischtäter,» the desk murderer (or, more precisely, desk perpetrator), a concept that in the late1960s became part of the lexicon of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, referring to those who administratively organized the massive bureaucratic undertaking of the extermination of the European Jews rather than physically committing acts of murder themselves. Lanzmann subtly but provocatively inserts the first part of the word in his dialogue, pausing at the end to evoke but not pronounce the second part of the compound noun, i. e. «Täter.» In this way, he encourages his audience to silently complete the word for him. Stier affirmatively repeats Lanzmann ’ s statement in the first person, pausing as well to find an appropriate end to the compound noun. These two iterations of the word «Schreibtisch» in quick succession (which follow Stier ’ s two mentions of his desk previously in the interview) make clear the nature of Stier ’ s role in the events about which Lanzmann is asking, but whereas for Lanzmann the word refers to the issue of Stier ’ s organizational culpability in the Holocaust, in which he participated remotely in murder but was able to keep his hands (and obviously his conscience as well) clean, for Stier the word signifies his lack of knowledge about the destination of the trains and therefore his innocence; he claims he was too busy to look up from his desk to see what was going on around him. Yet, within the space of this exchange, the word «Täter» hangs virtually in the 251 Listening to the Perpetrators air between the two men, unspoken but nevertheless powerfully present. Lanzmann brings apparent closure to the exchange by finishing the compound noun with «Mann,» a word that Stier immediately repeats and then reemphasizes with a modifier: «Reiner Schreibtischmann.» One might perhaps object that Lanzmann is too quick here to solve the subtle ambiguity of the situation by providing an innocuous ending to the word, thereby letting Stier off the hook, but I argue that Lanzmann has pushed the association as far as he can without actually coming out and saying the word «Schreibtischtäter,» which might be counterproductive for his interview and even potentially place him in a dangerous situation. (And indeed, as Lanzmann describes in his memoir The Patagonian Hare, he encountered several frightening moments in his secret filming of perpetrators; at one point, he was discovered and severely beaten by an interviewee ’ s grown sons [457 - 64].) Moreover, Lanzmann ’ s suggestion of the word «Mann» to complete the compound does not ultimately provide resolution to the ambiguity evoked previously, for, unlike «Schreibtischtäter,» «Schreibtischmann» is a provisional compound invented by Lanzmann on the spot and not an actual concept in the German language. In the context of the interview, then, «Schreibtischmann» thus carries the trace, the «Spur,» of its silent but subtly invoked counterpart, «Schreibtischtäter.» Stier, in an attempt to find a way out of Lanzmann ’ s insinuations about his knowledge at the time and thus his culpability, reinscribes himself, on the level of language and for the listener, in them. Lanzmann ’ s achievement in this scene, as with other interviews in which he provokes his witnesses to reenact the past performatively, lies in trapping Stier into a tacit acknowledgement of his actual role in the Holocaust, one that he outwardly denies. Lanzmann ’ s interview with Franz Grassler, Deputy to the Nazi Commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto during the period prior to and during the mass deportations to Treblinka, is, to my mind, the most compelling of all of Lanzmann ’ s encounters with the perpetrators and one that features prominently in the final hours of Shoah. Given that Lanzmann excluded interviews with several additional perpetrators from the final cut of the film, it is surprising that he spends so much time focusing on Grassler. Yet, this one interview is singular in many ways; for one, Grassler, unlike the other perpetrators in the film, agreed to allow the interview to be filmed; the context of his statements is thus very different from that of Suchomel, who believed he was being audiotaped rather than filmed, Stier and Schalling, who were filmed without their knowledge, and Oberhauser, who knew he was being filmed but refused to engage in a proper interview. Moreover, despite his obvious discomfort with many of Lanzmann ’ s questions and insinuations, Grassler 252 Erin McGlothlin appears to be at least partially willing to discuss his experience overseeing and administrating the Warsaw Ghetto. While his own narrative about the period is largely at odds with the picture that Lanzmann draws for him, his denial is not total, as is Stier ’ s; nor is he mutely hostile to Lanzmann ’ s questioning, like Oberhauser. Rather, in these scenes Grassler attempts (and by all appearances his endeavor is largely sincere) to grapple with the historical facts that Lanzmann presents to him in light of his own memory of the events and to integrate these two disparate ways of understanding the past into his own selfimage. As I will argue in my reading of particular moments in the interview, the interaction between Lanzmann and Grassler is extraordinarily intricate and multilayered, demonstrating a complex and ambivalent struggle between competing narratives that will not - and to all intents and purposes cannot - be resolved. Grassler ’ s interview is divided into five scenes that alternate with scenes featuring Lanzmann ’ s interview with Raul Hilberg, who reads from and discusses the diary of Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Warsaw Judenrat, who committed suicide the day after the deportations of the Warsaw Jews to Treblinka (known as Grossaktion Warschau) commenced. (Significantly, apart from Lanzmann himself, Hilberg is the only «character» in Shoah who cannot be classified as a survivor, a perpetrator, or a bystander.) Such alternation creates on the cinematic level a conversation between Hilberg and Grassler (even though the two never engage directly with each other), with Hilberg filling in the profound gaps left open by Grassler ’ s testimony. It also makes possible, to a certain extent, a dialogue between Grassler and Czerniakow, who is channeled by Hilberg; according to Daniel Listoe, «when Czerniakow ‹ speaks, › his voice is Hilberg ’ s» (64). As with the scene with Stier, Lanzmann focuses in this interview on the issue of knowledge; as Sue Vice argues, the juxtaposition of Hilberg ’ s testimony with that of Grassler creates tension with regard to the issue of «acknowledging versus disavowing what one knows» (Shoah 72). However, as Grassler ’ s statement about repressing «schlechte Zeiten» quoted earlier shows, Grassler is much more aware than Stier of the difficulty and reliability of memory and thus does not pursue the strategy of near-total disavowal that characterizes Stier ’ s interview. As demonstrated by the following exchange, Grassler is much more cognizant of the fact that what he may have once known and acknowledged may be something he has since forgotten (i. e. repressed): Lanzmann: Ja, aber wissen Sie, wie viele Leute sind gestorben jeden Monat im Warschauer Getto in ‘ 41? Grassler: Das weiß ich nicht, nein, jedenfalls weiß ich ’ s heut nicht, ob ich ’ s damals gewußt hab . . . 253 Listening to the Perpetrators Lanzmann: Aber Sie haben gewußt, weil es gibt ganz genaue Statistik. Grassler: Wahrscheinlich hab ich ’ s gewußt. (DVD disc 4, chapter 12; German text of the film 255, revised to reflect the actual dialogue in the film) In contrast to Stier ’ s absolute repudiation of knowledge («Ach, um Gottes willen, nein! »), Grassler ’ s response to Lanzmann ’ s question in this scene exhibits a large degree of ambivalence; Grassler both denies and affirms, admits to both knowing and not knowing. Such ambivalence is the hallmark of Grassler ’ s testimony, which is characterized by nervousness, hesitation (as made evident by his abundant use of such modal particles as «net,» «ja,» «eben,» and «sicher» and such phrases as «sagen wir mal»), confusion, backtracking, contradiction, retraction, affirmative refutation, disaffirmative agreement and defensiveness. In other words, unlike Stier, who consciously at least admits to no doubt regarding the state of his knowledge at the time, and also unlike Suchomel, who, as we shall see, is confident in his pedagogical mission, Grassler appears in his testimony to be a man in perpetual psychic discord. Although Grassler ’ s testimony contains much more open acknowledgement about the events of the Holocaust than does Stier ’ s, Grassler also demonstrates the disavowal of knowledge. But whereas Stier displaces his knowledge temporally, arguing that he only learned about the nature of the camps and the deportation trains when they had effectively ceased to operate, Grassler displaces the knowledge of the larger policy of the Final Solution from the perpetrators onto the victims themselves. In a stunning sequence, after a scene in which Hilberg speculates with Lanzmann about what Czerniakow knew about the deportations from Warsaw and why he committed suicide, Lanzmann asks Grassler about this particular moment in the history of the ghetto: Lanzmann: Warum hat Czerniakow Selbstmord gemacht? Grassler: Weil er wohl erkannt hat, daß eben . . . eben keine Lebensfähigkeit mehr für das Getto bestanden hat, und wahrscheinlich hat er eben früher als ich erkannt, daß die Juden umgebracht werden sollten, net. Ich . . . ich nehme an, daß, also sagen wir mal, sich schon die . . . die Juden haben ja eigentlich ihren Geheimdienst ganz gut gehabt, net. Die wußten mehr, als sie wissen sollten, und die wußten mehr, als wir wußten. Lanzmann: Glauben Sie das? Grassler: Das glaube ich, ja. Ja. Ja. Lanzmann: Die Juden wußten mehr als Sie? Als Sie und . . . Grassler: Da bin ich überzeugt. Da bin ich überzeugt. Lanzmann: Das ist schwer zu akzeptieren. Grassler: Doch, doch. Denn die deutschen Dienststellen, die wurden ja nie informiert über das, was nun, sagen wir mal, mit den Juden geschehen 254 Erin McGlothlin sollte, ne. (DVD disc 4, chapter 14, German text of the film 260 - 61, revised to reflect the actual dialogue in the film) This exchange is significant for a number of reasons. Grassler asserts the theory that Czerniakow committed suicide because he presciently recognized that the Nazis ’ demands that 6,000 ghetto inhabitants be rounded up daily for deportation meant the deportees ’ certain death. However, this interpretation is not in and of itself extraordinary; Hilberg argues essentially the same thing in the previous scene: «He knows, he knows. I think he knew or he sensed or he believed the end was coming» (172). In fact, by placing the scene with Hilberg ’ s speculations about the suicide right before the exchange with Grassler, Lanzmann provides the authoritative argument of the historian to buttress Grassler ’ s interpretation, thus emphasizing its historical plausibility. What is significant here is that Grassler links the knowledge that both he and Hilberg attribute to Czerniakow to Grassler ’ s own lack of knowledge at the time. Grassler inverts here the historical power relationship between the Nazi perpetrators and the Jewish victims, essentially arguing that the Nazi administrators of the Warsaw Ghetto were innocent of the terrible knowledge of the Final Solution (and therefore innocent of the intentions and actions leading up to it as well), whereas the inhabitants of the ghetto were aware of their fate all along (and can therefore be blamed for it). Lanzmann, in a characteristic moment of understated irony, responds to Grassler ’ s incredible gesture of displacement by protesting, «Das ist schwer zu akzeptieren,» whereupon Grassler answers, «Doch, doch,» adding emphasis to his profession of full conviction («Da bin ich überzeugt»). However, Grassler ’ s claims of certitude about his ignorance, though asserted emphatically, are less than fully confident, as evidenced by the grammar of hesitation and defensiveness in which they are expressed; they reveal a man who seems as bent on convincing himself as he is on persuading Lanzmann. The interview thus pits Grassler ’ s narrative of self-persuasion («Da bin ich überzeugt») against Lanzmann ’ s historical skepticism («Das ist schwer zu akzeptieren»), resulting in, as I will demonstrate, Grassler ’ s agitated attempt to harmonize his memories of the role he played in the Warsaw ghetto with the historical fact of the Final Solution. In a lengthy, circular discussion of the purpose of the Warsaw Ghetto and the policies of the Nazi ghetto administration that is spread out over several scenes, Grassler maintains that the ultimate goal of the Nazi administration was to keep the Jewish ghetto inhabitants alive and healthy in order to prevent the spread of disease outside the ghetto and to provide workers for the German war effort. He freely agrees, however, that the widespread hunger and overcrowding in the ghetto made such a goal impossible: «Ja, aber 255 Listening to the Perpetrators wirklich erhalten hätte man es nur können mit wesentlich höheren Lebensmittelrationen, net, und nicht in dieser Zusammendrängung, ne» (DVD disc 4, chapter 12, German text of the film 256). Lanzmann, on the other hand, pushes Grassler to admit that the German policy was directed toward the extermination of the ghetto: Lanzmann: Sie sagen, daß man wollte das Getto erhalten. Grassler: Sagen wir mal, es war Aufgabe des Kommissars, das Getto nicht zu vernichten, sondern das Getto am Leben zu erhalten. Es war ja nun auch . . . Lanzmann: Ja, aber was heißt «Leben» mit solche . . . Grassler: Das war ja das Problem. Lanzmann: Ja. Grassler: Das war ja das Problem, net. Die . . . Es sollte ja auch doch gearbeitet werden, es wurde ja gearbeitet. Lanzmann: Aber die Leute sind gestorben auf die Straßen, es gab Leichen überall. Grassler: Eben, eben. Lanzmann: Ja. Grassler: Ne? Das war das Paradox ja an der ganzen Geschichte. Ne? Lanzmann: Ja. Glauben Sie, es war ein Paradox? Grassler: Ja, entschieden. Hm? Lanzmann: Aber warum? Können Sie das erklären? Grassler: Nein. Lanzmann: Warum nicht? Grassler: Ja, was soll ich da erklären? (DVD disc 4, chapter 12; German text of the film 256, revised to reflect the actual dialogue in the film) This scene is exemplary for Grassler ’ s engagement with the provocative questions Lanzmann poses to him. On the one hand, he doesn ’ t contest Lanzmann ’ s characterization of the ghetto; he even appears to agree with Lanzmann ’ s assessment of the mortality rate («Eben, eben»). On the other hand, he doggedly insists that «das Bestreben der Dienstelle» 11 (DVD disc 4, chapter 10, German text of the film 251) was to maintain the ghetto rather than destroy it. He thus agrees with Lanzmann even as he disputes him and then terms this inconsistency «das Paradox ja an der ganzen Geschichte,» which he not only cannot explain but also believes he shouldn ’ t have to, since the situation on the street in Warsaw in some inexplicable manner did not match the purported Nazi policy. But, in fact, what Grassler sees as an enigmatic paradox refers less to the historical events as they played out in Warsaw and more to his own cognitive dissonance about his role in the extermination of the Warsaw Jews, in which he attempts to reconcile what he acknowledges from a contemporary perspective to be historical fact (i. e. the mass extermination of Warsaw Jewry) with what he maintains to have believed and 256 Erin McGlothlin under which assumption he felt he was operating at the time. What Grassler knows rationally to have been true calls into question his belief in his mostly benign role in the Warsaw Ghetto (where he claims to have endeavored to keep the inhabitants alive rather than to orchestrate their death) and thus his positive self-image. He attempts to reduce the dissonance between these irreconcilable positions through a circular logic that holds that the Nazi ghetto administration did its best to save the ghetto even as unnamed outside forces attempted to destroy it. In this way, Grassler engages in a complex dance of acknowledgement and denial that is designed to somehow harmonize two mutually exclusive explanations, resulting in statements of pure cognitive dissonance such as the following: Während damals eben, soweit ich noch weiß, eben unsere Aufgabe war, für das Getto zu sorgen, wobei natürlich dies nicht möglich war, zu verhindern, daß bei diesen ungenügenden Rationen und bei diesen . . . bei diesen Massen eben doch eben große Todesfä - . . . viel zu viele Todesfälle gab, ne. (DVD disc 4, chapter 12, German text of the film 257) Grassler ’ s words here indicate a mind at odds with itself, one mired in selfconflict. On the one hand, he is realistic enough to know that he cannot deny the overwhelming historical evidence about the Holocaust gathered in the preceding decades (unlike Stier, who has no qualms about presenting revisionist theories as plausible accounts: «Ich mein, das ist ja heute noch, wird da ja noch dagegen gekämpft und gesagt, hier, das ist doch unmöglich, so viel Juden kann ’ s gar nicht gegeben haben! Ob ’ s wahr ist, weiß ich nicht. Das wird denn erzählt» [DVD disc 3, chapter 10, German text of the film 192]). Moreover, Grassler ’ s statement also reveals that he recognized at the time that the severe conditions in the ghetto could not allow for the continued survival of the population and the maintenance of a work force. On the other hand, he cleaves tenaciously to what Sue Vice has termed «his ideological delusions» (Shoah 68), false beliefs that I argue are not just ideological but also - when one looks closely at his word choice, his prevarications and his telling slips - psychological in nature. His linguistic performance thus betrays symptoms of both conscious and unconscious disavowal. Unlike Stier, who seems to suffer no conscious uncertainty about his personal role in the Holocaust, even though Lanzmann makes clear that his work at the Reichsbahn was critical for the functioning of the deportation-extermination machine, Grassler appears to be genuinely concerned about the larger consequences of his actions in the ghetto administration. Lanzmann ’ s interview, which foregrounds Grassler ’ s psychological exertions to reconcile his view of himself with his role in the Warsaw ghetto, thus presents a man who is desperate to shape historical truth so that it can accommodate his own delusions. In the last scene of the 257 Listening to the Perpetrators interview, in an expression of frustration at his inability to convince Lanzmann, but also in order to stave off any further penetration by Lanzmann of the logic of his deluded narrative, Grassler finally announces a stalemate: Grassler: Herr Lanzmann, wir drehen uns im Kreise, ne. Wir kommen zu . . . wir kommen zu keinen neuen Ergebnissen. Lanzmann: Nein, nein, ich glaube, es ist unmöglich, zu neuen Ergebnissen zu . . . zu kommen. Grassler: Ja. Ja. Ja. Und . . . was ich heute weiß, das habe ich ja damals nicht gewußt, ne. (DVD disc 4, chapter 16, German text of the film 266) Grassler claims that the two men are caught in a circular discourse in which there is no exit and therefore no possibility of coming to new conclusions or of resolving the disparities between two diametrically opposed narrative frames. He then underscores this assertion by once again retracing the circle of the question of his knowledge, as if to discursively substantiate the impasse. However, as I have argued, the disjunction demonstrated by this interview pertains not only to the radical difference between Grassler and Lanzmann (and thus to Lanzmann ’ s absolutist distinction between the perspective of the perpetrators and that of the victims), but also to the inner discord, or cognitive dissonance, that resides in Grassler ’ s self-understanding itself. Grassler ’ s account of his role in the Holocaust is thus characterized by an inner paradox that he attempts to resolve in his testimony; in the end, however, he is unable to break out of the circular discourse in which he is trapped. The most acute illustration of the psychic dilemma that characterizes Grassler ’ s situation can be found in the first scene of the interview, when Lanzmann confronts Grassler with Czerniakow ’ s diary: Lanzmann: Er hat ein Tagebuch geschrieben, und das ist nur jetzt veröffentlicht. Er schreibt, und das ist 7. Juli ‘ 41 . . . Grassler: Am 7. Juli 1941? Das ist das erste Mal, daß ich ein Datum selber wieder erfahre, ne. Darf ich mir da ein Zettel nehmen? Ich mein, ich hätt natürlich genug da, net, aber das interessiert mich auch. Net? Denn ich hab nie . . . also, also, dann war ich Mit. . .im Juli schon dort. Lanzmann: Ja, und er schreibt Juli 7. ‘ 41: «Morgen in der Gemeinde,» das heißt: jüdische Gemeinde . . . Grassler: Ja, ja, ne . . . Lanzmann: «. . . und später mit Auerswald, Schlosser.» Grassler: Schlosser war. . . Lanzmann: «. . . und Grassler. Gewöhnliche Sache.» Das ist das erste Mal, daß Sie . . . Grassler: Daß der Name erwähnt wird, ja? Lanzmann: Ja. (DVD disc 4, chapter 8, German text of the film 246 - 47, revised to reflect the actual dialogue in the film) 258 Erin McGlothlin Grassler responds to Lanzmann ’ s mention of the diary with interest, and when Lanzmann mentions a particular date, Grassler picks up a notepad and begins to write on it, behaving almost as if he were learning about events that happened to someone else rather than being reminded of his own experience. His odd remark upon hearing that date - «Das ist das erste Mal, daß ich ein Datum selber wieder erfahre» - indicates a disconnect from his own experience, as if he were unable to own it as a memory and must, like a dutiful student with pen in hand, be reeducated about it. Klaus Theweleit argues that, by staging himself as an unschooled student of the events which Lanzmann queries, Grassler puts Lanzmann in the position of witness to his own ignorance of the deportations to Treblinka: Lanzmann ist sein Zeuge mit einem Mal dafür, daß er, Grasser [sic], nichts wissen kann von seiner Zeit als stellvertretender Überwachungs- und Abtransportkommisar für die Warschauer Juden. Die Verkehrung ist so grotesk wie total: Lanzmann erzählt, und Grasser [sic], wie ein Protokollant bei Gericht, nimmt auf: schreibt mit, daß er nicht gewußt haben kann davon, wohin man die abtransportierten Ghettobewohner brachte. (103) While I agree with Theweleit that Grassler ’ s naïve posture allows him to pursue a particular strategy of innocence that he maintains throughout the interview, I think something more unconscious and fundamental is going on with his gesture of taking notes about what he learns from Lanzmann about his own past. In my opinion, Grassler demonstrates a remoteness from his own experience, an acute gap between his actions in the past and his identity in the present that, as we have seen, manifests itself psychologically as disavowal or cognitive dissonance. Grassler must take notes on his time in the ghetto because this experience has not effectively or consonantly been integrated into his life narrative, a psychic condition further exemplified by his reaction to Lanzmann ’ s comment, «Das ist das erste Mal, daß Sie . . . .» Rather than responding with «daß ich erwähnt werde,» or «daß mein Name erwähnt wird,» Grassler speaks of «der Name,» indicating the profound self-alienation that characterizes his relationship to his past. I ’ d like to end my analysis by considering Lanzmann ’ s interview with Suchomel, which, of all the scenes with perpetrators in Shoah, has attracted the most critical attention. Critics have commented chiefly on a few admittedly remarkable moments in the five scenes that feature Suchomel, such as the scene that shows Lanzmann promising Suchomel, who is unaware that he is being filmed, that he won ’ t reveal his name (a pact that not only Lanzmann breaks with his paratextual identification of Suchomel with subtitles at the beginning of each scene, but one that is also broken by Suchomel himself, who mentions his own name in the interview [DVD disc 1, chapter 55, German text 259 Listening to the Perpetrators of the film 79]), and the dramatic moment in which Lanzmann convinces Suchomel to twice perform the song the Nazi guards at Treblinka forced the Sonderkommando workers to sing. 12 As I argued earlier, critics have tended to view Suchomel, more than any other perpetrator interviewed in the film, as the ideal «other» onto which they can project their discomfort about the testimony of the former Nazis; as Boswell argues, «In Franz Suchomel, Lanzmann finds the kind of criminal who is worthy of the pursuit» (157). To my mind, however, stunningly absent in critics ’ assessment of Suchomel is any sort of consideration of his astonishing frankness about his experience as a guard at Treblinka, the most notorious of the Aktion Reinhard death camps. Given the muteness of Oberhauser, the stubborn insistence on ignorance of Stier, and the convoluted logic and tortured self-alienation of Grassler, Suchomel ’ s candidness about the genocidal operations at Treblinka - from the perspective of the perpetrators, at least - is unparalleled. Suchomel ’ s testimony is not only valuable for the insight it provides into how the perpetrators remember and report their experience over thirty years later, it is also of significant historical use, especially given the relative scarcity of eyewitness testimony about Treblinka. The vivid image Suchomel draws for us of the daily operations at Treblinka is one that no other witness in the film - perpetrator or survivor - can (or will) provide; according to Lanzmann, «I was horrified by what I had learned, and yet I knew that this was extraordinary testimony since no one had ever described in such a detailed manner - urged on by my precise questions, which sounded purely technical and devoid of all moral implications - the killing process of Treblinka extermination camp» (The Patagonian Hare 454). Moreover, Suchomel ’ s eagerness to supply answers to Lanzmann ’ s queries, rather than avoid them, is quite remarkable. The forthright and compliant character of Suchomel ’ s interview, however disturbing it may be, is anomalous not only in the context of Shoah itself, but also in that of perpetrator testimony in general; the unrivaled quality of these scenes thus cannot be overemphasized. For this reason, my focus here thus differs from that of many of the scholars who have written about this scene; rather than concentrating on the admittedly shocking details that Suchomel so easily offers as evidence of Suchomel ’ s radical otherness, I choose to pose the question differently: given the prevarications of most of the perpetrators Lanzmann encounters, why does Suchomel so openly and seemingly without hesitation or reserve tell us so much about Treblinka, including so much about his own role there? Lanzmann gives us insight into this matter in his memoir, The Patagonian Hare, in which he traces the history of his connection with Suchomel, with whom he had long corresponded and whom he had visited several times prior 260 Erin McGlothlin to the day of filming, which was conducted at a hotel in Austria in 1976. In order to engage Suchomel for the interview, Lanzmann, who has described his strategies of procuring the perpetrators ’ testimonies as clever, deceptive, and the result of a «self-imposed iron discipline» (454), originally contacted Suchomel with the pretense that he required assistance that only Suchomel could give: I arrived one morning with Corinna [Lanzmann ’ s German assistant], unannounced as was by now my rule. I told him I had read the evidence he had given at the Treblinka trial and what he had said to Gitta Sereny. I had not come, I added, out of psychological interest, nor was I a judge, a prosecutor or a Nazi-hunter; he had nothing to fear from me. But, I told him, I believed that we desperately needed his help - without explaining precisely what I meant by «we.» «We don ’ t know,» I continued, «how to raise our children. The young generation of Jews do not understand how this immeasurable catastrophe could have happened, how six million of our people could have allowed themselves to be massacred without response. Did they really die like sheep in a slaughterhouse? » This way, I was putting Suchomel in the position of teacher and myself in the position of student, impressing on him the historic role that would be his were he to explain the various stages of the process of mass extermination in Treblinka. (445) Lanzmann thus pitched his proposal to Suchomel with a particular strategy, one that placed Suchomel in the role of expert who has important knowledge to convey. Rather than treating him as a criminal who would be asked to justify himself and his past actions, Lanzmann chose an approach that appealed to Suchomel ’ s self-importance and didactic nature. This strategy (along with Lanzmann ’ s offer of payment, which, as Lanzmann mentions several times, was very important to Suchomel), like Lanzmann ’ s manipulation of his command of German, creates a particular power structure in the interview in which Suchomel appears to be a patient pedant who condescendingly explains to a disingenuously credulous Lanzmann how millions of Jews were killed in Treblinka. As with other staged scenes later shot for the film, such as the interview with Bomba in the rented barber shop, Lanzmann prepared carefully for Suchomel ’ s interview in order to maximize its performative potential, even going so far as to procure props - a map of Treblinka that he arranged to have enlarged and mounted and a fishing rod that he split in half «to create a baguette de magister - a schoolmaster ’ s pointer» (453) - that would achieve the performative effects Lanzmann was hoping to create. The result of Lanzmann ’ s casting of Suchomel in the role of teacher and his construction of the mise-en-scène, which bears a strong resemblance to a classroom, is an interview in which Suchomel negotiates the issue of knowledge in a vastly different way than do Grassler and Stier. Whereas the latter men endeavor to either justify their lack of knowledge of the Final 261 Listening to the Perpetrators Solution, harmonize their actions in the past with their contemporary knowledge, or displace their knowledge, Suchomel appears in these scenes to embrace his knowledge and to mete it out magnanimously for the benefit of posterity, an attitude that Lanzmann consciously creates and supports. 13 Suchomel ’ s eager assumption of the didactic role is evident throughout the interview. He patiently explains to Lanzmann various concepts and terminology, he describes the layout and organization of the camp (often denoting particular locations on the map with his pointer), he corrects Lanzmann ’ s mistaken facts and impressions, and he, like any proper scholar, proposes a theoretical framework for considering the past. The scene in which he relates to Lanzmann his definition of Treblinka is exemplary in this regard: Suchomel: Ja, Auschwitz war eine Fabrik. Lanzmann: Und Treblinka, das war ein . . .? Suchomel: Ich sag Ihnen meine Definition. Merken Sie sich das. Treblinka war ein zwar primitives, aber gut funktionierendes Fließband des Todes. Lanzmann: Fließband? Suchomel: . . . des Todes. Verstehen Sie? (DVD disc 2, chapter 1; German text of the film 91) Suchomel pronounces grandiloquently his characterization of the camp, which he clearly has thought about and composed beforehand, pausing dramatically so that Lanzmann can absorb a statement that Suchomel evidently believes is profound. His pedantic gestures - «Merken Sie sich das» and «Verstehen Sie? » - not only underscore his self-production here as an expert who is in control of knowledge and couches it in the antiseptic language of euphemism, they also performatively indicate his assumption of the role Lanzmann has given him, that of the superior teacher who condescendingly explains to and then tests his student. Although Suchomel appears to be in control in these scenes as Lanzmann ’ s teacher and mentor, it is ultimately of course Lanzmann who manipulates the interaction between them, since he not only is more aware of the conditions of the interview (i. e. that it is being filmed clandestinely), but he also created the teacher-student scenario in the first place. It is thus not surprising that Suchomel ’ s self-production as a teacher breaks down at particular moments, revealing the underlying power dynamic of the interview. This is evident above all in the notorious scene in which Suchomel, prodded by Lanzmann, twice sings the Treblinkalied, which opens the «Second Era» of the film (DVD disc 3, chapter 1). After the first iteration of the song, Lanzmann encourages Suchomel to sing it again, but Suchomel appears to realize the absurd indecency of the performance, protesting to Lanzmann, «Nehmen Sie mir ’ s nicht übel. Weil . . . Sie wollen Geschichte haben, und ich sag Ihnen Ge- 262 Erin McGlothlin schichte» (German text of the film 149). At this moment, Suchomel seems to grasp the ambivalence of his role as educator; he acts here as the self-important expert who relays knowledge to Lanzmann, and by extension, to posterity, but the content of his knowledge inevitably indicts him. He thus can only weakly assert that he ’ s giving Lanzmann history in an attempt to justify his performance. After Lanzmann encourages him to sing the song again, arguing «Das ist sehr wichtig» (German text of the film 150), Suchomel finishes the song by asking, «Sind Sie zufrieden? » (German text of the film 150). This aggressive, almost accusatory appeal to Lanzmann demonstrates his awareness of the fact that Lanzmann has «made him sing,» both literally and figuratively; it also shows that his performance of the song exceeds his own authority over it, revealing (as do the many scholarly analyses of the scene) much more than Suchomel can control or be aware of. However, he follows this accusing question by once again referring to his status as expert: «Das ist ein Original. Das kann kein Jude heute mehr! » (German text of the film 150). With his perversely proud proclamation of the ultimate authority on the song, since those who were forced to sing it are no longer alive, 14 Suchomel reasserts his role as educator and congratulates himself for his knowledge. By accepting the pedagogical role in which Lanzmann casts him, Suchomel is thus able to transmit his considerable knowledge about how the Jews were exterminated at Treblinka, an operation to which, as his testimony reveals, he contributed actively. By virtue of his self-important, didactic mission, Suchomel ’ s knowledge thus functions also as an acknowledgement of his crimes on a purely factual level, even though any ethical or moral acknowledgment (let alone regret or sorrow) on his part is shockingly missing. In a sense, Suchomel operates in these scenes as an almost machine-like conduit of information - «Ich sag Ihnen Geschichte» - that does not seem affected by the information it produces; he merely passes it on as a lesson in history without appearing to process it himself. By producing himself as an expert, Suchomel, like Grassler and Stier, also engages in the process of displacement; in this case, however, unlike with the other two perpetrators, it is not the knowledge itself that is displaced. Rather, Suchomel displaces his sense of culpability and moral awareness onto his extensive knowledge of the organization and operation of the Holocaust, where it is safely kept at arm ’ s length. The verbal exchanges between Lanzmann and Suchomel, Stier and Grassler in Shoah thus all revolve in intricate ways around the question of knowledge of the immense genocidal undertaking to which all three men contributed. In each case, Lanzmann, through his adept performance as an interviewer and his ingenious facility in German, is able to push past the defensive postures and 263 Listening to the Perpetrators canned protestations of innocence on the part of the former perpetrators to mediate a complex image of how these men have integrated and learned to narrate their participation in the Holocaust. Although, in his absolutist conception of the film, Lanzmann claims to be utterly uninterested in the perpetrators ’ subjective understanding of their experience, he creates, through his masterful exchanges with these men, nuanced portraits of their psychology that are revealing of their very humanness, rather than flat or grotesque caricatures that emphasize their intrinsic otherness, and he even offers a broad panoply of psychologies, from disavowal to didacticism, to explain their past and present behavior. Even though there are similarities between how each man interacts with Lanzmann, the processes of denial, disavowal and displacement of knowledge function uniquely in each case, emphasizing the individual character of these men and making it impossible to advance any single overarching explanation about how the film represents the figure of the perpetrator. The interview with Walter Stier presents the most airtight case of the denial of knowledge; however, as we have seen, Stier ’ s adamant refusal to admit his knowledge at the time is challenged on an unconscious linguistic level by his own statements. Franz Grassler, on the other hand, both admits to knowing and refuses to know, a dissonance that he tries to solve by displacing his knowledge so that he can integrate his experience into a positive self-image. For his part, Franz Suchomel, who is the most forthcoming of all about his role in the Holocaust, is able to integrate his experience by reframing his narrative of perpetration according to pedagogical goals; he believes he is teaching us important lessons about history and thus does not feel the need, as do the other two, to justify himself and his wartime actions. It is perhaps unsurprising that, in these three cases at least, each man ’ s willingness to acknowledge his perpetration in the crimes of the Holocaust increases with his proximity to and involvement in them: Stier is thus able to effect an almost total denial because he never saw a train, while Grassler, who tells us «Nein, also, ich bin nicht ins Getto gegangen, nachdem ich ’ s mal kennengelernt hatte. Und, wenn ich nicht mußte, also, ich war in der ganzen Zeit wohl nur ein paarmal dort, net, also» (DVD disc 4, chapter 10; German text of the film 251), can insist on a certain distance from the arenas in which the actual killing took place. Suchomel, on the other hand, was in the thick of the actual physical implementation of the Final Solution, so his testimony is less riddled with claims that he didn ’ t know or can no longer remember. At the same time, however, what is surprising about the film ’ s focus on what the men did or didn ’ t know is that, as a collective complex of concerns, the issue of knowledge in Shoah also functions as a sort of displacement, for it obscures, to a certain extent, the problem of perpetration 264 Erin McGlothlin in general in its quest for the truth of what the men knew rather than what they did. In a sense, the perpetrators in Shoah are thus presented as Wisser (or Nicht-Wisser) rather than Täter. In any case, these particular verbal exchanges between Lanzmann and the perpetrator witnesses demonstrate an astonishing diversity among the former Nazis with regard to their relationship to their roles in the Holocaust and their psychic investment in their past. One of Lanzmann ’ s most important achievements in Shoah is to have made, despite his best intentions, such a differentiated view of the perpetrators possible. Notes 1 Critics who analyze the scenes with Simon Srebnik include Denby, Friedman, Moser, Plank, Robson, Theweleit, Weissman and Williams. Those who discuss the scenes with Abraham Bomba include Angress, Cantor, Elsner, Furman, Hirsch, Jochimsen and Listoe. Critics who address in detail scenes featuring both survivors include Avisar, Boswell, Brinkley, Colombat, Felman, Howland, LaCapra («Lanzmann ’ s Shoah»), Lichtner, Olin, Reichel, Saxton, Thiele and Vice (Shoah). 2 Lanzmann himself uses the word «incarnation» to refer to his method of prodding his witnesses to re-experience the past in the present (The Patagonian Hare 435). Sue Vice investigates in depth Lanzmann ’ s strategy of performative reenactment (which she refers to as «reincarnation» [45]) in her volume on Shoah. 3 With the term «perpetrators» I refer to the five male interviewees in the film who either were former death camp guards who had direct experience with the machinery of genocide (Franz Suchomel, Franz Schalling, and Josef Oberhauser, who were guards at Treblinka, Chelmno and Belzec, respectively) or who held positions of some authority in the German implementation of the «Final Solution» (Franz Grassler, who was part of the German administration of the Warsaw ghetto, and Walter Stier, a bureaucrat for the Deutsche Reichsbahn in Nazi-occupied Poland). Footage of interviews between Lanzmann and at least six additional perpetrators that was excluded in the final cut of the film has been deposited in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As this essay was in press, Sue Vice ’ s article «Claude Lanzmann ’ s Einsatzgruppen Interviews,» part of a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History that focuses on the representation of Holocaust perpetrators in literature and film, appeared. Vice provides a perceptive analysis of those interviews that were left out of Lanzmann ’ s film, but she does not discuss the scenes with the perpetrators that were included in Shoah. 4 In general, German-language scholarship on Holocaust representation has been far less interested in Shoah than English-language Holocaust Studies. It is my impression, and Martina Thiele confirms this suspicion in her chapter on Shoah in Publizistische Kontroversen über den Holocaust im Film, that, because Lanzmann ’ s film had minimal exposure when it was screened in Germany in 1986 (first in February at the Berlinale, then a few weeks later in four parts on the regional public networks [Drittes Programm], where it reached «ein ganz kleines Publikum» [Thiele 400], an even smaller portion of which saw the film in its entirety), its impact on cultural memory of the Holocaust in 265 Listening to the Perpetrators Germany and thus on German scholarship has been limited. Apart from some perceptive initial reviews in the mass media and Getrud Koch ’ s and Klaus Theweleit ’ s excellent analyses of the film, there is little scholarship in German that focuses extensively on Shoah. Theweleit ’ s astute impressionistic essay on the memory of violence in Shoah (which, although it includes an excellent discussion of how Lanzmann ’ s film demonstrates the «totale ‹ weiß nix › » [102] among contemporary Germans with regard to the Holocaust, only cursorily looks at the film ’ s scenes with the former perpetrators), attributes the film ’ s limited appeal in Germany to precisely its depiction of the perpetrators: «Die Deutschen bei Ophuls und Lanzmann in ihrer maskenhaften Leblosigkeit, in ihrer primitiven Absolutunschuld, sind klar unterschieden von allen anderen Menschen. Das ist so; man braucht nur hinzusehen. Wahrscheinlich ergeben sich daraus die deutschen Zuschauerzahlen von Shoah und Hotel Terminus. ‹ Wer will denn sowas sehen? › . . . › Man kennt doch die Geschichte mit den Juden. › Ja, aber die mit den Deutschen vielleicht nicht . . . will man nicht kennen» (104). 5 Lanzmann has stated that he not only was uninterested in the psychology of the perpetrators and how they have come to understand their actions, but that he also adamantly rejected a perspective that considered such factors. Delineating his method from that of Gitta Sereny in her work on Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, he writes: «Her approach seemed to me purely psychological: she wanted to think about evil, to understand how a husband and father can calmly take part in mass murder, the central subject of many later literary-historical works. From the beginning of my own research, by contrast, I was so astonished that I braced myself with all my might against the refusal to understand» (The Patagonian Hare 420). According to Jay Cantor, Lanzmann ’ s adamant disavowal of psychological insight into the perpetrators ’ motives and selfunderstanding is tantamount to the sort of instrumentalization of humans that characterized the Nazi genocide: «Lanzmann, stunned, refuses to enter the Nazis ’ psychology, to grant them inwardness. But this is, of course, the terrifying double bind that Hitlerism, perhaps all racism, confronts us with. He will not be like the Nazis; they must be utterly alien to him; they cannot even be imagined, granted insides; they are not human. But the Nazis knew better than us that technique of making their opponents not human! And so the machine has made him into a machine; he has become like them, for not to grant others inwardness means not to have it oneself. His outrage, his obsessive defense ( › I decided to have only technical conversations › ), meant to ensure that he remain uncontaminated, instead brings about the very thing he seemingly wants to avoid» (34). 6 For a discussion of the tendency to sacralize the Holocaust in critical discourse, please see my article «Narrative Transgression in Edgar Hilsenrath ’ s Der Nazi und der Friseur and the Rhetoric of the Sacred in Holocaust Discourse.» 7 The one astonishing exception to this almost universal reading of the perpetrators in Lanzmann ’ s film can be found in Ernst Nolte ’ s infamous essay «Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,» a provocative and historically specious article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that in 1986 ignited the Historikerstreit about Germany ’ s relationship to the Holocaust past. As with major events and details of the Holocaust, which Nolte interprets in a highly unorthodox (or plainly false) way, he asserts (but, as with the other arguments in the essay, provides no evidence for) a reading of the perpetrators in the film that both shifts their culpability and recasts them as victims: «Um die gleiche Zeit läuft im Fernsehen der bewegende Dokumentarfilm Shoah eines jüdischen Regisseurs, der es in einigen Passagen wahrscheinlich macht, daß auch die SS-Mann- 266 Erin McGlothlin schaften der Todeslager auf ihre Art Opfer sein mochten und daß es andererseits unter den polnischen Opfern des Nationalsozialismus virulenten Antisemitsmus gab.» 8 In a recent article in German Studies Review, Timothy L. Schroer stresses the complexity of the psychological states of Holocaust perpetrators. Reminding us that «ample evidence exists that killing defenseless victims indeed produced a psychological strain on the killers» (42), he goes on to investigate the apparent «emotional coldness» (35) that characterized so many autobiographical accounts by perpetrators, which he attributes to a social ethos of self-control that emerged in the generation of German men who came of age during the Weimar Republic. He then concludes by emphasizing the importance of an approach to the subject that avoids an absolutist understanding of perpetrators: «A historically grounded approach to the perpetrators should eschew theories that posit an unchanging ‹ human nature, › whether that nature is conceived of as inherently violent or sympathetic. Instead, we should approach the perpetrators as people whose actions, thoughts, and emotions were subject to the play of contingent influences» (49). 9 Throughout the film, witnesses attest to the problem of knowledge and/ or the lack thereof from various perspectives. In general, while the survivors speak of the victims ’ lack of foreknowledge about the death camps (Ruth Elias: «I didn ’ t know about Auschwitz anything» [DVD disc 4, chapter 1; English text of the film 142]; Filip Müller [about the Polish Jews]: «Wahrscheinlich ahnten sie auch, daß da etwa nicht stimmt, aber niemand von denen könnte im kleinsten sich vorstellen» [DVD disc 3, chapter 6; German text of the film 173, altered to reflect Müller ’ s actual syntax]), the bystanders and perpetrators claim that the Jewish victims were aware of the fate that awaited them (a Polish man in Grabow: «The Jews knew it too» [DVD disc 2, chapter 13; English text of the film 75]; Frau Michelson: «Die merkten ja doch, was los war» [DVD disc 2, chapter 24; German text of the film 131]) and at the same time emphasize their own lack of knowledge (Schalling: «Die sogenannte Endlösung, die war uns ja natürlich nicht bekannt, net» [DVD disc 4, chapter 12; German text of the film 254). This displacement of knowledge from the perpetrators to the victims figures prominently, as we will see, in Grassler ’ s testimony in particular. 10 Lanzmann claims that his strategy of linguistic incompetence had a lasting effect on his command of German: «Bevor ich Shoah gedreht habe, sprach ich ein wesentlich besseres Deutsch als danach. Ich habe gewissermaßen mutwillig während der dreizehn Jahre, in denen ich an Shoah arbeitete, mein Deutsch verlernt. Das war gut für den Film» («Claude Lanzmann im Gespräch mit Max Dax» 284). 11 Grassler rarely uses the first person - either plural, like Stier, or singular - to refer to the Nazi administration for which he worked, preferring to speak about the wishes of the «Dienstelle» or the «Kommissar.» 12 Critics who have discussed the ethics of the furtive filming of the interview include Felman, Furman, Ophüls, Spitzer and Vice (Shoah). Those who have analyzed Suchomel ’ s performance of the Treblinkalied include Angress, Boswell, Brumlik, Felman, Howland, Lichtner, Moser, Spitzer, Talbot and Vice (Shoah). 13 Moreover, as several commentators have pointed out, Suchomel appears relaxed and responsive in the scenes that feature him, unlike, for example, Grassler, who seems nervous and defensive in his interview. Suchomel ’ s ease is undoubtedly the result of Lanzmann ’ s promise to him that Suchomel would have nothing to fear from the interview, but can likely also be attributed, as Theweleit argues, to the fact that Suchomel had already been sentenced to six years prison time (four years of which he served) in the so-called Treblinka Trials of 1964 - 1965 and thus did not need to worry that his 267 Listening to the Perpetrators testimony to Lanzmann would criminally implicate him (122). In this way, Suchomel is able to assert at the beginning of the interview, «Ja, ich bin sehr zufrieden mit dem heutigen Tag» (DVD disc 1, chapter 55, German text of the film 77). 14 Of course, at the time in which Suchomel sang the Treblinkalied there were at least two former «Arbeitsjuden» who were alive and potentially also knew the song: Richard Glazar and Abraham Bomba, but Lanzmann does not ask them to perform it (at least not in the scenes that were included in the film). Works Cited Angress, Ruth K. «Lanzmann ’ s Shoah and its Audience.» Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 3 (1986): 249 - 60. Ash, Timothy Garton. «The Life of Death: Shoah - A Film by Claude Lanzmann.» Claude Lanzmann ’ s «Shoah»: Key Essays. Ed. Stuart Liebman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 135 - 47. Avisar, Ilan. Screening the Holocaust: Cinema ’ s Images of the Unimaginable. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1988. Boswell, Matthew. Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Brinkley, Robert and Steven Youra. «Tracing Shoah.» PMLA 111.1 (1996): 108 - 27. Brumlik, Micha. «Der zähe Schaum der Verdrängung.» Rev. of Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann. Der Spiegel 17 Feb. 1986: 192 - 97. Cantor, Jay. «Death and the Image.» Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film. Ed. Charles Warren. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1996. 23 - 49. Chevrie, Marc and Herv Le Roux. «Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about Shoah.» Trans. Stuart Liebman. Claude Lanzmann ’ s «Shoah»: Key Essays. Ed. Stuart Liebman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 37 - 49. Colombat, André. The Holocaust in French Film. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993. Denby, David. «Out of Darkness.» Claude Lanzmann ’ s «Shoah»: Key Essays. Ed. Stuart Liebman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 73 - 76. Elsner, Anna Magdalena. « ‹ L ’ obscénité absolue du projet de comprendre › : The Communicability of Traumatic Knowledge in Claude Lanzmann ’ s Shoah.» Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture. Ed. Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 41 - 55. Felman, Shoshana. «The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann ’ s Shoah.» Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 1992. 204 - 83. Friedman, Elisabeth R. «The Anti-Archive? Claude Lanzmann ’ s Shoah and the Dilemmas of Holocaust Representation.» English Language Notes 45.1 (2007): 111 - 21. 268 Erin McGlothlin Furman, Nelly. «The Languages of Pain in Shoah.» Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and «the Jewish Question» in France. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1995. 299 - 312. Hirsch, Joshua. Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. Howland, Jacob. «Reflections on Claude Lanzmann ’ s Shoah.» Proteus 12.2 (1995): 42 - 46. Jacobowitz, Florence. «Shoah as Cinema.» Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust. Ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. 7 - 21. Jochimsen, Jess. « ‹ Nur was nicht aufhört, weh zu thun, bleibt im Gedächtnis › : Die Shoah im Dokumentarfilm.» Shoah: Formen der Erinnerung: Geschichte, Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst. Ed. Nicolas Berg, Jess Jochimsen and Bernd Stiegler. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996. 215 - 31. Koch, Gertrud. «Die ästhetiche Transformation der Vorstellung vom Unvorstellbaren: Claude Lanzmanns Film Shoah.» Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992. 143 - 55. — . «Der Engel des Vergessens und die black box der Faktizität - Zur Gedächtniskonstruktion in Shoah.» Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992. 155 - 69. LaCapra, Dominick. «Holocaust Testimonies: Attending to the Victim ’ s Voice.» Catastrophe and Meaning: the Holocaust and the Twentieth Century. Ed. Moishe Postone and Eric Santner. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003. 209 - 31. — . «Lanzmann ’ s Shoah: ‹ Here There is No Why. › » Critical Inquiry 23.2 (1997): 231 - 69. Lanzmann, Claude. The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir. Trans. Frank Wynne. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. — . «Hier ist kein Warum.» Trans. Claude Lanzmann. Claude Lanzmann ’ s «Shoah»: Key Essays. Ed. Stuart Liebman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 51 - 52. — . «Seminar with Claude Lanzmann 11 April 1990.» Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 82 - 99. — . «Claude Lanzmann im Gespräch mit Max Dax.» Shoah. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011. 279 - 303. — . Shoah. Trans. Nina Börnsen and Anna Kamp. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011. — . Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995. Lichtner, Giacomo. Film and the Shoah in France and Italy. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008. Listoe, Daniel. «Seeing Nothing: Allegory and the Holocaust ’ s Absent Dead.» SubStance 35.2 (2006): 51 - 70. McGlothlin, Erin. «Theorizing the Perpetrator in Bernhard Schlink ’ s The Reader and Martin Amis ’ s Time ’ s Arrow.» After Representation? : The Holocaust, Literature, 269 Listening to the Perpetrators and Culture. Ed. R. Clifton Spargo and Robert M. Ehrenreich. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2010. 210 - 30. — . «Narrative Transgression in Edgar Hilsenrath ’ s Der Nazi und der Friseur and the Rhetoric of the Sacred in Holocaust Discourse.» German Quarterly 80.2 (2007): 220 - 39. Moser, Keith. «The Poignant Combination of Beauty and Horror in the Aesthetic Representations of the Holocaust in Lanzmann ’ s Shoah and Le Clézio ’ s Etoile Errante.» Dalhousie French Studies 92 (2010): 75 - 83. Nolte, Ernst. «Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will. Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht gehalten werden konnte.» Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 6 June 1986. 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Spitzer, Leo. « ‹ You Wanted History, I Give You History › : Claude Lanzmann ’ s Shoah.» Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust. Ed. Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes. New York, NY: Modern Language Association of America, 2004. 412 - 21. Stoicea, Gabriela. «The Difficulties of Verbalizing Trauma: Translation and the Economy of Loss in Claude Lanzmann ’ s Shoah.» Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 9.2 (2006): 43 - 53. Talbot, Daniel. «Distributing Shoah.» Claude Lanzmann ’ s «Shoah»: Key Essays. Ed. Stuart Liebman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 53 - 65. Theweleit, Klaus. Das Land, das Ausland heißt. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995. Thiele, Martina. Publizistische Kontroversen über den Holocaust im Film. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001. Todorov, Tzevtan. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996. Vice, Sue. «Claude Lanzmann ’ s Einsatzgruppen Interviews.» Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. 17.2 - 3 (2011): 51 - 74. — . Shoah. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Weissman, Gary. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004. 270 Erin McGlothlin Williams, Linda. «Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary.» Film Quarterly 46.3 (1993): 9 - 21. 271 Listening to the Perpetrators Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@francke.de • www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! 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