WI BEY T NESS O TH REBECKA REBECKA ND THOR KA E TZ HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION AND THE TESTIMONY OF IMAGES THREE FILMS BY YAEL HERSONSKI HARUN FAROCKI AND EYAL SIVAN WITNESS BEYOND BEYOND T REBECKA REBECKA H T KAT H E O Z R HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION AND THE TESTIMONY OF IMAGES THREE FILMS BY YAEL HERSONSKI HARUN FAROCKI EYAL SIVAN FOR SAM AND ISIDOR PRELUDE 1–3 9–13 WHAT IS A WITNESS? 15–23 AN EVENT WITHOUT AN IMAGE 23–24 WHEN NO WITNESSES ARE LEFT 24–28 IMPOSSIBLE REPRESENTATIONS 28–31 IMAGE AS WITNESS 32–36 GESTIC THINKING 36–39 RESITUATED IMAGES AND THE QUESTION OF FRAME 39–43 STILL IMAGES 45-69 BRESLAUER AT WORK IN WESTERBORK, 1944. 45 A FILM UNFINISHED BY YAEL HERSONSKI 46–55 RESPITE BY HARUN FAROCKI 56–63 THE SPECIALIST BY EYAL SIVAN 64–69 ARCHIVAL WORK 71–72 THE STATUS OF ARCHIVAL IMAGES 73–76 ARCHIVAL STORIES 1: DAS GHETTO AND A FILM UNFINISHED 76–80 ARCHIVAL STORIES 2: THE WESTERBORK MATERIAL AND RESPITE 80–83 ARCHIVAL STORIES 3: RECORDING THE EICHMANN TRIAL AND THE SPECIALIST 84–86 5 STRUCTURING FRAMES 87–88 AGENCY AND ANALYSIS 88–91 THE HOW OF THE IMAGE 91–95 OVERCOMING AESTHETIC DISTANCE 96–99 TRUTHS IN NON-TRUSTWORTHY IMAGES 100–104 REFLEXIVITY AND EXPOSURE 104–107 VOICE, TEXT, AND NARRATION 109–110 VERBAL AND PICTORIAL WITNESSING 110–115 SOUNDS OF SILENCE AND COMMOTION 115–117 SHOWING INSTEAD OF TELLING 117–119 VISUALIZING TESTIMONY 120–123 THE PERPETRATOR AS WITNESS 125–126 THE NAZI GAZE 126–129 THE PERPETRATOR IN FOCUS 129–132 REMOVING THE WITNESS 132–137 HAPPY IMAGES OF THE CAMP 137–141 THE TESTIMONY OF IMAGES 143–144 TESTIMONY AND MONTAGE 145–146 INTERPRETING TESTIMONY 149–151 FURTHER ROUTES OF TESTIMONY: WHY DON’T YOU ASK ME ABOUT AUSCHWITZ? 151–154 REFERENCES 155–184 NOTES 155–173 BIBLIOGRAPHY 174–179 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 183 7 BEYOND THE WITNESS HOW TO BEGIN “The beginning as such, on the other hand, as something subjective in the sense of being a particular, inessential way of introducing the discourse, remains unconsidered, a matter of indifference, and so too the need to an answer to the question: With what should the beginning be made? remains of no importance in face of the need for a principle in which alone the interest of the matter in hand seems to lie, the interest as to what is the truth, the absolute ground.” 1 9 BEYOND THE WITNESS ALAN KURDI On September 8, 2015 the German newspaper Bild produced a whole issue without images as a response to the role of images in relation to the acute situation for refugees try- ing to reach Europe. Days before, an image had circulated of a dead child who drowned on his way to Europe and was washed up by the Mediterranean waves on a beach in Turkey. This horrifying image momentarily caused both European governments and citi- zens to act. Why is an image like this needed? What does it do that words do not? 11 BEYOND THE WITNESS AN UNSEEN IMAGE It is fitting to begin with an image. However, this is an image I have not seen, so we have to rely on my imagination. Somewhere in a pile, in a historian’s office, there is an image depicting people entering a gas chamber during World War II. Thus, it was taken inside a camp while it was in operation – probably not by the Nazis, but by someone else in the camp, an inmate or someone passing through. The historian has tried to trace where and when and by whom the photograph was taken, but found nothing. The East German image agency where he found it no longer exists and all that remains is his paper copy. He has brought it to Yad Vashem, to the museum in Auschwitz, and to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, but no one knows under what circumstances the photo was taken. How the historian knows that it was taken on the way into the gas chamber, I do not know, but it seems to be the only thing that is certain about the image. I wish to see it, to analyze it, and to relate to it once he finds it, but at the same time I do not need to see it, since in one sense it fulfils its role by its mere existence. Georges Didi-Huberman claims that in order to remember, one must imagine, and the image can help us do that.2 It provides a space for the viewers’ imagination while at the same time enacting a particular historical moment. Let us keep this image of an image in our imagination while moving along. I, as I write, and you, as you read. 13 BEYOND THE WITNESS I used to visit my great-uncle Herman from time to time. Seated in the commu- nal living room of the Jewish home for the elderly in Gothenburg, he would be reading booklets on the Swedish media reports about the Holocaust – what the journalists knew, what they wrote and when. On entering the facility, one encountered old men reading newspapers in Yiddish, a woman who had lost the ability to speak sensibly, now happily blabbering nonsensical sounds, and among them, Herman. Although he was not a survivor of the Holocaust, he was severely marked by it, like many in his generation. Still, my grandmother tells me about when her grandparents came to visit in 1939, after she and her family had made it to Sweden, and how they returned to Germany since even the streets of Gothenburg were treif. 3 Even I, the third generation after the war, cannot separate the events from the very essence of my being. In my mind, the story of my family is intermingled with the long line of literary witness accounts, rang- ing from Anne Frank, Primo Levi, and Imre Kertész, to Fania Fenélon and Jean Améry, that I read throughout my adolescence. I learnt most of what I knew about the Holocaust through these survivor testimonies. Images and films from the war came later, as visual evidence of what I had read. The images shot when the camps were liberated functioned as a confirmation of the images painted by the words of survivors. When I began writing this dissertation I could not imagine that Swedish Neo-Nazis would ever be granted the right to march through central Gothenburg on Jom Kippur, one carrying a sign with the word “criminal” written below an image of a Holocaust survi- vor, nor that over ninety instances of arson attacks on refugee shelters throughout Sweden would be reported during one single year and that thousands of lives would be lost on the Mediterranean on their way to Europe.4 To account for the present and past testimonies is crucial and the need for witness accounts will never end. The survivors of the Holocaust, those who bore witness to the event, will soon be gone, and at the same time, the forces that want to diminish or deny the Holocaust are growing in numbers, in Sweden, Europe, and the USA. It is therefore urgent to formulate alternative routes for the commemoration of this specific historical event, as well as for others taking place currently. Before the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, survivors had not testified in public, and from the outset one of the aims of the trial was to create a platform for witness accounts.5 In this book, I will analyze three films, so as to examine them as reactions to the con- struction of witness-based Holocaust commemoration that has been ongoing since the Eichmann trial. By different means, and to different ends, the films pose alternatives to the trope of witnessing and the role of the survivors’ oral accounts when historicizing 15 the event. I seek to answer the question of how images bear witness when they are pro- What brings these three films together,beyond their interventions in Holocaust commem- duced, reproduced, and resituated in conflicting political and historical situations. My oration, are two common and crucial factors. Firstly, they can be seen as critiques of other hypothesis is that the testimony of images can be grasped through the work of montage films departing from an assemblage of several sources, where archival material is put to and in relation to their archival conditions, the context, and the framework (conditions use in order to illustrate a given narrative. Secondly, these filmmakers inscribe themselves of production) and means of aesthetic representation (voice, narration, and gaze). These as actors intervening in the materials. In all three films the intervention in the material is factors offer the framework for the analysis through which the testimony of images can be highlighted rather than obscured, and the presence of the filmmaker is embedded in the understood. The tension embedded in an understanding of the image as witnessing, lies narrative – it is their specific voice, gaze, and argument. Through a reading of how the films between the image as acting, speaking, and testifying and the necessary interpretation of reinterpret the archival material and position it in a new time and context, I seek to expli- its speech and testimony. cate how the film images bear witness. Thus, throughout this work, I intend to follow two strands of inquiry. The first strand is Each of the three films manifests a particular method, or a certain way of understanding the specific discussion of the witness tradition after the Holocaust and the role of images how images testify: in a discussion of a beyond the witnessing subject and the role of therein.