The director "Shoah" Lanzmann is dead "DiePresse.com



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The radical imprudence of this man was notorious. She invited him to greet the sandwich served at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna with the words "What is that mess ?!". And she produced one of the most important films about the Holocaust. Without his leaps forward and his extraordinary self-confidence, the Frenchman Claude Lanzmann would not have worked for twelve years on his monumental film project "Shoah", hounded the victims and the executioners against a seemingly insurmountable resistance, and made a film that will last more than nine hours Milestone should be the memory of the Nazi era.

He introduces the term Shoah

Claude Lanzmann, who died Thursday in Paris at the age of 92 years. Twelve years of his main work has occupied, the film published in 1985 "Shoah". Yes, even more – you think of movies like "Sobibor" (2001), "The Karski Report" (2010) or "The Last of the Unjust" (2013). Lanzmann dealt with interviews with eyewitnesses who had not found their place in his film "Shoah".

This is the title of this film that introduced for the first time the Hebrew Bible term for the Holocaust disaster. Lanzmann, a grandson of East European Jews, was shooting at the sites of former concentration camps, with eyewitnesses, without any archive material – and with a huge claim: to make a film that would replace the nonexistent images of death in the gas chambers. the Holocaust – not to show, but, as he says, should be "!" And more than all the original footage: When he had found pictures of people dying in the gas chambers, Lanzmann once said that he had destroyed it. His film was to become "the memory of the horror" par excellence, as it was called Simone de Beauvoir, lover of Lanzmann.

Together with her and her friend Jean-Paul Sartre, Lanzmann, a young journalist and veteran of the Resistance, publishes Les Temps Modernes. "Exit But his friendship with Sartre fades, especially because of Sartre's critical position on the state of Israel – on Lanzmann's first documentary film" Why Israel "(1970).

The second was already "Shoah." Only collective death should be his theme, not to help, not to be saved.Lanzmann found survivors, such as the Jewish "hairdresser Treblinka", who had to cut the hair of his victims before entering the gas chamber.In search of the perpetrators, he had to give up countless times – for example, with the leaders of SS Einsatzgruppen, who were at the center involved in the He almost provoked information from SS Unterscharführer Perry Broad stationed in Auschwitz, he says in his 2009 memoir – but the camera hidden in the bag started to smoke, Lanzmann fled the house. did not let go, had criminals committed.

called the survivors "ghosts"

The soul of the murderers did not interest Lanzmann. He found it flat, easy to understand. He only wanted to know the details of the extermination workflow, for example when he was sitting in the living room of the man who was responsible in Treblinka for incoming transport management. Survivors also served as information providers. In his memoirs, there is a hint of remorse: as he was interested only in the collective death, he had hidden in his film the personal destinies of the "ghosts" (Lanzmann called the survivors) – yes in a sense, "killed".

The total suppression of aid and survival has been criticized on several occasions. Similarly, the position of the filmmaker as an infallible, in the possession of the judges of truth.

But even though he was barely recognizable in his work – Lanzmann was not just the man of "headstags" and "plunges into the void" called important decisions) and not only an embodiment of self-righteousness. Yes, maybe movies like "Shoah" should even help a little to quell the gnawing insecurity. His biggest fear was always to "die cowardly," says Lanzmann as an old man in his autobiography. This concern had poisoned his life, which he loved immensely. And he recounts a childhood memory in the 50s: once his unmistakably Jewish mother made a scene for the sellers in a shop – then he fled shame. "I played this afternoon as a true anti-Semite, in his worst variant, the anti-Semitic Jew."

"I see people, I see badbadins" [Lanzmann a montré son dernier film à Cannes en 2017] "Napalm" on the Korean War shortly after Felix, his 23-year-old son, pbaded away. cancer – pain has determined Lanzmann's last life. Francois Hollande called him "friend of humanity" in 2014 on the occasion of the presentation of the National Order of Merit Lanzmann did not like: "I'm not not a friend of humanity, "he said in a conversation," on the contrary, people.When I see people, I see murderers. "

(" Die Presse ", print edition, 06.07 .2018)

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