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The Holocaust essayist: the director of "Shoah" Claude Lanzmann died
VIENNA. French director Claude Lanzmann is dead
Claude Lanzmann Image: Reuters
For Claude Lanzmann, viewing the past has always been the goal of his work. With the documentary test "Shoah", in which he traced a characteristic of the Holocaust for nine hours to the old horror sites with eyewitnesses, but without any archive material, he has created one of the defining works of the National Socialist journal. Thursday, Lanzmann died in Paris at the age of 92 years.
Lanzmann was always a bearded fighter, a filmmaker considered stubborn, ironic and uncompromising. And it is precisely these features that made possible the "Shoah" masterpiece. For twelve years, Lanzmann worked on one of the most radical films about the extermination of European Jews under National Socialism. Victims and executioners have their say in this silent essay, working without overwhelming images, without ever questioning the position of the filmmaker.
Already in "Warum Israel", his first 1972 film, Lanzmann showed the state need, before working in "Sobibor" the uprising in the same camp extermination of the Nazis. In 2013, at the Cannes Film Festival, he presents a book entitled "The Last of the Unjust", in which he combines lengthy interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council of Theresienstadt, to plead his rehabilitation. The rabbi, who has died today, has been accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Here too, the search for truth was the guide to Lanzmann's work
. With "Napalm" in 2017, he moved to Cannes to focus on the Korean War (1950-1953) in which American airmen dropped large quantities of napalm. In the film, for which he traveled to the dictatorial country under communist leadership in 2004 and 2015, he recalls nurse Kim Kum-sun, whom he had immortalized during his residency of several weeks in 1958.
Lanzmann was born on November 27, 1925 in Greater Paris, son of a family of Jewish origin. From his adolescence, he was involved in the movement of young communists in France and, with his brother and sister as a student in the Resistance, the French resistance movement against the Vichy regime collaborator. However, his experiences with anti-Semitism did not prevent him from going to Germany after the war to study philosophy there. At the Free University of Berlin, Lanzmann also worked as a lecturer.
As a journalist, he traveled to China and Korea and participated in the war against Algeria. In 1960, he was alongside Simone de Beauvoir, Alain Resnais, Françoise Sagan and Simone Signoret, one of the first signatories of the famous "Manifesto of 121" against the war in Algeria . For that, he had to go to jail with a few other supporters for a short time. He then intensified his journalistic work against violence.
His journalistic work was always philosophically underpinned, as Lanzmann was friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and had a seven-year relationship with writer and feminist Simone de Beauvoir. And also the essayist of the film worked as an author, by which his life was the main objective, as evidenced by the volume of the memoir "The Patagonian Rabbit" of 2009.
his 90th birthday in 2015 appeared "The Divine Diver's Tomb" in German, whose title refers to the Greek tombs discovered in 1968 in the ruins of Paestum near Naples, which show a naked man jumping into the sea. "All decisions important that I had to take were like dives, dives in the void, "explains Lanzmann in his preface to the choice of title. In the "Diver" Lanzmann illuminated his life as a "writer", as he was calling at that time. After all, Lanzmann has long worked as a journalist for various media, including the magazine "Les Temps Moderne" founded by Sartre.
The honors for Lanzmann were many at the end. For "Shoah" he received the Grimme Prize in 1987, in 2011 he became Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and in 2013 the Berlinale awarded the filmmaker Honorary Bear Goldeneye for his work of all his life
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