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Claude Lanzmann died yesterday. He for whom "a hundred lives would not tire him" lived his own. In 2009, he delivered his memoirs. The Patagonian Hare was the product of a life embodied by the animal, sometimes agile, fast and leaping to escape the barbed wire of Auschwitz, sometimes rogue to play with life under the wheels of the car of Lanzmann on the Argentine roads of El Calafate
The death of Lanzmann returns the historian and the teacher to his inheritance. Lanzmann was not a training historian but a philosopher. His legacy through the monumentality of his works has transformed the way to glimpse history.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet recalled during a conference in the Sorbonne in 1992 that three works had better than any other historian production allowed to apprehend the genocide: that of Primo Levi, Raul Hilberg (political scientist) and his. Attracted by the wrath of his peers, Vidal-Naquet had nevertheless understood the importance of the Lanzmannian heritage: that of the necessary interdisciplinarity in the apprehension of the human and social sciences.
Lanzmann was a visionary during his contemplative approaches , from his shots of Birkenau birch fields where the emptiness of nature makes us forget the inhumanity, where the song of the birds makes the cries evaporate.
Now, the place is the same, in a temporality different. Lanzmann was able to remind us that history was not fixed in a dusty straitjacket where the historian handles the archive without putting it in perspective, without contextualization.
He was also a visionary in his report to the archive. In a time marked by the memory of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog where the archive was confined to the clumsy role of illustration, Shoah by Lanzmann is disembodied from archives, participating the liberation of the Jewish word and making the testimony a leading source for the historian. Heritage was also valuable in the apprehension of objects of study.
For a long time synonymous with "memorial badgraphy" – to use his own words – the study of the executioners he forged to popularize by the interview of the SS of Treblinka Franz Suchomel in particular, has today become an historical genre (The Täterforschung or "study of the executioners", have established themselves as a dynamic part of the historiography of Nazism and the Shoah since the mid-1990s. 1990s)
Lanzmann is also a name in history textbooks. The redesign of the National Education programs of October 2011 placed the writer-director at the forefront of the baccalaureate.
In a chronology going from the first days of resistance to the present day, the pupils of the General Terminals clbades are studying the role of the historian and memories of the Second World War, alongside Robert Paxton as Claude Lanzmann, became the time of a similar educational sequence, despite a diametrically different methodological approach. Whatever. The teacher is there to think in terms of breaks and permanences, and for the paradox facing meaning.
Vidal-Naquet was not mistaken, nor the educational institution. Lanzmann's work is such that it constitutes one of those ruptures necessary to the making of history. Two years before the Barbie trial and the participation of Jewish witnesses at the helm, Shoah propelled into French mentalities the global and systematic character of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, raising the compromises and the participations active. In a France sore by the memory of Sorrow and pity during the previous decade, Lanzmann pursued the distillate in the opinion of the awakening of the unspeakable.
Yesterday, the hare s is transformed into a cat, the one with seven lives. Lanzmann lived one. Historians and teachers must now live others, and perpetuate the work undertaken. There is no duty here of memory but the evidence of that one. As the written archive is subject to the vagaries of time, memory and orality come up against the loss of interest and the relaxation of vigilance.
Historians and teachers are dependent on this heritage for the sake of perpetual transmission
The acuity of the cat and its intense vision, its sharp claws and its ability to resist falls, all characteristics of Lanzmann that now feed the rhizomes of historical knowledge. To us, from now on, to make ours this legacy and to make it fruitful. It is at this price that future lives will derive from the mortal experience of barbarism and the tragedy of history the guarantee of a salutary existence. In Patagonia as elsewhere
See also The HuffPost :
Also read:
• "'Shoah' by Lanzmann has had a tremendous impression on me, to the point to inspire me a book "
•" We all have a debt to Claude Lanzmann, and to his brothers and sisters witnesses, survivors "
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