Obituary for Claude Lanzmann: "I love life like crazy"

When Claude Lanzmann received the Golden Bear for his work at the Berlinale in February 2013, he congratulated the jurors for choosing his film "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 pm" for the ceremony . That, said Lanzmann, was a "smart and brave" choice. Because in this film, the Jews killed Germans, and to show something on this occasion, witnesses of "fair play and panache" – fair play and momentum.

Focusing on: resistance to the use of life. One of the "Sobibor" witnesses, Yehuda Lerner, who killed an SS man with an ax at sixteen – the beginning of Sobibor's uprising – felt close to Lanzmann. The distance that was otherwise so necessary for him to persuade the survivors in his monumental work "Shoah" to accurately describe the industrialized murders, these two protective distances almost disappeared in a conversation with Lerner.

Atemlos und jumpy

Lanzmann, born in 1925 in Paris, son of a Jewish badimilated family, was barely eighteen when he joined a resistance group of communist students at Clermont-Ferrand High School. . He distributed leaflets and completed shooting exercises in the basement of the school. The spies of the Gestapo escaped with false papers in occupied France. After the war, Claude Lanzmann spent two years in Berlin as a lecturer at the newly founded Freie Universität in what was then West Berlin. At the request of the students, he held an anti-Semitism seminar that displeased the university leadership. An article published by Claude Lanzmann in the Berliner Zeitung in the early 1950s about FU's grievances provoked a scandal.

In his pbadionate life story "The Patagonian Rabbit" reads the episode of Berlin as well as Lanzmann's youth as a chapter of an adventure novel, breathless and leaps and bounds. As for his involvement in the Resistance, Lanzmann is amazed at his former arrogance, which he believes is more due to ignorance than sacrifice. "The question of courage and cowardice is the thread running through this book and my life," writes Claude Lanzmann. And only a few pages before the explanation of his deep conflict can be found: "The reader will realize that I love life almost crazy even now, since the farewell of him is near."

An "Unmanageable" Movie "

Anyone who loves life can he really become a hero? Is it even desirable? His love for life has been poisoned by the fear of behaving cowardly under torture, says Lanzmann in his autobiography.He did not have to go through this repetition.His courage, however, shows in the fundamental work of 1985, that he has forever enrolled in the world. human history "Shoah", an "unmanageable film", as Lanzmann said.For twelve years, he worked on the film, determined to become independent of all those who aspired to images, images of death camps, which were meant to illustrate the truth of the voices that Lanzmann made talk about.And they would have destroyed.For the really overwhelming, unmanageable strength of this film is also due to the absence of such images

For nine hours Lanzmann envisioned death, the art of killing. not deportation, concentration camps and survival but death. Those who report it have reached the last threshold, as slaves of the Sonderkommando. Forced to take the dead out of the gas chambers, burn the bodies, remove the traces, until they too were murdered. "Returning", Lanzmann called the witnesses in front of the gas chambers. Like the barber Abraham Bomba, who cut women's hair before she was murdered. Like Simon Srebnik, the boy who was to sing songs of soldiers on a Polish river for the sake of the SS.

"Here is not why"

"Places, voices, faces", writes Simone de Beauvoir. She was the first to consider "Shoah" as a work of art, despite all the skepticism about the term she used as "poetic construction". How Lanzmann found these faces, how he brought people to expose his questions, maybe he did not know each other. But he knew exactly why he did it: It appears as a quote from Isaiah's book, chapter 56, verse 5, at the beginning of his movie: "I want to give them an eternal name, which should not not disappear. "

In his essay "Here is no why", Claude Lanzmann explains lucidly why the question of the reason for the murder of European Jews is such a perfidy . "In fact, there is an incredible obscenity to try to understand. (…) To face the terror, it is necessary to give up any form of distraction, espionage and especially, and above all, to the central question, but erroneous, to know why, with all the endless academic frivolities and lousy tricks they make

Whenever it was his time

"Shoah" not only replaced the term Often used as a "Holocaust", the nine-hour film has become the norm for all Holocaust documentaries, and even decades after the German premiere at the Forum der Berlinale, nothing about this film is related to its time of day. The present and the past infiltrate each other in the images of Polish villages and landscapes, the voices of the authors, the victims and the spectators.Lanzmann followed the historian Raul Hilberg, whose the sobriety and renunciation of Emphase could become a mod for the interrogation of Lanzmann. In subsequent films, he distanced himself from it – "IDF", a documentary on the Israeli army, made a clear stand for the militarization of Israel.

Lanzmann was disputed with Sartre over the Middle East conflict that it would have shaken the lifelong friendship between the philosopher and Lanzmann. Even the seven-year love affair between Simone de Beauvoir and 17-year-old Lanzmann, originally a journalist, could not hurt the agreement between all concerned. A great gift for friendship is talking about Lanzmann's book, an expression of this "crazy love of life" that he has kept in all ages. He was doing all the time in his time, not by denying aging, but simply ignoring the time spent working on his films.

Reviving, Not Remembering

In recent years, Lanzmann has finished particularly movies that have eaten conversations that he had not used in "Shoah". Like the film about Benjamin Murmelstein, the controversial former Jews of Theresienstadt. Under the title "The Last of the Unjust", in January 2018 Arte broadcast a film by Claude Lanzmann – "Four Sisters". He kept his principle of dispensing any illustration with archive images thirty years later. The voices of the sisters speak of extreme violence and cruelty, torn between torment to recall the unspeakable and the need to testify.

Ruth Elias, one of the sisters, became a subject of experimentation by concentration camp doctors, one of them was Josef Mengele. Her baby was not allowed to badfeed, the doctors wanted to know how long a baby survived without food. Later, he said to those who asked Claude Lanzmann: "To tell what they had seen and experienced, people had to pay the highest price: relive – relive. Live again – and do not remember. It's the price of truth. And I wanted to probe this truth and transmit it. "

Claude Lanzmann died in Paris on Thursday at the age of 92.