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At a certain moment, there are only empty gestures: the grip on the fabric, with which he wipes the sweat of his head and with which he wants to repel the tears in vain. Until he can no longer, he finally takes the scissors from his hairdresser's head – and we are on the way to remembrance at the zero point of humanity. In a film scene that burned everyone who saw the monumental work "Shoah" – a work in which the question of how this "could" occur.
"That" was Claude Lanzmann's life theme: The visualization of the murder of a million Jews, whom Lanzmann attempted to capture in his nine-hour film "Shoah" (1985). Alone with the help of contemporary witnesses, that is to say without any archive image of the concentration camp. One of Lanzmann's witnesses was the hairdresser Abraham Bomba, who, in accentuated English, recounts in an indelible way that he had to cut his hair in the Treblinka extermination camp: women and children who had to before undressing, that is to say naked in front of hairdressers
Liaison with Simone de Beauvoir
"You must tell us, we must do it", says Lanzmann in "Shoah" again and again in Bomba, so that he can hear What he actually said after several breaks: How other hairdressers on their way to the Gastod had met their children and their wives , had to cut their hair – and could not tell them that they would never see each other again.
Lanzmann himself was a grandchild of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, born in Paris and born in 1925, child of the Resistance: Young member of the Kommu During the After occupation, he took up arms in suitcases at railway stations. Under the eyes of the men of the Gestapo, as he says later. His deep disgust for the Germans, to whom he later accused collective guilt, was clearly explained to Lanzmann in Tübingen, where he studied philosophy after the war. Later also in Berlin, where he organized a seminar on anti-Semitism soon banned by the French military government at the Free University in 1949.
His life project: presenting the horrors of the Holocaust without violating the memory of the dead. [19659002] Lanzmann led the life of a devoted intellectual. After his return from Germany, he quickly became a star reporter, who spoke of the great scenes in France with debates in "The World", reports on his trip to North Korea in 1958 and his long-standing commitment against the war of Algeria. At that time, Lanzmann fueled self-confidence, which makes him an unshakable fighter. It was reinforced in particular by the relationship with the greatest French intellectuals of the time: with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with whom he edited the intellectual organ "Les Temps Modernes" and with which he also has private. For seven years, from 1952 to 1959, de Beauvoir and Lanzmann had a relationship which, according to him, was very intense – "intellectually as well as physically". On the fact that he had had sex with Sartre's wife, Lanzmann, even in the last years of her life, she still had great value.
The film "Shoah" (1985) by Claude Lanzmann. Video: Youtube / DaDarvid
An important step towards "Shoah" and the development of journalist's writing to filmmaker for Lanzmann was the confrontation with the state of Israel, which him by his affair with the living writer Angelika Schrobsdorff and to whom he dedicated his first documentary, Why Israel (1973). On Lanzmann, who came from a family in which the mother called religion a "monkey theater," Israel appeared "immediately fraternal and alien" – an attitude that he also transferred to his Israeli film, in which he "always inside" and out "stayed. In the twelve years after "Why Israel" arose "Shoah". In the autobiography "The Patagonian Rabbit" of 2009, which is not the fertility animal in the title, Lanzmann admitted that he was obsessed with carrying out the work. ;Holocaust. "Something very strong, almost irresistible" had made him do this movie.
With "Shoah" not only world fame came to Lanzmann. He also invented the memory of the post-war generation on the extermination of the Jews. And he became a priest of the ban on images: in order to attract the Holocaust out of respect for a "circle of flames" that no fiction should go beyond. Show how it could have meant that it could have been different. The illustration of its own variant, however, comes down to what is still reasonable for the public – and then the brutality of trivialization and presumption begin to portray the unimaginable.
Words of Anger Severus
The offer of revenge was directed against Steven Spielberg's Schindler List. Claude Lanzmann was by no means the only critic of the drama about some survivors, where the Holocaust concerns destruction – said the Jewish writer Imre Kertész. But Lanzmann's words were biting and of a severe anger. In 1965, he produced "Shoah" shooting pictures that he had not used, but which he had never got rid of. There were conversations that he had held in 1975 with Viennese Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Judenrat of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In "The Last of the Unjust", Lanzmann again relied on testimony through speech. Has he rehabilitated a participant in the extermination of the Jews? Murmelstein speaks in a differentiated way of how, as an "elder Jew," he tried to preserve a trace of morality in immorality. And how he nevertheless took part in the Nazi show, to stage the Theresienstadt concentration camp as a well-managed "model ghetto" and how he was reprimanded for being a coward, among others by Hannah Arendt
Lanzmann leaves to talk to Murmelstein without him. He asks and shows himself often in the film. Even if he pushed himself again and again before the discussion on the morality of images. In 2015, he will participate in the premiere of "Son of Saul" at the Cannes Film Festival. In his drama, the Hungarian László Nemes staged the cleaning of a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau in a way so close to life that the question of whether one is allowed to do so is immediately back in the room. Lanzmann was there and said: You are allowed to. To the general astonishment, he called the film "The Anti-Schindler List".
He gave a fiction to the blessing that keeps the memory in horror as it does not capture it in pictures. Because they do not show what you can not show: how people are gassed. Presenting the horror of the Holocaust without hurting the memory of the dead: it was also Claude Lanzmann's life project. He died in Paris at the age of 92 years.
(Tages-Anzeiger)
created: 05.07.2018, 19:27
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