Jean Amery, in his essay, On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew, writes “On my left forearm I wear the
Through the perversion of everyday symbols, acts and traditions, the Jewish population of Europe, began in 1935, to be identified as abstractions, numbers, bills of lading, cargo and chattel transported at their own expense across borders and into what became known simply as “the final solution.” But, before this final solution was possible the Jew had to be debased and removed from popular culture, from society by being denied his dignity and right to live. In this final bedraggled state a solution could be had that seemed fitting to the state of being that Jews had been reduced too. Now, sixty years later, we are left with varying degrees of images to remind us of the facts. Stories in their multitudes, more forgotten than remembered are recorded and transformed into film and narrative as a means of commemorating and meditating on a brutal chapter in human history.
Amery describes striking a Kapo in the face as an act of dignity even though he was beaten severely for this brief and ultimately fruitless act of resistance. Dignity is at the heart of Sydney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. Nazerman claims he has come to terms with the holocaust because he doesn’t care about nostalgia, he doesn’t believe in pity and ultimately is incapable of extending dignity to other people. Those that come into his pawnshop are greeted with nothing more than base courtesy. People respect the pawnbroker but hate him for his mercantile prowess as he lords over them a single dollar for their possessions. It’s impossible to speak to Nazerman because he has become an exclusive being, a problem, exteriorized by the numbers on his forearm, and thus ultimately incapable of meaningful human connections.
Nazerman’s inability to recognize “other” than himself, to extend a human courtesy could be viewed as a direct result of his experience in the camps where images are wounds that don’t heal according to Insdorf[3]. When forced to bear witness to horror, Nazerman chooses to ignore humanity as it is both the source and victim of that horror; as dehumanized as Nazerman is in the camps, it’s the human master that reduces him to a state of inhumanity and forces him to bear witness to his own wife’s brutal rape and eventual murder. To “see”, to have those visions that are like wounds, is also a state of absolute powerlessness; it’s the inability to act in a fashion that would salvage one’s dignity as in Amery’s case, but more accurately it is a state of being an object[4], inanimate in the sense that death is the only form of salvation and inevitable conclusion.
In 1844 Karl Marx wrote his essay, Estranged Labor, to identify, philosophically, the problem faced by the worker. Marx spoke of an objectification that happens when the product of labor becomes more valuable than the act of labor; a worker’s labor becomes a commodity when the product of that labor is no longer owned by the worker. Labor’s only means is a means to a ‘subsistence end’ and has no value in the act of ‘working’. Thus the individual that performs that labor is ultimately unable to claim the act and begins a long line of dissociations that make it impossible for the worker to recognize “other” than himself, through a loss of language, identity and finally a kind of psychological recognition of ‘other’ people. Nazerman’s objectification, a catalogue number on his arm, which has closed him off from other people, from humanity, a dissociation and inability to understand that his (in)actions are capable of causing the same harm that befell him from a lack of recognizing “other”. His flashbacks begin to haunt him as witness mutates into a kind of constant reliving of historical reality.
The further reality of this dissociation is based on Marx’s concept of the ‘laws of political economy’[5] which posits an inverse relationship between the worker and the object of his labor, or the labor object. As Nazerman accumulates ever greater value, he is devalued himself as he is beholden to Rodriguez thereby denying any real ownership of that wealth. Nazerman is ever the courier of blood money and eventually, his conscience gets the better of him. Every object in his pawnshop is labor objectified, dissociated from the memory of that object and the person who retains that memory. Every offer made to Nazerman, of something to be pawned, is accompanied by a personal experience that is checked at the bars inside the pawnshop.
The world of the pawnshop is as much a cage and prison as was the camp with its bars that hold back the teaming masses of people that remind Nazerman that other people did him an injustice and denied him both his dignity and forced upon him images that robbed him of his humanity. The pawnshop’s bars are the middle-man of the transactions where Nazerman gives out as little as he can for customer’s memories, for their effects and human tropes, it’s a speech grill through which all human dialogue becomes impossible:
SPRACHGITTER
Augenrund zwischen den Stäben.
Flimmertier Lid rudert nach oben, gibt einen Blick frei.
Iris, Schwimmerin, traumlos und trüb: der Himmel, herzgrau, muß nah sein.
Schräg, in der eisernen Tülle, der blakende Span. Am Lichtsinn errätst du die Seele.
(Wär ich wie du. Wärst du wie ich. Standen wir nicht unter einem Passat? Wir sind Fremde.)
Die Fliesen. Darauf, dicht beieinander, die beiden herzgrauen Lachen: zwei Mundvoll Schweigen.
-Paul Celan (1959)
Eye's roundness between the bars.
Vibrarile monad eyelid propels itself upward, releases a glance.
Iris, swimmer, dreamless and dreary: the sky, heart-grey, must be near.
Athwart, in the iron holder, the smoking splinter. By its sense of light you divine the soul.
(If I were like you. If you were like me. Did we not stand under one trade wind? We are strangers.)
The flagstones. On them, close to each other, the two heart-grey puddles: two mouths full of silence.
-Paul Celan (1959)
Celan’s poem echoes what Nazerman himself would claim he has become, a mouthful of silence, content within himself, and yet reflective. A puddle has the potential for reflection, so the question has to be asked, what is being reflected if not that which has made him silent: the shear inability to convey the horror. He claims that “bitterness has passed him by” and that he is content with simply being. This passive vessel of suppressed memories acts as a reflection for the ghosts and the collection of random objects in his shop that remind him at every step and turn, consciously or not, that he too is a bill of lading, tagged and shelved, inside and out.
However, Nazerman’s lack of humanity doesn’t begin with the number on his forearm, rather you get a sense that it’s much older than the experiences he had in the camps. The first dissociation occurs thousands of years ago and is a byproduct of what Nazerman refers to as the bearded legend in his speech to Ortiz:
“First of all you start off with a period of several thousand years, during which you have nothing to sustain you but a great bearded legend. Oh my friend you have no land to call your own, to grow food on or to hunt. You have nothing. You're never in one place long enough to have a geography or an army or a land myth. All you have is a little brain. A little brain and a great bearded legend to sustain you and convince you that you are special, even in poverty.”
The concept of God as a bearded legend, distant and abstract, is the beginning of a process of dissociation that makes it impossible for the Jew, and ultimately Nazerman, to feel beyond himself. His emotion stops at the gate of the numbers on his forearm. To further confound the problem, without an afterlife built into the covenant with God, the Jew has nothing but the fact that death is the end; the promise of a land of milk and honey and a good life here on Earth is the only established pay off to follow the 613 rules of a good Jew’s life. Paz notes that Death defines life and that we don’t transform or transfigure as in western doctrines of Christianity, but rather we disappear; thus, if our deaths lack meaning so do our lives[6]. Confronted with so much senseless death, and a legend filled with empty promises, the shell of the self becomes the only place where meaning can be created.
In reducing God to a bearded legend, an abstract with a goatee, Nazerman has effectively transferred any belief he had into idolatry: “Then, Mr. Teacher, aint there nothing you do believe in?” asks Ortiz to which Nazerman replies: “Money.” Salvation is found in the proclamation of “In God We Trust” emblazoned on every dollar bill. For Nazerman, this salvation, this reality, holds true that he can enjoy a sterile and servile life beholden to Rodriguez through an agreement that so long as money flows, then there is peace on Earth. Yet consider the rich that went to the furnaces of
Lumet’s near charicature of Nazerman, a usurer, a heartless pawnbroker, victim turned victimizer doesn’t evoke sympathy easily. It’s difficult to truly feel sympathetic toward someone who hasn’t learned from the experience and hasn’t walked away with an appreciation for humanity above and beyond the fact that people are other living creatures. Simultaneously, it’s nearly impossible to hate Nazerman or scorn him for his inhumanity because he is ultimately brought back from believing that suffering didn’t exist outside of
It’s exactly a warning, from Rodriguez, that sends Nazerman into a tail spin that ends with a betrayal by Ortiz that backfires and ends up killing him. The only option at this point is to feel something, and so Nazerman impales himself in the final scenes of the film, turning his body into both a human check and assuming the role of an impotent man, unable to create life, nor save it, and according to Insdorff, a broken pawn[8]. To Insdorff’s point of the inheritance of the Nazis concept, self mutilation, a wound that never closes, Amery would say that this wound is the result of “the Jewish question”, historically and socially determined conceptual phenomena as a matter for the disgrace of the antisemites as their disgrace[9].
Ortiz’s death reminds Nazerman how fleeting life can be, and even a silent wail is important, a shriek to better understand why the Jews were sacrificed by fire. The term holocaust is the first stage of dissociation, on the tongue, in the mouth, when discussing genocide. If it is through images that we have come to terms with the unsettling facts that comprise the catastrophe of those war torn years, then it is in language that we falter by using a term that intones something of a religious quality to what is the destruction of a people. To whom, is the Jew sacrificed? What cause is furthered by the sacrifice? Is the Jewish Question answered by fire? It would seem, through Lanzmann’s documentary, that no answer suffices, but rather one must understand the roles and personalities that kept the wheels turning, the trains running, the ovens cooking.
Shoah illuminates three categories of witness: those that suffered, those that stood by and those that committed the crimes of genocide. The bystanders are inculpated into the crime by doing nothing, and more importantly, feeling nothing. This method of tackling the fact of the event, examines the function or role of each separate part of what was a very large bureaucracy surrounding the Nazis machine. This is not murder, nor is this genocide in the frenzied sense of the Hutus slaughtering the Tutsis. Participation isn’t simply defined by those that wielded machetes but everyone surrounding the system that worked like business. The veneer of engineering and punctuality, as is the myth surrounding German trains being on time, is broken open to show the foulness of the task at hand. You walk away with a sense that nothing of this order could be clean, and no one comes out clean for dipping his hands into that well.
If the misunderstandings surrounding the holocaust begin, like the new testament, in the beginning was a word, then they end in the final scenes of Alain Renais and Jean Cayrol’s, Night & Fog: who is responsible? That question was asked before the film was made of the perpetrators in Nuremburg. It was asked once more but in the context of how do you talk about something that begins as a misnomer? Every generation has had to face catastrophe and give it new meaning through various art forms. In the cinematic age, the options are almost never ending in terms of how to create a narrative, which story to choose, it’s a limitless pool now.
Ten years passed before Night & Fog was made, before cinema was given the right to deal with a wound still open, and gaping considering what happened in 1948 with the creation of the Israeli state and the conflict surrounding its genesis. Since then, technology and the speed of information has overwhelmed us. There is a film ready a week after the disaster. We are approaching an age where we won’t need actors anymore, only their voices. The fresh wounds of September 11th, 2001 are still open and festering while
There will always be questions and concerns surrounding how we remember this event, or the next catastrophe for that matter, and how it shapes our memory of prior events. Thankfully we have film to remind us as a kind of malleable and artistic conscience. The same concerns of how do we go about ‘remembering’ what happened and what representations of that memory might mean to society, are as important today as they were in 1955. We’ve had numerous documentaries and theories that recount the blunders, the missteps, a made for TV movie, and now, a
[1] Amery, Jean, At The Mind’s Limits, Indiana University Press,
[2] From Paul Celan’s Der Totes Fuge (Death Dance) …Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland…
[3] Insdorf, Annette, Indelible Shadows: Film & The Holocaust, Pgs. 28-30. “When Nazerman refuses to look a soldier pushes his bald head through the glass forcing him to see. In this film, one pays a price for vision: images are wounds that will not heal.”
[4] Paz, Octavio, The Labrynth of Solitude, Grove Press, New York, NY, 1985 – “Modern criminals and statesmen do not kill: they abolish. They experiment with beings who have lost their human qualities. Prisoners in the concentration camps are first degraded, changed into mere objects; then they are exterminated en masse.”
[5] online source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm:
(The estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed according to the laws of political economy in the following way:
1. the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume;
2. the more value he creates, the more worthless he becomes;
3. the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker;
4. the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker;
5. the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker;
6. the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes a slave of nature.)
[6] Paz, Octavio, The Labrynth of Solitude, Grove Press, New York, NY, 1985 – “Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living. The whole motley confusion of acts, commissions, regress and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation but an end. Death defines life; a death depicts a life in immutable forms; we do not change except to disappear. Our deaths illuminate our lives. If our deaths lack meaning, our lives also lacked it.”
[7] Mehmedinovic, Semezdin, Sarajevo Blues, City Lights Press San Francisc, CA, 1998 – From the poem Corpse: “…I heard the crunch of snow under tires / like teeth biting into an apple / and felt the wild desire to laugh / at you / because you call this place hell / and you fele from here convinced / that death outside Sarajevo does not exist …”
[8] Insdorf, Annette, Indelible Shadows: Film & The Holocaust, Pgs. 31.
[9] Amery, Jean, At The Mind’s Limits, Indiana University Press,
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