To better understand the effect of “Todesfuge” “Deathfugue” on the Margarete and Sulamith paintings of Anselm Kiefer, Bonnie Roos in her article, “Anselm Kiefer and the Art of Allusion: Dialectics of the Early Margarete and Sulamith Paintings,” prepares an analysis of both women as alluded to in the poem and in the artwork. In exploring the archetypal role each plays in representing both the Holocaust and Romantic narratives leading up to the time of the National Socialists, Roos goes back into earlier literature to position both of them in terms of the symbolic valence that each carries.
Perhaps Sulamith is the easier of the two to understand in terms of the Romantic narrative in place before the Nazi era. Her status as an “earthly ideal” lies at the center of her choice by both Kiefer and Celan. Portrayed as a favorite wife of King Solomon in the Old Testament’s “Song of Songs,” Sulamith, according to Roos, is “typically viewed as a call to the purity and wonder of monogamous, sensual life, with the marriage of the two lovers representing—depending on the interpreter—differences in race, class, and/or religion overcome by means of a passionate, loving marriage.” After having a quarrel, the two lovers reconcile in a garden. Roos sees this historic imaging of Sulamith as a “Romantic investigation of the sublime.” Without a doubt, Celan shatters that context when he portrays Sulamith as a victim of the Holocaust. Other references also come to play in this portrayal of Sulamith. Roos points out the analysis Felstiner makes in his book on Celan that the name Sulamith references her as a Jewish woman who acts as the embodiment of a bridge, as "the loving and merciful means by which differences are overcome."
As a Romantic ideal, Margarete has an even more complicated imaging system to work through. In Goethe’s work Margarete portrays a woman seduced by Faust. In Goethe’s work, Margarete portrays a woman seduced by Faust. She is blonde and an archetypal German. Her love for Faust is tainted. According to Roos, “Margarete inadvertently kills her mother with a sleeping potion, is responsible for her brother's death while defending her (now dubious) honor, and is left pregnant and abandoned by Faust. As final testimony of her corruption, she drowns her own child.” As both victim and perpetrator, Margarete seems ideally located in the Romantic canon for use by Celan and later by Kiefer to take on the role of beloved to the soldier in “Todesfuge.” At the same time that he writes to her, he is capable of brutalizing and murdering Sulamith. Roos suggests that “the same Romantic dichotomies that allow for the fetishization and objectification of Margarete in some measure sanction[s] the dehumanization of prisoners.”
In the partnering of these two women who represent Romantic ideals, Roos asserts that Celan’s poem “blames German masculinity for the atrocities committed during the Holocaust.” She sees both Margarete and Sulamith as victims to the National Socialist agenda. Surely, it is worth noting that Kiefer keeps the two women separated in the art while working on both sets of paintings. Celan partners the two through repetitions of language even as he keeps each on her own separate line. In the case of both Celan and Kiefer the archetypes function inextricably together. The representation of one has little meaning without the other. They are linked, according to Roos, by their "inseparability and express sadness, rather than anger, at the devastation that such a pairing historically has meant to each."
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan
Recently I read a review of Andrea Lauterwein's book Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory by Kevin Hart that explores the relationship of Celan's poetry to the artworks of Anselm Kiefer. My plan here is to take a look at the reviewer's comments and combine them with my own thoughts about the the way the uncanny works as a bridge for the two artists. Into the mix, I'll add my choice of images as I sort out strategies used by both Kiefer and Celan to similar effect.
Clearly, Celan's poem "Todesfuge"/"Deathfugue" had a powerful effect on Kiefer. Beginning in 1980 and going for more than twenty-five years, the artist names canvas after canvas either Margarete or Sulamit or a variation of those names, referencing the two women from the poem. (I'd like to add a note here that the naming of the Shulamite works, whether in English or in German lacks consistency in my source materials. I'll reflect those variations in the blog.) Kiefer uses many of the metaphors and devices connected to the uncanny in connection with the Holocaust that we have looked at earlier in this blog: the use of silence or a sense of void in the paintings, a sense of being unhomed, of a disruption to perception or to the senses, and the juxtaposing of unlikely images and materials to create a feeling of danger and peril in the work.
The early paintings tend to quote the poem fairly literally. Kiefer lays the final line of the poem, "Dein aschenes Haar Sulamit," directly onto the canvas. That line, which in English translates as "Your ashen hair Shulamith," speaks to the beloved of King David, who also functions in the Bible's "Song of Songs" as a stand in for the Jewish people. The ashen hair, a clear reference to the Holocaust with its ovens, appears representationally in these first paintings, both from 1981--Sulamit, a woman with her long hair.
Sulamit 1983
Kiefer used as a model for this painting a photograph of a building by German architect Wilhelm Kreis who made work through various political eras in Germany, including the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Federal Republic. Kiefer subverts Kreis' Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers in the making of the above Shulamit painting. In a similar way to the shifts in meaning that take place in the Margarete paintings, the war memorial in the photo converts the nationalistic structure in the photograph below to a shrine or void or memory space for those who died in the Holocaust in the painting.
Architect Wilhelm Kreis's Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers
Clearly, Celan's poem "Todesfuge"/"Deathfugue" had a powerful effect on Kiefer. Beginning in 1980 and going for more than twenty-five years, the artist names canvas after canvas either Margarete or Sulamit or a variation of those names, referencing the two women from the poem. (I'd like to add a note here that the naming of the Shulamite works, whether in English or in German lacks consistency in my source materials. I'll reflect those variations in the blog.) Kiefer uses many of the metaphors and devices connected to the uncanny in connection with the Holocaust that we have looked at earlier in this blog: the use of silence or a sense of void in the paintings, a sense of being unhomed, of a disruption to perception or to the senses, and the juxtaposing of unlikely images and materials to create a feeling of danger and peril in the work.
The early paintings tend to quote the poem fairly literally. Kiefer lays the final line of the poem, "Dein aschenes Haar Sulamit," directly onto the canvas. That line, which in English translates as "Your ashen hair Shulamith," speaks to the beloved of King David, who also functions in the Bible's "Song of Songs" as a stand in for the Jewish people. The ashen hair, a clear reference to the Holocaust with its ovens, appears representationally in these first paintings, both from 1981--Sulamit, a woman with her long hair.
"Dein Aschenes Haar Sulamit," (1981)
oil on canvas, 51 by 67 inches
oil on canvas, 51 by 67 inches
Kevin Hart contends that in these harsh strokes Kiefer is "showing how the reality of the Shoah manifests itself to him" (50), that is, that the work itself becomes a manifestation of the Shoah, an aesthetic belief we see shared by all the artists we are considering in this blog. Part of the strategy in these works comes from the shifting of context, that is putting one context within another, which disrupts the original sense, as it were, "unhomes" it, a defining basis for the uncanny. Each iteration embodies the same sense of atrocity in varying media. Hart goes on to express the sense that "[t]ime and again Kiefer tells us that we cannot ever be 'at home' in the world, and that the desire to be 'at home' in a land, a language, and a history, is itself courting of danger" (51).
your golden hair Margareta," "Hart quotes Kiefer about his process. "My thought is vertical, and one of its planes was fascism. But I see all its layers. In my painting I tell stories in order to show what lies behind history. I make a hole and I go through" (46). In that hole and that going through, both Kiefer and Celan move into the uncanny to explore ways the Holocaust disrupts and destroys homeland and "unhomes" all concerned, not just victims, but perpetrators.
The quality of the uncanny we see as silence, void, or absence, manifests in Kiefer in certain of the Sulamith, paintings. As I noted in an earlier blog, the painting below has what might be seen as a reduced reference to Sulamith, her name relegated to a corner. The sense of void here, of empty space, is palpable. We see references to the ovens in the death camps, to crypts, to ash. The reviewer, Kevin Hart explains that "what was dark has become darker now. In terms of tonality, the silence of Kiefer's canvases is not that of a world momentarily lifted out of time but of a time after the screams of the dying can no longer be heard...The silence of the works is the silence of mourning" (47-48)
For over twenty-five years, Kiefer has created these artworks based on the poetry of Paul Celan. Below is a sculpture that in 1990 takes Shulamith as subject once again. Media have shifted from canvas to soldered lead, female hair, and ashes. By this point these images have become layers of detritus, sediment. The form, moving ever closer to Celan, is a book.
Shulamith, 1990.
Book made from soldered lead, with female hair and ashes
64 pages, 101 x 63 x 11 cm.
64 pages, 101 x 63 x 11 cm.
The themes all remain in place. Kiefer continues to reference the Holocaustal uncanny in Celan with its sense of disruption, of "unhoming," of silence and the void, of the creation of the thing itself, not a representation of atrocity. Kevin Hart describes this process of layering as the gathering of the detritus of human suffering that offers "the very feel of the sediments of our past...[that] rise to a sharp point in horror itself" (51).
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The Uncanny Jewish Museum Berlin
To understand a little about the nature of the Jewish Museum Berlin as a representation of the uncanny, it may be useful to look at the way that Daniel Libeskind uses the concept in his design. There are two ways into the notion of the uncanny that Libeskind uses architecturally as manifested in the E. T. A. Hoffman Garden of Exile and Emigration and in the Paul Celan Court.
The E.T.A. Hoffman Garden gains its name from a writer that Sigmund Freud discusses in his definitive essay on the uncanny. Here he explains the concept. “[T]he central factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness [is] intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it” (Young, Jewish Museum, 194).
E.T.A Hoffman Garden of Exile and Emigration
This garden bench shows the use of the uncanny perceptually.
This garden seems upside down with willow oak trees planted on top of the columns.
Celan Court
Celan Court. Windows as slashes of light also resemble glass shards from Kristallnacht. This courtyard capture the sense of absence of the Voids within the museum. At the same time, these windows replicate the lines of connection motif within the context of the uncanny.
Originally, in the design of Celan Court two stones were to be engraved with the words Tod and Meister reference Celan’s line in his poem “Todesfuge” or “Deathfugue.”Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
Death is a master of Germany
The entire poem works from a sense of the uncanny that Libeskind adopts for the museum. Throughout there is a sense of working through trauma, of moving through the shock itself.Inside the museum itself, we can see Libeskind’s development of architectural uncanny. He uses voids, slanted halls, claustrophobic spaces, and disorientation in general much the way that Celan does in his poetry. It is difficult for viewers to orient themselves, to find themselves, as it were, at home.
Eric Kligerman in his essay “Ghostly Demarcations: Translating Paul Celan’s Poetics into Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin explains that holocaust uncanny works in a different way from Freud’s uncanny. “Whereas for Freud it is the uncanny figure of the phantom that crosses the line between the living and the dead to approach the individual, this direction is reversed in the holocaustal uncanny: The artists lure the viewer into the space of the dead” (35). Kligerman goes on to discuss the ways that terror and estrangement result when this sense of the uncanny is brought into play and the viewer crosses into that alternative space.
Libeskind explains a little about this sense of the uncanny that he incorporates into his design. “I always remember the words of St. Augustine ‘Everyone is permanently leaving but some are leaving with their ankles and feet, and others are leaving with their hearts and souls’”(58).
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Libeskind on Trauma
When Daniel Libeskind was chosen as the architect for the Jüdisches Museum Berlin / Jewish Museum Berlin, he needed to reexamine his thoughts on the trauma that is the legacy of the Holocaust. In an essay from the book Image and Remembrance, edited by Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz, he discusses the ways he has approached his own depictions of trauma in various memorial spaces. For my purposes, I'll look at his comments on his various dilemmas in designing the addition to the Kollegienhaus, a former courthouse, built in the 18th century, to create a new museum dedicated to Jewish history in Berlin.
Libeskind describes some of his thoughts concerning the design and building of the museum, which opened in its new form in 2001. One of the most important questions for him involved ways to portray the changes based on absences in Berlin and in the world because of the Holocaust. Very few Jews were left in Berlin after the Holocaust. Yet, before the Nazi regime they had been active contributors to life and culture in the city. Libeskind decides to use architectural voids throughout the museum to explore that sense of physical and cultural absence that came from the deportations and exterminations. “The void embodies the literal annihilation of culture, the annihilation of the carriers of culture” (Libeskind 46).
To depict the presence of the Jews in pre-Nazi Berlin as social and intrinsic, he takes a look at lines of connections concerning Jews. Generally this comes about in a symbolic form. Libeskind uses what he considers an irrational star matrix as the shape of the addition to the older building. He bases this shape on complicated geometric formulas derived from street addresses and events through time “as one looks from one place to another, across [Berlin’s] housing projects, across historical events, across the empty sites of Berlin” (53). The intent of using the star shape is also to reference the yellow star Jews were forced to wear during the 3rd Reich. Libeskind explains, “Through the categories or dimensions of architectural thinking I drew the irrational star matrix that connected Germans, Berliners, and Jews across the absence of light…I took the complexity of this matrix as part of the light that comes into the museum, the light that cuts through the windows which are not regular windows, not just holes that bring light to the collection, but rather lights that fall from deep lines of intermarriage and lines of destiny which are irretrievable” (52-53).
Libeskind understands, as any artist does, that a work of art must be the thing, even more than to represent something. To enter into the space of trauma, the visitor to the museum must be in engaged with the trauma, “be in it” (45). Libeskind captures this sense of trauma by putting the visitor’s body and psyche into the trauma itself. He does that by disrupting perceptions. In the Garden of Exile, he tilts the plane on which people walk. No one can be sure of where to put their feet.
At the center of the design of the building there are three axes that cut through the spaces of the museum.
Holocaust Tower, window view
Holocaust Tower, floor level
The intent with all of these depictions of trauma is for the visitor to come to an understanding of the Holocaust that cannot be captured in a more typical memorial space. By causing a sense of trauma to the visitor, Libeskind helps extend the larger dialogue concerning the Holocaust and its effects. Instead of freezing the memorial space, he brings it alive. Each visitor interacts with the space and brings new meaning to that interaction.
In this blog entry I am discussing physical manifestations of trauma for the visitor. In another, I’ll explore Libeskind’s use of the uncanny as it affects the psychological and emotional states of the person exploring the museum.
Kollegienhaus
Libeskind describes some of his thoughts concerning the design and building of the museum, which opened in its new form in 2001. One of the most important questions for him involved ways to portray the changes based on absences in Berlin and in the world because of the Holocaust. Very few Jews were left in Berlin after the Holocaust. Yet, before the Nazi regime they had been active contributors to life and culture in the city. Libeskind decides to use architectural voids throughout the museum to explore that sense of physical and cultural absence that came from the deportations and exterminations. “The void embodies the literal annihilation of culture, the annihilation of the carriers of culture” (Libeskind 46).
One of the voids in the museum
To depict the presence of the Jews in pre-Nazi Berlin as social and intrinsic, he takes a look at lines of connections concerning Jews. Generally this comes about in a symbolic form. Libeskind uses what he considers an irrational star matrix as the shape of the addition to the older building. He bases this shape on complicated geometric formulas derived from street addresses and events through time “as one looks from one place to another, across [Berlin’s] housing projects, across historical events, across the empty sites of Berlin” (53). The intent of using the star shape is also to reference the yellow star Jews were forced to wear during the 3rd Reich. Libeskind explains, “Through the categories or dimensions of architectural thinking I drew the irrational star matrix that connected Germans, Berliners, and Jews across the absence of light…I took the complexity of this matrix as part of the light that comes into the museum, the light that cuts through the windows which are not regular windows, not just holes that bring light to the collection, but rather lights that fall from deep lines of intermarriage and lines of destiny which are irretrievable” (52-53).
Addition derived from star-shape
Light cutting through windows
Garden of Exile (exterior)
Garden of Exile from inside
At the center of the design of the building there are three axes that cut through the spaces of the museum.
One of the design axes
One of these leads to the Holocaust Tower, which is a space in the museum that dead ends. Within, there is a sense of claustrophobia, of peril, of being unable to connect with life outside the tower. Throughout, the architect creates a “state of instability, of disconnection/connection, of disorder/order will be understood intellectually and kinetically. I always remember the words of St. Augustine in The City of God: ‘Everyone is permanently leaving Babel, but some are leaving with their ankles and feet, and others are leaving with their hearts and souls’” (58).
The intent with all of these depictions of trauma is for the visitor to come to an understanding of the Holocaust that cannot be captured in a more typical memorial space. By causing a sense of trauma to the visitor, Libeskind helps extend the larger dialogue concerning the Holocaust and its effects. Instead of freezing the memorial space, he brings it alive. Each visitor interacts with the space and brings new meaning to that interaction.
In this blog entry I am discussing physical manifestations of trauma for the visitor. In another, I’ll explore Libeskind’s use of the uncanny as it affects the psychological and emotional states of the person exploring the museum.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
The Day I Didn’t Go to Dachau
Certain memories of this day are still clear to me. I remember the subway stairs in Munich where my first husband and my two children left me to head for Dachau. This stairway in my mind is wider than subways are in truth. At least double in width. And black. A gaping hole with no other people in the scene but my family disappearing into the dark. My son Russ says this is a false memory. He didn’t go to Dachau that day either he says. One thing I am sure of. He was 16 that morning in July. When I asked him recently where he went instead, he has no memories of Munich or Dachau. He wasn’t with me, I’m sure of that much.
My daughter Laurel had an obsession with the Holocaust. The only request she had about things to see on our trip in 1988 to Germany, both East and West, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Austria was to see a camp. Her chance came in Munich.
While we were in Budapest I had hurt my leg, torn ligaments in my ankle. I was in an old-fashioned plaster cast that covered my toe and went all the way up to my knee. Although I had found a cane to move around a little, the stairs in the subway were way beyond what I could do. So, everyone else went off to their day and I found a café near the subway. I remember drinking Weissbier, or white beer, or wheat beer, and white sausages called Weißwurst or Weisswurst or white sausage. I was alone and spent the day thinking of many things.
I imagine Dachau was on my mind. I had already seen the film Nuit et brouillard. It was easy enough to substitute the images of Auschwitz for Dachau. Mostly I picture grass and barbed wire and buildings off in the distance. There is always an unused train track in the picture.
All these images come back to me as I read Ruth Kluger’s survivor memoir, Still Alive. Why is there a need to maintain the camps she asks. Maybe I agree with her suspicion that Auschwitz is simply a “lucrative venture for nearby Cracow” (68). Could that be? Today, as I’m thinking about Holocaust memorials, I am immersed in Paul Celan’s uncanny and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. I think about their use of voids and silence. I think about Ruth Kluger’s calling forth of ghosts. “To conjure up the dead you have to dangle the bait of the present before them, the flesh of the living” (69).
That’s how it is for me with Dachau with my own timescape. I remember the great open maw of the subway. The quietness of my day. My immobility. My family disappearing. How the wind must be blowing across the ruin of the camp. The horrors I do not see but that are with me still all these years later. How alone I am. The way the juices of hot Weißwurst burst in my mouth. How Weißbier cools my throat. That I am alone, but steady enough. That my family, the four of us, will never again find ourselves together after that day. Not really.
My daughter Laurel had an obsession with the Holocaust. The only request she had about things to see on our trip in 1988 to Germany, both East and West, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Austria was to see a camp. Her chance came in Munich.
While we were in Budapest I had hurt my leg, torn ligaments in my ankle. I was in an old-fashioned plaster cast that covered my toe and went all the way up to my knee. Although I had found a cane to move around a little, the stairs in the subway were way beyond what I could do. So, everyone else went off to their day and I found a café near the subway. I remember drinking Weissbier, or white beer, or wheat beer, and white sausages called Weißwurst or Weisswurst or white sausage. I was alone and spent the day thinking of many things.
I imagine Dachau was on my mind. I had already seen the film Nuit et brouillard. It was easy enough to substitute the images of Auschwitz for Dachau. Mostly I picture grass and barbed wire and buildings off in the distance. There is always an unused train track in the picture.
All these images come back to me as I read Ruth Kluger’s survivor memoir, Still Alive. Why is there a need to maintain the camps she asks. Maybe I agree with her suspicion that Auschwitz is simply a “lucrative venture for nearby Cracow” (68). Could that be? Today, as I’m thinking about Holocaust memorials, I am immersed in Paul Celan’s uncanny and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. I think about their use of voids and silence. I think about Ruth Kluger’s calling forth of ghosts. “To conjure up the dead you have to dangle the bait of the present before them, the flesh of the living” (69).
That’s how it is for me with Dachau with my own timescape. I remember the great open maw of the subway. The quietness of my day. My immobility. My family disappearing. How the wind must be blowing across the ruin of the camp. The horrors I do not see but that are with me still all these years later. How alone I am. The way the juices of hot Weißwurst burst in my mouth. How Weißbier cools my throat. That I am alone, but steady enough. That my family, the four of us, will never again find ourselves together after that day. Not really.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Desperately Seeking Celan
Here’s my story for the week. First off, know my plan was to be multi-tasking, as I was trying to understand Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” and then ways Daniel Libeskind, the architect for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, channeled Celan in creating that building. My goal this week, I thought, seemed centered around the sense of “soul.” I could search out the “spirit” of the building. My task looked easy enough. I had Eric Kligerman’s article, “Ghostly Demarcations: Translating Paul Celan’s Poetics into Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin” in hand. “Todesfuge” is one of those poems I carry in my heart, so I set off to find the connections. First thing I did was write all over the printout of the essay. I mean, all over every page. It’s not that I don’t understand Kligerman as he connects Celan’s work to the voids and halls and lines of the museum. All of it comes together in a clear way for me. A central concept, that of the uncanny, that literary state of being “unhomed,” familiar and foreign and somehow alone, also resonated for me in a way that was, well, comfortable enough. I’ve read the uncanny poetry of Elizabeth Bishop for years. The place that Celan writes from is terrain I recognize. Sometimes I write from there myself.
At any rate, I realized I wasn’t nearly ready to write about the essay. Maybe, I thought to myself, the problem was the German that came from Celan’s speech as he accepted the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. I don’t have German, right? So to begin to sort out the article, I printed myself a copy of that speech. I read it and marked it up quite a bit, too. The problem was not a lack of understanding. What Celan says about art lines up in important ways with my own work and understanding about the making of art. The problem here is to force this material into some kind of logical mold. That will happen another day. Another day I’ll compress Kligerman’s article into a scholarly shape. Today I prefer to stay in the abyss, the human but uncanny world where Celan wrote and Libeskind designs. In my last semi-scholarly moment, I note that in the following I am not putting quotations into quotation marks.
Okay, so the first thing we need to do is breathe and travel the distance poetry must cover. This will be a search for liberation, for freeing ourselves while encountering the other. The way to do this is by allowing that poet-self to move into free fall, into the terrifying silence. There’s a feeling here that Celan does not quite explain, but has to do with the uncanny, in ways it hangs on the body. For me, it’s as if my human skin is electrical. It has to do with a certain kind of concentration along with a sense of danger. And being brave enough to stay in that state to record that territory, mindful, Celan might say. It has to do with being in the moment, one moment, always one moment, and paying attention. Attention is the natural prayer of the soul (Walter Benjamin, sorry, I slipped on my pledge.) In a while, we’ll do a breathturn. The poem has become a desperate conversation. The encounter, what the poem knows, what the poem needs. There is only one moment and only one place. The poem is still here.
I read to the end of the speech. I found what Celan that day had called “a meridian,” the imaginary line connecting pole to pole around the world. Because he and I had journeyed for a while on that map, in that realm, I came to that word, “meridian” and nearly cried. That’s how it is when the poem is of that world, of the experience itself, not a description. I felt in familiar territory, yet so nearly lost, with only one thin line, the meridian, to guide me. And I knew that would be enough.
At any rate, I realized I wasn’t nearly ready to write about the essay. Maybe, I thought to myself, the problem was the German that came from Celan’s speech as he accepted the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. I don’t have German, right? So to begin to sort out the article, I printed myself a copy of that speech. I read it and marked it up quite a bit, too. The problem was not a lack of understanding. What Celan says about art lines up in important ways with my own work and understanding about the making of art. The problem here is to force this material into some kind of logical mold. That will happen another day. Another day I’ll compress Kligerman’s article into a scholarly shape. Today I prefer to stay in the abyss, the human but uncanny world where Celan wrote and Libeskind designs. In my last semi-scholarly moment, I note that in the following I am not putting quotations into quotation marks.
Okay, so the first thing we need to do is breathe and travel the distance poetry must cover. This will be a search for liberation, for freeing ourselves while encountering the other. The way to do this is by allowing that poet-self to move into free fall, into the terrifying silence. There’s a feeling here that Celan does not quite explain, but has to do with the uncanny, in ways it hangs on the body. For me, it’s as if my human skin is electrical. It has to do with a certain kind of concentration along with a sense of danger. And being brave enough to stay in that state to record that territory, mindful, Celan might say. It has to do with being in the moment, one moment, always one moment, and paying attention. Attention is the natural prayer of the soul (Walter Benjamin, sorry, I slipped on my pledge.) In a while, we’ll do a breathturn. The poem has become a desperate conversation. The encounter, what the poem knows, what the poem needs. There is only one moment and only one place. The poem is still here.
I read to the end of the speech. I found what Celan that day had called “a meridian,” the imaginary line connecting pole to pole around the world. Because he and I had journeyed for a while on that map, in that realm, I came to that word, “meridian” and nearly cried. That’s how it is when the poem is of that world, of the experience itself, not a description. I felt in familiar territory, yet so nearly lost, with only one thin line, the meridian, to guide me. And I knew that would be enough.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Pulse Shadows
In exploring this song cycle that Sir Harrison Birtwistle based on the poems of Paul Celan, it may be useful to see ways the composer worked as a secondary witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. In the essay by Dora Apel that I looked at in an earlier blog, Michael Rothberg offers two mutually exclusive strategies for such a viewing. A realist view presumes the Holocaust is knowable and can be translated into a “familiar mimetic universe”; the antirealist analysis refuses any sense of knowability in terms of representation. We find a third strategy that Rothberg calls “traumatic realism,” which may help bridge the gap between the irreconcilable strategies, again by employing a sense of chronological time through the use of ordinary and extraordinary elements to retell the story while bringing into play “contemporary conditions of the telling.” Both Birtwistle and Celan work through these "contemporary conditions of the telling" by using a sense of the uncanny, that is, by disrupting the sense of realism for themselves and for their listeners or readers. These strategies appear over and over for us as techniques of witness whether as primary retellers who have experienced the horror or as secondary witnesses who come to such knowledge through other sources. These markers of the uncanny appear in all the medial forms I will examine in this blog. The short list includes a sense of obsessive repetition; an inability to find sure footing in a world gone wrong, that is, a sense of disorientation in an environment where the witness has become "unhomed"; a sense of fragmentation, and one of being lost in the void, in the abyss.
Pulse Shadows won a Gramophone Award for best contemporary album in 2002 in Great Britain
In exploring this song cycle that Sir Harrison Birtwistle based on the poems of Paul Celan, it may be useful to see ways the composer worked as a secondary witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. In the essay by Dora Apel that I looked at in an earlier blog, Michael Rothberg offers two mutually exclusive strategies for such a viewing. A realist view presumes the Holocaust is knowable and can be translated into a “familiar mimetic universe”; the antirealist analysis refuses any sense of knowability in terms of representation. We find a third strategy that Rothberg calls “traumatic realism,” which may help bridge the gap between the irreconcilable strategies, again by employing a sense of chronological time through the use of ordinary and extraordinary elements to retell the story while bringing into play “contemporary conditions of the telling.” Both Birtwistle and Celan work through these "contemporary conditions of the telling" by using a sense of the uncanny, that is, by disrupting the sense of realism for themselves and for their listeners or readers. These strategies appear over and over for us as techniques of witness whether as primary retellers who have experienced the horror or as secondary witnesses who come to such knowledge through other sources. These markers of the uncanny appear in all the medial forms I will examine in this blog. The short list includes a sense of obsessive repetition; an inability to find sure footing in a world gone wrong, that is, a sense of disorientation in an environment where the witness has become "unhomed"; a sense of fragmentation, and one of being lost in the void, in the abyss.
Music has often played an important role as inspiration and structure for Paul Celan in his poetry. His poem “Todesfuge” references the fugue as a compositional strategy. An early version of the same poem used the word tango in the title instead, “Death Tango.” Several musical composers reversed that inspiration and have worked with Celan’s poetry as basis for their own compositions. Sir Harrison Birtwistle, a modernist, once musical director of the Royal National Theatre in London
Birtwistle uses certain elements in his work to respond to Celan. He has his own versions of structural elements that the poet uses, a sense of cyclical ritual based on rhythm and pulse, of fragmentation, and an evocation of the void. Celan, of course, uses repetitions through out the poem “Todesfuge” to create an incantation of horror. Words repeat, phrases transform. In John Felstiner’s translation, “Black milk” intensifies into a drink of death. “We drink you at midday Death is a master.” Like Celan, Birtwistle uses certain subjects or motifs over and over. These motifs enter one section as brief mention and develop more fully as an inversion in a different section of the composition. Repetition comes with a fugue and anti-fugue sense according to Stephen Pruslin in the liner notes. In the “Todesfuge” section Birtwistle introduces two subjects. Pruslin sees the first of these becoming a “ghost subject” that seems to disappear after being featured only in the harmonics, in something of a “dance of death” (6).
Without going into the complex structure of the whole piece at this point, I can at least comment on the strategy of repeating certain subjects in one section and developing them further in another part of the composition. This sense of fragmentation, of the composition being “sliced,” as Pruslin says, creates a tension while also pressuring the cyclical vocabulary of the music. Perhaps, as Pruslin claims at the end of his essay, there is a sense in a “spirit true to Celan, [that there are] more songs, and more quartet-movements silently sounding." Certainly, we end Celan’s “Todesfuge” with its “Sulamith” vibrating into the void.
The use of this void speaks directly to Birtwistle as he follows Celan's lead into the void we associate in part with the Holocaustal uncanny. As reviewer Paul Griffiths says about the composer's expedition into that world, "Any encounter with Celan must have to do with death," a given which causes these songs to "come not from piling on the pressure but from looking somewhere else, to where the poet knew songs could be found." That somewhere else, which Griffiths speaks of in terms of "uncanny riddling," functions differently in terms of representation from other art forms we will look at, perhaps because the composer's entry point comes through in English translation. His first acquaintance with the poems is through Michael Hamburger's translation. As an act of representation, Birtwistle remains several steps removed from the memory functionally created by the poems. Language, nationality, and generation separate him from Celan's poetry of witness. Born in 1934 in rural Lancashire, England, he joined a military band as a child. His understanding of the poem and of the Holocaust comes as the world, undertook the task of understanding, not as German or Jew. Musically Birtwistle moves into Celan's world as a secondary witness. Nevertheless, the uncanny that works through the the composer's atonal phrasings leads him to a place in which the review sees that "Sir Harrison is at once at home and a stranger, on a shore--the poem's shore--where what is anciently familiar is the same as what has just been washed new by the last wave."
The use of this void speaks directly to Birtwistle as he follows Celan's lead into the void we associate in part with the Holocaustal uncanny. As reviewer Paul Griffiths says about the composer's expedition into that world, "Any encounter with Celan must have to do with death," a given which causes these songs to "come not from piling on the pressure but from looking somewhere else, to where the poet knew songs could be found." That somewhere else, which Griffiths speaks of in terms of "uncanny riddling," functions differently in terms of representation from other art forms we will look at, perhaps because the composer's entry point comes through in English translation. His first acquaintance with the poems is through Michael Hamburger's translation. As an act of representation, Birtwistle remains several steps removed from the memory functionally created by the poems. Language, nationality, and generation separate him from Celan's poetry of witness. Born in 1934 in rural Lancashire, England, he joined a military band as a child. His understanding of the poem and of the Holocaust comes as the world, undertook the task of understanding, not as German or Jew. Musically Birtwistle moves into Celan's world as a secondary witness. Nevertheless, the uncanny that works through the the composer's atonal phrasings leads him to a place in which the review sees that "Sir Harrison is at once at home and a stranger, on a shore--the poem's shore--where what is anciently familiar is the same as what has just been washed new by the last wave."
This sense of the uncanny, along with the repetitions, and the use of the void, that is, what cannot be said, the people who are gone, the emptiness, and desolation, the use of silence, all of these play an important role in both music and poetry. In this music of secondary witness, time always plays an integral role. In Birtwistle’s case he uses it to create a “terrible beauty,” a term the translator Michael Hamburger used to express his feelings about the poetry by Celan that he was translating. As I listen to the music, I feel disoriented, stressed. The atonality pressures me as does Celan's language. There is a story here, but I can't reach the narrative. There is a grief beyond understanding.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
"Todesfuge/Deathfugue"
The poet Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, which at that moment was in Romania. According to John Felstiner, an important translator of his work, Celan probably wrote the poem “Todesfuge” or “Deathfugue” during 1943-1944 when he was in a forced-labor camp. His parents died in the camps during the war. Many consider this work to be an important, perhaps the most important, poem to come from a survivor of the Holocaust. At any rate, it is a seminal work, that is, an art piece that forms the basis for other artistic work. Various twentieth century composers, visual artists, and architects acknowledge the impact of Celan’s poetry and specifically this poem, on their own contributions.
As a poet of witness, Celan fills nearly every line of “Deathfugue” with disjointed verbal material from many sources, including descriptions of specific moments in the camps. Simultaneously, he refers to music, Bach, Wagner, the tango, perhaps, and German drinking songs, to literature including, Genesis, Faust’s blonde heroine Margareta from Goethe, and the Jewish beauty, dark-haired Shulamith, from the Bible’s "Song of Songs." In its earliest published version, in a book discussing his experience translating the poet called Paul Celan: Poet Survivor Jew, Felstiner explains that the first printed version of the poem, originally written in German, appeared in Romanian as “Tangoul Morţii” or “Tango of Death.” There seems to be a strong connection with the poem and music from the camps; often an orchestra would accompany the arrival of people to the camps on trains.
At any rate, Celan changed the musical form mentioned in the earlier title to “Fugue,” an effect that strengthens the reference to the repetitive structure and recurrent motifs of the poem itself, while simultaneously referring to classical German composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who both used the form with its repetitions of an initial musical statement.
Felstiner talks about the minimalism and the lack of accessibility of the poem as a difficulty in translating it to English. Celan himself recognized the need for a sense of encounter for the reader similar to the one that occurred for him as writer (Felstiner xvi). For me, that is always what must happen in the creating of a work and in the communication of that work with the reader or audience. The poem is not so much a representation of the thing, it is a thing in and of itself. The translator of the poem also makes the point that although the poem appears metaphoric on many levels, and no doubt is, at the same time much of it takes as its material actual scenes from the camps that are quite literal.
In looking at lines of the poem specifically, certain images repeat and intensify as the poem accelerates. The poem begins with the following lines that change as the poem progresses, as the theme and variations manifest.
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling,
he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us to play up for the dance.
The “black milk”—what is that about? We are in the camps. Celan has directly landed us there. Milk is usually thought of as nourishing: this milk does not nourish. The two words come directly after the title and seems linked inextricably—black milk/deathfugue. As a writer myself, I hesitate to play the game of this-line-means-this. I’m more comfortable talking about what the poem does, how the poet works. Fugue-like, the black milk repeats and repeats throughout the poem as “we drink and we drink,” with its echoes of the German beer hall. Drink what? Death, ash, grief, emptiness? “We shovel a grave in the air.” We shovel and shovel while a “man lives in the house he plays with his vipers.” This line will repeat with variations throughout the poem. This man has power in the camps, “he lives in the house” and writes “your golden hair Margarete.”
Each of these lines will return, each time more horrible, faster, and in bizarre ways more accessible. Each phrase or part of phrase is disjointed, cubistic almost. Yet the whole is clear and black. Felstiner, as translator makes a brave leap with this poem as he moves through it. He translates less and less to English as he trains his reader to read the German. By the end of the poem we are entirely in German and the sense of abomination barely allows us to breathe.
The two women in the poem need another note. Margarete is Goethe’s heroine in “Faust.” Celan places Goethe and Margarete, as the heart of Germany’s enlightenment, blonde here, and a romantic ideal. How indeed to reconcile her presence with Shulamith, the Jewish maiden, now with her ashen hair, who has been transformed from the earlier line, “the stars are all sparkling…he whistles his Jews into rows.” At the end of the poem we have Death as the master. Ashen-haired Shulamith, the final word.
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith
As a poet of witness, Celan fills nearly every line of “Deathfugue” with disjointed verbal material from many sources, including descriptions of specific moments in the camps. Simultaneously, he refers to music, Bach, Wagner, the tango, perhaps, and German drinking songs, to literature including, Genesis, Faust’s blonde heroine Margareta from Goethe, and the Jewish beauty, dark-haired Shulamith, from the Bible’s "Song of Songs." In its earliest published version, in a book discussing his experience translating the poet called Paul Celan: Poet Survivor Jew, Felstiner explains that the first printed version of the poem, originally written in German, appeared in Romanian as “Tangoul Morţii” or “Tango of Death.” There seems to be a strong connection with the poem and music from the camps; often an orchestra would accompany the arrival of people to the camps on trains.
At any rate, Celan changed the musical form mentioned in the earlier title to “Fugue,” an effect that strengthens the reference to the repetitive structure and recurrent motifs of the poem itself, while simultaneously referring to classical German composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who both used the form with its repetitions of an initial musical statement.
Felstiner talks about the minimalism and the lack of accessibility of the poem as a difficulty in translating it to English. Celan himself recognized the need for a sense of encounter for the reader similar to the one that occurred for him as writer (Felstiner xvi). For me, that is always what must happen in the creating of a work and in the communication of that work with the reader or audience. The poem is not so much a representation of the thing, it is a thing in and of itself. The translator of the poem also makes the point that although the poem appears metaphoric on many levels, and no doubt is, at the same time much of it takes as its material actual scenes from the camps that are quite literal.
In looking at lines of the poem specifically, certain images repeat and intensify as the poem accelerates. The poem begins with the following lines that change as the poem progresses, as the theme and variations manifest.
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling,
he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us to play up for the dance.
The “black milk”—what is that about? We are in the camps. Celan has directly landed us there. Milk is usually thought of as nourishing: this milk does not nourish. The two words come directly after the title and seems linked inextricably—black milk/deathfugue. As a writer myself, I hesitate to play the game of this-line-means-this. I’m more comfortable talking about what the poem does, how the poet works. Fugue-like, the black milk repeats and repeats throughout the poem as “we drink and we drink,” with its echoes of the German beer hall. Drink what? Death, ash, grief, emptiness? “We shovel a grave in the air.” We shovel and shovel while a “man lives in the house he plays with his vipers.” This line will repeat with variations throughout the poem. This man has power in the camps, “he lives in the house” and writes “your golden hair Margarete.”
Each of these lines will return, each time more horrible, faster, and in bizarre ways more accessible. Each phrase or part of phrase is disjointed, cubistic almost. Yet the whole is clear and black. Felstiner, as translator makes a brave leap with this poem as he moves through it. He translates less and less to English as he trains his reader to read the German. By the end of the poem we are entirely in German and the sense of abomination barely allows us to breathe.
The two women in the poem need another note. Margarete is Goethe’s heroine in “Faust.” Celan places Goethe and Margarete, as the heart of Germany’s enlightenment, blonde here, and a romantic ideal. How indeed to reconcile her presence with Shulamith, the Jewish maiden, now with her ashen hair, who has been transformed from the earlier line, “the stars are all sparkling…he whistles his Jews into rows.” At the end of the poem we have Death as the master. Ashen-haired Shulamith, the final word.
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Anselm Kiefer and his "Todesfuge" Paintings
Anselm Kiefer, a German artist born in 1945, developed a series of works based on Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge.” These paintings bear the names "Margarete" and “Sulamith.” I first saw images of a couple of these works in an essay by Lisa Saltzman in Barbie Zelizer’s Visual Culture and the Holocaust called “Lost in Translation: Clement Greenberg, Anselm Kiefer, and the Subject of History.” I'd like to spend a little time discussing the essay, but I'd like to say right away that I am having serious trouble with the premise and the reasoning. On the other hand, I did find the paintings seemed to give themselves up to me in an exciting way and to lead me to a wide range of accompanying thoughts. Let me explain a little of what’s going on in the essay, along with my own responses to it, and then on to the art work.
The essay itself works inductively. Saltzman circles her subject quite a while before finally showing her intent. She expresses a belief that Kiefer ultimately takes a page from Greenbergian criticism and removes historical and biographical concerns from the "Todesfuge" paintings, particularly the cryptlike “Sulamite” which functions for her “as sepulcher…then, as a space not of mourning and memorialization, but of melancholia and forgetting, where the remains of history give way to ashen remainder”(85). Saltzman comes to the convoluted conclusion that Kiefer's "Todesfuge" paintings are removed from history. Sulamith exists in the painting, not as image, according to Saltzman, but only as a name in the corner of the canvas. Saltzman goes on to ask, "[D]oes this mean that [Sulamith], and with her, history, is missing as well, that all are, indeed, lost, irrevocably, in translation?"(83) She comes to this conclusion in a syllogistically-challenged way: given that Clement Greenberg established an important reputation in the world of art history by eschewing interest in historical reference in artworks to establish a standard in modernism and given that Clement Greenberg translated and published Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” in 1955, therefore an artwork, such as Kiefer's, that takes that poem as subject must also have removed a historical nature from the work.
Saltzman can’t reconcile Greenberg's act of translating such a historically charged piece with his visual art criticism which rejected historical and biographical reference in favor of high modernism. His essays and sponsorship helped build the careers of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko who had left referential art behind. Saltzman can’t seem to get her head around the possibility that Greenberg’s translations of Celan came from a different place in his brain or heart. Therefore, she argues that Anselm Kiefer may well have left history behind, too. Her essay is over-intellectualized and, in ways, unfortunate.
Kiefer’s work from the beginning has explored the ambiguous experience of being a German artist after Auschwitz, after the Holocaust. The work that first brings him to the attention of the art world is the series of controversial photographs in which he has himself photographed in various locations doing the Nazi salute. Often as subject for his work he incorporates Jewish mysticism or an interest in the Kabbalah. Probably a good argument can be made that he works with a symbolic, perhaps personal vocabulary. Clearly he is not working in a representational manner. Kiefer was born in 1945. As he comes to understand anything about the Holocaust, he arrives to the images, often photographs that present the atrocities of the camps. Those have taken on symbolic valence. Kiefer seems to incorporate this symbolic mythology into the "Todesfuge" paintings. All of that argues for me that this series does not abandon historical reference, but uses it to express the never-again imperative. Despite Saltzman's theory, there is no "lost in translation" sense to these powerful paintings.
All this said, I am excited that Lisa Saltzman’s essay carried me to a new place personally by introducing me to the "Todesfuge" paintings. Anselm Kiefer has been on the edge of my radar with works such as his “Seven Heavenly Palaces.” As I viewed Saltzman’s images from the Todesfuge work, I felt their power.
The relationship between Celan's poem and Kiefer's paintings lines up with a long held interest I have had in ekphrasis or the translation of one work of art into another medium. I began thinking about ways that Celan’s “Todesfuge” manifests in visual art, music, and architecture. I turned to John Felstiner’s book, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, with his detailed description of his own experience translating “Todesfuge” to “Deathfugue,” which has become the standard English translation of the poem. The poem and its descendants opened various avenues for me. I am interested in exploring in a future journal entry how “Your ashen hair Sulamith” in the poem transmigrates to the painting. Also, I am taking a look at Sir Harrison Birtwistle's use of "Todesfuge" in an avant-garde, musical composition Pulse Shadows. Of course, Daniel Libeskind's use of "Todesfuge" plays an important role in his architecture in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Lots to think about here.
The essay itself works inductively. Saltzman circles her subject quite a while before finally showing her intent. She expresses a belief that Kiefer ultimately takes a page from Greenbergian criticism and removes historical and biographical concerns from the "Todesfuge" paintings, particularly the cryptlike “Sulamite” which functions for her “as sepulcher…then, as a space not of mourning and memorialization, but of melancholia and forgetting, where the remains of history give way to ashen remainder”(85). Saltzman comes to the convoluted conclusion that Kiefer's "Todesfuge" paintings are removed from history. Sulamith exists in the painting, not as image, according to Saltzman, but only as a name in the corner of the canvas. Saltzman goes on to ask, "[D]oes this mean that [Sulamith], and with her, history, is missing as well, that all are, indeed, lost, irrevocably, in translation?"(83) She comes to this conclusion in a syllogistically-challenged way: given that Clement Greenberg established an important reputation in the world of art history by eschewing interest in historical reference in artworks to establish a standard in modernism and given that Clement Greenberg translated and published Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” in 1955, therefore an artwork, such as Kiefer's, that takes that poem as subject must also have removed a historical nature from the work.
Saltzman can’t reconcile Greenberg's act of translating such a historically charged piece with his visual art criticism which rejected historical and biographical reference in favor of high modernism. His essays and sponsorship helped build the careers of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko who had left referential art behind. Saltzman can’t seem to get her head around the possibility that Greenberg’s translations of Celan came from a different place in his brain or heart. Therefore, she argues that Anselm Kiefer may well have left history behind, too. Her essay is over-intellectualized and, in ways, unfortunate.
Kiefer’s work from the beginning has explored the ambiguous experience of being a German artist after Auschwitz, after the Holocaust. The work that first brings him to the attention of the art world is the series of controversial photographs in which he has himself photographed in various locations doing the Nazi salute. Often as subject for his work he incorporates Jewish mysticism or an interest in the Kabbalah. Probably a good argument can be made that he works with a symbolic, perhaps personal vocabulary. Clearly he is not working in a representational manner. Kiefer was born in 1945. As he comes to understand anything about the Holocaust, he arrives to the images, often photographs that present the atrocities of the camps. Those have taken on symbolic valence. Kiefer seems to incorporate this symbolic mythology into the "Todesfuge" paintings. All of that argues for me that this series does not abandon historical reference, but uses it to express the never-again imperative. Despite Saltzman's theory, there is no "lost in translation" sense to these powerful paintings.
All this said, I am excited that Lisa Saltzman’s essay carried me to a new place personally by introducing me to the "Todesfuge" paintings. Anselm Kiefer has been on the edge of my radar with works such as his “Seven Heavenly Palaces.” As I viewed Saltzman’s images from the Todesfuge work, I felt their power.
Above is one of the Margarete paintings. Kiefer has used straw to stand in for her golden hair. Fires light the strands. Below is the Sulamith image that Saltzman imagines has left behind historical reference. Never mind the crematorium-like structure, or crypt with its possible references to a menorah in the structure of the columns. Kiefer uses ash as material. That's not even representational. Ash is ash.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
“The Artist as Secondary Witness"
The Introduction to Dora Apel’s Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witness
As I read Dora Apel’s introduction to her book(3-8) concerning art of secondary witness, that is, art coming from people who were not direct survivors of the Holocaust, I am struck by what I call the repetitions of patterns of three among the critics. Here’s what I mean by that. Various scholars offer a pair of opposing views by which to investigate the Holocaust. Within a gap or abyss or contradiction separating these comes a suggestion of a third way combining the other two in some paradoxical fashion. This mediated alternative often serves as the place art becomes possible.
For instance, according to Apel, Roger Simon examines ways to preserve remembrance of traumatic history. His first strategy focuses on “strategic practice,” a sociopolitical strategy that looks toward a better future and a sense of never-again with an emphasis to learn to live with and to deal with loss despite proof of continuing genocides around the world. The opposing pedagogical strategy, “difficult return,” recognizing that horrors continue, intends to “bring the dead into presence,” which often leads obsessively to despair. The third way, which often works through art, realizes that meaning changes over time. The telling and retelling of the story and the story of the story become the focus. We have a work like Maus, that moves into the abyss that exists in the lives of both Art Spiegelman and his father, a Holocaust survivor, as the author draws and writes their personal stories to preserve memory.
Also according to Apel, Michael Rothberg offers two mutually exclusive strategies. A realist view presumes the Holocaust is knowable and can be translated into a “familiar mimetic universe”; the antirealist analysis refuses any sense of knowability in terms of representation. Again, we find a third strategy that Rothberg calls “traumatic realism,” which may help bridge the gap between the irreconcilable strategies, again by employing a sense of chronological time through the use of ordinary and extraordinary elements to retell the story while bringing into play “contemporary conditions of the telling.”
As I read these and other strategies I am struck with a non-pedagogical insight. Although I am capable of considerable detachment and can follow along with scholarly paradigms, my personal viewpoint comes as maker, not critic. I have a sense that the scholars themselves in this introduction come close to the place of abyss, into the idea of paradox, right at the fulcrum of much of art-making itself whether triggered by the Holocaust or by something else.
Art often, not always, comes from obsession and traumatic remembrance. I turn to a favorite artist, Louise Bourgeois, now 98 years old. In a book of writings and interviews, “Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father,” she talks about the role of the unconscious. “There is something very special in being able to sublimate your unconscious, and something very painful in the access to it. But there is no escape from it”(164). My sense is that this is the third way that these scholars are accessing. Often the key is to reside in the heart of paradox, in the inescapable struggle and pain to make art and to understand anything about the nature of personal and artistic reality, where events such as the Holocaust are both knowable and unknowable, rational and horrific in the unconscious mind. Secondary witnesses as artists often do not choose their points of entry or even their responses. We come to their work and enter into the abyss with them. In the strategic paradigms that Apel presents us, the scholars come along, too, into that place.
As I read Dora Apel’s introduction to her book(3-8) concerning art of secondary witness, that is, art coming from people who were not direct survivors of the Holocaust, I am struck by what I call the repetitions of patterns of three among the critics. Here’s what I mean by that. Various scholars offer a pair of opposing views by which to investigate the Holocaust. Within a gap or abyss or contradiction separating these comes a suggestion of a third way combining the other two in some paradoxical fashion. This mediated alternative often serves as the place art becomes possible.
For instance, according to Apel, Roger Simon examines ways to preserve remembrance of traumatic history. His first strategy focuses on “strategic practice,” a sociopolitical strategy that looks toward a better future and a sense of never-again with an emphasis to learn to live with and to deal with loss despite proof of continuing genocides around the world. The opposing pedagogical strategy, “difficult return,” recognizing that horrors continue, intends to “bring the dead into presence,” which often leads obsessively to despair. The third way, which often works through art, realizes that meaning changes over time. The telling and retelling of the story and the story of the story become the focus. We have a work like Maus, that moves into the abyss that exists in the lives of both Art Spiegelman and his father, a Holocaust survivor, as the author draws and writes their personal stories to preserve memory.
Also according to Apel, Michael Rothberg offers two mutually exclusive strategies. A realist view presumes the Holocaust is knowable and can be translated into a “familiar mimetic universe”; the antirealist analysis refuses any sense of knowability in terms of representation. Again, we find a third strategy that Rothberg calls “traumatic realism,” which may help bridge the gap between the irreconcilable strategies, again by employing a sense of chronological time through the use of ordinary and extraordinary elements to retell the story while bringing into play “contemporary conditions of the telling.”
As I read these and other strategies I am struck with a non-pedagogical insight. Although I am capable of considerable detachment and can follow along with scholarly paradigms, my personal viewpoint comes as maker, not critic. I have a sense that the scholars themselves in this introduction come close to the place of abyss, into the idea of paradox, right at the fulcrum of much of art-making itself whether triggered by the Holocaust or by something else.
Art often, not always, comes from obsession and traumatic remembrance. I turn to a favorite artist, Louise Bourgeois, now 98 years old. In a book of writings and interviews, “Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father,” she talks about the role of the unconscious. “There is something very special in being able to sublimate your unconscious, and something very painful in the access to it. But there is no escape from it”(164). My sense is that this is the third way that these scholars are accessing. Often the key is to reside in the heart of paradox, in the inescapable struggle and pain to make art and to understand anything about the nature of personal and artistic reality, where events such as the Holocaust are both knowable and unknowable, rational and horrific in the unconscious mind. Secondary witnesses as artists often do not choose their points of entry or even their responses. We come to their work and enter into the abyss with them. In the strategic paradigms that Apel presents us, the scholars come along, too, into that place.
Monday, February 1, 2010
"Ukraine's Got Talent"
The other day my mother sent one of those pop culture emails making the rounds. This one showed a young woman Kseniya Simonova, who recently won the finals in a TV program named Ukraine’s Got Talent, something of an American Idol knock-off. The woman created sand paintings on a large light-table that featured scenes from German invasion of Ukraine [USSR] during World War II. While it may not be correct to consider this invasion part of the Holocaust, one in four people living in Ukraine at the time of what they locally called the Great Patriotic War died. Watching the video, analyzing its circumstances, and reflecting on its merits either as a work of art or as a moment of witness may prove useful as I move ahead exploring questions to ask concerning ways that art and poetry contribute to the conversation concerning the Holocaust itself.
Here’s what happens in the images Simonova creates in sand. First, a couple in love sits on a bench. The war planes come, he disappears, a tear stains the woman’s cheek, a baby arrives. The chaos of war returns, the woman receives news he is dead. Then we see the face of an old woman, more tears on cheeks and, based on varying interpretations, we next see either Ukraine’s "Monument to an Unknown Soldier" [Sailor] or a marker on the man’s grave. The final scene shows the woman looking out a window with her young child. The image of a sailor, hands pressed against the glass, looks in.
In the video, people in the audience cry. The judges cry. People receiving this online email cry as they watch the beautiful woman in a nunlike black dress choreograph this sand painting that looks almost like an animation. She obviously has talent as an artist and as a performer. The prize, varying by accounts of the contest, ranges from $75,000 to $125,000 US.
As I watched the video, I felt discomfort about the whole experience. Let me try to analyze what I think was going on with the production as a whole and then to separate out my own reaction. At the time that Kseniya Simonova appeared on the reality show in September of 2009, the country was in the middle of what the Guardian.co.uk spoke of as a “fraught presidential election campaign …underway ahead of a vote in January 2010 and a deepening financial crisis.” This video also had much in common with the viral video with the unlikely winner on a sister program Britain’s Got Talent, singer Susan Boyle. The reality show platform requires the winner to be an unlikely candidate to win, Susan Boyle because of her appearance, Simonova because she paints in sand. A dream may be part of the equation. Susan Boyle wants to be a star. Simonova presents a world rocked with war with hope of catharsis, perhaps through having a child. Her images of destruction replaced by those of healing seem powerful. One of the most important aspects of both comes from their dependence on a public vote. People choose the winners based, often enough, on emotional response, not on artistic merit. Both are part of a global franchise called Got Talent. The word franchise signals the selling of goods and services.
I felt grateful to Simonova and to Ukraine’s Got Talent as I watched. I began a list of questions that I feel a work of art, of witness, needs to address. All of these felt lacking in the video I saw. First, I want to see something authentic, real, earned. The images in the sand painting were generic and sentimental. How easy to draw the tear in the eye as the lover goes to war. How obvious the baby in the early moments of the piece, the small child later. I had no sense of whose story this was. Or to what purpose beyond the winning of the contest did the creation of the sand painting lend itself. I am a huge believer in art for art’s sake. Yet, if a work considers itself political, then how and what does it argue. Intent should go beyond the simplistic “War is bad” statement this piece makes. Also I want accuracy. As I surfed the Web concerning the video, I discovered the town portrayed was actually in Romania at the beginning of World War II, not Ukraine. I want to feel that there is a sense of layering, that there is more to discover in the piece, that everything is not right there on the surface and obvious. Perhaps most important for this to be art, I want to feel that the artist herself has put something at risk. I want to feel a sense of danger in the art itself, that the artist has gone way inside to a place of personal discovery. Then, maybe I’ll be able to feel something, too.
Here’s what happens in the images Simonova creates in sand. First, a couple in love sits on a bench. The war planes come, he disappears, a tear stains the woman’s cheek, a baby arrives. The chaos of war returns, the woman receives news he is dead. Then we see the face of an old woman, more tears on cheeks and, based on varying interpretations, we next see either Ukraine’s "Monument to an Unknown Soldier" [Sailor] or a marker on the man’s grave. The final scene shows the woman looking out a window with her young child. The image of a sailor, hands pressed against the glass, looks in.
In the video, people in the audience cry. The judges cry. People receiving this online email cry as they watch the beautiful woman in a nunlike black dress choreograph this sand painting that looks almost like an animation. She obviously has talent as an artist and as a performer. The prize, varying by accounts of the contest, ranges from $75,000 to $125,000 US.
As I watched the video, I felt discomfort about the whole experience. Let me try to analyze what I think was going on with the production as a whole and then to separate out my own reaction. At the time that Kseniya Simonova appeared on the reality show in September of 2009, the country was in the middle of what the Guardian.co.uk spoke of as a “fraught presidential election campaign …underway ahead of a vote in January 2010 and a deepening financial crisis.” This video also had much in common with the viral video with the unlikely winner on a sister program Britain’s Got Talent, singer Susan Boyle. The reality show platform requires the winner to be an unlikely candidate to win, Susan Boyle because of her appearance, Simonova because she paints in sand. A dream may be part of the equation. Susan Boyle wants to be a star. Simonova presents a world rocked with war with hope of catharsis, perhaps through having a child. Her images of destruction replaced by those of healing seem powerful. One of the most important aspects of both comes from their dependence on a public vote. People choose the winners based, often enough, on emotional response, not on artistic merit. Both are part of a global franchise called Got Talent. The word franchise signals the selling of goods and services.
I felt grateful to Simonova and to Ukraine’s Got Talent as I watched. I began a list of questions that I feel a work of art, of witness, needs to address. All of these felt lacking in the video I saw. First, I want to see something authentic, real, earned. The images in the sand painting were generic and sentimental. How easy to draw the tear in the eye as the lover goes to war. How obvious the baby in the early moments of the piece, the small child later. I had no sense of whose story this was. Or to what purpose beyond the winning of the contest did the creation of the sand painting lend itself. I am a huge believer in art for art’s sake. Yet, if a work considers itself political, then how and what does it argue. Intent should go beyond the simplistic “War is bad” statement this piece makes. Also I want accuracy. As I surfed the Web concerning the video, I discovered the town portrayed was actually in Romania at the beginning of World War II, not Ukraine. I want to feel that there is a sense of layering, that there is more to discover in the piece, that everything is not right there on the surface and obvious. Perhaps most important for this to be art, I want to feel that the artist herself has put something at risk. I want to feel a sense of danger in the art itself, that the artist has gone way inside to a place of personal discovery. Then, maybe I’ll be able to feel something, too.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
"Fascinating Fascism"
In 1975, The New York Review of Books published this review by author and literary theorist Susan Sontag about a new book of photographs by Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. The new volume, The Last of the Nuba, takes a look at the people of southern Sudan. Rather than examining the photographs first, Sontag discusses Riefenstahl’s biography as presented on the book jacket and an introduction to the book, both “full of disquieting lies.” In the essay itself and in letters to the editor that follow there is much back and forth concerning the facts of Riefenstahl’s life and career that for the most part have not been resolved today. Much of what-did-she-know, who-did-she-know, and when-did-she-know-it is still debated today.
The above image could as well have been taken from Riefenstahl’s work during the Nazi era if not for the race of the wrestlers. We see here domination, submission, and ritual spectacle on the part of the tribal group amassed for the matches. Sontag further defines this fascist aesthetic in part as “the ideal of life as art [and] the cult of beauty."
In this kind of analysis lies Sontag’s strength. She wraps huge ideas into each component. How else to look at the Third Reich if not as a saga of domination and submission? Many would argue that the stakes were never higher. Whether the domination had to do with territory or the conquering of individual human spirit, the Nazis’ aim was total victory. With the movement into country after country until the Germans occupied most of Europe and North Africa, Hitler’s forces seemed insatiable. On a personal or human level, anyone who was different from the Aryan ideal had to flee or submit completely to the Nazi authority which lead to loss of rights, imprisonment, and death. These persecuted people included the mentally retarded, homosexuals, political opponents, and Gypsies, as well as Jews.
Eric Rentschler, in his book, The Ministry of Illusion speaks to Sontag’s next point that top Nazis held to the ideal of life as art: “If the Nazis were movie mad, then the Third Reich was movie made”(1). Ample evidence exists that much of the orchestration and scheduling of the Nuremberg Rallies coordinated with their filming. Rentschler points out that Goebbels successfully used various media to accomplish such ends: film, of course, celebrations, light shows, rallies, and mass extravaganzas filled with “flags, uniforms, and emblems.” Many of the leaders lived lives surrounded by the documentation remained at the heart of the Nazi aesthetic with the intent that these materials would live, along with the regime, for a thousand years.
Sontag is correct that the cult of beauty is central to both Riefenstahl’s work and to the fascist aesthetic. Whatever else critics say about the films, their visual content seems undeniable. Her sense of mise-en-scène, which refers to everything that appears before the camera, the equivalent of scopic regime in photography, is impeccable. Whether she shows men wrestling or repetitions of form seen in workers marching, inherent beauty remains an essential element. When Riefenstahl shows Aryan faces along a parade route, we have a clear picture of this alliance of beauty in art and in the racial beauty prized by the National Socialists.
So, what to make of all this? When I ask myself about my own sense of Riefenstahl’s images, whether of the Nuba tribe or of her films, and about Sontag’s assessment in terms of defining them, I don’t seem to make much progress. I first saw Triumph of the Will in 1985. I still remember where I was personally and the way the airplane came in through the clouds, how Riefenstahl created Hitler as a god, the crowds of people enthralled, beyond thought, a vast machine of people ready to do whatever the regime required. If the filming of that was beautiful, if the destruction that came from the domination and submission of peoples was nearly absolute, if this was a world complete at that moment, I still cannot lose the sense of horror that always accompanies the work. This is work I cannot come to terms with. Sontag helps me analyze elements of that work. The horror I feel has nothing to do with analyis.
Instead of engaging in those questions and in the possibility of Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation, I am personally more drawn to examining Sontag’s description of a fascist aesthetic. While the Nuba photos portray an aboriginal society dedicated to ritualistic wrestling, Sontag sees various preoccupations in the Nuba photos that work in a continuum from Triumph of the Will. Both sets of images deal with domination and submission within the context of spectacle.
The above image could as well have been taken from Riefenstahl’s work during the Nazi era if not for the race of the wrestlers. We see here domination, submission, and ritual spectacle on the part of the tribal group amassed for the matches. Sontag further defines this fascist aesthetic in part as “the ideal of life as art [and] the cult of beauty."
In this kind of analysis lies Sontag’s strength. She wraps huge ideas into each component. How else to look at the Third Reich if not as a saga of domination and submission? Many would argue that the stakes were never higher. Whether the domination had to do with territory or the conquering of individual human spirit, the Nazis’ aim was total victory. With the movement into country after country until the Germans occupied most of Europe and North Africa, Hitler’s forces seemed insatiable. On a personal or human level, anyone who was different from the Aryan ideal had to flee or submit completely to the Nazi authority which lead to loss of rights, imprisonment, and death. These persecuted people included the mentally retarded, homosexuals, political opponents, and Gypsies, as well as Jews.
Eric Rentschler, in his book, The Ministry of Illusion speaks to Sontag’s next point that top Nazis held to the ideal of life as art: “If the Nazis were movie mad, then the Third Reich was movie made”(1). Ample evidence exists that much of the orchestration and scheduling of the Nuremberg Rallies coordinated with their filming. Rentschler points out that Goebbels successfully used various media to accomplish such ends: film, of course, celebrations, light shows, rallies, and mass extravaganzas filled with “flags, uniforms, and emblems.” Many of the leaders lived lives surrounded by the documentation remained at the heart of the Nazi aesthetic with the intent that these materials would live, along with the regime, for a thousand years.
Sontag is correct that the cult of beauty is central to both Riefenstahl’s work and to the fascist aesthetic. Whatever else critics say about the films, their visual content seems undeniable. Her sense of mise-en-scène, which refers to everything that appears before the camera, the equivalent of scopic regime in photography, is impeccable. Whether she shows men wrestling or repetitions of form seen in workers marching, inherent beauty remains an essential element. When Riefenstahl shows Aryan faces along a parade route, we have a clear picture of this alliance of beauty in art and in the racial beauty prized by the National Socialists.
So, what to make of all this? When I ask myself about my own sense of Riefenstahl’s images, whether of the Nuba tribe or of her films, and about Sontag’s assessment in terms of defining them, I don’t seem to make much progress. I first saw Triumph of the Will in 1985. I still remember where I was personally and the way the airplane came in through the clouds, how Riefenstahl created Hitler as a god, the crowds of people enthralled, beyond thought, a vast machine of people ready to do whatever the regime required. If the filming of that was beautiful, if the destruction that came from the domination and submission of peoples was nearly absolute, if this was a world complete at that moment, I still cannot lose the sense of horror that always accompanies the work. This is work I cannot come to terms with. Sontag helps me analyze elements of that work. The horror I feel has nothing to do with analyis.
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