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Although Charlotte Salomon was a pre-Auschwitz painter – the supreme artist of the rise and grip of Nazism, but not of her own end – she is, as already mentioned, included in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Israel where Shalev-Gerz was taken as a child. ‘State educational programmes’, she comments, ‘generally consider that the duty of memory means speaking of the persecution of the Jews all the way from Egypt to the Holocaust.’36 Instead for her it was a place to meet friends. Out of that disjunction, which some might find jarring, the core principles of her project will emerge. ‘I have always found the two faces of that place surprising.’ ‘What interests me’, she continues, ‘is people, their words, their silences, their lives, their ways of resisting and getting through their history.’37 The simplicity of this statement is deceptive. Shalev-Gerz is describing a passion which is also a refusal addressed to the authority of state (‘the duty of memory means speaking of the persecution of the Jews’).
Shalev-Gerz hardly ignores that persecution. Indeed in many ways she has made it her theme. In this she can truly be seen as Salomon’s artistic heir. Her 2004–2006 Buchenwald Memorial exhibition, Menschendinge, or The Human Aspect of Objects, shows five people working at the memorial, an archaeologist, an historian, a restorer, the director of the memorial and a photographer who was also the curator for this project, talking about the found and discarded objects of Buchenwald – a ring, a hairclip – while holding and turning them in their hands. The objects, created and adapted by the inmates, demonstrate, she writes, their capacity ‘to resist the inhumane conditions imposed upon them’ (like Salomon painting against advancing terror, as we might say).38 One of Shalev-Gerz’s unrealised projects, Vis-à-Vis of 2006, is a monument to the homosexuals murdered by the Nazis. Another completed work, Judengang (1997–2000), is based at the site of a condemned pathway skirting a nineteenth-century former Jewish cemetery which Jews were not allowed to access through the main entrance – in a video the local residents who use it as a backyard are invited to think of a use for this place appropriate to a history they are either unaware of or choose to ignore. But if she repeatedly evokes that history, it is always in the form of participation, never as the dead letter of the past. In The Berlin Inquiry, which was staged in 1998 at, among other venues, the People’s Theatre on Rosa Luxemburg Square, spectators were invited by the resident company of actors to recite passages from the testimonies given during the 1965 Auschwitz trials by victims, perpetrators, bystanders and judges. This system ‘made passive contemplation impossible and created a spoor for active memory in the permanently lit auditoria’.39
If Shalev-Gerz activates the past, it is therefore always part of a demand for a new type of focus and attention. To this extent and often against all odds, she devotes herself to creating a new type of community – we could call these ‘communities of imagination’ – out of her art. Does Your Image Reflect Me? (2002) consists of a double portrait – Isabelle Choko, a Polish-Jewish woman from Lodz who spent the war in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, not far from Hanover; and Charlotte Fuchs, a German actress and anti-Nazi who had been a resident of the same city at the time. Charlotte Fuchs kept her door shut when someone on the stairs shouted, ‘Heil Hitler!’ Whenever her husband was asked why he wasn’t in the Party, he would reply, ‘There must be other decent Germans too!’ Only because he was a famous German actor did he get away with it for a while (he was then killed as a soldier in the last days of the war although his wife was not notified of his death for three years). As she breastfed her first son, born in the first month of the war, he ‘would spit it all out and scream his head off’.40 We are witnessing the ugly intensifier of the unborn babies of Sound Machine. Each of the women talks and then listens to the other by means of images on their television sets – Isabelle Choko as she tells her story, slowly and hesitantly, for the first time, is recording the history which Fuchs and her husband had resisted without success. They do not meet or enter the same space. Reconciliation is not the aim. Instead, the exhibition suggests, something transformative is taking place by mere dint of the fact that these two stories are, simultaneously and at a distance, being spoken and heard. As you watch and listen to the one telling their tale, something happens to you because something is happening to them. As if being asked to tell the story – ‘what story would you like to tell’ is the question with which Shalev-Gerz often begins – gives to the participants in her odyssey a type of permission: to open doors in their minds and their histories which they never knew were closed, of whose existence indeed they may not have been aware.
To this project, Shalev-Gerz’s artistic commitment is as total as it is delicate, cautious and self-aware. She treads carefully. She is nothing like Claude Lanzmann, in what is for me one of the most disturbing moments of his famous eight-hour 1985 film Shoah, when he insists – forces would not be too strong a word – that the survivor barber, Abraham Bomba, should remember, speak: ‘You have to do it. You know it.’ (even if Lanzmann does apologise.)41 One of Shalev-Gerz’s most powerful exhibitions – Between Listening and Telling: Last Witnesses, Auschwitz 1945–2005 – mounted at the Hotel de Ville in Paris in 2005 was commissioned for the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. At winding, snake-like red tables, viewers can sit and listen to the testimonies of sixty camp survivors whom she had invited to talk of their experiences before, during and after internment. Once again many of them had never told their stories before. As you look at their faces and watch their often elegant, always thoughtful demeanour, you have a strange sense of ceremony or occasion, as much as grief. Perhaps they know that nobody will ever listen again (only one participant retracted his testimony because he had never told his story to anybody, not even his family). The recordings were not edited but are given in their entirety – the duration of each video corresponds to the duration of the filming, which lasted for between two and nine hours. ‘I decided’, she comments, ‘to create a face-to-face situation between witness and spectator.’ On the walls of the exhibition space, three vast screens show an identical video but with a time lapse of seven seconds, slowing down the film, capturing the moments of silence between the words, ‘opening up a different space-time, outside the logic of language, that of sensuous corporal memory’. She wanted, she explains, to portray the witnesses ‘through their silences’, to capture, between the question and the reply, ‘the fugitive moment where memory emerges . . . a moment both of letting go and of intense concentration can be read on these faces, because the past is being evoked in the present.’42 These silences are not vacant, they are not failures of testimony, but rather ‘events in speech’, in Didi-Huberman’s phrase.43 A type of full speech, in the sense of full to overflowing, this is speech which knows, at the fleeting moment it is grasped by consciousness, that it is too much. Annika Wik describes the time-lapsed video as recording the second before the story leaves the body.44 You cannot be sure whether body or story will make it, if either is really there. She has placed herself on the borderline between unconscious and conscious, sentient, life. Remarkably – given the amount of discussion about whether the Holocaust can or should be spoken – Shalev-Gerz has managed to create a space which registers at one and the same time the necessity of the human voice and the impossibility of words.
What Shalev-Gerz is offering her participants and spectators can be understood as a form of emancipation – the democratic project is inscribed into the formal properties of her work. Moving into worlds that could not be more intensely private, she is also creating a public domain. Her work has been described as a res publica, ‘giving form to the common good’.45 ‘The difficulty of sharing a moment, of sharing it aloud,’ is, she states, ‘what we call democracy’.46 This is the ‘prevailing pressure’, as she puts it, that runs through her art: ‘The effort to articulate persons, peoples, places, or moments that always elude articulation, not so as to demonstrate the limits of speech, but that a community might form around and through the
act of seeing, saying and listening.’47 One spectator, Gabriella Zerega, wrote to her after seeing her work of how she no longer felt ‘either trapped inside an enforced forgetfulness or permanently drowned in the horrors of the past, both equally deadly, but instead now part of the work of “living memory” from which life can unfold and recreate itself.’ What, we might ask, are the bleak options for those confronting a world that is beyond redemption and refuses to be named? ‘Faced with the unforgivable,’ Zerega continued, ‘your work opens up so many new perspectives: but with no place for shrinking away, endless repetition, forgetting or, worse, the spirit of vengeance.’48 How do you conjure a history which can only rise to the surface with such force and rage that, as it does so, it is in danger of obliterating itself? Between revenge and forgetting, repetition and denial, Shalev-Gerz quietly – by listening, watching, recording – offers a new way of scanning the darkest moment of twentieth-century European history.
Above all, the participants in her projects are being granted a moment of reflection, of thinking which has also been our recurrent theme. French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who has written with enthusiasm several times on her work, has described this as ‘the movement of attentive thought calling for attention’.49 We are watching thought thinking about itself. Thus Shalev-Gerz places reflection, caught in its most painful and silently eloquent moments, at the heart of her work. This is how she seizes a future for which we, as her viewers, are being asked to take responsibility and in which we are being invited to participate. Likewise for Arendt, critical thought was the only basis for engagement in civic, political life. Remember too Luxemburg, crushed into her cell, bewailing the fact that her prison conditions were depriving her of the possibility of thinking (not perhaps the most obvious cause for complaint): ‘Enthusiasm combined with critical thought,’ she had declared, ‘what more could we want of ourselves!’50 These women are laying claim to a right. In their different ways, each one is asking the world to hold off its path of destruction for a split second, to gather its mental resources and pause for thought. Shalev-Gerz has described this as a form of trust – ‘trust in the other person’s intelligence’ – which is, she insists, the property of everyone.51 She is relying on what thinking, provided it is given the time and space, is capable of. ‘I know full well,’ insists one of the Auschwitz survivors, ‘that nobody lived these events in the same way. No one experienced the same thing. Faced with the enemy, you must hold your head high. That too is a bit of resistance.’52 ‘Our support to each other was our speech. We had nothing else to give.’53 Nothing, in all of this, could be more at odds with the idea that we best pay tribute to history by casting its actors in the role of the victim: ‘I am always interested in survivors, the fact of their “living with it”, which for me has absolutely nothing to do with victimhood.’54 She is another woman for whom the idea of victimhood, so often invoked as a baseline for women, is a trap. It robs us of our participation in the polity. And it freezes history, stopping it blindly in its tracks.
If Shalev-Gerz takes us back to the moment of Charlotte Salomon – the repeated reference to Auschwitz, a mother hiding from the Nazis in the forest as the dark core of her work – her meticulous attention to sound and to voice can be seen as forging another link (she has described her work as giving the image voice).55 Both women orchestrate their work. It was of central importance in considering Salomon’s Life? or Theatre? that it straddled the two World Wars – the singing maestro Daberlohn was a survivor of the first. His project, and hers through him, was to give voice to the war dead (at one moment in the trenches he had experienced himself as a corpse). Rendered mute by the war, Alfred Wolfsohn, the character on whom Daberlohn was based, had been told he would only be able to recover his singing voice when he could bear to remember the screams of his dying comrades. The music of Salomon’s piece – her three-coloured ‘singspiel’ – was therefore, as we saw, an act of defiance and a type of cure, bringing a dead past to life. It was also her riposte to the Nazi silencing of the Jew. Remember her stepmother, the famous contralto Paula Lindberg, singing in the last concert broadcast from St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig in 1933 the night before the ban on public performances by Jews, while boy choristers wore swastika armbands. The musical component of her work allowed us, I suggested, uniquely to focus a question. What do we in fact mean, physically, sensuously – gutturally, as one might say – when, invoking historical trauma, we talk of reviving the voices of the past and allowing history to speak?
In her commitment to voice and sound, Shalev-Gerz gives another shape to this question, ushering it into its next phase. Her title Between Telling and Listening which she uses for two of her exhibitions – the Saami woman speaking and listening to herself, the Auschwitz survivors’ testimonies – is an ethical demand that she is making on her participants and viewers alike. The act of listening, so deeply structured into her exhibitions, makes us acutely conscious, not just of what can be spoken, but of how best to listen – both to the other and to oneself. This is why, as more than one commentator has pointed out, she has created an aesthetics of the ‘in-between’.56 This idea will also be crucial to the painting of Thérèse Oulton, the final portrait of this book. What should be the destiny, the home and the legacy, of such painfully elicited words? Where do they go after they have been spoken? (Testimony cannot be an end in itself.) Shalev-Gerz also sees herself as resisting an injunction to be mute which – again paradoxically – she locates at the heart of the museum culture where she carries out most of her work: ‘When you enter into a museum and see all the paintings, they do not talk. They are mute. Face to face with them, I am meant to be mute as well. This is one of the circumstances that led me to introduce language into my practice. Almost as an emergency.’ ‘I work with words and against words – against their control by others . . . People who manage to master words are the masters of worlds.’57
She is evoking another legacy of feminism, its central claim that the world is harmed, perhaps lethally, by those who believe that language, like women, as one might say, can be harnessed. ‘And if words have meaning,’ wrote Woolf in Three Guineas, ‘as words should perhaps have meaning, you will have to accept that meaning and do what you can to enforce it.’58 Shalev-Gerz knows that keeping the world open to a better future will depend radically on how we use words: ‘The answer must not exhaust the question . . . The answer is the question’s sworn enemy.’59 Nothing has been decided. Listen to no one who tells you that the present dispensation of the world is how things have to be. Answering the question, like dictating the meaning of language, is a form of violence and one of the most deadly frauds of history.
We are talking about freedom. ‘I tell my students,’ she comments, ‘that to be an artist is to let something traverse you, not to mutilate it. You must not tell it what to do.’60 When Shalev-Gerz cuts into a visual image, she sees herself as ‘trying to set light free’ (we will see this again with reference to Oulton).61 The drive to freedom, as an aesthetic and historical principle, might therefore be seen as the fundamental impulse of her art. ‘In what way,’ she asks with reference to Describing Labor, ‘is liberty embedded in an image?’62 However much she might conduct her own work, by repeatedly handing over her project to the voices of others, she unleashes something spontaneous and unpredictable into the body of her art: ‘While the final compositions are made taut through meticulous editing, their content has its origins in unpredictability.’63 (Remember ‘it was the unpredictable in herself that she used’, Eve Arnold’s description of Marilyn Monroe.) She never has any idea of what she will hear next: ‘I never even try to imagine what the people will say.’64 She is relinquishing her authority and ceding her own power. This makes her a scrupulous respecter of difference, as she uncovers who – as distinct from herself – these people are: ‘I am I and they are they,’ she says of the subjects of her work; ‘I would like my work to be them.’65 This is what listening means for her. She is violating – the word she uses is ‘corr
upting’ – the sanctity of her own space, which is perhaps why watching her work can make you feel almost dizzy, as if you were being thrown from where and who you think you are. Nothing is known or laid down in advance: ‘I throw the stone and I run to catch it.’66
Above all, and as we have seen so many times before in this book, this is a new form of knowledge: what I am calling the knowledge of women, a knowledge that neither parades nor aggrandises itself. Once again this is a matter of language, of setting words free. ‘No matter how hard we try to rein in these words,’ she writes, ‘still they will go their own way – spontaneously, intuitively and responsively. It is always surprising. It is always fragile. It never quite gets there. But it is on its way.’67 We are back again with Rosa Luxemburg, for whom spontaneity was the core of all viable political life. No night watchmen, no bullies, no dictators. This is the politics of her art. ‘At this point in time,’ writes Shalev-Gerz, ‘it’s all right to say that you don’t know and that we should perhaps start over again. That it’s good to have contradictions and humility. But politically we’re not there by any means yet. There are still dictators out there. But we have “a foot in the door”.’68
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If Esther Shalev-Gerz takes up her key place in these final chapters, it is because of the energy with which she carries over these questions into modern times, where we discover them once more in new and alarming forms. Today the question of power – of bullies and dictators – has an added dimension as Europe, increasingly inhumane in its treatment of its migrant peoples, starts to brace itself against, but also to repeat, its own past. As I write, public discourse on immigration is becoming more shrill and threatening by the day: neo-Nazism allowed to flourish in Germany, ignored by authorities who choose to believe that Turkish migrants are killing each other rather than being murdered by native Germans; racist murder in Greece abetted by the police, who turn a blind eye to Golden Dawn recently revealed as in cahoots with the government that officially declared it illegal; the electoral rise of the anti-immigration UKIP party in the UK. This too can be seen as a legacy of the Second World War. UKIP supporters describe the ‘flood’ of migration into the country as making them feel that the war was not won, and – with a truly hallucinatory leap of imagination – that the Germans are invading all over again.69 Here we might return to Tony Judt. It is a paradox of post-war Europe, he suggested, that its recovery was massively facilitated by the homogenisation of populations engendered by fascism. Being reborn from the devastation of the war, the making of a flourishing economy, relied on the worst that the war itself had done. Europe in the 1950s prospered as a world of hermetic national enclaves, rough edges – meaning vagrant populations – smoothed away. An earlier multicultural Europe, described by Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski as a sizzling melting-pot, had been ‘smashed into the dust’.70 Today’s immigrants are therefore the return of the repressed, Europe’s living ‘others’, and the panic they provoke simply shows, to cite his words again, ‘the ease with which the dead “others” of Europe’s past were cast far out of the mind’.71 The hallucinatory return of such ‘others’ will be at the core of Yael Bartana’s work, my second modern artist, to whom we turn next.
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