The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Wendi von Neurath, whom I met through Tournier, invited me to spend the weekend at her family home near Stuttgart, about a hundred kilometres from Tübingen. She was an attractive girl, of medium height, a little plump, with every pore exuding goodwill and morality in action. Her uncle, Konstantin von Neurath, a career diplomat from a long line of aristocrats, had been an ambassador, then Minister of Foreign Affairs in both the von Papen government that cleared Hitler’s path to power and in Hitler’s government until 1938, and later Reichsprotektor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia until relieved of his duties in 1941 for being too lenient – he was succeeded by none other than Reinhard Heydrich before he was assassinated by Czech partisans. Von Neurath was subsequently named ambassador to Ankara, and was among the accused at the Nuremberg trials. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but served only eight. He was released in 1954, seven years after my visit to the ancestral family home. Wendi’s mother was Konstantin’s sister and their place was very different from what in France we call a grande propriété: it was what the Germans call a Gut, literally a ‘good’, sprawling over thousands of hectares where the feudal system still more or less prevailed: here were hundreds of peasant farmers who, before my incredulous eyes, knelt before Baroness von Neurath, a tall, lean woman whose certainties and habits seemed invincible against the hustle and bustle of History. I told myself that, far from what people claimed, the deep-rooted fabric of the German fatherland had not all been destroyed. It lived on in Tübingen, in hundreds of small towns in Swabia, in countless villages. Decades later, as I toiled back and forth across Germany, researching and filming Shoah, I arrived in the beautiful little medieval town of Günzburg, so picture-perfect that it was almost a caricature: birthplace of Dr Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s ‘angel of death’, and the site of the Mengele factories. In the many kilometres of fields and meadows around Günzburg, the side-panels and roofs of tractors and combine-harvesters still proudly bore the name MENGELE, repeated ad nauseam.

  The von Neurath Gut was near Vaihingen. I arrived one Saturday evening and spent a restive night beneath a thick eiderdown in a virginal white bedroom, but it is Sunday lunch the following day that is forever etched on my memory. At least fifteen Wehrmacht generals and general officers were seated around the long, solid wood table, reserved, almost silent, most of them in uniform. They were connected to the family by caste or by blood, and had been released from jail or from prisoner-of-war camps. The baroness, as a mark of honour, seated me on her right, and I began talking about my travels in Italy. One of the high-ranking guests suddenly awakened from his deep dogmatic sleep and in a booming voice eructated, ‘Ich hass die Italiener’ [‘I hate the Italians’], clearly he held them entirely responsible for the invincible army’s defeat, then he slumped back in silence. That afternoon, Wendi took me on a tour of the estate and at a certain point, though there was no boundary, no marker, no sign, I suddenly found myself at the heart of a concentration camp, with wooden bunk beds, rows of latrines, a gallows, whips, tattered clothing, wooden clogs, everything a chaotic mess, yet entirely distinct. This was the Stuttgart-Vaihingen concentration camp, the first I ever saw. It is familiar to historians these days and it had not lagged behind other, more famous camps in the harshness and cruelty of its treatment of prisoners. Wendi was crying; the camp was a part of the von Neurath Gut and the family could not have been unaware of what was happening here.

  Much later, I learned that Wendi, like a number of young Germans who wanted to expiate the sins of their fathers, joined an organization called Aktion Sühnezeichen: she went to Israel (the state was founded the following year) and began to work with Jewish survivors. Some Germans went much further in their attempts at reparation: in Israel I met Dieter von Schwarze, the son of another aristocratic family, an uncompromising man who felt that helping survivors was not enough. He had to become a Jew: he and his wife set about converting to the most strictly Orthodox Judaism, passing the all-but-impossible tests imposed on those determined to convert – in order to discourage them, since Judaism, as we know, does not proselytize. Dieter and his wife stood firm, they succeeded in converting, learned Hebrew, settled in Jerusalem; they chose a Hebrew surname, he grew a beard and she wore a sheitel, the wig Orthodox Jewish married women wear to inhibit desire. Two of their sons became brilliant officers in the Tsahal. Dieter and his wife later returned to live in Germany under their original name; their children have founded a line in Israel.

  I saw Wendi before leaving Tübingen for Berlin; she lent me 100 marks – 100 Deutschmarks after the Währungsreform, the currency reform intended by the Americans and Adenauer to make the mark a strong currency once more – and although I promised to pay her back, I never did: the paths of my life have been such that I lost track of her, and later I forgot. In 1986, in Washington shortly after the release of Shoah, I discovered that she was the wife of the German ambassador. Her birthright and her destiny had caught up with her; she had heard of Shoah, which had been screened at the Berlin Film Festival that year, but seemed not to care a damn about it. We arranged to meet at the ambassador’s residence, and she seemed to me now to be entirely suited to her role, speaking passionately but superficially about daily life as an ambassador’s wife. She would have liked to have had dinner with me, but her diary was full and her husband was about to show up at any moment to take her to some reception or other. I told her I remembered my debt to her and that I wanted to honour it as I had always intended. She nodded gravely, approvingly, but did not suggest waiving the debt. ‘I’ll pay you back in dollars,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to adjust the figure after so many years.’ The ambassador’s arrival – he too was an aristocrat from one of the noblest families, a wounded veteran of the Battle of Kursk, his steel-blue eyes set in a ravaged face, as tall and slim as Wendi’s mother – brought our meeting to a close. I still have not repaid her.

  When the director of the Maison de France in Tübingen, who reported both to the military government and to the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, informed me at the end of the year that there was a vacant position for a lecturer at the newly created University of Berlin, I applied and was accepted: I would be lecturing in philosophy and literature, but I would also be responsible for the Centre Culturel Français, which had been founded a year earlier and was not, I was told, satisfactory. I had never taught before; Berlin to me meant the Cold War at its hottest, the Berlin Blockade; my nature, in spite of my legitimate worries and fears, insisted that I could not refuse; I landed at Tempelhof in late November; I was not yet twenty-three. This dual role, or rather the two hats I was expected to wear, afforded me greater freedom than if I had only one, but, as I quickly realized, it also increased the constraints on me. In that immense, formless Berlin, I could not live where I pleased; although there were areas still devastated from the bombing, some middle-class and aristocratic residential areas such as Grünewald, Dahlem, Zehlendorf, Wannsee and Fronhau were as unscathed as Günzburg or Tübingen. The Freie Universität Berlin was in Dahlem, in the American sector of the city, but I was permitted to live only in Frohnau, in the French sector, in the far north of the capital, thirty kilometres from the university and thirty-five from the Centre Culturel, at the far end of the Kurfürstendamm. I was expected to present myself together with the papers given to me by the military administration on whom I would depend for the best part of my material existence, as well as to the French Embassy because, without wishing to be, I was registered among the Foreign Affairs personnel, and finally attached to the German administration at the university, which would pay my salary after deducting the Kirchensteuer – the church tax levied on all Berliners – a group to which I now belonged, of which I was rather proud. Général Ganeval was commander-in-chief; he would later be military attaché to René Coty, the President of the Republic, the same ‘bon Monsieur Coty’ who caved in to the police lobby and allowed Jacques Fesch, who had become a saint while on death row, to go to the guillotine. But there were also French diplomats,
aristocrats again for the most part, such as François Seydoux de Clausonne and a certain Marquis de Noblet d’Anglures who dealt with cultural affairs: a charming man with fine features who held audiences with me in his bedroom while he was getting dressed, like a levée with Louis XIV. He wore a nightcap, and from time to time, impassive and emotionless, he would let out a resounding, malodorous fart. He was a marquis, I was very young for a lecturer and to him I was nothing more than a pleb, and a Jew to boot; this was his way of letting me know what he thought.

  I was assigned a large, opulent villa in Frohnau whose owners – such is the law of the victor – were compelled to occupy the mezzanine floor and the cellar. But even so, the house was too big for one person, and I was allocated a housemate, a French journalist of Romanian origin, also Jewish, Benno Sternberg, a small, skinny, short-sighted man, curious about everything, much older than me and with a rich and varied experience of politics, a real Trotskyite; in fact, he had personally known Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, whom he worshipped. Benno and I quickly became firm friends, our friendship would last until his untimely death. He had been a member of every faction and Fraktion of Trotskyism and was a Fraktionist at heart, preferring schism to compromise, never afraid to be alone in his opinion. I think of him every time I reread Nekrassov, Sartre’s brilliantly comic play. On the night of its première at the Théâtre Antoine, Jean le Poulain, a wonderful, slightly portly actor, played the role of a Trotskyite who learns that someone else wants to join his Fraktion. Distractedly, incredulously, le Poulain exclaims, ‘What, my party would have two members!’ Benno occupied one floor of the huge house and I the other, but we threw joint parties and receptions.

  The Freie Universität at the time was a den of Nazis, the denazification that was the order of the day everywhere being nothing more than a joke. I wasn’t immediately aware of this state of affairs, but after a few weeks I became convinced of it, and in the year that I spent in Berlin I continued to come across ever-more flagrant proofs. My every movement was closely watched by a Fräulein Doktor Margass, the Rektor’s spy, an ugly, fat woman whose face occasionally appeared at the round dormer window that opened on to my crowded lecture hall. I quickly discovered that I liked teaching and my students repaid my efforts by their assiduous attendance. I lectured in French according to the combinative method that I invented – as mentioned earlier – in which I wove Le Rouge et le noir and L’Être et le néant into a single coil. The girls were in the front rows, the boys at the back, seated or standing, because there wasn’t enough room for everyone. The girls were of normal student age, but the boys were all older than I was, most of them just back from prisoner-of-war camps. I remember that when I quoted Sartre’s ‘the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion – neither consenting nor resisting – a thing’, carried away by my zeal and a demonstrative enthusiasm, I grabbed the hand of the nearest girl – who was also one of the prettiest, something that did not escape the eagle eye of the vile Margass, who had opened the skylight at that moment.

  One day – I had been teaching for several months by then – a student delegation asked to see me. They knew that I was Jewish. It was not openly discussed, but I had made no secret of the fact. They liked me, we had an excellent rapport, one based on freedom. I was almost certainly the only one of my kind at the university. To my surprise, they asked me if I would agree to hold a seminar with them and for them on the subject of anti-Semitism. I was surprised, moved. I didn’t feel qualified, but I accepted and we began to work, proceeding by a Socratic, maieutic method – which is something I’m rather good at. It was very rewarding; their questions helped me immensely and I in turn helped them. It was not an ex cathedra exposé but an ongoing, egalitarian exchange between individuals of the same age. I talked to them about what had happened to me, to my family, about the war, the Resistance, the Shoah – or at least what I knew of it then, which was not much, truth be told, numbers and abstract ideas – but I talked to them in particular about Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive. Mostly I talked to them about this book, at first about the ‘portrait of the anti-Semite’, which was visibly illuminating for them; I read them whole passages from it. Yes, Réflexions sur la question juive was the cornerstone of that seminar. I’ve often mentioned, and mention here again, the crucial role this book played in my life. I was identical to the Jew described in it, raised outside any religion, any tradition, any culture that might be called Jewish; of any obvious inheritance, properly speaking. This seminar on anti-Semitism inextricably led to my first trip, three years later, in 1952, to Israel: I knew I needed to go beyond Sartre’s book, that there were many other things to discover, to think about – I later talked to Sartre himself about it, and he approved. The seminar was held once a week and it gripped us all, myself and the students.

  So that I could get around, the French military government had allocated to me a car, a Volkswagen Beetle, the ‘car of the people’ that Hitler had made part of his political agenda in 1934. I did not have it entirely to myself since I had also been designated a driver, a man who unashamedly wore a Hitler moustache and always stood to attention before me. When he opened the door, he would doff his cap, click his heels in military fashion and roar, ‘Zu Befehl, Herr Lanzmann.’ He had been a chauffeur to some general on the Eastern Front and he now spied for both the French military government and for the university. Sometimes, after class, it happened that – Berlin being so vast – I offered one of the boys or girls in my class a lift, or even piled several students into the Beetle, something that did not please the driver, who liked to think of himself as a chauffeur, not a taxi driver. He reported everything. For my part, I had only one desire, to drive the car myself, so I was constantly at odds with the designated driver. Ultimately, I won my case and he had to give me the keys; it was a joy to be alone, at the wheel of the people’s Beetle driving through the ruins of Berlin. The chauffeur never forgave me.

  One fine morning he arrived with a smile, bearing an official notice from Général Ganeval, whom I mentioned earlier, summoning me. The general was a man of great poise, about fifty, with white hair. I had not met him at the time. He received me in his lavishly appointed office, and his first words were: ‘Young man, I hear you’ve been dabbling in politics.’ I was completely taken aback. ‘Politics, mon général?’ ‘You are conducting a seminar with German students on anti-Semitism, are you not?’ ‘Yes, sir, I am, only because they asked and – after everything that’s happened – I don’t see how a seminar on anti-Semitism at Berlin University can be seen as political, or why I would be wrong to hold one.’ He curtly replied, ‘It is political, and you have no right to engage in politics. Berlin is a sensitive city, a melting pot of five nationalities: Russians, English, Americans, French and Germans.’ I protested strongly, told him I did not understand, that I did not know how I could explain such an act of censorship to my students. He was disdainful, almost hostile, reiterating his veto and refusing any further discussion. I left, confused and appalled, without a word. Then I decided to write to him, repeating that I considered his position indefensible and that I could not remain silent on the matter. My letter clearly had the desired effect, and he summoned me again, this time greeting me rather affably, ‘Young man, as Barrès puts it, “I feel for anyone who is not a rebel at twenty”,’ – I found this reference to Barrès perverse. Nonetheless the general reissued a formal military order for me to terminate the seminar. But Barrès’ disciple did not surrender, he carried on in secret, with the agreement of his students, holding the seminar off-campus. Once again, my insubordination was quickly reported and I was summoned to see the marquis in his room early one Sunday morning: after an introductory fart, he told me, all smiles, that of course he understood, but that if I persisted in my course of action, I would lose my post. With a heavy heart the students and I agreed to put an end to the seminar. One of them – Heinz Elfeld, I’ve never forgotten his name, a tall boy with bushy eyebrows over deep-set coal-black eyes, always sil
ent, but never missing any of these seminars – came to tell me that he wanted to leave Germany, that he could not bear to go on living there. I questioned him and discovered that he had served with the Waffen SS (the paramilitary arm of the SS) on the Russian front. There was something decent and genuine in the way he spoke; I arranged for him to get a grant to study in Paris, which he did. Years later, on the boulevard Saint-Michel, I heard someone calling me: ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’ It was Elfeld, completely transformed, happy and smiling as he told me he had fallen in love with a young Jewish girl.