The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  I loved, I still love, Berlin and I will never truly get to the bottom of the enigma that the ex-capital of the Reich, now the capital of a reunified Germany, represents for me. I can spend hours at the Paris Bar or the Café Einstein where I tirelessly observe those open, free, serious young German couples, so similar to those memories of my mind’s eye. But I have been back to Berlin many times since 1948. A few years after the fall of the Wall, during a cruise on the River Spree, which runs through the city, I was struck by the architecture of the new Berlin: light, airy, imaginative, utterly at odds with the original ruins I had seen, or even of the first reconstruction, which I witnessed, as though history has decreed that this metropolis should be in a state of perpetual renewal. Earlier, in 1989, I had discovered the Bauhaus-Archiv by the Landwehrkanal, where the body of Rosa Luxemburg had been dumped after she was murdered (my friend Marc Sagnol, a dedicated ferreter-out of evidence of the Jewish presence in Germany, in Eastern Europe, in Russia, the Ukraine and Moldavia, was the first person to show me where her floating corpse had been found; I go there now every time I visit Berlin, without quite knowing why, it is like self-imposed duty I cannot shirk); I also discovered undeveloped areas, huge abandoned spaces that flanked both sides of the Wall in the heart of the city. During the interminable years of the Cold War, I had visited East Berlin with an official permit on many occasions, but had never seen these places because, since they abutted the Wall, it was forbidden. But, as I now realized, these barren wastelands were precisely where Nazi institutions had been. Had I seen them before making Shoah, I would probably not have been able to read them, to decipher them. Because of Shoah, my vision had become acute, sensitive. The name Prinz-Albrecht-Straße spoke to me; here and in the vicinity had stood the edifices of the Nazi terror: the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Head Office), the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office), the Gestapo, the heart of Hitler’s totalitarian system. Beneath one of these waste grounds, down a few steps, one could access a small subterranean exhibition, not very substantial, in just a few rooms, of photographs – some already known, others not – with powerful, sobering captions. The site was called the ‘Topography of Terror’. I wondered which Germans had had the idea for this place and, although I did not know them, I felt a certain affinity with them. The past comes alive in this handful of open rooms in a no-man’s land to which no one has laid claim, where everything seemed possible. At that moment I realized that Berlin was a city without equal, because it was possible to read the entire past of our time in this urban landscape as clearly as in the strata of an archaeological dig – Imperial Berlin, the Berlin of Kaiser Wilhelm, Nazi Berlin, Allied Berlin, Red (Communist) Berlin – all coexisting, coalescing, merging into a unique site of twentieth-century history. For me, it was like a miracle of memory, a fragile miracle that had to be preserved at all costs. It occurred to me that if the architects and urban planners of the new Berlin wanted to shoulder their responsibility to history, they should leave this place untouched, preserve this empty space in the middle of the city, this hole that I personally referred to as the trou de mémoire [lapse of memory]. I remember raising the subject once at a colloquium, though with no hope at all: property developers invariably have the last word, and they, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Indeed, the ‘hole’ I dreamed of no longer exists, it is now the new Potsdamer Platz, with its futuristic, often wonderful architecture.

  Truly, I loved Berlin from that first year, overcoming my fear of the East. The collapse of the Third Reich, the surrender, had instilled in the people of Berlin a sort of wild, unbridled freedom fused with extraordinary courage and discipline. Day and night, groups of women known as Trümmerfrauen, ‘rubble women’, cleared away bricks from ruined buildings, piling them into tall pyramids at crossroads. The buildings on the Kurfürstendamm at first appeared to be unscathed, but it was like a film set; more often than not, behind the façades, there was nothing other than struts holding them up, but sometimes, on certain floors, there would be entire apartments left almost untouched or already reconstructed. I remember the apartment of a Greek consul, more German than Prussian, called Papaianou, who used to invite me to lavish parties attended by overbearing surgeons, lawyers and nouveau riche property developers who congregated and held forth in dark corners and restrooms, while their elegant wives pressed their insatiable red lips to mine, deftly palming their telephone numbers scribbled quickly on a ticket. This was how I met the Countess von B, a haughty beauty who turned out to be a whore – she asked me for money the first time we found ourselves in bed together. The count, her husband, had a hangdog expression and it was difficult to say whether he had knowingly married a prostitute or whether she had become one after the collapse of Germany and the destruction of the von B factories, which had since been rebuilt: industry always rises from the dead.

  In certain snow-covered streets in West Berlin, one might see men – in ill-assorted clothes, caps and boots – speaking various languages, but often Yiddish, as these were DPs, displaced persons, men who had been freed from the concentration camps in 1945. There were many Jews among them; they had been waiting here for three years now, to go to America, Australia, Israel. In fact, they were quite content in Berlin because they were untouchable. After what they had been through, they were above the law, and besides, no one seemed quite sure what the law was. They trafficked in everything: cartons of American cigarettes, raw materials, shares, including Japanese industrial shares, which were at an all-time low, but which they knew would rise again. A number of them became extremely rich: Yossele Rosensaft, known as ‘the king of Belsen’ for surviving all the tortures inflicted on him in the Nazi camps before being liberated from Bergen-Belsen by the Allies, this steely little man of extraordinary intelligence built his fortune this way. I visited him in his New York apartment on 71st and Madison when I was preparing to make Shoah. He showed me his most unusual collection of French Impressionist paintings. We had been in Berlin at the same time, we discovered. (He later died of a massive heart attack in the lobby of Claridge’s hotel in London.) DPs were not unique to Berlin, they could be found in all the big German cities: Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich. Some, curiously, rebuilt their lives in Germany where they were to form the kernel of the future Jewish community. The first person to dare to break the German post-war taboo forbidding attacks on Jews was Fassbinder, in a play entitled Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod [Garbage, the City and Death], in which he shamefully attacked the Jewish property developers in Frankfurt, many of whom were former DPs. While they spent fortunes buying up worthless land in order to build the Frankfurt of the future, Fassbinder made the hero of his story an ammoral man with no faith and no name, presented as ‘der reiche Jude’ – ‘the rich Jew’ – a man whose greed was consubstantial with his nature. It was made into a film in 1977 by the Swiss director Daniel Schmid under the title Shadow of Angels.1

  After the summer holidays of 1949, I returned to Berlin and my students for a second year of teaching. The cancellation of the seminar had encouraged them to launch an investigation into the existence of a Nazi bureaucracy within the university administration. For my part, I could not bear the contradiction between official Allied propaganda about the necessity of denazification and the ban imposed on me by the French military government. So I decided to tell the truth about the Freie Universität. I wrote a long, well-documented article that I naturally submitted to Der Kurier, the daily newspaper in the French sector, whose articles had to be vetted by the French censor. Général Ganeval was immediately informed. Publication was out of the question, it was rejected outright and attempts were made to intimidate me. It met with the same fate with the British, who were manipulated by their French counterparts. A scandal was to be avoided at all costs. The Americans wanted to publish the article because the university was in their sector and directly concerned them, but in the end they too lacked the courage of their convictions. There remained one last possibility – the press in East Berlin, in the Soviet sector, which, since
the previous October, was also capital of the newly created German Democratic Republic. It was still possible to move freely between West and East – the Wall had not yet been built – you had only to take the S-Bahn, which ran overground for the most part, to get to East Berlin, getting off at Friedrichstraße. This ability to move about freely was very important to the Russians and the German Communists: the Soviet bloc was at the height of its powers, World Festivals of Youth and Students were organized in East Berlin, and they wanted to bring together as many people as possible. Like it or not, there was something powerful and fraternal in those vast Red communions.

  The Berliner Zeitung, the main newspaper in East Berlin, which still exists, immediately accepted my article, publishing it in two instalments, with a double-page spread on each occasion. But the Berliner Zeitung had also discovered that Edwin Redslob, the Rektor of the Freie Universität, had written courtly sonnets dedicated to Emmy Goering, the Reichsmarschall’s wife, the former actress Emmy Sonnemann, praising her graceful elbows as she served tea to Nazi dignitaries. So here, then, was my vitriolic article about the Freie Universität and the censored seminar, with, in a box in the centre of the page, in bold type, the Rektor’s poems to the wife of the Reichsmarschall recently condemned to death at Nuremberg, who had preferred cyanide to the gallows. I knew nothing about this before publication. What a scandal! A double scandal. The Rektor was later dismissed along with a number of others. Général Ganeval’s reputation did not emerge unscathed, and I was told that he seriously considered having me placed under close arrest. I had expected that, however, and had left my apartment for several days. In fact, I was no longer living in Frohnau, but in Zehlendorf, in an apartment not far from the university that I paid for out of my own pocket. I was therefore entirely free of the French military administration. Apparently, I remained on a sort of blacklist at the Quai d’Orsay for several years. Je ne regrette rien.

  When I returned to France, the issue of earning a living was pressing. From Cau, I found out that Suzanne Blum, a celebrated lawyer, had decided to learn philosophy. She lived on the rue de Varenne in what I considered to be a lavish apartment. Her brother, André Blumel, had been secretary to Léon Blum and they had remained close. Suzanne Blum had spent the war years in England and the United States with Pierre Lazareff and the founders of France-Soir and the other newspapers in the group. Suzanne was a tall, intelligent, attentive woman and three times a week I taught her what I knew, it was truly philosophie dans le boudoir, since her boudoir was my classroom. She learned fast, was very fond of me, and claimed that she would help me find a career. She even seriously considered marrying me off to a Rothschild – I never knew which one – which would surely have had beneficial consequences for my later life. She recommended me highly to Pierre Lazareff and Charles Gombault and I was quickly engaged as a ghost writer, or, as they were called, a ‘rewriter’, for the popular high-circulation papers of the Lazareff group. This anonymous work was entertaining and offered me extraordinary freedom, I learned a great deal and the team, under the gentle but firm hand of Roger Grenier – a future star at Gallimard – included many aspiring writers who considered not pursuing a career and reserving time for themselves to be something beyond price. Grenier astonished me by his speed and his ability to rewrite without apparent effort: he sat in front of his typewriter and typed away for hours, completely unaffected by writer’s block.

  But I was still haunted by Germany and suggested to Lazareff that I might head off for the summer to the newly created German Democratic Republic and write a feature for France-Soir. I thought perhaps my contacts at the Berliner Zeitung might prove useful. He agreed and I flew back to Berlin in a French military plane; we were caught in a storm and the plane pitched and shook for the duration of the flight while the other passengers, a group of senators, rushed to the toilet to throw up, the stench of vomit only serving to make their nausea worse; they murmured to each other, ‘Try to rest, cher ami, try to rest.’ To enter the GDR, I required a visa from the Soviet authorities. I went to the Russian headquarters in Berlin-Pankow and explained what I was planning. The duty-officer asked which newspaper I would be writing for. At the time I didn’t have a press pass or any form of accreditation; I told him I was a freelance and, as proof of my good faith, showed him my articles on the Freie Universität in the Berliner Zeitung. It was no good, the only newspaper that would have militated in my favour was L’Humanité. I didn’t mention France-Soir, but I dared to mention Le Monde. He replied that it was a capitalist newspaper in which I would never be allowed to publish the truth about the GDR. The Cold War was a serious business, the Korean War was about to erupt and, in France, the demonstrations organized by the Parti communiste generally ended in violent confrontations with the so-called ‘forces of law and order’. So instead I took advantage of the famous Leipziger Messe – the Leipzig Trade Fair – which anyone could attend, in order to secretly infiltrate the GDR. Thinking back now on the young man I was then, I realize it was sheer madness: I took a serious risk, the trip was an odyssey. Pastor Casalis, whom I had met while living in Frohnau during my first stay in Berlin, and who introduced me – to my astonishment and then delight – to Protestant energy and optimism, had given me the addresses of some of his East German colleagues who had formed a network called the Bekennende Kirche, the Confessional Church. ‘They’ll help you,’ he told me as I prepared to launch myself into the unknown. This turned out not to be the case: every time I introduced myself to one of the Lutheran fathers he turned pale, then green, and unceremoniously gave me to understand that I was putting him in danger. Not one of them helped me. Without a visa, it was impossible to stay in a hotel. In Weimar, Dresden and Jena, I slept in public squares, under bushes in parks. I remember a terrifying night in Halle as the VOPO – the Volkspolizei – combed the streets of the city and I spent all the hours of darkness on the move. But I managed to take a boat down the Elbe from Dresden towards what is known as Saxon Switzerland.

  By the time I made it back to Paris – in spite of these difficulties – I had seen and read rather a lot, and had spoken to many people, including friends I had made in East Berlin. I wrote a dozen articles, which I submitted to France-Soir. After much hesitation they rejected them: what I had written did not have sufficiently broad appeal and was considered too favourable to the Eastern bloc. So I sent the articles to Le Monde, where I knew absolutely no one. Four days later, the editor replied that he would be very happy to publish me because the tone of my articles was as fresh as the information they contained. They were quickly published, one a day, the first appearing on the front page under the headline ‘Germany Behind the Iron Curtain’. Had I been caught, I might have spent years in prison. In spite of that, the articles were, I believe, objective and nuanced.

  Cau told me that Sartre had read my articles and found them interesting. In fact, I saw the great man shortly afterwards at a dazzling conference on Kafka and introduced myself. He said, ‘Oh, so you’re Lanzmann,’ and suggested I might like to join the editorial meetings of Les Temps modernes, held in a smoky room on the fourth floor of 42 rue Bonaparte that overlooked the church and the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. So much has been said about these meetings that I will not dwell on them. Even now I am moved when I recall the unique trust Sartre had in young people who were completely, or virtually, unknown. He assigned subjects in his wonderful metallic voice, so warm that it convinced us all that, however difficult they appeared, we were equal to the task. Sartre was truly intelligence in action and at work, his generosity rooted in intelligence, his lively and intensely experienced sense of equality by miraculous contagion affected us all. We left these meetings enthused, our minds alert, enterprising, ready both for battle and for solitude. What he wrote about himself at the end of Les Mots [Words] – ‘If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any’ – I understood the truth of this from our first meetings at Les
Temps modernes, even if my sister made fun of him, saying, ‘Maybe, but you think you’re the first of the last.’ Merleau-Ponty spoke rarely, holding back, a philosophical statue of the Commendatore, watching and listening, amused, surprised, sceptical as his comrade talked about the latest films he had seen and assigned to his willing volunteers the task of writing them up in short paragraphs or in even briefer, but often savage, notes. Whether cinematographic or literary, the team of critics at Les Temps modernes was constantly changing, there were no permanent positions: Cau, Jean Pouillon, Jacques-Laurent Bost, both former pupils of Sartre at the Lycée du Havre, Francis Jeanson, François Erval with his formidable Hungarian accent and his invaluable knowledge of publishers and their forthcoming titles – magazines at the time published entire chapters of major novels in bonnes feuilles [advance sheets] – Roger Stéphane, the flamboyant liberator of Paris who gossiped about everything, J. H. Roy who travelled all the way from Châtellerault by train to attend the meetings. Some I’ve missed, some I’ve forgotten.

  And Simone de Beauvoir. We’ve finally come to her. From the first, I loved the veil of her voice, her blue eyes, the purity of her face and, more especially, of her nostrils. Something in the way I looked at her, in my attentiveness when she spoke or interrupted Sartre, referring to him as ‘vous autre’, must have alerted her to my attraction for her. I sweated blood over the first article I wrote for Les Temps modernes in my chambre de bonne on the rue Alexandre-Cabanel; I worked on it determinedly for weeks. I had called it ‘On the Press of Freedom’, punning on a title by the young Marx, ‘On the Freedom of the Press’, published by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The article was an extended meditation on the nature of the press, inspired by my experience with the Lazareff group. I argued that the press – we didn’t talk about the media back then – being in essence publicity (not in the sense of advertising, but in the sense of ‘making public’), can only be publicity of the truth, that truth and publicity are consubstantial. The opposite of publicity is not falsehood, but silence, censorship. Why would anyone publish a falsehood? And this is why the press – it is the worst crime it can commit, an attempt on its very essence – can lie with impunity. Even if he knows that everything in it is false, a tyrant’s subject reads the tyrant’s press. Because it is written! I concluded with the dizzying possibilities of propaganda. My text was praised by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and appeared in Les Temps modernes in April 1952, but it was published under the name David Gruber, a pen-name I based on Grobermann, my mother’s maiden name. After all, I was a rewriter at France-Soir and I was hoping to remain one. The magazine Esprit carried a flattering notice about the article. My second piece appeared in July of the same year, a shorter piece entitled ‘There Had to be Blood’, an eye-witness account of the demonstration of 28 May. I remember it as though it were yesterday; I’ve never forgotten the name of the Algerian worker who was killed by the riot police on the boulevard Magenta: Hocine Belaïd. The Korean War had begun and the Communists had accused General Ridgway, the head of the American armed forces, of using bacterial weapons. Demonstrators were chanting ‘Ridgway la peste’ [‘Ridgway the plague’], as Baylot, the Prefect of Police, and Brune, the Minister of the Interior, dreamed up the ‘homing-pigeon conspiracy’ in order to be able to arrest Jacques Duclos – the great Communist orator, with a gravelly voice and a belly like a barrel, who was second-in-command of the Parti communiste – on trumped-up charges, accusing Duclos of subverting state security. While Sartre, thinking about the demonstration, got down to writing his irascible and theoretical political roman-fleuve, Les Communistes et la paix [The Communists and Peace], which cannot be lightly dismissed as it so often is nowadays by those who have not read it, accusing it of recurrent Sartrian ‘errors’. The book is, in fact, more theoretical than ideological, already pregnant with many of the ideas that would later appear in Critique de la raison dialectique [Critique of Dialectical Reason]. Together with Deleuze, we characterized the demonstration as ‘fuite en public devant la police’ [‘a public flight from the police’]. Demonstrations at the time were extremely violent. There had been a march against Le Figaro, whose offices back then were at the Rond Point des Champs-Élysées. The marchers chanted, ‘Figaro SS, Figaro Nazi’. Neither side favoured subtlety. I wasn’t marching, but I was there as an observer when suddenly, on the pavement of the Champs-Élysées, I was swept up in a riot police charge: helmets on, batons high, the gardes mobiles were unhinged and didn’t care whether their batons hit the right target. I was, according to the beautiful theory we elaborated, guilty of ‘fleeing in public before the police’; I tried to blend into a cinema queue. Seeing the cops arrive, some woman – a born informer – started squealing, ‘Here he is, He’s here! He’s right here!’ My forehead was split open by a cosh and I was kicked in the stomach as I was dragged from the queue and bundled into a police van. The riot police had a field day: they slapped me, punched me, heaped abuse on me – their insults taking an anti-Semitic turn after they checked my papers – they spat in my face. I was called ‘gueule de raie’ [‘skate-face’] and ‘lotte pourrie’ [‘putrid monkfish’]. Ever since that day I’ve been completely allergic to those fish, delicious, I’m told, but the very names are enough to make me nauseous. I was held in the police van overnight and released – or rather, chucked out – at dawn, in a terrible state. I stumbled around Paris for hours not knowing where to go, not wanting to go anywhere. I felt humiliated, exhausted, defeated.