The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Jerusalem was at its lowest ebb when I arrived that November night: heavy clouds lowered above the rooftops, an icy rain chilled me to the bone, the wind and the cold leached into the houses. I was staying at the American Colony Hotel in the Arab quarter of the city; the hotel was as bleak as my soul and I asked myself what I was doing here, why I was even thinking about making the film, the pretext for my trip. On the second day, I fell ill, I was coughing, flu-ridden and running a temperature and had no hope of light, or even a wisp of blue winter sky. I decided not to stay in bed but to have dinner at Fink’s, a restaurant-bar in the Jewish city, its walls plastered with crude, vulgar German slogans, bordering on the obscene – ‘only happy farts [frölicher Furze] are permitted in this establishment’ – where they served wine, pommes sautées and red meat. The owner was a tall Westphalian Jew who had arrived in Israel as a child; his first name was Dave and his last name, although he was not related to the Frankfurt bankers, was Rothschild – something he was proud of. I had been invited there once before while working on the special issue of Les Temps modernes, but the entrance was so inconspicuous I had trouble finding it again. I stepped inside. Only one table was occupied, and I immediately recognized Uri Avnery, a member of the Knesset and editor of the weekly magazine Ha’olam Ha’zeh, whom I had first met in 1952. He too was a German Jew, wounded during the War of Independence, a staunch advocate of Arab–Israeli reconciliation who systematically opposed every Israeli government and also one of the contributors to our special issue. Avnery was not alone, there was a woman sitting next to him who he introduced in German, then we quickly slipped into English. He invited me to join them and I accepted, despite my red nose, my cold and my cough. I had not quite caught the name of the woman whom I assumed to be Avnery’s mistress, he had hissed it inaudibly, but it hardly mattered, from the moment I set eyes on her, she fascinated me, her presence here in Fink’s, in Jerusalem, in Israel, was a mystery to me. Such matchless beauty does not exist there, nor in France, nor anywhere. I could not connect her with anything, not to the most beautiful Jewish women I had ever met, who had never evoked such a feeling of strangeness, nor to any of the women I had met in other countries. Faced with this utterly enigmatic woman, who to me had no name, no origin, no history, I truly felt in terra incognita, with no landmarks that might lead me to her. She said little, a word or two in German from time to time, in a gravelly voice that electrified me, and she proved to speak impeccable English. I was in no condition to sustain a conversation with Avnery, who I liked a lot, but whose sarcastic way of pulling his country to pieces until there was not one stone standing on another had always irritated me. For him, it was a sort of existential trick that made it possible for him to go on living here, an extreme incidence of Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’, happy in its own unhappiness. Israelis are particularly adept at this subterfuge, and although Uri was one of the best at it, he was not the first I had encountered and, as it was not something I really needed to hear while preparing to make a film about Israel, I took my leave of them, resolving to penetrate the mystery of this unknown woman, whose stern but noble face and the intimation of her sylph-like body tormented me all night. I wanted desperately to see her again but the only information I had gleaned over dinner was that she was currently living in Jerusalem. I wondered how to track her down: finding a woman whose name I did not even know would be an impossible task and I had to face the fact that Avnery was the only person who could help me. I phoned him, thanked him for dinner and frankly confessed that I was obsessed with this mysterious woman and wanted to see her again. He had the good grace to give me her name, her phone number and some information about her. She was from Berlin, her mother was Jewish and her father a member of the Prussian haute bourgeoisie; after living for several years with a Bavarian baron, an architect by profession, she had left him the day after their wedding to move to Jerusalem where she had encountered friends of her mother who had known her as a child and who had fled Germany in 1936 or 1938. Angelika Schrobsdorff was a writer who had published a merciless but hugely successful novel about men, Die Herren [The Men], and was considered to be the most beautiful woman in Germany. My cold cleared up, I called her, we met, and in my rough and ready way, I swept her off her feet by the intensity and sincerity of the passion I felt for her from the moment I first set eyes on her. It was mutual love at first sight and I believe that, ill-disposed towards happiness, she was happier at the beginning of our relationship than she had ever been. Hardly had she married the baron than she had told him that making their relationship official had been a mistake and she wanted a divorce.

  There was no longer any need to think about whether or not I would make a film; it was obvious that I would. I stayed in Israel for about a month, crisscrossing the country, sometimes by myself, sometimes with her, alone as little as possible. She gave me the priceless gift of meeting her friends, Berlin Jews, her mother’s friends in fact, who thought of her and treated her as their own daughter, admiring her for her beauty and because to them she represented all that was great about the German language, the critical freedom, the inventiveness and the mordancy of pre-Hitler Germany, for which they had retained an incurable nostalgia. Handsomely bound editions of the Sämtliche Werke [Complete Works] of Goethe, of Schiller, of Hölderlin, of Hegel, of Kant, lined the bookshelves of the Yekke – as German Jews were known in Israel – in the quiet, shady neighbourhood of Rehavia I mentioned earlier, causing my eyes to well with tears, though I did not really understand why. Israel, Germany, the two years I had spent there, the Shoah, Angelika, connected within me at unsuspected depths. And I began to feel an affection for the bankers, the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers, the pernickety law-makers who comprised the majority of Israel’s Supreme Court, an admiration that overshadowed the friendship I felt for Flapan’s friends, the kibbutzniks of Hashomer Hatzair. I have already mentioned how dazzled I had been by Gershom Scholem’s library, that glorious Aladdin’s cave of Jewish culture, but I became immensely fond of Scholem on the first occasion that he and his wife Fania invited Angelika and me to dinner. This great scholar was no priggish pedant, he was generous with his knowledge if he felt that the person he was talking to was genuinely interested. He was a pioneer, a land-clearer, curious about everything, a thinker, a philosopher, a polemicist, plain-spoken and extraordinarily witty. I liked his face too, his big, commanding nose, his pale blue eyes that still held a glimmer of childhood. He was a Berliner like Angelika, with whom he had a close friendship; he took us both under his wing and four years later he was a witness at our Jewish wedding when Rabbi Gotthold married us under the huppa in Jerusalem on a warm October afternoon. There is no such thing as a civil wedding in Israel, but the Yom Kippur War had taken place in October the previous year, and to marry like this was for Angelika and me a tribute to this country that we thought we had lost and that we both loved.

  I returned to Paris and informed the producer that I would direct the film, consumed by a single thought: seeing Angelika again, going back to be with her as soon as possible. But Mademoiselle CW had no intention of taking shortcuts. Though she was rich, she did not intend to finance the project personally. Producers, as is well known, rarely risk their own money. Since she wanted to play at being a producer, she now had to prove herself by behaving as they do, and so she asked me to write a treatment – a word and an activity I despise – of about a hundred pages that she could use to raise the necessary funds. This delayed my reunion with Angelika, something that upset her as much as it did me. We wrote long letters to each other every day in English (for many years, until she learned French, it was our shared language), I loved her cynical, pessimistic style, she never lied to herself, the worst, as far as she was concerned, was a foregone conclusion. I loathed the idea of writing a screenplay, scene by scene, with dialogue and directions like ‘EXT.-DAY’ or ‘EXT.-NIGHT’. But I set myself to work and produced seventy pages distilling my essential thoughts about the normality of Israel, which for me was in
fact the abnormality, with indications of shots and sequences. CW and her assistant declared themselves delighted with my work and some days later informed me that, according to their calculations, I would need to film for forty-eight days, eight nights, four dawns and three dusks. I realized I was dealing with grotesque amateurs and that I would never get anywhere with them. But I agreed to go back to Israel with CW, who, armed with my screenplay, planned to raise the money for the film there; my only plan was to rush straight into Angelika’s arms and spend every night with her while we were there. Finally, I grew tired of CW’s endless quirks and procrastinations and put an end to our collaboration and set about trying to find alternative funding for the project. The budget for Pourquoi Israël was very small; I managed to raise modest sums from various sources, which I offered like a dowry to a production company recommended to me by Claude Berri. If I seem to be making much of this it is only because I want to make it clear that the love of a woman was the decisive motivation for the film. In fact, Pourquoi Israël is dedicated to Angelika Schrobsdorff, and the key scenes are peopled by the German Jews that I met through her. Gert Granach, whose contributions open and close the film and whose deeply moving Spartacist songs, accompanied by his accordion, punctuate it, is a close friend of Angelika’s. She herself can be seen in a long shot panning from left to right, but there is another shot – a more subtle way of marking her presence – a shot of a stone balustrade in Jerusalem with her cat, a beautiful tortoiseshell Persian named Bonnie, replaced, after she died, by Deborah, the cat I was chasing in our garden in Paris when I broke a bone in my foot.

  When I first met her, Angelika had not written for several years; she was obsessed by her family’s painful past, which she knew she had to face, to relive, if she were ever to regain her creative freedom. I managed to coax the story from her in snatches, the story she has since told in her books after I managed to convince her (with the reciprocity of love) to write again, to persuade her that she would come through her crippling bouts of depression only if she faced what was hardest for her to face. But it was not until she gave me the magnificent, heart-wrenching letters written by her half-brother, Peter Schwiefert, to their mother that these fragments came together for me into a coherent whole and I understood the tragic uniqueness of those lives crushed by history. It was the only solution to the enigma posed by Angelika that first day, the enigma was her life. After reading Peter Schwiefert’s letters, I knew which questions to ask and how to ask them. In the vibrant, uninhibited Berlin of the 1920s, Else, their Jewish mother, beautiful, frivolous, at once carefree and anguished, did as she pleased; she had three children by three men, all gentiles, the last of whom she married. Bettina was the daughter of the first man; Peter was the son of the second, a fashionable playwright named Fritz Schwiefert; the father of her youngest child, Angelika, was Eric Schrobsdorff, the son of wealthy developers who owned a number of properties in Berlin. Eric married Else in spite of his family’s fierce disapproval. His mother joined the Nazi party after Hitler came to power and forced Eric to divorce: his marriage to a Jew was bringing shame on the family. But Else loved Berlin, she could not imagine living anywhere else, she did not take the Nazi threat seriously. Rather than leave the country for Palestine while she still could, as her friends had done – the friends I had met who were the reason for Angelika’s presence in Jerusalem – she waited until the last moment. It was too late. Eric, who was still very fond of her and had provided for her financially, found a Bulgarian who agreed, in return for a hefty fee, to participate in a marriage of convenience and to convert to Judaism. Since Bulgaria was one of the rare Balkan allies of the Axis powers not to lapse into anti-Semitism and, thanks to King Boris, protected its Jews, Else moved to Sofia with her daughters, Bettina and Angelika, where she spent the war years unworried. It is only fair to say that during the war Eric Schrobsdorff, in his Wermacht uniform, visited his wife and daughter, and helped them out during their exile.

  But what of Peter, the son? He abhorred Nazism: in spite of the fact that he was protected by his father’s status as a non-Jew, and though his mother begged him to stay – he was not yet twenty – he left Berlin and Germany for Portugal without a penny a few days after Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938). There he lived in abject poverty, learning the language, giving lessons, and beginning an extraordinary correspondence with his mother: while she stubbornly refuses to leave what she still refers to as her homeland, he deliberately chooses the Jewish part of himself, going to the German consulate in Lisbon to declare himself a Jew and consequently being forbidden from returning to Germany. And, in letter after letter, it is this half-Jewish son who, often in coded terms, pleads with his mother to accept who she is, imploring her to recognize the consequences. He demands that she do something, that she live up to the Judaism of her forefathers, yet he understands the difficulties and the contradictions with which she is struggling, his compassion invariably prevailing over his intransigence. For he is devoted to his mother, and once he learns that she is in relative safety in Sofia, he devises lunatic schemes to get to her from Greece – where he is now living – organizes daring meetings that inevitably come to nothing. In 1941, the letters suddenly stop: Peter Schwiefert has left for Egypt where he has enlisted in de Gaulle’s Free French Forces. He fights against Vichy troops in Syria, in Cyrenaica in Libya with the British Eighth Army, he is one of the heroes of the battle of Bir Hakeim; he crosses Italy from south to north, is wounded in the Battle of Monte Cassino and again north of Rome; he arrives in Saint-Tropez where he fights until he reaches the Vosges where, for the first time in three and a half years, he writes to his mother, having heard that Sofia has been liberated by the Red Army, telling her that, for all this time, he had lost the ability to write or even to speak: ‘The bird has no wings any more,’ he writes. A long, absolutely admirable letter, a ruthless condemnation of the Germans who supported Hitler to the end and who are obeying him still. He vows to march into Berlin and settle scores with Germany and with his own family. It is he who tells his mother and his sisters of the enormity of the crimes committed by their country. This letter, like all of his letters, reveals a lucidity, an honesty, a nobility of thought, a sensitivity that are unique and can be read only with tears in one’s eyes and with profound admiration. But Peter Schwiefert never made it to Berlin. He was killed on 5 January 1945 during Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt’s counteroffensive, known as the Ardennes Offensive, or the Battle of the Bulge. By the time his mother Else received his last letter in Sofia, he had already been dead for six months. He is buried in the military cemetery of Strasbourg-Kronenbourg and his grave, when I visited it with Angelika, had a cross over it. This was something that had to be put right. I did so. Peter’s letters were published in 1974 by Gallimard under the title L’Oiseau n’a plus d’ailes [The Bird Has No Wings], in the collection ‘Témoins’, edited by my friend Pierre Nora. I wrote the preface and the linking texts and corrected or rewrote the translation. The book met with unanimous praise by the critics and earned the success it deserved. It was my wedding present to Angelika. By this time, I had been working on Shoah for a year.

  Chapter 18

  Pourquoi Israël met with a curious fate. Shooting was brutally interrupted one day by an uncompromising female producer who considered I had already amassed sufficient ‘material’ to edit the film and refused to allow me to buy the film stock I knew I still needed. My cinematographer, William Lubtchansky, who refined and deepened my cinematic education, was as distraught as I was. The same producer then reoffended during the editing process after a screening that thrilled those invited to attend, who explained their enthusiasm in terms that were new to me: ‘It’s a film d’auteur, a film d’auteur.’ The following morning, when my editors, Françoise Beloux and Ziva Postec, and I arrived, in deepest darkest Neuilly, feeling animated and enthusiastic, I was refused entry to the stuffy box-room that served us as a cutting room. I was told that the production had no more funds and that editing had been s
topped sine die. This meant sorting things out by myself; the producer wasn’t taking the slightest risk: she knew this was my first film and that I would be ready to do whatever it took to complete it. She was not wrong, I found the money, brought it to her, the cutting room was reopened. In order to devote myself to Pourquoi Israël, which cost me almost three years’ work, I had asked Pierre Lazareff if I could take unpaid leave and he had agreed. Being inexperienced and madly in love with the film and with Angelika, I had signed the contract imposed on me without negotiating terms – I would have signed anything. Thus, although I had raised some of the funding and made it possible to complete the film, I was paid a bare minimum. Compared to my previous salary, it was a considerable step backwards, and by the time I finished the film I was desperately poor, and the joy I felt at completing it was tinged by anxiety over my future.