Bordeaux was the refuge of the last elected French government, a place of negotiations and diplomatic meetings, and this throws a new light on Csiki Weisz’s bicycle trajectory. He wasn’t looking for just any Spanish comrade; he was aiming at someone high enough to assure him that he would be leaving right away.
Arriving in the center, Csiki goes directly in search of people who count, Hôtel Splendid, they tell him, the lobby and the Grand Café are so crowded with politicians and other prominent types that his dusty figure passes unobserved. But when, in that throng, he finds the prime minister of the Spanish Republic, why does he leave him only the prints and not the boxes? Did Negrín tell him he didn’t have room? Or did Csiki fear that he would be among the first to be arrested in the unfortunate event of a mishap and didn’t want to entrust him with the negatives?
And so more pedaling, more trips: to the port, to the ticket offices of the steamship companies, screening all the public parks overcrowded with refugees, more and more exhausted. In the meantime, in a building he’d passed too many times, France had signed the armistice. He heard it on the radios turned up high, saturating the Atlantic air with an odor of the end of the world. There wasn’t time to find someone with a place on a ship, he had to be content with that Chilean, and then out, away, hurry to Marseille.
The treasures that Csiki Weisz loaded onto his back truly had a surreal landing place, despite his obstinate prudence: the prints meant for Mexico ended up in Sweden, the negatives to be carried to the Chilean consulate in the diplomatic luggage were sent to Mexico City—discoveries confirming after the fact that it would have been impossible to get them back by following their traces.
But there is an element that raises some more questions, and it is, again, Csiki.
In a 1998 photo that shows him with Leonora at the age of eighty-seven he’s dressed as if he’s about to go out. And if his memory, not his body, had begun to betray him, it would almost certainly have erased more recent memories rather than those tied to the negatives that reappeared in the city where he has spent a large part of his life. How is it that no one thought to get in touch with him? Why didn’t anyone try to take him to see his boxes again, something that, perhaps, could have put pressure on those who had inherited them? Or was it Csiki who no longer wanted anything to do with the whole business? It’s possible, certainly, that he was tired.
More than twenty years had passed since his friend’s most famous photograph—the Falling Soldier—was accused of being inauthentic. At that time Csiki had been quick to send Cornell Capa a testimonial, in English, ready to be taken up in the debate.
In 1939, when the Germans approached Paris, I put all Bob’s negatives in a rucksack and bicycled it to Bordeaux to try to get it on a ship to Mexico. I met a Chilean in the street and asked him to take my film packages to his consulate for safekeeping. He agreed.
The letter of ’75 reechoes in an advertisement that Cornell sends to the French magazine Photo, when the Louis Vuitton trunk rekindles hopes of finding the negatives, which have now become crucial as evidence to clear his brother.
In 1940, before the German advance, my brother gave a friend a suitcase full of documents and negatives. On the way to Marseille, this man entrusted the suitcase to a former soldier from the Spanish Civil War who was supposed to hide it in the cellar of a Latin American consulate. The story ends here. The suitcase, despite much searching, has never been found. Naturally a miracle is possible. If anyone has information regarding it contact me and you will be blessed in advance.
Someone shows up. A team from the International Center for Photography departs to dig holes in the countryside of southern France and returns to New York empty-handed. Seen in hindsight, the undertaking couldn’t have had a better outcome—and yet the advertisement, although correcting the mistake about the year in Csiki’s letter, diverges from it with details that make it more imprecise. It doesn’t matter that Cornell placed his brother in Paris when he was stuck in Mexico City—by another twist of fate later revealed to be salvific for the one who had loaded the negatives on his back. But why does a rucksack become a suitcase and Bordeaux disappear in favor of Marseille? And why, above all, does the consulate of Chile become a generic “Latin American consulate”? Why didn’t Cornell realize that, if you want to reestablish a truth or recover a treasure, the precision of the footholds is essential?
Suddenly you think you can guess. A faint laugh cancels out every laborious reflection, a laugh that you imagine reached the inner ear of Cornell Capa when, before trying the ad in Photo, he began to plan an expedition to Chile.
“Forget it, you hear me? Let sleeping dogs lie.”
It may be that the negatives were in Chile, but no one would turn up. They had become dangerous again, as when Csiki was pedaling in order not to be captured by the Germans. With luck, they would have ended up somewhere else, taking yet again the path of exile: in Mexico or Paris, wherever Chileans fleeing the country that had been very hospitable toward the Spanish refugees were welcomed.
“When one coup dies, another emerges. In Spain freedom is returning, magnificent, in Chile they haven’t yet finished the dirty work. You want someone to get in trouble based on a suspicion that they have something to do with some old photos? ‘And what’s the difference, anyway,’ for Chim and Gerda and me?”
Cornell names his brother numerous times a day, he still often dreams about him, and sometimes those intense dreams wake him in the night. It’s Bandi who causes him worries, worries that fill his life, and if now he has the sensation that he can almost hear him, it’s not unusual for him to summon him to ask for some advice. Who better to give it than the older brother who has gone through wars and flights, threats of expulsion and regimes? The great Robert Capa, however, wouldn’t understand that today not only politics can ruin him, and so don’t say ‘what’s the difference, anyway,’ Bob. Not when I’m the one who’s losing sleep over your negatives and who will go on looking for them as long as I live . . . ”
In the heat of driving out ingratitude, Cornell Capa no longer hears his brother’s voice. He says to himself, “I’ll think it over tomorrow,” adjusts the covers, and goes back to sleep.
Rinvenire, to discover, and inventare, to invent, descendants of the same verb, remind us that to recover something you have to draw on memory, which is a form of imagination. And yet, setting out on the search, you make some unpredictable discoveries. So the nocturnal dialogue between Cornell and Robert Capa has brought to light a new clue. It was already there, black on white, but you didn’t see it. Cornell Capa didn’t know that the negative of the Falling Soldier wasn’t in one of the three boxes, and it was also impossible for the man who made them to remember. But Csiki hadn’t forgotten Bandi, who had obtained false papers to get him out of a concentration camp. The occasion had arrived to pay him back, even if he could do nothing but add a tiny adjective: all. Yes, it was all.
But maybe “I put all Bob’s negatives in a rucksack” didn’t ultimately satisfy Cornell Capa. So he could have called Csiki to press him with a question: was that particular negative in the baggage left in Marseille?
“In Bordeaux.”
“Who cares: was it there or not?”
“I think so . . . ”
“But if you wrote that you took them all, it means it was there.”
Silence falls in the receiver, or the meowing of a cat that takes advantage of the immobility of the man on the phone to seek attention.
“The photograph was among the ones I gave Juan Negrín, the negative must have been there, too.”
Cornell understands that he isn’t getting anything. Annoyed, he counters that Csiki could at least tell him in writing that the Falling Soldier was authentic, since in Paris he was the one who did the lab work.
“What do you want from me: a death certificate? Haven’t you got enough? I wrote you that I tried to save all your brother’s photographs, I c
an’t do more than that: please, Cornell, leave me in peace.”
Cornell, resigned, sends his greetings to Leonora and, at the end of the useless phone call, delivers the letter to his secretary.
Meanwhile Csiki, a little agitated, makes an effort to remember in spite of himself. In the green box Chim’s work, in the ochre the clippings. So maybe among those? Or in the red box along with the battles of Madrid, Brunete, Teruel . . .
Then he remembers that he took a break to arrange Fred Stein’s negatives and see how much space remained. He remembers the strips of Gerda at the typewriter, he remembers that even his portraits hadn’t come out badly—she was so photogenic!—and it doesn’t really matter that he had to leave them in Paris, along with most of his own work. The images that Bandi wanted to have—he had taken all of those, starting with the only shot where they’re together, he at the height of happiness next to Gerda.
Maybe Csiki, having reprinted it more than once over the years at the Atelier Robert Capa, wondered how in the world, just at that precious instant, Gerda had a smile so far outside the range that illumines every other portrait of her. And then, you venture to imagine, he gave in to the curiosity to see the entire series blown up.
There she is, usual story, usual scene. Gerda at the table with a handsome youth who laughs, jokes, flirts. Suddenly, when he gets up to call the garçon or goes somewhere or other, Bandi appears and positions himself on the chair that has just become free. He smiles, smiles at Gerda, after saying something that, to a guy from Budapest, comes out as a joke (“I can’t leave you alone for even an instant!”), but in fact comes out of absolute love of that girl, even though she likes to joke and flirt with others. The girl laughs, and in the picture she has a slightly artificial smile, but she’s not an artificial girl, at all, and in fact she reprimands him: “Cut it out, O.K.?”
And Bandi immediately lowers his gaze, he’s sixteen again and Julia is scolding him, only then he did it mostly for show, while with Gerda he’s sincerely hurt. Then Fred photographed a wall of electoral propaganda and finally went back to the Dôme, where Gerda has resumed talking to that other guy and Bandi must have left with his tail between his legs.
The audience for the second act is the same as before: Fred, who’s shooting (but then is careful not to bring a print to his friends), and the man at the table behind, who’s no longer smiling but, rather, seems a bit dismayed. Maybe he, too, was an émigré who could catch Gerda’s growl word for word, or the tone of voice and the shake of the head were enough: Mon dieu, what a temper! These modern girls, but really . . .
Finally, there’s you who wonder if the snapshot that comes out of the “Mexican suitcase” in some way changes what you imagined, or only contradicts the effect of the preceding shot, where the lovers are smiling at each other against the background of one of the most legendary spots in Paris. You realize, then, that it’s more frequently the spectator who falsifies a photograph than the subject: and in the case of the snapshot at the Café du Dôme this is proved by the sequence of rediscovered negatives that reveal André’s intrusion into Gerda’s flirtation. Those snapshots, or clichés, as they’re called in French, narrate a different story from the romantic cliché projected onto the famous portrait of the couple, but that view doesn’t originate with a diffusion of the image that not even Benjamin could have foreseen. Maybe it begins when Capa brings the photo to New York, or even at the moment when Fred offers him that gift fated to send into oblivion everything that it doesn’t frame: because souvenir photographs, and memories themselves, serve to forget.
Forget what? That she didn’t feel the same rapture toward him that both snapshots capture on his face? That squabbles were the order of the day, because Gerda couldn’t bear his jealousy of the boys she never stopped attracting? That if a tank hadn’t crushed her he would probably have been an episode for Gerda, and she his great youthful love, who would take on the coloring of a beloved old photograph?
Capa couldn’t have seen her with detachment during a time that, with Gerda’s death, seems to have accelerated the flow of the sand in the hourglass. So you try again, now that you can interpret what the two images together narrate. There’s the evidence that, although glowing with triumph at having stolen a rival’s place, he immediately appears so contrite, as if admitting that he shouldn’t behave as if Gerda were his. And finally it explains why, at that moment, she doesn’t seem happy and in love. And yet she’s laughing at some foolish thing that André has said to her, first she laughs and then she gets angry.
Couples break up or stay together for inscrutable reasons, maybe partly because the same man who so often exasperates you can still make you laugh. And if that wasn’t enough—maybe because in the long term everything can become boring, maybe because there would be little to laugh about in the years to come—maybe need would have prevailed, or convenience, compelling them to confront those years together, if Gerda had returned to Paris. Fleeing with Chilean visas, starting again, thanks to Life, resuming the experiment of the agency on a grand scale and baptizing it Magnum . . .
Many couples that formed before or during or soon after the catastrophe that destroyed the world of their youth (Gerda’s brothers and parents who had taken refuge in Yugoslavia were shot; Capa’s father and older brother escaped, because they died in Budapest before the war) remain together all their lives: joined in the memory and the oblivion that they embody, living like a gift of good fortune any affinity that existed before that endless void. Lilo and Fred, Leonora and Csiki, and, finally a couple that forces the narrator to use the first person. My parents became engaged in the ghetto, found each other again after the war, loved each other and, at times, hated, amused, and supported each other, until death parted them. My mother, who had the stubborn coquetry of Gerda, could have been a cousin of hers. My father, like Capa a great storyteller, a younger brother. No, I have no trouble imagining Robert Capa and Gerda Taro on a bench in Central Park, she’s telling him to straighten his shirt, he’s grumbling mein General, jawohl, mocking her indelible accent, and she is irritated that he again has to play the clown, showoff. And while they continue to squabble, a kid passes on a skateboard in shorts and T-shirt so big that, as they flatten and swell in the wind, he looks like a giant, gaudy neon-colored bat and, since he’s speeding just a foot or so from the noses of the two old people, they are silenced for a moment.
“That would have been something to photograph.”
“Ach! Now where has he got to . . . ”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND NOTES
First of all, I’d like to thank Irme Schaber.
I met The Girl with the Leica at a show organized by Schaber, and my book is based on her biography. (Unfortunately, the most up-to-date edition, of 2013, is available only in German.) Above all, she was truly generous in giving me access to the materials she had collected in the course of the work that brought out of oblivion the life and photographic oeuvre of Gerda Taro.
Warm thanks to Mario Bernardo4 for his responses and to Zenone Sovilla for restoring the podcast in which Bernardo describes his time in the Resistance.
Thanks to Professor Giovanni Battimelli, of La Sapienza University, and to Nicoletta Valente, who opened to me the Vittorio Somenzi archive—which had never been examined before—and found the right volumes.
I’d like to thank Professor Peter Huber, of the University of Basel, and Harald Wittstock, the president of the Kämpfer und Freunde der Spanischen Republik 1936-1939 association, for information about Georg Kuritzkes. Thanks to Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr for information about Ina Britschgi-Schimmer.
Thanks to Roberta Gado, who drove me around Leipzig and helped me consult the Staatsarchiv Sachsen.
Thanks to Giacomo Lunghini and Sabrina Ragucci for explaining how a Leica and an analogue reflex camera work.
Thanks to those who tried to rein in my mania for documentation, reminding me that I was writing a novel. It’s true: although
I’ve stayed close to the sources, the soul of the book is, necessarily, the product of my imagination.
I took the liberty of calling my protagonist Gerda, although her name was Gerta Pohorylle, because she herself preferred the softer and more common version of her name.
Thanks to all the friends, who listened to me, encouraged me, and supported me. They know who they are.
4Mario Bernardo died in February 2019.
PHOTO CREDITS
1: Gerda Taro © International Center of Photography/Magnum/Photos
2: Robert Capa © International Center of Photography/Magnum/Photos
3: Robert Capa © International Center of Photography/Magnum/Photos
4: Gerda Taro © International Center of Photography/Magnum/Photos
5: © Estate of Fred Stein, www.fredstein.com
6: © Estate of Fred Stein, www.fredstein.com
7: © Kati Horna @ 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández
8: © Marion Kalter
9: © Estate of Fred Stein, www.fredstein.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Munich to a Polish Jewish family, Helena Janeczek has been living in Italy for over thirty years. With The Girl with the Leica she won the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award, and was a finalist for the Campiello Prize. She lives in Milan, Italy.
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