It may have been a defect in the lightning system that suddenly caused the landscape to lose its color. But there it lay, quite silent under its ashen sky. It was as though I could have heard even wind and church bells if only I had been more attentive.1
At the beginning of the 1900s in Prague, a little boy comes to visit the panorama, chaperoned by his grandmother. What is it that he sees inside?
[A]n almost completely darkened room. Around a polyhedral wooden cabinet high stools are arranged. In front of each one there are two round openings, which are dark peepholes located beneath a metal shield. You hold your eyes up or press them to the shield and the program appears. An attendant receives the guests and takes them to free spots.2
This is how Hans Günther Adler (1910–1988) begins his novel Panorama (first published in 1968). For the little child, a visit there is a long-awaited pleasure, an exciting adventure, and also an inexplicable enigma: In the darkened room, his eyes glued to the two peepholes, little Josef goes through what probably is the first truly historical experience in his life, that of a complete loss of reality. Fascinated, the boy watches pictures representing all the wonders of the outer world chase one another, each movement announced by the delicate strike of a little bell: “Attention, time’s up! Get ready for the next wonder!”3
Then the “next wonder” happens: The child becomes one with the image and at the same time dissociated from the world. The boy finds himself captivated by an imaginary space that he cannot enter.
The daily world disappears and is gone. The viewer and the picture become one on the inside, no one can get in. [. . .] The otherwise familiar world has disappeared. Here is another world, which one can only gaze at, there being no other way to enter but to gaze. Only the little holes are there for the eyes. Josef can see so for himself, simply by touching the glass, that there is no other way in. All the people and the distant lands that you encounter in these pictures remain untouchable behind the glass walls that are only large enough for the eyes.4
“Everything here is hard and fixed and tense,” the little boy in Adler’s novel notices: There is a cruel, hard pedagogic inbuilt in the construction of the spectacle. The strict grandmother does not even have to discipline the child, for the fascination of the experience itself is such that Josef is better behaved than usual. “Normally there is no opportunity here [in the panorama] to misbehave:”5 The loss of reality in the overwhelming visual attraction is sufficient to stop mischief.
In this essay, I will be considering panorama as a principle underlying the Nazi misrepresentation of the essence of the Holocaust and the perversion of its historical truth with the help of technologically reproducible images, such as photography, motion pictures, and museum displays. Hans Günther Adler was a survivor and the chronicler of the Theresienstadt ghetto, one of the most important historians and theorists of the Holocaust, the author of a pioneering and monumental study of the ghetto, Theresienstadt 1941–1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (first published in 1955).6 He also wrote poetry and novels, some of which, including Panorama quoted above, I am using in my analysis below. I am arguing that he in fact discovered panorama as a principle in the construction of terror, in the symbolic component of the Nazi industry of destruction. It was from this latter vantage point that Adler, in his study of the ghetto, described an episode that belongs to the domain of the unheimliche even by the measure of the ghetto’s in general quite unheimliche history—namely, the story of cinematography in Theresienstadt.7
Adler reflected on the collective experience of Theresienstadt’s victims in his postwar sociological, historical, and political writing, as well as in his (until now not fully appreciated) fictional prose and poetry. In what follows, I will use some of his writing in order to elucidate Adler’s original approach to the Holocaust, with its focus on the community of coercion (Zwangsgemeinschaft), a category that allowed him to elucidate that particular configuration of the practices of extermination, survival, representation, and remembrance that created the unique and quite surreal reality of the Theresienstadt ghetto.
In admitting a possibility for the image to convey at least a share of truth of the Holocaust, we proceed from the assumption of the emancipating potential inherent in the image: As Georges Didi-Huberman maintained, “to snatch an image” inside a death camp means to transcend the death camp.8 In Theresienstadt, the prisoners were forced, under the threat of punishment, to act the roles of happy Jews enjoying a privileged lifestyle in what the SS sought to represent as “a Jewish paradise.” In that case, Didi-Huberman’s thesis does not quite apply but appears somewhat too optimistic, and also somewhat simplistic.
In Adler’s perspective, the image has no power of transcendence but has a different power: that of a tool for (moral) torture. As unbearably absurd, cynical, and sadistic as this project was, it nevertheless did appear as commonsensical and realistic in eyes of the SS bureaucracy. And no matter how abominable it felt, it was implemented by the prisoners of Theresienstadt. The lives of those people, in an overwhelming number, were obliterated immediately after the film was ready, and a short time before the film itself was partly obliterated as well. Those bits and pieces of footage that survived do register one instance of truth, and all the rest about it is just lies imposed by extreme violence: namely, that at a certain moment of time and a certain geographic point, a ray of light collided with a mass of nontransparent human bodies and left an imprint of its non-passage on the celluloid, producing certain shifts in the alignment of molecules and atoms in the coating on the surface of the film. This collision registered the truth, in the sense that those bodies actually had been present then and there, and had been alive at the moment of shooting. (We will see presently that even such ephemeral presence of the victim in the reality of the Nazi panorama was not desirable.) The question is: Is there any other truth one can maintain on the basis of such images beyond that initial one?
The ambiguity of cinematography in Theresienstadt appears to be irresolvable in those terms that were suggested by Didi-Huberman. Yet in Adler’s account, it is quite clearly nothing but a powerful means for the creation of an impenetrable optical envelope around Theresienstadt and around the lives and deaths of its prisoners. It is a visual environment that materially implements the principle of Nacht und Nebel in the Nazi representation of the Final Solution: to defame the victim; to destroy the victim symbolically by soiling his or her honor and memory; to render terror invisible, incomprehensible, and impossible to remember; to document; and to testify about.9 While producing an abundance of visual material, such an image aimed at burying the legal and historical evidence of the Endlösung. Its purpose was the eventual effacement, not preservation, of what it represented: subjection through moral destruction, and robbing from the victim even his or her own image.
In what follows, I will attempt to demonstrate that Adler’s critique of cinematography can be subsumed under a more general notion that would help in producing an analytic of Theresienstadt on a higher level of generalization. Using Adler’s own imagery in his early novel, I will call this overarching symbolic order “panorama.” I will try to analyze the structure of the apparatuses of power containing panorama as a constitutive principle: cinematography, photography, museum, and, primarily, the most elaborate and sophisticated apparatus among all others: the Theresienstadt ghetto itself.
The End of the World and Its Reproduction: Als Ob in the Town Called “Als Ob”
The propaganda film produced in the ghetto in 1944–1945, Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, was commissioned by the SS, who used Theresienstadt’s prisoners as the director, cameramen, writers, actors, and extras. In the annals of Theresienstadt, the production became a memorable event that all memoirists recollect vividly. Yet from the very beginning, there was an irresolvable ambiguity already in the idea itself to use cinema—to reiterate, a medium of light—in order to produce a “Jewish paradise” out of the deeply conflicted and unbearably painful, dark, and torturous heterotopia of Theresienstadt.
The cynicism of the intention itself, to make such a gigantic work of such profound falsification, a colossal misrepresentation of the ghetto’s tragic and miserable reality, was founded not only on the consideration of propaganda, but also on a simple commercial calculation: to sell the image of the Jews to the outside world in order to disorient the public opinion and to make profit from negotiating the lives of “prominent” Jews with Jewish organizations abroad. Later, during the SS so-called moderate period at the end of the war, the commercial component became even more pronounced when the SS were negotiating an exchange of those who could eventually survive Theresienstadt for a separate peace after the imminent fall of the Reich.10 Adler considered the idea itself to be a logical continuation of the Endlösung, an ingenious project of defamation aimed at the destruction of the present and future of the Jews in Europe (and, in addition, defamation produced by the Jews themselves through their own efforts). The anti-Semitic audiences watching the film would be given an additional reason to hate the Jews:
It was a film of pure fables, such that only the most stupid Jew hater could imagine about the Jews. [. . .] “While the Jews in Theresienstadt drink coffee with cakes and dance, our soldiers defend their motherland and bear all the burdens of the terrible war, need, and privation.”11
An additional complexity arises in connection with the fact that the film project aimed to be a representation of Theresienstadt, while the Theresienstadt ghetto itself already had been designed by the Nazis to serve for representational purposes. That was a truly bizarre assemblage: one apparatus of illusion, that is, filmmaking facilities, deployed in the middle of another apparatus of illusion, namely, a site of extermination seeking to produce the impression of a Jewish paradise. Theresienstadt’s unique status as an installation for suppression of life and the production of appearances—and, consequently, as an additional weapon in the extermination of the Jews, in this case, also by symbolic means—was only too obvious to the prisoners themselves.
Rather than empowerment, this awareness produced ambivalence: By the ambiguity of its design, Theresienstadt, that place of doom for the Jews, was still not Auschwitz; this end of the world was still not the end of the world. In Eichmann’s own words, it was “distinguished from other camps as day is from night,”12 which did not improve the situation of its prisoners in the eyes of “stupid Jew haters” as well as other Jews.13 Still, Theresienstadt did convey a weak hope for a slim chance. The ambivalence and ambiguity must have reflected upon the general mood. Adler, who survived not only Theresienstadt but later also Auschwitz and Buchenwald, insisted on underlining the crucial difference between the ghetto, where the doom remained ambivalent, and a death camp, where the doom gazed at its victim without any ambiguities, with the deadly gaze of the Gorgon (Primo Levi).
The specificity of the ghetto was in its in-betweenness. On the one hand, Adler conceded, the paramilitary organization indeed made it similar to a prison or a concentration camp. The crucial difference, however, was “Selbstverwaltung” (a word Adler invariably wrote in quotation marks), the system of “self-administration,” with the Jewish Council at the top deciding on matters of life and death.14 Especially destructive was (and still remains) the terrifying irony contained in the prefix Selbst-. Rule by administration should suggest a civil character of the community, and to produce such a misconception was the intention of the Nazi rulers when they established the ghetto as an illusion of a new order. However, the ambiguity in the term “self-administration” itself was both ethically and politically impossible to resolve. Such was the fundamental principle and the constructive force that produced and reproduced that specific configuration of violence of the Zwangsgemeinschaft (coercion community) in which Theresienstadt’s Jews were not only imprisoned but also manipulated and forced to perform, in an impossible combination of roles as martyrs-cum-functionaries, in a total spectacle of the “self-administration” of their own humiliation and extermination. This is what happened when, from its original condition of a closed concentration camp, Theresienstadt transformed into a “ghetto” (Adler uses quotation marks again) in summer 1942 to summer 1943:
Its elements never differed significantly from a concentration camp, but the self-government with its functions in the community of coercion (Zwangsgemeinschaft) were built in such a way as to conceal, at least apparently, the real relations, and to create forms that would indeed change the social foundation.15
This is how ambiguity was effective in the formation of the community of Theresienstadt. In an unwilling togetherness of men, women, and children, brought together by lawlessness and the force of brutal violence, there arose what Adler defines as a “pseudo-order of Chaos, a specter of order” that “cemented the community of prisoners with a mixture of active insanity, passive obsession, and the violence of the SS.”16
In a famous cabaret song produced inside the ghetto, Leo Strauss, the author of the lyrics, named Theresienstadt “a little town As If.”17 The little town from the song has a European cafe, music, food, and coffee—even though all of these are spectral “as if”-objects—and is therefore “quite OK” (ganz tip-top). The town is populated by people who belong to an “as-if-race” and live an “as-if-life” full of “as-if-truths.” These “as-if people” bear their heavy doom “as if it were not that heavy and speak of a better future as if there would be any tomorrow whatsoever.”
Whether Strauss intended this effect of meaning or not, there was dark irony in the fact that this macabre cabaret product described quite aptly not only the illusionism of Theresienstadt, that live installation of falsification. Als ob is the principle of metaphor in language and representation, the foundation of all phenomena of symbolization, the device that is supposed to bridge—and by bridging, confirm—the gap between the symbol and the world, the verbum and the res of the Aristotelian tradition. Kant invented Als ob as a principle that allowed judgments about things one cannot know empirically, as, for instance, in theology, astronomy, or psychology, also based on metaphor and analogy. By giving the place of their martyrdom, whether in jest or quite seriously, the name die Stadt Als ob, the cabaret in Theresienstadt succeeded in capturing the very essence of the Holocaust as it was being performed in the ghetto. Cinematography—Als ob in the medium of moving images—turned out to be a constructive element that cemented Zwangsgemeinschaft, an Als-ob-community, with additional, symbolic violence. To reiterate, that curious reduplication: One illusion (the Als ob of cinematography) deployed within the framework of another illusion (the Als ob of the ghetto itself) constituted an assemblage that was historically unprecedented, something truly unique among other social inventions of the industry of terror in the Third Reich.18
The reduplicated Als ob was not only the condition of existence in Theresienstadt but ultimately the only condition of survival. The last Jewish Elder of Theresienstadt, Benjamin Murmelstein, would point out this paradox in his conversations with Claude Lanzmann in the 1970s. Murmelstein insisted that not only his own survival, but also the rescue of what could be saved of the ghetto population, depended on the ghetto’s (and Murmelstein’s own, as the Elder) capability to maintain the Als ob, to continue acting out—in spite of the thousands being transported to Auschwitz—the appearance of serenity and happiness inside the ghetto. The whole of the population was thus forced to participate in an involuntary cooperation with the SS, creating a large-scale enactment, with hundreds of organized people taking part and massive investments of money and expertise that were intended, scripted, and directed toward the sole aim of misrepresenting the Final Solution in the eyes of the contemporary audiences and for all posterity. In his characteristic manner of dryly humorous and macabre paradoxalism, Murmelstein compared himself (and the ghetto in general) with Scheherazade, who survived
because she told a new story every night. A story was expected of her. . . . I had the task to tell the story of the Jewish paradise. And it was always expected of me . . . I would tell the story of the Jewish paradise, the city which the Führer presented to the Jews. [. . .] Like Scheherazade, she had to have a fairy tale to tell. I had to have a fairy tale to tell. Right? The ghetto had to be revived so that the fairy tale could be continued to be told.19
“Verschönerung”: Embellishing the End of the World
Adler’s suspicion toward cinematography can be placed into a wider context of his more general critique of mechanically reproducible historical and cultural representation, the various panoramas of terror. In connection with the proposed visit in June 1944 of the Danish and the International Red Cross, to give the ghetto an attractive look, Theresienstadt was subjected to a massive input of activities comparable to the present day’s campaigns of commercial gentrification. In order to convince the visitors of the innocence of what they would be demonstrated, the administration mobilized the population to build, pull down, rebuild, or renovate the ghetto according to the SS’s expectations of what might be the expectations of the visitors. The idea to change the image of the town thus amounted to a massive re-representation of the ghetto, to give it the appearance of well-being and happiness—a “Jewish settlement” based on the modern principles of self-organization, productive work, and social welfare, under the benevolent cultural patronage provided by the Nazis.20 It was within this framework of Verschönerung that Kurt Gerron, a prisoner of Theresienstadt and in the past a popular theater, film, and cabaret actor and director from Berlin, was summoned to direct the production of the film.21
Given this emphasis on the expectations and desires of the consumer of Theresienstadt’s image, the ghetto as an institution and a site of terror was being not simply falsified but also commodified, the new look intended not only to deceive the visitors but also to seduce the outside world into negotiation. Packed with what the Nazis categorized as “prominent,” or “exchange Jews” (Austauschjuden), as well as well-known cultural workers, the ghetto was reevaluated by its masters in the SS, who by the end of the war discovered its value as a piece of capital. The strategies of re-representation and commodification also included attempts to exhibit the ghetto as if it were a site of historical and ethnographic interest. Just like present-day tourists, the Red Cross visitors were expected to admire the beautiful nature and the fully intact Baroque architecture of the historical fortress Theresienstadt. In addition, they would satisfy their ethnographic interest concerning both traditional and modern Jewish lifestyles under the protection of the Third Reich.
Complete with plans to promote Theresienstadt by means of Gerron’s film and souvenir production, such as landscape postcards and postal marks printing,22 the embellishment project became an insane version of the ethnographic museum: It celebrated historical heritage against the background of which human life was being systematically repressed and decimated. Even though the survivors experienced the time around the Red Cross visit as comparatively free of violence, still, more than 7,500 people were transported to Auschwitz precisely during the time of the campaign.23 But even the term “embellishment,” or “beautification,” itself was probably a loan from heritage preservation: The word and the concept had been used by the popular cultural movement of German Verschönerungsvereine back in the 1860s–1870s.24 Those had been culturally conservative voluntary associations that worked to make their towns and cities attractive for tourists. In Theresienstadt, there also appeared a weird moment of “museumification” in the way the site of terror beautified itself to make itself presentable for strangers.
The demonstration of support by the administration and the SS of cultural and intellectual production in Theresienstadt was supposed to dramatically increase the ghetto’s value as commodity in the eyes of a visitor or a negotiator. Adler therefore dedicated a special chapter to the history of cultural activities in the ghetto and its cultural life in general—both that part of it that was demanded or tolerated by the SS and the administration, and that other one that had to be hidden in the underground (Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, pp. 584–623). Interestingly enough, describing the ghetto’s extremely rich and variegated cultural life, Adler never mentioned film. It seems as if he demonstratively took a distance to exclude cinematography from the memory of the ghetto’s cultural activities. Instead, he told the story of the attempts to film Theresienstadt in the chapter about Verschönerung, thus presenting the film among the Nazis’ apparatuses of coercion; that is, as something that explicitly is not culture.
For Adler, the refashioning of Theresienstadt into a piece of negotiable cultural heritage represented a massive exercise by the regime in symbolic violence and, in fact, an instance of the regime’s ultimate fulfillment: a vicious carnival of cruelty, a culmination of terror in a Trauerspiel of “active insanity” mixed with “passive obsession.” The idea itself not only to embellish but also to film the process of embellishment or, as Adler says, to transform Theresienstadt into “a Hollywood of the SS’s victims”25 signaled, in his eyes, a multiplication of the originary evil. Adler was aware of the earlier attempt of filming in the ghetto, in 1942, supposedly intended for Himmler’s personal use, which had been written powerfully and realistically—and probably exactly for that reason of powerful realism, the project was terminated by the SS. Yet the new film in 1944, Adler continued, was part and parcel of the general “organized insanity” that characterized both the idea and the implementation of the whole of the Verschönerungsaktion. The organized madness involved each and everyone:
Even the human-friendly SS participated [in the shooting of the film]. The gallant Burger offered elder ladies his hand helping them to alight from the [deportation] train, Haindl [Burger and Haindl were SS officers] played games with children. Epstein [the Judenrat elder] had to give a welcome speech to entertain the new arrivals. [. . .] To the credit of the prisoners, there reigned strong resistance against the film; however, if someone refused to come of free will, there would be warnings that openly threatened one to expect punishment in case of no-show. Not only the film itself was to be fabricated, but also the participants, both the voluntary and forced ones, were to be fundamentally prepared and made up as required in filmmaking. They were expected “to behave in a relaxed manner and welcome every performance with a storm of applause.”26
As if for guilt by association, Adler seems to condemn not only the Gerron film but any film at all and to deny all cinema in principle the status of a cultural representation or creative phenomenon. What is essential in film as medium and technology and what is crucial in the understanding of cinematography—and this is exactly what makes it non-culture, in Adler’s view—is that film is the product of organization, not of poetic or creative effort. Cinematography is nothing else but organization, the Selbstverwaltung of insanity.
In his fiction, Adler develops his scholarly reflection of the phenomenon of the ghetto, and there we can see how deeply his writing is permeated by suspicion and anxiety concerning matters of vision and sight in the broadest sense, visual image and visuality in general, and especially mechanically reproducible images. In his novels, various apparatuses for image-making operate as constitutive figures of thought and narrative. I started this essay by introducing his autobiographic novel Panorama (1968), in which Adler proposes a critique of the technologically reproducible image from the point of view of its alienating power. In its very construction, panorama, with its illusion of freedom and mobility, acts as the precursor of film with its illusionism in the creation of an image of time that moves. In the reality of Theresienstadt, where all movement had stopped, all life felt like having come to an end, and time itself appeared to stand still in the expectation of the ultimate end, the gruesome irony of cinematic illusionism must have been felt exceptionally strongly.
In the beginning of Panorama, the child is looking at a succession of magically mysterious, otherworldly realities to which he can only relate like a peeping tom relates to a forever forbidden, obscene love object. (In a comparable way, one could add, also a cinematographer, filled with voyeuristic desire, peeps at life through the hole in the film camera thus making life strange to its own representation.) Further in the novel, Adler narrates the main character’s life as a teenager and then an adult man, episode after episode, without connection, in the same mode of a panoramic parade of attractions: at school, in a boy-scout camp, in the rich family where he works as a private teacher, in a forced labor camp, in a concentration camp, or, later on, in the freedom of emigration—everywhere and anywhere, Josef feels as detached and eliminated from reality as in the panorama of his childhood. Panorama robbed him of experience, and his unique personal history only appears to him in an anonymous and inexplicable flow of disconnected, neutrally “objective” images without rhyme or reason. Panorama is “organized madness” because it promotes in the subject the non-seeing, non-understanding, and non-involvement in his own life. For a grown-up man, the twentieth-century historical and experienced reality is something untouchable and present as if from behind the glass, as it was also for the little boy who was sitting next to his granny in the panorama pavilion in Prague before World War I.
The End of the World, Continued: Representation Confirming Absence
Adler’s other reflections of the panorama can be found in an earlier novel from his Shoah cycle, The Journey (Eine Reise, first published in 1962).27 The novel tells the story of an “embellishment” campaign organized in a town called Leitenberg that lies very close to another town, called Ruhenthal.28 Here, Adler speaks directly about the murderous power of images, their will and capacity to replace life, a motif that he would develop later in his third novel, The Wall (1989), in connection with still another instance of panoramic technology, the museum. Images wipe out living beings; their spectral reality dominates and ultimately takes over those places that used to be occupied by the living flesh of the objects of representation. The order of representation becomes a Gespensterordnung, the true order of the Holocaust, the order of ghosts and a ghost of order.29 That dissociation and loss of reality that fascinated little Josef in Panorama is not only the principle of the double illusionism of Theresienstadt but also the literal truth of the Holocaust in general.
One character in The Journey, by the name of Schwind, is a newspaper reporter. While on an assignment around the town, taking pictures for his next story, he comes across a column marching toward the railway station, a group of unidentifiable creatures, vague and unidentifiable to the looking eye, like an unfocussed, underdeveloped, or overexposed photographic or film image. They flicker rather than appear—sometimes as ghosts, sometimes as rabbits, sometimes surrounded by swarms of locusts, but invariably impossible to register so that the reader never learns what they look like, where they come from, and where or how they disappear. Adler is careful not to use any direct language to describe the situation. Schwind, the occasional onlooker, certainly knows what exactly he is looking at, but he never acknowledges his own knowledge even for himself. The unwilling witness with a photographic camera in his hands, Schwind refuses to testify to what he happens to be a witness of; he even refuses to give things their proper names. The imageless, nameless creatures have no attributes or properties; their status within Schwind’s social reality is fully described by just one word, “forbidden”:
All that has been forbidden in the world now meant nothing, for it had never been a law but rather an arrangement that rested on enforced custom. [. . .] Highways and byways were forbidden, the days were shortened and the nights lengthened, not to mention that the night was forbidden and the day forbidden as well. Shops were forbidden, doctors, hospitals, vehicles, and resting places, forbidden, all forbidden. Laundries were forbidden, libraries were forbidden. Music was forbidden, dancing was forbidden. Shoes forbidden. Baths forbidden. And as long as there was money it was forbidden. [. . .] Thus everything was forbidden and they mourned their lives, but they didn’t want to take their lives, because that was forbidden.30
Thus, forbidden to relate even to their own deaths, these creatures lose any image of humanness, any definability in the eyes of the witness, the photographer: What he sees instead of human beings is a dark mass of unknown matter surrounded by locusts. Yet he cannot escape the embarrassment of having been seen by them. Moreover, and even more embarrassing, the mass can talk. They implore the reporter to take a picture of them to confirm that they once existed (and the reader cannot help thinking that, maybe in a similar way, Theresienstadt’s prisoners at the time of the Verschönerungsaktion were also asking Gerron’s crew to confirm their existence by filming them). We would never know if Gerron ever obliged, but Schwind definitely did not:
They want the life they no longer have. They want to be photographed in order to create verifiable evidence that they are there. If it were true then the incorruptible film would provide proof because that which does not exist cannot be photographed. Schwind would be happy to oblige them but the rusty apparatus prevents it.31
The rusty apparatus designed for the preservation of memory prevents—or rather forbids—the already forbidden existence to be confirmed in evidence. Later on, for another newspaper report, Schwind would be using his rusty apparatus to take pictures that are not forbidden. There is an official ceremony, which Schwind is officially invited to report about: a public funeral ritual at the crematorium, where the dead would first be photographed and then cremated, after which the ashes would be mixed into macadam and rolled into the road.
The pictures turn out superbly . . . and are developed on white shiny paper, then enlarged painstakingly, almost to their natural proportions. Wonderful material for study. The dead look so alive, almost like the originals. The city archivist has sealed them so that they neither get moldy nor are eaten by insects. It’s such a pleasure to look at them. The high school principal asks for a few of them since he finds them so useful to look at in class. [. . .] The corpses are secretly cremated but the photographs remain there in eternal infamy.32
“‘Eternal infamy”: corpses burnt up, ashes concealed, photographs displayed. Instead of documenting presence, the technically reproducible image re-presents, confirms, and reproduces absence, at the same time covering up and expelling from the representation the circumstances under which the disappeared were disappeared from existence. The forbidden creatures ask to confirm the fact of their lives. Instead, the “rusty apparatus” confirms that they should not have lived at all.
The End of the World, Complete: The SS Jewish Museum in Prague, 1942–1945
Adler was researching his history of Theresienstadt at the archives and library at the Jewish museum (Jüdisches Zentralmuseum) in Prague, which after the defeat of the Third Reich was purged of its Nazi ideology but not of its contents, structure, and organization—nor of the memory of how the museum as such had come to be. It was there that the surviving documentation from Theresienstadt was deposited after the liberation of the ghetto. In 1947, already in exile in London, Adler was invited to deliver two lectures on the subject—one at the Leo Baeck Lodge B’nai B’rith; the other, on commission from the Foreign Office, in front of German POWs in a British internment camp, where he was asked “a thousand questions, for instance, if ‘Hitler had done right or not.’”33
In The Journey, Schwind’s photography produces “wonderful material for study. The dead look so alive, almost like the originals.” The Jewish Central Museum of the SS in Prague (1942–1945) as Adler describes it in his lecture and later on in the third novel from his Shoah trilogy, The Wall (Die unsichtbare Wand, first published in 1989), appears as still another fascinating and alienating, murderous panorama. Another instance of “organized madness,” the exposition of the museum was mounted while the deportations, as well as the requisition and destruction of Jewish private and communal property, were still going on in Prague. A thoroughly scientific exposition of Jewish history and culture at the museum was composed exclusively out of pieces of confiscated Jewish property and exclusively with the purpose of representing the Jews as the enemy (Gegnerforschung, adversary studies, being the official name of the discipline in question). For the moment, still physically present in reality, an enemy was defeated and therefore no longer dangerous, but presenting an ethnographic and historical interest, as if an exotic, long-extinct tribe. It was Adler’s conviction that it was the Nazis’ fear of the defeated “Gegner” combined with the typical madness of organization that drove forth the hasty museum-building activities.34
The “enemies” so fully dispossessed, conquered, and subdued—the Jews of the city of Prague and its surroundings—were still somewhere close, probably sitting at the railway station and waiting to be loaded onto deportation trains. Simultaneously, the museum had already started the processing of the “acquisitions.” In a terrifyingly literal sense, representation, indeed, substituted for the living presence; it took over the place of the disappeared presence, and robbed those who were thus represented not only of their property but also of their stories and identities. This was done in keeping with the principles of disciplined scientificity, in the spirit of what Adler called “a ‘modern’ scientifically operating barbarity” (“eine ‘moderne’ wissenschaftlich arbeitende Barbarei”).35
The Jews were still somewhere close by, but as if no longer real, while a different reality was being simultaneously erected at the SS museum, in all haste but nevertheless in the perfect order of advanced museum technology. In due order and highly efficiently, the confiscated loot—masterpieces of classical and modern European art and objects of Jewish cult, holy books and ancient manuscripts, photographs and everyday objects—were sorted into those having or not having museum value, organized and registered, described, catalogued, and displayed to represent the Jews as the eternal, historically determined, and absolute evil. Even Adler himself could not help being fascinated by the efficiency in the mounting of the apparatus: “No other museum in the world could have presented a display of a certain period of history, none could have been established and organized in such a short time.”36
The museumification of Jewish property was performed under Nazi control by Jewish museum experts commandeered by the Jewish council (an arrangement similar to that of the production of the Theresienstadt film described above). In fact, this did help prevent the outright physical destruction and theft of at least part of the valuables. At the same time, it became an act of symbolic extermination of Jewish history, memory, and identity. However, Adler points out in his lecture, museumification as a measure of destroying history by means of selectively conserving its tokens was not entirely a Nazi invention. The campaign of the sanitation of the ghetto in Prague by the imperial administration in the early twentieth century yielded a considerable amount of ancient objects that seemed to belong to no one. They were used to set up the Jewish Museum, a paradoxical institution that served to preserve the memory about what was being simultaneously eradicated.37 Yet the Nazi campaign was innovative because it reinvented the museum to become an integral part of the apparatus of defamation, a component in the efficient robbing and killing machine:
The conquerors not only made history; they also loved the old history and tried to conserve it. “The conquerors did that? The same who—” Precisely the same, my friends. Does that surprise you? Here the conquerors have provided an indisputable service. The living were killed, and their past in stones, images, books, and objects, as set down by their ancestors, was collected, taken care of, and brought to life.38
In a properly Kafkaesque manner, and in Kafka’s place of birth, the museum, with its practices of objectivizing scientific representation, acquired the power to destroy and simultaneously monumentalize what was being destroyed in a meticulously organized and scientifically legitimized re-representation. The panorama principle inherent in museumification efficiently served the extermination of the past. It substituted a mechanically reproducible image for the disappeared “nature.” In the exposition of the SS museum, the objects that just recently had lived their usual lives in Jewish homes and synagogues were arranged in installations representing themselves in the reconstructions of their “natural historical environments”; and living people, many of them at the time awaiting their doom in Theresienstadt, were represented by full-size wax effigies in “historical attires.”39
Adler’s novel The Wall is dedicated to the impossible dilemmas of memory: the Nazi museumification and postwar de-museumification. Here, Adler’s autobiographical protagonist, the art historian and librarian Dr. Arthur Landau, works sorting out the remainders of Jewish history in the debris of the museum, once organized by the “conquerors” and now lying in ruins after the “conquerors’” defeat. The museum is another implementation of the panoramic principle, another “town Als ob”: Instead of living beings, the museum is populated by effigies and ghosts. By making wax figures of themselves for the museum (or, one should add, by providing filmic images of themselves for propaganda or by helping to arrange dead corpses so as to represent a living environment in a photo session), the Jews hoped to postpone destruction; by the same gesture, they also confirmed it. Retribution, redemption, and eternal memory—but also, no other being available for the Jews apart from that in the fears of the executioner. In the “conquerors’” fantasies, the dead Jews would be forever alive, even though “otherwise not at all”:
Give us a little time and we will make mannequins that will look just like us, though they won’t know what is good or evil. They’ll be life-size and look entirely natural, not made of earth, as if resting in fields and caverns but instead made of an artificial material that is used for the kinds of mannequins one sees in the display windows of clothing stores, except much finer and more expressive, so deceptively the same that the only thing preventing them from being living souls is the lack of any breath. You’ll be startled by how alive our people can appear, even when they are extinct. Then you can experience again the fear of us that has so possessed you. Cold terror will grip your spine and run deliciously throughout your very core and bones. But spare yourself any fear, for even stronger within you is the feeling of unconquerable power, for you are protected and saved; the mannequins, with their painted faces and hands and glued on hair, will perhaps not be innocent, yet innocuous and harmless. You can take comfort from them, as the mannequins are dead and will not persecute you, for a blow can break them. They will be alive only in your past fears, otherwise not at all.40
The End of Light: Critique in a Windowless House
Panorama is a windowless house, says Walter Benjamin. The peepholes look down onto it and allow the external spectator to gaze at the spectacle, but if one is locked inside, behind the glass, “one cannot see out these windows to anything outside.” “What stands within the windowless house is true [. . .] what is true has no windows; nowhere does the true look out to the universe.”41
In Adler’s three cases of representation in, and of, the Theresienstadt ghetto, whether by means of such different media as cinematography, photography, and the museum, I tried to follow his logic by identifying a panoramic principle that he seems to see as underlying all the symbolic politics of the Holocaust. Various media as Adler discusses them in his documentary research of the Theresienstadt ghetto, and then in the three Shoah novels, all possess power to annihilate life in representation and to insert manipulated images into the historical reality of mass extermination. Panorama claims the power to suspend the judgment of historical justice by transforming historical truth into a house without windows through which truth might look upon the world. In the Zwangsgemeinschaft of the SS ghetto of Theresienstadt, the victims were not only forced to self-administrate their own death and survival but also to participate in the falsification of their own posthumous memory, of the truth of the Nazi crimes, and even of their own credibility as victims and witnesses.
In each concrete instance, Jacques Derrida proclaims, death is strictly unique and at the same time a catastrophe of cosmic dimensions. “Death declares each time the end of the world as unique totality, the end of every world as unique totality, thus irreplaceable and thus infinite.”42 “Each time something dies, it’s the end of the world. Not the end of a world, but of the world, of the whole of the world, of the infinite opening of the world.”43 Mass destruction in world war is not simply a repetition of the end of the world with each individual death but something qualitatively different: the end of the end of the world, the end of the possibility of there being a world in general.44 The end of the world, just like its origin, “always resists analysis” and can only be testified by the trace . . . wherever there is a trace, there is this origin or end of the world.”45
However, Adler seems to disagree on precisely this latter point, warning us not to rely too much on the redemptive power of the trace. As if to challenge Derrida’s somewhat sophistic messianism (an end versus the end versus any end whatsoever), Adler the thinker of the end of the world and its survivor points out the inherently treacherous nature of traces, especially those left by apparatuses of mediatization. Adler’s panoramic devices (film, photo, and the museum) do not testify for the victim but instead make the act itself of testimony questionable by creating a gray zone of ambiguity and guilt around its victim. “What is true has no windows,” to repeat Benjamin’s profound remark in connection with panorama. When artificial illumination fails, the magic fades, and everything turns into ashes. In Russian (like in many other languages of Eastern Europe), the equivalent of “the end of the world” is an idiom that describes Apocalypse as if it were a short-circuit of the Cosmos: konets sveta (“the end of light”).
Nevertheless, there is one factor that “the end of light”—the Nacht und Nebel of the windowless truth—cannot eradicate from its own genealogy, from the logic of its own production. This is the fact itself that what it envisages is invisibility: “The end of light” becomes a visible evidence that any evidence can be rendered invisible, including the evidence of the strategies themselves of the making-invisible of terror.46 Jean-Luc Nancy makes this point in his essay about sleep: Even when they are shut, eyes (and also windows, to continue with Benjamin’s metaphor) still cannot stop seeing:
The instant just before [falling asleep], when eyelids have slipped over our eyes and they for one more moment have remained seers behind their curtain . . . at that instant the gaze has seen the night into which it was entering. What it saw was nothing but the absence of all vision and all visibility. Even that, it saw.47
In the dead of night, nothing is visible except one thing that we still see: invisibility itself. This seems to support Derrida’s belief in the redemptive power—not in the trace, however, but in our ability to discern traces, even if memory and truth in them are perverted toward complete destruction. Concealing Theresienstadt behind an impenetrable shield of cynical fiction, such traces still reveal something to us—namely, the presence itself of an artificially imposed invisibility. It calls on us nowadays to continue looking, we who remain outside and can only peep into the panorama of the end of the world through a peephole, terrified by the implications of what we are looking at, and ashamed of the obscenity of the act of watching.
Notes
This chapter is an elaborated version of the following article: Irina Sandomirskaja, “Welcome to Panorama Theresienstadt. Cinematography and Destruction in the Town Called ‘As If’ (Reading H. G. Adler),” in Ghetto Films and Their Afterlife, Natascha Drubek (ed.), special double issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe (2016: 2–3). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2016.0002-3.48, accessed at http://www.apparatusjournal.net/.
1. Walter Benjamin, The Imperial Panorama, p. 347, in “Berlin Childhood in the 1900s,” Selected Writings, vol. 3: 1935–1938; translated by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Michael W. Jennings (eds.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 344–411.
2. Hans Günther Adler, Panorama: A Novel, translated by Peter Filkins (New York: Modern Library, 2012), p. 4.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., pp. 4–5.
5. Ibid., p. 5.
6. Hans Günther Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012). For a short biography of Adler, see Peter Demetz’s afterword in Adler, Panorama: A Novel, pp. 441–50. For a comprehensive biography and a systematic account of Adler’s works and days, see Franz Hocheneder, H. G. Adler (1910–1988): Privatgelehrter und freier Schriftsteller. Eine Monographie, mit einem Vorwort von Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2009). For a comprehensive discussion of Adler’s role as a survivor, a thinker of the history and politics of Holocaust, and a creative writer, see H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy, Julia Creel, Sara R. Horowitz, and Amira Bojadzija-Dan (eds.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), accessed at http://wu9fb9wh4a.search.serialssolutions.com/?sid=sersolReport&genre=book&SS_PostParamDict=disableOneClick&SS_source=42&title=H.G.+Adler+life%2C+literature%2C+legacy¶mDict=en-US on August 29, 2016.
7. On the two projects of filming Theresienstadt (one undertaken in 1942 and the other in 1944), see Karel Margry, “‘Theresienstadt’ (1944–1945): The Nazi Propaganda Film Depicting the Concentration Camp as Paradise,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 12 (2:1992), pp. 145–62; Karel Margry, “The First Theresienstadt Film (1942),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19 (3:1999), pp. 309–37; Eva Strusková, “Ghetto Theresienstadt 1942. The Message of the Film Fragments,” Journal of Film Preservation 79–80 (2009), pp. 59–79; Eva Strusková, “‘The Second Life’ of the Theresienstadt Films after the Second World War,” in Ghetto Films and Their Afterlife, Natascha Drubek (ed.), special double issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe (2016: 2–3). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2016.0002.28, accessed at www.apparatusjournal.net/ on August 29, 2016. For extensive visual material, documentation, and commentary, see the DVD Truth and Lies: Filming in the Terezín Ghetto, 1942–1945, published by the Prague Jewish Museum (Pravda a lež: Filmování v ghettu Terezín 1942–1945 = Truth and Lies: Filming in the Terezín Ghetto, 1942–1945 = Wahrheit und Lüge: Dreharbeiten im Ghetto Theresienstadt 1942–1945 (Praha: Židovské muzeum v Praze, Národní filmový archiv, 2013). I would like to thank Natascha Drubek for an invitation to speak at the conference “Films from Ghettos and Camps: Propaganda—Clandestine Messages–Historical Source” (2014) and for the help and advice she gave, which was invaluable for my work on this essay.
8. The double impossibility of “snatching” images, documenting, and giving testimony in Auschwitz consists in the obliteration of the witness and the difficult representability of the reality inside (Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, translated by Shane B. Lillis [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008], pp. 3–49). On problems involved in imagining and theoretically thinking the Holocaust, see Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” Saul Friedlander (ed.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
9. I am aware that I am using the “night and fog” metaphor in the meaning it acquired post factum thanks to Alain Resnais’s documentary Nuit et brouillard (released the same year as the first edition of Adler’s Theresienstadt, 1955). The original meaning of Nacht und Nebel as it was used by the Nazis was different. It was a code name introduced in Hitler’s decree from 1941 that “directed that persons in occupied territories engaging in activities intended to undermine the security of German troops were, upon capture, to be brought to Germany ‘by night and fog’ for trial by special courts, thus circumventing military procedure and various conventions governing the treatment of prisoners. The code name stemmed from Germany’s most acclaimed poet and playwright, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who used the phrase to describe clandestine actions often concealed by fog and the darkness of night.” “Theresienstadt: Final Weeks, Liberation, and Postwar Trials,” The Holocaust Encyclopaedia, 2015; www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007505, accessed June 5, 2016.
10. On the “moderate” period and the Nazi attempts of commerce with “prominent Jews,” see Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Group, 1992), pp. 145–46. The commodification of the prisoners and their use by the Nazis as “Austauschjuden” (i.e., Jews meant for exchange) peaked in 1945 when the SS “agreed, as a token of good faith, to the release of 1,200 Theresienstadt prisoners in exchange for five million Swiss francs put up by Jewish organizations in an escrowed account in Switzerland.” “Theresienstadt: Final Weeks, Liberation, and Postwar Trials,” accessed July 23, 2016.
11. H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, pp. 183–84. (Here and further in quotes from Adler, translations are mine—I. S.) In connection with the Theresienstadt films’ postwar history, the film historian Eva Strusková writes that no one who ever came in touch with the film was unaffected by it, whether in its production or afterward, when its fragments started to be discovered and contested in the mid-1960s. “For a long time there was a sense that everyone who had been made to participate was somehow guilty. . . . The sense of guilt and embarrassment, the trauma around the film shoot and the staged film still linger today.” Eva Strusková, “‘The Second Life’ of the Theresienstadt Films after the Second World War,” pp. 2–3.
12. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 133.
13. On the ambivalence of being a ”prominent Jew” in Theresienstadt, see the unsympathetic judgment by Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 133–34. Adler’s position is considerably more nuanced. Still, in her Report, Arendt uses Adler’s work without its subtleties, in confirmation of her own accusations against the Judenräte (ibid., pp. 117–25). Adler’s witness account in Theresienstadt 1941–1945, indeed, was not included as testimony by the court in Jerusalem, which according to Arendt was a political decision in an indirect way supporting her criticism of the trial.
14. For more on Selbstverwaltung, see H. G Adler, Nach der Befreiung: Ausgewählte Essays zur Geschichte und Soziologie (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2013), pp. 49–70, 189–238.
15. “Ihre Elemente unterschieden sich nie wesentlich von einem Konzentrationslager, aber die Selbstverwaltung mit allen ihren Funktionen baue man so in die Zwangsgemeinschaft ein, daß die ursprüngllichen verhältnisse, scheinbar zumindest, verdeckt wurden, und sich Formen ausbildeten, die wirklich die soziale Grundlage veränderten” (Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, p. 142).
16. “[E]ine Scheinordnung des Chaotischen, einer Gespensterordnung . . . eine Mischung von aktivem Wahnsinn und passiver Besessenheit unter dem Zwange des SS alles zusammengekittet” (ibid., pp. 240–41).
17. For the text of the song and a caricature of its author, see Art against Death: Permanent Exhibitions of the Terezin Memorial in the Former Magdeburg Barracks (Prague: OSWALD, 2006), p. 215. Leo Strauss, born in 1887, was deported to Theresienstadt from Vienna with Transport IV/12 in October 1942, and then in October 1944 to Auschwitz, where he was murdered; www.jugendbegegnung.de/terezin/, accessed July 23, 2016.
18. Adler’s notion of Zwangsgemeinschaft is a community organized by violence; that is, an impossible community, if one accepts the Weberian understanding of community as a social unity that shares common values. This oxymoronic name, however, makes sense in Adler’s approach, given his understanding of power in Theresienstadt as Verwaltung and Selbstverwaltung; thus as a fundamentally economic arrangement aimed at the utilization of the prisoners “towards self-annihilation, towards extermination in gas chambers, towards nothingness” (“zur Selbstauflösung, zur Vernichtung in Gaskammern, zum Nichts”) (Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, p. 223). Adler developed both notions in various pieces of political writing throughout his life, including essays in Nach der Befreiung. These nowadays practically forgotten concepts of his, which he also applied in his critique of Western democracy after the war, deserve much attention. For a valuable discussion of the Theresienstadt ghetto history and sociology, see Natascha Drubek, “Ghettoisierte Sprachen: Die tschechisch-deutsche ‘Zwangsgemeinschaft’ der Juden von Theresienstadt,” in K. Smola and O. Terpitz (eds.), Jüdische Räumeund Topographien in Ost(mittel)europa: Konstruktionen in Literatur und Kultur (Opera Slavica, Neue Folge 61, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014) pp. 91–134. For a discussion of Adler’s use of the term “Zwangsgemeinschaft,” see especially ibid., pp. 13–16.
19. Benjamin Murmelstein Theresienstadt Judenalteste, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Stephen Spielberg Film and Video Archive. The Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, Interview with Benjamin Murmelstein; English translation accessed at data.ushmm.org/intermedia/film_video/spielberg_archive/transcript/RG60_5009/09E79F04-7CD0-4BFB-8265-3A01A0AC703A.pdf on May 20, 2015.
20. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, pp. 150–84.
21. Ibid., pp. 181–84.
22. See some pictures for the commemorative album Bilder aus Theresienstadt by the artist Joseph (Joe) Spier and postcard sketches by Otto Kaufmann in Art against Death, pp. 146–48.
23. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, p. 180.
24. For a later history of beautification associations in Imperial Germany, see, for example, Thomas Lekan, “A ‘Noble Prospect’: Tourism, Heimat, and Conservation on the Rhine, 1880–1914,” in Journal of Modern History, 81(2009: 4), pp. 824–58; DOI:1. www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/605487, accessed July 23, 2016.
25. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, p. 184.
26. “Auch die menschenfreundliche SS wirkte mit. Burger half gallant alten Damen aus dem Zug [i.e., a deportation train], und Haindl spielte mit Kindern. Eppstein mußte eine Begrüßungsrede halten, und dann wurden die Ankömmlinge bewirtet. . . . Zur Ehre der Gefangenen sei gesagt, daß sich ein starker Widerspruch gegen das filmen regte, doch wer nichts gutwillig kam, erhielt Mahnungen, die unverhüllt drohten, daß man. [. . .] Strafen im Falle des Nichterscheinens zu erwarten habe. [. . .] Aber nicht bloß der Film selbst wurde gestellt, auch die freiwilligen oder gezwungenen Mitspieler wurden gründlich präpariert und filmgerecht geschminkt. Sie mußten sich “ungezwungen benehmen und allen Darbietungen schallenden Beifall spenden” (Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, pp. 182–84).
27. H. G. Adler, The Journey: A Novel, translated by Peter Filkins (New York: Modern Library, 2009).
28. These telling names appear to hint at Theresienstadt (Ruhenthal, the valley of peace) and Leitmeritz (Czech Litoměřice, a town nearby that had a concentration camp, Auβenlager, or Arbeitslager Leitmeritz (Litoměřice) in 1944–1945; www.pamatnik-terezin.cz/vyhledavani/Alitomerice/, accessed July 23, 2016.
29. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, pp. 240–41.
30. Adler, The Journey: A Novel, p. 24.
31. Ibid., p. 111.
32. Ibid., p. 112.
33. Quoted by Hocheneder in H. G. Adler (1910–1988), p. 126. For Adler’s lecture, see Adler, “Die Geschichte des Prager Jüdischen Museums,” in Monatshefte 103 (2:2011), pp. 161–72.
34. For a detailed history of the activities of the museum, see Jan Björn Potthast, Das jüdische Zentralmuseum der SS in Prag: Gegnerforschung und Völkermord im Nazionalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000). For an analysis from the point of view of Nazi memory politics as well as the relation between the collection of valuable objects from Jewish property and the annihilation of the Jewish population, see Dirk Rupnow, “‘Ihr müßt sein, auch wenn ihr nicht mehr seid’: The Jewish Central Museum in Prague and Historical Memory in the Third Reich,” in Holocaust Genocide Studies 16 (1:2002), pp. 23–53. DOI: 10.1093/hgs/16.1.23., accessed July 23, 2016. Rupnow believes that the aim of Jewish museum specialists who mounted the display out of objects stolen from the Jews and under control by the SS was to preserve the valuables to be later on returned to the owners. Thus, in this episode, just like in the case of Theresienstadt’s “Selbstverwaltung,” and like in the case of the film project at the Westerbork camp, there is “partial convergence of victims’ and perpetrators’ interests under the conditions of the Final Solution . . . the will of the victims to ensure some measure of survival (or at least a memory) and the will of the perpetrators to degrade, to rob, and to destroy their victims” (ibid., p. 27). Just like the makers of the Theresienstadt film, the Jewish museum specialists worked under the constant threat of deportation to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Adler, however, is of a different opinion: He points out that those were driven largely by idealism and self-denial, but in many cases by a lack of wisdom and sheer self-interest, which he considers unforgivable even though humanly understandable (Adler, “Die Geschichte des Prager Jüdischen Museums,” pp. 165–67). In the eyes of Adler the survivor, the many forms of destruction and dehumanization inherent in projects like museumification or beautification prevail over the purposes of memory preservation as this is assumed by the present-day historian.
35. Ibid., p. 161.
36. Ibid., p. 167.
37. Compare a similar gesture of museumification/eradication in the early Soviet practices of heritage preservation, when property expropriated by the Bolsheviks from private homes and churches was partly destroyed, partly stolen, and partly deployed in hastily organized state-owned proletarian museums in the capacity of historical and aesthetic monuments. Irina Sandomirskaja, “Catastrophe, Restoration, and Kunstwollen: Igor Grabar, Cultural Heritage, and Soviet Reuses of the Past,” in Ab Imperio: Theory and History of Nationalities and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Realm (2: 2015): pp. 339–62.
38. H. G. Adler, The Wall: A Novel, translated by Peter Filkins (New York: Modern Library, 2015), p. 394.
39. Reproductions of museum installations, Hocheneder, H. G. Adler (1910–1988), pp. 135–38; a reproduction of the effigies representing a Jewish family at a Seder meal, ibid., p. 131.
40. Adler, Nach der Befreiung, p. 396.
41. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 532.
42. This fragment from Jacques Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, is quoted by Ian Balfour, “Introduction,” in Late Derrida (South Atlantic Quarterly, special issue 106:2, 2007), p. 216.
43. Michael Naas, The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), p. 181n.
44. Ibid., p. 55.
45. Ibid., p. 52.
46. Compare, however, Dirk Rupnow’s critique of the belief among scholars within memory studies concerning the Nazi politics of obliteration of the victims both from history and from memory (Aleida Assmann’s Mnemozid, Harald Weinrich’s Gedächtnismord, etc.). The SS did not hesitate to annihilate the memory of the victims, but at the same time they tried to provide their own future image of “Anständigkeit” (term used by Himmler in his address to SS leaders in October 1943) and planned a future memory of themselves as the heroic perpetrators of a transgressive, “world-historical task” (Rupnow, “‘Ihr müßt sein, auch wenn ihr nicht mehr seid’: The Jewish Central Museum in Prague and Historical Memory in the Third Reich,” pp. 23–25).
47. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, translated by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), p. 48.