Claude Lanzmann and the War Against the Question Why
In which the director of Shoah tries to silence a Holocaust survivor who fails to understand his film
It was a moment of high drama. It left some who witnessed it stunned and angry. It was perhaps the signature moment in Claude Lanzmann’s ferocious campaign against Hitler explanation, his crusade to silence the question Why.
It was a moment in which Lanzmann, the maker of Shoah, the highly respected nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary, turned on a Holocaust survivor—a man who had endured two years in Auschwitz—because the survivor had dared violate one of Lanzmann’s commandments about how one should, and should not, speak about the death camps.
Some who witnessed it found Lanzmann’s attack—his successful attempt to suppress the discussion the frail and gentle septuagenarian survivor wanted to have about certain troubling questions that arose from his Auschwitz experience—shocking. One of those present spoke up and compared Lanzmann’s behavior to that of Nazi book burners. And four years after the attack, the target, the Auschwitz survivor, Dr. Louis Micheels, still sounded shaken when he spoke about it to me. He called the filmmaker’s behavior “totalitarian.” A strong term, but one that perhaps should not come as a complete surprise to those familiar with Lanzmann’s position on the question. Because his central commandment—the one he enforced so harshly against Dr. Micheels, his imperious “Thou Shalt Not Ask Why”—is one Lanzmann has proudly adapted from a Primo Levi story about an SS guard at Auschwitz, a man who told Levi, “There is no why here.”
Many will be surprised at how extreme Lanzmann has become in his holy war against the explainers, at the way he’ll call their work “obscene,” even “Revisionist,” linking the Hitler explainers with Holocaust deniers. Lanzmann is a man deservedly much honored, even revered, by many for whom Shoah was the primary, even the defining evocation of this greatest of all human tragedies. To many, he is a sage, even a prophet or holy man, for having been the medium of transmission of a powerful, horrifying truth. To some, however, particularly among poststructuralist, American and French academics in the thrall of the theories and jargon of Jacques Lacan, he has become the center of what amounts to a literary theorists’ Holocaust cult—academics whose response to Lanzmann’s film is to celebrate it for embodying poststructuralist, theoretical fetishes such as “open signs” and “mimesis of representation” in his footage of death-camp witnesses.
Consider the introductory description of Lanzmann by one of his chief academic acolytes, a paean delivered on the very evening Lanzmann succeeded in suppressing the voice of the Auschwitz survivor:
Shoah . . . was described by critics immediately upon its appearance as “the film event of the century.” We know today that it is more than the film event of the century, because it is not simply a film but a truly revolutionary artistic and cultural event. . . . One of the things that has been most frequently remarked upon, especially in Europe about the film Shoah is the amazing psychoanalytic presence of Claude Lanzmann on the screen . . . a presence tangible both in the depth of his silence and in the efficacy of his speech, in the success of his interventions in bringing forth the truth.
I thought Shoah an impressive achievement when I saw it, although there were some aspects of it—Lanzmann’s unquestioning adoption, for instance, of the point of view of an inmate witness who survived by keeping fellow Jews about to be murdered in the dark—that raised questions in my mind about his judgment. I was not aware until I began researching the literature that had arisen around Lanzmann and Shoah in the aftermath of its 1985 release how the film had raised him to the vatic, prophetic heights from which he now hurls thunderbolts at those who violate his commandments. It is not an exaggeration to call them commandments. Lanzmann uses explicitly Sinai-like rhetoric to articulate the rules for all who dare to discuss his subject. Consider the words he used in his published attack on Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List: “After Shoah, certain things can no longer be done.”
When I first heard that line, I was sure there had been a mistake. A researcher was reading to me over the phone a translation of the version of Lanzmann’s attack on Spielberg that appeared in the Parisian daily Le Monde on March 3, 1994.
“You mean he’s saying, after the Shoah, certain things are forbidden,” I said, thinking Lanzmann might have been echoing Theodor Adorno’s famous remark that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
No, my researcher insisted, “Lanzmann is saying that after Shoah, after his film, certain things are forbidden.”
The most severe of the many strictures Lanzmann issued against Spielberg’s film was the “forbidden” crime of “creating a false archive”—that he had transgressed by attempting to re-create scenes within the concentration camps, because any attempt at representation inevitably falsified the reality. Finding a true path through Lanzmann’s commandments about recreation and representation is tricky. He, for instance, in order to provoke a sobbing breakdown on the part of his key death-camp witness, the Jewish barber in Treblinka, had rented a barber shop and instructed the reluctant ex-barber to pretend to be practicing a trade he’d long abandoned—to clip hair in order to force him to confront the barbering he’d done at Treblinka: shaving the heads of thousands of women before they were gassed. Lanzmann is proud of that representational re-creation. But on the other hand, he is equally proud of his own rejection of genuine archival footage. Not only did he refuse to use any actual film footage or still photographs of the death camps in Shoah (footage of the sort that Alain Resnais used with devastating effectiveness in his Night and Fog, for instance), Lanzmann made it a moral principle that such film was inferior to his method of reconstruction: talking-head interviews between Lanzmann and survivor witnesses, which gives him more screen time in Shoah than any of the survivors, makes him the hero of memory, makes him “the amazing . . . presence” to replace the absent images of real victims he’s forbidden and banished.
But Lanzmann goes further: In his attack on Spielberg, he insisted that if he ever found a secretly made film that shows the actual killing of three thousand Jews in a death camp, say, not only would he refuse to use it, but he would seek to destroy it. There certainly are arguments to be made on both sides of these questions, but for Lanzmann, “after Shoah,” there is no argument: Certain matters are settled, certain things are forbidden. His film is not merely superior to reality: it replaces, substitutes for, and demands the literal destruction of the merely real.
Of course, Lanzmann is not alone in his impulse to make post-Holocaust commandments. Emil Fackenheim offered one: Thou shalt not grant Hitler any posthumous victories. But Fackenheim has the humility not to insist that after his book further discussion is forbidden, nor has he forbidden actual survivors from raising questions about their experiences, as Lanzmann did when he used his celebrity power to silence Auschwitz survivor Dr. Louis Micheels in a humiliating public attack.
It was in preparation for a scheduled interview with Lanzmann in Paris that I came upon some disturbing transcripts and memoirs of that episode, which occurred on the night of April 11, 1990, at Yale’s Becton Engineering Laboratory auditorium before an audience of one to two hundred academics and psychoanalysts. After immersing myself in it, I found myself forced to ask the forbidden “why” about Lanzmann: What could possibly explain his behavior that evening? Before describing my tense encounter with the sage in Paris, some further background is appropriate.
To begin with, Lanzmann was a latecomer to Jewish identity. According to the laudatory introduction at Yale by his admiring acolyte, “Claude Lanzmann was born in Paris . . . to a Jewish family that had cut its ties with the Jewish world. During the Second World War he was a student resistance leader in France organizing, at the age of seventeen, his fellow high school students as a resistance group against the Nazis.”
There is something of the zeal of the late convert in his behavior. One observer of the crusades Lanzmann and his circle have pursued so relentlessly against those who violate the commandment against asking Why suggested that the “late-conversion phenomenon” might be responsible for the fanaticism of the cult surrounding him as well: “Many of them are Lacanian psychoanalysts who have lionized Lanzmann, having themselves only come to Jewish identification through Shoah.” Again, not through the Shoah but through Lanzmann’s film about it.
One source of the fanaticism on the question is the combative style of the engagé French intellectual. Lanzmann rose in that world by serving first as private secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre and then later as lover of Sartre’s onetime great love Simone de Beauvoir, who anointed him editor of Les temps modernes, a position equivalent to that of pope of postexistentialist, poststructuralist Parisian intellectuals, one that encouraged the issuance of intellectual papal bulls and proscriptions.
The style calls for a kind of moralizing, even criminalizing rhetoric of ethical and aesthetic matters. My favorite example of Lanzmann’s edicts in this respect is his reply to a questioner at a seminar at Yale about the “crime” of certain camera angles. “I wanted to show the village of Chelmno, and the cameraman told me there is only one way: by helicopter. I said, ‘Never. There were no helicopters for the Jews when they were locked in the church or in the castle.’ This would have been a crime—a moral and artistic crime.”
Maybe yes, maybe no. One wonders if the dead of Chelmno would be as exercised as Lanzmann on this helicopter-shots issue or as appreciative as his self-congratulatory tone suggests they should be.
Still, the zeal of the convert and the arrogance of the Parisian intellectual are not sufficient to explain Lanzmann’s rage, the violence of his attack on the idea of explanation. Certainly, the eleven-year ordeal of making Shoah, of living with the horror as he did, helps make the passion he brings to these questions understandable. Once, in the course of researching a story on the bitter controversies over the origin and meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls—and the potentially momentous implications their decipherment might have for both Judaism and Christianity—a prominent Scrolls scholar, the head of the Prince ton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls publication project, began ticking off for me a casualty list of some of the most brilliant of the Scrolls scholars, men who had been driven to madness, drink, religious conversion, suicide, and heretical visions by the long years they’d spent trying to piece together some meaning from the hellish jigsaw puzzle of the fragmentary scraps of scrolls that remained to be linked up. The attempt to find some ultimate Lost Revelation, perhaps the very fingerprints of God in these tattered scraps of ancient parchment, drove all too many over the edge. It’s surprising it hasn’t happened more often among those like Lanzmann trying to piece together the truth about the nature of ultimate evil from the fragmentary scraps of evidence that are our only clues.
But what’s surprising about Lanzmann’s post-Shoah crusade is not the passion of his own views but the violence of his attack against views of others. It’s not enough to refute their logic or question their assumptions; they must be hounded into silence or oblivion, branded as guilty of virtual complicity in the Holocaust. Consider the way Lanzmann virtually branded Rudolph Binion of Brandeis, the son of a Jewish mother, as “a Revisionist”—a Holocaust-denying Nazi sympathizer. As editor of Les temps modernes, it wasn’t enough for Lanzmann to publish an acolyte’s vituperative assault on Binion’s book Hitler Among the Germans, an attack that nearly caused cancellation of a planned French edition of the book. But Lanzmann could not resist putting a blood-red banner across the otherwise sedate cover of that issue for a promotional blurb:
RUDOLF BINION AND ADOLF HITLER: PSYCHOHISTORY AS FIG LEAF FOR REVISIONISM?
Binion believes the misspelling of his first name as “Rudolf” rather than “Rudolph” was a sly covert effort to make it conform visually with Adolf. Whatever the case, the overt content of the promotional blurb is an assault in itself: In asking whether Binion’s Hitler explanation is a “fig leaf for Revisionism,” Lanzmann comes very close to branding Binion himself as a Revisionist, the clear implication being that his work is a deliberate attempt not merely to explain but to exonerate Hitler. Indeed, Lanzmann’s belief is that all explanation is, de facto, exoneration; but he can’t resist the imputation that in Binion’s case the explainer’s thinly veiled goal is the same as that of neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers. Binion told me he took Lanzmann to court in France for the Revisionist slur, but that after winning a preliminary judgment that he was entitled to a full-scale trial he had to drop the suit because he couldn’t afford to pursue it on his Brandeis professor’s salary.
“‘Revisionist’ is a strong word to use,” I said to Lanzmann in the course of our encounter in his Paris office.
“I don’t know if it’s a strong word,” he said, “but the ruling enterprise of Binion is obscene.”
Why obscene?
“Because he believes you can explain it.”
Obscenity: it is the epithet of choice for Lanzmann and his devotees when attacking those who ask the question Why. “Binion doesn’t shrink from formulating the question . . . ‘Why did they kill the Jews,’” writes Sabine Prokhoris, the author of the article heralded by the “fig leaf for Revisionism” blurb. “The obscenity of this question is stressed by Claude Lanzmann,” she says, as if that settles the matter all by itself.
But obscenity only begins to limn the rhetoric of abuse that the Lanzmannites heap on those such as Binion who ask the question Why. Consider this partial catalogue of insults that Prokhoris heaps on Binion and his work:
• “confounding stupidity”
• “epistemological monster”
• “bizarre”
• “despicable”
• “active ignorance”
• “destruction of thought”
• “scandalous”
• “perversity”
• “de facto justification of the Holocaust”
• “his [Binion’s] hero, Hitler”
• “annihilated history”
• “destroyed psychology”
• “fascist discourse”
• “poisonous imposture”
This catalogue of abuse, used to support the familiar Lanzmann argument that to attempt to explain Hitler psychologically is to empathize and excuse him, builds to a final vicious thrust. Binion is guilty, Prokhoris claims, of using explicatory “method as final solution,” a charge that goes beyond calling Binion revisionist or an apologist for Hitler; it is tantamount to identifying Binion as Hitler: both of them executors of a horrific Final Solution, with Binion as what Prokhoris calls, in a final epithet, a “paper Eichmann.”
And so I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose, when it turned out that in person Lanzmann proved as combative and intemperate on the subject as the buzz-saw prose he and his disciples use to assault those who dare to ask Why.
It was an ill-starred encounter in several respects, beginning with what in retrospect seems like a symbolic misunderstanding over “the codes.” Lanzmann’s assistant had written me, in reply to my request for an interview, suggesting that I contact Lanzmann when I reached Paris. After several days of missed connections, Lanzmann instructed me to meet him in his office at 7 P.M. one evening. But when I arrived there, a little early, I found a darkened building. There were no names identifying the two dozen or so buttons on the intercom, and Lanzmann had not given me an apartment number. The outer door was locked. There was a numbered and lettered keypad beneath the buzzers that, I later learned, was used to punch in the access code to the building lobby.
I stared up at the unlit windows above me and, wondering if I’d gotten the address wrong, then repaired to a nearby brasserie to call Lanzmann. I reached only an answering machine, left a message about my problem, and returned to the building to see if Lanzmann might have been waiting downstairs to let me in, thereby missing my call. Still no sign of life, much less of Lanzmann. I returned to the brasserie to call, reached the answering machine again, repeated the fruitless trek several times for a full half hour, until finally I left a despairing message on Lanzmann’s machine apologizing for any misunderstanding and telling him I was returning to my hotel, a good distance away in another district. Trudging unhappily through the streets in search of a taxi, I ducked into a laundromat and decided to give Lanzmann one more call.
This time, Lanzmann answered, but in a belligerent, annoyed voice asked me where I’d been, insisted he’d been waiting for me. I said I’d been waiting outside the building but didn’t know how to get in.
“But I gave you the codes,” he said, meaning the access code.
“No,” I said truthfully. “You didn’t give me the codes.”
“I gave you the codes,” he insisted.
When I asked him if I could come up and talk to him anyway, he said no, now it was too late.
But, I pleaded, I’d come all the way to Paris just to see him.
Finally, he relented, gave me the codes and the apartment number, and I headed back.
Later, after the interview had concluded and I had a chance to wonder about what went wrong, something odd about Lanzmann’s version of the misunderstanding occurred to me. If he’d been waiting there for me, why hadn’t he picked up the phone during the repeated calls I’d made over a half-hour period when I reached only his answering machine? And why did he only pick up the phone and answer after I’d left a message that I was leaving the district and returning to my hotel?
It’s a minor thing. I’ve done it myself to avoid encounters. And it’s possible that he really did think that he gave me the codes, but I found the episode puzzling, particularly in light of what seemed like a continuing hostility when I finally arrived. Out of breath and a bit flustered, I sat in one of the chairs across from Lanzmann’s desk, put my overcoat on an adjacent chair, and, trying to make the most of the time remaining, hastily slotted a cassette into my tape recorder. Before I could begin, Lanzmann stopped me and ordered me to remove the overcoat from the chair and take it out of sight into another room.
I complied without asking the forbidden why. Perhaps Lanzmann was trying to establish an atmosphere of “Here There Is No Why,” his primal commandment against explanation. Later, I came to think of our exchange about the codes as emblematic of Lanzmann’s commanding voice-of-Sinai attitude toward all other discourse on the Holocaust: I gave you the codes, in Shoah. After the giving of the codes, all other attempts to gain access to the mystery are fruitless at best, obscene at worst.
And to ask why such attempts must be called obscene, as I did that evening, is to compound the obscenity: I suspect that in addition to the contretemps over the codes, my encounter with Lanzmann might have gotten off on the wrong foot because my first question involved the use of the word “obscenity” and veered directly into an uneasy discussion of that evening in 1990 when Lanzmann tried to silence the Auschwitz survivor.
“You have spoken of the obscenity of understanding—” I began.
“No, no, I never said this,” Lanzmann barked at me. “Forget that quote.”
I was a bit taken aback by this, but fortunately I had brought with me the account of that “Evening with Claude Lanzmann” entitled “The Obscenity of Understanding,” from American Imago, the quarterly of the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis. I read to Lanzmann a passage from his spoken remarks that night.
“You said, ‘There are some pictures of Hitler as a baby too, aren’t there? I think that there is even a book written by a psychoanalyst about Hitler’s childhood [Alice Miller’s book, he later told me], an attempt at explanation which is for me obscenity as such.’”
“Where did I say this?” Lanzmann demanded.
I showed him the photocopied pages. “This is called ‘An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,’ it’s entitled ‘The Obscenity of Understanding.’”
“Show me this,” he ordered me, “where did it appear?”
“In this publication, American Imago,” I said, handing him the photocopied sheets.
At this point, two minutes after it had begun, Lanzmann tried to end the interview. “Explain to me,” he said, using the forbidden word, “what are you doing exactly?”
I repeated to him what I’d written in my original letter to him that had resulted in the invitation to meet with him in Paris: that I was writing a book that would focus in part on the debate over the explicability of Hitler, a debate I first became interested in through my conversations in Jerusalem with Yehuda Bauer and Emil Fackenheim. “I thought it was an interesting debate about whether explanation is possible or explanation is perhaps wrong. That’s why I was interested in your remarks—”
“You don’t speak French,” he said, interrupting me.
“No.”
“You should. You should learn. I have written about this.”
After agreeing with him that indeed I should, I explained that my book involved conversations with people in the controversy about questions they might not have addressed in written works.
At this point, he again tried to end the interview, claiming that he did not have time—because of my mistake about the codes, of course—to address this long and difficult matter, but finally he relented and began to respond to my original question about his characterization of the very attempt to explain Hitler as obscene.
He began by saying something surprising and paradoxical, something I hadn’t seen, read, or heard him say before on the question. “I don’t say that the Holocaust is an enigma,” he told me. “I don’t say this. I do not think so. It is an historical event which took place. It is not an event which took place out of history. In a way, it is a product of the whole story of the Western world since the very beginning.”
Before going further, it’s important to note that Lanzmann has made two important and perhaps contradictory points. First, he’d conceded that he has called the question Why an obscenity. And second, he had nonetheless offered a kind of answer to the forbidden question, offered an implicit explanation: Hitler and the Holocaust are “a product of the whole story of the Western world,” which has engendered the six million murders. Implicit therein is the assumption that there is something built into the very mode of thought and feeling, into the institutions, language, the deep structure of Western civilization that inevitably produced the Holocaust, an event described specifically as a “product.” Implicit as well is the assumption that Hitler himself is not an agent so much as a product. The formal cause of the mass murder is not the mind or will of Adolf Hitler but the mentality of Western culture.
Except that Lanzmann is somewhat inconsistent: Once having declared that it’s not an enigma, that it can be explained as a product of history, he then turns around and reiterates to me his belief that the Why of explanation is obscene.
“You can take all the reasons, all the fields of explanation, whether it is psychoanalytic explanation, an opposition between the German spirit, the German geist and the Jewish one, Hitler’s childhood, and so on. You can take the unemployment in Germany, the economic crisis, whatever you want. You can take all of these fields of explanation. And every field can be true, and all the fields together can be true. But these are conditions. Even if they are necessary, they are not sufficient. A beautiful morning you have to start to kill, to start to kill massively. And I said that there is a gap between all the fields of explanation and the actual killing. You cannot give birth—in French we say engendre—you cannot generate such an evil. And if you start to explain and to answer the question of Why you are led, whether you want it or not, to justification. The question as such shows its own obscenity: Why are the Jews being killed? Because there is no answer to the question of why.” Because, in other words, any answer begins inevitably to legitimize, to make “understandable” that process.
Lanzmann leaps from the epistemological inadequacy of explanation to condemning the moral inadequacy of those who try to explain, assuming accusatorially that they’re acting in bad faith, that in attempting to explain they intend to excuse.
One of Lanzmann’s critics in France, an expatriate American psychoanalyst named Sean Wilder, who had observed the havoc Lanzmann and his acolytes have wrought over this issue—their assault on a respected Parisian psychoanalytic institute that had the temerity to invite Binion to speak resulted in the implosion and dissolution of the Institute over the question—offered a commonsense critique of Lanzmann’s position: “I think the question of ‘why’ is a fundamental human function. For Christ’s sake, what do they think people are going to do? You put food in somebody’s mouth, and if he chews and swallows it, he is going to digest it. The question ‘why’ is the mental or intellectual equivalent to the process of digesting. You get information, and unless you are a bloody idiot you work on it, and one of the fundamental intellectual processes is this question Why. I think it is one of the nobler acquisitions of the human mind and should be considered as such.”
Lanzmann’s position in insisting that people ingest only raw information without digesting it is, to continue the metaphor, a kind of intellectual bulimia. Although he prefers a different sense-metaphor for his method: willed blindness. “When I was making Shoah I was like a horse with [blinders],” he told me. “I did not look to the side, neither my right side nor my left side. I was trying to look straight into this black sun which is the Holocaust. And this blindness, this voluntary blindness was—is—a necessary requisite, the necessary condition for the creation. And this blindness was the contrary of blindness, it was like clairvoyance, it was to see, to see absolutely clearly, you know. And the only way to cope with this blinding reality is to blind one’s self to all kinds of explanation. To refuse the explanation. It is the only way. It was a moral attitude, an ethical touchstone.”
Hearing Lanzmann rhapsodize in the eternal language of mystics (and French intellectuals) on blindness as insight and the ethical superiority of his position recalled to me another mystical formulation I’d seen him use: “Didn’t you once say that there should be a sacred flame around the Holocaust?” I asked him.
“A circle of flame. Yes, one should not, should never try to cross this circle.”
This seemed to me the very kind of language Yehuda Bauer was objecting to when he wrote his essay deploring the “mystification” of the Holocaust. If there’s a circle of flame around it, how does one know what’s inside the circle? Having spent considerable time with homicide detectives, I tried to imagine the reaction of those I’ve known if someone had said to them, “Don’t cross the circle around the body, don’t ask questions about the mind of the murderer.” And yet the Holocaust, while vastly different in scale, is still a homicide. Exempting the mind of the murderers from scrutiny, shielding the murderers with a circle of flame, is a policy that could please only the murderers and their would-be successors.
“A circle of flame around Hitler’s psychology, too?” I asked Lanzmann. “Don’t try to cross? . . .”
“No, there is no circle of flame around Hitler. I don’t look at psychology. I am not interested in it.”
No circle of flame but still a willed circumscription of inquiry. “The SS men in your movie? Not interested in their psychology either?”
“I was not interested in the psychology. I always said [to them], ‘I don’t talk about you, I am not interested in you.’ I wanted to ask them how it happened.”
By “how” he means only how, mechanically, they accomplished it, not how they could have become inhuman enough to want to do it.
“Yehuda Bauer says that there’s a danger of mystification if we set off the Holocaust and Hitler from the processes of history and psychology, there’s a sacralization, mystification—”
“Mystification of . . . ”
“Mystification of the Holocaust. If we say that it can’t be explained, that it’s a mystery beyond understanding.”
“But I told you at the beginning that it is not a mystery beyond understanding,” he said.
“But if we can’t get from the people who did it to the actual event, if there’s a gap as you’ve said, an abyss between the cause and effect—how did it happen?”
“How did it happen?”
“Yes.”
“I have shown it, I think.”
“You’ve shown that it did happen. But how did ordinary men come to this? Were they evil? Were they possessed by demonism?”
“No, I never said this. No, you don’t understand me, that’s all.”
I believe the problem is not that I don’t understand Lanzmann but that I do. That his position is philosophically inconsistent: Above all else, he insists it is wrong to try to explain the murders because inevitably that will excuse them, absolve them of responsibility. And yet, he insists that there is “no enigma” about why the Holocaust happened, he has the explanation, it is the product of “the whole story” of Western civilization. Which in effect does absolve individuals from responsibility: It is not the individual conscious—thus, culpable—decisions of the murderers that are responsible for the Holocaust; it is rather the machine, the engine of all of Western history that “produces” the crime.
If one is forbidden from inquiring into the psychology of the decision to murder, there is no way to account for it happening aside from spontaneous generation or some vague notion of everything causing everything, an abstract historic inevitability that excuses the murderers from individual responsibility. I don’t believe Lanzmann wants to absolve or exculpate the murderers of responsibility—all the more reason for him to be cautious in ascribing exculpatory “Revisionist” motives to those who take different philosophical positions on explanation from his.
Even Lanzmann’s professed devotion to the question “how” as opposed to why is called into question by his attack on a recent book that demolishes the no-gas-chamber arguments of the Holocaust deniers. The book, written by a former Revisionist, Jean Claude Pressac, is based upon documents Pressac found in the Soviet archives, documents described in a New York Times story on Pressac as “previously unpublished commercial correspondence and contracts linking Nazi officers at Auschwitz and the German engineering corporation that built the gas chambers, ventilation systems, elevators, crematories, and other devices that made murder possible.”
The French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, the man who brought Klaus Barbie to justice, called the Pressac book “a major contribution to the literature” of the Holocaust. “A problem existed,” Klarsfeld told the Times. “Exactly how did the gas chambers and the crematoria work? How could that number of bodies be disposed of? It was a question of explaining and documenting a criminal technique, and Pressac has now provided the most authoritative account.”
One would have thought that Lanzmann, who eternally urges that we should blind ourselves to everything but the how, the criminal technique, would have welcomed the production of these revealing documents, which revealed precisely “how.” Yes, the documents were discovered by a former Revisionist, but that does not make them less authentic. And in his film Lanzmann did not scruple to ask former SS men “how.”
But according to the Times, Lanzmann was “enraged by the book. ‘Mr. Pressac’s work,’ he wrote in the weekly Le Nouvelle Observateur, ‘is pernicious and marked by the bizarre reasoning of people . . . who deny the Holocaust. By insisting on documentary proof, by discounting the emotional testimony of survivors, the book legitimizes the arguments of revisionists, who become the point of reference for future debate. . . . I prefer the tears of the barber from Treblinka in Shoah to a Pressac documentary on gas detectors.’”
He prefers then his own staged and crafted catharsis to documentary facts. But what about the importance of combating neo-Nazis’ lies, which are used to justify contemporary violence against the Jews? Hitler rose to power on the back of Revisionist history, the stab-in-the-back myth that Germany didn’t lose the war but was cheated out of victory by a conspiracy of Jews and Jewish-controlled “November Criminals.” If Pressac helps pull the rug out from under contemporary liars and deniers, “shouldn’t one try to combat neo-Nazi Revisionists in every way?” I asked Lanzmann.
“First of all,” he says, “I didn’t say this.”
“The Times was misquoting you?”
“Yes,” he said, “it is a journalistic thing.” (The Times reporter told me he stood by his story when I read it back to him.)
“Okay, so tell me what you do feel about the Pressac book.”
“What is the Pressac book? Pressac is a former Revisionist. He’s convinced that the gas chambers did actually exist. And he’s not discovering anything new in this. Absolutely nothing. He opens the door of the gas chamber. Everybody knew they were there.”
Everyone knew, but a powerful and insidious claque of deniers is having disturbing success in convincing an alarming number of people they might not have been there. Klarsfeld, who has been on the front line of the fight against real Nazis and neo-Nazis rather than the battle over the aesthetics of filming them that Lanzmann is engaged in, believes the Pressac book is a useful weapon against the deniers.
Lanzmann purports to be interested in describing how the crime was committed but sees no particular value in studying how to prevent it from being committed again. “Yehuda Bauer told me,” I mentioned to Lanzmann, “that if we don’t try to understand how it happened, then we learn nothing about preventing it from happening again.”
Lanzmann refused to believe Bauer could have said this. “I [have known] Yehuda Bauer for a long time. And I am astonished he talks like this.” (In fact, in an essay entitled “On the Place of the Holocaust in History,” attacking “mystifiers,” Yehuda Bauer argued that “once [a catastrophe like the Holocaust] has happened, it can be repeated. . . . The Holocaust can be a precedent, or it can become a warning.” A warning, that is, against the possibility of repetition that Lanzmann is so unconcerned with.)
“Don’t you believe,” I asked him, “that it’s worth investigating the process of history in order to—”
“Okay, okay,” he said disgustedly. “We do this. We do this. I did it. As I told you, the Holocaust is not something which is out of history. So it is an historical event.”
“But you seem to be saying it’s out of psychology—”
“I tell you you can take psychology, you can take economic conditions, you can take whatever you want. All of this might be true. But this doesn’t give birth to the Holocaust. You cannot engender the Holocaust. As I told you, it’s an ethical position.”
Lanzmann is quick to define whatever choice he’d made as the only ethical one, but his self-proclaimed ethical position leads him to strange kinds of passivity in the face of the neo-Nazi movement in contemporary Europe.
“What about the neo-Nazis of Germany today?” I asked him. “One should not write about them? They want to kill Jews again.”
“It is not complicated,” Lanzmann says, to understand them. “And I don’t think that history repeats itself. You can write about the neo-Nazis if you can convince them, and so on, yes,” he allows.
“But can one do that without investigating the Nazis of the past?”
“Listen. What kind of investigation do you need? It has been done,” he repeats. “I did it. I already did it.”
It’s been done. I have done it. After Shoah, it is forbidden to speak of certain things. Because I have already said what needs to be said. The rest should be silence. If Lanzmann’s disciple can accuse Rudolph Binion of using “method as final solution,” one can almost say Lanzmann wants Shoah to be the final solution of Hitler explanation; further discussion must be terminated if not exterminated.
Toward the close of our encounter, I asked him directly: “Is it all to be condemned—to write or even think about Hitler?”
“I think it is to be condemned,” he said. “I think it is—all the way.”
At this point, Lanzmann went to get some homework for me. He handed me a copy of a collection of essays on Shoah and instructed me to read the one he’d written, the one called “Hier Ist Kein Warum” (Here there is no why)—the locus classicus of his attack on explanation.
I was familiar with that essay already. I was familiar with the story Lanzmann tells in that essay, the story about an incident in Auschwitz which Lanzmann makes the very heart and soul of his commandment against explanation—the why of his attack on Why. And I still find myself amazed by his use of it. It’s a story he takes from Primo Levi’s memoir, Survival in Auschwitz.
Here is Levi’s story. It’s about his first disorienting day in the camp:
The whole process of introduction to what was for us a new order took place in a grotesque and sarcastic manner. When the tattooing operation was finished, they shut us in a vacant hut. The bunks are made, but we are severely forbidden to touch or sit on them, so we wander around aimlessly . . . still tormented by the parching thirst of the journey. . . .
Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum?” I asked him in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum” (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.
And here is what Lanzmann makes of this story in his essay:
“It is enough to formulate the question in simplistic terms—Why have the Jews been killed?—for the question to reveal right away its obscenity. There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding. Not to understand was my iron law during all eleven years of the production of Shoah. I had clung to this refusal of understanding as the only possible ethical attitude. ‘Hier ist kein warum’—Primo Levi narrates how the word ‘Auschwitz’ was taught to him by an SS guard. ‘Here there is no why,’ Primo Levi was abruptly told upon his arrival at the camp. This law is equally valid for whoever undertakes the responsibility of such a transmission. Because the act of transmitting [what happened in the Holocaust] is the only thing that matters and no intelligibility, that is to say, no true knowledge pre-exists the process of transmission” (emphasis added).
A truly astonishing thing has happened here. Set aside the fact that he comes close to asserting the position that the Shoah did not exist until its “transmission” by Lanzmann in Shoah. Even more bizarrely, Lanzmann has taken an SS death-camp guard’s “grotesque and sarcastic” rebuke to a Jew asking why—and made that sneering mass murderer’s command into his own commandment. He’s made an insulting description (here there is no why) of a policy designed to keep the gas chambers running on time (without any troublesome Jewish questions harrying the murderers) into a moral injunction: Here there should be no why.
The SS guard tells the thirsty Jew he must suffer his torments without asking why; Claude Lanzmann tells those thirsty for knowledge, for an explanation, that they must suffer in a silence imposed by him. Perhaps it might be different if Lanzmann had been content to impose what he proudly calls his “iron law” on himself and his own work, as a kind of discipline. But, in fact, he and his acolytes have become a kind of gang of intellectual enforcers who don’t merely disagree but seek to suppress those who break Lanzmann’s law: Thou shalt have no Holocaust discussion that violates my iron law.
It’s important to distinguish skeptical, even scathing critiques of Hitler explanations—in part, this book is about the follies and fiascoes of certain explanatory attempts—from Lanzmann’s position. This ill-considered adaptation of the death-camp guard’s abusive remark to a thirsty Jewish prisoner as a motto with which to silence all inquiry suggests Lanzmann has lost his sense of proportion. That staring too long into “this black sun” has blinded him to the identity of the real enemy. Or so it would seem from his treatment of Dr. Louis Micheels.