Ian Kershaw writes in a review of KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, a newly published book by Nikolaus Wachsmann:
Is it possible to say anything new about Nazi Germany? This is, after all, probably the most thoroughly researched period in modern history. … [C]an a major work that alters our perceptions and influences our interpretation still be written?
Nearly two and a half million men, women and children passed through these camps. More than 1.7 million died in them (nearly a million of them in Auschwitz). Around 60,000 men and women served in the camps as guards and other personnel.
Kershaw praises the book as “brilliant” and notes that, among other reasons for its importance, Wachsmann tells what happened “through the eyes of those who inhabited the camps.”
Boris Lurie had been doing that for decades. His NO!art paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, and writings, largely overlooked for decades, are currently mounted in a retrospective exhibit at the Jewish Museum Berlin.
Postscript: June 26 — In its latest effort to promote Boris Lurie’s work, a controversial foundation has taken an ad for his S&M novel House of Anita in The New York Review of Books, which has paired it with that “very singular girl” Helen Gurley Brown. It makes a spread of two very singular girls. Lurie is either spinning or laughing in his grave. I think both.
For me, the best collection of eye witness accounts of the Holocaust are in Gerhard Schoenberner’s 1964 book “Wir haben es gesehen” which unfortunately is only in German. Its 430 pages cover not only the death camps, but also the ghettos which were in effect also death camps. Also covered are the mobile extermination units that followed the Wehrmacht into the occupied lands, especially on the Eastern front. The plain murder of rounding up people in towns and villages and machine gunning tens of thousands per day into pits and trenches is described in detail.
Americans tend to only know about the death camps. They are less familiar with the mobile extermination units and the ghetto. The horror of both was equal to the death camps. The book lends insights into the whole spectrum of the Nazi’s methods of genocide and the unspeakable mentality and culture of murder behind them.
The brutality and absolute absurdity of what is described is mind shattering. At least for me, the book is very difficult to read due to the severe depression and horror it creates. There is no historical distancing, no commentary, and no padding. The events seem beyond words, but there they are right before your eyes. The long out of print book can be ordered used and in German on the German Amazon.com here for about $9 plus shipping:
https://www.amazon.de/Wir-haben-gesehen-Gerhard-Schoenberner/dp/B0000BNH6A
Just yesterday I came across another documentation I had not seen before. PBS’s Frontline recently restored a never before broadcast 1945 film made by British and American film crews who were with the troops liberating the camps. The film was directed in part by Alfred Hitchcock. Seventy years later, Frontline pieced the film back together and broadcast it.
It’s fairly accurate and contains surprisingly little propaganda, though the basic film material is mostly well known. What is unique, and distantly related to Lurie’s work, is a Hitchcockian tone that combines horror and irony, and that actually functions fairly well in documenting what happened. It can be watched here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/memory-of-the-camps/
For me, Lurie’s irony is far more profound because he tries to capture and express the idea that the events of the Holocaust are beyond all words and all cultural expression. We see that even the moral commentary in the Hitchcock film becomes a kind of ridiculous redundancy in light of the unspeakable images.
By contrast, Lurie tells us that the Holocaust cannot in any way be aestheticized. The British/American film was made by people looking at surface events they couldn’t comprehend, but Schoernberner’s book and Lurie’s work hint at the cultural values, worldview, psychology, and belief systems of the people that created the Holocaust, a vastly more difficult task.
And of course, I’m keenly aware that even these approaches to the Holocaust cannot be adequately described. It seems that the simple eye witness accounts are the best we can do. It’s as if the species that created the Holocaust has no right, and even more, no true ability to comment on what happened. I think that is what Lurie was trying to tell us.
To be clear, I should add that when I speak of the species that created the Holocaust, I’m not only speaking of the Germans, but all humans. What is the creature that commits genocide? Why is genocide so widespread and why does it have such a long history? Why do even the survivors of genocide often show genocidal tendencies? How do we see this side of human nature and move beyond the perception that being human is an ignominy? How do we reassemble any form of hope? Again, I know of no artist who captures this problem better than Lurie, but he only captures the problem. He offers no solution, except perhaps the idea that our only way forward is an unbearable honesty which we have not even touched — and can perhaps never touch.
What I most respect about human beings, is how dangerous they are.
Two Singular Girls ––– even three? Consider the author of the ANITA foreword.
‘I have long been aware that I no sooner place two sticks side by side than they uncontrollably cross. My mere presence inspires others to behave perversely, in my shadow flares the contrary’ … quoting from her novel, The Correct Sadist.
‘Every sentence begs to be read and re-read’ says the Temple Press editor in his Introduction to the 1990 London edition of the Terence Sellers novel – ‘It quickly becomes very clear that we are dealing not with gratuitous acts of violence, but with an important part of human existence, that of the search for an emotional and psychological freedom, or wholeness.’
Uh, oh … controversial stuff indeed.