Writing Near Death: The Shrouded Scrolls of Aushwitz

Writing Near Death: The Shrouded Scrolls of Aushwitz

In the films we will examine in the following two chapters, issues of fakery, counterfeiting, misdirection, the work of art, and Judaism get relayed through transport in cinema, differently, all interested in an epistemic reversibility that links the work of art to the body of the victim, that poses a problem of salvaging and arching, of what goes missing, and of ending itself figured as a posting to the future to come. Before turning to the films, we want to make clearer the issue of reversibility, distraction, and ending by staying a bit longer with Didi-Hubermann. The ethical focus on four photos and the broader focus on the visual distract Didi-Huberman and his many antagonists from reading supplementary notes that have been written by victims “near” death to a future reader and left for that reader near the remains of the recently dead and the full written records recorded by the victims. Here four notes, all cited by Didi-Hubermann:

A message to the world must be addressed to the world from here. Whether it be found soon or in several years, it will always be a terrible accusation. His message will be signed by two hundred men of the Sonderkommando of Crematorium I, fully conscious of their imminent death [ . . ] The message has been carefully prepared. It describes in great detail the horror that have been committed here these last two years. The names of the executioners of the camps appear. We publish the approximate number of people exterminated, describing the manner methods, and the instruments used in their extermination. The message has been written on three large parchment pages. The writer-editor of the Sonderkomommnado—a former artist form Paris—has copied it in a beautiful calligraphy according to the style of the old parchments, in India ink so that the writing does not fade. The fourth page contains the signatures of the two hundred men of the Sonderkomnado. The parchment pages have been attached with a silk thread, rolled, enclosed in a cylindrical zinc box, specially made by one of our smiths, and finally sealed and welded to be protected from the air and humidity. This box has been left by the carpenters between the springs if the ottoman in the padding. ⁸

The notebook and other texts remained in the pits soaked with blood as well as the bones and flesh often not fully burned. These we could recognize from the smell. Dear finder, look everywhere in every parcel of earth. Underneath are buried dozens of documents, mine and those of other people, which cast light on what happened here. Numerous teeth have been buried, it was we, the workers of the Kommando, who deliberately dispersed them around the terrain as much as we could so that the world might find tangible evidence of the millions of murdered human beings. As for us, we have lost all hope of surviving until the Liberation. (D-H, 108)

We must, as we have until to know . . . make all known to the world by means of a historical chronicle. From now on, we will hide everything in the ground. I ask that all these various description and notes, buried and in their time signed Y.A.R.A., be collected. They are found in different containers and boxes, in the yard of the crematorium I: one, entitled Deportation, is founding the bone pits of crematorium I; the other entitled Aushchwitz, is found under a pile of bones, southwest of the same yard. After that, I rewrote it completed it, and reinterred it separately among the ashes of the crematorium II. I wish them to be put in order and printed together under the title In the Horror of the Atrocities. We, the 170 men remaining, are about to leave for the sauna. We are sure that we are being brought to our deaths. They have chosen thirty men to remain at crematorium IV. (DH, 109)

Reading these notes backwards as an arrhe-archive that has gone unread because prematurely unified and even sanctified as a set of single documents, means attending to a strange supplementary logic in the recording of the deaths of the victims that uncannily unsettles a distinction between the living and the dead: writing themselves into death (by murder, not suicide), the authors substitute the note for themselves and the records the notes identify stand in the for lives of the victims, but their relative importance gets entangled rather than neatly boxed up: unlike Walter Benjamin’s distinction between his manuscript and his life, the records are deliberately scattered, left to be exhumed later, collected, reordered, titled and published. Some records are sealed to be preserved, others are soaked in blood. Some are rewritten and reinterred. The records, one might say are to be resurrected but the body parts are presumed to be unidentifiable and not in need of care (paper becomes a contact sheet for human remains). Like Freud’s account of the uncanny as the mixing of the organic and inorganic, the living and the dead, “sowing” the body parts and boxes in the mass graves is connected to the sewing of the parchment. Mixed signals mean missed signals, the repetition compulsion uncannily existing on a continuum with witnessing.

What happens in the camp, then, is not only that people are made to survive beyond death which is not death, as do the Musselmanner in Agamben’s account in Remnants of Auschwitz, but that those neither people who survive nor those who die are not able to determine when the dead are dead, or distinguish less the dead from the living (about to be) dead but singling the dead from the deader than dead. The death of the victim is not reducible to time noted on a coroner’s report. As the Scrolls of Auschwitz already make apparent as a testimony of testimony, as a record of witnessing a record located elsewhere.

In elucidating the aporias what he calls the “testimonial condition” (Demeures, 41), Derrida notes that testimony in a legal sense has to be live: “For to testify . . . the witness must be present at the stand himself, without technical interposition. In the law, the testimonial tends, without being able to succeed in this altogether, to exclude all technical agency. One cannot send a cassette to testify in one’s place. One must be present, raise one’s hand, speak in the first person and in the present, and one must do this to testify to a present, to an indivisible moment, that is at a certain point to moment assembled at the tip of an instanteousness which must resist division.” (32-33). Testimony excludes technical agency in order to testify to a temporality of the present to a indivisible instant. Derrida goes on to explain why this legal view of testimonial is unable able “to succeed in this altogether.” Testimony requires the possibility of repetition and “quasi-technical reproducibility” (33) hence of grammatology: even if an illiterate witness must nevertheless be “capable of inscribing, tracing, repeating, remembering, performing the acts of synthesis that writing is. Thus he needs some writing power, at the very least, some possibility of tracing or imprinting in a given element . . . What I say for the first time, if it is a testimony, is already a repetition, at least a repeatability; it is already an iterability, more than once at once, more than an instant in one instant; and that being the case the instant is always divide at this very point, at the point of its writing. (40;41). Consequently, testimony admits techne even before the invention of particular recording media:

The root of the testimonial problem of techne is to be found here. The technical reproducibility is excluded form testimony, which always calls for a presence of the live voice in the first person. But from the moment that testimony must be able to be repeated, techne is admitted; it is introduced where it is excluded. For this, one not need wait for cameras, videos, typewriters, and computers. As soon as the sentence is repeatable, that is, from its origin, the instant it is pronounceable and intelligible, thus idealizable, it is already instrumentalizable and affected by technology. And virtuality. (42)

The temporality of testimony is thus similar to what Derrida calls, in Archive Fever, “the moment of archivization strictly speaking” this moment “is not . . . [a] so-called live or spontaneous memory but rather a certain hypomnesic and prosthetic experience of the technical substrate” (25). Yet Derrida’s critique of archeological hallucination of he moment of contact provides with another kind of temporality, that which cannot be repeated. The “matter” of the substrate’s techne is a surface, a contact sheet, like Gradiva’s footprint in the ash of Vesuvius, the moment of its impression never capable of being retraced, only hallucinated by the archivist turned archeologist.⁹

Before turning back to the Scrolls, we may grasp more clearly the way the temporalities of testimony and archivalization, of the impression, link up media to an uncanny and contradictory temporality and placelessness (Unheimlichkeit). Derrida introduces a cinematic metaphor—the screenplay—when commenting on a passage in Maurice Blanchot's The Instant of My Death in which a young French man is “prevented from dying by death itself”: as the Nazi officer in charge organizes a firing squad, the man’s family silently and slowly goes back inside the chateau, “as if everything had already been done.” This last phrase leads Derrida to comment:

He is the only man and thus the last man, this man already less young. The Last Man is not only the title of another of Blanchot's books. The eschatology of the last man is marked in the phrase that states in the mode of fiction ("as if") that the end has already taken place before the end: "as if everything had already been done." Death has already taken place, however unexperienced [sic] its experience may remain in the absolute acceleration of a time infinitely contracted into the point of an instant. The screenplay is so clear, and it describes the action so explicitly in two lines, that the program is exhausted in advance. We know everything with an absolute knowledge. Everything, all of it, has already happened because we know what is going to happen. We know the screenplay; we know what is going to happen. It is over; it is already over from instant of the credits. It begins with the end: as in The Madness of the Day, it begins with the end. We know it happened. "As if everything were already done," it already happened. The end of time. What will happen now will sink into what was done, as it were backward, into what has already arrived, that is to day, death. (Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, 62)

The temporality of the narrative is uncanny not because the repressed returns but because it places testimony and the archive backward in a non-place where death precedes death, becoming metaphorical visible as a movie screenplay, specifically, a last man scenario.

We are now in a position to turn to the Scrolls left by members of Sonderkommando to be exhumed later. We find yet again in these Scrolls a black box trope left in the exhumed notes themselves, the fantasy that the accusations will always stand, will always be transparent, will be found by the right reader (any reader who finds them is presumed to be right). The Scrolls stand as testimony beyond a legal sense. They are not offered as legal evidence. Indeed, the notes titled collectively as Scrolls become operative as a theological model of reading as re-cognition, in other words, a total recall and retrieval guidance system that transmits the recording of the present to the future intact. Yet listening at the receiving end of the transmitted notes becomes a problem of reading because taking it necessarily involves, long after evidence has to used in trials, a philological and archaeological reconstruction of records of an event that are not reducible to an absolute moment or single place: they retrace an impression of what cannot be retraced.

For this reason, gas chambers (when in operation) have become a hot black box, regarded both as the epicenter of the catastrophe, the heart of darkness, the dark room, the “eye of the cyclone, the eye of history,” (106) but also the most inaccessible space, the reader / viewer locked out by self-appointed guardians of the archives. Imagining the place and time of the gas chambers in operation is paradoxically viewed as pornographic (not evidence but the source of sadistic, perverse pleasure, so that Spielberg’s averted gas chamber turned shower scene in Schindler’s List is regarded by all parties to the debate as porn) yet also the most authentic, the best evidence and refutation of revisionists. In the 1980s, filmmakers have split over the question of the use value of the archive. Whereas Alain Renais’s Night and Fog (1955) alternates between color photography of Auschwitz in the present and black and white archival footage of the camps and Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) confronted interviewees with documents from the archive about their collaboration with the Nazis and inserting archival footage, Claude Lanzman decided to film Shoah ( 198) without using any archival footage, just filming in color interviews with survivors. By contrast, Jean-Luc Godard included archival footage in his Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988), though the film is not a documentary about the holocaust as is Shoah. Despite this split, the anti-archivist Claude Lanzmann and archivist Jean-Luc Godard share a similarly phantasmatic view of the archive, both imagining the existence of film footage of the camp in operation. Lanzmann says that if he had found a Nazi snuff film of gas chambers in operation, he would have destroyed it:

Spielberg chose to reconstruct. To reconstruct, in a sense, means to manufacture archives. And if I had found an existing film—a secret film that showed how three thousand Jews, men, women, children, died together in a gas chamber at a crematorium II at Auschwitz, if I had found that, not would I have shown it, I would have destroyed it. I am unable to say why. It is obvious. (95)

Godard says something similar about the actual existence of Nazi film footage of the camp, arriving, however, the inverse conclusion that the footage should be shown (destroying it does not occur to him): “We always discover archives a long time afterward. [. . .] I have no proof whatsoever of what I am claiming, but I think that if I worked with an investigative journalist on this, I would find the images of the gas chambers after about twenty years. We would see the prisoners entering, and we would see in what state they come out” (cited byDidi-Huberman, p. 216, n. 73). We perhaps somewhat precipitously hazard from these two quotations the following generalization: both the archivist and anti-archivist Lanzman creates a camp with a camp, the two camps being early mirror opposites: the anti-archivist imagines the archive as the contents of which are to be burned, a crematorium, as it were; the archivist imagines this crematorium within the camp (for burning pornographic, “bad” images) while creating another space, an unmarked urn, for not yet ashed remnants rendered readable. As Didi-Huberman puts it, “Something—very little, a film—remains of a process of annihilation . . . it is neither full presence or absolute silence. It is neither resurrection, nor death without remains. It is death insofar as it makes remains. It is a world proliferating with lacunae, with singular images which placed together in a montage, will encourage readability, an effect of knowledge” (167).

We have singled out Didi-Huberman’s Images of Auschwitz and the heated debate it has provoked for attention because of its indirect impact of the question of the archive when its use value has to do with the ethics of remembering rather than refuation. Did-Hubermans interest is saving a legitimate use value for visual media sheds helps explain the paradoxical ways opponents occupy the same ground for the same purpose by enabling us to the uncanny effect of the mediatization of the holocaust in its arche-archivalization. Didi-Huberman observes acutely the difficulty of reading images, including their reverse sides: “All this cries out the need for ‘a genuine archaeology of photographic documents,’ as Clement Cheroux suggests. It could only be done by ‘examining the conditions of their creation, by studying the documentary content, and by questioning their use.’ It is a tough program. It would require, for example, access to the reverse side of images—which recent digitalization projects often forget about—in order to glean the slightest sign, the slightest inscription that might better situate the image and identity, as far as possible, of the person who took the photograph: the question of viewpoint (undoubtedly, Nazi, for the most part) is capital in this domain” (67). Contrary to our account of Walter Benjamin’s briefcase, Didi-Huberman’s model of the archive is one of reassembly: We know that in 1940, just before committing suicide, Walter Benjamin was able to reformulate, to retrace and reassemble all of his sources, from the Kabala to Kafka, from Karl Marx to Rosenzweig, in a notion of Erlosung [redemption] understood from the point of view of the catastrophe and in the absence of any “salvation” either historical (definitive victory over the forces of totalitarianism) or religious (resurrection, definitive victory over the forces of death)” (169). Didi-Huberman cites no evidence about Benjamin here, and he has to miss the briefcase in order to conceptualize Benjamin’s self-archivalization as a total retracing and reassemblage, as a redemption that redeems the dialectic of enlightenment (“’redemption’ is . . . that which enlightens us regarding the dialectical manner in which both of these states exist on the foundation or possibility of the other” (170).¹⁰

Retracing and reassemblage is less a matter of readability, however, as it is a map of the archive made geographically specific. The central point of the debate over the four Sonderkommando photographs taken in Auschwitz turns out not to be the veracity of the photos (everyone agres they are not fakes) but the place from where they were taken. Didi-Huberman says they were taken from within a gas chamber, looking out from a door. His critics wonder if that is the case; one critic says the photographer looks through a window, not a door. This positivist debate is of less interest to us, however, than the fact that the photos are doubles. Did-Huberman astutely notes that “we are not dealing with one image. In each case of his locations, the clandestine photographer of Birkenau pressed the shutter release twice, the minimal condition for his testimony to account, from two angles at least, for the time that he took to observe. (123).” Rather than critically examine this uncanny doubling, Didi-Huberman reproduces and manufactures it in the way it reproduces the four photos on two pages, in opposite and reverse orders: “To maintain the chronology of the testimony [of David Szmulewski] would suppose the contact prints from the Auschwitz museum were produced from an inverted negative, a lack of technical attention all the more banal since the films in this format carry no single permanent inscription allowing us to distinguish the between the obverse and the inverse of the negative. If such were the case, it would be necessary—while keeping the chronology—to reverse the shots that we are shown in the prints conserved at Auschwitz. The question then remains open” (110). Yet right after acknowledging that we are left with an open question, Didi-Huberman labels the four photos as he thinks they were taken (117), not the ways they may be. The captions the four photos on page immediately following showing says they are “reversed” (118). Retracing, reassemblage, rethinking and turn out to be slightly different instances, then, of the sheer repetition.