Apocalypse by W.B. Sebald

Ditchingham churchyard was the very last stop on my walk through the county of Suffolk. The afternoon was already drawing to a close, and so I decided to return to the main road and continue a short way in the direction of Norwich, to the Mermaid in Hedenham, where the bar would be opening soon. The route I had to take led me past Ditchingham Hall, a house built around 1700 in beautiful mauve-colored brick, the windows of which were fitted with dark green shutters. It was situated well off the main road above a serpentine lake, and encompassed on all sides by extensive parkland.



It occurred to me that Ditchingham Park must have been laid out around the time Chateaubriand was in Suffolk. Estates of this kind, which enabled the ruling elite to imagine themselves surrounded by boundless lands where nothing offended the eyes, did not become fashionable until the second half of the eighteenth century. Planning and executing the work necessary for an emparkment could take two or three decades. In order to complete such a project it was usually necessary to buy parcels of land and add them to an existing estate, and roads, tracks, individual farmsteads, sometimes even entire villages had to be moved, as the object was to enjoy an uninterrupted view from the house over a natural expanse innocent of any human presence. It was for the same reason that fences were replaced with broad, grass-covered ha-has , which were dug out at a cost of many thousands of working hours. Naturally, such an undertaking, with its considerable impact not only on the landscape, but also on the life of local communities, could not always be accomplished without controversy.



At the period in question, an ancestor of Earl Ferrers, the present owner of Ditchingham Hall, having become embroiled in a confrontation with one of his estate managers, dispatched him with his gun, for which deed he was in due course sentenced to death by his peers in the House of Lords, and hanged publicly in London by a silken rope.



The least costly aspect of laying out a landscaped park was planting of trees as specimens or in small groups, even if it was not seldom preceded by the felling of tracts of woodland and the burning-off of unsightly thickets and scrub that did not comply with the overall concept . Nowadays, given that only a third of the trees planted at the time are still standing in most parks, and that more are dying each year of old age and many other causes, we will soon be able to envisage once more the Torricelli-like emptiness in which the great country seats stood in the late eighteenth century.



Chateaubriand himself made a modest attempt to realize the ideal of nature projected into such emptiness. When he returned in 1807 from his long journey to Constantinople and Jerusalem, he bought a summer house that lay hidden among the wooded hills in the Vallee aux Loups, not far from the town of Aulnay. It is there that he begins to write his memoirs, on the first pages of which he speaks of the trees he has planted and tended with his own hands. Now, he says, they are still so small that I provide them with shade whenever I step between them and the sun. But one day, when they have grown, they will give shade to me, and look after me in my old age much as I looked after them in their youth. I feel a bond unites me with these trees; I write sonnets, elegies and odes to them; they are like children, I know them all by name, and my only desire is that I should end my days amongst them.



This picture was taken at Ditchingham about ten years ago, on a Saturday afternoon when the manor house was open to the public in aid of charity. The Lebanese cedar which I am leaning against, unaware still of the woeful events that were to come, is one of the trees that were planted when the park was laid out, and most of which, as I have said, have already disappeared.



Since the mid-Seventies there has been an ever more rapid decline in the number of trees, with heavy losses, above all amongst the species most common in England. Indeed, one tree has become well nigh extinct: Dutch elm disease spread from the south coast in Norfolk around 1975, and within the space of just two or three summers there were no elms left alive in the vicinity. The six elms which had shaded the pond in our garden withered away in June 1978, just a few weeks after they unfolded their marvelous light green foliage for the last time.



The virus spread through the root systems of entire avenues with unbelievable speed, causing capillaries to tighten and leading to the trees’ dying of thirst. Even solitary trees were located with infallible accuracy by the airborne beetles which spread the disease. One of the most perfect trees I have ever seen was an almost two-hundred-year-old elm that stood on its own in a field not far from our house. About one hundred feet tall, it filled an immense space. I recall that, after most of the elms in the areas had succumbed, its countless, somewhat asymmetrical, finely serrated leaves would sway in the breeze as if the scourge which had obliterated its entire kind would pass it by without a trace; and I also recall that a bare fortnight later all these apparently invincible leaves were brown and curled up, and dust before autumn came.



It was then also that I noticed the crowns of ash trees were become sparse, and the foliage of oaks was thinning and displaying strange mutations. At the same time, the trees themselves were producing leaves from hard old wood, and by mid-summer they were dropping masses of rock-hard, deformed acorns that were covered with a sticky substance. The beech trees, which until then had remained in good shape, were affected by several long droughts. The leaves were only half their usual size, and almost all the beechnuts were empty. One after the other, the poplars on the meadow died. Some of the dead trunks are still standing, while others lie broken and bleached in the grass. Finally, in the autumn of 1987, a hurricane such as no one had ever experienced before passed over the land. According to official estimates over fourteen million mature hard-leaf fell victim to it, not to mention the damage to conifer plantations and bushes.



That was on the night of the 16th of October. Without warning, the storm came up out of the Bay of Biscay, moved along the French west coast, crossed the English Channel and swept over the south-east part of the island out into the North Sea. I woke at about three in the morning, less as a result of the thunderous roar than because of the curious warmth and the increasing air pressure in my bedroom. In contrast with other equinoctial gales which I have experienced here, this one came not in driving gusts but with an unrelenting and, it seemed, ever more powerful force. I stood at the window and looked through the glass, which was strained almost to the breaking point, down towards the end of the garden, where the crowns of the large trees in the neighboring bishop’s park were bent and streaming like aquatic plants in a deep current. White clouds raced across the darkness, and again and again the sky was lit up with a terrible flickering which, I later discovered, was caused by power lines touching each other.



At some point I must have turned away for a while. At all events, I still remember that I did not believe my eyes when I looked out again and saw that where the currents of air had shortly beforehand been pouring through the black mass of trees, there was now just the paleness of the empty horizon. It seemed as if someone had pulled a curtain to one side to reveal a formless scene that bordered upon the underworld. And at the very moment that I registered the unaccustomed brightness of the night over the park, I knew that everything down there had been destroyed. And yet I hoped that the ghastly emptiness could be explained by some other means, for in the mounting din of the storm I had heard none of the crashing sounds that go with the felling of timber. It was not until later that I realized that the trees, held to the last by their root systems, toppled only gradually, and because they were forced down so slowly their crowns, which were entangled with each other, did not shatter but remained virtually undamaged. In this way, entire tracts of woodland were pressed down flat as if they had been cornfields.



In the first light of dawn, when the storm had begun to abate, I ventured out into the garden. For a long time I stood choked with emotion amidst the devastation. It was like being in a kind of wind tunnel, so strong was the suction created by the onrushing air, which was far too warm for the time of year. The ancient trees on either side of the path leading along the edge of the park were all lying on the ground as if in a swoon, and beneath the huge oaks, ash and plane trees, beeches and limes lay the torn and mangled shrubs that had grown in their shade, thujas and yews, hazel and laurel bushes, holly and rhododendrons. With pulsating radiance the sun rose over the horizon. The gusts continued for a while, and then it was suddenly quiet. Nothing moved, apart from the birds which had lived in the bushes and trees and which were now flitting about amongst the branches that remained green well into the autumn that year.



I do not know how I got through the first day after the storm, but do recall during the night, doubting what I had seen with my own eyes, I walked once more through the park. As there were power cuts throughout the whole region, everything was in deep darkness. There was no glare from streetlights or houses to dull the sky. But the stars had come out, in a display so resplendent as I had seen only over the Alps when I was a child, or over the desert in my dreams. From the extreme north right down to the south where the view had before been blocked by trees, the sparkling constellations were spread out, the Plough, the tail of Draco, the triangle of Taurus, the Pleiades, Pegasus, the Swan and the Dolphin. Unchanged and, it seemed to me, more magnificent than ever before, they revolved above me.



The silence of that brilliant night after the storm was followed by the revving of chainsaws during the winter months. It took four or five laborers until March to cut up the branches, burn the rubbish, and haul away the trunks. An excavator dug large holes in which stumps and roots, some the size of a small house, were buried. Now, in the truest sense of the word, everything was turned upside down. The forest floor, which in the spring of last year had still been carpeted with snowdrops, violets and wood anemones, ferns and cushions of moss, was now covered by a layer of barren clay. All that grew in the hard-baked earth were tufts of swamp grass, the seeds of which had lain in the depths for goodness knew how long. The rays of the sun, with nothing left to impede them, destroyed all the shade-loving plants so that it seemed as if we were living on the edge of an infertile plain.



Where a short while ago the dawn chorus had at times reached such a pitch that we had to close the bedroom windows, where larks had risen on the morning air above the fields and where, in the evenings, we occasionally even heard a nightingale in the thicket, its pure and penetrating song punctuated by theatrical silences, there was now not a living sound.



The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. Translated by Michael Hulse, A New Directions Book, 1995

McVeigh Confronts His Public Image by Jody Lynee Madeira

In the years preceding his execution, not only was Timothy McVeigh a toxic presence in the bombing victim’s lives; they were also a devastating presence in his. Immediately after his arrest, victims criticized McVeigh’s unemotional and defiant persona, the protested the utter implausibility of his insistence that the Oklahoma City bombing was a military attack, with victims’ deaths constituting “collateral damage”. News media broadcast and built upon these remarks, formulating them into a formidable public representation of McVeigh that was, in his own view, malicious, even monstrous. McVeigh responded to the treatment he was given in the media with a slew of interviews and an authorized biography.




For McVeigh, the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City teemed with enemy non-combatants, and he, a patriotic warrior, would lead the attack that would vindicate the government’s deadly actions at Waco, Ruby Ridge and elsewhere. But family members, survivors and both the American and international public lived in an entirely different universe, one in which the Murrah Building was a place where ordinary Americans far removed from controversial events such as the massacre at Waco came to earn a living just like any other employees. McVeigh attempted to reconcile these two worlds and, indeed, even believed that it was possible to do so; a grave lesson in what can (and must) get lost in translation.



With his lawyer’s help, McVeigh was determined to show the public a friendly face. Above all, he wanted to be taken seriously, but a man made into a monster was likely to be seen as bestial, not rational so McVeigh was frustrated by media coverage awash in victims laments and felt it was important to salvage his mission and redeem his message before dying. What began as a statement of defiance became damage control. From his perp walk until his execution, McVeigh was engaged in a dialogue not only with his victims (particularly a handful with high media visibility) but also with the image of himself that the victims and others helped to create.



What the victims saw as a heinous instance of mass murder, McVeigh regarded as a military mission. He clearly saw himself as a soldier and analogized his reasons for the bombing to other U.S. military actions abroad. To McVeigh, the government actions at Waco and Ruby Ridge necessitated that he ‘go on the offensive' and his stoic soldierly mind-set allegedly accounted for his lack of remorse:


It’s a military act . . . . That’s the way I handle taking a human life... It’s like breaking the neck of a chicken. Look at the atom bomb at Hiroshima, 70,000 people were wiped off the map. To this day, the pilot of that plane says it was a dirty job, but he had to do it.



For McVeigh, then, the bombing was an act of war, and those who worked in the Murrah Building were “eligible combatants whether they’re on the front lines or not.” But family members, survivors, rescue workers, residents of Oklahoma, and the American public did not and could not see the Oklahoma City bombing in such martial terms. They could understand McVeigh’s righteous indignation over Waco and Ruby Ridge, but his decision to bomb the Murrah Building was riotous; being angry at the government was far different from taking innocent lives in retribution.



But McVeigh consistently objected to what he callously termed the “woe-is-me” crowd, objecting that their victimization was the same as that experienced by innocents harmed by U.S. attacks on foreign soil:



Those people, the victims, seem to elevate themselves into something special. They say that no one should have to go through this pot-traumatic grief that their whole city is going through. At the same time, we’re doing it to other nations all the time.”



He was frustrated by the depth and visibility of the victims grief, and he complained that victims were perpetually wallowing in their misery:



I had no hesitation to look right at them and listen to their story, but I’d like to say to them, I’ve heard your story many times before. The specific detail might be unique, but the truth is you are not the first mother to lose a kid, you’re not the first grandparent to lose a granddaughter or a grandson. I’ll use the phrase, and it sounds cold, but I’m sorry I’m going to use it because it’s the truth: get over it.



Family members and survivors could not understand McVeigh’s lack of remorse, and McVeigh was equally puzzled by their inability to do so. In an early interview McVeigh disclosed that he had received a letter from Kathy Wilburn, whose two grandsons he had murdered in the bombing. McVeigh appeared to be frustrated not by her anger but by her inability to understand why he did not show emotion for the murdered bombing victims:



People. I don’t know if they can understand or won’t understand, but when you see a picture of a pilot climbing out of is plane, coming back from a bombing mission, is he crying? If a cop shoots a perp, does he come home and cry? In these fields of fire rescue and law enforcement, you learn to suppress, to block out emotion. . . People grow accustomed to it. You ever see a person from a Third World country encounter a disaster? It’s like, OK, let’s pick up our shit and move somewhere else. You don’t see this weeping.



One news article from the Canadian Press quoted family member Jim Denny, whose two children were injured in the bombing, as saying that he did not understand McVeigh’s comparison between the Oklahoma bombing and the Gulf War. Enclosing the letter to a reporter, McVeigh noted in the margin: “I don’t want to be too harsh on JD, b/c I know emotion clouds reason and logic . . . I know what his kids went through (and are still going through), but what world is this guy living in?!?”



McVeigh’s overall attitude towards the majority of victims was inconsistent. At times, he derided, even mocked, their thoughts and feelings, yet on other occasions he claimed to feel “empathy” for them. McVeigh was clearly aware of how his behaviors impacted family members and survivors, noticing that when he “laughed at pretrial it bothered the victims.” He confirmed that his attitude at trial was at times defiant:



My attitude was, and is, carpe diem, seize the day, enjoy every day. I’m not going to go into that courtroom, curl into a fetal ball and cry, just because the victims wanted me to do that. I’ve already accepted my death, victims, you’re getting what you want, I’m getting what I want. . .



In one stunningly offensive remark, McVeigh analogized the Murrah Building employees to functionaries on the Death Star, the Galactic Empire’s space station and weapon made famous in the Star Wars movie:



The federal government is an army of people. They’re like storm troopers in Star Wars. Although they may be individually innocent, they’re part of the whole . . In the storm troopers analogy, they blow up the entire Death Star. In different scenes, you’d see different women sitting at the consoles in the Death Star, or you’d see storm troopers running around, not shooting at anybody. Guess what, they all get blown up in the Death Star and the audience was happy. As a whole, the Death Star represented the whole empire. Death Star, Murrah Building, they’re all working or the same cause...”



At the same time, McVeigh claimed he took no pleasure in what he did. He regretted that there was some collateral damage, that he did not know there would be customers in the offices of some of those agencies, like Social Security.


It really pissed me off that the prosecution presented that the day care center was easily visible. Mike Fortier and I were in the front of the building, that glass was black, just a sheen. You couldn’t see the kids in there . . . I recognized beforehand that someone might be walking down the road with heir kid or bringing their kid to work. However, it it was known there was an entire day care center there, it might have caused me to switch target and that might have made a difference. That’s a large amount of collateral damage. That issue really irked me; it was terrible that there were children in the building.



McVeigh knew that, in order for his ideological messages to be credible, it was most important to convey that he was not mentally ill. Early on, He disclosed to reporters the results of his psychological examinations in prison:



I was seen repeatedly by 3 defense shrinks (to psycho, 1 psychia.) pre-trial. I got along great with two; the 3rd grew frustrated b/c his job was to formulate a possible ‘mental defect’ mitigation – and he couldn’t find any basis for such. None of these 3 professionals, when everything was explained, found anything wrong with me.



He vehemently denied he was a sociopath, pointing to his ‘sensitive’(yet private) side,” and contended that “if I am sociopathic, still, I am only a reflection of the average American.” As if to offer the ultimate proof that he was rational and sane, McVeigh described his experiences in late 1992 with what he referred to as “delayed PTSD.” Although he termed PTSD ‘a misnomer,” he remarked that “As long as I was busy with something, it didn’t seem to affect me . . . However, whenever life became boring, I would start to ‘slip’ (feel upset at everything, super-restless, etc.).” He attributed the condition to his Gulf War service and characterized it as isolating:



Now that you’ve seen the extremes, experienced the ultimate highs, lows and realities – well, who gives a shit about conversations about the weather. . . the daily grind, all of a sudden, has gotten much more intolerable . . . you separate yourself from these encounters, and this from the people, to escape these conversations.



McVeigh was resentful that the media appeared to credit rescue workers’ PTSD accounts but not his own:



What’s funny is how these articles about victims and rescue workers are all sympathy, with experts weighing in, etc. - but how no such consideration was given me or my life . . . the way I look at it, either hand out the sympathy equally, or hand out none at all!



Yet, in describing the bombing conspiracy itself, McVeigh was profoundly angered by insinuations that he was not its mastermind:



Show me where I needed anybody else – financing?, Logistics?, Specialized tech. skills? Brain-power? Strategy? Or, old fashioned ‘means, motive, opportunity ‘test? Show me where I needed a dark and mysterious ‘Mr. X’!!




He repeatedly emphasized that he was calm and collected, even after the bomb detonated, that he “never lost composure” was “never hyped-up, always in control,” and even walked “calmly” to his getaway car.



In his letters McVeigh tried to showcase his thoughts and motivations so that others could appreciate the complexity of his intellect:



I’m trying to show you that my opinions are not just ‘jumping to unsupported conclusions, but that my opinions are formed over years of diligent observation and educated conclusions. . .One thing that separates me from the 5-minute attention span masses is that I remember what I’ve read in the past – I have it all stored away and made available for reference and cross-reference at any time.



McVeigh was very self-conscious about his communications and often reminded journalists that he was forsaking eloquence for efficiency. McVeigh was concerned about what would happen to his correspondence after his execution: “I hate to think what the likes of some reporters would do . . . I didn’t exactly pick up a dictionary or consult punctuation rules when I am writing an informal personal letter.” Bacharach found McVeigh’s self-concern and self-scrutiny interesting: “I was struck that he would care that people might pick apart his writing ability . . . someone who kills 168 people . . . he’s concerned they’re going to make fun of his punctuation.”




Killing McVeigh; The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure by Jody Lynee Madeira; New York University Press, 2012

Theresienstadt by W.G. Sebald

Soon after the beginning of the New Year, said Austerlitz, what was described as a Vershonerungsaktion or general improvement was undertaken at Theresienstadt, with an eye to the imminent visit in the early summer of 1944 of a Red Cross commission, an event regarded by those authorities of the Reich responsible as a good opportunity to dissimulate the true nature of their deportation policy, and consequently it was decided to organize the ghetto inmates under the command of the SS for the purpose of a vast cleaning-up program. . .



As the time of the visit itself approached and Theresienstadt, after another seven and a half thousand of the less presentable inmates had been sent east amidst all this busy activity, to thin out the population, so to speak, became a Potemkin village or sham Eldorado which may have dazzled even some of the inhabitants themselves and where, when the appointed day came, the commission of two Danes and one Swiss official, having been guided, in conformity with a precise plan and a timetable drawn up by the Kommandant’s office, through the streets and over spotless pavements, scrubbed with soap early that morning, could see for themselves the friendly, happy folk who had been spared the horrors of war and were looking out of the windows, could see how smartly they were all dressed, how well the few sick people were cared for, how they were given proper meals served on plates, how the bread ration was handed out by people in white drill gloves, how posters advertising sporting events, cabarets, theatrical performances, and concerts were being put on every corner and how, when the day’s work was over, the residents of the town flocked out in their thousands on the ramparts and bastions to take the air, almost as if they were passengers enjoying and evening stroll on the deck of an oceangoing steamer, a most reassuring spectacle, all things considered, which the Germans, whether for propaganda purposes or in order to justify their actions and conduct to themselves, thought fit after the end of the Red Cross visit to record in a film given a sound track of Jewish folk music in March 1945, when considerable number of the people who had appeared in it were no longer alive, and a copy of which had apparently turned up in the British-occupied zone after the war, although he, Adler himself, said Austerlitz, never saw it, and thought it was now lost without a trace.



For months, said Austerlitz, I tried in vain, through the good offices of the Imperial War Museum and other agencies, to find any clue to the present location of the film. I kept thinking that if only the film could be found I might perhaps be able to see or gain some inkling of what it was really like, and then I imagined recognizing my mother Agata, beyond any possibility of doubt, a young woman as she would be by comparison with me today, perhaps among the guests outside the fake coffeehouse, or a saleswoman in a haberdashery shop, just taking a fine pair of gloves carefully out of one of the drawers, or singing the part of Olympia in the Tales of Hoffman which was staged at Theresienstadt in the course of the improvement campaign. I imagined seeing her walking down the street in a summer dress and light-weight gabardine coat, said Austerlitz: among a group of ghetto residents out for a stroll, she alone seemed to make it straight for me, coming closer with every step, until at last I thought I could sense her stepping out of the frame and passing over to me.



It was wishful fantasies such as these which cast me into a state of great excitement when the Imperial War Museum finally succeeded, through the Federal Archives in Berlin, in obtaining a cassette copy of the film of Theresienstadt for which I had been searching. I remember very clearly, said Austerlitz, how I sat in one of the museums video viewing rooms, placed the cassette in the black opening of the recorder with trembling hands, and then, although unable to take in any of it, watched various tasks being carried out at the anvil and forge of the smithy, in the pottery and woodworking shop, in the handbag-making and shoe manufacturing sections – a constant, pointless to-do of hammering, metal-beating, and welding, cutting, gluing, and stitching; I saw an unbroken succession of stranger’s faces emerge before me for a few seconds, I saw workers leaving the huts when the siren sounded and crossing an empty field beneath a sky filled with motionless white clouds, a game of football in the inner court of one of the barrack buildings, with hundreds of cheerful spectators crowding the arcades and the galleries on the first and second floors, books being borrowed from the library by gentlemen of soigne appearance, I saw a full-scale orchestral concert and, in the moat surrounding the fortified town, kitchen gardens neatly laid out where several dozen people were raking the vegetable beds, watering beans and tomatoes, searching brassica leaves for Cabbage White caterpillars, whilst at the end of the day others were sitting on benches outside the houses, apparently in perfect contentment, letting the children play a little longer, one man reading a book, a woman talking to her neighbor, many of them just taking their ease at the windows, arms folded, in a way once common at the onset of dusk.



At first I could get none of these images into my head; they merely flickered before my eyes at the source of continual irritation or vexation, which was further reinforced when, to my horror, it turned out that the Berlin cassette inscribed with the original title of Der Fuhrer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt had on it only a patchwork of scenes cobbled together and lasting some fourteen minutes, scarcely more than an opening sequence in which, despite the hopes I had entertained, I could not see Agata anywhere, however often I ran the tape and however hard I strained to make her out among those fleeting faces.



In the end the impossibility of seeing anything more closely in those pictures, which seemed to dissolve even as they appeared, said Austerlitz, gave me the idea of having a slow-motion copy of this fragment from Theresienstadt made, one which would last a whole hour, and indeed once the scant document was extended to four times its original length, it did reveal previously hidden objects and people, creating, by default as it were, a different film altogether, which I have since watched over and over again. The men and women employed in the workshops now looked as if they were toiling in their sleep, so long did it take them to draw needle and thread through the air as they stitched, so heavily did their eyelids sink, so slowly did their lips move as they looked wearily up at the camera. They seemed to be hovering rather than walking, as if their feet no longer quite touched the ground. The contours of their bodies were blurred and, particularly in the scenes shot out of doors in broad daylight, had dissolved at the edges, resembling, as it occurred to me, said Austerlitz, the frayed outlines of the human hand shown in the fluidal pictures and electrographs taken by Louis Draget in Paris around the turn of the century. . .



Strangest of all, however, said Austerlitz, was the transformation of the sounds in this slow-motion version. In the brief sequence at the very beginning, showing red-hot iron being worked in a smithy to shoe a draft ox, the merry polka by some Austrian operetta composer on the sound track of the Berlin copy had become a funeral march dragging along at a grotesquely sluggish pace, and the rest of the musical pieces accompanying the film, among which I could identify only the can-can from La Vie Parisiene and the scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, also moved in a kind of subterranean world, through the most nightmarish depths, said Austerlitz, to which no human voice has ever descended. At the point where, on the original Berlin copy, a male voice, in high-pitched, strenuous tones forced through the larynx, had spoken of task forces and cohorts of workers deployed, as circumstances required, in various different ways, or if necessary retrained, so that everyone willing to work – jeder Arbeitswillige! , so Austerlitz interrupted himself – had an opportunity of fitting seamlessly into the production process, at this point of the tape all that could now be made out, Austerlitz continued, was a menacing growl, such as I had heard only once before in my life, on an unseasonably hot May Day many years ago in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris when, after one of the peculiar turns that often came over me in those days, I rested for a while on a park bench beside an aviary not far from the big cats’ house, where the lions and tigers, invisible from my vantage point and, as it struck me at the time, driven out of their minds in captivity, raised their hollow roars of lament hour after hour without ceasing.



And then, Austerlitz continued, towards the end of the film there was a comparatively long sequence showing the first performance of a piece of music composed in Theresienstadt, Pavel Haas’s study for stringed orchestral, if I am not mistaken. The series of frames begins with a view into the hall from the back. The windows are wide open, and a large audience is sitting not in rows as usual at a concert, but as if they were in some sort of tavern or hotel dining room, in groups of four around tables. The chairs, probably made specially for the occasion in the carpentry work-shop of the ghetto, are of pseudo-Tyrolean design with heart shapes sawn out of their backs.



In the course of the performance the camera lingers in close-up over several members of the audience, including an old gentleman whose cropped gray head fills the right-hand side of the picture, while at the left-hand side, set a little way back and close to the upper edge of the frame, the face of a young woman appears, barely emerging from the black shadows around it, which is why I did not notice it at all first. Around her neck, said Austerlitz, she is wearing a three-stringed and delicately draped necklace, which scarcely stands out from her dark, high-necked dress, and there is, I think, a white flower in her hair. She looks, so I tell myself as I watch, just as I imagined the singer Agata from my faint memories and the few other clues to her appearance that I now have, and I gaze and gaze again at that face, which seems to me both strange and familiar, said Austerlitz, I run the tape back repeatedly, looking at the time indicator in the top left-hand corner of the screen, where the figures covering part of her forehead show the minutes and seconds, from 10:53 to 10:57, while the hundredths of a second flash by so fast that you cannot read and capture them . . .



[Later] I spent several days searching the records for the years 1938 and 1939 in the Prague theatrical archives in the Celetna, and there, among letters, files on employees, programs, and faded newspaper cuttings, I came upon the photograph of an anonymous actress who seemed to resemble my dim memory of my mother, and in whom Vera, who had already spent some time studying the face of the women in the concert audience which I copied from the Theresienstadt film, before shaking her head and putting it aside, immediately and without a shadow of doubt, as she said, recognized Agata as she had been then.



Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald : Random House, N.Y. 2001

Shoah by Claude Lanzmann

I had filmed in Auschwitz several times already and, during my first, exploratory trip, I had walked alone along the railway tracks, through the blocks, the crematoria, the lake of ashes, the ramps, the museum; I had seen the watchtowers, the piles of suitcases, of spoons, of glasses and pince-nez, the chamber pots, the lone, charred, twisted tree framed against the white sky next to the Little Farm House, which had been turned into an experimental gas chamber; I had allowed it to seep into me, to imprint itself on me. This time it was Auschwitz the town I wanted to see again, I wanted to film the old Jewish cemetery with its tall tombstones carved with Hebrew letters, the cemetery where, before the war, before Hitler, the Jewish citizens of Oswiecim, who were lucky enough to due at home of natural causes, had been buried. In fact, the town of Auschwitz – I had not known this but learned it on my first visit to Poland – had been 80% Jewish. I did not realize how precious the few graves that had survived the passage of time and the vandalism eradicating all traces of the Jews in Poland would be to me during the editing phase.




As I had decided there would be not one word of commentary, the editing of the film is the key to its intelligibility, it is what makes it possible for the story to move forward and the viewer to understand. There is no voice-over to say what is about to happen, to tell the audience what to think, to connect one scene to the next. Such facile expedients, commonplace in what are classically called documentary films, are not permitted in Shoah. This is one of the reasons why the film defies and eludes the categories of documentary or fiction. The editing work was a long, serious, delicate, subtle process. On many occasions I found myself completely blocked, unable, as when climbing a mountain, to find the path that would allow me to carry on, to climb higher. Usually, there is only one, not two – just one right path. I refused to carry on until I had found it, which could take hours or days, on one occasion I am not likely to forget it took three weeks.



I was looking for a way to have Birkenau appear on screen for the first time, the great gateway of Birkenau, that sinister bird of death beneath which clattered the death trains headed for the gas chambers. I had begun by showing Oswiecan, this town that had once been 80 per cent Jewish, and I could not see how to engender Birkenau out of the scenes I had shot in town, to have it rear up at once as a scandal and a fatality, as a startling and surprising proof, to make it appear naturally and of itself, so to speak. All the attempts I had made were unsatisfying, then the radiant solution suddenly came to me: to bring to the screen this cemetery with no tombs, no skeletons, that is Birkenau.



To allow Birkenau to appear for the first time in the film, I had to use the ancient tombstones, those of the Jews who had once lived in Auschwitz, who had died and been buried there before the calamity. So I speak to Madame Pietyra, a Polish woman born in Auschwitz, who lived there all her life, and ask her, ‘Was there a Jewish cemetery in Auschwitz?’ She nods vehemently, happy to be able to teach me something I did not know. I press her, ‘Does it still exist?’ She nods immediately and over footage of the splendid tombstones, lopsided but still proud, we hear Madame Pietyra’s voice as she continues, ‘It’s close now.” ‘Closed? What does that mean? ‘They don’t bury there now.’ A few moments later I ask her again, ‘What happened to the Jews of Auschwitz?’ ‘They were resettled,’ she gives me an almost pitying smile at this preposterous question. ‘In what year?’ ‘It began in 1940, which was when I moved in here. This apartment also belonged to Jews. ‘Where were they deported to?’ At first she says she does not know and I say to her, ‘According to our information, they were “resettled”, since that’s the word, not far from here, in Bendzin and Sosnowiec in Upper Silesia.’ ‘Yes, yes, that’s right, because these were Jewish town too.’ ‘Do you know what happened to the Jews of Auschwitz later? ‘ Another pitying smile at my naivete: ‘I think they all ended up in the camp.’ ‘You mean they returned to Auschwitz?’



On the ‘yes’ that ends this conversation, naturally, harmoniously, so to speak, the first tracking shot appears, bringing us toward the entrance of the camp. I remember I pushed a mobile platform, on which Lubtchansky was standing behind the camera, along that single railroad track that ended the journey. And as we reached the accursed gatehouse, we hear Madame Pietyra’s voice, off-screen this time, lamenting, ‘There used to be all sorts of people here, from all over the world, they came here, they were sent here . . . All the Jews came here. To die.’




During the five years that it took me to edit the film, I only obeyed my own rules, not yielding to the constraints of time or money, or to those people who, not understanding why it was taking me so long and giving up hope that I would ever complete it, pressed me to finish. But that was how I was. . .



. . . . . . . . .



It was through Shoah that I met Bernard Cuau. I employed him on the editorial committee of Les Temps modernes , and his death in 1995 left me inconsolable. He never slept and I could phone him at all hours of the day or night, something I did when I felt anxious; his mellifluous voice was like a drug to me, I will always miss it. Bernard taught film studies at the University of Paris VII and spent a month holding seminars about Shoah. His oeuvre, whether on the page, on film or for the theatre, are among those rare works paid for with one’s life and which are not called part of literature because the are literature itself. When I say ‘oeuvre, I include the articles he wrote during his ten years at Les Temps modernes and his earlier books – La Politique de la folie [The Poliics of Madness], an implacable denunciation of psychiatric brutality, L’Affaire Mirval [ The Mirval Case ], with a preface by Michael Foucault and Pierre Vidal-Naquet – and his plays and the dozen films of touching power and subtlety he directed. The latter are mostly known only to students since they were directed through and for the university circuit: Bernard had no real interest in reaching the wider public. Power stratagems and media ploys were alien to him, self-effacement was his law. The multifarious works he produced throughout his life were ordained by a single burning locus; a vigil to absolute suffering. Bernard situated himself deliberately on the side of what was irreparable, the incurable, the sole setting for his words and actions: madness, exclusion, prisons. He gave weekly lessons at the prisons of Le Sante, Melun and Fresnes.



One day he had the extraordinary idea of suggesting a screening of Shoah for the inmates of La Sante, followed by a seminar, which he would lead. His suggestion was greeted with whistles, jeers and insults, with a brutal and definitive refusal: his students were Arabic and black and wanted nothing to do with Jews. But Bernard, with inflexible gentleness, did not give up and, over a period of weeks, brought them around to the idea. For six months in La Sante he taught a course on Shoah and, at the request of the class, asked me to spend a day there. I arrived at nine in the morning and the discussion proved so intense, their knowledge of the film so precise, their questions so surprising and intelligent, that the inmates asked the wardens if they could skip lunch so we could go on talking. The wardens agreed and the discussion went on until five. I have rarely encountered an audience with such an in-depth knowledge of Shoah, or such an intense understanding of the issues raised by the film. Some of them wrote to me for a long time afterwards.


The Patagonian Hare; A Memoir by Claude Lanzmann; translated from the French by Frank Wynne; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, N.Y.2012

Balzac's Omelette by Anka Muhlstein

One constant in Parisian society during Balzac’s time ( 1799-1850) was the presence of servants: however few or many of them there were and however well trained they may have been, they were always there. Even the modest shopkeeper’s household depended if not on a cook, at least on a housemaid. The only exceptions are the moneylender Gobseck, a pathologically secretive character who cannot abide any curiosity about his life, and Silvia Rogron, who dismisses her cook in a frantic bid to save money, claiming that “she herself cooked ‘to amuse herself.’” As a general rule, in Balzac’s world the quality and appeal of a meal are as much the product of a servant’s talent as her honesty and the relationship she has with her employers. These servants are inevitably women, because, as mentioned above, there are not active chef’s in Balzac’s work. . . .



There was inevitably a significant amount of theft among suppliers and staff, and this issue seemed to have obsessed Balzac, unlike Zola, who put his emphasis on how cruelly servants were treated. The conservative Balzac felt that “in every household the plague of servants is nowadays the worst of financial afflictions,” and he showed little indulgence for the servant who was effectively a “domestic robber, a thief taking wages, and perfectly barefaced.” According to him theft was so widespread in Paris that it required round-the-clock surveillance. Only the greatest misers and women who were very careful with their housekeeping money avoided this bloodletting.



The fact that Madame Marneffe’s household recovers is due to Lisbeth, also known as Betty, her lover’s cousin, who takes things in hand. The first task Betty assigns herself is to dismiss the disgraceful maid, because she knows that the servants have set up a secret toll system between the market and their master’s table, even going so far as to persuade shopkeepers to increase their written receipts by 50 percent. The only way to run a household economically is to watch over the cook and teach her to do her buying in the market instead of going to suppliers who have no qualms about pumping up the bill.



That is what the formidable Betty does when she reorganizes her friend Valerie’s house. A relation of hers once worked for the bishop of Nancy, a telling detail because, according to Balzac, doctors and men of the cloth were great specialists in gastronomy. “So she had brought from the depths of the Vosges a humble relation on her mother’s side, this very pious and honest soul. . .Fearing, however, her inexperience of Paris ways, and yet more the evil counsel which wrecks such fragile virtue, at first Lisbeth always went to market with Mathurine, and tried to teacher her what to buy. To know the real prices of things and and command the salesman’s respect; to purchase delicacies [unaffected by the seasons], such as fish, only when they were cheap; to be well informed as to the price current of groceries and provisions, so as to buy when prices are low in anticipation of a rise, - all this housekeeping skill is in Paris essential to domestic economy. As Mathurine got good wages and many presents, she liked the house well enough to be glad to drive good bargains.”



Going to market guaranteed the best price but also the best quality, and this was true right up until the twentieth century. Proust’s narrator (probably persuaded by his mother) sends the family cook there to buy the necessary ingredients to make her beef en gelee a masterpiece.



But going to the central market was no mean feat. When Balzac was planning to hire a cook who his sister had to let go for financial reasons, he made it a condition that she agreed to buy from Les Halles as restaurateurs and fruit sellers did. She refused, because it took exceptional energy to get up at dawn and barter with the vendors. When money was very tight, he was therefore reduced to hiring a woman who came in on Mondays to prepare meals for the entire week – despite his horror of cold meat. When he reached the end of his beef or mutton dish, he had to make do with bread, cheese, and potatoes like the Irish.



The marketplace of Les Halles was in fact a building site at the time. In 1811 Napoleon had started a project to replace the old wooden hangers and their stalls, open to the four winds, with a modern construction, but the work was not finished before the Second Empire. The regulars at Les Halles treated themselves to eau-de-vie spiked with pepper, and the overall noise and commotion was hardly designed to attract the fainthearted.



Even an old Parisian like the perfumer Birotteau, when looking for the hazelnuts he needs for his hair oil, has trouble making his way through the labyrinth “of slums which are, as it were, the entrails of Paris. Here countless numbers of heterogeneous and nondescript industries are carried on; evil smelling trades, and the manufacture of the daintiest finery, herrings and lawn, silk and honey, butter and tulle, jostle each other in its squalid precincts. Here are the headquarters of those multitudinous small trades which Paris no more suspects in its midst than a man surmises the functions performed by the pancreas in the human economy.” Cousin Betty, who is afraid of nothing, is commendably successful: to Madame Marneffe’s tremendous credit, her dinners bring together artists, politicians, and her lover’s friends.



Sadly, Cousin Pons and his friend Schmuckle lack this attention to detail and knowledge of current prices when they try to keep an eye on their concierge, Madame Cibot, who cooks their meals and, in doing sop, leads them to ruin. She boasts to her husband that she has amassed two thousand francs in eight years thanks to her cunning and talent. In fact, rather than going to the butcher, she rummages through the stalls at a regrattier, who buys leftovers from nearby restaurants. With a fiercely discerning eye, she chooses the best-looking debris of chicken or game, fish fillets, or eve boiled beef, which she dresses up with finely sliced onion. Using this technique, she cooks such strong-smelling sauces that her lodgers never complain, and she makes them pay three francs “without wine” for these dinners, a sizable sum if w consider that, in a modest but acceptable restaurant, a meal with a small carafe of wine cost a maximum of two francs.



This sort of misadventure was not likely to happen to Madame Guillaume, the draper’s wife in At the Sign of the Cat and Racket. She is so horrified at the thought of potential waste that not only does she trust no one else to pour oil over the salad, but she herself does it with such a sparing hand that she barely moistens the leaves. By way of desert, she serves Gruyere – which was a poor man’s cheese at the time – and Guyere so old that her staff as fun carving the date on it.



Less meticulous women were either ignorant of the full extent of the damage or resigned to be robbed by their cooks, and, in Paris, the cooks were cheekily aware of the fact. It is hardly surprising that it was essential for well-brought-up young ladies to learn – from watching their mothers – to scold the cook. Otherwise, they would soon find that a serving girl who “entered their service without effects, without cloths, and without talent, has come to get her wages in a blue merino gown, set off by an embroidered neckerchief, her ears embellished with a pair of ear-rings enriched with small pearls. Her feet clothed in comfortable leather shoes which give you a glimpse of neat cotton stockings. She has two trunks full of property, and keeps an account at the savings bank.”




Balzac’s Omelette; A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honore de Balzac by Anka Muhlastein; Other Press, N.Y. 2011

Looking Up To Jesus by Liu Xiaobo

Jesus, do you know me?
A yellow-skinned Chinaman
From where we bribe the gods with bread soaked in human
blood
we pray to gods and Buddhas solely to exterminate divinity
our gods are burnished in gold
from emperors and sages to soldiers and virgins
countless people have turned into gods
we only beg for blessings and never repent
even a puddle of piss reflects gods upside-down


I don’t know you, Jesus
your body is too gaunt and shriveled
each rib assaultingly distinct
your posture on the cross is too tragic
each nerve bearing the suffering
head slightly angled forward
neck crisscrossed with protruding veins
hands, hanging down limp
when their five fingers extended
it was like dry branches in a fire


Humanity’s evil is too heavy
and your shoulders are too narrow
can you hold it up, the cross
that was forced upon you?
blood soaking into the wood grain
brews the wine that rears humanity
I suspect you were a bastard child
cruel god tearing the hymen open
he made you sacrifice alone
how could it have been a way to
spread the news of God’s love?



Believers who read the Old Testament
are awed by its grammar of command
and terrified by its wrathful God
no questions, no discussion
no rationale at all
belief and disbelief, obedience and disobedience
when He wants to create, He does what He likes
when He wants to destroy, the floods rise high
God has no form
but sows seeds of hate


The creation story is a bit of entertainment
that caused unprecedented evil
our progenitors, the Tree of Wisdom, the snake
make a loop manipulated by God
since the start of humanity’s exile
God has become a bottomless trashbin
back then, Jesus
you hadn’t been born yet


Between the rural manager and God’s cross
a destitute infant
turned a wrathful God into the embodiment of love
continuous repentance and infinite atonement
love
no boundary, no leeway
like the darkness before history



for my unassuming wife
December 26, 1998
Translated by Nick Admussen


No Enemies, No Hatred; Selected Essays and Poems by Liu Xiaobo; edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin, Liao & Liu Xia

El Greco by Robert Byron

That the function of art is to translate the philosophical emotions evoked in the artist by the inner significance of material objects into visible and ultimately intelligible form, and that emotions are best expressed in the unfamiliar transformation of familiar objects, is an axiom that has not always been recognized, though a clear affinity exists in this respect between art and architecture of ancient Byzantium and that of the early twentieth century.



Against the ponderous complacence of classicism, the stationed symmetry, the reasoned representation; against the whole implied negation of the beyond and the before, there arises in the two parallel ages a quest for movement and emotional expression which bursts the confinement of capital and cornice, and spurns the suave contours of rotund boys and bolstered urns. This vigor derives in the one case from Christianity, in the other from science, each the new force of its time, carrying Reason to the service of the irrational. Form and technique, moreover, both the Byzantine and the modern have sought, not locally, but universally, not from set canons of proportion and preconceived ideas of grace, but from a whole multitude of methods of artistic expression with which the scope of their influence has brought them in contact.



The surviving examples of late Byzantine painting have been divided into two categories, the Macedonian and the Cretan schools. The distinction is at first obscure. The mosaics of the Kahrie stand outside both: not only as mosaics, rare in an era of material decline, but in the felicity, almost facility, of their compositions, and the pervading peace and simplicity of their figures. Next in order of time, as far as dates can be surmised, come the paintings of the Brontocheion and the Peribleptos at Mistra; in these churches the true Byzantine method of coloration by contrast, with which the Cretan school was later to be particularly identified, appears to combine with the quiescent dignity of Macedonian forms. Only the frescoes of the Pantanassa, painted immediately before the fall of Constantinople in the first half of the fifteenth century, does the Cretan character predominate, in the unique beauty of the coloring.



On Mount Athos, the difference between the two schools becomes easily perceptible; there, the Macedonian, arriving at the beginning of the fourteenth century, preceded the Cretan by two centuries, employing a separate iconography and a more Westerly technique of color. Its frescoes exhale an atmosphere of piety and quietude, and a sobriety of light, which , if tending sometimes to weakness, bespeak the dignity of spiritual repose, of unshakeable faith in a hidden world amid the mounting catastrophes of this.



From these 'Macedonian' ideals, the fully flowered Cretan method of expression was far removed. There are strange qualities about this Antarctic of the Greek world. We have cause to recall the seven hundred years of perpetual revolt that comprised the island's latter history. And such, indeed, is the text of its art. A warring of forces, of souls in cataclysm, is born into the conflict of its lines and colors. All that distinguishes Byzantine art from that of the West is riven from its hieratic quiet to form a staccato world of acrid shadow and livid prominence, agog with angry, inner light or swathed in silken tulle of ethereal brilliance.



Something possessed these artists, some spirit wrestling with their figures, that we have not. And of their line was born, eighty-eight years after the fall of Constantinople, Domenicos Theotocoulos, commonly known as El Greco. Cretan in birth and personality, he has furnished the apotheosis, the full flowering, the epilogue and climax to Byzantine culture.



When, in the last half of the sixteenth century, El Greco came to Italy, the Renaissance, that exquisite short song of Gothic spirit in the voice of humanism, had died away. Only the band played on, a ponderous empty symphony in which the heralds of baroque were piping unsubstantial notes. Of its form the Greek borrowed such measure of naturalism as was necessary to conquer naturalism. With this attained, he loosed from its iconographic prison the achievement of a millennium. Settling, at Toledo, amid barren rippling hills like Crete’s, and a semi-oriental culture reminiscent of his own, he gave to the art of his ancestors not a naturalism conventional as their own formality, but freedom, absolute, and vindicated by a consummate ability.



Alone he did it, and alone he lived, vouchsafing no explanations, but speaking sometimes, to such as understood his native tongue, of the infallibility of his race. He was the greatest Greek; perhaps, for those who have seen the St. Maurice, the greatest artist in all the world. Yet Greeks today, puffed of their earthly speculators, scarcely know him. Meanwhile European art pursued another road; and when he died, only his color remained for Velasquez to dilute.



A dubious posterity has thought to discern an astigmatism in his eye. Let it grieve, also, for that same astigmatism, which, for thirty generations, afflicted the artists of Byzantium: the astigmatism of fixation on Reality. Are not we, too, after four centuries, again infected? Perhaps all art and science seeks ultimately what cannot be attained. If El Greco, the Byzantine, has reached further than his fellows, let the present age congratulate itself that, in contrast to its predecessors, it does at least hold that goal in sight.


The Byzantine Achievement; An Historical Perspective CE 330-1453 by Robert Byron, 1929.