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Death in the image: The responsibility of aesthetics in Night and Fog (1955) and Kapò (1959)
This chapter examines erasure as an aesthetic approach in Syrian artist Khaled Barakeh’s photographs The Untitled Images. Noting that Barakeh’s images paradoxically materialize the invisible, the chapter shows how this way of representing suffering sidesteps both the aestheticization of pain and the reduction of affect some critics see as endemic to contemporary visual culture. Paying careful attention to the dynamic interplay between invisibility and visibility and, correspondingly, between absence and presence in the photographs, the analysis contextualizes Barakeh’s work with reference to an artistic tradition defined by gestures of radical reduction. The chapter furthermore argues that such a poetics of erasure is ripe with a rare ethical potential to resist the processes of commodification so widespread in our current image ecology.
This article considers the reasons for the paucity, by contrast to the literature of the wartime ghettos and camps, of cultural representations of the Einsatzgruppen murders. It does so by analysing those representations that do exist, in the form of memoirs, poetry and fiction by eyewitnesses and survivors, as well as a diary kept by a bystander to these mass shootings. The article concludes by asking whether very nature of these murders means that they are all but unrepresentable.
The Holocaust is frequently described in bounded terms. It is defined as an event possessing distinct existential, geographical and temporal borders. This explains why the barbed wire fences erected around concentration and extermination camps, fences that formed their physical boundary, have become a powerful trope for expressing boundaries of knowledge and understanding. The fence stands as a metaphor for limits to comprehension. Griselda Pollock adroitly illustrates the unbridgeable divide the fence has come to represent through her analysis of Margaret Bourke White’s photograph of ‘Survivors at Buchenwald, April 1945’. Pollock writes: ‘while they look at us, the spectators, the concentrationees are divided from us by a barbed wire fence that cuts horizontally across their vertically striped garb as a barely visible barrier that is, none the less, an absolute division. What these men have seen and what they will never cease to carry as images burned into hunger and pain-dulled minds, our sight of them from this side of that frontier cannot imagine’ (2007, p. 276). In this reading, the wire marks a limit point beyond which the minds of those not interned in the camps cannot journey in the sense that they cannot adequately conceive of the experiences endured by the inmates.
In the last months of the operation of the ‘death factory’ at AuschwitzBirkenau a number of manuscripts were buried in the grounds of the crematoria at Birkenau by members of the Sonderkommando, or Special Squads. Some of these remarkable documents were recovered after the liberation of the camp and are now collectively known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz. In addition to the manuscripts, the men also interred quantities of teeth. These had been extracted from the mouths of those murdered in the gas chambers and were, like the writings, intended to form a kind of testimony. Teeth, which comprise of four kinds of tissue of differing densities, are more durable than bone. They are more likely to persist, to survive the passage of time. The teeth provided physical evidence of the murders referenced by the documents. The Sonderkommando, therefore, engaged in a combination of activities in an effort to convey something of the crimes that surrounded them. They bore witness through words and bodily matter. The words can be understood to put the teeth in context and the teeth to lend substance to the words. The burying of writings and bodily remains had a singular aim: to leave a trace.
The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of 'palimpsestic memory', which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.
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