Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen

SuicideAccording to epidemiological investigations between 1.1% and 4.6% of the population have a suicidal attempt at some point during their life ... was the fate of many survivors of Nazi concentration camps; this was almost a kind of a deferred death, taking place right after accomplishing their testimonies, and thereby also resolving the so-called Levi paradox. Paul Celan, Jean Amйry, Tadeusz Borowski and Primo Levi all testified in a literary form about the horrors they had witnessed, the horrors that they had stored in their mind’s eye all the time of their post-camp lives. They were waiting for an appropriate form to disclose these memories, so they could be conveyed to people who were unaware of them. Absolved of that task, after making their testimony, and getting rid of the ‘burden of witnessing’, they decided to put their lives to an end and join those innumerable ones in whose name the testimonies were made.

As Jean Amery, one of the death camp survivors who later committed suicideAccording to epidemiological investigations between 1.1% and 4.6% of the population have a suicidal attempt at some point during their life ..., once wrote in lines that Levi has subsequently quoted: “Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured”. In the case of Levi, the everlasting tortureTorture represents the most severe form of trauma perpetrated by one human on another (Silove, 1996) ... was caused by the shame of surviving something that the others could not, which he considered as a kind of betrayal. He suspected that “each man is his brother's Cain” and that he “has usurped his neighbor’s place and lived in his stead” 1). So, to justify his own survival in that situation, he took advice to “look carefully at everything around you, and conserve your strength”, as Borowski has suggested, “for a day may come when it will be up to us to give an account of the fraud and mockery to the living – to speak up for the dead.” 2)

But Levi’s recurring nightmares were constantly casting doubts on the mere possibility of ever staying among the living, after giving a testimony. As one of his poems demonstrates, his wish to get back was realized in his dreams always with an internal time limitation. Therefore, it was fixed as a wish “to return; to eat; to tell the story / until the dawn command / sounded brief, low: / ‘Wstawаch'!” 3) His persistently recurring dream of going back home kept on being interrupted by the capo’s voice ordering ‘Get up!’ (Wstawаch!). Even when he really got back home, in 1962, he made notices of unceasing dreams in which everyday situations suddenly collapse, and he is back to the camp, right after hearing “a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, ‘Wstawаch.’” 4)

The content of these two versions of the dream, the one prior to and the one after the return from the camp, was formally the same. But, as Žižek argues, the way in which the stereotypical everyday situation is interrupted in them is significantly different. In the first place, “the dream is cruelly interrupted by the wake-up call, while in the second, reality is interrupted by the imagined command” 5). Responding to such a command, actually, to paraphrase Cathy Caruth, means responding to “a call that can only be heard within sleep” 6) – a call of the dead. Awakening within that dream was awakening into a situation of witnessing deaths again, in everyday life in the camp, so that, as Wiesel wrote, he finally “died at Auschwitz 40 years after returning home” 7) .

Cathy Caruth, in fact, refers to another case of awakening within the dream, the one Freud writes about at the beginning of his Interpretation of Dreams. That is the case of a father who had a dream that “his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’” 8) . Interpreting the case of awakening in response to that call in the framework put forward by Lacan in his Seminar XI, she derives a theory of a “a traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ... of the necessity and impossibility of responding to another’s death” 9) . This is applicable as well, as Žižek writes, to “the HolocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... survivor who, unable to save his son from the crematorium, is haunted afterwards by his reproach: Vater, siehst du nicht dass ich verbrenne?” 10)

“A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ [Vater, siehst du denn nicht dass ich verbrenne?]” 11). The child had died prior to the fire, and there was a watchman failing react to it who could be blamed, but the father still felt responsible.

In relation to this dream, one could argue that Levi’s dreams from the camp could fit into the frame that was proposed by Freud’s interpretation of the dream about the burning child, but Levi’s dreams upon his return call for a Lacanian reading. Namely, the Freudian reading is focused on the escape from the traumatic reality into a dream as a wish-fulfilling psychological device, while the Lacanian reading stresses the escape from the traumatic encounter with the Real – which happens in dreams – into the reality. In Freudian reading, the father falls into sleep in order to get back into the situation in which the child is still alive, and tries to stay there as long as possible, while in the Lacanian reading, he wakes up to avoid the accusing call from the child.

The accusation is very simple: the father has survived, the child has not, and that goes also for Levi’s dream: he has survived, most of his fellow detainees did not. “His survival must no longer be understood,” writes Caruth, “merely as an accidental living beyond the child, but rather as a mode of existence determined by the impossible structure of the response.” 12) The father will never be in a position to really respond to the call of the dead child. Even more so as that very child did, by addressing him when the fire has begun, actually save him, while he couldn’t save him at the time. “It is precisely the dead child,” Cathy Caruth claims, “who says to the father: wake up, leave me, survive; survive to tell the story of my burning” 13), and so makes sense of his survival.

Primo Levi has survived as a witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event .... He has survived to tell the story of all those who could not make it, who were killed and burnt in the crematoriums of Auschwitz, who were addressing him and urging him to survive, to tell their story, and he saw them burning, even though he has never approached the crematorium. As long as he was writing, it was always the same story, even though he never considered himself a writer, but a chemist, he coped with responsibility. He felt like a dead man on parole, in the same way as Antigone, after the death of her brother, about which she was to give testimony, saw herself as ordained to “dwell not among the living, not among the dead” 14) , because “her soul died long ago, and that she is destined to give help to the dead” 15).

But, there was another dream, quite similar to the first one, torturing him all the time. It also had a homely atmosphere as its milieu, and a traumatic turn – a failure to witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event .... “It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people, and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow me,” wrote Levi in Survival in Auschwitz, recalling the night on which he, while still in the camp, dreamed that he was back home. “I have dreamt it not once but many times since I arrived here,” he continued then, “and I remember that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone” 16).

Giorgio Agamben, in his books titled Homo Sacer and the Remnants of Auschwitz, argues for an ethical paradox, which he names after Primo Levi. He quotes from Levi, stating the following: “We, the survivors are not the true witnesses … we survivors are not only an exiguous but also anomalous minority. We … did not touch bottom. Those who did so, who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims’, the submerged, the complete witnesses …” 17) Primo Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved, as quoted in Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, doubted his ability to testify on behalf of the ‘Muselmänner’, the living dead who have crossed all human borders, becoming “too empty to really suffer” 18).

Levi’s biggest fear was that he will not only fail as a witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ..., but that he will finally discover that the whole issue of witnessing was a kind of a fantasy-construction that served just as a support for the reality of his selfish survival in the situation in which most of the others either did not survive at all, or have survived, but became ‘Muselmänner’. He was afraid that he might at the time disclose that ‘being a witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ...’ had in fact for him an ideological function, in the sense in which Žižek defines it, as “not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” 19) . As Dori Laub 20) wrote of the HolocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ..., it might just appear that it was an event without a witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ..., so not even Levi was one.

As for his relation to the ‘drowned’, Ryn and Klodzinski wrote, that “no one felt compassion for the Muselmann, and no one felt sympathy for him either”, that “other inmates, who continually feared for their lives, did not even judge him worthy of being looked at”, and that, also, “for the prisoners who collaborated, the Muselmänner were a source of anger and worry; for the SS, they were merely useless garbage” 21) . In that sense, we suddenly would not just have two parties at the camp, but at least three, of which one would be the Nazis, the other the Muselmånner, as the only true witnesses, who “carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history they cannot entirely possess” 22), and Levi would belong to the third group.

What Agamben calls ‘Levi’s paradox’ relates to the thesis that the Muselmann, as the ‘drowned’ victimIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ... who cannot bear witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ... for him- or herself, is the only complete witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event .... “The ‘true witnesses’ the ‘complete witnesses’ are those who did not bear witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ... and who could not bear witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ...”, writes Agamben, stating that “the survivors speak in their stead, by proxy, as ‘pseudo-witnesses’; they bear witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ... to a missing testimony” 23). The survivors are, for Agamben, who extensively cites Levi and Wiesel, only ‘pseudo-witnesses’, because, on the one hand, they could not experience everything the Muselmдnner have and still survive and bear witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ... from their own experience, nor were they disinterested enough in that issue to legitimately play the third party.

Agamben notes that, in Latin, the word ‘witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ...’ can be said in two different ways: ‘testis’, and ‘superstes’. “The first word, ‘testis’, from which our word ‘testimony’ derives, etymologically signifies the person who, in a trial or a lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (terstis)”, while “the second word, ‘superstes’, designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end, and can therefore bear witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ... to it” 24). Primo Levi belongs to neither of the groups that could fit under these definitions, and that is the basic paradox, because the main goal in his post-camp life, the very core of his existence is in testifying. He can only testify on the impossibility of him being a witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ....

In Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, it is Death and Life-in-Death that are gambling with dice for the Ancient Mariner's soul, and Life-in-Death wins. He survives the deaths of 200 of his shipmates, whose souls get to be set free of their bodies, and starts his wanderings from place to place. He has a strange power to single out the person who must hear his tale in each location he appears to get to. As he puts it: “I have strange power of speech; / That moment that his face I see, / I know the man that must hear me: / To him my tale I teach.” Recalling his life after his return to Italy, Levi compares himself to the Ancient Mariner, as having the same urge to tell his story to everyone who would listen, and in a later book takes a rhyme from it as an epigraph.

Levi’s approach is immediate – he cannot help but telling everything at once in a plain language, the one he assumes to be comprehensible to everybody. Perhaps the most valuable thing about it is, in fact, not in the content of what is said, or written, but in his persistence, his dedication to follow the demand to tell, as the ultimate demand of his being. He simply cannot exist except in the role of constantly testifying. That is allegorized in his writing by the use of the tale of the Ancient Mariner. Levi dwells in the limbo between life and death, in a manner that is the exact reverse of the one of the Muselmånner. While they are symbolically dead, waiting for their proximate physical death, he cannot die without paying the symbolic debt for living after they have sized to.

In fact, when Agamben is quoting from Levi, and when he is dealing with his language of witnessing, it is never about Levi’s standpoint and what he actually has to say. It is about what his approach to language, and his position as a speaking being, fails to take into account, but not just accidentally. This failure is exactly what keeps Levi going on, helps him in his attempts to provide a right testimony (even if he is not sure he could ever make it). While he was still in the camp, he was led by desire to get out and back to his lost ‘normal’ life, devoting himself to making sure that something like the HolocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... would never happen again. But after he came out, this desire turned into a drive, so the dignity that was lost appears as the dignity of the loss itself.

While writing, Levi reaches a conclusion that words from ordinary, everyday language fail to grasp the real experience of the HolocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ..., and claims that only a “new, harsh language” could do that 25). He turns then to the language he well masters, as a chemist working in a paint factory. In an interview with Phillip Roth, he discloses it as the idiom “of the ‘weekly report’ commonly used in factories”, so that it has to be “precise, concise, and written in a language comprehensible to everybody in the industrial hierarchy” 26). But, even though its role was to get away from the linguistic games of the Nazis, that idiom, as Cynthia Ozick points out, produced a “psychological oxymoron”, and Levi as a “well-mannered cicerone of hell, mortal horror in a decorous voice” 27).

In fact, as it was repeatedly mentioned, Levi did not consider himself to be a writer, but a chemist who had to write, because he had to testify. He constantly feared that no one would notice what he had to say, that no one would even listen, as the reality of his nightmares was convincing him. His words, which he knew would never accurately give voice to the ‘drowned’, were at least making the wrongness of their position, as the ultimate ethical ‘wrong’ of our civilization, present in the narrative sense. By doing that, Levi was on his way to getting back his humanity that was stripped when he was turned into “Haftling number 174517”. He has “become a man again … neither a martyrToday, it is an expression most commonly used to describe someone who has been killed for his/her religious beliefs ..., nor debased, nor a saint” 28), in order to, finally be able to die in peace, as he did then.

In July 1942, Paul Celan was sent to a labour camp in Tabaresti, in Wallachia, where he was detained until February 1944. His parents were taken to a concentration camp just one month before that. His father died of disease; his mother was shot. During the first year of his detention, Celan composed ‘Chanson juive’ (‘Jewish Song’), whose title he soon changed to ‘An den Wassern Babels’ (By the Waters of Babylon), echoing Psalm 137. A few months later, he wrote ‘Aus der Tiefe’ (Out of the Depth), after Psalm 130, and in 1945 ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Deathfugue’), all of them dealing with the ShoahHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler .... When he committed suicideAccording to epidemiological investigations between 1.1% and 4.6% of the population have a suicidal attempt at some point during their life ... in 1970, Yves Bonnefoy concluded: “I believe that Paul Celan chose to die as he did so that once, at least, words and what is might join.”

Primo Levi couldn’t deal with Celan’s treatment of language. He accused him of creating an ‘atrocious chaos’ and a ‘darkness’ that “grows from page to page until the last inarticulate babble consternates like the rattle of a dying man” 29) . Even though he was treated better than the others in the camp for being a chemist, which was something quite useful for the Nazis, he could never forgive those who had a better treatment only for mastering the German language, and Celan was surely one of those. But Celan also found it very hard to deal with the fact that the language he was writing in was the language of his people’s executioners, so he was constantly referring to the verbicide and genocideGenocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group ... committed in the name of the Third Reich.

What Levi has seen only as the ‘atrocious chaos’, Celan has called “the inalienable complexity of expression” 30), “ambiguity without a mask [Mehrdeutigkeit ohne Maske],” and a “conceptual overlapping and multifacetedness” 31). This arose out of the responsibility in the articulation and transformation of post-holocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... German poetry, which he could never consider to be the same as before. He dealt with the very materiality of the language, and he could never see himself in the position such as Levi’s, writing ‘for the judges’, who were to learn from his testimonies and use them to legally sanction the people who were responsible for the atrocities. On the contrary, in the scope of Celan’s work, only he was to be a judge, and the accused was the German language.

In Derrida’s interpretation, Celan “wakes up language, and, in order to experience the awakening, the return to life of language, truly in the quick, the living flesh, he must be very close to its corpse” 32). Celan does not have a nostalgic relation to the language as he experienced it before the camp, where all its ‘normal’ functions were suppressed. He is quite aware of the paradox that German, his mother tongue, is “indeed the language of his pride”, but “it is also that of his humiliation” 33) . His existence as a human being is inseparable from his existence in that language, which was mutilated the same way its speakers were. So, when he considers his task as a writer, it comes to digging “ashes of extinguished sense-giving … and nothing else but that!” 34)

Even though the HolocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... is always present in his writings, Celan does not confine his role of an author to the representation of atrocities and the people who have suffered them. In fact, the text he produces “no longer stands in the service of a predetermined reality, but rather is projecting itself, constituting itself as reality.” 35) His standpoint is that “no one witnesses for the witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ...”, and that silence is one of the characteristic modes of speech, not an anomaly. Perhaps the only way to deal with traumas sometimes is with a “mouthful of silence”, for some things can never be told; only repeated. Or, even if they can be told, it could happen only in a language that is reconstructed, and in the manner that does not pretend to mirror things, events and situations that it deals with.

Arguing historically, Allan Sekula wrote that the “photographic portraiture began to perform a role no painted portrait could have performed in the same thorough and rigorous fashion”. That role was derived “not from any honorific tradition, but from the imperatives of medical and anatomical illustration” 36). Piles of bodies photographed by the photojournalists travelling with the Allied troops to document their progress at the end of World War II did look just like that. There was not much doubt on the part of the photographers about how those bodies, caught in their images that were immediately sent to major newspapers, would be represented. They were reduced to objects, whose representation was to serve the purpose of spreading the truth about the atrocities in camps.

George Rodger was one of those photographers, but surely not the most typical one. He did have more than serious doubts, even though after the fact. Namely, at the time, he was a correspondent for Life magazine. On April 20, 1945 he entered the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen five days after the first British troops. He documented the situation they found there. His photos were consequently published in Life and Time, and the response they provoked made him a definite celebrity. But, as he confessed later on, when realizing that in the midst of that horror he was mainly thinking about the composition, fully consumed with how the bodies were to be arranged to make the best photograph, he decided to quit war photography.

“This natural instinct as a photographer is always to take good pictures, at the right exposure, with a good composition,” wrote Rodger later on, “but it shocked me that I was still trying to do this when my subjects were dead bodies … I realized there must be something wrong with me… otherwise I would have recoiled from taking them at all … I recoiled from photographing the so-called ‘hospital’, which was so horrific that pictures were not justified … From that moment, I determined never ever to photograph war again or to make money from other people's misery … If I had my time again, I wouldn't do war photography.” 37) After the war he did quit war photography and worked freelance for the National Geographic in Nubia, among other assignments.

What has followed afterwards was a flood of images of atrocities, which, according to Joachim Paech, fully “re-arrange and often disfigure the phenomenon of the HolocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ...” 38) , as instant surrogates of its experience, without the ability to lead into to the “interior space” of the experience of the HolocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... 39) . Soon they also became mixed with the photographs taken by the Nazis. “It is now reckoned that Nazi photo albums, which occasionally turn up in auction houses, will fetch higher prices if they contain atrocity photographs,” wrote Janina Struk in the final chapter of her book titled: Photographing the HolocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ...: Interpretations of the Evidence, “predictably, ‘extra atrocity photographs’ are copied from books, aged and added to albums before being offered for sale.” 40)

One of the reasons why Claude Lanzmann restrained from using HolocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... photographs in his nine and a half hour long documentary ShoahHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... has was exactly this overflow of images, to which he was countering the singular authenticity of memories presented through interviews. “It was necessary to make this film from nothing, without archival documents,” said Lanzmann in an interview, “to invent everything” 41). He has brought the experience of ShoahHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... back from the obscene spectacle to the real story of human suffering, which made Shoshana Felman write that it was “the story of the liberation of the testimony through its desacralization; the story of the decanonization of the HolocaustHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... for the sake of its previously impossible historicization?” 42)

In one of the typical scenes in ShoahHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ..., Lanzmann, who appears in the first person, asks a resident who works at the place where the concentration camp was: “Exactly where did the camp begin?” After he is shown where the fence was, he moves across the now non-existing barrier, asking again: “So I’m standing inside the camp perimeter, right?” and moving again: “So we’re outside the camp, and back here we enter it … And at this point we are inside the camp” and finally: “So where we’re standing is where 250,000 Jews were unloaded before being gassed?” 43) Instead of simply bombarding the viewer with images, he lets him/her imagine the horrors of passing that now non-existent and invisible barrier at the time when it stood there, and it is not less horrible.

What Lanzmann is doing here is a way of reenacting the traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ..., instead of representing it. He is not interested in showing a well-edited story of how things really were when the ShoahHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... happened, but in finding out how we could today, as we are, in the times that we live, in spaces we inhabit, relate ourselves to those impossible experiences, that no one could really convey to us. One could see this as a way of ‘acting out’ in which the author reproduces a repressed collective memory, “not as a memory, but as an action: he repeats it, without of course, knowing that he is repeating it.” 44) But, in fact, this is a deliberate action of recollecting and reconstituting, or rewriting of the history, “in which conjectures about the past are balanced against promises of the future.” 45)

Similar to Lanzmann’s approach to the ShoahHolocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler ... in film, are the approaches of Everlyn Nicodemus and Milica Tomić to different mass exterminations in visual art. Namely, in her work titled the “Reference Scroll on GenocideGenocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group ..., Massacre and Ethnic Cleansing”, made in 2004 on the basis of I.W.Charny's Encyclopedia of GenocideGenocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group .... Nicodemus produces an installation with no representative images, which simply lists the data from long centuries of genocideGenocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group ...s around the world. On the other hand, Milica Tomić, in her work titled: “XY Ungelöst”, made in 1996/7, personally reenacts the traumatic eventPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ...s of mass killing of ethnic Albanians in KosovoKosovo is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force ... in March 1989, which led to all the other events in former Yugoslavia in 1990.

Israel W. Charny, whose work Nicodemus builds upon, defines genocideGenocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group ... as, in a generic sense, “the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defencelessness and helplessness of the victimsIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ....” 46) That definition is very wide, and does not get entangled with identity politics, which leaves Nicodemus with quite a range of possibilities to simply put in public view a long list of massacres and ethnic cleansings, investigating the manners in which they become ideologically appropriated. Her work is, in its materiality, really an ordinary scroll, with inscriptions on it, presenting a ‘politics of traumaPsychological trauma can happen soon after witnessing or being the victim of a traumatic event ...’.

Milica Tomić appropriates the title of a German television programme broadcast on ZDF that aims to combat and solve crimes (“Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst”, in translation “File XY … Unsolved”) to deal with a crime that was inflicted upon her fellow citizens by the state apparatus, in the times of ethnic moblization and preparation for the civil war. The only traces of that event in the media were imprints of the bodies of the victimsIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ... in the snow, which made a kind of an allegorical motive for the video work, featuring the artist herself, and the close circle of her friends, reenacting the falling of bodies of people shot down by the police, into the snow. At the same time, the other screen shows the process of redressing the same people as the very victimsIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ....

George Rodger left his personal involvement in war photography as a photographer, but still the effect of the wide publicity of and strong public response to these kinds of photographs created a whole new genre that exploited war, poverty and famine. The agency that he later founded with three other war photographers in 1947, namely Robert Capa, David ‘Chim’ Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson, did still take perhaps the biggest advantages of this scopofilic urge on the side of the audience to see images of the subhuman state that some people were caught in. So, there could be no major disaster or atrocity today, in any part of the world, without the presence of some of the photographers from Magnum.

For instance, when mentioning SrebrenicaThe Srebrenica massacre was the July 1995 killing of an estimated 8,000 Bosniak boys and men, in the region of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), under the command of General Ratko Mladic' during the Bosnian War ..., or Vukovar, one cannot help but visualizing those places through the images of Gilles Peress and Josef Koudelka. They are strong and straight, and so massively reproduced that they reach and affect everyone interested in their topic. They are nowadays published in political magazines, shown at symposia dealing with various humanitarian issues, presented in gallery formats as art and circulated within the market and among private collectors as as commodity. There is absolutely no piece of writing, in any genre, that could get close to this publicity. It might happen that the atrocities in SrebrenicaThe Srebrenica massacre was the July 1995 killing of an estimated 8,000 Bosniak boys and men, in the region of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), under the command of General Ratko Mladic' during the Bosnian War ... and Vukovar will be remembered from Peress’ book “The Graves”, like Dachau from George Stevens movie.

Undoubtedly the biggest star of Magnum in the last decade was James Nachtwey, who has fascinated the general audience, the humanitarians and the professional photographers alike with his extreme though quite stylized photo recordings of orphanages in Romania, civil wars in former Yugoslavia, street massacres in Rwanda and famine in Somalia. He has perfected the art of transforming the reality of heavily underprivileged people and those affected by war, disease or famine into a spectacle. While being a Magnum photographer (a couple of years ago he founded his own agency), he was really everywhere, at the smallest possible distance to the sources of catastrophic images, shooting symbolism and even the sublimity of universal victimsIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ....

One of the sources of his enormous popularity is the power of his images to evoke basic human empathyAn individual's objective and insightful awareness of the feelings and behaviour of another person ... and instinctual solidarity with victimsIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ..., who are pictured out of any context, so that the viewer, usually shocked by the explicitness of the content, can still elaborate around it. As one looks, for instance, at his photograph titled “Indonesia, 1998 – A beggar washed his children in a polluted canal”, presenting a person who has lost one of his arms and one of his legs, but still being able to take care of his family, one is at the same time visually embarrassed and emotionally pleased, for the scene is highly symbolic. But there is no context to it, no reason why it is so. We find out that context only when seeing the critical documentary on him by Christian Frei.

Or, one can also take as an example his photograph titled “Croatian Militiaman Attacking Muslims. Mostar. Bosnia-Herzegovina. 1993”. It shows a gunman holding an AK rifle and firing through the window of a semi-destroyed bedroom, with blinds that shutter it for protection. There is absolutely no clue of what is going on outside, just an indication of complete chaos, in which a neighbor shoots a neighbor, for no obvious reason, while the face of the gunman is turned away from the viewer. For the photographer, he has no face, he has no name, and he just represents the madness of the region where it seems that wars happen as a kind of natural disaster. The task the photographer takes on appears to be just to freeze moments in which that becomes obvious.

Commenting on his new war photographs straight from the battlefield in Iraq, Nachtwey articulated what he saw and what he wanted to present with a photo of a group of Iraqi women fully covered: “Pure Beauty and Misery – Women Praying in front of the Mosque”. Of course, there is no word about how the troops that Nachtwey was following get to the point where they met these people, who are again without names and faces, reduced to their sex and confessional belonging, nor what happens to their surroundings and the local people around them, in the midst of the war. They are reduced to victimsIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ..., paradoxically sublime in their misery.

Tirdad Zolghadr has called that approach ‘poornography’, a ‘career-enhancing practice’ by the ‘representation of indignity’, that functions in the context of “the market demand for quick-fix solidarity, living-room worldliness and that cushy sense of ideological superiority through critical consumption” 47). Nachtwey presents himself as a war photographer by profession, but an anti-war photographer by conviction, constantly stressing that his work is to bare both moral and political messages. He pictures things that are not happening anymore, but he does that in a manner in which a pornographer would constantly produce degrading porn in order to show how sexual abuse really looks in its obscenity and thereby elevate general moral and political consciousness.

“There is something pornographic in the pejorative sense in Nachtwey’s work,” writes J.M. Bernstein on Nachtway’s photographs published in a book titled Inferno, and it “derives not from what they depict, but from how that depiction occurs”, which is “framing of devastation for the sake of the moral satisfaction of the liberal gaze” 48). His images are disconnected from any streams of lived experience, abstracted and fixed in their compositional perfection, made to provide a mix of disturbing elements, on the level of content, and pleasing elements, on the level of presenting that content. The strong aesthetic distance he has towards the presented, which is visually framed in a way that can be hung in any office, where these photos frequently end up, is to please that gaze.

Nachtwey presents himself as a witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ..., and his work comes out of an urge to witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ..., which is interpreted by Bernstein as being grounded in two principles. The first claims that “we must not avert our look from the face of extreme human suffering, at least when that extreme of suffering was perhaps preventable, that is, a suffering we have sufficient reason to believe was the product, finally, of conscious choices and actions”, while the second that produced in specific Nachtwey style, “the photography of atrocity transforms each remnant, living or dead, into a ‘mute witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ...’, almost a moral conscience” 49). In this way, Nachtwey puts himself into a position of a secondary witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ..., who does not give voice to the victimsIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ..., but makes visible their speechless numbness.

That finally brings us back to Levi and Agamben, and the paradoxes of the remnant as the only true witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ..., witnessing by simply living his dehumanized life. Bernstein analyses the proximity of Nachtwey’s photography to Agamben’s ‘philosophic’camera 50). He finds quite some analogies between them. He even utters that there is “something pornographic in Agamben’s philosophic portrait of the Muselmann, the pure desire to bear witnessA witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about a crime or dramatic event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching) and can help certify important considerations to the crime or event ... 51) ,” which fetishizes the undignified. The conclusion for Bernstein is that, “although there must indeed be an ethic of witnessing, witnessing is not ground of the ethical” 52), so we need a new categorical imperative, for the “reconfiguration of culture and the structures of authority governing the everyday” 53).