Back to Left Curve no. 22 table of contents
Ash Oracles
Herodotus, the Greek historian, makes mention of an unusual place of divination, which was frequented by those who had been unable to successfully learn of their fate at other Oracles. The commentators and Hellenists never, or almost never, dealt with this type of Oracle, which is located underground; and the search, the explication on the fate of past and future was based on what is known by the dead. I feel as if I am that kind of ignorant man who in the course of literary and other "divinatory" research turns to the Oracle of the Dead.
This world is a chaotic Dump, above which floats, as a spirit above the waters, "the sense of meaninglessness." That's how Leonid äejka1 thought of and painted The Great Dump, as an accumulated, disintegrated, decayed afterbirth of objects, "the coil of a road leading nowhere." According to this painter, however, there exists somewhere a junk-grinding machine which clears out the World's Warehouse, a strange machine which within the dump's labyrinth "devours all forms." äejka only had a presentiment about this machine. It is what rules above the Dump, and by annihilatiing it, the machine renews it. He didn't paint this machine - in any case it is unrepresentable, inexpressible - because he was blinded by a hope that beyond the Wall, behind the "ring" that girdles the Dump and its labyrinth, at the far-end of the Great Desert there stretches the longingly longed-for "Blessed Valley."
There isn't any kind of Heavenly Wall which might release or hold back the rotting stench, or divide "inside and out" and prevent us from transforming blessed valleys into garbage dumps. When we clear a path in the Blessed Valley and dispose of the left-over debris, the useless, the dirt, the annihilating grinder again just dumps out refuse and garbage. No matter where we are, garbage always follows us. From a few rings of dirt, dump-piles and garbage spread out and grow everywhere. There is no Wall. In the world of concentration camps only barbed wire exists. No matter how high we build up walls or sink them ever deeper, a barbed wire between the two camps is what separates the Dump from us, those living in garbage, from the ever expanding Dump itself.
The theory of this world might be a theory of garbage and, as such, a discarded, heretical theory which denies fulfillment, asks not for purification and makes no demands for cleanliness that would insure survival. It doesn't exaggerate differences, or transmute the "sense of meaninglessness" into a search for meaning, which another emancipatory system would insure. It acknowledges the footprints of difference within the rubbish, all the left-overs in which we live while we scamper on the endless garbage dump, roam among the ruins of the blessed promised land as we come ever nearer to the growling, exterminating grinder that cuts everything up into bits and pieces. This would be a useful theory since it could pick through the crumbs, live on them and divine from the garbage where we really stand, while we toss away, one after the other, all of our rags, organic and inorganic, with which we tried to protect ourselves from the shearing storms. It would try to think, before which we close our eyes, contemplate in the darkness, register the movements of disheveled figures in the night, who bow and scrape, dig, forage on barren landscapes of refuse, and find moldy food, pick out luminous bits and other objects, which may or may not look valuable in the dark. And when dawn breaks, they wouldn't vanish with these enigmatic, foraging shadows; they would stay and talk to us in the daylight about their nighttime travels, so that we couldn't shake them off and forget them as a disturbing, embarrasing phrase uttered in passing. In spite of anti-litter campaigns, re-cycling centers - we'd talk. We'd accept them the way they are.
Georges Bataille, in Solaris Anus (1927) quotes as a parody, clown-like, certain aspects of rubbish theory when he determines that "the nighttime open spaces of the earth revolve continually toward the loathsome sunshine. The Dump issues from the same anus as does the night, whose blinding strength nothing can contest except the Sun. Night - opening of the colon; Day - excrement. Elimination? After all, we are but refuse. While the subject is material it constitutes itself, by discarding what is distinct and different from itself, as it simultaneously eliminates. But a real connection to the discarded material is not lost, as Julia Kristeva echoes Bataille from a distance , when she introduces the concept of rejection, namely the notion of casting out, discarding. The body, taken as the dynamic requirement of the material and language of the subject as always being the "subject-in-process," is situated in its own procession of opening up, of bursting asunder. The body is refuse, material, on the rubbish dump of language.
In one of the Kolyma histories Salamov narrates a simple event about a Dump. The camp residents are simply "living material." When it was very cold, the guards didn't take a body count but would just drive the prisoners out to work without a list. In such a situation three of them were given easy work to do: they had to cut down larch-trees and saw them into beams for the camp's administration building.When they were finished, they didn't go "home" right away, because "they had to keep watch over a huge dump that was next to the fence, which they were not allowed to denigrate. They threw themselves on it and on hands and knees tore up the frozen layers of garbage into different colored pieces that they tossed off the mound. Their most valuable find was a pair of ragged men's socks which no doubt someone from the camp's administration had thrown out. They also found a frozen dew-covered school tablet, filled with innocent child drawings. From these drawings it was clear that "the child saw nothing, nothing had registered but the yellow buildings, the barbed wires, the towers, the guard dogs, the machine gun-toting guards and the endless blue sky." These were the views of the northern camp, where the sky always glittered in unusually clear colors, lacking nuances of shade or variable hues. Appearances seen through innocent eyes. Innocent taboo evidence. After briefly glancing through the pages, one of the prisoners crumples up the little notebook and tosses it back onto the dump pile: it was bad paper, can't be used to roll cigarettes.
The concentration camp world itself is a dump, which is at the far end of some other encampment's dump. The garbage-grinder creates garbage. When Kristeva weaved the notion of rejection into her theory she was still concerned with semiotics, the processes of the signifier. In Salamov's dump story everything also breaks down into terms of process: every sign points to another sign. The rubbish circumscribes the possible rubbish-theories. The "living material": nothing but rubbish. As with the larch-tree logs, the raggy socks, the thrown away notebook with the child's drawings of views of the camp everything ends up in the garbage, everything ends up in the dump. The Dump is the Great Signifier. The subject becomes constituted in the dump in the process of discarded rubbish. The most innocent eye-witnesses of the dump also form a part of the dump. Writing? James Joyce, for the word letter, substituted litter. The colon's end-opening is the dump, the letters however are just excrementa of the "sense of meaninglessness," a meaninglessness which - while we forage wide-eyed or half-blindly among the sediments - traps us in suffocating, inexpressible despair, hunger, cold
Pjotr Ravic, in his novel The Sky's Blood, writes about how the Nazis forced the concentration camp's inmates to desecrate a Jewish cemetery. Half-dead souls smash the grave stones and with each swing of the iron bar perhaps 500 year-old letters are sent flying. An alef flies to the left, while a beautifully carved he jumps to the right. A gimel ends up as dust and right after it flies a nun. It can't be said just how many miraculous symbols, sin, asking for the help of God, are smashed by the hammer's blow! Ravic goes on the tell us that the more the cemetery is transformed into a dump, the more indifferent become the inmates toward death. They wait to be swept into the world's ass, as the concentration camp's masters called the crematoriums, those fire-machines that serve to annihilate and eructate refuse. Anus Mundi. The letters break apart and the names of the dead disappear from the fields of legibility, just as the ovens wiped out people from the field of vision. The camp's "reality," according to Jean Amery, the Austrian-Jewish writer and Auschwitz survivor, is nothing but reality's dump, a kind of dump on which the whole of life that existed before the camp ends up, and new, rotting signs pile on top, signs of disfigurement which can only be written with the broken fragments of letters from old cemeteries. A Total Dump in a Total World. And, according to Amery, the word in this Dump loses all meaning, its force drains out, breaking the connection between words and objects.
For the fragmented subject confined within the processes of the Dump only fragments of letters remain, litter, dust. And while they were destroying the cemetery, continues Ravic, the more indifferent they became to the stone's death, and to their own death as well. However, not to hunger. During that same time when Leonid äejka was absorbed in painting the world's rubbish, Alexander Solzhenitsyn published his On Hell's Portico internment camp novel, the same Solzhenitsyn who in 1968 wrote about a camp's dump in which he portrayed the process of starvation, where nothing remains for the prisoner but his hunger. This prisoner, this living-dead among other living-dead, jealously scrutinizing his rivals, watches and waits by the kitchen's portico for the moment when the garbage is brought out. He throws himself on the pile of garbage, fights with the others, grabs from someone's hands a fish-head, a bone, some stinking vegetable. (Some of them even die.) He then cooks and eats the garbage. Quickly Bessarabian peasant-women attack the dump which the living-dead have already ransacked. It seems that after the end-point of hunger there still remains another point of hunger beyond. That garbage has its own garbage. The theory of garbage: concentration camp theory. A particular engineer, after he admitted to another inmate, also an engineer, that he was afraid of him, afraid that he'd beat him up and take his portion, trotted out his theory: "The as yet not forgotten data on chemical compounds prove that one is able to get all the necessary nutrients for the maintenance of health; it is only necessary to ignore the stench and exclusively concentrate on extracting the required nutrients." Lev Nykolajevic J., the engineer, discovered that this is the best mode for subsistence for the living-dead. This engineer sits by a cloudy bog-filled ditch. Around the brim of the water-hole are lined, in orderly fashion: a herring-head, fish-bones, gristles, crusts of bread, a pile of mush, grey thin potato peels and other, unrecognizable things. On a small tin plate he lights a fire, above which a sooty tin cup hangs. He eats the black liquid with a wooden spoon. With each gulp he takes a little bite from the ring of garbage. Appropriate to his intellectual spirit, he slowly, carefully and attentively chews with his toothless mouth. His face and neck are covered with dark-grey fur. His face is like dirty wax. From his blinking eyes, tears flow. The concentration camp transforms without exception every theoretician into a practical rat. If during his "mealtime" someone approaches him, terror grips him and he quickly bundles the tin-cup and whatever is left over from the left-overs into his lap, falls to the ground and curls up like a porcupine. You can beat him as much as you want, he remains immobile; under no condition will he allow anyone to touch what he so tenaciously clings to in his lap.
Another trustworthy story came to me, about Goli Otok2. They saw a prisoner, the owner of a war medal, who pulled out an unwashed ox-belly from the septic-tank located at the far-end of the barrack's kitchen. From the corner of his mouth a yellow liquid was oozing out. The eating of excrement is an ancient ceremony, the so-called coprophagia - under these circumstances it is not yet ritual cannabalism. The mortally starving inmates fell on the sewage water as well, scooped out the sludge on the bottom and the garbage floating on top of the barrel, and stuffed their mouths. Their stomachs accepted everything, they didn't even vomit. While they were eating, their laughing overseers would beat them. And they would just keep slurping, while somehow trying to block the blows with their elbows.
In the concentration camp man-eating banquets were also revived. Everyone cut something off their body - an ear, a finger or carved out a slice from his arm All of this, blood and all, they tossed into a common pot, occasionally cooked it and ate it. We can situate this event between man-eating and self-eating. The living corpse is the lowest layer of the Dump, the so-to-speak transcendental-signified of the Great Signifier, the height of avant-garde theory. They also harvested from the dead. The living are now but the parody of the dead.
Pierre Gascard in his novel, Season of the Dead, also writes about a cemetery for recently dead and fallen soldiers which the prisoners gardened with their sickles. "We were a detachment of ghosts, waking each morning, in a peaceful green meadow, as gardeners of death," writes the narrator. A group of prisoners were assigned as grave diggers. They thoughtfully, properly, buried the soldiers somewhere in the middle of Poland. But once when they were on their way to the cemetery, they unexpectedly came upon a corpse by the roadside. They were grave diggers, they weren't too surprised. The corpse was different from others only by the yellow star sewn to his clothes. Soon thereafter they discovered other corpses in the area, they saw trains arriving packed with people and leaving empty. The number of dead multiplied around the little cemetery that was cared for by the prisoners; there already were more of them than those who were buried. The grave diggers quite simply realized that their peaceful cemetery, just as a dream in reality, lies within another larger cemetery, a horrible dump of corpses, a string of corpse-dumps in which bodies are strewn, en masse, side by side and on top of each other, in unorderable disorder. This is the "Great Ring," the zone of the intermingling of dream and reality. With Ravic the cemetery turns into a garbage dump. Here the Dump at first encompasses the cemetery. Then death's Dump conquers the garden, this "blessed land,"ordered by death. The grave diggers are helpless: even death's peace can't be protected from death's rubbish. What is parodying what here? What is the difference between the cemetery and the Dump? Before such questions the theory of rubbish is, no matter how we think of it or express it, just a Dump. The Dump's dump. The subject, however, thrown into the camp-world, ousted from his life before the camp, stands in front of the machine that grinds up everything, becoming just the body's rubbish pile, matter's rubbish pile, language's rubbish pile.
According to Jonathan Swift the man who takes a morning walk goes out into the city streets not so that he can examine and look at all the strewn garbage and excrement which was swept into the streets during the night, not so that he can observe the color and composition of the garbage, and still less so he can taste it; but rather so that he may remain as clean as possible as he scurries through the streets. A century later the Marquis De Sade, the theoretician of boundless debauchery, who included mankind's filth in his practical activities, would never have agreed with this. Michael Thompson in his book3 credits Swift with being the founder of the theory of rubbish. This book has just come into my hands after I had already set to paper my thoughts dealing with the question of the dumps of the world of concentration camps. Unfortunately, Thompson's train of thought has not changed the direction of any of my own formulations undertaken on my own, and without the big words, and has added nothing. I've simply become convinced again just how useless theoretical formulations and metaphysical speculations are in face of the experience of concentration camps, how really incapable they are of penetrating deeply, and don't know how to begin to deal with the problem of boundaries, not even when the ideas originate from catastrophy (mathematical) theory - as in Thompson's case -, of which René Thoma had laid the foundations. For myself, I've tried to do more, as much as I could: I allowed the experience to think itself and just kept writing until I became the captive of that chaos evoked by the feeling of despair at having to stand over the inexpressible.
Bones
The Dumps of concentration camps and of the comparable mass graves are peculiar places. Bones are always sticking out of the rubbish; they somehow stand out, decompose with difficulty. No matter how deep they are buried, they pop up to the surface. No matter how well we hide them, all of a sudden they pop out. What can we do with the bones? Can we create a system out of them? They do not stand against the idea, they simply pry it open. No matter how skillful I can be with new "forms of knowledge," such as the new style of deconstruction, what am I to do with the bones, how can I "put them over" into writing? How can I move them, pry them open so that they do not disappear? Think about it as if everything becomes helpless around the bones, in the face of naked bones: they are ungraspable nakedness. I don't even know of a word which might adhere to this barrenness - which I might then be able to grab onto . . .The more frequently we run into bones in the concentration camp-world, the more taxes have to be paid for them, and the more enigmatic they become. They are elementary, a real camp problem. The camp's guard dogs, the german sheperds, like all dogs, sharpen their teeth and strengthen their jaws on bones. When they had to get rid of the bones, the camp's rulers at first fared as the dogs did.They scraped holes in the ground, dragged the bodies into the ditch and threw dirt on top. These camp-graves, dug out dog-like, could not be a final solution. The growing mass of the dead presented problems. Sooner or later the earth wore away and the naked skeletons popped out. In Kolyma the corpses littered among the rocks waited in the gold mines, beside the underground precious-metal warehouses, in the eternally frozen ground. On the barren mountain precipices the rock-cavities stuffed with the dead opened up, and the bones - on which there still clung, thanks to nature's refrigerator, scratched, pussy skin and even the inner organs of the chest and stomach cavities - crept out from the side of the cliffs. Bone mountains. Apparitions for the Ministry of Camps. They deepened the frozen pits with drills and explosives. And the dead, writes Salamov, were gathered up again and stuck back into where they had come out. They swept up and cleared out the bones with the blade of a strong, mirror-bright bulldozer that had been given to them as a present by the Americans. They plowed the cadaver-shaped bones with bulldozers; in the meantime the living dead recognized their former friends. There are as many bones in the Kolyma ground as there is gold, lead, wolfram, uranium.Will the camp world one day proclaim this underground gallery as a bottomless bone mine?
Could it be that the bones and skeletons of the sacrificial victims are merely a fragment of an unending camp skeleton?
The world of concentration camps knows of examples and regions where in place of natural freezers natural abysses exist. Bottomless pits, craters After being slaughtered or shot, the victims were tossed into such mountain abysses. In the regions of Jadovno, Jasenovac and Jastrebarsko the dead fell until only bones remained of them. The bones would get stuck on the pit's protrusions, blocking the way. The bones are only the view of the bottom of the camp's bottomlessness. It seems that literary campology also follows this pattern. Concentration camp literature is like this: we find places that give rise to views of the bottom. The material is thick and durable, but if we stop in the middle of reading, the unfixed bottom falls out and thedescent resumes. These phrases have no bottom. Each sudden halt takes us back to that from which we tried to escape, from where there is no return; the ground begins to move under our feet and in place of words we find only bones around us; moreover, bones that become ever more horrifying, to the point that horror itself disappears, the more we recognize in them our friends.
If there exists an unseeable, unknown camp-skeleton, then the sheer mass of bones covers it up and all those thousands of micro-histories scatter us in every possible direction, making it impossible for us to begin with one small fragment and go on to reconstruct the form of the horrible whole. Because the skeleton is not just one. In the strange circumstances of the camp the laws of evolution are not applicable either, because nothing exists before it and nothing will exist after it. There is no historical law that we can follow by which it would be possible to reconstruct the many-sided, far-flung camp of bones stuffed in holes, mountains, lime.
The ever advancing camp-technology achieved with the bones what the skeleton-tearing german shepherd dogs never had the strength for. In the Nazi camps, as is known, the bones were ground up, and the powder used for fertilizer. When they discovered the final solution to their problem and started up the crematoriums, from the bones there remained ash-bones. These ovens were nodal points, at which, like on a kind of scale, the weight of the ashes and the smoke equalize through the burning . . .
As the camp's unavoidable refuse, the bones are pure unwriteable Text, the footnotes to the sacred literature of the camp's ash-religion. Fussnoten? ["footnote "- original in German - tr.] The bones are crumbs under the feet of nothing; from their ashes we read the Nothing of this world.
However it's not only human bones that we find in the camp world. Even if we don't take into account the bones that are thrown into a camp's usual composte-pile, which the camp residents forage and chew, the beginning lines of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag book suddenly come to mind. From out of the long frozen bed of the Kolyma river the researchers mined-out a block of ice in which prehistorical fossils were found. Fish, salamanders, snails The camp inmates rushed at the block of ice, smashed it and melted the pieces of ice by hanging them above a fire and, grabbing bits out of each other's mouths, they devoured these unbelievable fossils - items that every research academy, every museum of natural history, would have been proud to possess. Their eager hunger absorbed the ancient meat, the pre-deluge organisms. But just imagine that, according to Solzhenitsyn's eye-witness account, the bones still remained, bones which the toothless camp inmates were unable to bite through. Out of these came about the Gulag island world. From ancient bones. But let's be a little careful: among the objects frozen in ice there were, even if in no great numbers, tritons. A kind of flesh-eating snail which once, among other things, fed on carrion. They do not have bones, their skeletons are on the outside: fossilized, pointed shells. The view of the bottom, with which concentration camp literature tries to evoke the bottomlessness of the camp world, is but an attempt to versify the soft, mucous cell-tissue inside the snail's boney layer. The Camp Skeleton is not one and can not be grasped in this way; moreover it may not even be where we look for it. It is not inside, but out, strewn visibly everywhere. It is not hiding behind the bones, but it is itself these bones, endless bones in all kinds of shapes and forms. Inside there are only mucous cells which feed on dead meat. The stomach of the camp world, as with snails, is protected by a mass of bone. The camp world casts bones out of itself, buries them, throws them into the abyss, grinds them up, fries them.
And the dogs devour human bones while the camp-world's teeth sharpen and its jaws strengthen.
There are not only human bones in the camps, though it's difficult to differenciate the bones that are in the camps. At Stara Gradiska during the 50's it appeared at one time, narrates D. J., that the severity of the system was easing (one of the administrators left, another came). The prisoner, Mrksic the Sculptor, was even given bones from the kitchen which he subsequently carved with great skill into figures. The administration agreed that D. J. should join him. The camp administration then confiscated the completed bone-figures, all kinds of little decorative objects, occasionally complete chess sets, and distributed them in the offices and homes or gave them away as presents to important guests and notaries who came, on occasion, to inspect the camp's fortifications. Unforgettable memorial pieces. A few bones from among them, which our sculptor received as material, never would dry sufficiently in the sun. Somehow they always got wet. As if they had some kind of dew inside, which after some time would come to the surface and could never be completely sucked out. Besides this, these bones were the most sturdy, unbreakable. This "dew" didn't drip, you could only touch it. And these bones had their own particular odor.
D. J. didn't say whether or not Mrksic did anything with these "wet" bones. But even now, as he tells his tale, I can see his eyes, as if he went blind among the wet prison walls and in the enclosed burning sun, and he just can't understand what kind of bones these could have been that "sweated."
Indeed whose eyes could possibly decipher the origins of these horrible bones? Whose dry hands could locate by touch their thin layer of grease? Who among the haunted living could see that death oozes from the bones?
The bones of the camps, the bare bone fragments, all of them, are all unmournable and their smell can never be changed, through any kind of literary mediation, by the painless, forgiving scent of a death-wreath.
Women's Orchestra
The last evacuation is from the last circle of Hell. In this evacuation Death, the escort of wheezing, poisoning black smoke, outdid himself. But Fania Fénelon belongs among those few who was transported from the last circle of Hell into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which meant to a certain degree her survival.
The expression "among those few" already is an exaggeration. "Those few" refers to those who were left in the circle into which Fania Fénelon was thrown and where she spent a year. The exaggeration is a massive repugnant lie. We propose for this stylized lie the sign that goes by the name of hyperbole. For the signification of the actual relationships that the word encompasses
we lack stylistic tools. Is the language deceptive? It wasn't invented to be able to be precise in the face of the unimaginable. In the numerical difference between survivors and deceased gapes an ashen abyss. Language is quite simply incapable of finding itself; in confronting the horrible abyss lies become necessary. A chasm also opens up between the customary meaning of "those few" and a paltry number of survivors. No matter what we say, we suffer from the unbelievabililty of the saying. No matter what we say, everything is a denial of actual events. It makes no difference if the language is pathetic, rigid, harsh or humorous; in any case it will be mistaken.
Who did they transport to Birkenau with Fania Fénelon? A few? A certain percentage? Out of thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, millions - a little bit? A few? A very-very few? As if no one - how can this be expressed at all?
And can it be said that Birkenau was "the last circle of Hell"? To call the camps of Kolima the last circle of Hell is as if to forgive Vorkut. If Birkenau is the last circle of Hell, we make light of Auschwitz, make it acceptable. To say that it was "better" in any camp, in Birkenau, or Kolima4, tears down all sense of the good. No, we cannot allow for any forgiveness, even if by mistake, for Auschwitz, Vorkut and all the other concentration camps, and relieve them of responsibility for the last circle's "office of accountability." In the world of camps, we are in the last circle, or we are thrown into the last circle.
Near Auschwitz, its "kid brother," cut from the same fresh branch - as the architects say - a few kilometers from the nodal point of Auschwitz, served by the same last railroad station, at the end of the little village called Birkenau, they built a new camp whose well-constructed interior was based on the best current expertise available.
It was more spacious, with the requisite architechture of death, more accessible, technically more advanced: a faster and more effective "assembly-line" of death - to the astonishment of the victims, it had a more efficiently equipped interior - more suitable for transporation into the last circle. In other wods it was a model camp, fulfilling the arrogant pride of the camp's masters.
It is a hopelesss, gloomy task to make comparisons and evaluations where there is no place for comparison or evaluation, because there is no guilt-free gauge by which to judge.
Thirty years after Fania Fénelon's liberation from Bergen-Belsen, she wrote down her experiences. There always is a longer or shorter period of latency among survivors. Bathed in silence, oppressive bewilderment and depression in the middle of waves of internal disorder of a rising instinctual forgetfulness, the victim is renewed by putting together the subject's scattered burdens, and extends the truncated language, wakes up the power of numb memory, strengthens fragile needs, so as to try to leave for others what she alone knows . . .
After being sent to Birkenau, she quickly found herself among a select few, among those who apparently and for the time being were offered two "possible" choices. The first: the process of elimination of all possibilities, the so-called special-treatment. The second: a suspension for a short time of the former. Fania Fénelon was admitted into the Nazi concentration camp world's only woman's orchestra. There also were a few men's orchestras.
The girls played music, practiced singing harmonics daily. They practiced on their violins, had a metronome for the morning and evening appellos, played for the departures of the regular and special work details, for their return, for punishments and hangings. They played and sang on holidays, for the arrival of eminent dignitaries, accompanied the many big banquets with music and struck up flourishes when guests were presented with the camp's awards. An attentive ear could hear - amid the rumble of the engines of trucks in which bodies were piled up high, the crackling of the mysterious ovens and the bellowing of black smoke - simultaneously the echoes of lively, and at times famous, musical masterpieces, and muffled human screams. Perhaps those who were dying thought that they were being escorted by a more or less proficient circus orchestra to their death.5 Massacre, being part of universal history, has also become part of musical history. What could they, who with their last breath and for the first and last time saw and heard these girls, have thought of them? What could the other women prisoners, those who at or between appellos could be chosen for immediate death, have felt toward the members of this orchestra? Did they feel envy, hate or sorrow toward them? The women musicians did enjoy certain advantages, if we can call it advantageous to "relieve" for a moment the pain of the precarious lives of condemned prisoners. They had taken the young Parisian singer from the typhus-quarantined barracks, in which healing was done through poisonous injections, and threw her into the orchestra because she could sing the arias for Madame Butterfly. First she had to pass the audition. Exhausted, hovering near the threshold of death, she sang "The Peaceful Sea" aria, knowing that she was singing for her very life.The knowledge, voice, talent, self-dignity that the aria required, became forced and false in the face of the ordeal of reality. Never before was singing so equivalent to existence, and never was it more different.
"Meine kleine Sängerin," is what Maria Mandl, the camp-commandant's wife, called Fania Fénelon. With her husband's backing, and supposedly as an advocate for the complete equality of woman, she founded and sponsored the only women's orchestra, where she pretentiously cultivated the highest forms of music, there where the last circle of Hell bids, "good night." The women's orchestra was the commandant's wife's, the camp's Führerin's, whimsy: a capriccio made up of Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, French, Dutch and German women, who were, naturally, not all Aryan. When the trains arrived with their cattle-cars, the orchestra played classical music for Maria Mandl, her husband, Franz Kramer, and his escorts - while under the windows of the barracks the selection of Hell went on -, played before Dr. Mengele, who was renowned for his great expertise and exquisite ear for music and who had as much passion for the art of music as for his medical experiments on selected subjects. According to a report on his two visits to Birkenau, Himmler smiled and gushed with emotion while listening to the woman's orchestra.
Among the prisoners, Alma Rosé, grandaughter of Gustav Mahler, daughter of the first violinist of the Berlin Opera, became the orchestra's prison guard. She loved music even beneath the sooty sky of the camp, demanded complete obediance and did not hesitate, in the name of music, to slap the face of a musician who happened to make a mistake. She felt "responsible" for the orchestra. Alma, who before had been the picture of innocence, turned in the camp into the musical prison guard6 who frantically ordered around the fearful, panic-stricken girls; and, when they heard that Maria Mandl would no longer be the orchestra's sponsor, they became even more terrified. Alma Rosé transformed that fear into music, whose captivating spirit broke through the boundaries of musical knowledge, as if killing from the inside the most god-like art. Why then have faith in artists, in the world of camps are they not all just shadows of the camp's shadow?
On the title page of Fania Fénelon's book, Moratorium for the Orchestra7 is the image of a torn-off violin string, though on the instrument's neck stretch barbed-wire. Will this tough, thorny concentration camp string also break sometime? Who can pull flawlessly with a bow on this violin string? Questions like these remain unanswered during this music lesson. The "kleine Sängerin" sings the haunting, technically perfect concentration camp's music of the spheres of Puccini. I do not know what to say, the sound freezes in my throat, I do not know what to decide, the world of the camps robs me of a choice: music as sin and music as refuge, ambiguous and treacherous ambiguities' music . . . There is no purgation rather repulsion infects us and it becomes harder and harder to find any kind of channel by which it could depart from us
Regardless of what the musical scores of the victims are like, we ourselves are whatever burns in our and others' memories.
Real/Unreal
No matter how often I've talked about the real, it seems that the unreal could just as well have stood in its place. Could I have been mistaken so much? Could it be that for everything I have said, its contrary likewise existed? The world of camps, a world of phantoms? We have come to the end of everything, the end of everyone, because we have become submerged in unreality, whose multiplier is the mask of excessive-reality. We accept the verdict without protest. There is nothing more unambiguous in the midst of the most diverse possible interpretations.
The end of unambiguous statements is darkness - within it we cannot refer to anything permanent. The world of phantoms becomes real through such statements. Since we have been building the world of camps (by resorting to all kinds of higher pretexts, while simultaneously, without exception, denying that we are deceiving reality with unreality) this statement has become our fate, our everlasting reality. The saying of it blinds us, but it seems that we can do nothing but writhe in its unspeakable snare.
Since we believe that what is more than real is unreal, so in the same way we are also convinced that we have understood everything exactly - yet the most obvious statement appears as the most absurd.
The world outside the camps also appears as unreal, since life is so real that the absurd is also real within it. We have no words with which to answer: in the final scene a final silence comes on stage until we carry out the final judgement to the end. This is the judgement of the real beyond the unreal.
Notes:
Back to Left Curve no. 22 table of contents