static / feedback

Two weeks ago we produced a magazine. It was such a crazy trip. I'm still not sure what my team and I actually did, but I guess we'll find out soon.

I will always remember those nights.

Class Journal

Shoah

I feel I should explain some of my background.

I’ve taken three and a half years of university level German, both grammar, as well as literature. In these courses, the subject of WWII, the Nazi’s, and their language has been avoided. We tended to concentrate on older works, such as Goethe and Thomas Mann, or the modern German authors such as Gunter Grass. However, the events that occurred during that period of history linger very much in the minds of both the students and the professors in the German department. In one of the literature courses, we studied Paul Celan’s Todesfuge. It is a poem written by a Jew in the language used to destroy his own people. In his memoir, he said that he felt betrayed by his own tongue. He can’t believe that he speaks and writes in the same words as those people who murdered. Much of his poetry and written work deal with this issue.

In the brief segments of Shoah we watched in class, I started noticing the many languages collected in the film. There is English, French, Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, German, Czech, maybe Russian, and some more I couldn’t recognize. If we treat this film as a text, then it’s already been translated five or six times over.

There’s the theory that says we are bound by the language we speak. Our language shapes our thoughts, and people from differing linguistic backgrounds think in different ways. I feel that if this is true, then this film is an attempt to fully articulate the horror of the Holocaust in language.

I started thinking, how many languages do we need to bring in, how many differing points of view do we need? It seems that the addition of each new witness, each new language, adds to the representation of the Holocaust in the film.

It does seem to me that the film is not just about the destruction of peoples. It’s also about the destruction of language. As the film progress, I can see the exhausted hulks of language piled up in the excrement of the Holocaust, beside the piles of exhausted people.

When English is not precise enough, switch to French. French is too gentle, change to Polish. To convey the clean lines, the rigid efficiency, change to German, and again to Hebrew for the historical and literal accuracy. And again, and so on.

Primo Levi mentions in his book a perpetual Babel (SA 38) that he was submerged into. I feel the same way about Shoah.

Reading Journal

Primo Levi

Se questo è un uomo

If this a Man

Title Poem – for notes

Voi che vivete sicuri
nelle vostre tiepide case,
voi che trovate tornando a sera
il cibo caldo e visi amici:
Considerate se questo è un uomo
che lavora nel fango
che non conosce pace
che lotta per mezzo pane
che muore per un si o per un no.
Considerate se questa è una donna,
senza capelli e senza nome
senza più forza di ricordare
vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo
come una rana d'inverno.
Meditate che questo è stato:
vi comando queste parole.
Scolpitele nel vostro cuore
stando in casa andando per via,
coricandovi, alzandovi.
Ripetetele ai vostri figli.
O vi si sfaccia la casa,
la malattia vi impedisca,
i vostri nati torcano il viso da voi.

I physically wanted to stop reading at page sixty-four. I began at page one, reading with an analytical mindset. I noticed the literary vocabulary and the multitude of metaphors intermeshed with the sparse language of destruction.

The number of the narrator is: ein hundert fier und siebzig tausand funf hundert siebzehn.

Or, if they read it as if it were phone numbers in modern Germany,

siebzehn, funf-und-fiertzig, siebzehn (17:45:17)

The latter sounds more sinister. I need to find an audiotape of this.