The Special Case of Four Auschwitz Photographs

Paris, 2001: an exhibition that commemorates the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of the Holocaust stirs up a vehement public debate. Georges Didi-Huberman, a critic and unconventional art historian of Jewish descent who has written on European painting and the depiction of hysteria in photography, contributes an essay to the exhibition catalog highlighting four particular photographs from the exhibit, which prompts further outrage.¹ More outrage, one might wearily note, than information about the camps had caused at the time the photographs were made; but less, perhaps, than was caused when the first atrocity images of the liberated concentration camps appeared in Western newspapers and news reels in 1945. What is it about these photographs, after all these years of exposure and all our familiar outrage regarding their subject, that still prompts intense polemics?
 
Didi-Huberman’s contributions to this debate have now been translated into English. The translation includes the original exhibition catalog essay (Part 1: “Images in Spite of All”) and Didi-Huberman’s response to critics (Part 2: “In Spite of the All Image”; originally Images malgré tout, 2003). The oddly old-fashioned, elaborately detailed table of contents will make no sense to anyone who hasn’t already read the book; this questionable editorial choice appears to indulge the author, as does the decision not to present the other side of the debate, which appeared in the pages of Les temps moderns (March-May 2001), in columns by Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux. The book would have benefitted from a translation of these articles, since Didi-Huberman engages in frequent exegesis with them. Clearly, without these provocations, the second half of this volume would not exist. But the choice to translate Didi-Huberman is timely. While the debate has distinctively French concerns, the larger problematic of the (limits of) representation of the Holocaust remains a fraught subject for Western scholars, and Didi-Huberman’s polemic takes the discussion in a new and productive direction.
 
The controversy over the Parisian exhibition focused on four famous photographs from Auschwitz, taken at the height of the Final Solution in 1944. The photographs were taken by members of the so-called “Sonderkommandos,” Jewish victims who were forced to participate in the genocide of their own people by removing the Nazis’ victims from the gas chambers and destroying the corpses through fire or mass burial (sometimes, in response to wartime stringencies, both). The identity of the photographer/s is uncertain; surviving records left by members of the Sonderkommandos indicate the names of those involved in making the images. These records also show that they were able to smuggle the camera into the camp and the film out again, in a toothpaste tube, with the assistance of the Polish Underground (10-11). These are the only surviving images that show any aspect of the gas chamber operations, and because they represent an act of resistance by victims of genocide, they have retained an exceptional status among Holocaust sources. However, their exhibition in Paris was considered by some to be a provocation-either to Holocaust deniers, who would challenge the veracity of these admittedly poor images, or to more sophisticated viewers who expressed affinities with Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker, whose remarkable documentary “Shoah” (1985) proscribed the use of archival images in favor of eyewitness testimony and film shot at the scenes of the crimes in the 1970s-80s. Holocaust deniers, of course, have never depended on actual evidence to promulgate their delusions. On ethical and aesthetic grounds, the second set of criticisms is more substantial and reflects a peculiarly French concern with a kind of Bilderverbot (prohibition of religious images). Wajcman accused Didi-Huberman of fetishizing these images in a perversely Christian fashion (“the passion of the image” 52). The exceptional status of the Sonderkommando photographs thus opens up debate about the memory and visual representation of the Holocaust in a nation which has not yet come to terms with its “Vichy syndrome,” to apply Henry Rousso’s term.²
 
Exceptional, unique, special: these are the English equivalents of the German prefix sonder. In the Nazis’ perversion of the German language, Sonder-nouns became hallmark euphemisms: Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) meant murder; Sonderkommandos (special operatives or units) meant surviving victims who had to perform inhumanly gruesome tasks, or die. Didi-Huberman refers to them as “living beings in spite of all, very provisional survivors,” whose extinction was always intended (106). The Sonderkommandos were regularly purged; the Nazis did not intend them to survive to offer their testimony. Victims such as Zalmen Gradowski, who could barely recognize themselves as human beings alive in the camps, existed as if perpetually “on the threshold of the tomb”-their own, their families’, their people’s (163). These uniquely suffering individuals were uniquely placed to witness genocide; they were, to coin a term, Sonderzeugen (special witnesses, all male). Given their continued presence at their intended extermination, their witnessing “in spite of all” renders their verbal and visual testimony invaluable. Didi-Huberman argues in favor of the exhibition of precisely these photographs because they depict the perspective of victims who were deliberately deprived of everything fundamental to human existence and yet, “in spite of all,” managed to resist deliberately, in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, in order to provide testimony to the crimes against them and their people. For all these reasons, Didi-Huberman argues, these images not only should but must be viewed.
 
Most provocatively, for his opponents, Didi-Huberman opens his essay with the assertion, “In order to know, we must imagine for ourselves” (3). The idea that anything about the Holocaust-surely one of the best documented and most thoroughly researched crimes in history-and particularly about the experience of the Sonderkommandos needs to be “imagined” caused an uproar of misunderstanding. Those supporting Lanzmann’s formal proscription read Didi-Huberman to be invoking an impossible kind of empathetic evidence, indeed an irresponsible form of subjective speculation. But Didi-Huberman offers a more specific and more useful understanding of the nature of this particular photographic evidence. He writes, “An image without imagination is quite simply an image that one didn’t spend the time to work on” (116). Work is required of ethically- and historically-minded viewers. He reminds us of the Nazi intention to document the genocide, which produced a massive amount of damning evidence even after they changed their minds in the midst of the war and began to destroy it. Against this intention to document successful destruction, he places the Sonderkommandos’ heroic efforts to document criminal destruction as successful resistance. Recalling the words of Sonderkommando survivor Filip Mueller (one of the most haunting witnesses in “Shoah”), Didi-Huberman argues that just as the surviving victim claims that the impossible was real and that “one must imagine” or one cannot conceive of Auschwitz, so too must we challenge the limits of the visible and our understanding. In German, this would be rendered as vorstellen: “to imagine” is “to place before oneself” what is otherwise unknowable; thus imagining is an act that bears with it an ethical imperative, because knowledge has been gained and we are therefore responsible for it. As Didi-Huberman argues, “To imagine in spite of all, which calls for a difficult ethics of the image: neither the invisible par excellence (the laziness of the aesthete), nor the icon of horror (the laziness of the believer), nor the mere document (the laziness of the learned). . . . I would say that here the image is the eye of history: its tenacious function of making visible” (39).
 
And since even the Nazis appear to have refrained from filming or photographing the actual operations of the gas chambers (though of course this evidence may have been destroyed), these images are the most proximate available. Critics have worried that the exhibition of these four images might inspire deniers or draw only perversely attracted viewers who wished to be titillated by horror. Attempting to “imagine” oneself in the midst of this most inhumane of human crimes, they argued, created an ethical risk of either dishonoring the experience and memory of the victims, or placing the viewer in the untenable position of the perpetrators. They also feared that these partially legible images depicting only a subset of the destruction process would come to be seen as representative of the entire genocide, thus reducing the scope, scale and extension of the horror to a few randomly captured moments. But the critics were, according to Didi-Huberman, creating an impossibly high bar for admissible evidence. Since there is no single image which can depict the entire Holocaust in its ghastly diversity, they refused to view any other actual images of the genocide, and turned Lanzmann’s ethical, situational decision into a dogmatic one. Critics objecting to the lack of representativeness in these images fall into a reductive trap: “Wajcman sought the all image, the unique and integral image of the Shoah; having found only not-all images, he dismisses all images” (124). Didi-Huberman plays with the notion of comprehensiveness while critiquing the possibly fetishistic delectation of iconic images-an ethical risk particularly in the case of these “special” photographs.
 
In the context of this very French debate, Didi-Huberman insists on the necessity of viewing these images, which had so improbably been created and more improbably survived: “They are infinitely precious to us today. They are demanding too, for they require archeological work. We must dig again in their ever so fragile temporality” (47). Here he adds a significant dimension to the ethics of historical memory: mere viewing is insufficient. It is not enough to look at the exhibit, in order to “never forget.” These images represent a “flash,” in Walter Benjamin’s terms: they are a rip, or a “rend” to use Didi-Huberman’s term, in the flux of time (47). Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” sees such moments as dangerous and significant; in these moments, history is recognized as a process rather than a static or given “past.” The second half of Images in Spite of All, written in response to the storm of criticism (rather like Benjamin’s famous “angel of history,” blown backwards into the future yet still looking at the past), articulates the meaning of “imagining” in response to the inspirational “rend” in time. In a certain sense, all historical understanding requires an intuitive leap into the abstraction of historical distance; R.G. Collingwood on “historical re-enactment” or Wilhelm Dilthey on subjectivity would be useful here, but Didi-Huberman speaks from within a poststructuralist, primarily Lacanian and Foucauldian critical framework. This intuitive leap is not easy; it requires imaginative “work,” which must not be confused with irresponsibly assuming that one can “feel” or “identify with” the trauma that others felt or experienced.
 
In order to imaginatively “see” the four photographs and attempt the archaeological work, Didi-Huberman argues, first of all they must be seen together rather than separately. They were taken in a sequence and they were taken under duress, which is more vivid when they are seen together. Reproductions of the images often crop them so as to highlight the figures, presumably because this is seen as the most useful documentary element, showing the victims themselves; they also realign the image so that the figures appear more “natural,” standing straight up. The photos have also been retouched to outline distinct female figures (35-6). While this ostensibly retrieves the possibility of some individual identity, these retouched images also tend to make the women look young and attractive in a disturbingly sexualized manner (it’s impossible to know the actual ages or names of these female victims, and the sexualizing of the images suggests the Nazis’ gaze rather than the photographer’s). Didi-Huberman highlights the way in which cropping out the original blackness at the edges of the images dislocates the photos from their original perspective and deletes information about their authorship: the fact that the clandestine photographer had to hide in the crematorium building and shoot the images through a doorway or window, which contributed to their blurriness and distorted angles (34-6).
 
Using the images as they were made, in a series, offers the possibility of montage. For Didi-Huberman, montage is a technique that “opens up our apprehension of history and makes it more complex. . . . it gives us access to the singularities of time and hence to its essential multiplicity” (121). No single image, however iconic, comprehends the diversity of a flow of single instants that is the human experience of reality. The films of Jean-Luc Goddard and Alain Renais suggest to Didi-Huberman a mode of expressing that diversity through motion in time (discussed at length in the last two sections). A montage of text and images can contribute to the same imaginative work in historical inquiry. Just as for the filmmaker there is no one image, but rather images working together as film, for the historically sensitive viewer no photograph should stand alone or be assumed to speak for itself. Montage is thus potentially a new ideal form for illustrated historical narrative, and histories derived from visual evidence. Didi-Huberman argues that “montage intensifies the image and gives the visual experience a power that our visible certainties or habits have the effect of pacifying, or veiling” (136), drawing an allusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Notorious, where fear is instilled via distillation (the audience knows that Cary Grant is uncovering the secrets hidden behind vintages of wine, but afraid that he will be caught in the act). Here Didi-Huberman is also alluding to an argument developed throughout his oeuvre, about a distinction between the visible and the visual, the realm of the apparent and the realm of the transcendent. The visual will only sometimes, through art, appear in traces: “With the visible, we are of course in the realm of what manifests itself. The visual, by contrast, would designate that irregular net of event-symptoms that reaches the visible as so many gleams or radiances, ‘traces of articulation,’ as so many indices…. Indices of what? Of something-a work, a memory in process-that has nowhere been fully described, attested, or set down in an archive, because its signifying ‘material’ is first of all the image” (Confronting 31). In his Confronting Images (2005), Didi-Huberman goes into greater detail about the way a Renaissance painter such as Fra Angelico could deploy “a whack of white” to signify divine miracles such as the Annunciation (24). Didi-Huberman’s attention to figuring the visual iconically, a distinctive Christian art practice, opened him to criticism once the images under scrutiny were Holocaust photographs. If the montage produced a holy icon, the critics argued, Didi-Huberman’s ethical quest to honor the memory of the victims was a failure. No “rend,” no differend, no trace, no “whack” nor any visual transcendence was to be received through the document of suffering, because none was offered to the victims.
 
These photographs haunt us, which is one way of saying that we can’t seem to see them or talk about them sufficiently to exorcise the evil that travels with them. Perhaps the sonder attribute of these four photographs can be revised, not as a statement of the limits of representation, but as an exception that provokes new rules. They remain contentious because of the ethical stakes involved in acknowledging the humanity of the crime they record. Didi-Huberman reminds us that these four exceptional images survive “in spite of all,” and as such demand imaginative work in order to be received and recorded within memory “in spite of all.”