Afterword to my dissertation:

The Shadow of the Object: Mourning and Melancholia in Autobiographical Film and Video about the Holocaust

You who live safe In your warm houses,

You who find, returning in the evening,

Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider if this is a man

Who works in the mud

Who does not know peace

Who fights for a scrap of bread

Who dies because of a yes or a no.

Consider if this is a woman,

Without hair and without name

With no more strength to remember,

Her eyes empty and her womb cold Like a frog in winter.

Meditate that this came about:

I commend these words to you.

Carve them in your hearts

At home, in the street,

Going to bed, rising;

Repeat them to your children,

Or may your house fall apart,

May illness impede you,

May your children turn their faces from you.

Primo Levi - If this is a Man

In confronting visual representations of the Holocaust it is impossible not to be shaken to the core of one's being. For, as Julia Kristeva writes, "these monstrous and painful spectacles disturb our mechanisms of perception and representation. Our symbolic modes are emptied, petrified, nearly annihilated, as if they were overwhelmed or destroyed by an all too powerful force."1 That my personal reactions, then, have influenced my dissertation, I cannot deny. Thus I thought it fair to fill you, the reader, in on my background - the interpretative horizon that inevitably has to some extent oriented this study.

As mentioned at the outset of my project, I was born and raised in postwar Germany - a country emotionally numb, marked by frantic consumption and a manic denial of historical culpability. Back then, the Germany I grew up in displayed a cultivated amnesia about the Holocaust in the midst of economic prosperity. In Margarate von Trotta's film Marianne and Juliane (Die Bleierne Zeit, 1981) the young protagonist during a class room screening of Alain Resnais's Night and Fog watches for the first time footage of concentration camps and is overcome by nausea. Her revulsion at the sight of Nazi atrocities perhaps most closely resembles my own shock when I as a teenager found out about the Holocaust. Similarly to Marianne I acted out my emotional paralysis in rebelliousness against the authoritarian and repressive educational system in which I grew up. Expelled from the Gymnasium (the German prep school for the university) I joined Aktion Suehnezeichen (Action for Reconciliation) a German organization devoted to doing amends for the crimes of the Holocaust by sending young Germans to needy places in various countries.

Through the years I have kept the very history textbook that told me in less than a couple of pages about the Nazi Genocide. Although, when I was thirteen years old I did not understand or fathom anything of what I read, there was accompanying the text an image of a Jewish woman whose grief-stricken face expressed infinitely more than those few condensed paragraphs could ever convey. This photograph - piercing me with an uncanny shock of recognition, the kind of intensely charged personal response Roland Barthes called the punctum - stood with me. 2 Its caption bluntly read: "Nachdem Ausladen in Auschwitz" (upon arrival in Auschwitz) chillingly dehumanizing the depicted woman, erasing her individuality and any clues as to her whereabouts. The picture was cropped so that her gaze appeared to be directed outside the frame to a space beyond. Kept away from my inquisitive eyes, the ghastly territory of annihilation her horror-filled eyes must have taken in was revealed to me some time later upon seeing some of the countless photographs and films documenting shorn emaciated inmates and piles of dead bodies. Retroactively it dawned on me what fate had surely awaited her.

I underwent psychoanalysis during the time I worked out my dissertation proposal. (1996) On the couch I re-entered the leaden atmosphere in which I had grown up and which I had always imagined I had finally escaped by coming to America. Until then I had no inkling that the ghosts of the past were still within me and how much my upbringing had determined my actions in the present. Whereas earlier I had wished I could somehow eradicate my national background, I gradually came to realize how inextricably I was still linked to my native heritage. Since my parents were raised during the Hitler regime they had been subjected to the constant indoctrination of Nazi ideology during their school years. Having learned to live within a totalitarian system they inevitably would have had to be influenced one way or another - an influence that would bear on their children. In this sense, then, the larger overarching social structures were replicated in my own family against which I revolted.

In the course of my analysis I also revisited the death of my mother who had died some years earlier of breast cancer. (1984) I had returned to Germany to spend her last days with her. Having received radiation and chemo-treatment she physically resembled the emaciated skeletons of Holocaust victims. Confronted with my mother's harrowing presence the dormant mental imprint of the abject Jewish woman in my textbook resurfaced in my mind. Although at the time when I first saw her photo I was not aware of the connection, I realized after much soul searching that this anonymous woman had all along reminded me of my mother. Indeed precisely because her image had been charged with a transferentially overdetermined threat of loss, it had allowed me to connect empathetically with the victims and their inconsolable bereavement.

My emotional identification with the victims, I confess, then derived from the love for my own mother and betrayed the kind of melancholic sorrow Jacques Derrida describes as that "deadly infidelity" that does not leave "the other his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove." 3 My sentimental response undoubtedly once again repeated the familiar scenario where a German can only bemoan his or her own losses. Realizing that my choice of topic was unconsciously motivated by narcissistic desires to reunite with the primary love object, I felt morally at fault. Patiently my analyst - a beautiful Jewish woman - convinced me that only when one mourns a loss that is deeply personal can one fathom those of others. I humbly accepted her interpretation and engaged in this study.

Looking back I have watched on screen textual re-enactments of traumatic loss in which survivors and their descendents obsessively return to moments of extreme anguish. As we recall trauma has been defined as an overwhelmingly violent event the individual could never consciously experience and therefore failed to assimilate. Incapable of integrating it into a narrative framework of his or her life story, the survivor nevertheless retains indelible images and haunting percepts of the overpowering event. Though unable to remember nor recall at will these disturbing memories, the victimized are driven to re-enact the terrifying scenario involuntarily in haunting nightmares, intrusive flashbacks and crippling symptoms in the vain effort to master the inundating shock retroactively.

In their tortured re-stagings they seek to address a recipient, as Cathy Caruth has told us: "It is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available." 4 Concurring with Caruth, Nanette Auherhahn and Dori Laub have pointed out that the traumatized above all seek out a responsive other who is transferentially overdetermined - frequently the primary love object. "In his search for an empathetic response the survivor often turns, internally, to the mother-child dialogue, for it is there that empathy has its inception, and hence it is this particular dialogue which the survivor attempts to re-instate." 5

As I have brought out in this study Caruth, Auherhahn and Laub's observations certainly also apply to the autobiographical films about the Holocaust. Just like the debilitating mental and physical aftereffects of trauma - these filmic encapsulations of painful dejection seek a responsive recipient. In these texts the cinematic screen analogously to the analytic mirror functions for the projection of affect-laden structures of identification engaging the audience's emotional involvement. These films stage a continual death encounter imploring the viewer to resuscitate lost love objects and cherished remnants of the past.

In this effort these texts play out overdetermined fantasies coercing the spectator to take up a destined role. Some of the films forge, as it were, an intimate I - you relation with the viewer whereas others are less direct in their solicitation of the audienceÕs position in an unconscious scenario. No matter how and to what degree rhetorical maneuvers veil the pressure upon the spectator to identify with the ghosts of the past, these narratives draw the viewer into a transferential drama to experience by proxy devastating relationships.

Some of the films made by survivors adamantly persuade the viewer to take a stance against the perpetrators and collaborators. Yet underneath their fierce message these texts are also burdened with textual traces of the very self-defeating psychic baggage that has been so damaging to survivors - the guilt of having survived when their loved ones perished. Not only do these texts seek the viewer as a judge to condemn the Nazi crimes against humanity, but also as an adjudicator for a more deep-seated kind of culpability. Staging confessions and demonstrations of love latently addressed to a transferential audience, these texts revive the absent ones as phantasmatic projections - traces of persecutory objects and eternal judges to be appeased to.

By contrast other films by survivors mesmerized the spectator with stylistic beauty immersing him/her in an Edenic pre-war world evidently disavowing at all cost the magnitude of a narcissistic injury too shameful to remember. Yet despite their hyper-vigilant rhetoric to fend off memories of unbearable disgrace, their sheer excess inevitably sheds light onto that what had to be camouflaged at all cost - aggression and ambivalence towards transferential love objects who were resurrected in the role of the projected viewer.

Overall the films by Second Generation filmmakers depict the vicissitudes of the transmission of the Holocaust and the grave legacy that has formed their identity. Marked by their parents' inadvertent projection of omnipresent traumatic memories - often involving intensely charged object ties to lost family members - their filmic work is fuelled by the wish to work through tormenting transferential reenactments. Displaying in vivo dysfunctional family relations, these films in soliciting an intimate familial gaze invite the viewer as a witnessing participant into the domestic sphere. In as much, then, as the autobiographical films about the Holocaust bear engraved traces of intense and conflictual yearnings for a vanished people, their world and traditions, they not only function as narrative figurations of bereavement but also as testimonies to the immense losses the Nazi Genocide has inflicted on victims, their children and generations to come.

I part with my project with the awareness that the psychic reverberations of the Holocaust are doomed to haunt us. May the films of survivors and their descendents remind us of the unrecoverable absence of the victims summoning us to remember and commemorate the dead.

Endnotes:

1. Julia Kristeva quoted in Andrea Liss, Trespassing through Shadows. Memory, Photography and the Holocaust, (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1998), p. 5.

2. Roland Barthes, Camera Obscura, transl. by Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), pp.26-27.

3. Jacques Derrida, Memories for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 6.

4. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience - Trauma, Narrative, History, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), p. 4.

5. Nanette Auherhahn and Dori Laub, "Holocaust Testimony," in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 448-49.