Fran/Jansy: your reactions are understandable. Being reminded of past horrors is something we naturally shun. My Austrian-born musicologist/linguist friend, Fritz Spiegl (1926-2003), who escaped by Boys’ Train after the Anschluss, went beyond your distaste for 1930s photographs. He nurtured throughout his life a deep loathing for the German language itself.
He realized that this was irrational, but found it difficult to disassociate the Nazi monsters from their barked, guttural commands. Like VN, Fritz became super-fluent in English, dispensing grammatical advice in his Daily Telegraph columns.
The cry in one of the earliest notes smuggled from the death camps was Record and Remember. (I can’t locate the original Yiddish text. Alexey might know?). Let’s not forget the many who need constant reminding: the polled USA/UK schoolchildren who think Germany were our allies in World War II. And the many DENIERS, old and neo, who resist the abundant evidence.
Incidentally, those who watch the History TV channels will be aware of vast FILM archives recording Der Fuhrer’s rise to power, the attempted Final Solution, and his ignominious downfall. The LIFE magazine STILL photos, however crisp and chilling, really are melyuzga (small fry) in comparison.
SKB
On 18/07/2010 18:15, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Fran Assa on 1930s Berlin photographs: I for one won't open these photos. I do not even write the H word. I use Der Fuhrer instead. It may be some form of animism, but to replicate the images, even the name, to me is a form of having these monsters live on. Somehow I think VN would agree.
JM: I deleted the images as soon as they reappeared at the VN List. I chided myself because they are historical items but, although I wouldn't have minded to keep them printed inside a book, I refused to have them in my archives in a computer - it's another instance of animism, perhaps. I found the relation bt these images and what VN saw while he lived in Berlin or what he would think about them a very strange preoccupation. Curiously, it was Walter Benjamin's suicide that came to my mind, the destruction of any stable reference in art, culture, "humanity," something that I feel to be worse than physical obliteration.