Claude Lanzmann belongs to a breed of Jew rare in England: defiant rather than
discreet. At once Parisian and globetrotting, he combines remnants of
leftist sympathies (the Soviet Union was for a long time “comme un ciel sur
ma tête”) with defence of Israel. His films Pourquoi Israel? and Tsahal
(about the Israeli Defence Force) celebrate both Jewish survival against the
odds and the reappropriation of manliness after centuries of sufferance,
study and “huckstering”, as a famous apostate put it. Lanzmann’s reference
to “drones” – the unmanned aircraft used in modern warfare – as “une
merveilleuse invention israélienne” is just the kind of remark to nettle the
bien-pensants.
Milling away right and left, like one of Byron’s favourite pugilists, Daniel
“the Jew” Mendoza, this shameless and readable autobiography spills out in
bursts of detailed reminiscence and accurate indignation. Lanzmann dictated
the plump text to secretaries whose dexterity spared a lifelong journalist,
now in his eighties, from the sedate tedium of tapping a keyboard.
Ebullience unimpaired, Le Lièvre de Patagonie leaps from episode to episode
of a vie mouvementée. What’s Patagonia got to do with it? Lanzmann saw one
of the famous local hares there, as he did its Polish cousin passing, like a
comment, under the rusted wire of a concentration camp. An Argentinian
story, cited as epigraph, tells of one which asks a pack of chasing hounds
“‘Où allons-nous?’. . . ‘À la fin de ta vie’, criaient les chiens . . .”.
There is pain here and passion and ruefulness, and a zest of rancour, but no
symptom of elderly resignation: “J’aime la vie à la folie”. Lanzmann remains
a man of the present tense.
He appears to have had many lives, and no few loves. An active Resistance
fighter in his teens, he has been both a popular journalist, for France-Soir
and France-Dimanche (where he was one of a renowned team of rewriters), and
– during the plus beaux jours of Saint Germain-des-Prés – a member of the
“family” of intimates and acolytes surrounding Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir. He was an early contributor to their house mag, Les Temps
Modernes, of which he is now Editor-in-Chief. The young Claude was, for
several happy years, Le Castor’s live-in lover, if not her only one: before
they first went to bed, she warned him that six other people were already in
the frame.
His mother, Paulette, was a force of nature, self-willed, demanding and
uninhibited. After having three children, she quit her husband because, as
Lanzmann declares with typical forthrightness, he wanted to “sodomize” her.
She took up with a sequence of bohemian lovers, with whom she survived the
round-ups of Occupied France; on one occasion, after being taken into German
custody. The Orléans chief of police, a poet in his spare time, lied to save
her and her lover, another poet whom he recognized, and then told them to
get out of town immediately.
When Paulette, a voluble stammerer, took her son shoe-shopping in wartime
Paris, she made such a protracted, attention-drawing drama of the selection
that “elle me faisait peur, elle me faisait honte, je me suis conduit cet
après-midi-là en véritable anti-Sémite, dans sa variante . . . la plus
répugnante, le Juif antisémite”. Paulette later had to buy off a Gestapo man
(such blackmail – pay or be deported – was common towards the end of the
Occupation), but the family, if never intact, survived to 1944 without
deportations; one pair of grandparents, first-generation Bretons, endured
thanks to the solidarity of neighbours who swore to the Germans that they
were native farmers like themselves.
Lanzmann’s revulsion at human cruelty began at the age of five or six. His
first chapter begins “La guillotine . . .” and recalls his childhood horror
when a maid took him to see the film L’Affaire du courrier de Lyon (1937),
in which an innocent man is decapitated. His own lack of neck (his head
appears ensconced in powerful shoulders) seems almost to be the physical
expression of an abiding horror of judicial killing. His disgust for Franco,
who was ordering executions even on his deathbed, Vychinski (“le
Fouquier-Tinville de la Grand Terreur”), Urvalek (“l’aboyeur tchèque” in the
Slansky show trial), Freisler (Hitler’s ranting prosecutor) as well as the
unnamed Saudi executioners, who arrive in white Mercedes, remains unabated.
He is always on the side of the victim: “Tant de derniers regards me
hanteront pour toujours”. He is no less haunted by today’s Islamists with
their “minables vidéos . . . tournées par les tueurs eux-mêmes, qui se
voulaient terrorisantes et le sont en effet”.
Lanzmann’s acquaintance with death is not only on a screen. During the war,
while still at the lycée in Clermont-Ferrand, he became a member of the
young Communists and a courier for deliveries of arms to the Resistance. He
and a Jewish schoolgirl, Hélène Hoffnung – both carrying identity cards
stamped “JUIF” – collected suitcases at the railway station and carried them
past German patrols. When the latter looked curious, the two would become
enlaced in a parody of passion. They returned covered with flagrant evidence
of passion, “alors que rien de sexuel n’exista entre nous”. Later, as a
full-blown Résistant in the Haute-Loire, Claude was sent to collect a
trailer loaded with arms, escorted by an older man called Biegelmann who was
armed with a pistol. When they were stopped by a sole member of the Milice,
Biegelmann lost his nerve. As they were being led away, Lanzmann’s elderly
father (a shadowy figure most of the time) happened to ride up on a bicycle
and shot the milicien with his Colt 11.43. Biegelmann has never been
forgiven.
Lanzmann only somewhat admires Marcel Ophüls’s Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1972),
one of the first documentaries to open the dossier of French collaboration
and docility under the Occupation. He insists that Clermont-Ferrand (the
source of Ophüls’s montage) was unfairly stigmatized as Pétainiste. His
favourite prof in that city was a Communist recruiter for the Resistance. In
1943, the eighteen-year-old Claude and some of his previous classmates
ambushed a German platoon. One of them, Claude Baccot, was killed when the
Germans returned fire: “He is always with me”. Lanzmann treats the theme of
death as Sisyphus his rock: a burden that defines him.
Claude and his fellow lycéens were introduced to the Communist Party by his
Communist father (who had survived a gas attack on the Somme in 1917, after
volunteering at the age of seventeen in 1914). Disillusionment with it began
(before he had read a word of Marx) when he was ordered to steal a load of
arms from the chateau of the patriotic Vicomte who commanded his Resistance
unit. When Lanzmann refused, he was condemned to death by the Party, a
sentence they did not have occasion to carry out before he was back at
school in Paris after the Liberation. His comrade Jean Poperen – later “un
éléphant considerable” under President Mitterrand – was then able to demand
that it be rescinded by “les cons”, the apparatchiks whose Party he, too,
soon quit.
After the Liberation, Lanzmann’s fellow khâgneux at the elite Lycée
Louis-le-Grand moved to have a classroom named in honour of an old boy,
Robert Brasillach, the anti-Semite and collabo who had recently been
condemned to death. Lanzmann expresses no pity for this particular victim of
a firing squad. He and his fellow outsider Jean Cau – an intellectual
Rastignac, eager to lose his Languedoc accent and make it in Paris –
publicly denounced their classmates as a “ramassis de traîtres” (bunch of
traitors). Having been a maquisard under fire while the Parisian jeunesse
dorée kept their empty heads down, Lanzmann took this as an opportunity to
compensate for the moment in 1938 when, at the modishly anti-Semitic Lycée
Condorcet, he was accused of being a Jew, and denied it. Brasillach did not
receive his plaque.
Sartre stands out as a dominant influence, but is said to be given to “délires
d’ivrognerie” (drunken ravings) as well as making seigneurial claims on
young women and, especially after 1968, holding opinions verging on madness
(Maoism was his Viagra). Beauvoir, who was almost twenty years older than
Lanzmann, escapes censure both here and in a recent hagiographical volume of
Les Temps Modernes in which only her scorn for motherhood is seen as
slightly tarnishing her saintliness.
Sartre’s 1946 Réflexions sur la question juive was a liberating influence on
the young Claude. He was incited by it to “assume” his (irreligious)
Jewishness and wear it with pride. Later, he realized that Sartre had
constructed his “Jew” with small knowledge either of Jewish culture or of
individual Jews. Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) is never said to have been a
riposte to the Master’s preconceptions but it served that purpose, among
others more urgent and significant. A nice, previously unreported moment in
Sartre’s thoroughly documented life has him and Lanzmann coming out of a
Montparnasse screening of David Lean’s Brief Encounter transformed into
sentimental softies, streaming with tears.
Although a first-class reporter, Lanzmann has contributed nothing of note to
literature or to philosophy. While he and Jean Cau were still students, Cau
applied to several famous writers asking for the post of secretary. Sartre
alone answered. Cau then joined the Temps Modernes team, to which Lanzmann
soon gained admission. If veneration for Sartre is proclaimed throughout
this book (he is to Lanzmann what de Gaulle became for André Malraux, whose
Antimémoires, more grandiose and less reliable, have something of Lanzmann’s
egotistic verve), Sartre is not spared, however, either on account of his
callous romanticism (world events were always read in the light of
preconceived Manichaean categories) nor, in particular, with regard to his
involvement with Lanzmann’s sister, Évelyne, who committed suicide in
November (still a painful month for Lanzmann) 1966, when she was thirty-six.
Her latest lover, the poet Claude Roy, was an immediate scapegoat, since he
had recently broken with her and returned to his wife. However, the
creepiest moment in the whole narrative describes how, when Évelyne was
making her stage debut, Simone de Beauvoir and Lanzmann, now a contingent
lover officially embraced by Sartre, went to see her in Sartre’s play Huis
Clos (locus of “L’enfer, c’est les autres”). Lanzmann soon sensed that
Sartre was preparing to play the devil’s role. The more he praised Évelyne’s
performance, the more certain was Lanzmann that Sartre intended to set her
up (in the usual flat in the rue Jacob) as his contingent lover: he and Le
Castor would then each have their pet Lanzmann.
The voluble author would amount to little more than a footnote in the épopée
Sartrienne were it not for one masterpiece: Shoah. After seeing the film,
Jean Daniel, the elegant editor of the Nouvel Observateur, told its maker:
“Cela justifie une vie”. Less directed than compiled, the film lasts nine
hours and, for all the flair, persistence and courage involved in its
composition, remains sui generis: to call it a work of art, as flatterers
have, claims too much for its formal qualities and too little for its
unblinking uniqueness. No other documentaries on the Holocaust (Alain
Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard of 1956 was the first and, in its tact, the
most artful) can match Shoah’s implacable pursuit of the witnesses of what
Raul Hilberg (an inspiring source) called, in his pioneering 1960 history of
mechanized mass murder, “The Destruction of the European Jews”. Avoiding
rhetoric and discounting the agony of the victims, Hilberg adopted Primo
Levi’s tone, that of a “factory report”, and concentrated on the German
organizational apparatus.
Lanzmann cleaves to a similar line, but holds tight to real people rather than
to statistics. The (sometimes hidden) camera lingers, sometimes unsteadily,
often artlessly, on faces and places, while the microphone picks up speech
that, by its raw flow or sudden caesuras, reveals what was for so long
unseen and unsaid. The horror grows and grows, unalleviated by sententious
phrases or clever montage. Lanzmann’s thorny genius expressed itself, over a
decade of assembly impeded by lack of funds, by threats and actual incidents
of violence, and by the difficulty of locating survivors and killers,
bystanders and escapees, in a work which at once bears a single signature
and carries no evidence of having been rigged by a selfconscious auteur.
Want of tact (even with regard to the bladders of the spectators) and
unevenness of texture make Shoah a film that is never a movie. Not all
memory’s children are muses.
A bulky rock thrown into the pool of post-war forgiving and forgetfulness,
Shoah was criticized (not least by the previously effusive Jean Daniel) for
being “anti-Polish”, as if it was a symptom of malice to disclose the
complicity of many Poles in the transport and slaughter of their fellow
citizens. The village of Auschwitz itself had been 80 per cent Jewish before
the war, but its inhabitants in the early 1980s had only vague memories of
who might once have lived in the houses many of them had appropriated. As
Primo Levi feared, even the ghosts of the Jews have been scheduled, by
Holocaust deniers, for extermination. Lanzmann pulled open and held back a
curtain which it would have suited a range of interests and ideologies to
leave closed.
After the war, Polish Communists echoed the Russians in designating those who
died in the camps only as “victims of fascism”. The Jews who had been all
but erased as a people, with the eager help of Ukrainians and Balts, among
many others, were filed as a generalized statistic which would lend pathos
to the Stalinist state which was itself increasingly (and soon murderously)
anti-Semitic from 1943 onwards. The only first-hand source to rival (and
precede) Shoah is Vasily Grossman’s account of the massacres, most memorably
of Kiev’s guileless Jews at Babi Yar. Lanzmann endorses Jonathan Littell’s
reimagination of the scene in his prizewinning novel Les Bienveillantes
(reviewed in the TLS, November 17, 2006), but not the novel as a whole,
without reference to its probable origin in Grossman, whose great novel Life
and Fate was impounded by the NKVD (one copy was smuggled out).
The reaction of many Poles in particular to the screening of Shoah was that
the Jews were persecuting them again. As Lanzmann writes, “La fantastique
polonaise recherchait alors toujours l’égalité de sacrifice avec les Juifs .
. . les pertes polonaises n’atteignirent jamais les trois millions
revendiqués par l’imaginaire patriotique . . . . À la racine de cette
comptabilité étonnante et macabre, il y avait . . . une volonté
d’effacement”. (“The Polish fantasy was, at the time, constantly to seek
equality of sacrifice with the Jews . . . . Polish losses never reached the
three million claimed by the patriotic imagination . . . . At the root of
this astonishing and macabre accountancy lay a desire for concealment.”)
Endemic Polish anti-Semitism showed itself again when Lanzmann was shooting
in Chelmno in the 1970s. Having killed a pig, the mayor invited him and his
helpers to a feast at which he explained that the Jews had been killed
because they were “les plus riches”, and then handed Lanzmann a $150 bill
for the dinner. Elsewhere, Lanzmann treats with scorn both Andrzej Wajda’s
gloatingly anti-Semitic post-war film La Terre de la Grande Promesse and
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play, Rubbish, Death and the City, which
pillories Jewish property developers in post-war Frankfurt.
Lanzmann always appears intimately adjacent to the Sartrean bande; Jewishness
set him at a slight angle to its ideological world. Yet he, too, was, for a
long while, willing to believe all kinds of myths about the exemplary virtue
of the ALN and the FLN. A veil of fraternity cloaked the internecine
savagery of Algeria’s chefs historiques. Frantz Fanon, for whom Lanzmann
conceived an instant devotion, even persuaded him that the freedom fighters
took time out between battles to study Sartre’s Critique de la raison
dialectique. He later discovered that Fanon had delivered one base-camp
conference on the subject, which manifestly went over the heads of his
audience.
Lanzmann also recalls that Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika, now the President of
Algeria, recognized him, in Sartre’s company, as a Jew and promised that
after independence Algeria would send a mission to Israel: his country had,
he said, an “enormous amount to learn” from the Jews. In the event,
Bouteflika announced only that Algeria would send 100,000 men to liberate
Palestine.
French anti-Semitism has been a regular feature of Lanzmann’s life. Soon after
the war, he went to lecture in occupied Germany, where a French officer who
was a marquis made a point of unabbreviated farting during their
conversations; a French woman, who had seemed amenable, responded to his
sexual advances by saying that she could never sleep with a Jew. Lanzmann
seems to have got on well with young Germans, however, to whom he lectured
on the dread topic. One comes to suspect that even Sartre’s
anti-anti-Semitism had more to do with hostility to bourgeois idées reçues
than with any concern for real people. Just before the Six Day war, he
allowed himself to be fêted and flattered by President Nasser, for whom de
Gaulle had a distinct partiality. However, while on an excursion to refugees
in the Gaza Strip, Sartre abruptly challenged his hosts to explain why the
Arabs, with all their wealth and their vast territory, did nothing to
resettle them, but preferred to blame Israel. He then reverted to
ideological type and said that the Arabs should be ashamed to leave their
brothers to be fed and sheltered by the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency, “a tool of American imperialism”. Sartre and de Gaulle, même combat:
both saw America as the paramount evil. Lanzmann, by contrast, emerges sûr
de lui-même, valiant for truth and undiplomatic in its proclamation.
Claude Lanzmann
LE LIÈVRE DE PATAGONIE
Mémoires 558pp. Gallimard. ¤25.
978 2 07 012051 2
Frederic Raphael’s most recent novel is Fame and Fortune, 2007. Ticks
and Crosses, the fourth volume of his Personal Terms series, was published
last year.
