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> writings In the late 80’s a curator from the Guggenheim Museum in New York came to visit my studio. Because there were works in the studio about the reception of the Holocaust in film and literature we got into a more general conversation about Jewish identity. We talked for some time too about the power structures in the various museums in New York City and about where in the museum hierarchy Jews were situated. A very candid,interesting and eye opening conversation. She was also Jewish and roughly my age and somehow we ended up talking about our sense of Jewishness as children and she asked me if any other religion had ever been attractive or tempting growing up. And it seems that both of us had thought briefly of converting to Catholicism around the ages of 9 and 10. Oddly, both of us had been prompted to this momentary Catholic fervor by the same Hollywood film - The Song of Bernadette. The film starred Jennifer Jones as the young peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous who sees or rather “is chosen by God” to see the vision of a “Beautiful Lady” in the town of Lourdes in 1858. So these two sweet middle class pre-pubescent Jewish girls were attracted to the romance of Catholicism by this Hollywood depiction of a young Catholic nuns’ suffering born in silence. After the opening credits to the film but before the action begins there are a few introductory captions, the last of which reads:”For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible.” When I thought back over the years on that desire to convert to Catholicism I had always attributed that momentary lapse to having osmosed and identified with the misogyny of American mass culture. But after this meeting, I was no longer convinced that the catch all of patriarchy was to blame, but rather some intuitive recognition of Jewish identity as suffering. I bought a copy of the film and saw it again for the first time in nearly 40 years. It was originally released in 1943, 10 years before I was born and 6 years before my parents emigrated to America from Eastern Europe. I was astonished to hear the following words coming from the mouth of Vincent Price, of all people - so astonished that I rewound and listened at least half a dozen times more: “Good news, Monsieur Mayor - the holocaust will spread no more - I have found a way to stop it.” The word holocaust here referring to the mass pilgrimage on foot from all over the French countryside to the small and now overcrowded town of Lourdes where a curative spring had bubbled up through the soil on the site of this miraculous visitation to a young peasant girl. In The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. George Steiner imagines for us that Hitler has successfully escaped war ravaged Berlin and made his way to the jungles of South America. There he is finally caught by a handful of intrepid Nazi hunters who decide to try him on the spot. Steiner put these words into the mouth of Adolf Hitler as he defends himself on the witness stand: “You call me a tyrant, an enslaver. What tyranny, what enslavement has been more oppressive, has branded the skin and soul of man more deeply than the sick fantasies of the Jew? You are not God-killers, but God-makers. And that is infinitely worse. The Jew invented conscience and left man a guilty serf.” Recently, in the New York Review of Books, I came across a review of the collected poems of Boris Slutsky. He had been a member of the Soviet Writer’s Union. He was born in 1919. He was Jewish. His poetry spans the years under Stalin, the Nazi invasion and nearly the duration of the cold war. After his death it was discovered that well over half of his writings remained unpublished, the implication being that they could not have been published in the political climate at the time. His work is described in this review as “the most valuable body of individual poetic testimony to the experience of the Russians under Soviet rule”. In the late 60’s and early 70’s my mother’s basement and den served as a refuge for newly arrived immigrants from the communist Eastern Bloc, a halfway house for numerous Hungarians who hadn’t yet fled in 1956. All of these new arrivals seemed to harbor the same peculiar desire - to see Dr. Zhivago. In those days, the forbidden film, banned in Hungary, was always playing in some obscure art house in Manhattan and I was repeatedly forced to see this 3 hour long sentimental film with whatever newcomer insisted on seeing it. By the time I graduated from high school I must have seen the film more than half a dozen times. In a meeting with the scholar Dora Apel who was working on a book about artists born after the conclusion of the war who have made work about the Holocaust, these excursions into Manhattan from suburbia with various Hungarian immigrants - some of whom could barely speak English -came up. She too had seen Dr. Zhivago in her teens. Given the number of times I had seen the film back then it came as a surprise to me to discover that I could only remember one scene in the film with any clarity. It is the scene in which the young girl, played by Rita Tushingham, is asked by her father’s half -brother , played by Alec Guiness, “How did you come to be lost?” It is the scene that opens and closes the film.. And she replies “I was walking with my father (.....) and he let go of my hand. He let go of my hand! And I was lost.” This scene was also the only scene that my scholar friend Dora remembered. Slutsky, as it turns out, had been among the writers who had participated in the expulsion of Boris Pasternak from the Writer’s Union after the publication of Dr. Zhivago abroad. It was an act he perceived as patriotic at the time and one he was later to regret. When I returned home from my walk to Prachatice I had many images to edit and many experiences to absorb. With the metaphor of journey in mind I sat down and read a travel book. When I finished graduate school I worked for an art consultant who had known Bruce Chatwin and was quite fond of him, she suggested his writings to me. So it was while reading one of his books that I began to sort out my thoughts. I imagine now that I must have selected this particular book by Chatwin based solely on the aptness of it’s title. Here is what I found in his What Am I Doing Here in a chapter entitled Werner Herzog in Ghana - “He (Werner Herzog) was also the only person with whom I could have a one-to-one conversation on what I would call the sacramental aspect of walking. He and I share the belief that walking is not simply therapeutic for oneself but is a poetic activity that can cure the world of it’s ills. He sums up his position in a stern pronouncement ‘Walking is virtue, tourism deadly sin’.” It is from this chapter of Chatwin’s book that I learned that in 1974 Herzog had set out on foot from Munich and walked to Paris. He had learned that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill, perhaps dying and he believed that if he walked to Paris to see her he could save her. Eisner was a film critic and an associate of Fritz Lang. She had helped to found the Cinémathéque in Paris after emigrating there in the 30’s. She was a great supporter of the new German cinema and Herzog was, according to Chatwin, her favorite. Herzog set out on the 23rd of November and arrived in Paris on December 14th. It had taken him 22 days to walk from Munich to Paris. It had taken the same number of days to walk from Helmbrechts to Prachatice. And Lotte Eisner, she went on to live for another ten years. A while later I discovered that Herzog had kept notes, a diary of his walk. It had been published under the title Of Walking in Ice, but was now out of print. Amazon.com found me a copy. Herzog was just three years old when the war ended and he began his career in film only shortly before Albert Speer completed his twenty year prison sentence in Spandau prison. In 1945, Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and later his Minister of Armaments, was tried by the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, along with numerous high-ranking Nazi officials. Unlike most of the others, who were found guilty and sentenced to death, the urbane, handsome, charming and self-serving Speer was sentenced to only twenty years in prison. Spandau prison was located in Berlin and was administered by the four occupying powers: the British, the French, the Soviets and the Americans. In the summer of 1947 the Americans gave the prisoners (all German war criminals) permission to garden the exterior space at Spandau - then described as “a 6000 square meter wilderness”. This wilderness was later described by one American colonel as “Speer’s Garden of Eden”. Speer had laid out a path in the garden he created. It began as an exercise path but in September of 1954 he decided to think of his exercise rounds as a walk from Berlin to his home in Heidelberg. “I had worked it out - if I did thirty circuits of the path I had laid out in the garden, that would be seven kilometers a day. I asked Hess, who sat and watched me, if he would mark down each time that I passed him, so that I wouldn’t lose count. He had a marvelous idea. He gave me thirty peas and said, ‘Put these in one pocket and move one to the other pocket each round. That will do it’. It was a more imaginative goal than just completing the circuit thirty times as I had been doing. That was successful, so I kept on going across the mountains to Italy, and finally decided to see how far I could get. After preparing for the walks by studying maps, travelogues, and art history books, I focused imaginatively on the differences in the landscapes, the rivers, the flowers, plants, trees and rocks. In the cities I came through, I thought of churches, museums, great buildings and works of art.” He determined what he thought to be the shortest route around the world at 40,000 kilometers and so the goal became a “Walk Around the World”. September 29, 1966 was the last day Speer spent walking in the garden. He was released from Spandau the next day - having served 19 years in prison. In the twelve years since he had begun he had walked a distance of 31,936 kilometers. At midnight on his last night at Spandau he had sent a close friend the following message: “Please pick me up thirty-five kilometers south of Guadalajara, Mexico.” The next day I saw him on television. I was thirteen years old. |
Helmbrechts walk, day 7 (the road between Zwodau and Lauterbach)
Bus shelter, Lodz (Poland), 1998
Helmbrechts walk, day 3 (the road between Neuhausen and Treben)
Helmbrechts walk, day 12 (the road between Straz and Vilkanov)
Children at play in eroding grave of human remains, Belzéc (Poland), 1998
Helmbrechts walk, day 4 (the road between Treben and Bukowa)
Jewish cemetery, Krakow (Poland), 1998
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©2007 Susan Silas