Remembering death

Few surviving historians have risked writing their memoirs, as if the practice of history had taken its place, or as if the writing of memories threatened to thwart the separation between present and past that the historiographical operation requires. . Few have risked it, with the exception of Saul Friedländer, in the heart of the 1970s, at the very time of the conception of his great work, Nazi Germany and the Jewswhich was to be completed twenty years later. In this decade when the question of the relationship between history and psychoanalysis greatly agitated historians, Friedländer published When the memory comes…which was inscribed under the sign of this quote from the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink: “ When knowledge comes, memory also comes, gradually. Knowledge and memory are one and the same thing. » We know that this experience was at the origin of the journey which led Friëdlander to bring into the historical narrative the voices of the victims, those of testimonies produced at the time of the events as well as those of memories.

Otto Dov Kulka, near contemporary of Friedländer (born 1932 ; Kulka was born in 1933) and originally, like him, from Czechoslovakia, also risked it, but with apparently less faith in the knowledge effects of memory, and at a later moment in his life as a historian and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Friëdlander wrote his memoirs at age 45. It was from 1991 that the remembrance project began which led to the writing of the text translated from English and published by Albin Michel, Landscapes of the metropolis of death.

Biographical past versus historical past

Locked up with his mother in the Theresienstadt ghetto, Kulka was deported in September 1943 to Birkenau in the “ family camp “, from whose liquidation he miraculously escaped, in July 1944. The young boy found his father, Erich Kulka, in the “ men’s camp » from Birkenau, survived the death marches with him, but lost his mother, who had been sent to a satellite camp of Auschwitz, in Stutthof, on the Baltic coast, near the Vistula estuary. She died of typhus after the evacuation of this camp, hidden in a neighboring village.

For Kulka, knowledge and memory do not go well together. His work as a historian, the strict and impersonal attitude of distance specific to research ”, was built, he explains straight away, on a silence and on a choice of cut: “ Cutting the biographical past from the historical past “. This break undoubtedly signified – although the author obviously decided not to talk about it in this book – a certain distance taken from his own father, Erich Kulka, who wrote on Auschwitz from 1945 and published in particular with Ota Kraus a study on “ the death factory » widely distributed in the Soviet bloc countries after the war, before being translated into English in 1966.

The break imposes on the son another choice, that of not getting too close to the territory of his university research and the experience of the camps. If Otto Dov Kulka is indeed a historian of Nazism, his work has focused on the history of anti-Semitism and the situation of German Jews under the Third Reich, but not specifically on the places and methods of the extermination of the Jews . Except once, about the “ family camp » from Auschwitz where he had been detained, “ perhaps the only one I have devoted to the subject of concentration camps », indicates the author in the brief commentary he devotes to it in the Landscapes… The article, titled “ A ghetto in an extermination camp », was published in a collective collection in Jerusalem in 1984.

If this is, perhaps, the only work of the historian devoted specifically to the camps, it is, he emphasizes, “ an article based on documents found in German archives ”, where he “ uses the third person, as if to describe a distant historical reality “. The article approaches the territory of memory, but remains below a certain limit: “ There are things he doesn’t talk about, which remain in me like strong experiences “. Now published as an appendix to Landscapes of the metropolis of deathscientific work comes to plant the “ historical scene » of memory, illuminating the context of the experience, evoked but never linearly recounted in the chapters of the book. It also serves to measure the distance between historical research and the shadowy domain of memory.

Death as the only perspective

Between 1991 and 2001, Otto Dov Kulka recorded on magnetic cassettes “ the images that rose up in (his) memory “. He drew from it this unclassifiable text, according to the author himself, “ neither a historical testimony nor an autobiographical memoir “. Because the memory of this historian is indeed such as historians see memory: it is fragmented and selective, it excludes what researchers sometimes consider to be the most important (certain memories of extreme violence and cruelty), it is full of holes. : “ What memory do I have of this block? ? », he writes about the children’s barracks. “ First, what I don’t remember “.

It is also a child’s memory, which also remembers “ amusements » macabre of the camp and for which « the order of selections, of death as the only certain perspective “, was that of the first world he had truly known. Or the beauty of a summer sky. And the great strength of the text is to construct the sixty-year-old historian’s encounter with this child’s memory: Kulka does not remember, he observes “ scenes from memory », and this confrontation gives a striking force to the arrival of the memory.

Memory summons landscapes and what was constituted, in silence, as a “ private mythology “: a clean world in which Kulka lived (“ these landscapes where I am at home “), which he calls “ Country ” Or “ Metropolis » of Death, governed by “ the law of the Great Death “. How to depict this intimate country, “ the place where I apparently lived and always remained » ? This is the question around which the author never stops turning, returning to the same images, as in psychoanalysis the patient returns to the same memories in order to pass through the doors of memory. There is no question of analysis here, but the “ doors » and recurrence belong to the very experience of the camp – the brush with death, and the minimal event which defers it, pushes it aside.

Also the story of Kulka’s return to Birkenau in 1978 joins the story of the dream that always brought him back there. And it is indeed the meeting of the return and the dream which seems to have led, slowly, the surviving historian to look at the scenes of his memory. These scenes are supported by selected images, photos, children’s drawings, which punctuate the text from the recordings: some come from archive funds (Auschwitz Museum, Jewish Museum in Prague, etc.), others from the author himself, who photographed the places (Birkenau in 1978, the location of the Stutthof camp and its surroundings in 1992). Some come from elsewhere, like this photo of a “ desolate railway station at night », borrowed from the story of W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. The station filled with mist or steam drowning the high metal pilasters comes here to meet the evocation of dreams of escape or return to the camp, by train, “ when suddenly the loudspeakers call my name and I introduce myself and am sent back to Auschwitz, to the crematoria “.

In the alternation of memory evocations, images and travel stories to the places of death, Kulka constructs something which resembles what Ruth Klüger, another survivor of Theresienstadt and the “ family camp » from Birkenau, calls “ timescapes » – places in time – that no museum can restore, no research can reconstruct, no historical account can reach or represent: places “ at a certain time » and living in the past of memory, of “ landscapes » of memory.

Three poems on the threshold

In the last two chapters of his text, before reading three fragments of diaries written after the completion of the cassette recordings, Kulka questions the irreducibly singular dimension of these landscapes and his doubt as to the possibility of transmit them, for him who has never been able to read or see works of any kind on Auschwitz, because they can never speak to him about what he experienced. The historian’s questioning then meets literature head-on, as the only form of writing capable of making singular fragments of time travel, alone “ door » capable of crossing the « impassable rivers » which separate from the past, and to represent the “ presence of the past which is perpetually part of my present “.

Having reached the end of his journey of remembrance, Kulka evokes Franz Kafka and “ the wonderful episode of the man standing before the gate of the Law », which is indeed the door to singularity and transmission. Literature opens the gap in time. But this is not a discovery: she had already opened it, for the young boy, facing the “ system of the immutable law of the Great Death ”, thanks to three poems from “ gas chamber threshold ”, written by a “ unknown poet in her twenties » and saved by the father, Erich Kulka. In these three poems which accuse and which hope is preserved, writes the author, “ the only shimmering shard that has been saved from a great work of art that existed and perished in this place of perdition “. For the young boy who read them, it was a word directed towards somewhere else, towards something beyond the camps and their law of death, perhaps towards an afterlife.

It is not insignificant that these three poems once led the historian to take liberties with his discipline. They appear in the 1984 article on the Auschwitz family camp, as a “ single message » sent from the threshold of the gas chambers. Only Kulka, on this occasion, had not indicated the provenance of his source, contravening all the rules of historical writing. A landscape in time and a small “ memory scene » stood there, silent, between two paragraphs. Here they are deployed – and how powerfully – under the pen of the historian who watches the memory come.