Kafka moves in for the kill. . . . It should be noted at this point that the Kafka Binion refers to so casually and dismissively is not a lone, obsessive amateur. Dr. John Kafka, M.D., is, in fact, a scholar in his own right, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the George Washington University School of Medicine, a senior training and supervising analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and the author of Multiple Realities in Clinical Practice, a provocative book about the way “our personally meaningful realities are fluctuating and subtly diverging.” The divergences in realities between Kafka and Binion are far from subtle, but Binion is not too far off, however, in his perception of Kafka’s relentlessness, his implacability in pressing home, at every opportunity and in every forum, his attack on Binion’s thesis.
But when he “moves in for the kill,” he does so by entangling Binion in an unspeakably complicated and bizarre—indeed Kafkaesque—polemical embroilment over medical packaging as practiced nine decades ago in provincial Austria. Specifically, whether, back in 1907, Kafka’s uncle Dr. Bloch used the “large economy size” of iodoform gauze and exactly how much use he made of it.
Binion argues on the basis of Dr. Bloch’s billing notes in his Klara Hitler file that Bloch overapplied the iodoform-soaked gauze, thus causing Klara needless torture. At that San Francisco conference, where Binion was delivering a paper and Kafka “moved in for the kill,” Dr. Kafka argued that while Dr. Bloch’s records show purchases of forty packages of sterile iodoform gauze, Binion is mistaken in concluding he applied all the gauze in every package to Klara’s breast.
“Kafka is saying, in effect, he bought large economy-size packages,” Binion tells me, “used a little, and since he wanted the gauze to remain sterile, he would have discarded the unused balance. But the gauze is an antiseptic; it remains sterile. If you think it through,” Binion says, “that means he would have bought a huge package, charged Adolf for it, and snipped off a bit and thrown the rest away. Completely insane! And nobody believed that.”
Of course both positions are matters of retrospective conjecture, and Binion’s argument didn’t get Kafka to back off. Indeed, Binion says, Kafka has taken his Binion-baiting crusade international now and is stalking not just Binion but his scholarly allies. “I recently got a letter from Eberhard Jäckel,” Binion told me. “Jäckel was speaking at some conference in Germany and along came Kafka to heckle him because he was one of my supporters. And he began with this business about the iodoform and the large economy size.”
Binion sighs. “Kafka will never give it up.”
I believe Binion might have lost something in translation, because the way I reconstruct the heckling-of-Jäckel episode, it took place at an international conference held in Frankfurt on the psychoanalytic and psychohistorical sources of anti-Semitism. Kafka was not present in person but was represented by what I’ve come to call Kafka’s truth squad, a number of psychoanalytically oriented colleagues who’ve joined with him in his attack on the Binion theory of Hitler’s anti-Semitism.
In any case, the heckling seemed to have had an effect on Jäckel, who evidently hadn’t known the ins and outs of the large economy-size question and, under fire, left the conference early.
“Look, Eberhard,” Binion recalls replying to Jäckel, “it’s about time you looked at the problem yourself. I spelled it out as carefully and simply as I could to him, because people lose patience.” And no wonder they do: If you try to follow Binion’s “simple” explanation, he leads you into the thickets of his obsessively researched and calculated disquisition on the sizing and pricing of iodoform-gauze packaging in 1907 Austria.
“I went to the Austrian pharmaceutical registry, which had perfect records as far back as 1907. They sent me all the literature for that year: how much it costs, how it’s sold. Iodoform gauze can be bought in three ways: small, medium, and large. And the larger was slightly more economical by so-and-so many centimeters. And you just cut off a little. And it’s perfectly clear in all the books that you can just cut it off and then wrap the rest and it’s reused indefinitely, it’s absolutely specific.” In other words, Binion is saying, Dr. Bloch used up all the iodoform gauze he charged the Hitlers for, which means, in effect, he overused, even abused it.
If we now seem a bit far afield from the quest for the source of Hitler’s anti-Semitic metamorphosis, this episode is typical of how frustratingly elusive the search for certainty is about any of the fragmentary pieces of evidence that underlie grand Hitler explanations. And how bitter the battle over details can be.
Here, for instance, is the chart Binion has prepared to support his assertion that Dr. Bloch was overprescribing iodoform, excerpted from a terrifyingly complicated, four-page single-spaced response he made to Kafka’s “large economy size” critique:
For his protracted treatment of Klara Hitler, Bloch certainly bought the iodoform gauze in 5-meter strips, these being the most economical. The price of 5-meter strips in Austria 1907 was:
The price of iodoform powder then was : 10 grams = 90 Heller.
Therefore, each application of iodoform gauze by Bloch involved:
These are highest and lowest average quantities for 42 applications.
The maximal cost figure of 59 Kr. represents the total of the three “a conto” payments if the one for 3 October is 15 Kr.; if it is 18 Kr., then the results under 59 Kr. above should be increased by some 5%. The minimal cost figure (a) excludes the “a conto” payment for 3 October, the next “a conto” payment having been made before the iodoform treatment began, and (b) counts only 15 of the 24 Kr. paid “a conto” on 2 December, as these 24 Kr. may have been meant to last a month, or 31 days, whereas the patient lived only 19 days more.
It goes on and on, getting even more complex, virtually indecipherable. Still, I found myself returning again and again to gaze transfixed at the forest of figures, the cryptic hieroglyphs of century-old prescription protocols. I found myself feeling finally that there was something emblematic and tragic embodied in it—and in the heroically optimistic belief that pinning down with precision the mathematics of iodoform prescriptions will somehow bring us closer to the elusive spectral figure supposedly lurking in that thicket, the elusive truth about Hitler that has slipped away once again from yet another attempt to pin down the origin of his evil.
Even Binion’s allies have shied away from following him into the labyrinth of his iodoform chart. Eberhard Jäckel, a historian renowned for his ability to penetrate the veils of even the minutest of Hitler minutiae to retrieve a valuable insight, resisted following Binion this far: just wouldn’t read the insanely complex chart.
“‘Don’t you see what this man Kafka is doing?’” Binion wrote to Jäckel. “‘He’s trying to create an ambiguity where there is none!’ So I get an answer from Jäckel saying, ‘Oh I know you’re right, so I can’t be bothered with the details.’” (One German researcher who did bother with the details, Ernst Günter Schenck, author of a study called Patient Hitler, has claimed that Binion might have misinterpreted some of Dr. Bloch’s abbreviations for iodoform, although Schenck, too, acknowledges the difficulty of finding any certainty in disentangling and deciphering the nearly century-old details of the prescription mathematics.)
By this time, the relentless Dr. Kafka had, it appeared, begun to wear down even the ceaselessly combative Binion. He described to me an attempt to reach out through the Kafka family to see if he could get Dr. Kafka off his back. He appealed to George Kren, the son of Dr. Bloch’s daughter Gertrude, himself a well-known Hitler-era historian based at Kansas State University. Kren’s mother had called Binion’s book about her father “an international disgrace” for unfairly accusing her father of “malpractice” that “caused the Holocaust.” But Kren himself had given Binion’s book a fairly positive review, one that focused on Binion’s belief that the overtreatment with iodoform was Hitler’s idea as much as Bloch’s, that Hitler’s implication in his mother’s suffering was more important psy
chologically than the actual number of grams per yard of gauze Bloch used.
Then, according to Binion (in an account that is substantially confirmed by Kren and Kafka himself), Binion discovered that Kren too had been chastised by Dr. Kafka, his own great-uncle. When Dr. Bloch’s daughter Gertrude Bloch Kren died in 1992, both George Kren and Dr. Kafka attended the funeral.
George Kren “stayed for the funeral in Trenton, New Jersey, with John Kafka,” Binion told me. “And he said Kafka started in on him again. He’d attacked George at that San Francisco meeting for supporting me, and George had a terrible attack of emphysema—they had to carry him out on a stretcher! [Kren recalls the emphysema, not the stretcher.] We were all terribly upset about that.”
In any case, after the funeral, in response to Binion’s plea—“George, can’t you stop Kafka?”—Kren did speak with Kafka about Binion. Only to report back, according to Binion, that Kafka said “there’s no way” he’ll ever stop. “He says that you have maligned his adored foster father,” Kren told Binion, “and he will get you if it takes his last dying breath.”
You have maligned his adored foster father . . .
When I spoke to Dr. Kafka, I was impressed by his passion, which, he argued, came from more than a mere personal or familial motivation. He believes that Binion’s psychoanalytic reasoning is simplistic and flawed; more important, he insists: “You cannot explain the Holocaust by saying some Jew is the cause of it in one way or another.”
But still, something about Dr. Kafka’s whole crusade recalled to me the opening lines of The Trial, in which Franz Kafka had written: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”
Somebody was spreading lies about my foster father, Dr. K. must have thought to himself on whatever fine morning he awoke to read the Binion thesis. Someone was spreading lies that the country doctor (another Kafka title, of course) was to blame for Adolf Hitler metamorphosing into Adolf Hitler.
The story of Binion’s haunting by Dr. Kafka is in itself a kind of Kafkaesque parable of the danger, the consequences of too confidently trying to explain Hitler, of the way such explanation can almost inevitably involve shifting responsibility from Hitler to whoever or whatever supposedly “caused” his metamorphosis. In particular, it’s an example of the danger of trying to trace, to pin the origin of his anti-Semitism on a hapless Jew. Binion doesn’t go as far as George Steiner, who, as we’ll see, not only seems willing to blame the Holocaust on Jewish ideas, he seems to want, in a more than metaphorical way, to blame it and Hitler on the power of Franz Kafka’s imagination.
But Binion’s Hitler explanation has become the symbolic focus, even the scapegoat, for a radical reaction against, a rejection of, the whole project of explanation itself, a rejection embodied in Claude Lanzmann’s fervent denunciation of the “obscenity of the very project of understanding.”
CHAPTER 14
Claude Lanzmann and the War Against the Question Why
In which the director of Shoah tries to silence a Holocaust survivor who fails to understand his film
It was a moment of high drama. It left some who witnessed it stunned and angry. It was perhaps the signature moment in Claude Lanzmann’s ferocious campaign against Hitler explanation, his crusade to silence the question Why.
It was a moment in which Lanzmann, the maker of Shoah, the highly respected nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary, turned on a Holocaust survivor—a man who had endured two years in Auschwitz—because the survivor had dared violate one of Lanzmann’s commandments about how one should, and should not, speak about the death camps.
Some who witnessed it found Lanzmann’s attack—his successful attempt to suppress the discussion the frail and gentle septuagenarian survivor wanted to have about certain troubling questions that arose from his Auschwitz experience—shocking. One of those present spoke up and compared Lanzmann’s behavior to that of Nazi book burners. And four years after the attack, the target, the Auschwitz survivor, Dr. Louis Micheels, still sounded shaken when he spoke about it to me. He called the filmmaker’s behavior “totalitarian.” A strong term, but one that perhaps should not come as a complete surprise to those familiar with Lanzmann’s position on the question. Because his central commandment—the one he enforced so harshly against Dr. Micheels, his imperious “Thou Shalt Not Ask Why”—is one Lanzmann has proudly adapted from a Primo Levi story about an SS guard at Auschwitz, a man who told Levi, “There is no why here.”
Many will be surprised at how extreme Lanzmann has become in his holy war against the explainers, at the way he’ll call their work “obscene,” even “Revisionist,” linking the Hitler explainers with Holocaust deniers. Lanzmann is a man deservedly much honored, even revered, by many for whom Shoah was the primary, even the defining evocation of this greatest of all human tragedies. To many, he is a sage, even a prophet or holy man, for having been the medium of transmission of a powerful, horrifying truth. To some, however, particularly among poststructuralist, American and French academics in the thrall of the theories and jargon of Jacques Lacan, he has become the center of what amounts to a literary theorists’ Holocaust cult—academics whose response to Lanzmann’s film is to celebrate it for embodying poststructuralist, theoretical fetishes such as “open signs” and “mimesis of representation” in his footage of death-camp witnesses.
Consider the introductory description of Lanzmann by one of his chief academic acolytes, a paean delivered on the very evening Lanzmann succeeded in suppressing the voice of the Auschwitz survivor:
Shoah . . . was described by critics immediately upon its appearance as “the film event of the century.” We know today that it is more than the film event of the century, because it is not simply a film but a truly revolutionary artistic and cultural event. . . . One of the things that has been most frequently remarked upon, especially in Europe about the film Shoah is the amazing psychoanalytic presence of Claude Lanzmann on the screen . . . a presence tangible both in the depth of his silence and in the efficacy of his speech, in the success of his interventions in bringing forth the truth.
I thought Shoah an impressive achievement when I saw it, although there were some aspects of it—Lanzmann’s unquestioning adoption, for instance, of the point of view of an inmate witness who survived by keeping fellow Jews about to be murdered in the dark—that raised questions in my mind about his judgment. I was not aware until I began researching the literature that had arisen around Lanzmann and Shoah in the aftermath of its 1985 release how the film had raised him to the vatic, prophetic heights from which he now hurls thunderbolts at those who violate his commandments. It is not an exaggeration to call them commandments. Lanzmann uses explicitly Sinai-like rhetoric to articulate the rules for all who dare to discuss his subject. Consider the words he used in his published attack on Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List: “After Shoah, certain things can no longer be done.”
When I first heard that line, I was sure there had been a mistake. A researcher was reading to me over the phone a translation of the version of Lanzmann’s attack on Spielberg that appeared in the Parisian daily Le Monde on March 3, 1994.
“You mean he’s saying, after the Shoah, certain things are forbidden,” I said, thinking Lanzmann might have been echoing Theodor Adorno’s famous remark that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
No, my researcher insisted, “Lanzmann is saying that after Shoah, after his film, certain things are forbidden.”
The most severe of the many strictures Lanzmann issued against Spielberg’s film was the “forbidden” crime of “creating a false archive”—that he had transgressed by attempting to re-create scenes within the concentration camps, because any attempt at representation inevitably falsified the reality. Finding a true path through Lanzmann’s commandments about recreation and representation is tricky. He, for instance, in order to provoke a sobbing breakdown on the part of his key death-camp witness, t
he Jewish barber in Treblinka, had rented a barber shop and instructed the reluctant ex-barber to pretend to be practicing a trade he’d long abandoned—to clip hair in order to force him to confront the barbering he’d done at Treblinka: shaving the heads of thousands of women before they were gassed. Lanzmann is proud of that representational re-creation. But on the other hand, he is equally proud of his own rejection of genuine archival footage. Not only did he refuse to use any actual film footage or still photographs of the death camps in Shoah (footage of the sort that Alain Resnais used with devastating effectiveness in his Night and Fog, for instance), Lanzmann made it a moral principle that such film was inferior to his method of reconstruction: talking-head interviews between Lanzmann and survivor witnesses, which gives him more screen time in Shoah than any of the survivors, makes him the hero of memory, makes him “the amazing . . . presence” to replace the absent images of real victims he’s forbidden and banished.
But Lanzmann goes further: In his attack on Spielberg, he insisted that if he ever found a secretly made film that shows the actual killing of three thousand Jews in a death camp, say, not only would he refuse to use it, but he would seek to destroy it. There certainly are arguments to be made on both sides of these questions, but for Lanzmann, “after Shoah,” there is no argument: Certain matters are settled, certain things are forbidden. His film is not merely superior to reality: it replaces, substitutes for, and demands the literal destruction of the merely real.
Explaining Hitler Page 42
