by Greil Marcus
“Against an idea, even a false one,” Huelsenbeck wrote in Germany Must Fall, “all weapons are powerless”—no matter that the Spartacist rising was crushed, Liebknecht and Luxemburg assassinated, their bodies dumped like garbage. “Even a false one”: that idea was the essence of dada, and inside Winterland, where the performance was staged to give the lie to itself, that idea seemed the essence of the Sex Pistols. “FUCKING BLOODY MESS!” Johnny Rotten screamed at the fetus, then as the fetus, then as the Elephant Man—“I’m not an animal!”—it didn’t matter what you thought. The song wasn’t about abortion; it was an irresistible moment of torture, fear, hatred, and vulgarity. You went into the body, and the body was torn to pieces.
BELSEN WAS A GAS
“Belsen Was a Gas” was the only tune the Sex Pistols played at Winterland that had not appeared on record—that the crowd didn’t know. It was a crude, cheesy, stupid number, thought up, it is said, by Sid Vicious, the crudest, cheesiest, stupidest member of the band. It was altogether lacking in the poetry of “Anarchy,” “Bodies,” “Pretty Vacant”: a piece of shit. The audience locked into the song; something kicked up the crowd’s ability and its need to shout back the chorus the second time it was played, and “Belsen Was a Gas” didn’t even have a real chorus. As earlier people threw objects they had brought into the hall at the stage, now they threw back pieces of what was being thrown at them.
“The body of Rosa Luxemburg, dragged from a canal in March 1919”
—King Mob Echo, April 1968
Stymied, perhaps in their attempt to see some history in “Holidays in the Sun,” here the Sex Pistols had turned to writing it, starting on 15 April 1945, when Belsen gave the British troops who liberated the murder camp their first good look at the Nazi fact. In a way, then, the Winterland audience had indeed heard “Belsen Was a Gas” before: seemingly affirming nothing but its own vulgarity (“Belsen was a gas, I heard the other day / In the open graves where the Jews all lay),” the song was a musical version of the punk swastika, a motif first popularized, in his pre-Pistols days, by Sid Vicious. In England (and, through newspaper and TV features, in the United States), the ubiquity of the symbol had by 1978 forged a media identification between punk and resurgent British Nazis. The swastika painted on clothes, carved into schoolroom desks, carved into arms—how different was it, really, from the National Front campaign to purify the U.K. of its colored populations, Jamaicans, Pakistanis, Indians, the backwash of Empire? How far, really, was punk from the 1970s rehabilitation of Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, who in his glory days led riots in London’s Jewish neighborhoods? As for years in the U.K., colored people were beaten on the streets, and some were killed, but in a context of a new sensationalism, a new seriousness. It was a hot topic until 1979, when the Tory party shifted from noblesse oblige to class war, and Margaret Thatcher, the new prime minister, buried the National Front by coopting much of its program. After that, as in the early punk years, colored people were beaten and killed—more, as it happened—but with the context altered once again: with the hard facts smoothed into a context of legitimacy, the facts were no longer news. A punk parading down King’s Road with “SID LIVES” and a swastika stenciled on his black leather jacket caused no panic; he was a tourist attraction.
The punk swastika was a convoluted symbol: a nascent sub-cultural celebration of the purest racism; a demand for the replacement of business as usual with excitement. It meant (to take Nik Cohn’s definition of the impulse behind all postwar British pop subcultures—the Teddy Boys of the 1950s, the Mods and Rockers of the 1960s, the Skinheads of the early 1970s), “My dad’s a square, I hate him, I hate you too, I’ll smash your face in,” or diversion of that impulse into public business: I hate them too, let’s smash their faces in. It was a touch of the old épater la bourgeoisie. It meant, history books to the contrary, that fascism had won the Second World War: that contemporary Britain was a welfare-state parody of fascism, where people had no freedom to make their own lives—where, worse, no one had the desire. And it meant that negation is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems—but only when the act is so implicitly complete it leaves open the possibility that the world may be nothing, that nihilism as well as creation may occupy the suddenly cleared ground.
Nazi crime was final crime, a buried wish made flesh and turned into smoke, the most complete wish ever given voice—a voice that in 1978, the year the Sex Pistols played their final concert, Guy Debord traced back to the twelfth century, to “the secret the Old Man of the Mountain”—Rashid al-Din Sinan, leader of the Assassins, millenarian terrorists of the Levant—“surrendered, it is said, only in his last hour, and then only to the most faithful of his fanatical disciples: ‘Nothing is true; everything is permitted.’ ”
Debord was not talking about Nazis. He was narrating a film on his own life, looking back a quarter-century over his years as the tribune of the Lettrist International, then of the Situationist International, groups little enough known in their own time and now barely remembered. He was staking his claim on history: “Thus was set forth the best-made program for the absolute subversion of the whole of social life: classes and specializations, work and entertainment, the commodity and city planning, all were to be dashed to pieces. And such a program contained no promise other than that of an autonomy without rules and without restraint. Today these perspectives are part of the fabric of life—and there is combat for and against them everywhere. But when we first set out, they could hardly have seemed more chimerical—if the reality of modern capitalism had not been more chimerical still.” “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” Debord was explaining, was simply the watchword the young men who formed the LI in 1952 had taken as their passkey into the realm of “play and public life.”
On Debord’s screen one saw merely habitués of Saint-Germain-des-Prés cafes, sitting at tables, playing guitars, and then Lacenaire, the “literary bandit” executed in Paris in 1836: Lacenaire as played by Marcel Herrand in Debord’s favorite movie, Marcel Carné’s 1945 Les Enfants du paradis. Dashing and sinister, Lacenaire turns to his rival, the Count, and to the Count’s retinue of toadies: “It takes all kinds to make a world . . . or unmake it.” “Quite good,” sneers one of the Count’s men. “Only a pun, but quite good.”
The last words of the Old Man of the Mountain too were only a pun, a play on words, an intimation of the absolute reversals hiding in everyday language, in everyday life—it was because Debord had learned that language that he heard his ideas in everyone’s mind. And just as Debord’s ancient motto contained all the possibilities of nihilism, possibilities that included creation, so too did the palindromic title of his film: “the ancient phrase which comes completely back upon itself, which was constructed letter by letter like a labyrinth one can never leave, in a manner that so perfectly marries the form and content of perdition: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. We turn in a circle in the night and we are consumed by the fire.”
ALL THE FEELING
All the feeling of that line was in “Belsen Was a Gas”: not in the words, or in the arrangement, not even in the rhythm, but in the sound, in the way the whole echoed back on itself. That night in Winterland, it was as if this straightforward performance, established by means of ordinary equipment (microphones, amplifiers, speakers), had been transformed by onstage aural flashbacks, flash forwards, freeze frames, split screens, matched dissolves, metronomic tracking shots: all the technology of displacement. The echoes were patent, physical. Photographs and film documentaries, the commonplace evidence of Belsenism, came into view.
Everyone has seen some of this evidence, and everyone, for mnemonic reasons as unique as fingerprints, retains a few specific fragments—fragments of an individual response not swallowed up by the ideology of the fact itself. I remember visiting the Dachau extermination camp in Germany in 1961, before it was cleaned up and fitted with audiovisual displays, when the
ovens looked as if they had been warm the year before—still that memory, like most of the commonplace evidence, is just genre, iconography. The victims, whoever they were, had no individuality for me, even though I was taken to the place by a man whose parents had been killed there, even though my ancestors had lived and worked just miles away. The victims were part of the pit, or interred soul-wise in some official memorial complete with meditation chapel. But in two photographs I know—“Nazi Execution of Two Russian Partisans,” taken by a Nazi photographer, and “U.S. Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, Chairman of the House-Senate Committee on War Crimes, Buchenwald, near Weimar, Germany, April 24, 1945,” taken by a U.S. Army photographer—the sense of individuality is overwhelming, and from opposed directions.
What the Nazis did, Arendt said, was something new: they altered the limits of human action. In doing so, the Nazis provided humanity with more than a burden—the need to comprehend their actions—they also provided a legacy: “It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past . . . Once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”
—blind fragment in collage of text and photographs, Londons Outrage! no. 1, London fanzine, December 1976
“Nazi Execution” is impossibly expressive: Lewis Hine goes to hell. A girl, a teenager, has been hung. Her dead face communicates the motives that caused her to risk death and the motives of those who have just killed her: the Nazi officers who, in the photo, are visible, people whose task it was to exterminate just this sort of expressiveness. The girl’s face says more than those of most living camera subjects. As she dangles in the air, one of the officers fits a noose around the neck of a boy, perhaps the same age as the girl, perhaps much younger. You make up a story to match his face. His face says: “We were comrades, but I never thought I would be made to watch her die; I never thought I would be made to witness my own death; but so be it.” Looking at the picture, you are made aware of this image as a doubling of human possibility, as a doubled version of what it means to be human; you are made aware of an event that, one day, actually happened. Two people, specific within the species, were deprived of life in a particular way. Genre and iconography explode; the ideology of the fact cannot contain the moment.
In “Buchenwald, April 24, 1945,” Senator Alben Barkley stands before a cordwood pile of corpses. To us today, familiar with such images as Barkley in 1945 was not, what we see first is genre, the pit, which we easily turn into iconography, “The Holocaust.” But one must look at Barkley. The corpses are naked; he is heavily clothed in vest, suit, overcoat, hat, shoes. He stares at the corpses; the dignity in his face is bottomless. He is not dignified—the word immediately suggests pose, knowledge, distance, authority. This man, the photograph says, has struggled to understand what he has been made to look at, to understand something all of his experience of contemporary life and all of his reading of history have not prepared him to understand, and he has succeeded. The dignity in his face is not his own, and it is not that of the power he represents. In a moment of unpredictable comradeship and humility, Barkley has taken the dignity of which the people upon whom he gazes were robbed into his own face. If I were to die in this way, his face says, I would want someone to look upon me in this way. “We don’t mind!” Johnny Rotten screamed in “Belsen Was a Gas.” “Kill someone, be someone! Be a man, kill yourself! Please someone! We don’t mind!”
He seemed near to coming loose from his own skin. As in other moments on the same stage on the same night, as in so many moments on the singles the Sex Pistols put out over the previous year, he seemed not to know what he was saying. He seemed not to be himself, whoever that was; once more he was less singing a song than being sung by it. Nothing existed but an objective, historical iconography, the common coin of any crowd called together anywhere in the West, where Nazi iconography, the spectacle of the Nazi fact, still served to diminish the exterminations of the present and to shroud the exterminations of the past, where Nazi iconography functioned not as history but as its most grandiose anomaly, the exception that proved the rule that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds (it was hard to think, with the song pounding on your head, and impossible not to)—nothing existed but that, that and an objectification of this treasured iconography by a disembodied but still subjective voice, which dissolved iconography as surely as Alben Barkley’s face. Johnny Rotten did not seem to be commenting on an historical event, but rather to be quoting from an as-yet-unmade movie:
[In 1985, in Shoah, a documentary film on the Nazi exterminations, director Claude Lanzmann interviews historian Raul Hilberg on the agencies responsible for transporting Jews to concentration camps.] “It was the same bureau that dealt with any kind of normal passenger?” “Absolutely. Just the official travel bureau. Mittel Europäisch Reisebüro would ship people to the gas chambers or they will ship vacationers to their favorite resort, and that was basically the same office and the same operation, the same procedure, the same billing . . . With children under ten going at half-fare and children under four going free.” “Excuse me, the children under four who were shipped to the extermination camps, the children under four . . .” “. . . went free.”
Or reading from an as-yet-unprinted news item:
(UPS, 11 Sept 1980—Salisbury, England)
A former army sergeant thinks he has come up with the ideal British vacation—three days in an imitation Nazi prison camp.
“They’ll have a horrible time and love every minute of it, or I’ll want to know the reason why,” said Bob Acraman, 41.
Having taken over a former army camp on the bleak Salisbury plain, he is inviting vacationers to spend $72 for three November days behind barbed wire, guarded by gun-carrying guards in German uniforms and watchtowers around the perimeter.
Acraman promises “a nice line in psychological interrogation” for vacationers who try to escape.
“There’ll be plenty of fog, rain and frost for our 2 A.M. searches,” he said.
“The food will be first-class prison nosh—thin soup and stale bread. And there’ll be no fires in the huts.”
Acraman claims demand for his vacation is heavy.
“There are plenty of crazy people around like me who love being locked up and made to suffer behind barbed wire,” he said.
Of course, Johnny Rotten couldn’t predict the future; he could only insist that it was contained by the past. That was the meaning of no-future. After “Belsen Was a Gas,” “Holidays in the Sun” was still to come that night in Winterland, and Johnny Rotten had no way of knowing, had he been born in another time and another place, that he could have ridden to Belsen for free, or that had he been willing to wait, he could have seen a new Belsen without ever leaving England. Or is that exactly what he meant?
On stage, all one saw was an ugly, unlikely youth declaring that his time as a pop star had come to an end: you could see it happen, hear him deciding to quit. “Ah, it’s awful,” he said in the middle of “No Fun,” his last song as a member of the Sex Pistols, even his loathing leaving him: “It’s no good.” The disgust that the band had been built to talk about had finally, so quickly, overtaken the one whose job it was to talk about it. The show had gone far enough. All one saw was a failure; all one saw was a medium. The hall shook: it shook like a seance table in nineteenth-century Boston, Paris, or Petrograd, when the devotees sat waiting, ready for the dead to come knocking on the horizontal doors. The show had gone as far as a show can go.
A BARITONE
“A baritone came on, to a round of applause. He had a fine voice and the most funereal aspect imaginable. You would have guessed him to have been in bygone days a répresentant du peuple, a member of the Montagne, a ‘thinker’ who prided himself on his looks . . . If this baritone were to figu
re in the troubles which await us, I for one would not be surprised.” So wrote the conservative journalist Louis Veuillot, four years before those troubles, in the form of the Paris Commune of 1871, arrived to match his prophecy. Seance tables weren’t the only thing shaking in Paris in 1867.
As cited by T. J. Clark in The Painting of Modern Life, Veuillot was describing a performer in the Alcazar, a “café-concert”: the warmup act for Thérésa, the singer all Paris came to hear. She was stocky, unlovely, and powerful; the texts of her songs were carefully monitored by the government censor, but he couldn’t control her voice or her gestures—the way, Clark says, she won her battles “against the standardized melodies, the footling lyrics, the cynical production values, the farrago of violence and souped-up emotion.” This was a matter of lifting a hand in the right place at the right time, of turning a phrase, and as Howard Hampton once said of the concerts Bob Dylan put on in 1966, Thérésa had the knack of turning a casual aside into a condemnation of the whole social order: the “audience,” Clark writes, “lived for the moment when the band struck up ‘La Canaille’ [The Rabble] and the singer invited them to join in the chorus of ‘J’en suis! J’en suis!’ [I’m part of it].”
The Alcazar was a big hall, where drinks were served to thousands. The new petite bourgeoisie, the clerks who filled most of it, would in their workday or domestic lives have taken “rabble” for the crude class insult it would have been. Here they embraced it, out of longing for the proletarian or peasant past they were escaping, out of hatred for the real, propertied bourgeoisie they longed to emulate. Here, in the new domain of regular entertainments and organized leisure, they had a privileged space to dissipate their yearnings and their rage, or to focus them. So Veuillot’s anonymous baritone (who along with twenty thousand others was in June 1871 in the extermination of the Commune put up against a wall and shot) (or who had already left town) raises an interesting question: is the cabaret a place where the spirit of negation is born, or is it where that spirit goes to die?
