#valentin groebner

[taubenmaedchens]

[lavosxii]

"To a certain extent, the National Socialist mass murder of the European Jews during the Second World War constitutes an exception. Under the heading of the Holocaust, it has increasingly come to serve as a universalized metaphor for an abstract modern human condition per se in the United States and western Europe. In his much-discussed 1995 book Homo Sacer, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben made the extermination camp at Auschwitz the virtual nomos, or law, of European modernity. According to his account, it was only in the National Socialist concentration camps that ancient Greek conception of unlimited power over an anonymous "bare life" as the basis of the political order found its "true," ultimate form, which remains valid today and which can turn anyone into a faceless "homo sacer." Anyone? Admittedly, Agamben's work is an extreme example of a finalization that makes the Nazis the dark heroes of modernity--at least from the perspective of the philosophy of history. But the concept of the Holocaust summarizes, and conveys to a broad public, "indescribable" violence, nameable evil, and the portrayal of historical guilt in certain continually repeated pictorial formulas. Recent studies of the use of photos of the mass murder of the European Jews have, doubtless correctly, described this pictorial politics as a tool in the conflict, as "rules governing what is sayable in the struggle for memory." The Holocaust itself often appears as an aporia of visualization. The more the historical event is studied, portrayed in the media, and replicated, the more present the individual names of its victims have become on monuments devoted to its remembrance, the more people insist on the fundamental unportrayability of the destruction of European Jewry."

- Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, translated by Pamela Selwyn from German

A lot of representation of events that are historically denoted as exceptional through their sheer brutality seems to come from a combination of first-hand reporting of the violence and statistics relating to the violence. The replication and remembrance of the Holocaust, the focus on the names of the survivors and the names of those lost, does not directly contradict its status as unportrayable. The Holocaust replicated is a homunculus crafted with death rates, Nazi idealogy, and the personal touch of survivor narratives whose purpose is to bridge the deep pain and violence done against any given survivor or victim with something as large as a nation; connecting an individual pain with the conditions of history. The unportrayability comes in specifically with the depiction of that personal violence. Recounting does not recreate, and the story of a survivor will at once mediate a connection between that violence and a historical spectator and bar their access to it by way of saying that this mediation is all that's left.