Berlinale – memory of a memory

Claude Lanzmann worked on »Shoah« for more than ten years. In 1985, forty years ago, the work came to the cinemas. Sure, Lanzmann wrote film history with his nine and a half hour documentary, but not only that: he also made his contribution to the processing of the German mass murder to the European Jews, confronted the world with the memories of the victims, whom every presentation of the dead of dead Those who had to suffer the unspeakable.

Lanzmann had found survivors of the extermination camp for his film, Jews who did not fall victim to the German lust, but also the perpetrators and their henchman. They are all talked about by the filmmaker. Sometimes he looks merciless. If the memories are too painful, the what happened can hardly be banned into words, the camera remains on. The imposition, the overwhelming, the impossibility, to cope with the past, should also be attested. Contemporary recordings from the death camps or their structural remains as well as the tracks, which were part of the infrastructure of the warehouse system, are added. Lanzmann’s »Shoah« is extremely important and hard to look at.

The French photographer and filmmaker Guillaume Ribot made “Je n’avais que le néant” Lanzmann’s “Shoah” the subject of a documentary film. There was talk of a kind of making-of various locations. Ribot’s film is a gentle reminiscence – and the memory of a memory.

In 2018 Claude Lanzmann died in Paris at the age of 92. The same fate overlooks the last survivors from the Nazis extermination camps. This day the news of Marian Turski was announced, who had been through the horror of Auschwitz himself. In January of this year, Turski found warning words for posterity on the 80th anniversary of liberation: “Our days that the survivors are counted: but we will not fall silent if they do not remain silent.”

You shouldn’t be silent. But talking about the German extermination campaign against everything Jewish can no longer be the same in a world to which the victims no longer belong and in which the witnesses can no longer speak directly to us. A world in which the Holocaust comparison belongs to the standard repertoire of political speaking and fascists celebrate their return to the streets and parliaments.

Ribot does not use the material of Lanzmann’s work on »Shoah«. He taught passages from the filmmaker’s memoirs. So he throws quietly and reserved faint lights on the monumental work. We experience Lanzmann how he struggles with the self -made task. How to start? How to tell countless death? We follow him in search of the survivors, the disappearing minority compared to the dead, who also often flee the past. We encounter the Germans with him, who knew nothing about everything and who still don’t want to know anything. We meet Lanzmann from the Polish rural population, who had looked at everything and who was never asked again about what had happened. And of course those Poland whose hatred of Jews was unbroken – which in the country also led to scandalization not the reactionary character of the population, but by Lanzmann’s “Shoah”.

Ribot deals with his object, the filmmaker and his probably undisputed work. The question arises whether the term making-of is not somewhat high. Ribot’s “Je N’avais que le néant” is more of a finger, a shapely gesture that draws attention to something bigger. The film material published for the first time, of course, comes close to the known version of “Shoah”. The entanglement of Lanzmann’s statements with the camera images, which he made in his tireless and powerful work, gives him an impression of the big task he has set.

Of course, Ribot’s film cannot take the place of »Shoah«. He behaves more like the footnote to the essay – which is by no means meant in displeasure. A little uncomfortable is – apart from the cruelty of the topic – the form that seems to be related to the dying of the last witnesses for a new stage in the memory policy: Ribot has created something that Lanzmann would never have been able to do. The brutal omission of individual memories, which may never be able to penetrate in the presence and the future. We should not understand “n’avais que le néant” as a replacement for “Shoah”, this unconsc consumable opus, which has to be viewed despite all of this.

“I only had nothingness -› Shoah ‹by Lanzmann”: Frankreich 2025. Regie/Buch: Guillaume Ribot. 94 min.
February 22nd, 3:30 p.m. (Haus der Berliner Festival)