On Stories - Shoah, Night and Fog, Night

This was done as part of a term paper asking me to differentiate and make claims about the specific differences between the given holocaust media we engaged with in class.

Introduction

To understand how these stories are different, the method I seek to utilize is to generalize how any two stories may be differentiated and then adapt that understanding to the specific particularities of the stories under consideration.

In its most general form, any semantically coherent unit of utterances can be likened to a story; We choose to focus our intentionality on a specific subset of the infinity of qualia in Human Experience. In that choice of recounting an experience one way instead of the other, we are telling a story - how we as narrators and humans choose to define and communicate ourselves to others given that they can never understand the full particularity of our being.

But this definition is too general, and it needs to be honed in further to actually be of substance. To demonstrate that fact, consider that a human’s rationalization for arbitrary choices like the clothes they chose to wear is as much and as pertinent of a story as them deciding to recount the geopolitical situation of the Middle East.

In this sense, a pertinent thing to discover is that there is always more depth that a story can be reached into. Often when it feels like we are making progress, we are simply paying back some of the epistemological debts of reductionism that allowed us to make sense of an infinitude of interacting events.

But the more important thing here, is to see from this abstraction that stories are devices for compressing the information of someone’s being. And that this self-organized process of abstraction also happens at larger levels.

The scale at which we tell stories goes all the way from the individual - with their history and understanding of their own trauma and life experience - to historiographic and eschatological perspectives that drive large scale political movements. be it through an obsession towards being on the right side on judgement day or on the right side of the unfolding dialectic process of history. 

Through mechanisms of power, resistance, capital flow - people and communities develop a cannon of their own. A way in which they recount their own stories. The stories then are not just information compression devices, but also mimetic units that get passed down and modified through the aforementioned mechanisms. The set of stories itself ends up reflecting the community’s understanding of themselves thereby making storytelling a radical and political act of self determination.

To someone who has not engaged with this literature before, it seems like an insipid mass of information (over which they may have heard the loudest voices and judgements) . But in reality, the millions of voices that still are affected by the events of the Holocaust today want to imprint themselves onto the literature. Even as the cannon seeks to stratify and settle there are Deleuzian lines of flight always teeming within the interstices and complexities willing to be organized into resistance. Landmark pieces of media and the great men within this area like EH Carr says are those who are able to shape and mold the will of these ages - to organize disparate perspectives that haven’t been spoken yet into coherency and speak them out loud.

 

The Political Scientists understanding of the holocaust as a limit point for early 19th Century Fascism, The sociologist and media theorists understanding of the Holocaust in relation to Nation Building and shared othering, the French Avant garde’s perverted interest in Hitler’s occultism, or the Evolian superfascists denial and insistence that Hitler did not go far enough. When a reader is exposed to this literature (by literature here, we mean all types of media that tells stories of the holocaust), it is imperative to understand and engage with it as a dynamic and evolving process that is an arena for the debate of all these pressure groups. 

It is within this very specific cannon of Holocaust Literature that the particularities of our given stories are placed. 

Methodology and Frameworks.

Given our definition of a story as the creative act of choosing and relaying a certain subset of one’s qualia by weaving them together a certain way, it is an interesting question to think what the essence of a story is. For when the concept is defined and understood, a categorization and differentiation between different types of stories naturally flows from it. 

The story, plot, narrative structure is an exemplary framework to begin with. The plot consists of the actual chronological events (within our world or a constructed one) that allow the story to unfold. The narrative is the tone, perspective and other particularities of the persona of the narrator that guides us through the story. The story itself is the compilation of the emotional arc, the stylistic elements that unfolds. 

For a reader, the plot answers the question of what happened, the narrative answers the question of how it was relayed to them, and the story as a whole answers for the reader why they should care about that specific experience.

My central thesis here is that the story itself is a dialectic between the author and the reader in determining why the reader should care for a certain experience that they crafted and decided to tell them about. The answers to what, and how are surrogates that are determined through this dialectic process. 

For understanding how the how flows simply from the why, consider that an author or any creator really can only tell their stories through the craft they are able to express themselves through.

There are examples of sociologically unprivileged classes or generally unskilled people speaking through mediums they are not trained in, for example the Dalit Literature in vernacular languages of India, but even then that expression itself creates its own raw aesthetic within the form. Even there, the form of media chosen to express is restricted through material conditions and the mediums they allow access to.

For understanding how the what flows through the why, consider how the given stories - Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, Night by Elie Wiesel and Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, are broadly based around the same events. However, there are specific aspects that end up being told, which ends up being a political act and an imprint of the creator’s ideology as explained above.

Within this framework, it is relatively straightforward to locate a writer and their work in the political and sociological currents of the time, but this analysis is slightly complicated by the fact that this definition of storytelling only works when it is divorced from the reader. 

Among the billions of possible people (future and deceased) that a piece of media can interact with, not everyone interprets the intentions of the author the same way. Therefore we cannot define the literature in terms of the teleology of the political project it directs a reader towards. The cultural matrix can change in a way that an author gets retrogressively villainized or pedestalized. 

Such perspectives are highlighted in French Poststructural critique such as Roland Barthes’ Death of the author - it is then that the stylistic elements - the what and the how become important to piece together the author’s intention. 

Comparative literature is then also freed from all meta-narratives about its interpretation. All we are left with is a sort of phenomenological investigation, a practice of extending empathy (but not necessarily), understanding perspectives (but not necessarily), being moved towards political action (but not necessarily). Any of the questions mentioned above can now become an entry point into this practice of extending ourselves outwards in an attempt to understand - something which is Wittgensteinean terms, just utterances referring to themselves. 

This doesn't mean that it is useless as a process. Rather it is elevated to a creative endeavour precisely because of this deconstruction. It is left to us, the practitioner, to travel the lines of flight on this landscape and glean what we can - in terms of stylistic trends, political mobilization, expanded facets of understanding through a constant practice of ethics and other insights whose form may not even be anticipated before putting different pieces of media together in specific configurations. 

We consider this in the next section.

Comparative Analysis

Our central thesis is the following: 

There is a clear impact of the creator’s ideology seen on the works that we compare here. It displays as an imprint of their morals; that which we have taken to be unquestioned. In our own stories it is reflected by what we choose to justify and sanctify in our life events, while in others’ stories through our choice of events from others’ stories and our aestheticization of them. Putting all three works together, the constellation shows us that storytelling is always going to be a radically political act, no matter if we do it for ourselves or for someone else.

Throughout the rest of the section, we sequentially argue for the above through pointing out particularities of the media analysed.

Ellie Weisel’s Night is qualitatively different from the other pieces of media we analyse. 

Firstly, its textual form as compared to the audiovisual documentary format of the other stories leaves a lot more up to interpretation for the reader. It necessitates more visceral first person accounts e.g. consider the chapter covering the author’s march away from Buna(85-97). It is a particularly vivid description of bodily trauma and the dissociation caused by it, or consider the author’s recounting of the hanging corpse of the pipel boy ... “the soup tasted of corpses” (65).

Whereas the events covered are roughly the same between all the three pieces of media, covering through different perspectives roughly the years of 1940-45 and experiences of the Holocaust, there is a slight difference caused by the first person recounting which I demonstrate along three axes.

Firstly, the selection of events, the what changes. Instead of covering the event in historical terms, there is a distinct personal character. How an event broke the narrator’s faith, How he held on to his father, How he found it funny that he caught Idek naked, How the experience had changed him by the end to be apathetic to his father.

Secondly, the narrative structure, the how, also changes as mentioned above. Another way in which Night does this is by providing absolute certainty to the writer’s experience and an unquestionable quality to the account; To even consider putting into question some of the fantastical seeming elements of the account - such as the beginning when the author is on that train and the lady sees fire (24) - is to be blasphemous.

And thirdly, the ideological basis, the why can also be seen as distinctly different from the other stories. Night and the critical acclaim that it received is a cornerstone in understanding Weisel’s Zionism. Its inherent deification of the holocaust as something only firsthand survivors can have epistemic access to, along with the strong Jewish mystic and religious roots mentioned in the beginning of the story allow (7-13) us to see how Night shaped and was shaped by Weisel’s political project. 

Overall, the effect that it creates on the reader is that of creating unquestioned empathy. Of watching a story unfold and having no choice but to marvel in a way that pedestalizes the spirit of those who survived, a pit in our stomachs for what they had to endure, and a resolve to never let it happen again.

The differences between the documentaries Night and Fog and Shoah emerge on a deeper analysis of the conditions they were placed and created in and how they utilize the medium in which they were created.

Let us again first consider the how. Since both are audiovisual media, we differentiate on both accounts.

Night and Fog utilises classic 50s post war documentary music effectively, pivoting between upbeat intensity whenever Nazis are being mentioned (00:04:14) and calm scores for nature (00:02:56).

Shoah plays with silence, be it in the long intro scenes where text is mentioned (00:06:35), or the long natural shots that juxtapose the Nazi genocide machinery with the serenity that serenades over those landscapes now that nature has taken its course(00:07:56), or even between interviews which follow a slow natural pacing with large pauses in between sometimes waiting for the translator or because the camera is hidden. 

Visually, Night and Fog plays with the black aesthetics of the SS uniform (00:04:14), Hitler's speeches, and claimed footage (00:25:00-00:27:00) overall creating a sense of something that happened to a community. Shoah has been acclaimed to not use any historical footage linked with a radically humanistic bent - to allow only the survivors and perpetrators accounts to let the story unfold. 

The questions seem to be what any empathetic person destroyed by the horrors of the holocaust would ask (e.g. “How does he still live, How does he still smile?” 00:15:25). These subtle differences about what aspects of the same base experience get recounted - first person testimony in Shoah (e.g. 00:42:10 where the survivor in Auschwitz recounts houses by the people who lived there and the trade they practiced) compared to the part in Night and Fog where they are talking about how the SS officers were ruthlessly practical, using the skin to create paper (00:28:20), the women’s hair to create carpets (00:27:10), and the bonemeal as fertilizer (00:27:50).

Finally we can look at the why by situating the material conditions which allowed these pieces of media to come into being. 

Night and Fog was envisioned and funded as a project starting on the observance of the 10th Anniversary of the Liberation of France, aiming to “"communicate historical research through contemporary media”1. The title itself comes from the scriptwriter and survivor Jean Cayrol’s previously published survivor account, Poèmes de la nuit et brouillard. The horrors of the holocaust were still fresh in the collective imagination. All of this together led to a very specific style akin to propaganda films. The film aims to paint the despair of the holocaust in deep strokes, to engrave “never again” so deeply within us that we never forget.

Shoah on the other hand was commissioned by Israeli officials in 1985, much after the war was over. It aimed to be a documentary covering the Holocaust “from the perspective of the jews”2 . However, it became a passion project for Lanzmann and ended up taking 11 years and a significant amount of resources to complete. We see Lanzmann’s personal desperation in understanding the phenomena of the holocaust and Hitler, in his sometimes angry interviews 3, and sometimes when he pushes the interviewees to even cry by asking emotional questions (00:23:10). This also has a very marked effect on the reader where they feel that they are participating along with the interviewers and investigators, and also are intertwined with the stories and emotional catharsis of the survivors.

Conclusion

Through this paper, I have first argued for a general conception of stories as compressions of experience and storytelling as a political act of self determination. After that we developed a general framework to differentiate between different pieces of media and saw how that dialectical development dismantles a static understanding of literary analysis.

Finally, we have applied that framework to the given stories and seen how the story, plot and narrative create differing impressions upon the reader. We were able to see how there is a clear expression of ideology among the works presented, be it a story told about one’s own community or another. A radically different effect can be produced even when covering the same event because of differences in writers’ ideologies, their use of aesthetics to emotionally position their audience and the events they deem relevant to talk about. 

Storytelling is a radical political act that we engage in every time we create art, including performing in public discourse.

References

1. Eisler, Hanns (2014). "Film Music to Nuit et brouillard". In Breyer, Knud; Dahin, Oliver (eds.). Hanns Eisler Complete Edition. VI, Film Music. Vol. 23. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel. ISMN 9790004803318.

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/movies/07shoah.html?pagewanted=all

3. Rosenbaum, Ron (1999). "Claude Lanzmann and the War Against the Question Why". Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-679-43151-9.