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A Contribution to the artistic documentary
research project "Searching for My Mother's Number” by Sanja Iveković, Dokumenta 11, Kassel 15. 7.-15. 9.
2002 www.biondanera.net Partly published
also in the Catalogue to “in absentia” Collective
Contemporary Art Exhibition, curated by Stephen Wright Centre d’art
Passerelle, Brest, 22 june to
15 October 2005., p. 59 |
“The Blond
Nera” Victimizing Non-Victims The Quest for Personal Identity, and How We Misunderstand a Nazi Victim's Discourse Diary of a Misconceptualizing
Reader
I
do not know whether it was the name of Auschwitz, the universal place-form of
the history of extermination of Jews, that brought me to the
poetical-semological way of explainig (and justifying?) the process of
de-localisation and de-racination of Nera's personal history as a young
communist and member of the (formerly) yugoslav resistence movement. Or was
it, rather, the opposite way leadng from her "local" name to the
end-place of a universal history? Wasn't it, so I thought, a sufficient
indication of her Jewish identity that "Nera Šafarić" was selected out like a black (Jewish)
corn among the white rice of the Slavonic race - minor with respect to the
German but still “aryan” - of the arrested and deported Croatian and
Slovenian partisans from the so-called "Adriatisches Küstenland".
Wasn't she just (justly?) added to the mass of the unclean rice of
(non-aryan) Jews, deported from Triest and the reagion to Auschwitz at that
time. Why Auschwitz if not for that one reason because she was a Jew besides
being a captured partisan of Tito's liberation movement. Was Auschwitz the
"Motherland" of all Jews to which they necessarily belonged by the
pre-destinated future of the Big Death in the Third Reich. In this
perspective "Nera" was just an omen, a name-symbol of a
destiny-like dark history of Jews. I conceptualized the search for her
non-memorized number as a process of blowing up a small individual dark squar
on a dark background of the universal history of mankind. But she
contredicted my reading, she didn't re-cognize herself as a Jew. It
was an over-ideologized conceptualisation of my reading but not obviously a
false one. I understood that I spontanuously - ideologically - applied a
method of over-exposing the object of search by cultural-historic elements
that make up its semiotic representation, adding freely and arbitrarily
further semio-logical associations such as "riso nero" (instead of
“Riso amaro”) - the title of a dark-realism film by Roberto Rosselini about
women's post-war history, and the bright shining memory of the foundation of
the Jew brigade within Tito's partisan army in the late 1943. My
mis-conception viz. re-construction of a heroic shining dark ghost was to
perfect to be correct. Was it false? Nera's Local Self-Understanding When
Nera in her diary tells how she got cought by the Nazis in the house of “the
ingenieur” it was with nearly friendly expressions of a pleasently fulfilled
prophecy. She was expected to come out from the cave, where she - the shining
blond Nera - was invisible for the gaze of the hunter: "Ach, da ist sie
ja!" (“There she is!” - so Nera cites). These are not words of a
personal but of a topological identification. The German word she heard was
"da" and not "das". She stepped into a capture frame.
Obviously, she was already known to her catchers. She was not sought for but
simply trapped in a place-form matching with guilt or condamnation to death.
But her guilt was not simply the big historical one. According to her own
testimony, she was delivered to the Nazis for being guilty of another thing
than just of being a young communist "working" illegaly for Tito's
resistence movement, and by being guilty to another fellow subject than just
to the big One, "the Nazis". The other guilt of her was the love
for men. The other subject, she felt guilty to, were other women ("Over
again, it was a comradess that betrayed me"). Nevertheless we know from
indepedent testimonies that she was gossiped by male comrades too (not only
by women), for “receiving visits by the enemy”. The
real thing of which she was guilty comes out later in her diary: "I only
thought of the final victory and of my last love". It is nothing but her
personal sincerity crossing through different ideologies. She had a
melancholic sense of historical optimism endued with a looser insight for
justice ("People are just like that"). The reason why she didn't
die in Auschwitz cannot be just the six-months-period of imprisonnement - as
if it were a too short period for dying a true victim's death. It must be
rather the lack, in her self-understanding, of a victim's consciousness. The
reason why there is no mention of a Jewish "identity" in her diary
is not simply because she was not a Jew but rather because she did not have
the awareness of being a Non-Jew in Auschwitz. She didn't see from within the
camp what I saw from without, looking through her name. With her disinterest
for anything more than stripped clothes of camp prisonners she contradicted
the invisible, but operative, classification of victims in Auschwitz, which
is valid even today. Was this the reason why she later became untrustworthy
and unclassifiable victim of the early regime in the post-war-communist
Yugoslavia? A non-conclusive number I
have always wondered what would be the function of Nera's prisonner's number?
Regarding the fact that it has always-allready been "there", in
Auschwitz, its eventual finding will always be redundant like every
identification. More important thing is that the finding of the number must
remain non-conclusive for the artist’s project because it is a research
project about the history of the number. In this history, Auschwitz is only
one of many ends - a big one, to be sure. It is a dark place where Nera saw
herself “staring for the first and the last time" in a Soviet
documentary film on the Great Liberation of Auschwitz. But beyond her
narcissist self-understanding, it is a place which got cleaned from history
long before Heidegger ever came to call it the bright-shining Night of Being
of the National-socialist People's Movement. It became a museum of what the
Nazis did to the mankind and not of what the mankind did against the Nazis.
No wonder that Nera’s self-understanding is not accepted, that she remained
unrecognized as non-victim. The way of organizing the testimony about the
criminal against the humanity seems to reflect the logic of the criminal
himself. He sees the humanity only as the matter for doing things. Is there
in Auschwitz any trace of what Nera did to the Nazis? Does the history of
victims report of any activity besides their being "normal people with
ordinary everyday lifes"? Did the Nazis not have any other enemies
besides big armies of the war-winning nations? Were prisonners not rebelling
humans through their endurance? Is this not resistance? Universal
histories seem to be sought out and concluded by narratives but not local
ones. The real history of Nera's number should be sought for in her
construction of the "ticklish subject" - implied perhaps in the
figure of "another woman" - of the human intrigue between persons
and institutions. Her look on the history of the liberation movement is not
heroic: "There is no heroism in there, only the beautiful blue sky and
nicely dressed people", she says commenting her expectation to be called
up for execution in the Risiera-Camp, anounced to her by a female fellow prisonner.
On this background, finding her prisoner's number could turn out to be the
failure of not looking after the history of her name and of endorsing - be it
unwittlingly or not - the ideology of the end of history. As if the human
history had ended up in the big mouth of silence in Auschwitz where -
confronted with the Big Evil - one cannot talk any more. Even if a number
concludes the historical research work, giving it an end by classifying a
personal history within the universal history of victims, it is Nera's
personal history, including her self-understanding, that should guide the
research to an unconclusive, but still truth-oriented discourse of
con-current small histories competing for universally acceptable truth. The
big story of the (Ex-) Yugoslav socialist emancipation movement has another,
competing narrative in Nera's becoming mother. In rendering her number
invisible she must have used the first socialist washing product. Her story
is about how we survived "communism" and still love it. |
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