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Authentic.
Objective. Subjective. Or which rules does one follow?
A mail interview by Lotte Møller with Gitte Villesen about
her participation in "Auschwitz-prozess 4 Ks 2/63 Frankfurt
am Main" in Martin-Gropius-Bau.
"Authentic. Objective. Subjective. Or which rules does one
follow?" - is the title of a video piece by Gitte Villesen
commissioned for the exhibition "Auschwitz-prozess 4 Ks 2/63
Frankfurt am Main".
The show documents the first Auschwitz trial, which took place from
1963 to 1965, and which turned out to be the biggest jury trial
of West German justice up to that time, finally bringing the issue
of Holocaust into a public discourse. Central for the show is the
reconstruction of the trial (by the example of 6 of the 21 accused),
which includes excerpts of the original sound recordings from the
trial giving almost too vivid examples of the atmosphere in the
court room. The historical background for the trial is also traced
and the history of the reception of the trial in literature, philosophy,
journalism and theatre. In addition to the historical part of the
show twelve artists were asked to give a contemporary response to
history.*
The fact that there ever was a trial had much to do with chance
as well as the persistency of a few people like the Hessian Attorney
General Fritz Bauer, whose investigations made it possible to carry
the whole thing through, despite years of silence regarding the
National-Socialist crimes of the past.
For her video Gitte Villesen interviewed 6 employees at the Fritz
Bauer Institute at the University in Frankfurt, who initiated the
Auschwitz trial exhibition and produced a DVD with archival material
concerning the trial including 100 hours of tape recordings. Gitte
Villesen's interview focuses on the technical problems of objectivity
and subjectivity with regards to scientific standards. One could
also say that it is about the impossible search for the truth and
about the human factor, which tends to complicate everything.
LM: I am curious to know what your first thoughts were, when you
were asked to produce a work for this exhibition, considering the
complex subject matter?
GV: The invitation was followed by a long description of the historical
background along with the concept of the show, and when I read it
I was totally convinced that they had taken me for someone else.
I never worked with this particular or related subjects before,
and I found it incredibly hard to imagine a way of dealing with
it.
As politely as possible I called the curator and asked him if he
was sure he knew who I was. Which he did! In fact he knew my works
very well, so...
Basically I was very much in doubt and I was very afraid of being
out of my depths, but in the end I was talked into at least to go
to Frankfurt once to visit the Fritz Bauer Institute.
LM: Why did you decide to focus on the people who were working with
the DVD and the exhibition?
GV: I almost immediately, during the first visit to the institute,
got very curious about the people working there. What was their
thoughts about the whole matter?
In my own work it has been really important to me to be "truthful"
to the situations and stories I was working with. During my first
videos back in 94 and 95 I worked along some lines of directions
that I have since tried to follow quite strictly until the last
few years where I have perhaps loosened up a bit on these. I wanted
to be clear about the situation no matter what story I was working
with. In these works I always followed the chronology in which the
recordings where made, the original sound was always kept together
with the original image and everybody present, including myself,
had to be part of the story.
The last condition was based on the argument that the one asking
the questions always affect the answer and the reaction. One way
of making this responsibility clear was by clearly showing that
there is a subject behind the project. To show the subjective interest
and presence. Furthermore I have often transcribed the recordings
very carefully, down to describing the different meanings of a "yes-yes"
or spelling laughter differently compared to how it sounds. So despite
the VERY huge difference in the work of the employees at the Fritz
Bauer Institute and my artwork it was very easy for me to relate
to some of their conciderations, and I found it really interesting
to hear their examples.
How do you represent a given material, on what do you choose to
focus and who is in the position to make these choices?
In producing a historical document, what are the limits for what
you can do? When do you have a knowledge that you personally find
important and relevant but which isn't strictly speaking close enough
to the original subject to be included? Or when do you have information
that you can't include because you don't have any proof of that
being the case no matter how convinced you are yourself.
Tanja Müller, who is one of the employees at the Fritz Bauer
Institute who have been working with the original audio recordings,
is giving an example where a woman who had worked as a SS guard
for three years in the camp, claims that she had never heard off
"selection". When Tanja Müller were defining the
index words for this passage she couldn't write "here the woman
is lying" she could only write that the passage deals with
selection.
So, how do you define truth and what is allowed if the work is to
be considered objective/impartial? When is knowledge subjective
and where is the line drawn in terms of personal interests and opinions?
How do you for instance deal with terms that are considered TERMINUS
TECHNICUS although they might well be considered TÄTERBEGRIFFE?
That is, words which very definition have been made by the people
being accused.
How do the employees personally deal with working on such an extreme
subject on a daily basis? The last interview deals with the construction
of truth in fiction as well as documentary films. How there are
certain ideas of how the "truth" looks, and how you can
choose to play with this.
There is of course many, many differences between their work and
mine. A very important one being that despite my need to be "truthful"
I have no intention of being objective, impartial or scientific.
But I am interested in how this is defined.
LM: How did the staff at the Fritz Bauer Institute react on your
wish to talk about their working methods?
GV: Some said yes right away and some no. After some explanation
of my intentions some of the people who at first didn't want to
participate agreed on participating on the condition that they could
tell me only to use the sound, and not the image parts or not use
the interview at all after they had seen a first proposal from me.
This of course made the whole process much more insecure for me,
but it also gave me the possibility to talk to more people, which
I at this point I very much wanted to do. If not for the use in
the actual film then at least for the research. Fortunately they
all wanted to stay in the project after seeing the proposal.
LM: What did you find the most striking experience working on the
video?
GV: How the whole matter would sneak deeper and deeper into my mind.
How you would feel that it was touching you fundamentally to face
these stories and especially so the original audio. Parallel to
this I would see how I over time was developing a distance to some
images and facts. I had what you could call a minor experience of
what Werner Renz and Katharina Stengel are talking about in the
video. About how they need to have what you usually call a professional
distance to be able to work with the subject year after year and
that you over time develop something like a professional deformation.
And that they despite this still get emotional affected. Werner
Renz gave an example: "Most SS witnesses who gave testimony
in the trial, lied or only divulged part of their knowledge to the
questions of the court. Mostly, they protected the accused. Even
though they could have said something - that was obvious - they
remained silent when confronted with the accusations. And here it
was often unbearable for us to listen to these SS witnesses who
stood in front of court as free men and left court as free men,
since they were, according to our estimations, as involved in the
crimes of Auschwitz as the accused themselves. And here it was often
very, very difficult to continue the objective work, as it were,
if one experienced how the SS witnesses appeared during testimony.
Of course, it is like that, that you cannot always suppress your
own emotions in this work. On the other hand, one develops a sort
of professional callousness...".
LM: Your video piece is clearly about mediation and documentation
on several levels. First of all it is about the difficulties of
mediating or documenting historical material of this particular
kind in an objective manner. The trial itself is also an attempt
to reconstruct what actually happened in the Auschwitz camp. On
top of that the video piece is a self reflective mediation of the
interview material - in fact a documentation of a documentation
of a documentation. But for me your work also had a mediating function
in relation to the historical part of the show. Especially after
I listened to the personal comments on the trial from the people
interviewed, I found it a lot easier to engage with the extensive
textual material. Was it also a part of your considerations making
this video, that it could support the accessibility of the historical
material in the exhibition?
GV: It is really nice if it can have that function. In general I
personally appreciate if there are different ways for people to
access a subject. But I hardly know how to answer your question
- at the starting point of this specific project I had way too much
respect for the subject and the specialists in the field to think
that I would support their work. But somehow I hoped to be able
to address it from a different angle. I wanted to know more about
the thoughts and considerations behind the show - the construction
of a historical statement. Thoughts that might not be directly visible
in the result of their work.
LM: How do you think the exhibition works as a whole presenting
the historical material?
GV: I don't want to pretend that I am able to judge it all, but
I do think that personally I would have focused even more on the
audio. The audio is such an incredible source and they have 430
hours! On the DVD there is 100 hours transcribed from many different
languages, for every minute they made an index word and extra documentation
- to me it looks like they, in the Fritz Bauer Institute, did an
incredible job. And you really can get a feeling of how the trial
worked when you listen for longer.
I could imagine to have had places where you could sit and listen
to longer sequences from the beginning to the end while you were
reading the transcript. Of course people can still do this by themselves
when the DVD is ready.
Beside that I really like the combination of the example of six
of the accused and the history of the reception.
LM: I know you said to me, before I went to see the show, that you
were afraid that your work would be too boring, because the video
nearly consists of interviews alone, shot in the bureaucratic atmosphere
of the Fritz Bauer Institute. Despite the "formal dryness"
of the video I still believe it is one of the most engaging works
in the exhibition. Why did you choose this special aesthetic or
to pick up on your own title: which rules do you follow?
GV: Sometimes in my work I feel like I should somehow add a bit
of aesthetics or fiction but in each project the form is chosen
so that it suits my specific interests the best and that form seems
to stay within a certain direction. So to answer your question in
a very brief manner it was because I felt that this form would be
best suited for my interests in this project. Also it has to be
said that the specific subject of this specific project obviously
creates certain limits to what you can actually do with the material.
But in all of my projects I like to be able to meet people and talk
with them about their ideas, thoughts, passions, needs etc. And
after those meetings I want to be alone thinking about and messing
around with the resulting material for a long time. I really like
these two working processes and they seem to be more productive
for me than any others I have tried. For me "real life"
keeps me focused. There is no escape into thinking that the world
maybe is more like I would want it to be.
The subjects I am working with could obviously be expressed in other
forms but probably not by me. For instance one of my favourite writers,
that I think is very much dealing with subjects that I find very
important in my work, is Ursula Le Guin and that is Science Fiction
and, I would say, with no formal dryness at all.
The 6 employees are:
Dagi Knellessen worked on the exhibition. Research concerning the
accused and the witnesses was her area of responsibility.
Werner Renz evaluated the court records at the institute, constructing
indexes for the tape recordings and annotating the transcriptions.
Additionally, he identified the speakers on the tape recordings.
Katharina Stengel mainly dealt with authenticating the tape recordings
for the DVD.
Tanja Müller was responsible for constructing the index for
the DVD. In time she increased her work with data-administration,
and above all, assumed responsibility for the technical aspects
of the DVD's publication.
Christian Kolbe researched and processed the data bank containing
information about different individuals, identifying the people
involved in the trial and supplying them with profiles in the DVD-project.
Ronny Loewy worked on the project "Cinematography of the Holocaust".
For the exhibition he selected feature films, documentaries, movies,
and made-for-TV films that are related to the trial.
* The exhibition was first presented in Frankfurt and the participating
artists were: Tamy Ben-Tor, Tania Bruguera, Els Dietworst, Hermann
Maier Neustadt, Silvia Schreiber, Loris Cecchini, Claus Föttinger,
Robert Kusmirowski, Bojan Sarcevic, Wilhelm Sasnal, Joachim Seinfeld
and Gitte Villesen. The first five artists listed were not included
in the show in Berlin.
Original printed in Neue Rewiew # 8 2005
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