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‘Things. Places. Years.’ by
Anthony Auerbach (with German translation by Bettina
Steinbrügge)
in: Klub Zwei, in Zusammenarbeit mit,
edited by Annette Südbeck (Vienna: Secession,
2005), pp. 34–39; first
published in in Lasso, No. 1 (Lüneburg:
Halle für Kunst/Frankfurt am Main: Revolver,
2004) pp. 88–92 (German), pp. 151–153
(English).
 Things. Places. Years. is a film about women I know by women
I have gotten to know; a film about women I have grown up with in London — women
to whom I owe my education — by women who have grown up and
were educated in Germany and Austria. It is a film about the knowledge
of Jewish women. That is, getting to know Jewish women and getting
to know what Jewish women know. The film records a process of coming
to terms with the knowledge of an absence: the absence through which
the past makes itself present in a city such as Vienna.
I first met Klub Zwei (Simone Bader and Jo Schmeiser) when they
came to London in 2000 to begin researching a project then without
a name. They did not introduce themselves as documentary film-makers.
They introduced me to a collaborative art practice focused on the
interrogation of women’s experience and an approach to media
in which forms of representation — graphics, video, text — are
understood as interventions in public space, that is, as interventions
in a public discourse rather than in a supposedly autonomous art
discourse. Klub Zwei’s (then) most recent project Work
on/in Public (Arbeit an der Öffentlichkeit, 1999),
developed in co-operation with MAIZ (an autonomous centre run by
and for migrant women) in Linz, Austria, resulted in a series of
posters based on interviews with women from various parts of the
world who had recently settled in Austria. The women’s remarks
on the present-day legal, social and political condition of immigrants
in Austria came to be seen in a sharper light, especially outside
Austria, after the success of Jörg Haider’s far-right
Freedom Party in the 2000 general election. One of the poster headlines
reads, in the words of one the women, ‘Austria never got over
the Hitler era.’
The initial motivation of Klub Zwei’s research in London
was to follow up their previous work by investigating the heritage
of emigration from Austria, that is, the presence in London of women,
their daughters and granddaughters, who had escaped — some only
narrowly — from the genocidal persecution of Jews during the
Nazi period. Jo and Simone were particularly interested to meet
women whose work involved them in the cultural sphere: in the production,
transmission and preservation of knowledge. It soon became clear
that this could be no objective documentation. It would be a conversation
which examined not only the émigré condition, and
the experience of the Holocaust, but also Klub Zwei’s own
position, in their words, ‘as descendants of the perpetrator
society.’ The project would establish its structure on the
axis Vienna-London, not by focusing exclusively on Jewish women
born in Austria, but by talking about women’s experience of
the city. The twelve women with whom Klub Zwei recorded interviews
come from diverse geographical and religious backgrounds and would
never conceive of themselves as a group. Things. Places. Years. asks
us to reflect on what these women might share, alongside the fact
that by chance or by design they have made their homes in London.
That is, to reflect on the construction of identity: what it means
when we identify ourselves or are identified by others as women,
as Jews, as migrants, as bearers or curators of a culture or a historical
experience.
In the interviews, history is refracted through the women’s
family stories: through their relationships with people, places,
things. However, it becomes clear that for many of the women, these
stories were not discussed in the family. Ruth Sands describes how,
if ever her father mentioned their life before emigration, whenever
he began ‘Bei uns in Wien ...’ (‘At home in Vienna
...’), her mother would interrupt angrily, ‘Es gibt
nichts zu sagen.’ (‘There is nothing to say about it.’)
She says of her mother: ‘She left Vienna and she was, I think,
thirty-three and it was as if her life started when she was thirty-three.’
Ruth Sands also tells how she attempted to protect her own children
by not discussing the family history. The acknowledgement of this
reluctance is echoed in different ways by several of the women.
Yet for all the women, there is no question that the history which
has marked their families in various ways is something that should
be known. One may also say that all the women recognise the desire
and the right of the next generation to know. In Klub Zwei’s
conversation with Elly Miller and her daughter Tamar Wang, Tamar
questions her mother and remarks how it was almost as if she had
never heard it before; how her sense of history was never a family
story, or at least that the family story was only ever pieced together
from things mentioned occasionally in the home and intermingled
with fragments of the bigger picture of history that was taught
outside the home. Elly Miller makes the point that her own childhood
recollections are also coloured by the knowledge, acquired only
later, of the monumental horrors which now seem to stand at the
centre of Europe’s twentieth century. Hearing my mother Geraldine
Auerbach speak to Klub Zwei and reflect, for example, on her father’s
family’s journey from Lithuania to South Africa at the turn
of the twentieth century, her upbringing there under the regime
of ‘separateness’ (apartheid) and her joy in the diversity
(the mixed-up-ness) of a city such as London, was to hear things
I know, but only vaguely — family things — expressed in
an unfamiliar way. My mother prefers, perhaps, to express what this
heritage means to her through her work as founder and director of
the Jewish Music Institute. This also suggests something about another
of Klub Zwei’s questions: about the women’s sense of
Jewish identity.
The crossing of history, identity and
work also emerges in what we learn of
Ruth Sands’s co-operation in the
Second Generation Trust, an organisation
founded by Katherine Klinger. The organisation
was started as a way of ‘bringing
out into the open the generational
consequences of history,’ specifically
for the post-Holocaust generation,
the generation for which the Holocaust
is nonetheless, as Katherine Klinger
put it to Klub Zwei, ‘part of
an unseen and unexpressed trauma.’ However,
the Second Generation Trust does not
focus only on how it has affected the
descendants of the survivors [note 1],
but includes the children of perpetrators,
collaborators and so-called bystanders.
Is the history from which Ruth Sands
derives her sense of Jewish identity
the same as that which makes Jewish
identity, for Katherine Klinger, hard
to grasp? Is the historical
‘rupture’ which is the topic
of the Second Generation Trust’s
activities echoed in the cultural displacement
felt by immigrants and their children?
Do we value these displacements as historical
reminders, that is, the vectors of a
history on which an identity might be
founded, even if a broken one? Is Jewish
history (and hence identity) unique
in being founded, it seems, on displacement
and remembrance?
Things. Places. Years. does not attempt to extract a consensus
from the women’s statements, nor impose one on it, nor is
it a history lesson. It is a film, that is, an intervention by Klub
Zwei. The film accepts the severity of cutting many hours of interviews
to seventy minutes. It suggests the telling of history as a form
of interrupted speech, remembrance as interruption in the present.
The cut permits the viewer to listen as if the women would speak
for one another, and so, their differences in experience, in expression,
in opinion, emerge as an equivocality in the identity we have projected
on them. The cut works because of Klub Zwei’s consistent attentiveness:
on a single page such as the poster Bei uns in Wien, on
many pages such as the book Things. Places. Years. The Knowledge
of Jewish Women (which forms an extensive record of Klub Zwei’s
conversations and from which I have quoted), in five minutes of
voice and text such as Schwarz auf Weiss or in seventy
minutes of interruption documenting the presence of absence.
Anthony Auerbach
Los Angeles, January 2004
 ... return ‘Hallo Wien’
... return: Urban matters
Note
-
This is the focus of the Second Generation
Trust. Many of the survivors lost their
parents, thus they are the children
of the
‘victims’ (A common childhood
experience of the second generation
was that it was always other people
who had grandparents). But the identification ‘victim’ can
be problematic. The phrase ‘victims
of the Holocaust’ perhaps
falsely dignifies their fate. To acknowledge
that the grandparents were murdered
by the Nazis could be more to the point. [back to text]
References
Things. Places. Years.
(2004, DV-CAM, colour, 4:3, stereo,
70 min, English with German subtitles)
a film by Klub Zwei (Simone Bader & Jo Schmeiser)
Things. Places. Years. The Knowledge of Jewish Women
(2004, 300pp, 140 x 202 mm, English and German)
a book by Klub Zwei (Simone Bader & Jo Schmeiser)
Bei uns in Wien/At home in Vienna
(2002, 594 x 841 mm)
posters by Klub Zwei (Simone Bader & Jo Schmeiser)
Österreichischer Grafikpreis, Innsbruck, 2002
with: Geraldine Auerbach, Josephine Bruegel, Erica Davies, Lisbeth
Perks, Katherine Klinger, Elly Miller, Rosemarie Nief, Anni Reich,
Ruth Rosenfelder, Ruth Sands, Nitza Spiro, Tamar Wang
Schwarz auf Weiss — Die Rückseite der Bilder
(2003, Mini-DV, B&W, 4:3, stereo, 5 min, Polish, French, Bulgarian,
English and German)
a video by Klub Zwei (Simone Bader & Jo Schmeiser) with Rosemarie Nief
Images
Passport of Jewish girl born in Vienna in 1938, held by her granddaughter in 2001, photographed by Klub Zwei
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