4 ‘The being together of two human beings …’ Rilke, from ‘On Being With Others’ in Letters on Life.
5 ‘Let’s be alone together …’ Leonard Cohen, ‘Waiting for the Miracle’.
6 At the end of our Ottoneum performance we chalked two sentences (translated into German) on vertical blackboards:
‘The silence of the earth is our blindness’
‘The silence of our country is your deafness’
And then we wrote our ‘6 Questions for FIU Kassel from FIU. London’ (again translated):
Why does the Free International University have so little curiosity about other countries?
Why do you not debate the question of Power, Wealth and Class?
How much is the FIU really involved in its locality in Kassel?
When does theoretical discussion become accompanied by practical action?
With regard to ecological crisis, how far does your theory of self-responsibility go?
By refusing to listen to any criticism of its founder, will the FIU become ossified – like a church in which only the faithful talk to each other?
7 ‘Here tulips bloom as they are told; / Unkempt about those hedges blows / An English unofficial rose …’ from ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ by Rupert Brooke (written in Berlin in 1912).
8 The Canadian sprinter was Ben Johnson. The new world record time set on 30 August 1987, that we saw in the bar in Twiste, was not 9.85 seconds, as I thought at the time – but (as my very conscientious copy-editor informs me) 9.83 seconds. However, Johnson subsequently admitted to steroid use between 1981 and 1988, and so this world record time was struck out of the official records by the IAAF Council in September 1989.
9 ‘I see that I must give …’ The last line of Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels.
Chapter Five: The Town of Organised Forgetting
1 Shoah was finally released in 1985, the premiere taking place in Paris in April 1985. The film was then shown, in different countries, over the next months – the first screening in America was in New York in October 1985, and in Britain in spring 1986. It was immediately acclaimed as a seminal work – called ‘a sheer masterpiece’ by Simone de Beauvoir and ‘the greatest documentary about contemporary history ever made, bar none’ by the great filmmaker Marcel Ophüls.
My journal from early 1987 records that on 2 and 3 January:
[I] finally got to see the stunning Shoah – a ten hour film about the Holocaust – (‘Shoah’ = the Annihilation in Hebrew) at the Curzon. Remarkable for many reasons, but especially the lack of sentimentalizing or histrionics. Pared down to the bone, creating a rhythm of its own … No real dramatic climax, no need for it – it gave you room, it never bored. Until at the end … I wanted more. I could have watched for another twenty, thirty hours. It took Lanzmann eleven years to make – eleven years and hundreds of hours of film, somehow got down to nine and a half. How? The dedication of that – the nightmarishness of the task. Images now burned into my mind …
2 The full memorandum – ‘II D 3 a (9) NI. 214/42 G.R.S. Berlin, 5th June 1942 Technical adjustments to special vans at present in service and to those that are in production’ – is reproduced in Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, edited by Kogon, Langbein and Ruckerl, Yale University Press, 1993.
3 Section 2 of the memorandum is extremely convoluted and has caused a certain amount of confusion among translators:
The original German of this part of the memo is as follows:
2.) Die Beschickung der Wagen beträgt normalerweise 9 – 10 pro m2. Bei den großräumigen Saurer-Spezialwagen ist eine Ausnutzung in dieser Form nicht möglich, weil dadurch zwar keine Überlastung eintritt, jedoch die Geländegängigkeit sehr herabgemindert wird.
Lanzmannn’s version in Shoah translates this as:
The normal load is nine per square metre. In Saurer vehicles, which are very spacious, maximum use of space is impossible, not because of any overload but because loading to full capacity would affect the vehicle’s stability.
The translation included in the Yale University Press work Nazi Mass Murder (ed. Kogon, Langbein and Ruckerl) is:
2.) The normal capacity of the vans is nine to ten per square metre. The capacity of the larger special Saurer vans is not so great. The problem is not one of overloading but of off-road manoeuverability on all terrains, which is severely diminished in this van.
4 Other trucks, including Opel Blitz, Renault, Dodge, Diamond and Magirus were used as gaswagen as well, though Saurers were the main lorries used.
Chapter Six: Saurer: A Coda – ‘The blind spot in the writing of history’
Material in this chapter is taken from the Bergier commission (final report) – available online at www.uek.ch/en/ and also the Independent’s obituary of Bergier (19 January 2010) and the Telegraph’s obituary (4 November 2009).
1 The information on China’s use of execution vans comes from Amnesty International – ‘Execution Vans, Organ Harvesting – Business as Usual in China’ (19 February 2009). The Irish Times article (also 19 February 2009) is by Clifford Coonan in Beijing – ‘Killing Vans Make Process Easier for China’s Authorities’.
Chapter Seven: The Architect in London; First Trip
Information about Speer’s first trip to London, in summer 1936, is taken from his autobiography, Inside the Third Reich, Chapter Eight. Speer makes a curious error here, suggesting that Ribbentrop wanted the improvements to the German Embassy to be finished ‘in time for the coronation of George VI in the spring of 1937’ – yet, when Speer visited London in summer 1936, Edward VIII was king, and so it was his coronation which was scheduled for spring 1937, not George VI’s. (Though, of course, Edward VIII’s coronation never took place because of his abdication in December 1936.)
1 Material relating to Hitler giving Speer his own jacket at the Reich Chancellery is from Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Chapter Three, ‘Dizzy With Excitement’, by Sereny.
Chapter Eight: ‘Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues’
Most of the Ken Saro-Wiwa quotations in this chapter are taken from a transcription I made of his final interview, ‘Without Walls: Ken Saro-Wiwa, The Hanged Man; Nigeria’s Shame’, produced by Bandung, broadcast by Channel 4, November 1995.
1 The term ‘the Black Holocaust’ has been widely used to describe the genocide of millions of African men, women and children, killed during 400 years of slavery and the slave trade. It is also the title of a book – The Black Holocaust for Beginners, published by Writers & Readers, in 1995, by the American academic and activist S. E. Anderson.
2 ‘Troops entered towns and villages shooting at random, as villagers fled to the surrounding bush …’ This witness testimony of the ISTF raids on Ogoniland appeared in the Human Rights Watch report ‘The Ogoni Crisis: A Case-Study of Military Repression in Southeastern Nigeria’, published in 1995.
3 The British barrister Michael Birnbaum, QC, published his powerful report Nigeria: Fundamental Rights Denied, Report of the Trial of Ken Saro-Wiwa and Others in June 1995. He had been an observer for part of the trial and his report found that ‘the trial is fundamentally flawed and there is grave reason to fear that its continuation will represent a gross injustice and an abuse of human rights’.