Lipstick Traces (18 page)

“Nazi Execution” is impossibly expressive: Lewis Hine goes to hell. A girl, a teenager, has been hung. Her dead face communicates the motives that caused her to risk death and the motives of those who have just killed her: the Nazi officers who, in the photo, are visible, people whose task it
was to exterminate just this sort of expressiveness. The girl’s face says more than those of most living camera subjects. As she dangles in the air, one of the officers fits a noose around the neck of a boy, perhaps the same age as the girl, perhaps much younger. You make up a story to match his face. His face says: “We were comrades, but I never thought I would be made to watch her die; I never thought I would be made to witness my own death; but so be it.” Looking at the picture, you are made aware of this image as a doubling of human possibility, as a doubled version of what it means to be human; you are made aware of an event that, one day, actually happened. Two people, specific within the species, were deprived of life in a particular way. Genre and iconography explode; the ideology of the fact cannot contain the moment.

In “Buchenwald, April 24, 1945,” Senator Alben Barkley stands before a cordwood pile of corpses. To us today, familiar with such images as Barkley in 1945 was not, what we see first is genre, the pit, which we easily turn into iconography, “The Holocaust.” But one must look at Barkley. The corpses are naked; he is heavily clothed in vest, suit, overcoat, hat, shoes. He stares at the corpses; the dignity in his face is bottomless. He is not dignified—the word immediately suggests pose, knowledge, distance, authority. This man, the photograph says, has struggled to understand what he has been made to look at, to understand something all of his experience of contemporary life and all of his reading of history have not prepared him to understand, and he has succeeded. The dignity in his face is not his own, and it is not that of the power he represents. In a moment of unpredictable comradeship and humility, Barkley has taken the dignity of which the people upon whom he gazes were robbed into his own face. If I were to die in this way, his face says, I would want someone to look upon me in this way. “We don’t mind!” Johnny Rotten screamed in “Belsen Was a Gas.” “Kill someone, be someone! Be a man, kill yourself! Please someone! We don’t mind!”

He seemed near to coming loose from his own skin. As in other moments on the same stage on the same night, as in so many moments on the singles the Sex Pistols put out over the previous year, he seemed not to know what he was saying. He seemed not to be himself, whoever that was; once more he was less singing a song than being sung by it. Nothing existed but an
objective, historical iconography, the common coin of any crowd called together anywhere in the West, where Nazi iconography, the spectacle of the Nazi fact, still served to diminish the exterminations of the present and to shroud the exterminations of the past, where Nazi iconography functioned not as history but as its most grandiose anomaly, the exception that proved the rule that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds (it was hard to think, with the song pounding on your head, and impossible not to)—nothing existed but that, that and an objectification of this treasured iconography by a disembodied but still subjective voice, which dissolved iconography as surely as Alben Barkley’s face. Johnny Rotten did not seem to be commenting on an historical event, but rather to be quoting from an as-yet-unmade movie:

[In 1985, in
Shoah,
a documentary film on the Nazi exterminations, director Claude Lanzmann interviews historian Raul Hilberg on the agencies responsible for transporting Jews to concentration camps.] “It was the same bureau that dealt with any kind of normal passenger?” “Absolutely. Just the official travel bureau. Mittel Europäisch Reisebüro would ship people to the gas chambers or they will ship vacationers to their favorite resort, and that was basically the same office and the same operation, the same procedure, the same billing . . . With children under ten going at half-fare and children under four going free.” “Excuse me, the children under four who were shipped to the extermination camps, the children under four . . .” “. . . went free.”

Or reading from an as-yet-unprinted news item:

(UPS, 11 Sept 1980—Salisbury, England)

A former army sergeant thinks he has come up with the ideal British vacation—three days in an imitation Nazi prison camp.

“They’ll have a horrible time and love every minute of it, or I’ll want to know the reason why,” said Bob Acraman, 41.

Having taken over a former army camp on the bleak Salisbury plain, he is inviting vacationers to spend $72 for three November days behind barbed wire, guarded by gun-carrying guards in German uniforms and watchtowers around the perimeter.

Acraman promises “a nice line in psychological interrogation” for vacationers who try to escape.

“There’ll be plenty of fog, rain and frost for our 2
A.M.
searches,” he said.

“The food will be first-class prison nosh—thin soup and stale bread. And there’ll be no fires in the huts.”

Acraman claims demand for his vacation is heavy.

“There are plenty of crazy people around like me who love being locked up and made to suffer behind barbed wire,” he said.

Of course, Johnny Rotten couldn’t predict the future; he could only insist that it was contained by the past. That was the meaning of no-future. After “Belsen Was a Gas,” “Holidays in the Sun” was still to come that night in Winterland, and Johnny Rotten had no way of knowing, had he been born in another time and another place, that he could have ridden to Belsen for free, or that had he been willing to wait, he could have seen a new Belsen without ever leaving England. Or is that exactly what he meant?

On stage, all one saw was an ugly, unlikely youth declaring that his time as a pop star had come to an end: you could see it happen, hear him deciding to quit. “Ah, it’s awful,” he said in the middle of “No Fun,” his last song as a member of the Sex Pistols, even his loathing leaving him: “It’s no good.” The disgust that the band had been built to talk about had finally, so quickly, overtaken the one whose job it was to talk about it. The show had gone far enough. All one saw was a failure; all one saw was a medium. The hall shook: it shook like a seance table in nineteenth-century Boston, Paris, or Petrograd, when the devotees sat waiting, ready for the dead to come knocking on the horizontal doors. The show had gone as far as a show can go.

“A baritone came on, to a round of applause. He had a fine voice and the most funereal aspect imaginable. You would have guessed him to have been in bygone days a
répresentant du peuple,
a member of the Montagne, a ‘thinker’ who prided himself on his looks . . . If this baritone were to figure
in the troubles which await us, I for one would not be surprised.” So wrote the conservative journalist Louis Veuillot, four years before those troubles, in the form of the Paris Commune of 1871, arrived to match his prophecy. Seance tables weren’t the only thing shaking in Paris in 1867.

As cited by T. J. Clark in
The Painting of Modern Life,
Veuillot was describing a performer in the Alcazar, a “café-concert”: the warmup act for Thérésa, the singer all Paris came to hear. She was stocky, unlovely, and powerful; the texts of her songs were carefully monitored by the government censor, but he couldn’t control her voice or her gestures—the way, Clark says, she won her battles
“against
the standardized melodies, the footling lyrics, the cynical production values, the farrago of violence and souped-up emotion.” This was a matter of lifting a hand in the right place at the right time, of turning a phrase, and as Howard Hampton once said of the concerts Bob Dylan put on in 1966, Thérésa had the knack of turning a casual aside into a condemnation of the whole social order: the “audience,” Clark writes, “lived for the moment when the band struck up ‘La Canaille’ [The Rabble] and the singer invited them to join in the chorus of ‘J’en suis! J’en suis!’ [I’m part of it].”

The Alcazar was a big hall, where drinks were served to thousands. The new petite bourgeoisie, the clerks who filled most of it, would in their workday or domestic lives have taken “rabble” for the crude class insult it would have been. Here they embraced it, out of longing for the proletarian or peasant past they were escaping, out of hatred for the real, propertied bourgeoisie they longed to emulate. Here, in the new domain of regular entertainments and organized leisure, they had a privileged space to dissipate their yearnings and their rage, or to focus them. So Veuillot’s anonymous baritone (who along with twenty thousand others was in June 1871 in the extermination of the Commune put up against a wall and shot) (or who had already left town) raises an interesting question: is the cabaret a place where the spirit of negation is born, or is it where that spirit goes to die?

“There was a revolution round the corner,” Clark writes, “made by baritones or not.” And around the next corner was the trashcan of history. The Commune emerged on 18 March 1871, when Adolphe Thiers’s one-month-old conservative parliamentary regime, brought to power by Emperor
Louis-Napoleon’s surrender in the Franco-Prussian War, fled Paris in the face of the Prussian advance and the desertion of government troops. For the next months almost every radical idea of the previous hundred years was dug out of the ground and put into some sort of practice. Private people once again became citizens, interested in everything, because when everything seemed possible, everything was interesting. “I will never forget those delightful moments of deliverance,” one man said. “I came down from my upper chamber in the Latin Quarter to join that immense open-air club which filled the boulevards from one end of Paris to the other. Everyone talked about public affairs; all merely personal preoccupations were forgotten; no more thought of buying and selling; all felt ready, body and soul, to advance towards the future.”

To many then and now the Commune was not a revolution at all, but an anarchist parody of what had begun as an old-fashioned bourgeois rejection of ossified authority. If it was a revolution it was certainly queer: “the greatest festival of the 19th century,” Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi, and Raoul Vaneigem wrote for the situationists in “On the Commune” in 1962. They were constructing a philosophy of leisure (“Underlying the events of that spring of 1871 one can see the insurgents’ feeling that they had become the masters of their own history, not so much on the level of ‘governmental’ politics as on the level of their everyday life”), of modern leisure as medieval baccanale: as masters of their own history the communards abolished ordinary time. The Lord of Misrule, joke king of the ancient overnight saturnalia, executed the day after, had somehow seized history and declared that misrule would last forever. It was as if, instead of stumbling home drunk and getting up the next day to stand at the counter, Thérésa’s fans had poured out of the Alcazar and into the streets, and there changed the world beyond the power of memory to recall what it had been like the day before. “That was the dance that everybody forgot,” rockabilly singer Butch Hancock once said of Elvis Presley’s first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. “It was the dance that was so strong it took an entire civilization to forget it. And ten seconds to remember it.”

A memory of a change in the structures that governed work, family, and leisure—a dissolution of those structures, those separations—was what the
Paris Commune left to those few who wanted to remember it. The Commune made the organs of direct democracy that appeared in later revolutionary moments—the Petrograd Soviets of 1905 and 1917, the Berlin Räte of 1918, the anarchist collectives in Barcelona in 1936, the Hungarian councils of 1956, perhaps the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964, the assemblies and occupations in France in May ’68, the Solidarity unions in Poland in 1980—seem bureaucratic. The situationists wrote:

The official organizers of the Commune were incompetent (if measured against Marx and Lenin, or even Blanqui). But the various so-called irresponsible acts of that movement are precisely what is needed for the continuation of the revolutionary movement in our own time (even if circumstances restricted almost all of those acts to a purely destructive level—the most famous example being the revolutionary who, when a suspect bourgeois insisted that he had never had anything to do with politics, replied: “That’s exactly why I’m going to kill you”).

Stevedores, it is said, spread philosophy like gossip; clerks wrestled with absolutes (“That’s exactly why I’m going to kill you”). The Commune may have had as much in common with John of Leyden’s Münster as with any certified modern revolution—Georges Clemenceau, in 1871 mayor of Montmartre, thought so. It can hardly be an accident that the most convincing rejection of the Commune remains Guy Endore’s 1933 horror potboiler,
The Werewolf of Paris:
as a dramatization of freedom, the Commune was also a riot of the social unconscious. As it uncovered every wish for life, it uncovered a wish for death, which contained a wish for the death of the Commune itself. With Bismarck’s troops and the whole of the French army massed outside Paris, the Communards never had a chance, and they knew it. Many were willing to die because, after a taste of freedom that could be measured only by the inadequacies of the surprises of the previous day, they found themselves unwilling to settle for anything less, to live as they had lived only one day earlier, much less to return to the freedom of a choice between whatever commodities others had put up for sale, a choice between a Sunday in the park or on the river: so goes the legend invented after the fact. In that sense the Commune was not a seizure of history but a
gift to it, or a curse on it, a standard against which the future would be judged: a moment to be worshipped or damned.