Literature and Film from East Europe's Forgotten "Second World"

Essays of Invitation

Gordana P. Crnkovic

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501370663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Russian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia-no longer on the map. East Europe of the socialist period may seem like a historical oddity, apparently so different from everything before and after. Yet the masterpieces of literature and cinema from this largely forgotten "Second World, " as well as by the authors formed in it and working in its aftermath, surprise and delight with their contemporary resonance. This book introduces and illuminates a number of these works. It explores how their aesthetic ingenuity discovers ways of engaging existential and universal predicaments, such as how one may survive in the world of victimizations, or imagine a good city, or broach the human boundaries to live as a plant. Like true classics of world art, these novels, stories, and films-to rephrase Bohumil Hrabal-keep "telling us things about ourselves we don't know." In lively and jargon-free prose, Gordana P. Crnkovic builds on her rich teaching experience to create paths to these works and reveal how they changed lives.

Part I

Invitations

Chapter 1

The Flight of Form

THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
(Tadeusz Borowski, Poland 1948)

All of us walk around naked. The delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers. Only the inmates in the blocks cut off from ours by the “Spanish goats” still have nothing to wear. But all the same, all of us walk around naked: the heat is unbearable. The camp has been sealed off tight. Not a single prisoner, not one solitary louse, can sneak through the gate.¹

This translation of the opening passage of Borowski’s story “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” opens with a striking sentence, “All of us walk around naked.” The original, however, starts with a more restrained statement: “Cały obóz chodził nago,” or “The whole camp walked naked.”² The tense of the original is not the urgent present but the past, over and done and thus emotionally calmer, and the word used to name the subject who walks around naked is “camp,” obóz. While the translator may have chosen to alter the tense and the subject of this statement to get a rhetorically stronger opening expression which loses the cooler narrative tone of the original opening, the replacement of the “whole camp” with “all of us” also, importantly, loses the original’s effect, which this paragraph gets from the close repetition of the word “camp.” “The whole camp walked naked” is followed soon after by “The camp has been sealed off tight” (“Obóz ściśle zamknięto”).³ In the original, there is only one sentence, a very long one of fifty words, that separates these two short “camp sentences.”⁴ The echoing of two emphasized appearances of the word obóz, camp, as the subject of the two twin-sentences, both curt and definitive like a verdict, makes a clear connection between the camp that walks around naked and the camp that is sealed off tight. The camp is an external, hermetically closed—sealed—prison from which no one, none of us, can escape. But the camp is, at the same time, us: we are that camp that walks naked.

Borowski’s camp is us because it penetrated and incorporated us, the enslaved inmates, in itself as its own living force that makes possible its smooth function. We are that camp of slaves who process all those newcomers upon their arrival: we give their valuables to the watchful German soldiers, load ourselves with their food and clothes for our own keep, shove these people onto trucks that take them to the death chambers, carry their corpses to crematoria, and finally, now as a “heap of burned bones” (56), we deposit them into the pond. “We are not evoking evil irresponsibly or in vain, for we have now become a part of it” (113).

But one could imagine another reason for the story not directly spelling out that I or we “walk naked” in this first sentence. The narrator’s rhetorical keeping of his clothes on, as it were, even when they are factually off, may indirectly affirm the preservation of one’s form that keeps the mind whole and resists the destruction coming from the outside. Keeping one’s clothes on in language, if not in reality, could thus be seen as a metonymy for the assertion of the literary form that upholds one’s mind, a form that helps one to survive and pushes from the inside against the camp’s destruction of all such internally asserted shapes of oneself.

* * *

Both of Borowski’s parents were sent to Soviet prison camps when he was a child. He was taken care of by relatives and Franciscans until the family were reunited. Sixteen years old when Germany attacked and invaded Poland, Borowski was imprisoned in Auschwitz in 1943, liberated by the US Army from Dachau in May 1945, and wrote his first stories in Germany. He wandered through the newly liberated and chaotic Europe, returned to Poland, and married his fiancée. His stories, based on his camp experience, got published, and he was not only recognized for his talent but also attacked for cynicism and nihilism. He moved to a different kind of writing and worked for the new Polish regime; he got to know that regime intimately too. After attempting suicide several times, he finally gassed himself soon after his wife gave birth to their daughter. Tadeusz Borowski was not yet twenty-nine years old when he died on July 3, 1951.

Yet, the story of Borowski’s life could also be told differently, as a story of life in and with literature. During the German occupation which, among other things, prohibited any education beyond elementary school to Poles, Borowski studied literature in an underground school. “In a seminar on English literature [he] drew attention with his translation of the fool’s songs from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.”⁵ He published his first book, a collection of poetry, in 1942; he might have “worried that,” as the narrator of one of his later stories remembers, he and his peers “should grow up to be a generation of illiterates” (121) and was apprehended by Germans with a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in his possession. His imprisonment at Warsaw’s Pawiak prison created, according to his story “Auschwitz, Our Home (a Letter),” a sensation that he would “not be able to endure a day without a book . . . without a sh eet of paper.” He “paced up and down the cell and composed poems to the rhythm of [his] steps” (110). When asked by the mildly intrigued German S. S. doctor, “And what was it you studied?”, Tadek, the first-person narrator of Borowski’s Auschwitz stories, modestly replies “the history of literature” (99).⁶ Tadek’s description of his arrival in Auschwitz prompts Witek, one of the listeners, to say “approvingly”: “‘How you can talk! It’s evident that you’re a poet’” (127). Taking at times the role of a literary critic himself, Tadek notes that one of the Auschwitz Kapos, a man renowned for brutality and cruelty, also distinguished himself by his “short but touching letters, filled with love and nostalgia,” written “to his old parents in Frankfurt” (123). In a letter to his fiancée kept in the women’s part of the camp, Tadek remembers “the two most talented men of our generation,” now dead, and restarts the dispute he had with them, a “dispute about the meaning of the world, the philosophy of living, and the nature of poetry” (137). Writing to her about the “dark-blue forest” where “the earth is black and it must be damp,” he adds: “As in one of Staff’s⁷ sonnets—‘A Walk in Springtime,’ remember?” (101). Imagining, in the camp, the future that the two of them will have after being liberated from the camp, Tadek thinks “about the poems [he is] going to write, the books [they] shall read together” (140). “My passion are books,” reads the opening of one of his stories.⁸

The story of one’s life may be the story of holding onto and perfecting, strengthening, and perhaps ultimately losing one’s literary form. Written as the first-person narrative of Tadek, one of the camp’s inmates and a Vorarbeiter, and despite their apparently transparent straightforwardness, Borowski’s Auschwitz stories are actually highly and ingeniously organized.⁹ While the surface of the text often reveals paragraphs that are rarely more than half a page long, and a regular alteration of narrative passages and dialogues that creates a strong, forward-pushing rhythm, the overall construction involves a number of less noticeable, diverse, and inspired forms—such as mock Platonic dialogues or the indirect use of multiple literary genres—that function as an array of literary and conceptual means of grasping and handling the reality of the camps. All these shapes are mounted and marshalled as tools of comprehension and resistance to that unthinkable reality of the camps that simply happens. “You see, the inexplicable actually happens” (118). These penetrating forms of thinking and writing remind the reader of different high-frequency waves that reveal various inner structures of the body that are otherwise invisible—x-rays for the bones, magnetic resonance for soft tissue, and ultrasound for motion.

“You know how much I used to like Plato. Today I realize he lied,” we read in the story “Auschwitz, Our Home (a Letter)” (131). The text proceeds to allege that Plato’s untruth lies in the fact that things of this world are not a “reflection of the ideal, but a product of human sweat, blood and hard labour . . . We were filthy and died real deaths. They were ‘aesthetic’ and carried on subtle debates” (132). Yet, rather than such an explicit, declarative statement, the internal logic of Borowski’s early story “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” itself provides a deeper insight into Plato’s “lie.” The lie here considers not so much the “grammarian revolution,” as it has been called at times, that empties the practice of the matter/mother/materiality shared by both working—or enslaved—bodies and the abused nature with which they are one. Instead, the lie revealed in this story concerns the creation of knowledge through Plato’s Socratic dialogues. Borowski’s story also mounts a dialogue of a sort as one of its own active forms. This dialogue proceeds through several stages and, by the end, reverses, echoing Plato’s model, the one interlocutor’s beginning position. But the progress of knowledge here is not a result of the dialectical method employed in a leisurely street conversation among free men. The understanding is instead brought about by a change in the existential predicament of one of the interlocutors, a slave just as much as his dialogical opponent.

The dialogue in question, between Tadek and his French campmate Henri, is itself enabled by the rarest occurrence, the cessation of back-breaking labor demanded of all the inmates. A delousing of their clothes has left them naked and unemployed. “All day, thousands of naked men shuffle” around in the scorching heat (29). “The hours are endless,” and even more so because of the absence of the “usual diversion” of the rivers of people walking to their deaths (30). “For several days now, no new transports have come in” (30). Men visit with friends and that is how, made possible by this odd oasis of leisure and quiet, Tadek and Henri start their conversation. They talk while sitting on the top bunk and eating bread, bacon, onion, a can of evaporated milk, and even a tomato salad made with commissary mustard. “Only a week ago my mother held this white loaf in her hands . . . dear Lord, dear Lord . . .,” thinks Tadek, as the bread came in a package from Warsaw sent to him by his family. The Frenchman Henri has been a member of “Canada,” the camp’s group charged with processing the transports of people arriving at the Auschwitz train station. Tadek, while having been interned in the camp for a while and seeing the masses of “the people who walked on,” unknowingly, to the gas chambers, has actually never worked at the “ramp” where the overcrowded trains dislodge their human cargo.¹⁰ He argues with Henri who says that the cessation of these transports would lead to the death of all those who inhabit, at least for a short while, the camp of living and working. “They can’t run out of people,” says Henri, “or we’ll starve to death . . . All of us live on what they bring” (31). Tadek disputes Henri’s claim by arguing that he and some other inmates would nevertheless survive on the packages they get from home. Henri counters by saying that such men would not be allowed to use those packages if everyone around them were starving, because those others would fight them for that food. In the end, however, Henri offers, “Anyway, you have enough, we have enough, so why argue?,” and Tadek internally agrees: “Right, why argue?” (31).

The two men’s argument is not about the truth of general concepts—like courage, virtue, love, or art—pursued in Plato’s dialogues, but instead, appro­priately descended to the lowest earthly spheres, about the day-to-day survival of the camp’s slaves. Nor is Henri a Socrates figure: he doesn’t ironically plead his own ignorance to pursue a dialogue in which his interlocutor becomes aware of his own wrong opinion, and he actually cuts the argument short without any final resolution. But Tadek seems very much like Socrates’ interlocutors who are, at the beginning of a dialogue, fully assured of being in the right and possessing a true knowledge. He agrees to stop arguing but retains his original belief, and it seems implied, given how he has carried himself so far, that no amount of additional talk would convince him otherwise.

Suddenly, a new transport is announced, and Henri gets permission for Tadek to accompany the “Canada” group to the ramp to participate in the unloading of this transport. The second part of their dialogue takes place in a different environment. The setting is no longer the top bunk in an unusual moment of peace, but instead the “inferno on the teeming ramp” (45).

A huge, multicoloured wave of people loaded down with luggage pours down from the train like a blind, mad river trying to find a new bed. But before they have a chance to recover, before they can draw a breath of fresh air and look at the sky, bundles are snatched from their hands, coats ripped off their backs, their purses and umbrellas taken away. (38)

In tremendous heat, Tadek and Henri are now processing these people, carrying and sorting out everything (valuables to the Germans, loot to the side heaps, corpses to the trucks), cleaning up everything, and moving things along. The “Canada” men shove people up into trucks and pack them tightly, “sixty per truck, more or less” (39). The few words Tadek and Henri manage to exchange concern their own actions or, in Tadek’s case, his own unpredictable transformation: “I am furious, simply furious with these people—furious because I must be here because of them. I feel no pity” (40). Yet, their undecided dialogue from the beginning carries on this whole time, though not through words and arguments now, but instead through this whole reality that presents its own facts and, on the basis of them, mounts its own argument. While rivers of people arrive on trains and leave on trucks for gas chambers and crematoria, while they come and go, their belongings remain. “The heaps grow . . . mountains of bread pile up at the exits, heaps of marmalade, jams, masses of meat, sausages; sugar spills on the gravel” (38). Tadek realizes how the enormous quantities of food and other things, brought by and taken from people on these transports, dwarf the few packages which he and a few other Poles get: “The Canada men, weighed down under a load of bread, marmalade and sugar . . . line up to go” (49). He has now understood that the entire camp indeed survives on this loot—either because they live off of it or because the men who are thus provided leave in peace those few like himself who receive packages from the outside. He does not exclude himself anymore. “For several days the entire camp will live off this transport. For several days the entire camp will talk about ‘Sosnowiec-Będzin.’ ‘Sosnowiec-Będzin’ was a good, rich transport” (49).

The story’s grotesque reenactment of a Socratic dialogue starts with speech but then replaces concepts with the mat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Credits
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION: ON INVITATIONS AND DISCOVERIES
• Part I INVITATIONS
• Part II PROBING DEEPER
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright