In 1924, after his failed attempt at a coup, Hitler was imprisoned in the old fortress at Landsberg. He was treated as an honored guest, given a room with a view, showered with gifts and visits from admirers. It was there that be began dictating the book, later known as “Mein Kamph” or, “Our Struggle.” Turgid and ponderous, it was not a best seller until Hitler came to power when it became politic, even obligatory for every family to have a copy prominently displayed. According to William Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), few, including foreign diplomats, read it at the time.
It’s possible that the world might have been spared the horrors to come if they had done so, understood the message and acted against it. For in Mein Kamph, Hitler laid down his blueprint for the new world order – German supremacy under his absolute dictatorship, Lebensraum (Living space) and “racial purity, “ that is, a call for the destruction of everybody who wasn’t of “pure” Aryan blood.
We now know what that lead to.
Eighty-one years later, in 2005, French painter and photographer Linda Ellia held in her hands a French translation of this book, that lead torture and slaughter of millions. Born in Tunisia to a Sephardic Jewish family, Linda Ellia moved to Paris with her family at age eight to escape the increasingly violent antisemitism of 1960s Tunisia. The book was heavy with in her hands, heavy with its murderous ideology and heavy with the memory of the murdered millions.
Compelled to respond, she grabbed a large red marker and drew on one of pages. She named the drawing Alie (wings).
“I felt such pleasure, that I continued on about 30 pages, “ says Ellia. I covered them with my words, with my drawings, with my paintings. I cut them up. It was them that I thought about the others. Why not share the experience that I was in the process of living.”
Over the next three years, Ellia distributed the pages of Mein Kamph to people from all walks of life, first to the people around her home, later to ever-widening circles from school children, artists to every man or woman on the street. The reactions were many – some curious, some emotional, some outwardly racist. As the pages came back, she decided to use them to recreate the book. Instead of a message of toxic, lethal anti-Semitism, she would create a memorial to creativity, to tolerance; to affirm life, rather than destroying it.
Simone Veil, a concentration camp survivor, the President of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah (Holocaust), a lawyer and a politician was profoundly by the project and became its godmother.
In her forward to the book Notre Combat, Veil writes, “What should we do with such a book? Ban it? Some would still pass it around on the sly. Forget it? It would be an insult to the millions who died because of it. Burn it? It would be resorting to the methods used by the Nazis during the auto-de-fés of Kristallnacht. Linda Ellia’s luminous intuition was to turn this book into a memory vector. …This past is too burdensome to be silenced and whether we want it or not, the Holocaust is our common heritage and we must confront it. Linda Ellia’s work is an expression of this confrontation. It summons us to never forget what was.”
Lifted by Veil’s support, Ellia doggedly pursued contributors and the project began to build – more and more people agreed to take a page home and work on it. Friends and family also helped to take pages to the far corners of the world. “A chain reaction was formed globally,” says Ellia. “And suddenly I had amazing messengers from all around the world helping me. The project became almost a performance – proof that it is possible to take up arms against trauma.” The pages began to steadily fill the mailbox.
Contributions came from professional artists, a school classroom in Spain, a café drifter, a merchant in Tel Aviv, and many others. Artistically, the work is uneven but that is not the main point. This particular exhibit can not nor should it be judged by the "normal" artistic guidelines.
The multiplicity of artists had lead to a multiplicity of perspectives, from mournful to angry to some that even were funny as they skewered Nazi propaganda images of Jews. Many pages in the display are loosely organized by common themes. A wall of pages depict Hitler in one form or another and in another section, a case includes images of participants painting over the words. The exhibit also includes a complete, unaltered copy of “Mein Kampf,” on loan from the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
For me, the last two images in the exhibit, also contributed by Ellia are almost unbearably painful – a lock of hair and a real gold tooth.
In “The Last of the Just,” French author Andre Schwarz-Bart wrote about the legend of the Just Men, the tradition of the Lamed-Voy. According to this story, the world reposes upon thirty-six Just Men, men who are simple and often unaware of their station. But “If just one of them were lacking, the sufferings of mankind would poison even the souls of the newborn and humanity would suffocate with a single cry. For the Lamed-Voy are the hearts of the world multiplied, and into them, as into one receptacle, our all our griefs.” In his novel, the last of his Just Men perishes at Auschwitz.
But I nominate Ellia as a new generation of the Just, one who has born witness to the malefic evil generated by the man who wrote this book and by those who followed him. By engaging with it and encouraging others to engage with it, she has produced a work of cathartic power and symbolic reclaiming.
Notre Combat on Vimo: http://vimeo.com/9524745
CNN Interview: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-409423
Contemporary Jewish Museum: http://www.thecjm.org/ Through June 10, 2010
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