December 2, 2012
I’m walking through Vienna with hard drives in my coat pocket, containing films of thousands of secret envelopes that contain the pubic hair of political prisoners, of extinguished Africans, of murdered Jews. Films of de-fleshed human skulls, of ear measurements, of death masks, of teeth and skin and selves. I had set my camera to record in low light. I charged my batteries. I adjusted my lenses. Upon invitation, I went into the bowels of an unknown Vienna. I agreed not to show the work – for now. But I have it, here, in my pocket, burning a hole.
In Vienna, at my hotel, I copy the files off the cameras, and onto several drives, and begin mailing them out so that they cannot be lost, and I upload them to the cloud, then I transfer the films back onto SD drives, and put the little cards in a hotel pass-card envelope and keep them in my trouser pocket where they are flat and small but not quiet. It is films of our hands, unpacking the cobwebbed crates from the genocidal SS anthropological mission to Africa. The crates from the death camps. They are nearly untouched for decades. They are behind steel doors, deep underground. We unpack them, and we turn away to cry, peeling off the layers of German newspapers dated 1938, 1941. Wrapped inside are faces – faces of human dinosaurs. We want to vomit. This is human versus human. Inhuman is a weapon. I am filming, filming. In case the cases of destroyed people are destroyed. It is for witness, and a lens is not adequate. It is data of a crime that can never be fully adjudicated.
I stop for wine afterwards. I am shaking. I am worried about the cameras in my bag. I am afraid for the data. People talk to me, and irrationally I do not trust them. I do not trust plastic. I do not trust chips. I do not trust the flurries of snow on the christmas market. I hurry home. I hide the films in my shoes. I think, if i have to run away in the night because I can no longer be part of this species, then I will have my proof beneath my soles.
This is the way you think immediately after you see 15,000 skulls archived in cardboard boxes. The ones that say “Jew” or “roma” or “African” or “epileptic” have been turned backwards, so as not to attract attention. I am Jew, or Roma, or African, or epileptic. I cannot turn backwards.
Then it’s time to leave, to head on to Munich on the train, and again I don’t want to risk losing the films, so I tuck them in my bra and wear them next to my body as I cross the German border. I feel my bra to make sure they’re still there, and it looks obscene, as though I am touching myself in public, for pleasure. Alas. I am feeling for the proof of inhumanity, for the memorial of the murdered, and I keep them warm, safe, near my body. It seems the only place to store them.
I’m paranoid, or am I sentimental, or am I courageous, or am I insane – I am all of this. But who else has films of these atrocities? The act of witness is both solitary and shared, and there is no list in the book to know who else has seen and what they’ve felt. Who else has this particular proof? Where is it needed? What can it do?
I have to talk about it. I have to say what I have, and ask if you want a copy.
Do you want a copy?
Would you otherwise believe me?
Do you believe me, even now?
If you are Jewish, or Roma, or from a dissident’s family, or of African descent, you might recognize the name of an ancestor, or a relative…you might say: this is what my hair looks like, between my legs. These are eerily like my teeth.
Then again, perhaps you did not survive the scientific method of industrialized genocide.
Perhaps your lineage was or was not destroyed, and yet the texture of this hair nonetheless haunts you.
Perhaps you cannot touch your hair again, without thinking of those whose bodies were shaved because they were destined to be dinosaurs. A last souvenir. You are not a person, you are an object and I am in Vienna, and men flirt with me: they say, you look like one of Klimpt’s Jewish models. You look like an Egon Shiele nude. The Jewess.
You offer to buy me a drink and you don’t know that I am thinking: If i went home with you, would you try to take a clipping?
No, that’s mean of me. Warped. Unkind. Irrational. Or is it? There are hundreds of thousands of these envelopes beneath Vienna. Beneath the bars, beneath the Maria Theresa statue where lovers meet. A man offers to buy me a spiced wine beneath the statue, and I recoil in horror. I know what is archived underneath.
Subtext.
Not all of us are one generation removed from someone whose body parts were harvested, before they were murdered, and then their flesh painstakingly archived for a future museum of extinct peoples. Some of us are. We look like everyone else, but not quite: we still stick out in Austria and Germany. Exotic enough, perhaps, to be bought a round of drinks at a death metal bar.
Because not all of us are extinct. Enough of us, but not all of us. Some of us are trying to keep our hair attached.
And some of us have cameras. But cannot (yet) show the films.
The Austrian scientists who worked with the Nazis, and the SS, took advantage of the Nazi policies on eugenics, and the belief in eventual Aryan domination, and the fervent faith that all unfit peoples would be soon extinguished.This was their opportunity for archival greatness.
Quick – if you had a chance to peel a toenail off a dinosaur before it died, would you? They did. They did it. They wanted the last hairs of the Jews. The last teeth of the African tribesmen.
I saw the documents: JUDE marked in blue at the top of a ledger sheet, with hundreds of measurements of body parts in carefully calibrated decimal points. What is the exact size of Jacob’s ear? Is he your murdered grandfather? Next to banana boxes and wooden field crates from Africa and the camps, because they are ventilated, because they are filled with straw and skin, because they are sturdy enough for the weight inside them.
This is science.
It is known. The breadth and depth of his nostrils. The dinosaur political prisoner. The queer. The epileptic.
I went down into the tunnels and behind door after door, more boxes, more envelopes, more ledgers. 1937. 1938. 1939. These men of science planned for greatness, for fame, for the Nobel prize in the documentation of extinguished genetics. This skull has a name written on it in pencil.
This is documentation.
The scientists – anthropologists, biologists, ethnographers – I saw their navy blue fountain pen handwriting, their ruled paper, their highly literate, multiple degree’d, hallowed in their fields of excellence stalwart field notes perfectly notated as they clipped the pubic hairs of Jews and “pygmies” and gypsies and political prisoners and they put them into carefully, meticulously marked envelopes and the poured plaster over their living faces and their dead faces with frozen looks of pain and grief and terror immobilized forever in vaults beneath Vienna and the highly advanced scientists boiled the flesh off their skulls and they placed these bits and pieces, these “artifacts” into wooden crates and field boxes and one day, they believed, they would be the hero scientists, the great men who had harvested the biological specimens of extinct peoples.
The new Pterodactyls, you and I.
I tell you, but do you believe me? Do you want photos? Films?
Would you prefer not to believe me, and also not to see? Yes, I would prefer that too. What luxury.
The data is on a card tucked into my brassiere. Where else to put it? In my shoe? On the cloud? Yes. There too.
So in the catacombs of a major institution in Vienna are eugenics ossuaries. Down into the belly of the city, nearly untouched since 1939. I can’t show these photographs, these films. It was horrifying to record them. But what else is the option? To let them continue to vanish?
I am now sharing space with the data. I go to dinner, with the films of the political prisoners’ pubic hairs. I take a shower, and the films are in my room. I walk down the street- they are in my bag. I talk to someone about the best lemonade at the grocery, and the films are in my pocket. I am inhabited by this data.
After all of this turmoil I experience with the act of seeing, the act of filming, of witnessing, of agreeing not to show, of feeling the burden of my exceptional access, the weight of the pressure to document and make visible, and yet not make visible….I realise: the archive was never intended to vanish. We were intended to vanish – as a Jew, as a queer, as an epileptic – I was three times over intended to vanish. I haven’t, and here I have the proof. I have it in my bra. I have it literally in and literally on my body.
It was not intended to vanish. It was intended for the archive, for permanence. The only surprise in all of this is that I am here, and this time I have a camera, and my clothes are on, and I am to some extent free to leave.
After the loss of the Nazi Reich, these “objects,” these dehumanized human souvenirs, are placed away from view, away from sight of those who might not be sympathetic.
I am not sympathetic. I am hostile. I spent time in the undisclosed location and I tell you: if you have been to the major tourist sites of Vienna, you have been within a meter of these items. These bits of bodies, collected. You were almost a witness, too.
What does it mean to go viral? Should I post them, anonymous? What are the ethics? What can be redeemed? Who can be held accountable? I was asked to witness something, and now I hold them in my own archive. I have archived the archives.
I go out into the Munich night, into the snow, and I stand in the plaza and I take my gloves out to feel my bra and make sure the SD cards are still there. I am frozen in place. I do not know what to do. Three elderly ladies catch sight of me in the darkness. They talk amongst themselves, and one steps forward to snap a photo. Startled by the flash, I move my hand from my breast and put on my gloves. The women scream and clutch at one another. They rush over and begin to touch my arms inside my coat.
“Ach,” they say in German, “you scared us. We didn’t think that you were real.”