SubStance

A man's stature is shown by what he mourns and what ways he mourns it. To raise mourning to a high plane, to make it into an element of social progress: that is an artistic task.

— Bertolt Brecht, 1957

Allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.

— Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

It showed nothing at all.

— Jean-Luc Godard on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah¹

In 1948, on the eve of his return to a Germany far different from the one he fled in 1933, the dramatist Bertolt Brecht was in Prague. There he made the following terse, almost elliptical entry in his journal:

Of 37,000 Jews 800 came back after the Hitler occupation. We visit the Jewish cemetery. It was reduced in 1903 to make room for a polytechnic. The gravestones were moved and left in a disorderly heap. But in the old part too the gravestones are quite indecently crammed together—even the synagogue, the oldest in Europe, was only permitted to be 9m wide and 15m long. The stones are ugly in shape, but covered in writing, and many tell of persecution. Scholars have grapes as their insignia.

(Journals 395)

The tone is one of indifferent observation. The precise measurement of the space, and his concentration on the grotesque and disorderly suggest something like a sketch for a set piece—a backdrop for a play possibly leading an audience toward a critical perception of persecution, a perception that would emphasize the almost studious and scholarly necessities to apprehend such injustice.

Setting aside for the moment the more general questions of cemeteries and their theatricality, and the theatrical investments in our acknowledgment of the dead, and even that Brecht had staged Antigone in Switz-erland the year before, the first line of the entry seems to signal a very particular form of instruction. If there is a command to think about the evidence before us in the cemetery, then we can see this brief entry as [End Page 51] closely tied to his critical theater practice: how to respond to the visible and the invisible. For by beginning with the number of Jews missing from Prague, Brecht is not only looking at the cemetery, but through it, past the scene before him, to what it cannot contain: the absent killed and exiled. Studying the headstones that have been removed, moved, cramped into their space, and with the postwar date acknowledged, Brecht, who was a relentlessly historical thinker, recognizes that the graveyard has been reconfigured. Its very meaning for our notion of death, burial, and continuity has changed. It no longer holds what should determine it—the dead of Prague.

Death's death in the wake of the Holocaust has been pursued by thinkers from Adorno to Žižek, and if Adorno is right in saying that the very idea of death cannot be removed from the "convolutions of history" and that therefore "since Auschwitz, fearing death means fearing worse than death" (371), has not the cemetery as a socially symbolic space been forcefully translated by the larger number of those who could not be buried there? The graveyard that marks death's role in the community's continuity, drawing the mourned and memorialized into an arc of tradition—and death itself determining the "community," as Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy have written (Blanchot 10)—has, in this case, undergone a powerful wrecking of figurative function. The headstones Brecht analyzes have lost their capacity for that symbolic bridge between the dead and the living. With the absent, haunting "weight" of those Holocaust victims, the heavy stones have been crushed into ruin.

Standing before a uniquely Jewish "space" in the aftermath of war, how could there be any just witnessing of presence, given the vast absence? Rather than seeing a memorial history of the Jews of Prague, Brecht suggests we witness the powerful non-presence—the nothingness—of the absent dead. This nothingness is not an easy concept to accept. Recognizing the nothingness of the scene means absorbing the annihilation of the very cultural symbols...