In Arnošt Lustig’s novel The Unloved (1979), the diary entries of 17-year old Perla record her life at the Terezín concentration camp, located 50 kilometers north of Prague. “Because I have eluded it once more, am fortunate in the midst of so much misfortune, am happy in the midst of the bad luck of others … I am foul because I am glad to be alive even though I understand exactly how all those affected must feel, those who have been selected are about to leave.” She is referring to sexual favors traded for essentials and comforts – and the crammed transports headed for Auschwitz.
The Nazis used the labor-transit camp as propaganda, deceptively portraying Terezín as a retirement colony, and sending prominent Jews there. Among those notable Jewish figures was the composer, conductor and critic Viktor Ullman, who fled to Prague from Stuttgart in 1933 when the Nazis’ racial laws went into effect. He was deported to Terezín on September 8, 1942. The diabolical environment of Terezín, then called Theresienstadt, has been described in many texts, such as those by H. G. Adler, Norbert Troller and Anna Hájková. The 1964 publication of I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a collection of poems and drawings, led to several exhibitions of art made and hidden in or smuggled out the camp. Now we have Mark Ludwig’s Our Will To Live: The Terezín Music Critiques of Viktor Ullman.
In February 1944, the Nazis began preparing for a visit by the International Red Cross, strictly monitored to create an entirely false impression. In September, a film was produced “to give the false impression of a ‘paradise ghetto’ for the Jews.” Ludwig writes, “I am haunted by the faces of prisoners in the audience and chamber orchestra appearing in the 1944 propaganda film. The vast majority were weeks away from being sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. For them, these moments offered the last music they would hear or perform.” By the end of October, this artistic and cultural community had been decimated.
[Left: Viktor Ullman] There are 26 Ullman Kritiken (critiques) here in which he describes and praises the performances, offering insights into the composers and their works. “With great detail, Ullman often describes the difficulty of producing these programs in such challenging circumstances,” Ludwig says. The question for me is – why did he write these pieces? They were not intended, nor would they be permitted, for publication. Ludwig suggests it is probable that Ullman “wished to chronicle and in a sense tragically memorialize many of the doomed artists around him.” But even more, Ullman simply believed in the necessity of art and expression. He wrote, “In Theresienstadt, where in daily life one has to overcome matter through form, where everything musical stands in direct contrast to the surroundings: here is a true school for masters.”
Our Will To Live is a record of response to a hopeless condition. Generously illustrated with poster and other art saved from oblivion, and informed by Ludwig’s introductory essay, the book offers an immersion into spirit itself. But I also glance back at Lustig’s Perla, a young prostitute “happy in the midst of the bad luck of others.” As the orchestra played and the children’s chorale sang, lists of the names of the doomed were already determined. To find and share some peace and pleasure, the incarcerated artists, musicians, writers and entertainers continued to ply their trades, giving lectures, concerts, and theatrical performances.
Between late 1941 and the spring of 1945, approximately 141,000 people were herded into the former walled garrison town; about 33,500 died there. Some 88,000 people were deported to the eastern extermination camps, of whom 3,500 survived. When the SS abandoned Terezín in 1945, the Red Cross found 17,500 survivors there. Lustig arrived at the camp from Prague at age 15, was transported to Auschwitz, and later escaped from a train headed to Dachau when an American bomber destroyed the locomotive.
I peered at the handmade graphics designed to announce the musical and stage performances – artwork expressing the liveliness and gorgeous shapes of a lost world, creative exuberance made manifest for whatever uplift it could inspire. When I met Arnošt Lustig for dinner at my cousin’s house near Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s, I had just read The Unloved and some of his other work. From my notebook: “Arnošt: ‘There’s only one kind of freedom that I can accept with no reservations – the freedom that exists in my mind. Most of us – and this goes for Perla – have to keep it a secret while we do what we have to do to survive. For some of us, to convey that freedom is a necessity. But I admire some of the Perlas of this world more than some of the artists. And vice versa.’”
[Published by Steidl on January 11, 2022, 328 pages, $45.00 large format hardcover]
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“When you walk in a minefield, you hate the weight of your own body,” writes Shahriar Mandanipour (b. 1957) in his essay “Why I Became an Iranian Writer.” Here he refers to his 10 months as a front-line lieutenant during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. “You wish you were as light as a dandelion. Every step you take can be the step of your death. It is in these moments that you feel the existence of your feet. The same feet that on ordinary days, while walking, while running, you completely ignore. Therefore, you feel your own existence, your being, in the present tense. Taking a walk, or perhaps dancing, in a minefield.”
The war and its punishing after effects shape the context of several stories in his collection Seasons of Purgatory– and as in the remarks above, Mandanipour interweaves the ordinary – its features blunted or enhanced by extraordinary demands – with circumstances imposed by looming forces. Sometimes those powerful oppressions spring from the regime or cultural tradition or even family politics; sometimes they take the form of an individual’s obsession. In the first story, “Shadows of the Cave,” a Mr. Farvaneh is tormented by animals in the zoo across the street from his apartment, insisting that they have evil designs on humans. But the narrator also tells us that Farvaneh had been jailed for 40 nights after the Shah was deposed. Allowing these factors to swirl around each other, Mandanipour respects his reader by esteeming resonance over facile moralism or plot-shock.
In 2006, just after the Ahmadinejad regime imposed itself in Tehran, Mandanipour traveled to the U.S. to teach at Brown University. He has lived in the States ever since. He has called the Iranian regime “one of the most horrid religio-ideologic dictatorships,” but his stories are not ideology driven, never pointing towards the need for change. Nevertheless, the distress and confusions experienced by Mandanipour’s characters are only rarely detached from forces that bear down on them. It is almost always a matter of what his Iranians want and fail to accomplish within their personal and cultural limits. Their struggles are resonant because of Mandanipour’s techniques and attitude. About composition, he advises writers in an interview, “Don’t aim directly at the subject of your story. Imagine the outer limits, the hidden layers, and let the reader imagine the heart of the story. Let the reader write the heart of the story that you are trying to tell.”
In “King of the Graveyard,” a woman named Marokh Khanoon returns to a cemetery “every Friday night” where her son had been interred eight years previously. The story is told by her husband who fears that their visits will result in their undoing: the mother insists the son had been “falsely accused” of an alleged anti-revolutionary crime that led to his murder. Also, a rival family called the Hemmatis, they believe, seeks to undermine them. The graves are unmarked; father and mother argue over the exact location of the son’s remains. Piriza, the graveyard attendant, risks his own standing by indicating the spot – but he also doesn’t believe that the son had been unjustly accused. The Hammatis’ son had been among a group who chased down and killed the boy. The father says, “I say, ‘No! As God is my witness no … It was their son who together with his buddies started chasing my son. What will a nineteen-year-old do when he sees three or four guys with guns chasing after him? My son was running away. They started to shoot. A bullet hit their son.’” But the father has a secret or suspicion that he keeps from the mother. And he is planning revenge. Mandanipour is mainly interested in the oppressiveness of their situation and the inertia of their intentions.
In “The Color of Middday Fire,” Captain Meena, an Iraq-Iran War veteran (“Six years of war had worn him out”) takes a compulsory one-month leave from the military. A fellow former lieutenant narrates; they now swap stories and memories – and go hunting for the leopard that mauled Meena’s little daughter. Meena had been prescribed medicine for his apparent breakdown, but the narrator says, “A man’s pill is his heart – he gnaws at it and calms down.” That sentence expresses a great deal about the exiled Mandanipour himself and his methods: the psyche in his stories gnaws at an actual world and eludes purgatory for the moment by giving that world an obsessively resonant sound, rendered with a keen ear for urgency and strife by translator Sara Khalili.
[Published by Bellevue Literary Press on January 25, 2022, 208 pages, $16.99 trade paperback. Translated from the Persian by Sara Khalili]
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I started collecting vintage postcards during my years in grad school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the mid-1970s. One might find a family postcard album at a yard sale, and it seemed that every town had an antiques shop with shoeboxes filled with cards, sometimes organized by topic. My special categories were hotels and motels, street scenes, natural and human-caused disasters, local and global historic events, 1950s America, and anything strange. I also collected old advertising, apothecary ephemera, and baseball cards. But postcards were inexpensive, wildly various, and inscribed. Their messages were usually inconsequential and predictable but occasionally urgent.
Historian Lydia Pyne, whose Bookshelf (2016) unpacked the values, infatuations, and manias of the titles on our shelves, has now turned her attention to the production and collection of these postal remainders in Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network. She begins with the U. S. Postal Service’s revenue shortfall in 1909 – soon erased by the flood of postcards it delivered. She says, “Historians estimate that in the first two decades of the twentieth century something like 200 billion postcards were in global circulation … Postcards have been printed, sold, mailed, and received on a scale that makes them, historically, the largest class of artifacts that humankind has ever exchanged.”
Produced inexpensively, their messages quickly jotted, and mailed for a penny, postcards’ disposability seemed intended from the start. But at the same time, as Pyne expends most of her effort to show, they reinforced national and regional identities, celebrated civic life, portrayed the exotic and bizarre, and expressed the rising urge to travel (“wish you were here”). Despite the large quantity of surviving postcards, their uncountable discarded billions suggest that “any history will inevitably be incomplete.”
Postcards accomplished more than simply picturing the world. They created a new and enduring expectation – “that one ought to be able to send inexpensive messages around the world.” The glut of postcards also was a factor in the establishment of global mail coordination: “The question of how to send postcards internationally was solved in 1874 when 22 countries signed the Treaty of Bern.” A Universal Postal Union was formed by country members. Pyne also asserts that postcards as a communication medium reinforce democratic values by definition — “the first means of communication that didn’t depend on the sender or the receiver being of a particular socioeconomic class.” Postcards sometimes carried “overtly political messages, whether they focused on the women’s suffrage movement, armed military conflicts, nation and empire-building, or global wars.” And postcards quickly became a selling tool, advertising new products and reinforcing capitalistic values and consumer-society desires.
Since postcards spurred broadscale participation between senders and receivers, Pyne sees the phenomenon as a precursor to Instagram and social networking. The wish for speed, the accessibility of postcards at the neighborhood pharmacy, the fleetingness of the messages – all seem to presage social networking. Although Facebook may be storing your cat photos, their collectability is much different than that of postcards. In a late chapter, Pyne addresses collectability – especially now that she has become the official keeper of her family’s postcard collection. Why collect them now? She writes, “A postcard with a singular life history that appeals to a general cultural gestalt – something that sets that one postcard apart from the myriad of others that look exactly like it – often translates to a reason for that one postcard to be collected.”
Postcards captured grim moments as well, functioning the way we use video today. Filmmaker Christine Turner chose to employ postcards for her new documentary, Lynching Postcards: ‘Token of a Great Day.’ As the film begins, the first postcard shows the image of the dangling feet of a Black man – but then her camera backs up and we see the white men standing behind him, some smiling. A parallel emerges between this image and the video of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, shown in court to help convict his killers.
[Published by Reaktion Books on December 21, 2021, 256 pages, 80 color plates, 30 halftones, $40.00 hardcover]
Postcards shown are taken from Ron Slate’s collection.
