'Shoah' Director Claude Lanzmann: 'Death Has Always Been a Scandal'

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SPIEGEL: You never thought of moving to Israel?

Lanzmann: David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of Israel, who I saw several times in those years, said to me: "We need people like you. Come live in our country." But I had just met Simone de Beauvoir, and we had slept together on the evening before my departure. She wrote to me and asked me to come back. My ties with France and the language were too strong. I don't speak Hebrew and I'm not religious. One of my most amazing experiences in Israel was a Sabbath in the small city of Afula. Suddenly everything came to a standstill. There were no buses and no cars, and I couldn't even get back to Tel Aviv. I was stranded in this remote town in the desert, with nobody on the streets. Where were all the Jews?

SPIEGEL: Did you support Israel with your films?

Lanzmann: "Shoah" is a universal work that addresses the entire world. But I got my first ideas for the film from Israeli government agencies. I don't believe that Israel is the outcome of the Shoah, the deliverance from it. But the connection is indisputable.

SPIEGEL: Could you have shot "Shoah" if you had been a concentration camp survivor yourself?

Lanzmann: Probably not. This work required distance. Respect and wonder grow with distance.

SPIEGEL: Why did you dispense with historic images completely in your film? "Shoah" consists exclusively of the accounts of contemporary witnesses, victims and perpetrators.

Lanzmann: There are no images of people dying in the gas chambers. I was interested in the visualization of what had happened, the incarnation, the shaping of memory.

SPIEGEL: By exterminating the Jews, the Nazis also wanted to exterminate their memory.

Lanzmann: And remove all traces. I wanted to resurrect the dead. The accounts, the tears, the emotions of the witnesses are more authentic than historic documents -- a past that is experienced and relived. The historians who specialize in the subject never liked my film.

SPIEGEL: Probably because you dispense with historic explanations altogether.

Lanzmann: I claim that there are none. Not wanting to understand was always my iron rule. When posed the question, "why?" by Primo Levi, then a prisoner, an SS officer answered: "There is no why here." This is the truth. The search for why is absolutely obscene.

SPIEGEL: There are indeed historically documented reasons for that homicidal anti-Semitism.

Lanzmann: Of course, the historians assemble their chain of causation -- the world economic crisis, unemployment, the defeat in World War I, Bolshevism, Hitler's experiences as a young man, and so on. The explanations end with the extermination of the Jews as almost a harmonious, rational, logical outcome. That's precisely the obscene thing. It may be that certain conditions are necessary for the rise of homicidal anti-Semitism, but they are not sufficient. The ruthlessness of death in the gas chamber remains incomprehensible. Presenting this bewilderment is the goal of my film.

SPIEGEL: Does that also explain your provocatively paradoxical statement that no one was really in Auschwitz?

Lanzmann: That sentence infuriated the survivors. Auschwitz was both an extermination camp and a labor camp. The Jews condemned to death were taken to the gas chamber immediately after being selected at the ramp. They didn't even know that they were dying in Auschwitz. There was no consciousness, just sheer horror. The others, who stood a chance of surviving, didn't see the gas chamber at the moment of death. The site of the horror is unreal, which is what the perpetrators wanted. I was deeply disturbed the first time I saw the sign for the town of Treblinka in Poland. I couldn't imagine that such a place really existed.

SPIEGEL: Is that why you concentrated on the Jewish witnesses of the last stage, before the act of extermination?

Lanzmann: I wanted to get as close as possible to death. No personal accounts are told in "Shoah," no anecdotes. It's only about death. The film is not about the survivors.

SPIEGEL: The perpetrators stood at the other end of the chain of extermination. You describe how difficult it was to get them to talk. You misled them, gave them money and filmed them with a hidden camera. Didn't you have any qualms about this?

Lanzmann: What qualms should I have had about misleading Nazis, murderers? Weren't the Nazis themselves masters of deception? Didn't the perpetrators lead fraudulent lives after the war? My film is supposed to be a tomb to the murdered, which they never received in reality.

SPIEGEL: You can look back at an exciting and sometimes dangerous life. You write that an Israel military doctor who examined you before you were allowed to fly as a passenger in a fighter jet told you it was possible that you could live to 120. Doesn't death frighten you, now that you are in your old age?

Lanzmann: I am ageless. I think about death constantly, including my own death. At the same time, it all remains completely unreal. As I said, only life counts.

SPIEGEL: Monsieur Lanzmann, we thank you for this interview.

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• Part 1: 'Death Has Always Been a Scandal'
• Part 2: Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
• Part 3: 'There Is No Why Here'