To anyone who wonders just how the hell it all happened, Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933 is all you need.  It reads like a novel, or the best historical fiction if you’re into that sort of thing, albeit one where you might wonder ‘who would make this stuff up?’ It is a moving yet unemotional history of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in Germany that manages to be engaging, visual (you can see the film playing in your mind as you read), and never dull. Elon puts it all in a social & cultural context too often absent from other accounts. Oh, and it’s all true.  This is a history book for people who hate history books.

On the occasion of Elon’s death last week, The New Yorker published an elegant essay by his friend Bernard Avishai.  I recommend reading the whole essay, but there was one part that inspired me to write this post.  Avishai provides a nuanced explanation of Elon’s outlook on the nature of human beings:

Amos could not get over how history went wrong because of the ways in which broken-hearted people act together and ricochet off one another, how qualities that we ordinarily like in people—creativity, loyalty, sincerity, steadfastness—combine to create disasters; how human desires, whose details only a compassionate observer can describe, explain everything, including how we routinely throw happiness away.

Is this love gone wrong or the state of Palestinian/Israeli relations?  It could be either (he goes on to quote Elon from an essay on the latter). And that’s the genius of Elon and The Pity of It All. With this humanistic view, he pushes History onto our shoulders, small human shoulders that bear the consequences of wants and desires so poorly pursued. Our histories – individually and collectively – rely on our ability to mitigate the breaking of hearts.  When we fail, all hell breaks loose.

While You Were Here centers on the friendship between my grandmother and Hans ‘Kino’ Frank, and by extension the relationships between religions, classes, and political parties in a southwestern German village. If it is true that our human desires can explain everything, then the desires of the people in this village may explain the course of events in a way that makes them more understandable, closer to ourselves, and that much harder to ignore.

Something always slips.  Pieces are missing.   Images without sound.  Sound without images.  People whose names I was told and forgot.  Whose stories, so pixellated through time and retelling, barely resemble their origins.  And there are photos like this:  A relative without a name.

In an album full of portraits of relatives of my great grandfather, Moritz Marx,  only 2 people are named.  The rest are unknown but presumably related to me and each other.  I admit there is a desire to know who they are, but couldn’t say exactly why. Curiosity, yes, but to what end?  Does it matter if I know where he lived, whether he was married, had children, died young or old, from illness, age or violence?

Yes:  that knowledge connects us to history and shapes how we see ourselves in the world.  No: in spite of our dna this is a stranger, as much as any I might pass on the street today.  Maybe I wouldn’t even like him.

The names are missing because, well, really – do your photo albums have everyone’s names in them? Even yours? Online photo sharing & tagging may change that but for now it still leaves out a good many photo albums of the world. I think, like us, they – these ancestors -  just assumed their family knowledge would be handed down one way or another.  Were they more connected to each other than we are now? For all our social networking, maybe.

To the boy in the picture, social networking probably looked something more like this:

This elderly woman is remembering, and telling what she recalls to local historian, Gerhard Holzer. Gerhard has been researching Jewish families of Flonheim (where the Marx family is from) and other small villages nearby, collecting stories from the handful of elderly people left to tell them.  He is a major character in the film and you’ll see/read more about him here.  On November 9th 2008, he led a walking tour through Flonheim identifying the houses where Jewish families once lived, sharing stories he has learned through his research.  In the middle of the tour, this tiny old woman came out in the rain and started to talk.  Riveted, we listened as she quietly took over the tour for as long as her memory permitted.

Recently, I realized I did not have her name and wanted more details about her as I would like to include her scene in the film.  Gerhard told me that she is Annemarie Lehn.  And that she died just weeks ago.  Fortunately he had captured some of her stories in his notes. And I have some on videotape.  The rest, including the names that may not appear in her photo albums, just slipped through.

The past couple of months have been unproductive – at least as far as the film is concerned.  Failed attempts to get to Toronto to meet/interview my grandmother’s first cousin, the longest living member of the Marx family (I will not say oldest – at 92 she is adept with email, maintains a sharp wit and is likely to read this); assorted technical problems, and a photographic diversion have allowed me to ignore the mountain of tapes lurking over my shoulder.

I have often heard people say things  like ‘embrace the failure’. Ok. Here’s a hug:

I had been struggling to figure out how to shoot the documents in my grandmother’s archive. Intent to avoid filmmaker rehab for “Ken Burns’ Effect” addicts, seductive pan-and-zooms are not on my menu.  To help me see these documents, letters & photos better, I decided to photograph them in their boxes, stacked and banded together in all their messy glory.  The image at the header of this blog and on my home page are from an earlier, similar effort.  I have returned to this idea in the last couple of months, shooting more stills and the result is a series of photographs that stand on their own, an archive of the archive, documents of documents of.

At the end of March I worked with artist Katy Martin to learn about how to produce archival pigment prints of these images with the intent to eventually produce a series for exhibition in conjunction with (or separately from) the finished film.  I wasn’t looking for another project but I am excited about realizing these images.  As for whether or not they helped me figure out how to shoot the documents, letters and photos for the film, that’s less clear.  But, I’ll say yes.

Today I learned that the tuxedo Obama will be wearing on inauguration day was made by Hart, Schaffner & Marx, a company co-founded by my great, great, great (great?) uncle, Marcus Marx, in Chicago.

www.thestar.com/living/article/551498

My grandmother, Gretel (Marx) Roos (1916 – 2003), saved these photographs, which show the factory ca. 1912.  There is a calendar in the background of one of the photos showing the first week of January 1912.  Given the massive labor strikes brought by Chicago’s garment workers ca. 1910/1911 perhaps these photographs were intended to document improved conditions?

Another item I would like to research now is the fact that Marcus was not the only Marx in the business.  In fact, I never heard much if anything about him from my grandmother. But rather I heard stories about his brothers Alexander and Morris Marx.  Morris Marx is in the photograph on the top left of this post.  (For you Marx family members reading this, he is an uncle to the Moritz Marx you are probably thinking of).  Because of Marcus’ absence from these stories I thought Alexander and Morris had more to do with HS&M than Marcus, which obviously isn’t the case.

The back of another photograph says “A. Marks & Sons”.  (The dual spellings of the family name appears throughout my grandmother’s papers, though Marx is used most of the time, and that’s the spelling on the gravestones as far back as they exist).  I would like to find out more about the relationship of A. Marks & Sons to Hart, Schaffner & Marx. If my grandmother’s stories were accurate, they made the front pieces (coat lapels and such) for HS&M.  Perhaps the alternate spelling was for business purposes.

My uncle, James Roos (1944- 2004), knew a lot about these brothers – he had apparently done some of this research, but I don’t remember the details of his stories, and to my knowledge they were never recorded.  I have a vague memory though, of there being some conflict between the brothers or somewhere inside the family about these bothers.  This may not be true, although if it is it might explain something about the omission of Marcus from the family histories I was told.

I will plan to do some research on this.  And I invite anyone reading this who may know differently or better than I do, to post a comment here.  In the meantime I will watch tomorrow’s inauguration with a little extra attention to the tuxedo.

Thanks to my Canadian cousins and to Gerhard Holzer for bringing the Toronto Star item to my attention.

Thousands of letters, documents and photographs tell my grandmother’s life story, with emphasis on her family’s emigration from Germany to the US in the ’30s. But her archive is a methodical chaos – she might as well have stuck a post-it to the lot saying: “I want you to know, but not really.”

I have not organized it yet because to her it was ordered – she usually knew what she had and where it was. She chose what she wanted me to know.  But now I have the rest of it, and should I ever learn her ‘order’ I hope it might reveal something to me about what she saved or why.

I like the idea of this faulty archive, as incomplete and unreliable as her own memory. Since we rely on archives for facts, in support of truths, for what we can ultimately know, what happens when you can’t?

The facts about prejudice and persecutions in WWII Germany are well known, documented in countless ways.  They form stories of victims and perpetrators, fixed by our own moral compass: we always know what we would have done.  But the truth is more subjective and personal, it’s the internal narrative we create to move forward through our circumstance, whatever it may be.

While You Were Here follows a letter from my grandmother’s archive, back to her hometown, to the man who wrote it to her in 1946. The stories I collect along the way mingle facts and truths, extending and complicating the ones I grew up with, unfolding a complex history in progress.

Stay tuned – I’ll show you what I mean.