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EMIGRATION,
N.Y. - The Story of an Expulsion
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I'M
NOT A DOCUMENT, I'M A PERSON
Considerations
and Fragments By Egon HUMER "To
be told about certain aspects of history by just plain ordinary
people who had a major part in them, with a vividness that seems
to suspend the time dimension: What a fascinating thought."
Like it or not: We do remember. How human memory functions, or that which we call "Weltsicht [world view]" always includes also a more or less specific notion of the essence of history, where certain attitudes towards the past have far-reaching effects on our society". Remembering, however, is also an active process. You remember if you accord significance to that which you have experienced. And this active process of creating a memory includes the present or part of the present whenever we call up memory and when we try to reconstruct the past. To generate the (collective) memory of a society is (also) a task and function of the state: In its institutions, by education, by historiography, by certain ritual and monumental customs (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) the peculiarities of individuals and groups are set into a larger context. Thus memory can contribute to the formation of social policy - a design for action. For perfectly good reasons (such as the (non-)payment of reparations, citizenship, the election of Kurt Waldheim to the Austrian presidency) relations between Austria and the emigrants are not without conflicts. In recent years, efforts on the part of Austria to start a new dialog have been intensified. Former Austrians receive invitations, are honored in books and symposia. In these instances the themes usually are political and artistic aspects of emigration. The film EMIGRATION, N.Y. is primarily dedicated to people who hitherto had little or no contact with the Austrian Republic. In this film seven women and five men tell the story of their "Vertreibung" (expulsion) - of being existentially threatened, the loss of property, the desperate struggle to be permitted to leave the country, the agonies of flight up to the arrival in a country with a foreign language. They tell a story of the persecution and ultimate destruction of relatives, the general misery of refugee existence, haunting memories of a "homeland" lost forever, a temporary return and the entailing anxieties and hopes. What has to be refuted is the cliché of emigration, culminating in the reproach that all émigrés had been "well off in the safety of foreign countries". Only for a small minority did emigration really represent an opportunity, and statistics never can tell the story of the pain and agony in the trivially brutal routine of flight into exile and of trying to make a fresh start on unfamiliar ground. New York eventually became the scene for the shooting of this film out of personal contact with Amos Vogel. More decisive, however, than the place was the person, even though, then as today, New York is an important center of Jewish life. The original concept, i.e. to deal with the theme `emigration' centered on a specific "sanctuary" [`Fluchtort'] New York and to describe the new life there, in the course of researching, preliminary talks on the project, and, ultimately, during the shooting itself became considerably expanded. We learned that the traumatic events of the past are still present in today's life of the émigrés and even in the lives of their children, and that in this process of expulsion, the flight from the former homeland has to be accorded just as much time in the film as the time devoted to their life in EMIGRATION, N.Y. EMIGRATION, N.Y. is put together using simple building blocks. It all is based on twelve interviews recorded in New York in December 1994. In these, the persons interviewed for several hours talk about their lives. One of the key questions confronting us was whether and to what extent these narration’s had to be "illustrated" so that the meaning of things said could be understood. Private photographs, documents like sounds and music were used to establish relations with the time and were worked into the fabric of the film, somewhat like a "matrix of memory". When selecting historical photographic material, it came to the matter of finding pictures that would not "illustrate", blank out, or dominate the personal histories but rather would augment them as in a dialog. In this, we were faced the problem that official historiography or its pictorial expression and personal history should not mix as long as there was no direct nexus between the two. We did three versions of the rough cut, with each version of the film attempting to increasingly integrate the persons in their specificity into the fabric of the film. According to Andrej Tarkovskij, the rhythm of a film is the decisive formative element of cinematic art. The properties inherent in the material even while still shooting to a great extent appear to organize - in the best possible sense of the word - themselves once the film is in the cutting room. Consequently, `montage' cutting and balancing in themselves do not impart any new quality to the film. At best they express more clearly something that was inherent in the different shots before. In doing so we attempted:
Selection of the material followed both content-determined but also formal criteria, e.g. how the material "narrates" itself, is involuted, one part supplementing, but at the same time in friction with the other, and is perceived in the narrative flow of the film. While doing the rough cut, we lost some of the strands of events in the stories told since - while they "worked" perfectly on paper - they did not "work" properly in the flow of cinematic narration. One point of emphasis was representing the events themselves, the other one to delineate the traces they had left. All persons interviewed had been confronted with the problem of coming to terms with the experiences of their expulsion while in exile. All the people appearing in the film, with the exception of Gertrud M. Kurth, Rosa Ully Axelrod, and Henry Wegner, at the time of their emigration had been children or adolescents. Consequently, in the film quite frequently it is the viewpoint of the child, from which their story and that of their parents is being told: Of the indignities and the traumatic rupture of the continuity of their young lives to which the experience of forced emigration exposed them. At the same time it seemed important to me to show that in this group of survivors - in spite of all their experiences - we are not meeting anxiety-ridden, traumatized persons, but human beings who managed, with much readiness for self-improvement, to lead a full, successful, and satisfying life. Many of the refugees feel, as survivors of a brutal expulsion, the moral obligation to be opposed to injustice - whatever form it might take. EMIGRATION, N.Y. was never intended to be "historizing" in the sense that the expulsion from the childhood homes of these people is treated as "merely" a historical event. At the same time, the film always was meant to be an attempt to build a bridge to the themes of flight and expulsion so poignantly in evidence in our present day. Here, a base of transmission to the outside world - to the media - is essential. Programming and production of time-relevant material in television e.g. is dependent on the personal memory of TV people, on their individual conception of the pasts, and its effects on the present. To discuss the questions of guilt, collective crime, memory, forgiving, presupposes that a certain mental attitude is given value and moral weight: That, beyond suffering and remembrance, the search for truth is taken to be a primary spiritual value. Vienna, October 1995
FILME: Meine "Zigeuner" Mutter | Leon Askin | Matura | Intifada |
