By: Leo Kepler
In 1939 Captain Nándor Andrásovits led his boat, Érszébet Királyné (Queen Elizabeth), carrying Jewish refugees from Nazi-ruled Vienna and Bratislava, along the Danube downstream to the Black Sea where they transferred to the sea ship Noemi Julia to continue their journey to Palestine. In 1940, Captain Andrásovits was involved in another mass migration: the Queen Elizabeth was one of the 27 ships hired by the Reich to transport ethnic Germans from Bessarabia back to their “fatherland” by way of the Danube, this time upstream. The captain was an amateur filmmaker. He recorded many of his journeys, including the two exoduses: the flight and the forced evacuation.
Péter Forgács, Danube Exodus, 2002. Courtesy of www.danube-exodus.hu
Peter Forgács, a film artist and a founder of the Private Photo & Film Archives Foundation (PPFA) in Budapest—a collection of several hundred hours of Hungarian amateur film footage mostly from the first half of the 20th century—used Captain’s films about the two journeys as two currents to re-create the charged field of the Second World War Europe. In 1998, Forgács produced a 60-minute feature from the amateur films of Nándor Andrásovits. In 2002 he collaborated with the Labyrinth Project to make an installation which is on view now at the Jewish Museum.
The installation takes up two rooms. The wall-size map of the Danube which serves as a timeline for both journeys is in the first room. The journey south is narrated above the serpentine of the river and the journey north—below and against the river flow. Across the hall there are two computer monitors, one for each journey. Behind each monitor, the respective film of the captain is projected on screen strips.
The computers exhume many layers of what is represented by one line in the chronological diagram on the opposite wall. We hear and see the 1939 journey through the stories of the ship’s former passengers: the Ashkenazi family, the Menzels, and Aron Grünhut. Each narrative is divided into chapters—we meet several living members of the Ashkenazi and Menzel families and hear David Ashkenazi’s diary. Aron Grünhut was one of the masterminds behind the exodus. His story—a memoir about the tragedy of Slovakian Jews that he wrote late in life—cut by the telegrams between the various official representatives involved in the enterprise, gives a historical context. Forgacs talks to the former passengers; they show old photographs (Raul Menzel took over 1000 pictures during the trip), documents, notes, and objects. We learn about the various mundane details, obstacles created by the governments of the countries they traversed, difficult conditions and bribes requested by on of the ship’s crew. We feel hopefulness and fear, and still lasting grief. Despite a shadow of death, life did not stop on the boat: a child was born, a wedding took place, and a divorce happened. The passengers’ memories of the journey brush against the official secret report of the High Commissioner for Palestine Harold MacMichael to the British Foreign Office dated September 23, 1939 – one of the daily reports following every move of the Queen Elizabeth. Aron Grunhut’s account, David’s observations and the secret report are voice over. There are three chroniclers: an impresario, a participant and a relatively detached observer – a “humble servant” whose stakes were elsewhere. The past as present in David’s diary, in the official report and in many images joins the past as oral memories and embraces the past as historical account.
Forgacs put only two narratives on the computer devoted to the 1940 resettlement of the Bessarabian Germans. Guido Fano along with his wife Ella and Helmut Fink are the witnesses. Their stories are not limited to the journey, but are also accounts of being caught between the two powers, the Reich and the Soviets. Both stories begin in 1815, when Bessarabia became part of the Russian empire, come to the 1940 Hitler – Stalin pact which put these territories (then part of Romania) into the hands of the Soviet Union, re-count the journey and end with the Soviet victory over Hitler. The relocation journey concluded in what is now Poland (part of the Reich at the time) where, after a year long stay in the refugee camps, the Bessarabian Germans were forced to take over the homes of Poles, mostly Polish Jews many of whom fled to Palestine. Some refused and were given a choice between the take over and the concentration camp, some found that after the loss of their homes and a stay in the refugee camps it was much easier to accept such an arrangement, and some committed suicide within a year. When Germany lost the war to the Soviet Union, the Bessarabian Germans had to abandon everything and flee west. Forgács incorporates Soviet propaganda film into the visual sequence of the Fano narrative – a “fake reality” from the past. Fink tells a story of his father’s arrest by Gestapo for an imprudent remark about German invasion of the Soviet Union and his subsequent release on the condition that he would never say anything about what he went through to anybody including his family. He never did, but we are aware of the past that cannot be known and hence, remembered, but nevertheless should not be left to oblivion.
In the second room eighteen films grouped into 3 storylines of six films each - The Jewish Journey to Palestine, the Bessarabian German Journey and The Captain - are projected on a five-part screen. Each film is streamed in five simultaneous projections and is composed of several layers. Those include the captain’s films, stills of old photographs lent by the former passengers of the Queen Elizabeth, historical footage, old images and various sounds (music of different countries and occasions, noises associated with everyday life, the sound of the river flowing, and the music of the composer Tibor Szemsö, Forgács’ long time collaborator). The projection streams and the layers interrupt, cross, reinforce and, sometimes, clash with each other. There’s no continuity to a single stream or a layer; the whole is a collision of many fragments.
Each of the three parts of the installation – the timeline, the stories on the computer and the projection – establishes a different relationship with a viewer. The historical outline provides a succinct and simultaneous view of both journeys. The computer permits an exploration of the dimensions of each journey; both the historic context and the private world unfold. The projection fragments everything both spatially (broken into five streams) and temporally (the chronological continuity is abandoned). I, as a viewer, was disoriented. I did not recognize many places and people in the images nor did I understand all the actions. I did not know what happened just before or shortly after many events and I wasn’t sure about the meaning in countless instances. To me, the visual disorientation stood for existential confusion. This collision of a knowledge of history (both previously learned and just acquired) and the flow of its fragments put me face to face with “not-knowing” in its many shades – unrecognizing, unawareness, ignorance, denial and oblivion, both individual and collective.
The captain was my fulcrum in this upheaval. Forgács, as I see it, used the captain’s story to bridge the chronicles of the two journeys causing a representational synchronicity. This is not the first time that Forgács built his piece on the tension between two roughly concurrent and parallel successions of events to “densify” the context and to question meaning, knowledge, and history. In his 1997 film The Maelstrom, screened at the Museum in March, Forgacs juxtaposed the home movies and the fates of two families, the Dutch Jewish family and the family of the Reichskomissar for the occupied Netherlands. But in this installation the artist went much further, because he embedded a viewer-chronicler, the captain, thus allowing his audience (us) two distances from and two angles of looking at the events: the close and immediate vision via the captain’s eyes and contextualized perspective of the contemporary viewer in which the captain himself is being observed (Forgacs included the footage of the captain himself). In the previous works Forgács was looking from outside - he used the historical context to converge the events. This time he also establishes an internal connection between the two separate events via an extraordinary coincidence in a life of a man who was filming history. The captain’s camera lens transmitted and refracted history reducing the distance between it and a viewer (we witness history as everyday life) and bringing a viewer back to the same setting (the captain’s river boat) to magnify the historical interconnections. Forgács balanced the captain’s close up view with the panoramic perspective of not only history but also memory.
The captain’s films put us face to face with the private and the ordinary. In his Erasmus Prize speech and during the lecture on the occasion of this exhibition, Forgács talked about his preoccupation with the banal as an inherent attribute of home movies. The captain’s films and many other homes movies are historic documents and possess larger meaning because they have become part of the larger context. Joining this larger context does not only alter the meaning of the images. Simultaneously, the quality of transience of an image that previously was private gives way to its value as evidence. With his fragmented projection Forgács protects these films from becoming simply a reference to something –– we see instants and glimpses of life as they are, naked. In his hands the (re)construction (his installation, edited footage, art, or context) heightens the intimate, the mundane and the now - the passing moments and the life in the present moment. In his Erasmus Prize speech Forgács said that history was present time. But through this installation I have experienced it as “presentlessness.” I was suddenly in the present that I did not know existed and that I knew was past.
“The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River” runs through August 2, 2009
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street
Museum website: http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/danubeexodus
Artist’s website: http://www.forgacspeter.hu/english/installations/A+Danube+Exodus/22
Project website: http://www.danube-exodus.hu/
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