On Seeing Hotel Modern’s "Kamp"

Representing the Holocaust remains an important political task. It must continue to be done because of the constant danger of forgetting, ignoring, or consigning the event to an irrelevant history. For these same reasons, the way we represent the Holocaust is more important than the mere fact that we do so, and no congratulations are required of any work that shows a concentration camp on screen or stage, or in prose or verse. Instead, what is required is critical interrogation—how does this representation refresh and re-imagine, and in so doing re-enliven the Holocaust for a generation that wants to make the Holocaust into a melodrama, a sad story told in order to reframe the sacrifice of the Jews as a necessary sacrifice for the betterment of mankind. They had to die in order for us to learn never to do that again. It is this fundamental position that must be guarded against, carefully and systematically, with each new “go” at representation.

This is true because all aesthetic representation, and by extension all acts of theatrical creation and reception, are acts of reconstruction. They are intensified refractions of the very processes by which meaning is made every day of our lives—with every shape we pull out of the darkness, we make possible knowledge and political change, and we do this through the violence of making impossible other shapes and other knowledges. We gain only by losing. What saves meaning is its necessary incompletion, and it is this incompletion that is underlined by the social frame of the aesthetic. Because every interpretation, every ounce of knowledge, is available to deconstruction and critique, there is always the possibility for new knowledge. But in the “everyday” world—the world we pretend has nothing to do with theater—we carry forward with the belief that what we know is true, is not subjective and transcendental and, if not eternal, at least “the way things are today.” When we doubt, we go to art. When we want nothing to do with doubt, we go to science. And when we are sick of doubt but know we can’t be rid of it forever, and so need to manage it in some way, we go to philosophy and critical analysis. Religion participates, at various times, in all three categories of experience, though the boundaries among them are nonetheless reinforced by each instance of relation with religion.

The guest I saw Kamp with was frustrated by the piece because, as he said, “it left me cold.” He wanted a greater emotional pay-off for the time he spent in the theatre, though he was quick to admit he did not want “the tears of Schindler’s List,” but he did want an emotional release or catharsis or arc of some kind. He wanted, again in his own words, an experience that was “not merely intellectual.” This policed boundary between intellection and emotion is indicative of a common misconception of the role that art has to play in human cultures. It is to assume, falsely, that ideas cannot pleasure, or hurt.

Kamp presents a day in the life of Auschwitz by re-creating the entire camp in miniature and moving a series of tiny puppet-figures around the stage. In some parts of the performance, the audience watches three puppeteers push and pull the puppet pieces around the stage. In other parts, we watch on screen close-up video of activities of the puppets. Sometimes these filmed scenes take place in spaces that are unavailable to the naked eye—for example, a gas chamber, or Nazi barracks—and sometimes these scenes are also available to plain view—for example, a hanging of three prisoners witnessed by a crowd of their peers, or a solitary prisoner’s suicide-by-electric-fence in the dead of night. The combination of all these perceptual experiences dramatize the very challenge and impossibility of seeing “the Holocaust.” We are made aware of a series of ironies— 1) that the only way to represent in a live space the entire camp in one view is to use tiny puppets, which are of course a step removed from “real” human beings, and also 2) that even in this case, the mediating device of video is necessary to see what is given to be seen. Other ironies follow of course—that we can only see one day, that we can only see one camp, that we can only see what the puppeteers allow us to see because we are at the whims of both their dramaturgy and their research.

What we do see, though, is the camp as its own aesthetic creation. By seeing the camp as a landscape—and by using a dramaturgical structure that resembles, though because of its reliance on minimal narrative does not fulfill, a Steinein/Wilsonian landscape—we are able to consider that this, too, was something that was made, as all architectural products are made. We are able to enter the consciousness of a concentration camp architect and consider what aesthetic choices were made here—in what way was this camp designed so as to resist appreciation as art (unlike, say, the Reichstag)? Who was the intended “audience” for the camp? The prisoners? The Nazi soldiers? Hitler? The German volk? Suspicious international neighbors whom the Nazis need to 1) ignore the camps, and 2) if they cannot ignore them, to see them as working cities that are best left alone? The camp, of course, negotiates all these audiences in their aesthetic design. But by being aware of the camp as a created thing, we become aware of the relationship between more familiar acts of creation and the foreign-ness of the concentration camp. At one point in the event I found myself thinking, “Look how old and un-advanced the technology of this place is. Imagine what we could do today. Think of how much sleeker, more efficient, and more sterile would be a concentration camp made today.” And to be put in the position of the designer is to be removed from the position of the spectator of a melodrama, where the given to be seen simply “is”—is beyond our control, is someone else’s fault, is behind us.

And it is not ugly or evil. It is banal. And it was designed and constructed. And it can be torn down. And it can be rebuilt differently. And as the sun set on one day in the life of the camp, with no sound of liberators in the distance, and no proffered “hope” or emotional release for the spectator, not even the consolation of a resilient human spirit that “cannot be destroyed,” nor of a moral superiority for those of us watching (all these constructions only serve to make the camps less dangerous)—we are left with the disturbing and also empowering image of a work of art (the camp) rendered as a work of art (Kamp), and therefore no longer finished, but forever incomplete.

Note: This post is unedited. I guess that's the point, right?