Fwd: PHOTOGRAPHS [New] Freud Exile Shoah 39 Elsworthy Rd.

[Doug Millison]

Many names here (the forwarded post below) that have surfaced in 
various recent threads -- Walter Benjamin, Freud, the ongoing 
Holocaust-in-Pynchon's work discussion, GR's treatment of 
architecture, the possibility of artistic representation of traumatic 
historical events and what shapes such might take....

By the way, I was sitting in my dentist's waiting room the other day, 
leafing through a copy of Field & Stream, enjoying the tale of a 
manly fisherman's struggle with a scaly creature of near-mythic 
proportions, when I noticed an old copy of the literary journal, 
Representations, which had, mysteriously, fallen open to Leo 
Bersani's article, "Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature." A curious 
coincidence...very, very curious. Yes, the Holocaust in GR and the 
rest of the politics and history no more than mere window dressing 
for the real show that you know goes on, tantalizingly off stage, yes 
how to come to grips with that, or, better, not to play Their game, 
instead follow Slothrop and dispearse, quit the game entirely, fake 
Them out. Still, there sits GR on the shelf, V. next to it, Vineland 
next to that, M&D, Slow Learner, COL49 quite mysteriously missing for 
the moment, all of them full of that politics and history and science 
and culture high and low, and one after another reference or allusion 
or however you want to slice and dice them or whatever you want to 
name them pointing to -- well, that depends, I guess, on where you 
stand and where you look -- to the still-rather-recent (some of them 
ongoing, transmuting human gold into lead in over there in that 
alchemy that American RadioWorks reported a few days ago, to name 
perhaps the most recent tragedy) troubles.

>Date:         Mon, 29 Jan 2001 16:43:01 -0500
>Sender: Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts
>               <PSYART at LISTS.UFL.EDU>
>From: Norman Holland <nholland at ufl.edu>
>Subject:      PHOTOGRAPHS [New] Freud Exile Shoah 39 Elsworthy Rd.
>
>From:
>         Namesmemorial at aol.com
>
>3:03 AM
>  <A HREF="http://www.javari.com/FreudPsa/39ElsworthyRd.htm#CONT">Click here:
>Freud Exile Shoah 39 Elsworthy Rd.</A>
>http://www.javari.com/FreudPsa/39ElsworthyRd.htm
>NEW materials including photographs of Hrdlcka Memorial etc.
>
><<It is as well to note Freud's entries in his diary: "Anschluss with
>Germany" on Sunday 13 March, 1938, and "Hitler's arrival in Vienna" on 14
>March, whereafter arrests were made, Jewish property confiscated and
>synagogues and schools destroyed, especially in the Leopoldstadt district
>where most Viennese Jews lived. Adolf Eichmann, head of the Central Office of
>Jewish Emigration was responsible for and arranged the expulsion of almost
>250,000 Jews from the city by the end of 1949, the Nazi authorities exacting
>large sums of money for the exit permits while the first deportations to
>Poland had begun. Emigration was finally prohibited in October 1941 and the
>first death train Transports began to run form Vienna to Theresienstadt and
>Auschwitz where by 1945 over 70,000 [Baedeker gives 45.000] Viennese Jews had
>met their death--including K.R.Eissler's beloved brother, Erich....Nothing
>can, or one should say could, prepare one for the shock of "Gatevay of
>Violence," the so-called monument  against war and fascism, erected in
>1988-91, by the Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka which dominates Vienna's
>Albertinaplatz, supposedly to commemorate the victims of the Nazi regime and
>those Austrians killed in the air-raid shelters below the square. The
>towering white marble Orpheus is intended to symbolize the doom of war and
>was counterposed with a bronze of an elderly religious Jew, possibly a
>bearded rabbi, scrubbing the pavement as a reminder of the events of the
>Anschluss of 12 March, 1938 when Jewish citizens were forced to scrub off
>with rags and toothbrushes, the pro-Austrian slogans painted on the streets.
>On approaching this site in August 1996, I first saw through a narrow
>passageway, this crouching degraded bronze figure with only a background
>glimpse of the main marble artefact, and I could not believe my eyes,
>especially for the barbed wire nailed to the back of the aged Jew in this
>obscene graven image which replicated exactly the historical insult instead
>of memorializing the names of the victims in writing... [<A
>HREF="http://www.javari.com/FreudPsa/39ElsworthyRd.htm#CONT">continues below
>photographs...</A>] <A HREF="http://www.javari.com/hrdlcka.htm"> </A>
>[<A HREF="http://www.javari.com/hrdlcka.htm">Click on photographs for
>enlargements</A>]
>ALFRED HRDLCKA
>Jew Scrubbing Pavement
>Gateway of Violence (1988-91)
>Vienna, Albertinaplatz
>Photograph by Jennifer Stone (August 1996)
>©2001Jastonephd
>
>It appears that the barbed wire was not organic to the statue but an appendix
>to deter picnickers who were using the supine Jew's back of the figure as a
>bench.... I have purposely truncated here a representation of the heroic
>Gateway of Violence!  It would seem that following objections by the Simon
>Wiesenthal and other Jewish anti-defamation groups and vociferous debate in
>Vienna's small Jewish community of 12,000, this incredible assault on our
>"memorabilia of grief" might have been removed (I have not been inclined to
>go back to Vienna to check...) when a new deservedly ugly memorial of a mock
>mausoleum (12x24x33ft. large) in the spectral white shape of an externalized
>library with the outside edges instead of the concealed spines of books as
>its walls by the British artist-sculptor, Rachel Whiteread of "Sensation"
>fame, was in October 2000 brutally imposed on another square more than a
>stone's throw away, Judenplatz, Vienna's architecturally Baroque square where
>Mozart lived during the composition of Cosí fan tutte and where a newly
>excavated synagogue was burned with some of its human inmates in a medieval
>pogrom in 1421. The new mausoleum, with the names of the extermination camps
>inscribed along its base, is shaped to recall the Walpurgisnacht of
>bookburnings by the Nazis (not to speak of the destruction of the Freuds'
>Psychanalytischer Verlag) and despite its figuration of two doors, is
>impenetrable: my own fantasy is that the bronze of the humiliated Jew is
>buried inside, a "repressed" archeological fragment of Viennese anti-Semitism
>now suitable for exposition in our FreudPsa E*archive.  What without the
>brilliant empty prolepsis of Daniel Libeskind's justly (Un)heimlich Berlin
>Jewish Museum according to the one-way street map of Walter Benjamin and
>illustrated by Paul Celan?... >> [to be continued...]
>
>©2001javari
>©2001Jastonephd
>All rights reserved
>grateful acknowledgements to Shaul Ze'ev ben David
>
>
>J.A.Stone (PhD London)
>Psychoanalyst NYC
>
>CEO & General Editor
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