IRVING’S CHILDREN (& THEIR TATTOOS)
Apr 8th, 2008 by Sean Baite
[ Primo Levi - c. http://www.filmitalia.org/ ]
During the last week, I managed to get to see Davide Ferrario’s documentary film ‘Primo Levi’s Journey’ in my local cine-club/
sanity preserver Montreurs d’images . The film’s premise is to follow the tortuous route taken by Primo Levi in returning to his native Turin on his release from Auschwitz in 1945 (described in his book ‘The Truce’ / ‘La Tregua’ ). It took Levi 10 months to return to Italy during which time he passed through much of the former Eastern Bloc, Austria and Bavaria before finally getting across the Alps. 60 years on, the filmmakers take a number of snapshots of the countries passed through (for some reason, possibly budgetary, seeming to dedicate the most part of the film to Poland-Ukraine-Belorussia). A new town built under Polish communism is viewed in the cruel light of post-Solidarity free-marketism (and the disabused gaze of the great Polish director Wajda). Ukraine is passed through twice evoking the murder of a famous Ukrainian-speaking singer by a Russian speaker and the Chernobyl disaster. Belorussia resembles a more sinister version of Borat’s Kazakhstan - the crew are even entitled to assistance by a secret policeman while there, as in the good old days.
It is the recounting near the end of the film of Levi’s suicide, in 1987, over 40 years after he managed to walk out of Auschwitz, that left the deepest impression on me. I don’t pretend to be able to get inside the mind of someone having decided to check out of this stupid world early but I would’ve thought that emerging from the horrors of Auschwitz alive a person would tend to want to cling on all that harder to life. Some have suggested that a contributory factor to Levi’s suicide was the increasing visibility, in the late 80s, of revisionist/negationist approaches to the Holocaust. A phenomenon that Levi found loathsome - Irving and his disciples had managed to turn Levi’s stomach. He killed himself by throwing himself into the stairwell of his Turin apartment building 42 years after walking out of Auschwitz.
[ Primo Levi’s Itinerary 1945-6 - c. http://www.imdb.com/ ]
In the film, it is not until Munich that we are shown any actual Neo-Nazis. From what I read and hear about the former Eastern Bloc, the crew very likely had ample opportunity to do so before arrival in former West Germany but chose not to. Instead they waited until they got to where Hitler served his political apprenticeship. In a political meeting in what resembles a beerhall, we encounter the familiar trappings of the far right - the same cropped heads, the same doc martens, the same tattoos. One of the tattoos, on a skinhead’s neck, is possibly some sort of reference to Irving’s project : ‘Aryan memory’ or some such bumph. Skinheads, their female variant, cranky pensioners of indeterminate sex and a smattering of normal-looking people make up the audience in the beerhall. In the interview conducted outside, the group’s ‘intellectual’ turns out to be one of those sinister-looking stamp collectors gone wrong that always seem to do the talking for this sort of grouping. He spouts some toned-down shite about a ‘Europe of sovereign peoples’ with a skinhead at his shoulder that doesn’t look in the least ‘toned down’.
An infinitesimal (I should hope) percentage of the German population repeating the grave mistakes of their past. This pathetic repetition is rendered all the more grotesque and obscene by the fact that, an hour earlier, we have seen footage of a very grave Levi visiting Auschwitz on the 40th anniversary of his liberation - in 1985 - just a couple of years before his suicide.
Sadly, I also note that some of Irving’s children appear to have passed through Belfast in the past fortnight. A man had his throat cut and was left in a critical condition in an attack in the area from where the Nationalist black taxis leave the city centre - following on from Cliftonville being knocked out of the Irish Cup at the semi-final stage by Linfield in an early kick-off http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7322242.stm ]. That the BBC report mentions some of the attackers having English accents leads me to suspect the same sort of involvement as that Landsdowne Rd. riot in the 90s. Unfortunately, for some people, history appears to still boil down to a question of tattoos.
