Claude Lanzmann

Claude Lanzmann (right) in 2008

Claude Lanzmann (French: [lanzman]; born 27 November 1925 in Paris) is a French filmmaker and professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He was the brother of writer Jacques Lanzmann.

Life and work

Lanzmann was born in Paris to a Jewish family that immigrated to France from Eastern Europe. He attended the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. His Jewish family went into hiding during World War II. He joined the French resistance at the age of 18 and fought in Auvergne. Lanzmann opposed the French war in Algeria and signed the 1960 antiwar petition Manifesto of the 121.

In 1963 he married French actress Judith Magre, and after divorce in 1971 he married German-Jewish writer Angelika Schrobsdorff.

Lanzmann's most renowned work is the nine-and-a-half hour documentary film Shoah (1985), which is an oral history of the Holocaust, and is broadly considered to be the foremost film on the subject. Of particular note is that Shoah is made without the use of any historical footage, and only uses first-person testimony from Jewish, Polish, and German individuals, and contemporary footage of several Holocaust-related sites.

Lanzmann persuaded Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski to be a witness in Shoah by calling forth—once again—his historical responsibility. Simultaneously, the complete text appeared in English translation, with introductions by Lanzmann and Simone de Beauvoir, providing multiple keys to the philosophical and linguistic preoccupations of the producers. It was also through Shoah that many viewers were first introduced to the work of American Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg.

Lanzmann has disagreed, sometimes angrily, with attempts to understand the why of Hitler, stating that the evil of Hitler cannot or should not be explained and that to do so is immoral and an obscenity.

Lanzmann is chief editor of the journal Les Temps Modernes, which was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In 2009, Lanzmann published his memoirs under the title "Le lièvre de Patagonie" (The Patagonian Hare). On July 14, 2011, he received the Legion of Honor.

At the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival in February 2013 Lanzmann was awarded with the Honorary Golden Bear.

Awards and honors

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• 2011 Legion of Honor
• 2010 Welt-Literaturpreis

Bibliography

Filmography

• Israel, Why (Pourquoi Israel) (1973)
• Shoah (1985)
• Tsahal (1994)
• A Visitor from the Living (1999)
• Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m (2001)
• Lights and Shadows (2008)
• The Karski Report (2010)
• The Last of the Unjust (to be released in 2013)

Books

• Shoah : an oral history of the Holocaust : the complete text of the film. Pantheon Books, New York 1985, ISBN 978-0-394-55142-5
• The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir (translated by Frank Wynne). Atlantic Books, London 2012 ISBN 978-1-84887-360-5 ; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2012. ISBN 978-0-374-23004-3

Further reading

• Galster, Ingrid (2011), "'Eine große Qualität meines Buches ist seine Ehrlichkeit.' Postscriptum zu der Debatte um die Autobiographie Claude Lanzmanns", In Das Argument, 290, 72-83. (online) (unpublished English translation: "'One great quality of my book is its honesty.' Postscript to the debate on Claude Lanzmann’s autobiography" online)
• “From the Holocaust to the Holocaust”. Telos 41 (Fall 1979). New York: Telos Press.

External links

• Claude Lanzmann at the Internet Movie Database
• 'Claude Lanzmann on why Holocaust documentary Shoah still matters', Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 9 June 2011
• 'Witness to History: Claude Lanzmann’s Journey to Shoah, Weekly Standard, Oct. 8, 2012