Fran Assa on 1930s Berlin photographs: I for one won't
open these photos. I do not even write the H word. I use Der Fuhrer
instead. It may be some form of animism, but to replicate the images, even
the name, to me is a form of having these monsters live on. Somehow I
think VN would agree.
JM: I deleted the images as soon as they
reappeared at the VN List. I chided myself because they are historical
items but, although I wouldn't have minded to keep them printed inside a book, I
refused to have them in my archives in a computer - it's another instance
of animism, perhaps. I found the relation
bt these images and what VN saw while he lived in Berlin or what he
would think about them a very strange preoccupation. Curiously, it was Walter Benjamin's suicide that came
to my mind, the destruction of any stable reference in art,
culture, "humanity," something that I feel to be worse
than physical obliteration.