(The University of Sheffield)
Closely Observed Train Workers: Claude Lanzmann’s Excluded Interviews with Reichsbahn Employees
This chapter discusses the interviews with two employees of the wartime German railway, Hans Prause and Eduard Kryshak, filmed by Claude Lanzmann but excluded during the process of making his Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985). These encounters were recorded in relation to Lanzmann’s concern, as evident in the released film, with the role of trains and their personnel in the commission of mass murder. The chapter argues that Lanzmann’s choice of interviewee and the questions he puts to them were influenced by Raul Hilberg’s historical research, and can be evaluated in relation to Zygmunt Bauman’s arguments about the impersonal working patterns of modernity. However, I conclude that these filmed encounters exceed the factual arguments even in their pre-edited state, giving the viewer of Lanzmann’s outtakes an insight into the artistic form this meditation on complicity might have taken.
Keywords: Claude Lanzmann, Holocaust, modernity, deportations, trains