INTERPRETING THE VISIBLE TRACES OF THERESIENSTADT 1

Starting from the citation of a notorious Nazi propaganda film about Theresienstadt in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, this article proceeds to inquire into that film itself and then into Un Vivant qui Passe, Claude Lanzmann’s filmed interview with the official representative of the International Red Cross, who filed a report in 1944 verifying the conditions in Theresienstadt. Not only because the Nazi propaganda film was made with the participation of a Jewish director, but also because the Jews in the film had to perform their daily lives for the cameras, it is difficult to make conclusive statements about the attitudes of the persons depicted; there are a number of obstructions to coming to terms with the visual evidence. With reference to the work of Giorgio Agamben, Primo Levi and others, this article addresses the question of how this filmed document complicates traditional tendencies in readings of Holocaust images.