March 7, 2024 : Wondercab Mini (62A)
MORE THIS AND THAT
THIS
For some months now, I have been sensing, with ever mounting conviction, how with its current war on Gaza, Israel is squandering its Holocaustal (or should I say Shoahvanistic) “Get out of jail free” card once and for all. But in his well-nigh essential piece in the current London Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra frames the current catastrophe in even wider terms, concluding, towards the end of his survey on “The Shoah After Gaza” that
All these universalist reference points—the Shoah as the measure of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry—are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, razes their homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and bombs them into smaller and smaller encampments, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist, from the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the Spanish, Irish, Brazilian and South African governments and the Vatican. Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945—the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.
and he goes on from there. For the entire piece, which is at once riveting and revelatory, see here.
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THAT
Meanwhile, those of you living in the New York area might want to check out another such historical meditation, albeit one pitched at an entirely different register, which is to say Jodie Markell’s star turn, by turns harrowing and hilarious, as she channels Hitler’s favorite auteur Leni Riefenstahl moldering away in cabaret hell (or is it just purgatory, or might it even be her own version of heaven?) in my friend Gil Kofman’s deliciously demented one-woman monologue, Leni’s Last Lament, under the sly direction of Richard Caliban at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, opening a three-week run (under the auspices of the Brave New World Repertory Theatre Company) on Friday, March 15.
I first encountered the piece a year ago when it was included in the one-night-only United Solo Festival in Manhattan, where it swept all three awards for best actor, best director, and best play, and indeed the production is now headed for one of the main stages at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival this summer.
You can get a whiff of the piece’s insolent pungency in the passages from Kofman’s script below,
Scene: Upstage, an older woman, still glamorous and alluring, is discovered by the collapsed spotlight of history. In her hand is a spent syringe at which she gazes dreamily, before putting it away. Then turns to address the Audience.
LENI
I have this dream that I’m dead. And I wake up every day at the same hour to come here and talk to you. Which makes me think that maybe you are dead too. Or that you are dreaming of me. Or that maybe we are all living in someone else’s dream. Who knows.
She floats towards an old fashioned microphone, taps it to make sure it’s alive. Sings a few bars of “Falling in Love Again” á la Dietrich:
Love's always been my game
Play it how I may
I was made that way
I can't help it.Falling...
She flails back from microphone, as if falling, hands in air above her head...
Falling...
Stops abruptly to consider her empty hand.
Where is my morphine? For my pains. But it’s too early in the evening for that. Besides, it makes those crazy dreams come with increasing intensity.
She crosses to a little cube and climbs on top, as if taking flight.
Last night, for example, I dreamt I was an eagle. Not the Nazi one you find perched above the Swastika, but the American eagle, cutting its way high above the Dolomites of Democracy. How I loved to soar so high and unencumbered. Everything apprehended so quickly when seen from above, vast expanse of winter snow interrupted here and there by burgeoning patches of spring—death and birth feeding off each other in perfect harmony—and I wonder if I actually ever died—or even really existed.
She fluffs hair, snaps open a hand fan, and is suddenly transported to a happier time.
Did I ever tell you I met Borges once, I was in Argentina, to visit some old friends from the old days, you know what I mean, Buenos Aires was crawling with them at the time...
She waves a wide Hello—or is it a truncated Heil Hitler salute?—to some invisible passerby.
“Hello Dr. Mengele! How are you Herr Eichmann...?” And there he was in a cafe. That enigmatic poet, Borges. His eyes already failing, blind for all practical purposes, but he could still smell Germans the way pigs detect truffles, and he approached me and said: “Lost in a labyrinth of Fate, you are more blind than Borges himself—the sooner you succumb to it, the sooner you will find peace.”
And later that very night, I fell into another dream. This one much more familiar, where I’m clad in my famous white trench coat—the one I wore to direct Triumph of the Will—and I’m circulating amongst all those black Nazi SA uniforms—visible, always visible in that dull sea of men—but this time I’m naked under my coat, in my dream, completely naked. And I’m directing, and ordering everyone about. They all want me, desire me. Hitler Goering Speer Goebbels Hess, from the top down, they all want to screw little Leni—kleine Leni—but when I open my coat—and this is a dream, ja?—I have this huge erect penis, and I fuck them hahaha I fuck them with my circumcised cock for the 1000 years Reich it takes me to come. Which is when I wake up.
But it’s not easy coming back into the world, disoriented by my surroundings, discombobulated, and confused as to who I am and what story I’m expected to tell. Which I presume is why you all came here tonight. To hear Leni’s side of the story. But telling my story doesn’t mean offering a wholesale apology. It’s also showing what they did to me. And my body of work. Those small–minded academics. Fashionable doormen guarding culture’s compost. For years they’ve sabotaged me and made it illegal to show my films in Germany. Monsters! Those terrible awful people with their taxing efforts to tarnish my name. Banish my work. Diminish my reputation. What they did to me was worse than what the Allies did to Dresden. But let’s not discuss that now.
She motions to Audience.
Recalling with relish.
Tonight we let you the public decide. Isn’t that what democracy is all about? Why so many people fought and died to eradicate fascism in the first place, ja...? Why you bought your overpriced ticket to come here tonight?
Granted, this is a paltry audience. Nothing personal, folks, but when you’ve been accustomed to the crowds I had to deal with... this is just a few drops of pee in a vast ocean of disappointment.
I’ll share a secret with you...yes? The larger the crowd the more compliant they are... easier to control. The Führer always knew this, the way he connected with the masses...it was almost supernatural.
Of course some people say that without Leni there would be no Hitler. And, although I’m not one for hyperbole, they unfortunately have a point. Which I guess is why I was so reluctant to accept Hitler’s job offer at the start.
She backs upstage, as if warding off the Führer, and bumps blindly into a bench. Stops.
But Hitler refused to take No for an answer. And let me tell you, that man could be very persuasive.
Impersonating Hitler, she assumes a rotund despotic pose. Deepens her voice.
“Leni, my liebling,” he said, looking out the window of the Hotel Kaiserhof. “If I wanted newsreel footage, I could ask anyone. But I need your special talent and skills for this.”
As herself again, to Audience.
Of course, I kept steadfast in my refusal. Something told me that in the long run it would be more trouble than it’s worth.
“Mein Führer,” I said, “You’ve seen my films, you know this is not what I do, I’m an artist, responsible only to my art."
Back as Hitler
“I see you are wearing the perfume I bought you.”
As herself again.
“Don’t you like it, mein Führer?”
As Hitler.
“Like it? I LOVE it! This way I’ll always know where you are.
Gestures, and the lights dim.
Even in the dark. When the blitzkrieg begins.”
Back as herself.
“Please mein Führer, you must leave the light on.”
To audience.
Blitzkrieg or no blitzkrieg, it was not easy to forestall his amorous advances.
As Hitler.
“Feels to me, Fräulein, like you are trying to disabuse me of my affections.”
As herself.
“Oh no, I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.”
As Hitler.
“Please, Fräulein Riefenstahl. Even Faust argued less with the Devil, and Lord knows I’m not the Devil. Or am I, hahaha...?"
As herself, gesturing to turn on the light.
I loved when the Führer laughed. Somehow it made you feel like everything would turn out just fine.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” I finally said, “but only under one condition. You must give me complete autonomy. I must answer only to you, mein
She shudders.
Poopsie. That Goebbels fellow is too creepy... even for me.”
You see what I had to deal with. The Jews were not the only ones forced into labor, and there’s only so much you can do to resist. But we’re getting too distracted here.
But there’s nothing quite like seeing the divine Ms. Markell sinking her teeth into the vertiginously clammy role, which you may still be able to do by contacting the box office here.
It will be interesting to see how events in the real world over the past year may have changed the valences of the play.
See you next week!
Thanks Ren for heads up for this astonishing essay in LRB. It should be mandatory reading everywhere! Leni's Last Lament sounds hilarious - and timely too. Hope she brings it to LA.
They will be the last to forget the Shoah -- they can see that the rest of the world already has -- but a human lifespan is a human lifespan, and no memory can now last longer. Contrast our Founders, for whom the English Civil War was so present that it may as well have happened that very morning.