In the movie "Persian Lessons", Nazi officers learn "Persian" from "Persians". (Infographic/Figure)
In 1887, after more than a decade of exploration, the Jewish Chaimenhof created an artificial language. Riding on the east wind of cosmopolitanism and anarchism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the language quickly swept the world, with a large number of followers from Western Europe to China. It came to be known as Esperanto, the most widely circulated artificial language in the world.
Born in Białystok (now Part Poland) of the Russian Empire, Zamenhof wrote to friends that he founded Esperanto to promote understanding and world peace among peoples. "I was educated to be an idealist, I was taught to be 'brothers everywhere,' but I don't see people on the streets who can be called brothers, they're just Russians, Polishes, Germans, Jews, or whatever." He said.
Hitler hated Esperanto, and in his autobiography he denounced Esperanto as "the language used by the Jews after plotting to dominate the world." This is not only because esperanto was Jewish, but also because it was a bridge between different races. During the Nazi regime, a large number of Esperanto speakers were slaughtered, and all three of Zamenhof's children died at the hands of the Nazis.
In the Nazi concentration camps, there was once a Jew who concocted an artificial language in order to survive, which not only saved his life, but also became a bridge between different peoples, as Chaimenhof hoped.
The movie "Persian Lesson" is based on this true story. In the movie, Giller, a French Jew who is sent to a concentration camp, escapes the disaster because he accidentally obtains a French version of "Persian Mythology" and falsely claims that he is not a Jew but a Persian. Koch, a German officer in charge of logistics in the camp, dreamed of opening restaurants in Tehran after the war and looking for his brothers who fled to Persia before the Nazis took the stage. He needed a Persian to teach him Persian. Giller didn't know Persian at all, but in order to survive, he made up a lot of "Persian" words every day to deal with the studious Koch, a "student" who could take his life at any time.
In order to round up the lie, an artificial "Persian language" was created by Giller. As the "learning" progressed, the feelings between the two also changed, and a "Persian myth" that only happened between the two of them began to sprout. Giller's fate swings back and forth on this string of tension that can be broken at any time, and this suspense is also the most enjoyable part of the film.
Founder of Esperanto, Chaimenhof. (Infographic/Figure)
<h3>Get rid of the contaminated German language</h3>
Giller's creation of the "Persian language" seems to linguists to be flawed—it has no verb conjugations, the grammar is probably copied from his native French, and there are no root connections between nouns and nouns. If Koch hadn't known anything about linguistics, Giller would have been in the crematorium long ago.
However, this language conforms to what Saussure called the principle of "arbitrariness of symbols", that is, the combination of signifiers (acoustic images) and signifiers (concepts) of language is random - Giller remembered the names of 2840 Jews in the concentration camp, slightly deformed their names, and created 2840 words, "I" is "Eile", "bread" is "Rachi", "tree" is also "Rachi"... It is this randomness that ensures that the language looks like a real language.
A world that seemed to grow out of nothingness was born in this language. In the 1950s, the Chinese-languageist Swadis listed a "Swadesh list" of more than 200 words, and as long as these words were mastered, learners of a certain language could communicate roughly. Koch uttered in simple words words he would never say in German: "I'm going to Tehran, I want to open a restaurant..." Like a baby who has started a life again, has learned to speak again.
Koch could even write poetry in this language. He wrote a poem like this in simple words: The wind sends the clouds to the east / There are souls everywhere who yearn for peace / I know / I will be happy / With the clouds / Drift to the place - this is the poem of a Nazi Party whose hands are stained with blood.
Koch also remembered why he had joined the Nazis—he had just seen them on the street, as if attracted by some magic, and he couldn't help but get caught up in the trend. How could such an advanced and cultured nation-state as Germany so quickly and easily succumb to the barbaric power of the Nazis? Why was there so little serious resistance to the Nazi seizure of power? All historians after the war are asking these questions.
The long-lived German historian Friedrich Meinecke looks back in his post-World War II memoirs on his experience of Germany and sees the regrettable absence of the German national spirit since Bismarck unified Germany in 1871. Almost all intellectuals became increasingly obsessed with the pursuit of world hegemony, and Germany's rapidly growing industrial power provided the basis for this obsession, and Hitler's route plan easily catered to the deep desires of the Germans (especially after the defeat in World War I), and the end result was that most Germans voluntarily boarded Hitler's chariot – with the obsession with the obsession with world domination – until the end of the world.
To achieve this, the Nazis first had to linguistically erase the Germans' "sense of reality"—the "sense of reality" in the sense of Isaiah Berlin. In the view of the English philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the Nazis were nothing more than a vicious development of a western trend of thought that was keen to find the laws of history, whether it was Hegelianism, Christianity, or social Darwinism, who were keen to find a key to understanding the development of history or to set some kind of historical goal. There is no doubt that the history of the 20th century proved that such efforts had gone bankrupt, and that such a way of thinking had been seized by the Nazis, which carried out the "insignificant" physical annihilation of the individual in the name of the overall german development goal.
In this sense, Koch's process of learning "Persian" is a process of getting rid of the tainted German language – a washing and re-enlightenment. His dialogue with other Nazis was filled with high-pitched words like "Long live Hitler," but when he communicated with Giller, he became a human being with normal emotions, and the simplest core words of humanity created by Giller—eating, drinking, bread, love—had nothing to do with all german dreams of hegemony, only with the most basic human nature.
A neatly written roster in the movie "Persian Lessons". (Infographic/Figure)
<h3>Overcome the innate apathy of human beings</h3>
When Zemenhof founded Esperanto, he set three goals for Esperanto, the third of which was to "find a way to overcome the innate indifference of mankind." In Chaimenhof's view, the estrangement between people arises from the innate indifference of human beings, and language is one of the important ways to overcome it.
Since the release of the film Schindler's List (1993), images of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews in Germany have made their way into commercial cinema. Perhaps this generation of moviegoers have seen too many of these films on screen, reflexively associating the subject with images such as iron fences, trains, and crematoriums that when seeing "Persian Lessons" being released, it is difficult to evoke the excitement of watching Schindler's List or "Beautiful Life" in the audience.
The years of Nazi rule are long overdue, and films that represent this history face a dilemma— if they are still as bitter as they were, the audience's nerves have probably lost their sensitivity; if they are too entertaining, it is a kind of frivolity and indifference—what Chaimenhof calls the innate indifference of human beings.
"Persian Lessons" does not jump out of the framed imagery and narrative logic of classic films, but its concentration camp story, with a clever entry point, reawakens the emotional and human tension of the subject itself, responding to the ethical dilemma of indifference.
Holocaust by the Nazis in Germany during World War II is a proper noun that distinguishes it from the general Holocaust in both Western historical discourse and image construction. Film scholar Li Yang summarized the history of the generation of Western images about the "Holocaust" into three stages.
In the 1950s, the facts of the Holocaust were far from being fully recognized by the public, and the important task of films about the Holocaust was to show evidence and reveal the truth. In 1956, Arun René's Night and Fog became a monumental beginning, with moving cameras that led the audience deep into the camps, showcasing the shocking horrors, and the film itself became a testimony.
In 1985, French documentary filmmaker Claude Langtzmann's 11-year, nine-hour documentary The Havoc was released. The film allows various Holocaust witnesses to face the camera, challenging the audience in front of the screen with the superposition of words. "Havoc" makes the Holocaust image truly go beyond display and witnessing, and become a weapon for reflection and recourse. In Langzman's view, fictional storytelling is a form of treason in the face of a "catastrophe" like the Holocaust, which is why he strongly criticizes Schindler's List.
At the end of the 20th century, with the release of Schindler's List, holocaust images began to become an expressive element of commercial films. Schindler's List completes the basic construction of Holocaust narratives and the classicization of Holocaust symbols for latecomers such as "A Beautiful Life" and "The Reader": barbed wire, trains, piled up corpses, crematoriums... It became the "standard" for commercial films of the Holocaust since then, and "Persian Lessons" was no exception.
Similarly, The Persian Lesson confronts the ethical issues of the Holocaust plots shown in commercial films, as Pointed out by Langzmann. Can the Holocaust just be the backdrop to a commercial film, and can those who die be brushed off in the film?
In the film, Koch has almost strict demands on whether the roster of prisoners in the concentration camp is neatly and orderly, so he dismisses the original Nazi female scribe and lets Giller take over the job. Giller also took inspiration from personal names and created a large number of words from them. Behind this plot lies the film's own attitude toward ethical issues.
Koch demanded that the names of the Jews be neatly arranged and undisturbed, but he didn't really pay attention to each of them—he had the opportunity to look through the roster, but turned a blind eye to the mysteries. This is what the Holocaust cinema calls the "ethics of the gaze," in which only gaze dissolves indifference; or, in The words of Chaimenhof, the film finds a way to overcome the innate indifference of human beings.
Only when people are constantly close to each other can his pain and hope be felt. In "The Havoc," Langzmann draws the camera infinitely closer to the witness, but Koch chooses to turn a blind eye. His only closest Jew, Gilles—in the secret language between them, the man-made language that the Nazis hated the most—became his friend. If there really is a Persian myth, it is a miracle.
The "Persian myth" was disillusioned on the day Koch arrived in Persia, and the language fulfilled its mission. In front of the Allies who liberated France, Giller reduced all the words to the names of the victims. Giller, as creator, untied the signifier and the signifier, and the heroic spirit that floated over Germany became the common witness of mankind as a contradiction between "unforgivable" and "worth saving".
Southern Weekend reporter Wang Huazhen