1 - Melancholy Journeys to the Past: The Films of Ruth Beckermann

Summary

Es hat mich einfach dazu gedrängt, das nicht untergehen zu lassen. [I felt the strong urge not to let this become lost.]

—Franz West (1909–85)

IN HIS SEMINAL ESSAY “Trauer und Melancholie” (Mourning and Melancholia, 1917), Freud defines melancholy as a coping mechanism of cathecting (incorporating and investing emotional energy in) a lost object's characteristics in one's own ego in order to cope with its loss. We find many such examples of melancholic cathexis in the work of the Austrian documentary filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, be they for a person or people, for a particular place, or correspondingly for a particular time. Beckermann (1952–), who started making documentary films in 1977, has been described as “obsessed with the past, with finding out the truth about the Shoah, victims and perpetrators.” Most of her films deal in some way with Austrian Jewish culture following the Holocaust, beginning with the film trilogy on Jewish identity Wien retour, Die papierene Brücke, and Nach Jerusalem (Toward Jerusalem, 1990), and continuing with Ein flüchtiger Zug nach dem Orient (A Fleeting Train to the Orient; in English as A Fleeting Passage to the Orient, 1999), Homemad(e), and Zorros Bar Mizwa (Zorro's Bar Mitzva, 2006). While Beckermann's work has been examined in the context of the predominant issue of memory in her films, the particular status of the city of Vienna, and re-emerging Jewish culture in Austria at the turn of the millennium, there has been no sustained discussion of the function of melancholy and nostalgia with relation to space and place in her work. This chapter will focus on three films in particular, Wien retour, Die papierene Brücke, and Homemad(e), and explore how all three deeply personal documentaries constitute an attempt to recoup, in some small way, the loss caused to Austrian Jewish culture by the destruction wrought by the Holocaust, and how the journeys that Beckermann undertakes to the places and spaces that were previously home to Jewish culture are consequently inflected with varying degrees of melancholy and nostalgia.