On Sunday afternoon, community members joined University students and faculty in 182 Lillis to take part in the first panel of the Oregon Humanities Center’s annual Witnessing Genocide symposium.
The crescendo of the panel was undoubtedly music professor Robert Kyr’s multimedia performance entitled “Witnessing the Unutterable.” The performance began as the lights of the lecture hall gave way to ominous dark. Five female flutists bedecked in black stood at the top of the room’s stairs as Kyr began to read Nazi Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue.” Playing above Kyr was a movie of a monochromatic hand writing music notes. As the notes began to form a song, one flutist began to play. After a few stanzas of the poem, four were playing in tandem, moving towards Kyr, each in their separate aisles.
As the flutists continued their slow descent toward Kyr, his voice began to rise to a menacing tone. A fifth flutist began to descend, but she did not play, she simply held her instrument to her chest. Once each of the four original musicians reached the floor they exchanged their flutes for bells, which they rang as they slowly climbed the stairs to exit the lecture hall. The fifth flutist began a solo as the hand began to erase its creation and Kyr picked up a bell to begin his own exodus. Soon all the notes, like Kyr, were gone and the soloist stood frozen as the blank screen faded to black and the lights came up on a silent audience.
While some audience members thought of the performance as a representation of Celan’s poem and, therefore, the Holocaust, Kyr had different intentions. He said he intended the piece to be “an embodiment or ‘ensoulment’ of what is beyond Celan’s text. It’s an event in relationship to the text. I wouldn’t call that a representation.”
Indeed, the indefinable nature of Kyr’s performance is indicative of the general sentiment of the panel: There is no way to represent genocide, specifically the Holocaust, that would accurately portray the horrific event.
Presenter Amy Colin, an associate professor in Germanic languages and literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, discussed a paper she wrote concerning the influence Celan’s then-Romanian home region of Bukovina had on his poetry. Colin focused on Celan’s use of language in his poetry concerning his experience in the Holocaust. Colin postulated that Celan’s use of German, his oppressors’ language, was consciously done to show language can be reinvented and purified from historical context. Colin’s talk provided a rich background for any spectator not familiar with Celan or his work.
Jeffrey Librett, Professor of Germanic Language and Literatures, presented next. His paper, titled “Abstraction and Materiality in Paul Celan’s ‘Rose of No One’ and Colette Brunschwig’s Celan Collages” was, in the words of Oregon Humanities Center director Steven Shankman, “theoretically challenging for an audience that were not specialists.”
Yet Shankman felt that Librett’s deconstruction of Brunchwig’s collage work was “deep and enjoyable.”