The Sticking Place Theatre and Film productions

I was born on April 18, 1921 in a city I loved, the son of assimilated Jews, my father a lawyer, my gentle mother a kindergarten teacher who worked closely with Alfred Adler and helped open the first Kindergaerten in Vienna after World War I. We lived in the IX district. I went to school in the Piaristen Gymnasium where I was not an extraordinary student, except for German language and literature. I grew up among the works of Goethe, Brecht, Shakespeare, Dreiser, Tucholsky, Marx, Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, Heine, Buechner, Edgar Wallace and Karl May.

From early on, I had been fascinated by the movies, and saw a great many films: Austrian, German, American and British, Russian and French. But the quintessential experience came when, as a teenager, I saw at Vienna’s cultural-educational center, the Urania, the great British documentary Nightmail by Basil Wright, Harry Watt, Cavalcanti, W H Auden and Benjamin Britten. It moved me deeply because it proved that it was possible to combine documentary with poetry.

My adolescence was marked by the 1934 Austrian civil war and Dollfuss/Schuschnigg stifling conservatism. I remember surreptitiously reading illegal political publications and Die Neue Weltbuehne, and getting detention (Karzer) for having dared discuss socialism with a schoolmate (who dutifully reported me).

But this was child’s play compared to March 1938 when I was suddenly informed that I was a cancer that had to be eradicated. I was expelled from school because I was a Jew. One day at dusk my girlfriend and I discovered that our favorite bench on the Donaukanal – where we had always sat and kissed – suddenly displayed a new sign: ‘Dogs and Jews are not permitted to sit here.’

My heart and mind are filled to the brim with other stories. Ultimately, the shock of being torn from ones roots (because one was an ‘Untermensch’) was enormous and set up a trauma that I have not overcome to this day. I was robbed of my home, my friends, my loves, my Muttersprache.

Penniless after my arrival in the U.S., I worked as a newspaper delivery boy, garage attendant, machine tool worker, poultry-farm helper until – having learned enough English – I obtained a degree in Economics and Political Science as one of the first graduates of the University in Exile, the New School of Social Research.

Having married in 1945 on the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, my wife Marcia and I – in love with cinema – founded a film club, Cinema 16, which quickly grew from 200 people into America’s largest, internationally most famous film society, with over 7000 members. We concentrated on documentary and avant-garde films and otherwise unavailable features from all over the world and premiered a new generation of American and foreign independents such as Cassavetes, Polanski, De Palma, Bresson, Resnais, Ozu, Antonioni, Alexander Kluge, Nagisa Oshima, Lindsay Anderson, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda and avant-gardists such as Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Robert Breer, Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner, Ed Emswhiller, James Broughton, Peter Weiss, Stan Vanderbeek, and untold others. Together with Maya Deren, catalyst of the American film avant-garde, we created the Creative Film Foundation which awarded prizes for best avant-garde films and premiered them at Cinema 16.

In 1963 I was invited by Lincoln Center to create a film festival and became the co-founder and first director of the New York Film Festival, introducing Godard, Bertolucci, Makavejev, Jancso, Sembene, Schloendorff, Fassbinder, Wenders, Straub, Malle, Pasolini, Paradjhanov, Herzog, Scorcese, Forman and all the other leading directors of the period.

In 1974 – having previously taught at Harvard, Columbia, the New School – I became a professor of visual communications at the University of Pennsylvania, published Film as a Subversive Art, which was translated into several languages, and was a frequent contributor to Village Voice, Film Comment, The New York Times and Cineaste. I have two sons, Steven and Loring, and still share my life with Marcia, my life-long companion.

I became an American citizen in 1944, admiring the country’s good qualities and democratic traditions and grateful for the opportunities it offered me, but an uneasy, unresolved dichotomy continues to possess me, so that I feel myself both as an European as well as an American, still bound to German culture and civilization as well as to the American one, a citizen of both or of neither, perhaps a citizen of the world.
To conclude, I would like to offer eleven succinct conclusions I have come to at age 72, based on what the Nazis – hard taskmasters – taught me.

1. Don’t trust the state. We all believe, almost automatically, that the state exists to protect us. I found out that it can also exist to exterminate us.

2. Don’t trust the police. One day in 1938, I watched the Vienna police brutally beat illegal Nazis demonstrating on the Ringstrasse for Hitler. On the next day and on the same spot, I watched the very same police brutally beat anti-Nazis demonstrating against Hitler. Nothing had changed except the political situation. Thus I discovered that the police has no principles. It is merely a tool of whatever government is in power. For a young person to see this 180 degree flip-flop was immensely educational.

3. Fascism is not limited to Germany. It’s not in the Germans’ genes. Potentially, it can exist anywhere. This makes the task of combating fascism larger.

4. What happened in Germany during the Hitler regime is – literally – unfassbar. It cannot be comprehended. What is more, the Taeter (perpetrators) are verschwunden (have disappeared), and their Taten (deeds) are forgotten or on the verge of being forgotten. After all, who now remembers the one million Armenians who were slaughtered in their own holocaust by the Turks after World War I?

5. We must support the victims everywhere, and I must do so precisely because I am a Jew, precisely because of my sufferings as a Jew; this means that I must support the Gypsies, the Turks, the Blacks, the Palestinians, the Vietnamese, the American Indians… and all the others.

6. If one remains silent in the face of injustice, one is implicated in the deed.

7. Here comes something I learned the hard way: Evil Exists. It really, really exists. Is this a banal statement? To the contrary, it is a most profound truth I refused to accept for a long time. Is it rooted in genetics? In the unconscious> In our aggressive instincts? I do not know. I do know – for myself – that it is not rooted in religion. There is no devil, and if there exists a God, he has much to answer for as regards the holocaust which consumed six million Jews and, equally, for the one hundred and fifty or so millions who died during the wars of the 20th Century and the slaughters of state-terrorist regimes such as Hitler and Stalin.

8. A world dominated by the Nazis – politically, economically, culturally – would have been a tragedy. Today we must add: a world dominated by any other nation would be a tragedy as well. In the context of the cinema, this means: “Beware of Hollywood.”

9. Television is the enemy of mankind. Not as a medium in itself, but as presently constituted. Es verbloedet die ganze Welt. It idiotizes the entire world.

10. The trauma of my Nazi experience robbed me of my mother tongue, of my family, my friends, my loves, my country. One of the other speakers at this symposium stated that – though born in Vienna – he had never, not even before Hitler, considered himself an Austrian but always as a Jew. I always considered myself to be an Austrian and a Jew. Of course, the Nazis cured me, and made me into a citizen of no country; or perhaps a citizen of all. Perhaps we all should become that. It may cure us of racism and ethnic strife and false notions of national or racial superiority and slowly begin to transform us into citizens of the world.

11. Finally, at 72, I have developed three guidelines for life.
1) Accept the fundamental instability of life and live fruitfully within it. After all, we are all but temporary aggregates of biological, physiological elements, hence unstable; and this instability characterizes life itself. However much we may desire to hold on to whatever good we have created and developed within ourselves or in our relations to others, life represents eternal change.
2) To quote someone out of fashion today yet still worth pondering, we should bear in mind Karl Marx’s reply when asked to define, in one word, what life was: “Struggle.”
3) Finally, do attempt to live by this ancient saying, which has remained fresh, true, fundamental for me through all these years and horrifying experiences. “Nichts Menschliches ist mir fremd.” “Nothing human is alien to me.”

To the extent that art can provide us with intimations of truth, personal freedom, epiphanies of human creativity, to the extent that it offers us weapons of fact and persuasion to fight injustice and inequality, I remain committed, at age 72, as I have always been, and for the same reasons, to creative, non-commercial, radical film.

© Amos Vogel 1993
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