Dangerous Beauty, Michael Paterniti Uses

¶ … Dangerous Beauty," Michael Paterniti uses recurring images of bodies, body parts, and bodily functions in order to tie together the different historical periods of his essay and give the story itself a sense of life. While the essay is mainly about David Williams, a professor interested in an anatomy book produced by Nazis during World War II using the bodies of murdered Jews as source cadavers, Paterniti also traces the history of the book itself, with a particular focus on its author and one of the its artists, Eduard Pernkopf and Franz Batke. Paterniti introduces Williams with a discussion of his heart problems and his daily regimen, and he uses the images of clogging arteries and a weakening heart in order to convey a sense of determination and possibly hopelessness to Williams' story (Paterniti 4). While Williams is determined to continue considering the book, going all the way to Vienna to investigate its origins, he is aging, and his love affair with the book is tarnished by its murderous origin, in the way that his heart muscles and arteries, which he exercises every morning, nevertheless slow down and clog. Paterniti also uses the image of a dividing cell in order to convey the tumult and divisions of history, repeating the notion of a cell (and history) splitting in two (Paterniti 9). The cell splitting is a process of life forming, but it also represents an irreversible division; in a way, the book itself can be considered the product of the process, because it is a beautiful, vital work born out of the destructive and horrific divisions of the Holocaust. Finally, Paterniti uses the images of detached body parts, both figuratively and in reference to the images in the anatomy book, in order to vividly demonstrate the destructive and dehumanizing effects of World War II. The Jews who died and were recorded in the pages of the book only appear as body parts, so that they are simultaneously given a kind of perverse life as vivid paintings while their real lives were snuffed out with little concern for the sanctity of their bodies.

Assignment 2: Fascination

Michael Paterniti's essay "The Most Dangerous Beauty" is full of interesting moments, as the narrative travels across the world and through time in order to tell the story of an anatomy book, the men who made it, and one American professor who was practically obsessed with it. However, a single moment stands out because it manages to capture the sense of awe that seems to surround the book without diminishing the terrifying historical context that the book sprang from. The moment comes when Paterniti is first introducing Eduard Pernkopf, on the day he gives a speech aligning himself irrevocably with the Nazi party and decrying Jews (Paterniti 12). Paterniti introduces Pernkopf the morning of the speech, but then goes back to discuss the history of the book itself and the effort of compiling its various artists. In doing so, he demonstrates how the creation of the book and the ascendance of the Nazi party are due to many of the same social and historical forces, so that the book itself seems to contain the essence of the historical period that created it. This history of the book is contained within Pernkopf's morning ritual before he gives his speech, and it helps define the character of the man not by describing his interactions or personality in detail (although Paterniti does this later), but by tying his personal work on the book into his more public work as a supporter of the Nazis. This moment is especially resonant because the essay as a whole details the morning ritual of David Williams, an American professor whose deep interest in the book frames the entire story (Paterniti 9). The similarities between the description of Pernkopf's and Williams' respective mornings make the moment eerily familiar, and it becomes somewhat more difficult to write Pernkopf off as a clear-cut villain when he is so closely tied to the ostensible protagonist of the story. Instead, one is forced to consider the personal and historical forces that drive individuals to their respective interests, and what connections might exist between oneself and seemingly distant, unrelated people.

Assignment 3: Assessment/Lacks

Question: How does the origin of a work affect its reception, and can genuine beauty come from the ugliest parts of human nature?

Michael,

In your essay "The Most Dangerous Beauty," you approach an interesting and important topic from a fresh perspective by attempting to uncover what it means that, among other things, Nazi atrocities produced works of seemingly undeniable beauty, and furthermore, whether or not the atrocious origins of a work should affect its subsequent reception and interpretation. However, while your essay raises these questions in vivid ways, it seems reluctant to offer a real answer, instead using the ambivalence of David Williams' own experience as a kind of cover that allows the essay itself to escape the need for an answer. In turn this forces the reader to ask a different question, namely, if a work's origin should affect its reception and interpretation, then how removed must that origin be in order for it to lose its hold over the subsequent work?

This question is crucial because it goes straight to heart of the dilemma facing anyone interested in the texts produced by the Nazis, which include not only Pernkopf's anatomy book but also the research conducted by scientists such as Josef Mengele. Mengele's experiments were cruel and horrifying, but they also contributed genuine knowledge about the human body (mostly in the areas of endurance, such the body's response to prolonged heat or cold). Most contemporary observers would agree that Mengele's experiments were immoral, but it is somewhat harder to determine whether or not it would be immoral to apply any of the knowledge he acquired through them. On the one hand, knowledge is knowledge, so what is done with it may be more important than how it was gained, but on the other hand, benefiting from his experiments forces one to acknowledge that they produced some benefit (even if one qualifies by stating that the benefits do not outweigh the harms).

This is the same conflict that David Williams seems to be struggling with in your essay, but tellingly, neither he nor the essay ever comes down clearly on one side or the other. However, this does not mean that there is not some hint as to both your and Williams' position. In the case of Williams, it seems as if he has accepted that beauty can come from atrocity, but he can only appreciate this beauty so long as he remembers to temper it with a healthy dose of sadness and guilt. Your essay, on the other hand, takes a more cowardly approach. Rather than make an explicit statement regarding the morality of benefiting from atrocity, or appreciating the beauty that may come from it, your essay pretends to be about Williams' own ambivalence, and as such, acts as if it has no stake in the debate, but is merely telling the story of someone who does.

In reality, however, you and your essay quite clearly have a stake in the debate, because your essay would not be possible without Pernkopf's anatomy book, or Williams' ambivalence. In a sense, then, you have directly benefited from the thousands of corpses stacked up by the Nazis outside the Institute in Vienna, but your essay pretends that this is not the case. Obviously, this is not to suggest that you or your essay hold any sympathy for the Nazis or anything like that, but when the entirety of your essay is about the difficulty of determining the morality of benefiting from and enjoying the products of atrocity, it seems almost disingenuous to remove yourself from the equation, and act as if you are merely reporting the story from afar, comfortably distant from the very real ethical questions at hand.

This lack of a willingness to make your position clear is made all the more crucial because it is not as if the essay itself is dispassionate or otherwise removed. Instead it is filled with vivid imagery and florid language, which has the effect of making it entertaining and engaging. If there is a problem with finding beauty in the work of Nazis, is there a problem with finding the story behind that work entertaining? If yes, then the essay itself has failed to live up to this moral standard, and if no, then it is impossible to say that there is actually a problem with finding beauty in that work, and the entire conflict of the essay disappears, becoming less a story about a man dealing with a difficult moral issue and more a story of a man who cannot make up his mind. Of course, one could attempt to distinguish between finding the anatomy book beautiful and finding your essay entertaining, but this simply returns to the question asked of you initially, because in order to make this distinction one must propose a standard by which a work is sufficiently removed from the atrocity that caused it in order to make enjoyment of it morally acceptable.

Based on what is present in the essay, it seems as if you do not really have a problem finding beauty in the work of the Nazis, or benefiting from their atrocities, but rather maintained a false sense of ambivalence throughout the essay in order to make it more compelling. However, it also seems likely that you would attempt to maintain a distinction between finding your essay entertaining and finding beauty in Pernkopf's book, if only because the essay's ambiguity points towards an unwillingness to follow your own positions to their logical, if sometimes uncomfortable, ends. The question your essay poses is a crucial one, and it is regrettable that you were unwilling to answer it sufficiently.

Assignment 4: Making a Scene

Scene:

Reading about the Holocaust is a little bit like reading science fiction, because everything is at once familiar and entirely alien. Movies and television have made almost everything about World War II easy to imagine, from the mud and steel of tanks rumbling across Europe to the finely detailed symbols and insignias of the Nazis' uniforms, but the Holocaust can still only ever be approached from a distance, and you can never get as close to it as you can with everything else. More than anything else World War II was a war, and war is fairly easy to picture, as human beings have been making war since as long as they had a history.

To picture the Holocaust, however, one cannot rely on images of war, because the term simply does not apply. Instead, the closest one can get to understanding the Holocaust is by comparing them to factory farms, where animals are bred, grown, and slaughtered with industrial efficiency and precision. In the same way, the concentration camps of the Holocaust were basically murder farms, where human beings were sent to die after being captured, packaged, and shipped long distance, like the food source for some great alien empire.

It actually would have been easier if the Nazis were aliens, because then people would not be forced to acknowledge that the Nazis were as human as anyone else. Their decision to round up and murder millions of people was just as human as charity, art, love, or anything else that people imagine separates human beings from other animals. Genocide seems to come as naturally to human beings as social networking, and it seems as if the biggest reason the Nazis have gone down in history as the villains par excellence is the way they demonstrated this fact to the whole world, by taking what human beings had done to each other for thousands (if not millions) of years and applying the technological and industrial advancements of capitalism to the project. The Nazis showed human beings what they really were deep down, and everybody was so terrified of that realization that they had to make them into something different, something positively evil, so that all the other, more mundane genocides committed via the inequitable distribution of goods and labor, a lack of healthcare, institutionalized racism, and a million other things would not look so bad in comparison. The Nazis did what humanity does best, and based on history's treatment of them, their only sin was being honest about it.

Thus, the drive to vilify the Nazis and decry everything they touched as inherently corrupted and evil is not a kind of recoiling at the alien element of their actions, but rather a self-loathing from the recognition that occurs when looking at the Holocaust. If the Nazis really were an alien evil, unprecedented in human history, then their difference would be self-evident and there would be no need to further vilify them. if, however, the Nazis were merely latest in a long line of hatred, cruelty, and exploitation, then it is incumbent on everyone else to vilify them as much as possible, lest anyone notice the lineage and begin to question the centuries of privilege produced by the very same kind of hatred, cruelty, and exploitation.

Something interesting happens when the need to vilify Nazis butts up against the extreme interest one cannot help but have about such ideologically and aesthetically consistent regimes, whose force, power, and solidarity essentially create an entire culture and mythos out of thin air. The Nazis produced countless works of art, science, and propaganda, but the need to vilify everything they saw or touched makes it difficult to know what the morally acceptable approach to these works is. One could simply avoid them altogether, but ignorance is rarely the best option. One could also examine them as carelessly as possible, attempting to remove them from the historical context which created them in a kind of hyper New Criticism. Finally, one can attempt to distinguish between different works, perhaps by parsing out the ideological message of those works, so that an anatomy book might be acceptably beautiful regardless of the fact that its subjects were all murdered, while the technical skill of a propaganda film must not be appreciated due to its despicable message.

Reading about the Holocaust makes this whole dilemma come to the fore, because the oft-repeated mantra of "never again" includes in it a demand that one constantly recall the Holocaust. However, this constant recollection and examination has the effect of making the Holocaust almost familiar, so that even when viewed from a distance it becomes something capable of being known, remembered, and cataloged; in short, it becomes one more idea, capable of bring joy or pain or any other emotion depending on how it is conveyed, such that the simultaneously familiar and alien nature of the Holocaust simply becomes one more way of describing a complex phenomenon, like someone listing the various flavor notes in a wine. Even writing about the Holocaust seems to diminish the moral outrage that it should inspire, because the simple act of expression provides the writer with some feeling of control or comfort, two things in short supply during the Holocaust itself.

In the end one must determine whether it really is important to never forget. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, but it also seems as if those who remember history are still doomed to repeat it, so it remains difficult to say whether remembering is all that it is really cracked up to be, especially when remembering help makes something as awful and unknowable as the Holocaust into something familiar, interesting, and even comforting. The only way to truly, accurately remember the Holocaust would be to live it every day, and more than anything, reading about the Holocaust seems to only make it more remote, like a story in a science fiction novel that could happen but probably never will.

Reflection:

I wrote this scene about reading because investigating the essay as well as the Holocaust more generally forced me to reconsider a number of assumptions concerning Nazis, the Holocaust, and World War II. While I do not have any questions about the repugnancy of the Nazis' actions, reading about Pernkopf's book forced me to reconsider how Nazis are framed in popular culture, and how that relates to the different texts that were produced by the Nazi regime. In particular, I was interested in why the Nazis were so vilified when their ideology and actions was not so different from a number of movements throughout history, and what it means to appreciate a work produced by the Nazis while condemning the regime and actions that allowed for the creation of that work.

I was also interested in the Holocaust itself, and how we are supposed to deal with it when reading or writing about it. On the one hand there seems to be an obligation to treat the Holocaust with solemnity and seriousness, but on the other hand this seriousness seems to have almost turned into a kind of reverence, so that the Holocaust itself has been fetishized, providing a kind of automatic guilt-and-sadness kick instead of pleasure. Never-forgetting, while understandable, also seems somewhat perverse, in the same way that Christianity's adoption of the cross as its primary symbol seems macabre and misguided to outsiders. The constant reification of the Holocaust through writing and reading, while contributing to the remembrance of history, also seems like it is diminishing the importance or impact of that history by making it into a kind of legend or trope, rather than an account of something real that happened not too long ago.

Assignment 5: Letter

Dear,

I recently read an interesting essay that got me thinking about how we deal with history, ethics, and the responsibility we might have (if any) to avoid benefiting from past harms. The essay was called "The Most Dangerous Beauty," and it was about an anatomy atlas created by a prominent Nazi scientist, Eduard Pernkopf. The essay made me reconsider some of my positions on the Holocaust, and particularly about whether or not it is acceptable to benefit from the Nazis' actions.

The atlas was actually fairly popular before people discovered that the pictures in it were based on the cadavers of people murdered by the Nazis when they took over Austria, and until relatively recently, the book was:

listed as available for loan in a general collection on the catalogue of several university libraries around Australia, including the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales, the University of Adelaide, the University of South Australia, La Trobe University, the University of Western Australia, the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Tasmania, often with multiple copies, which suggests that it may be held as teaching material. (Macintyre, King, & Isaacs 254)

Pernkopf assembled some of Austria's best artists to work on the book, and most of the essay was about the paintings themselves, and what it means to find them beautiful or useful. In fact, the essay I cited above was mostly concerned with this issue too, because the prospect of using a book filled with images of murder victims as an anatomy teaching tool seems to make more than a few people uncomfortable, to the point that Austria launched an official investigation in 1997 (Angetter 1454).

However, when I read the essay I realized that I had an entirely different reaction, because all of the ambivalent hand-wringing and ambiguous moralizing made me realize that I think it is fine to benefit from the Nazis' actions, and even to find some of the things they made beautiful. I'll explain in more detail, but in short it is because the Nazis really were not any worse than the rest of humanity, and if we are morally obligated to abandon any contributions they might have made or deny their artistic skill then we should be equally obligated to abandon the contributions everyone else guilty of racism, murder, or genocide. So, for example, if it is problematic to enjoy the paintings in Pernkopf's book, then it should be equally problematic to enjoy the work of George Washington, considering that he owned slaves and helped enshrine slavery into the Constitution. Similarly, Mount Vernon should be as solemn and depressing as Auschwitz, rather than a fun place to see people in old-timey dress.

Obviously there is a double standard going on here, and rather than pretend that there is a reasonable justification for this double standard, I decided to reevaluate how I feel about Nazi art in order to see if I actually had a good reason for viewing it with disdain or skepticism, or if that was based on the same double standard that puts a slave-owner on the face of money. I realized that far from having a responsibility to condemn or decry works of art produced by Nazis, I think we should get everything we can out of them while still condemning the actions that helped produce them. Thus, we should observe a kinship between Mount Vernon and Auschwitz while still appreciating George Washington's positive contributions as well as the artistic skill of Pernkopf's painters. Far from discarding anything created via immoral means, we have a responsibility to claim and use those works for moral means, effectively reversing the intended effect.

Thus, I think instructors should feel free to use Pernkopf's atlas for instruction, so long as they are clear about its origins. Rather than have a double standard where we universally condemn everything associated with the Nazis while make exceptions for the more familiar monsters of history, we should instead make a distinction between the monsters, their monstrous acts, and the beneficial effects that may have occurred, either intentionally or unintentionally, from those acts. Yes, it is reprehensible that the Nazis murdered thousands when they took Austria, but I would not go so far as to say that it is reprehensible that the Vienna medical school used the bodies of those murdered thousands as models for its anatomy book; indeed, while the use of the bodies does not diminish the crime of those peoples' murders, it was at least less wasteful than merely disposing of the bodies.

Furthermore, it seems to me that the drive to universally condemn anything touched by the Nazis is actually a way of whitewashing history, because it lets people believe that they are doing something ethical or moral when in reality they are simply perpetuating a double standard that lets everyone else get away with loads of terrible things. Appreciating works of art despite their Nazi origins while recognizing the horrible nature of those origins seems like a more productive way of dealing with the Holocaust, because otherwise we are simply playing along with an ultimately destructive set of double standards, standards that excuse genocides committed quietly, over the course of decades, while reserving condemnation for a single genocide because it occurred with surprising speed and efficiency.

Signed,

Assignment 6: Essay (Reckoning and Reviewing)

The legacy of the Nazis lives on not only in their ruined concentration camps and the memories of those who lived through the Holocaust, but also the less obvious works of art and literature produced under the regime. The question of how to respond to and interpret these works is of paramount importance to the contemporary critic, because understanding how to deal with the potentially creative side effects of an undeniably destructive regime cuts to the core of what it means to make an ethical judgment, particularly in the remembrance of history. By examining a dramatic account of one such work and the effect it had on an American scholar, one can begin to formulate a standard by which to judge the lingering artistic remnants of the Nazis crimes as well as figure out a way to deal with traumatizing, catastrophic events such as the Holocaust.

Prior to the Nazi occupation of Austria, Eduard Pernkopf assembled a team of artists at the Anatomy Institute in Vienna, and had them begin work on "an epic eponymous four-volume, seven-book anatomical atlas, an unrelenting performance spanning thirty years of eighteen-hour workdays" (Paterniti 10). The atlas was broken up into different sections based on the region of the body, with illustrations and paintings revealing the hidden workings of "the Chest and Pectoral Limb; the Abdomen, Pelvis and Pelvic Limb; the Neck; and the Topographical and Stratigraphical Anatomy of the Head" (Paterniti 9-10). The creation of the atlas itself is an impressive achievement, and "never again will social conditions warrant that so many talented fine artists gather together to detail the body, and never again will the art of medical illustration veer so close to that of fine art itself" (Paterniti 10). Economic necessity coupled with political expediency allowed Pernkopf to assemble a team of genuine artists to illustrate his atlas, and the result was nothing short of stunning such that his publisher was "convinced that Pernkopf's book [would] one day be mentioned in the same breath as da Vinci's sketches of the body, Vesalius' Fabrica, or Sobotta's Atlas der Anatomie des Menschen" (Paterniti 11).

However, the atlas has a dark side as well, because more recent research has convincingly concluded that "Pernkopf, an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi policies, used bodies of people executed at the Vienna Landesgericht (assize court) in the preparation of his atlas illustrations," and that the body parts rendered in such requisite detail once belonged to victims of the Nazi Holocaust (Angetter 1454). The bodies, "more than 1,000 in all, mostly political opponents, patriots, Communists and petty criminals, among them eight Jews," were stacked up outside the Institute and used as primary sources for his artists to record the human anatomy (Paterniti 12). It was not until years later that this connection was firmly established, although evidence for a an intimate connection with the Nazi regime was nevertheless evident in the images themselves, where some of the artists signed their names with flourishes that included swastikas and the SS double lighting bolts (MacIntyre, King, & Isaacs 255).

The practice of using executed prisoners for anatomical studies actually predates the Nazi annexation of Austria by centuries, and it is within this context that "Nazi anatomical practices were easily 'legalized,'" such that by 1939, "all bodies of executed prisoners were sent to the department of anatomy of the nearest university, for research and teaching purposes" (Angetter 1454). What makes the events at the Anatomy Institute of Vienna so remarkable is that unlike other universities under the control of the Nazis, the Vienna Institute ended up producing one of the most extensive and detailed studies of human anatomy to date, to the point that it has not been rivaled since (MacIntyre, King, & Isaacs 255). The sheer scientific and aesthetic value of Pernkopf's atlas has forced contemporary readers and viewers to confront the standards by which works are judged, and figure out for themselves whether or not one can find value and beauty in Pernkopf's atlas without diminishing the horror of which Pernkopf and his compatriots were a part.