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 Tim Judah and Fintan O’Toole on War Crimes in Ukraine

May 26, 2022 / Volume LXIX, Number 9

Ruth Franklin: Who Betrayed Anne Frank?

Laura Miller: Olga Ravn’s Workers in Outer Space
Cass Sunstein: Three Cheers for the Administrative State!
Brenda Wineapple: The Mysterious Mary Lumpkin
E. Tammy Kim: POW Archives of the Korean War
Susie Linfield: How Radical Movements Begin
“Lahiri explores her relationship
with literature, translation, and the
English and Italian languages in
this exhilarating collection.”
—Costica Bradatan, Washington Post
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A fascinating biography of one
of the most outrageous figures in
modern Jewish intellectual life.”
—Vivian Liska, author of German-
Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife
“[This] book shows us why
Tocqueville remains a
vital, necessary figure for
understanding our world.”
—David A. Bell, author of
Men on Horseback
“The picture of Mann that emerges
from his book is rich, multilayered
and always fascinating.”
“This much-anticipated
volume brings us Sahlins
at his iconoclastic best.”
—Marilyn Strathern,
author of Relations
“Alpert bridges philosophy and
self-help to envision something
that seems to be slipping from
our grasp: a livable world.”
—Gabriel Winant, author of
The Next Shift
“This engaging, illuminating,
and encouraging book proposes
realistic reforms.”
—Steven Poskanzer, President
Emeritus, Carleton College
“A thorough, unflinching look at
what it would take to eradicate
racial barriers in American
higher education.”
—Library Journal
“Dreams of a Lifetime compellingly
argues that dreams tell us about
our essences—who we are and
who we want to be.”
—Terence E. McDonnell, coauthor of
Measuring Culture
“The most authoritative
single-volume treatment of
the religious order.”
—Simon Ditchfield, University of York
“These aphorisms proceed
in a way that feels at once
unexpected and profound.”
—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone
Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
“Old Truths and New Clichés
is game-changing for
our understanding of
Isaac Bashevis Singer.”
—Debra Caplan, author of
Yiddish Empire
Contents
4 Geoffrey O’Brien Molière: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations
10
14
Fintan O’Toole
Laura Miller
Our Hypocrisy on War Crimes
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn,
translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken
THE
16
17
Camille Ralphs
Julian Bell
Poem
Surrealism Beyond Borders an exhibition at Tate Modern, London
EMBODIED
Catalog of the exhibition by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale,
with contributions from Dawn Ades, Patricia Allmer, and others
MIND
20 Ruth Franklin The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Rosemary Sullivan
23 Joshua Jelly-Schapiro Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman
25 Susie Linfield The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas
by Gal Beckerman
30 Brenda Wineapple The Devil’s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated
the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail by Kristen Green
32 E. Tammy Kim The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History
by Monica Kim
34 Gavin Francis Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self by Julie Sedivy
Alfabet/Alphabet: A Memoir of a First Language by Sadiqa de Meijer
42 Tim Judah The Russian Terror
48 Cass R. Sunstein The Chevron Doctrine: Its Rise and Fall, and the Future of the
Administrative State by Thomas W. Merrill
NOG A A R IK H A
49 Dan Chiasson Poem
51 Helen Epstein Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story by Fanny Pigeaud
and Ndongo Samba Sylla, translated from the French by Thomas Fazi THE CEILING
The CFA Franc Zone: Economic Development and the Post- Covid Recovery
by Ali Zafar OUTSIDE
54 Letters from Robert Goldman and Wendy Doniger
The Science and Experience
CONTRIBUTORS of the Disrupted Mind
JULIAN BELL is a painter based in Lewes, England. His E. TAMMY KIM is a contributing writer at The New Yorker,
new book, Natural Light: Adam Elsheimer and the Horizons a 2022 Alicia Patterson Fellow, and a Fellow at Type Media
of 1600, will be published later this year. Center. She is a cohost of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye.
DAN CHIASSON’s fifth book of poetry is The Math Camp- SUSIE LINFIELD teaches cultural journalism at NYU. She
“Astute, compassionate,
ers. He teaches at Wellesley. is the author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Po- and brilliant, The Ceiling
HELEN EPSTEIN is Visiting Professor of Human Rights litical Violence and The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left
and Global Public Health at Bard. She is the author of An- from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. Outside is finally an
other Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Ter- LAURA MILLER is a Books and Culture columnist for
ror and The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Slate. She is the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s
adventure story in the
Against AIDS in Africa. Adventures in Narnia and editor of The Salon.com Reader’s bewildering drama of being.”
Guide to Contemporary Authors.
GAVIN FRANCIS is a primary care physician in Edin-
burgh. His most recent book, Recovery: The Lost Art of GEOFFREY O’BRIEN’s latest books are Where Did Poetry — S IR I HU S T V E D T,
Convalescence, was published in the UK in January. Island Come From and the poetry collection Who Goes There. author of Memories of the Future
Dreams: Mapping an Obsession was published in Italian last FINTAN O’TOOLE is a columnist for The Irish Times and
year. the Leonard L. Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton.
RUTH FRANKLIN’s latest book, Shirley Jackson: A His new book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal His-
Rather Haunted Life, won the 2016 National Book Critics tory of Modern Ireland, was published in the US in March. “Noga Arikha is a poet
Circle Award in Biography. She is writing a biography of CAMILLE RALPHS’s poetry pamphlets are Malkin: An and a painter with the soul
Anne Frank. Ellegy in 14 Spels and uplifts & chains. She is the Poetry Edi-
JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO is the author, most re- tor at the Times Literary Supplement. of a scientist.”
cently, of Names of New York and, with Leah Gordon, CASS R. SUNSTEIN is the Robert Walmsley University —ANTONIO DAMASIO,
PÒTOPRENS : The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince. He Professor at Harvard and Senior Counselor at the US De-
teaches at NYU. partment of Homeland Security. author of Feeling and Knowing
TIM JUDAH is the author of In Wartime: Stories from BRENDA WINEAPPLE’s most recent book is The Im-
Ukraine. He has reported for The New York Review from peachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a
Ukraine, the Balkans, Niger, Armenia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Just Nation. She teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia. “With grace, rigour, and
Editor: Emily Greenhouse Publisher: Rea S. Hederman imagination, Arikha brings
Deputy Editor: Michael Shae Associate Publisher, Business Operations: Michael King
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Founding Editors: Barbara Epstein (1928–2006) and Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)
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Ŷ Walker Mimms: Saul Steinberg’s Drafting Table Ŷ Jeet Heer: The Anarchist Art of Martin Vaughn-James
— L I S A A P P IG N A N E S I ,
What’s new on
Ŷ Cristina Florea: Ukraine and the USSR’s Long Collapse Ŷ Julian Lucas: Black Cowboys Out of Egypt author of Mad, Bad and Sad
nybooks.com Plus: Christopher Benfey on Stanley Cavell, Carson Ellis on drawing from nature, and more . . .

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On the cover: Ronan Bouroullec, Untitled, 2020 (Ronan Bouroullec). The top painting on page 18 is © 2022 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ VEGAP, Madrid.
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3

Molière: The Complete
Richard Wilbur Translations
Library of America,
2 volumes, 1,086 pp., $70.00
When Richard Wilbur undertook in
1952 to translate Molière’s The Mis-
anthrope, it was as compensation for
his inability (despite having received
a grant for the purpose) to write verse
plays of his own: “They didn’t come
off. They were very bad, extremely
wooden.” With his first two books of
poetry, The Beautiful Changes (1947)
and Ceremony (1950), Wilbur had been
promptly recognized as an important
young poet working with total confi-
dence in traditional forms, and in the
age of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry
verse drama seemed a promising move.
As it turned out, translating Molière
became a lifelong commitment, an op-
portunity virtually to inhabit a thor-
oughly congenial alternate identity.
An exciting production of The Misan-
thrope at the Comédie Française in 1948
had first drawn Wilbur to the work, but
his involvement with France and French
theater went further back. As a teenager
he was impressed by Walter Hampden
in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, in
Brian Hooker’s rousing verse transla-
tion; during World War II he had come
to know France when serving for three
4 The New York Review
Schemes Gone Awry
Geoffrey O’Brien
Molière; illustration by Emmanuel Pierre
years with the Thirty-Sixth Infantry
Division; and afterward, at Harvard,
he became more deeply involved with
French poetry through his friendship
with the poet André du Bouchet.
The Misanthrope translation was pro-
duced with great success by the Poets’
Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
in 1955, and when Eric Bentley included
it in his anthology The Classic Theatre:
Six French Plays (1961) he described
it—voicing an opinion widely shared—
as “perhaps the first Molière in English
to be a delight from beginning to end.”
Over the next five decades Wilbur (who
died in 2017) translated nine more—all
the major verse plays along with the
prose Don Juan—which are now col-
lected in a two-volume set from Library
of America, along with his illuminating
introductions.1
1 to Borges and Brodsky—a line of sep-
Of the verse plays, he omitted only
the “heroic comedy” Dom Garcie de
Navarre and the spectacularly staged
“comedy ballets” written wholly or
partly in verse. Dom Garcie was for
understandable reasons a catastrophic
flop in its day—Molière’s otherwise in-
fallible theatrical instincts desert him
in this humorless portrait of paranoid
jealousy, but it would have been inter-
esting to see what Wilbur would have
done with its unusually knotty verse
and obsessive quibbling. The play was
T hese are not the first translations
to figure in Library of America; pre-
vious volumes include Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America newly rendered
by Arthur Goldhammer and Ezra
Pound’s Poems and Translations, con-
taining those versions from the Chi-
nese, Greek, and Provençal that in so
many ways expanded the possibilities
of American poetry. But this new set
seems to open wider the welcoming
prospect of more volumes addressing
literary translation as an art not mar-
ginal but central, and still too rarely
recognized as such.
In Pound’s case, translation and orig-
inal poetry were mutually enmeshed,
different facets of the same project. For
Wilbur, while translation was likewise
a constant practice—his poetry col-
lections are interspersed with versions
of poets from Villon and Baudelaire
aration was clearly drawn. If Pound
sought the freedom of radical recast-
ing, not only of the original text but of
English poetic diction, Wilbur asserted
that “one shouldn’t bother with it at all
unless one is willing to be slavish to
try to get over into English everything
obviously important to Molière, who
incorporated chunks of it into The
Misanthrope.
that’s there in the original.” Charac-
teristically, he chose to approximate
Molière’s rhymed couplets as closely as
possible, only substituting iambic pen-
tameter for alexandrines. He saw this
as far more than a matter of personal
preference, laying out in his introduc-
tion to The Misanthrope a multitude of
aspects otherwise lost, not least
the frequently intricate arrange-
ments of balancing half-lines,
lines, couplets, quatrains, and
sestets. There is no question that
words, when dancing within such
patterns, are not their prosaic
selves, but have a wholly different
mood and meaning.
His translations even on the page sug-
gest an operetta whose music resides
entirely in the volleying of words. They
capture precisely Molière’s sustained
cadence of argument and counterar-
gument, punctuated by the percussive
thrust and counterthrust of monosyl-
labic interjections and ripostes. There
are no rests—even when Molière’s char-
acters hesitate or temporize, they do so
with urgency—and it is easy to move
through these volumes, from scene to
scene and play to play, as if on a single
gust. The particular merit of Wilbur’s
versions is the cohesive fluency with
which they progress from beginning to
end, a fluency that encompasses, beyond
meter and rhyme, textures of speech
and movements of thought. “I spent so
much time,” he once commented, “try-
ing to figure out how to translate lines
that an actor would like to speak.”
His language neither updates nor
historicizes: “The diction mediates be-
tween then and now, suggesting no one
period.” There is a ’twould here and
a naught there, but the overall tone is
never antiquarian. On the other hand,
Wilbur was resistant to aggressive at-
tempts to drag Molière into the present
day, complaining about productions
recasting Tartuffe as a beaded 1960s
guru or The Misanthrope’s Alceste as
“a hippie who ‘tells it like is.’” As much
as possible he goes for a pointed, plain-
spoken exactness:
You could at least have beaten me
more gently. (The Bungler)
We have but one death, and it
lasts so long! (Lovers’ Quarrels)
Let’s put off friendship, and
get acquainted first. (The
Misanthrope)
He manages to make speaking in
rhymed couplets the most natural thing
in the world:
All this fine talk, so flowery and
so polished,
Is something I’d be glad to see
abolished.
It’s a vile custom: most men waste
two- thirds
Of every day exchanging empty
words. (The School for Wives)
And he achieves the uncluttered trans-
mission of lines of argument, so that
even the most elaborate speeches of The
Misanthrope do not get lost in syntactic
 “A terrific read and an
invaluable reference in
the debate of human
verses robotic space-
“An invaluable flight.”
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of the creation of a
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— Washington Post

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A Brief History of Equality
is a route into Piketty’s
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is riveting from start to
finish.”
—Susannah Cahalan,
author of Brain on Fire

hup.harvard.edu

May 26, 2022 5

thickets, as in Célimène’s mocking ob-
servations on a frequenter of her salon:
A man of mystery from top to toe,
Who moves about in a romantic
mist
On secret missions which do not
exist.
His talk is full of eyebrows and
grimaces;
How tired one gets of his momen-
tous faces;
He’s always whispering something
confidential
Which turns out to be quite
inconsequential;
Nothing’s too slight for him to
mystify;
He even whispers when he says
“good- by.”
Wilbur’s aim was “thought-for-
thought fidelity,” and, given his self-
imposed limits of lineation and rhyme
scheme, any gloss or clarification must
fit within a narrow groove, never weigh-
ing down the life of the line. He achieves
this with acrobatic grace. A similar mas-
tery can be found in his lyrics for Leon-
ard Bernstein’s Candide, with “Glitter
and Be Gay” a supreme example. One
might also bear in mind his training as
a military cryptographer and his predi-
lection for crossword puzzles. He spoke
more than once of an entire day spent
translating a couple of lines, but the re-
sults convey an air of spontaneity.
In its modes and imagery, Wilbur’s
own poetry could not be more remote
from what is found in Molière. His first
books especially bring an almost ro-
coco artifice to bear on matters of life
and death; in “The Death of a Toad,”
he opens on “A toad the power mower
caught,/Chewed and clipped of a leg”
and within a few lines has him gazing
“Toward misted and ebullient seas/And
cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia’s
emperies.” The elegance establishes the
poem as a separate realm of language
into which the evidence of the senses is
translated: bird voices “fountaining in
air,” fallen leaves “held in ice as dancers
in a spell.” Even while he preserves an
ordered surface, he does not deny the
deceptiveness of surfaces, as in “Mined
Country,” where French children after
the war walk cautiously through tran-
quil countryside in fear of land mines:
“Some scheme’s gone awry./Danger is
sunk in the pastures, the woods are sly.”2
Molière’s verse, as Wilbur notes, is
“almost wholly free of metaphor.” It
is free of natural imagery as well. His
plays are restricted to the human sphere
(putting aside the antique gods of Am-
phitryon and the supernatural visita-
tions of Don Juan). Neither weather
nor flora nor fauna enter into them,
nothing but human cravings and anx-
ieties staged in a generic setting, city
street or drawing room, for maximum
comic effect. Of schemes gone awry
there are many—almost their whole
concern is schemes gone awry—but as
long as the play lasts, there is no harm
done. This is not life but comic theater,
where lovers can be expected to scam-
per off happily freed from all obstacles
and clever servants to be left relishing
the success of their stratagems.
If it were not comic theater, of
course—and by the time Molière got
to Tartuffe and Don Juan and The Mis-
2
All quotes are from Richard Wilbur,
Collected Poems 1941–2004 (Harvest,
2004).
6 The New York Review
anthrope he was testing the limits—it
would end not with a last-minute rev-
elation or ingenious bit of trickery to
save the day, but in the harsh reality of
bitter old men marrying reluctant wards,
hypocrites engaged in predatory seduc-
tion and property theft in the name of
religion, honest men vengefully accused
of political disloyalty, and children sac-
rificing their own happiness to the irra-
tional demands of authoritarian parents.
When Wilbur writes of Molière’s words
“dancing within such patterns,” he pro-
vides by extension a definition of the
playwright’s singular genius for durable
comic delight in a world whose patterns
were, as the plays constantly imply, laid
down with capricious ferocity.
T he plays Wilbur translated do not
constitute the full range of Molière’s
theatrical life. Clearly he preferred the
particular challenge of verse transla-
tion, but it would have been interesting
to see what he did with The Ridicu-
lous Précieuses, The Doctor in Spite
of Himself, The Trickeries of Scapin,
George Dandin, and the great final trio
of comically unbalanced protagonists
in The Miser, The Bourgeois Gentle-
man, and The Imaginary Invalid. I
particularly regret that he did not turn
his hand to those two one-act pendants
to The School for Wives (written in
response to the controversy stirred by
that play’s alleged lewd suggestiveness,
insults to women, and mockery of the
sacredness of marriage), The Critique
of the School for Wives and The Ver-
sailles Impromptu. In the first of these
Molière put on stage a salon full of
his own fiercest critics (with himself
playing the most fatuous), and in the
second his own troupe in chaotic and
constantly interrupted rehearsal, offer-
ing a glimpse of himself as a harried
professional, beleaguered by his actors’
complaints and struggling to keep up
with the demands of his royal patron—
the patron who at the play’s end rescues
him by granting more time to rehearse.
The plainness of the dialogue might
be taken for realism, while bearing in
mind that the production was staged for
the Sun King in the first place. One pre-
sumes that Louis XIV was sufficiently
amused by Molière’s long speech to
his actors about the urgency of getting
the show in shape: “What kings like
is prompt obedience. . . . We shouldn’t
consult our own convenience in the
things they ask us to do. We are here
only to please them.”3 Molière’s ability
to keep the king amused was essential
to upholding his always precarious po-
sition as favored entertainer, at once
actor, writer, manager, and impresario.
Such a position must often have
seemed a remote prospect during the
long stretch when, after the failure of
his Parisian company L’Illustre Théâtre
in 1645 and a very brief imprisonment
for debt, he toured the provinces with
his fellow players for a dozen years. He
had walked away from the career his
family intended for him—to inherit
his father’s profession as a master up-
holsterer—and definitively chosen the
theater, evidently with the ambition
of succeeding as a tragic actor. By the
time the troupe returned to Paris in
1658, Molière had long since assumed
its leadership, absorbed a vast amount
of repertoire and technique in all
3 4
Eight Plays by Molière, translated by
Morris Bishop (Modern Library, 1957).
genres, and begun to supply the com-
pany with scripts of his own, steeped in
the influence of commedia dell’arte.
The earliest plays translated by Wil-
bur, The Bungler and Lovers’ Quar-
rels, draw directly on Italian sources.
From the outset Molière was a perpet-
ual scavenger of plots, character types,
situations, and jokes, mined in Plautus
or Terence or his Italian, Spanish, and
French predecessors and contempo-
raries. French scholars have dutifully
tracked down every appropriated scene
or line, although few have contested that
out of that mass of borrowed material
something distinctly and consistently
original was made. This was not a body
of work created in leisurely calm. The
Versailles Impromptu’s self-portrait of
an overworked showman is no exaggera-
tion, given that in addition to the steady
stream of plays supplied to Parisian
theaters in the 1660s, Molière was on
call to produce material for ever more
elaborate celebratory royal pageants.
These were full-fledged musical affairs
with ballet and song, framed by the
deployment of fireworks and immense
stage machinery, and at times cameo
appearances by king and courtiers. One
can think of the playwright as a perfec-
tionist working under extreme pressure,
taking whatever he needed from his ca-
pacious store of materials and devices to
achieve the precise effect envisioned.
Molière was insider and outsider, at
once royal favorite and someone who,
being an actor, was deemed unwor-
thy of burial in consecrated ground;
a merchant’s son mingling with nobil-
ity and sometimes taking mockery too
far. Surviving by talent alone, dodging
scandalous allegations and accusations
of impiety, he imparted to his plays the
dynamic of a balancing act in circum-
stances always fraught. If he celebrated
anything it was the triumph of intelli-
gence over pedantic obscurantism, and
clear-sighted honesty over delusion and
obsession; but the plays resist being re-
duced to any simple formulation, and
he was too wary a strategist to be easily
pinned down. When Tartuffe was re-
peatedly banned as “absolutely injurious
to religion and capable of producing very
dangerous effects,”4 he asserted vigor-
ously that it was nothing of the kind, and
then followed it in 1665 with the quickly
prohibited Don Juan, whose fascination
consists precisely in the way it provokes
opposite readings that resist resolution.
The Don is “indeed a monster,” as
Wilbur has it, a libertine foreshad-
owing the protagonists of Laclos and
Sade. Consider his declared intentions
regarding a couple he has just caught
sight of: “Never had I seen two people
so enchanted by each other, so radiantly
in love. . . . From the moment I saw
them I found their shared happiness
intolerable; . . . I began to consider how
I would mar their felicity.” Yet he totally
dominates a play in which there is no
one else to root for except, at moments,
his clownish servant Sganarelle (played
originally by Molière), whose seemingly
sincere expressions of naive goodwill
and religious faith are undermined by
his submissive complicity and trans-
parent corruption. Master and servant
seem locked together; even the exuber-
ant nihilist Don Juan needs someone to
talk to. When Sganarelle undertakes to
As reported in La Gazette, May 17,
1664.
refute the Don’s atheism—“I’d like to
ask you who made those trees, those
rocks, this earth, and the sky we see
up there, and if all those things created
themselves?”—he becomes caught up,
like one of Molière’s farcical doctors or
philosophers, in his own argumentation:
Isn’t it marvelous that I’m here, . . .
and can make my body do whatever
it likes? I can choose to clap my
hands, lift my arms, raise my eyes
to Heaven, bow my head, shift my
feet, move to the right, to the left,
forward, backward, turn around . . .
In so doing he falls to the ground, giv-
ing Don Juan the punch line: “There
lies your argument with a broken nose.”
The gag surely got a laugh, but for some
must have left an unsettling aftertaste.
To execute such a gag effectively
required a virtuosity acquired over
decades, applying the techniques of
farcical pantomime to a very different
end: a pratfall embedded in a theologi-
cal discussion. By contrast, in The Mis-
anthrope, the highest of high comedies,
Molière avoids low devices entirely
except for some patented vaudeville
involving Alceste’s dim-witted valet to
bring the curtain down on act 4. The
Misanthrope—admired but not espe-
cially successful in its day—represents
an ultimate refinement of style, going
beyond jokes and even plot to sound out
the nuances of its characters’ interrela-
tions. The stage becomes a prism where
everyone can be viewed from multiple
angles; above all Alceste, the most
sympathetic of Molière’s obsessives,
who insists on an honesty of speech
that would upend all ordinary social
relations, yet can hardly be faulted for
disdaining the fawning, complacent,
and finally treacherous aristocrats who
flutter around the irresistible but thor-
oughly unreliable Célimène. Wilbur
makes the most of the marquis Acaste’s
third-act monologue, turning it into a
patter song of inane self-regard:
I’ve wit, of course; and taste in
such perfection
That I can judge without the least
reflection,
And at the theater, which is my
delight,
Can make or break a play on
opening night,
And lead the crowd in hisses or
bravos,
And generally be known as one
who knows.
I’m clever, handsome, gracefully
polite;
My waist is small, my teeth are
strong and white.
The play’s delicacy can be gauged by
how much it hinges on Alceste’s un-
favorable critique of a sonnet, and its
force by an ending that for once refuses
to restore even a semblance of harmo-
nious resolution. After everyone’s bluff
has been called, and Célimène has fi-
nally told Alceste that she really is not
prepared to live alone with him in a
“wild, trackless, solitary place,” he sim-
ply bolts, leaving his friends with the
unlikely hope that they might somehow
change his mind.
In his introductions and interviews,
Wilbur emphasizes that the plays, being
“thoroughly written,” need not rely on
physical business to make their points
 Mark Fox
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 or get their laughs. This is certainly the
case with the verse plays he translated.
They are woven of argument, quar-
rels, pointed accusations and rebuttals,
coaxing and protests. Much crucial ac-
tion occurs offstage, like the slapstick
episode in The School for Wives of
Horace falling from a ladder as he at-
tempts to climb into the bedroom of his
beloved Agnès. In Tartuffe, we learn
only at second hand how the religious
hypocrite gained his ascendancy over
is the nonanswer answer, brought into
play when the real answer is not known,
or if given would lead to a beating.
T he casual bravura is breathtaking.
At the end of Sganarelle, as Wilbur
notes, “the four principals converge,
each speaking out of a different—or
differently weighted—misunderstand-
ing of the situation,” all this interwo-
ven with as much musical deftness as a

THE WALL
BY MARLEN HAUSHOFER
TRANSLATED BY SHAUN WHITESIDE
AFTERWORD BY CLAIRE LOUISE-BENNETT
“The Wall is a wonderful novel. It is as
absorbing as Robinson Crusoe.”
—Doris Lessing
the affluent bourgeois Orgon; by the
time Tartuffe finally appears onstage
(in the third act) we’ve been given,
from various sides, an almost novel-
istic sense of what he has wrought in
this particular family. Later, when Tar-
tuffe attempts to seduce Orgon’s wife,
Elmire, the dramatic effect lies not in
his frustrated gropings, however much
they lend themselves to sight gags, but
in her calling him out in words as he
does so, and he in turn unloading a se-
ries of outrageously specious justifica-
tions for his predatory moves.
In the one-act farce Sganarelle, or
The Imaginary Cuckold, Wilbur notes,
“much of what might have been ex-
pressed by physical violence . . . is real-
Mozart quartet, but a lot more noisily.
In The School for Husbands, Isabelle,
engaged against her will to her de-
tested guardian Sganarelle, must reject
her preferred suitor Valère while her
guardian watches. She manages this by
delivering a long speech perfectly con-
trived to mean one thing to Sganarelle
and the opposite to Valère.
Balzac, who alluded to Molière more
than to any other writer, admired his
ability to present both sides of a given
situation.6 The audience is invited to
laugh at the gulling of the self-beguiled,
yet the plays strike a tenuous balance be-
tween derision and sympathy. Arnolphe
in The School for Wives is a middle-aged
bachelor so consumed with the fear of

ALINDARKA’S
ized instead on the verbal plane.” Yet being cuckolded that he adopted a four-
the Punch-and-Judy threat of physical year-old girl to be his future wife, raising

CHILDREN
violence is always latent. In Molière’s
vocabulary one word recurs frequently
at crucial junctures: batôn. To beat
BY ALHIERD BACHAREVIČ someone with a stick, or threaten to do
so, is the last resort after verbal persua-
TRANSLATED BY JIM DINGLEY & PETRA REID sion has failed: this world is thoroughly
accustomed to husbands beating wives,
fathers beating children, masters beat-
“A dark fantasy by one of Belarus’s most ing servants. In Amphitryon a god
original contemporary writers.” —Jaroslaw beats a mortal, and in Tartuffe a female
Anders, New York Review of Books servant even threatens a bailiff serv-
ing a legal writ: “Monsieur Loyal, I’d
love to hear the whack/Of a stout stick
across your fine broad back.”
Language has its limits, and Molière
tests how far it is possible for his char-
her in total ignorance—“I told the nuns
what means must be employed /To keep
her growing mind a perfect void”—on
the theory that a clever wife is “unbeat-
able at plots and strategies.”
From the start it is clear his plan
will come to nothing, as the innocent
Agnès displays a natural gift for plots
and strategies to unite her with young
Horace; Arnolphe, even when apprised
of Horace’s desires, is so blissfully con-
fident of controlling the situation that
he deigns to feel pity for the young
man doomed to disappointment in
love. While Arnolphe thinks he has
the upper hand, the spectators know

CHINATOWN
BY THUʜN
TRANSLATED BY NGUYʴN AN LÝ
“Chinatown is a fever dream, a
hallucination, a loop in time and life. I
was completely immersed in this spell-
binding novel.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen
acters to go before transgressing them.
We are given speech as combat, se-
duction, sales pitch, con job, menacing
aggression, calculated outburst; a vir-
tual taxonomy of the uses and misuses
of language. Specialized jargons are
brought into play, of law enforcement,
real estate, religious precept, philo-
sophical speculation, formal etiquette,
and literary pretension. The literary
vanity of the strenuously ungifted, male
or female, coupled invariably with the
snobbery of the fierce social climber,
was a frequent target. It is a repertoire
of routines, deployed in successive
episodes that are (in the playwright
Jacques Audiberti’s phrase) “traps for
characters.”5 Some fall into the trap;
others wangle a way out; others, having
he does not: a double cruelty, with both
audience and lovers in league against
him. The domineering ogre thus be-
comes a victim and unavoidably an ob-
ject of some sympathy, especially when
he realizes that he has truly fallen in
love with Agnès and tries fumblingly to
woo her in a romantic rather than dom-
ineering spirit. Not being of the servant
class, Arnolphe will not be beaten with
a stick, but he will undergo the excruci-
ating alternative of public ridicule.
Many of the plays describe conspir-
acies to thwart the overreaching au-
thority of the seriously deluded and
unbalanced, conspiracies in which those
with nothing to lose—desperate lovers,
oppressed wives and daughters—often
rely on the assistance of cunning ser-

BLOOM
set one trap, go about setting another.
(“Long live chicanery and artifice!”
declares Mascarille in The Bungler.)
BY XI CHUAN Characters regularly misunderstand,
or mishear, or do not hear at all. “Think-
TRANSLATED BY LUCAS KLEIN ing himself alone” (a favorite stage di-
rection), a dupe will reveal his thoughts
“Xi Chuan’s surprising poems reach into in monologue to a nearby eavesdropper
or, fooled by appearances, will enthu-
tight corners of mind and matter, imper- siastically help to bring about the out-
sonal but intimate, new to be heard but come he least desires. A self-absorbed
also oddly familiar.” person will mistake terse noncommit-
—Gary Snyder tal interjection for heartfelt agreement.
A coward will stoutly resolve to face up
to a confrontation before predictably
caving in. Two people will endlessly
delay coming to the point by means of
exaggerated politeness. And then there
vants with a talent for deception. Since
the authority of parents cannot be legit-
imately defied, it must be evaded and
subverted by every form of subterfuge.
After all the concealment, imperson-
ation, and sleight of hand comes the
scandal of truth-telling. This moment
may arrive through perfunctory means:
an improbable revelation of hidden par-
entage, or a last- ditch bit of mischief in-
volving veils or forged documents. All
that matters is that, at last, deference and
circumlocution are sidelined, the truth
cannot be denied, and as a result mono-
maniac guardians lose their power and
hapless dupes have their eyes opened.
What has been going on all along is out
in the open and the comedy is done. Q

5 6
Molière, Dramaturge (Paris: L’Arche, Graham Robb, Balzac: A Biography
1954). (Norton, 1995), p. 375.

8 The New York Review


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Bob Dylan, Oral Cultures,
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9
 Our Hypocrisy on War Crimes
There is the war, and then there is the
war about the war. Vladimir Putin’s
assault on Ukraine is being fought in
fields and cities, in the air and at sea.
It is also, however, being contested
through language. Is it a war or a “spe-
cial military operation”? Is it an un-
provoked invasion or a human rights
intervention to prevent the genocide of
Russian speakers by Ukrainian Nazis?
Putin’s great weakness in this linguis-
tic struggle is the unsubtle absurdity of
his claims—if he wanted his lies to be
believed, he should have established
some baseline of credibility. But the
weakness of the West, and especially
of the United States, lies in what ought
to be the biggest strength of its case
against Putin: the idea of war crimes.
It is this concept that gives legal and
moral shape to instinctive revulsion.
For the sake both of basic justice and of
mobilizing world opinion, it has to be
sustained with absolute moral clarity.
The appalling evidence of extraju-
dicial executions, torture, and indis-
criminate shelling of homes, apartment
buildings, hospitals, and shelters that
has emerged from the Kyiv suburb
of Bucha and from the outskirts of
Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Sumy gives
weight and urgency to the accusation
that Putin is a war criminal.* By late
April, the UN human rights office had
received reports of more than three
hundred executions of civilians. There
have also been credible reports of sex-
ual violence by Russian troops and of
abductions and deportations of civil-
ians. According to Iryna Venediktova,
Ukraine’s prosecutor general, by April
21 Russia had committed more than
7,600 recorded war crimes.
Yet the US has been, for far too long,
fatally ambivalent about war crimes.
Its own history of moral evasiveness
threatens to make the accusation that
Putin and his forces have committed
them systematically in Ukraine seem
more like a useful weapon against an
enemy than an assertion of universal
principle. It also undermines the very
institution that might eventually bring
Putin and his subordinates to justice:
the International Criminal Court (ICC).
There have long been two ways of
thinking about the prosecution of war
crimes. One is that it is a universal duty.
Since human beings have equal rights,
violations of those rights must be pros-
ecuted regardless of the nationality or
political persuasion of the perpetra-
tors. The other is that the right to iden-
tify individuals as war criminals and
punish them for their deeds is really
just one of the spoils of victory. It is
the winner’s prerogative—a political
choice rather than a moral imperative.
Even during World War II, and in
the midst of a learned discussion about
what to do with the Nazi leadership
after the war, the American Society of
International Law heard from Charles
Warren, a former US assistant attorney
general and a Pulitzer Prize–winning
historian of the Supreme Court, that
“the right to punish [war criminals] is
not a right conferred upon victorious
*For more on the atrocities in Ukraine,
see Tim Judah’s “The Russian Terror”
in this issue.
10
Fintan O’Toole
Town council leader and lawyer Khalid Salman by the graves of his sister and her children,
who were among the twenty-four Iraqi civilians killed by US Marines in the
2005 Haditha massacre, Haditha, Iraq, 2011
belligerents by international law, but it
flows from the fact of victory.” Warren
quoted with approval another eminent
American authority, James Wilford
Garner, who had written that “it is
simply a question of policy and expedi-
ency, to be exercised by the victorious
belligerent or not.” “In other words,”
Warren added, “the question is purely
political and military; it should not be
treated as a judicial one or as arising
from international law.” As the Polish
lawyer Manfred Lachs, whose Jew-
ish family had been murdered by the
Nazis, wrote in 1945, this idea that the
prosecution of war crimes is “a matter
of political expediency” would make
international law “the servant of poli-
tics” and “a flexible instrument in the
hands of politicians.”
It is hard to overstate how import-
ant it is that the war crimes that have
undoubtedly been committed already
in Ukraine—and the ones that are
grimly certain to be inflicted on inno-
cent people in the coming weeks and
months—not be understood as “a flex-
ible instrument in the hands of politi-
cians.” They must not be either shaped
around or held hostage by “policy and
expediency.” This is a question of jus-
tice. Those who have been murdered,
tortured, and raped matter as individ-
uals, not as mere exemplars of Putin’s
barbarity. The desire to prosecute their
killers and abusers stems from the im-
perative to honor that individuality, to
restore insofar as is possible the dignity
that was stolen by violence.
But it is also, as it happens, a ques-
tion of effectiveness. If accusations of
Russian war crimes are seen to be in-
strumental rather than principled, they
will dissolve into “whataboutism”: Yes,
Putin is terrible, but what about . . . In-
stead of seeing a clean distinction be-
tween the Western democracies and
Andrea Bruce/ NOOR /Redux
Russia, much of the world will take
refuge in a comfortable relativism. If
war crimes are not universal violations,
they are merely fingers that can point
only in one direction—at whomever we
happen to be in conflict with right now.
And never, of course, at ourselves.
E ven before Putin launched his inva-
sion on February 24, the Biden admin-
istration seems to have had a plan to
use Russian atrocities as a rallying cry
for the democratic world. That day, The
New York Times reported that “admin-
istration officials are considering how to
continue the information war with Rus-
sia, highlight potential war crimes and
push back on Moscow’s propaganda.”
This was not necessarily cynical—
Putin’s appalling record of violence
against civilians in Chechnya and Syria
and plain contempt for international
law made it all too likely that his forces
would commit such crimes in Ukraine.
But this anticipation of atrocities, and
deliberation about how to make use of
them, underlines the administration’s
perception of the accusation of war
crimes as a promising front in the ideo-
logical counterattack against Putin. As
early as March 10, well before the un-
covering of the atrocities at Bucha, the
US ambassador to the United Nations,
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the
BBC that Russian actions in Ukraine
“constitute war crimes; there are at-
tacks on civilians that cannot be justi-
fied . . . in any way whatsoever.”
A week later, and still a fortnight be-
fore the first reports from Bucha, Biden
was calling Putin, in unscripted re-
marks, a “war criminal.” At that point,
he in fact seemed a little unsure about
the wisdom of making the charge—ini-
tially, when asked if he would use the
term, he replied “no,” before asking
reporters to repeat the question and
then replying in the affirmative. Sig-
nificantly, Biden was responding not
to ground-level assaults by Russian
troops on civilians but to the shelling of
Ukrainian cities. This may perhaps ex-
plain his hesitancy: civilian casualties
from aerial assaults by drones, rockets,
and bombs are a sore subject in recent
US military history.
Having crossed the line and made
this charge directly, Biden had little
choice but to raise the stakes when the
terrible images from Bucha were circu-
lated. First, on April 4 he went beyond
deeming Putin a criminal by calling
specifically for him to face a “war crime
trial.” Then on April 12 he pressed the
nuclear button of atrocity accusations:
genocide. “We’ll let the lawyers decide,
internationally, whether or not it quali-
fies [as genocide], but it sure seems that
way to me.” He also referred to an un-
folding “genocide half a world away,”
clearly meaning in Ukraine.
Biden did so even though his national
security adviser, Jake Sullivan, had told
a press briefing on April 4:
Based on what we have seen so far,
we have seen atrocities, we have
seen war crimes. We have not yet
seen a level of systematic depriva-
tion of life of the Ukrainian people
to rise to the level of genocide.
Sullivan stressed that the determina-
tion that genocide had been committed
required a long process of evidence-
gathering. He cited the recently an-
nounced ruling by the State Department
that assaults on the Rohingyas by the
military in Myanmar/Burma consti-
tuted genocide. That conclusion was
reached in March 2022; the atrocities
were committed in 2016 and 2017. The
State Department emphasized in its an-
nouncement that it followed “a rigorous
factual and legal analysis.”
It is obvious that no such analysis
preceded Biden’s decision to accuse
Putin of genocide. When asked about
genocide on April 22, a spokesper-
son for the UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights said, “No, we have
not documented patterns that could
amount to that.” Biden’s careless use of
the term is all the more damaging be-
cause, however inadvertently, it echoes
Putin’s grotesque claim that Ukraine
has been committing genocide against
Russian speakers in Donbas.
The problem with all of this is not
that Biden is wrong but that it distracts
from the ways in which he is right. This
overstatement makes it far too easy for
those who wish to ignore or justify what
the Russians are doing to dismiss the
mounting evidence of terrible crimes
in Ukraine as exaggerated or as just an-
other battleground in the information
war. In appearing overanxious to inject
“war criminal” into the international
discourse about Putin and making it
seem like a predetermined narrative, the
US risked undermining the very stark
evidence for that conclusion. By inflat-
ing that charge into genocide, it substi-
tuted rhetoric for rigor and effectively
made it impossible for the US to endorse
any negotiated settlement for Ukraine
that leaves Putin in power: How can
The New York Review
 RICHARD PRINCE
Hoods

Gagosian New York

May 26, 2022 11

you make peace with a perpetrator
of genocide? Paradoxically, it also
risked the minimization of the actual
atrocities: If they do not rise to the level
of the ultimate evil, are they “merely”
war crimes?
What makes these mistakes by Biden
truly detrimental, however, is that the
moral standing of the US on war crimes
is already so profoundly compromised.
The test for anyone insisting on the
application of a set of rules is whether
they apply those rules to themselves. It
matters deeply to the struggle against
Putin that the US face its record of hav-
ing consistently failed to do this.
On November 19, 2005, in the Iraqi
town of Haditha, members of the First
Division of the US Marines massacred
twenty-four Iraqi civilians, including
women, children, and elderly people.
After a roadside bomb killed one US
soldier and badly injured two others,
marines took five men from a taxi and
executed them in the street. One marine
sergeant, Sanick Dela Cruz, later testi-
fied that he urinated on one of the bod-
ies. The marines then entered nearby
houses and killed the occupants—nine
men, three women, and seven children.
Most of the victims were murdered by
well-aimed shots fired at close range.
The official US press release then
falsely claimed that fifteen of the ci-
vilians had been killed by the roadside
bomb and that the marines and their
Iraqi allies had also shot eight “in-
surgents” who opened fire on them.
These claims were shown to be lies
four months later, when Tim McGirk
published an investigation in Time
magazine. When McGirk initially put
the evidence—both video and eyewit-
ness testimony—to the marines, he
was told, “Well, we think this is all al-
Qaeda propaganda.”
This was consistent with what seems
to have been a coordinated cover-up.
No one in the marines’ chain of com-
mand subsequently testified that there
was any reason to suspect that a war
crime had occurred. Lieutenant Col-
onel Jeffrey Chessani, the battalion
commander, was later charged with
dereliction of duty for failing to prop-
erly report and investigate the inci-
dent. Those charges were dismissed.
Charges against six other marines were
dropped, and a seventh was acquitted.
Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, who led
the squad that perpetrated the killings,
was demoted in rank to private and lost
pay, but served no time in prison.
In his memoir Call Sign Chaos (2019)
the former general James Mattis, who
took over as commander of the First Ma-
rine Division shortly after this massacre
and later served as Donald Trump’s sec-
retary of defense, calls what happened
at Haditha a “tragic incident.” It’s clear
that Mattis believed that at least some of
the marines had run amok:
In the chaos, they developed
mental tunnel vision, and some
were unable to distinguish gen-
uine threats amid the chaos of
the fight. . . . In the moments they
had to react, several Marines had
failed, or had tried but were un-
able, to distinguish who was a
threat and who was an innocent.
I concluded that several had made
tragic mistakes, but others had lost
their discipline. . . . The lack of dis-
cipline extended to higher ranks.
12
Specifically, it was a gross over-
sight not to notice and critically
examine a tragic event so far out of
the norm. I recommended letters
of censure for the division com-
mander—a major general—and
two senior colonels.
Mattis nowhere uses phrases or words
like “war crime,” “massacre,” “atroc-
ity,” or “cover-up.” He was determined,
too, to exonerate the lower-ranking sol-
diers who participated in the violence
at Haditha that day. “You did your
best,” he reassured them, “to live up to
the standards followed by US fighting
men throughout our many wars.”
How does the “tragic incident” at
Haditha differ from the murders of ci-
vilians by Russian forces in Ukraine?
There are some important distinctions.
American army staffers organizing stacks of German documents to be used as evidence in
prosecuting war crimes at the Nuremberg Trial, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945–1946
Unlike in Russia now, the US had media
organizations sufficiently free and in-
dependent to be able to challenge the
military’s account of what happened. It
had elected politicians who were will-
ing to condemn the atrocity—in 2006,
for example, Joe Biden suggested that
then defense secretary Donald Rums-
feld should resign because of Haditha.
Senior military commanders, including
Mattis, were obviously repelled by the
atrocity. Putin ostentatiously decorated
the Sixty-Fourth Separate Motorized
Rifle Brigade for its “mass heroism
and courage” after that unit had been
accused by Ukraine of committing war
crimes in Bucha. There was no such of-
ficial endorsement of the First Marine
Division. These differences matter—
false equivalence must be avoided.
Yet uncomfortable truths remain.
One of the most prestigious arms of the
US military carried out an atrocity in a
country invaded by the US in a war of
choice. No one in a position of author-
ity did anything about it until Time re-
ported on it. No one at any level of the
chain of command, from senior leaders
down to the soldiers who did the kill-
ings, was held accountable. And such
minor punishments as were imposed
seem to have had no deterrent effect.
In March 2007 marines killed nineteen
unarmed civilians and wounded fifty
near Jalalabad, in Afghanistan, in an
incident that, as The New York Times
reported at the time, “bore some strik-
ing similarities to the Haditha killings.”
Again, none of the marines involved or
their commanders received any serious cepted its jurisdiction. That leaves two
punishment. countries that ended up in precisely the
Perhaps most importantly, nothing same contradictory position: Russia
that happened in these or other atroc- and the US. Both signed the Rome stat-
ities in Iraq or Afghanistan changed ute—Russia in September 2000, the
the way that deliberate acts of vio- US three months later. And both then
lence against foreign civilians are pre- failed to ratify it. Putin, presumably
sented in official American discourse. because of international condemnation
The enemy commits war crimes and of war crimes being committed under
lies about them. We have “tragic inci- his leadership in Chechnya, declined
dents,” “tragic mistakes,” and, at the to submit it to the Duma in Moscow.
very worst, a loss of discipline. When George W. Bush effectively withdrew
bad things are done by American from the ICC in May 2002, follow-
armed forces, they are entirely untyp- ing the US-led invasion of Afghani-
ical and momentary responses to the stan and his declaration that “our war
terrible stresses of war. The condition- against terror is only beginning.”
ing that helps make them possible, the The US then began what Yves
deep-seated instinct to cover them up, Beigbeder, an international lawyer
and the repeated failure to bring per- who had served at the Nuremberg Trial
petrators to justice are not to be under- in 1946, called “a virulent, worldwide
stood as systemic problems. Nowhere is campaign aimed at destroying the le-
gitimacy of the Court, on the grounds
Charles Alexander/US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C./ NARA
of protecting US sovereignty and US
nationals.” Against the backdrop of the
“war on terror,” Congress approved
the American Service-Members’ Pro-
tection Act (ASPA) of 2002, designed
to insulate US military personnel (in-
cluding private contractors) from ICC
jurisdiction. The ASPA placed numer-
ous restrictions on US interaction with
the ICC, including the prohibition of
military assistance to countries coop-
erating with the court. Also in 2002,
the US sought (unsuccessfully) a UN
Security Council resolution to perma-
nently insulate all US troops and of-
ficials involved in UN missions from
ICC jurisdiction. In late 2004 Congress
approved the Nethercutt Amendment,
prohibiting assistance funds, with lim-
ited exceptions, to any country that is a
party to the Rome statute.
These attacks on the ICC culmi-
nated on September 2, 2020, when the
Trump administration imposed sweep-
ing sanctions on Fatou Bensouda, a
former minister of justice in Gambia,
who was then the ICC’s chief prosecu-
American exceptionalism more evident tor, and Phakiso Mochochoko, a lawyer
or more troubling than in this compart- and diplomat from Lesotho, who heads
mentalizing of military atrocities. a division of the court. The US acted
under an executive order that declared
their activities a “national emergency.”
T he only way to end this kind of The emergency was “the ICC’s efforts
double standard is to have a single, to investigate US personnel.” Trump’s
supranational criminal court to bring secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, de-
to justice those who violate the laws nounced the ICC as “a thoroughly bro-
of war—whoever they are and what- ken and corrupted institution.”
ever their alleged motives. This idea A year ago, the Biden administration
has been around since 1872, when it lifted these sanctions against Bensouda
was proposed by Gustave Moynier, and Mochochoko, saying they were “in-
one of the founders of the Interna- appropriate and ineffective.” But the
tional Committee of the Red Cross. US did not soften its underlying stance,
It seemed finally to be taking shape in which is that, as Biden’s secretary of
the aftermath of World War II and the state, Antony Blinken, put it,
Holocaust, when a statute for an inter-
national criminal court was drafted by we continue to disagree strongly
a committee of the General Assembly with the ICC’s actions relating to
of the UN. This effort was, however, the Afghanistan and Palestinian
stymied by the USSR and its allies. In situations. We maintain our long-
the 1990s the combination of the end standing objection to the Court’s
of the cold war and the hideous atroc- efforts to assert jurisdiction over
ities committed during the breakup of personnel of non-States Parties
Yugoslavia and in Rwanda gave the such as the United States and Israel.
proposal a renewed impetus. This led
to the conference in Rome in June and In principle, this hostility to the ICC
July 1998, attended by 160 states and is rooted in the objection that the court
dozens of nongovernmental organiza- is engaged in an intolerable effort to
tions, that finally adopted the charter bind the US to a treaty it has not rat-
for the ICC . This statute entered into ified—in effect, to subject the US to
force in July 2002, and the ICC began laws to which it has not consented. If
to function the following year. this were true, it would indeed be an
Of the five permanent members of unacceptable and arbitrary state of
the UN Security Council, one (China) affairs. But this alleged concern is
opposed the adoption of the ICC’s groundless. The ICC does not claim
statute. Two (the United Kingdom any jurisdiction over states—it seeks to
and France) supported it and fully ac- prosecute individuals.
The New York Review
 This distinction was vital to the
Nuremberg Tribunal, which stressed
that “crimes against international law
are committed by men, not by abstract
entities, and only by punishing individ-
uals who commit such crimes can the
provisions of international law be en-
forced.” Moreover, the US is already
a party to the treaties that define the
crimes the ICC is empowered to pros-
ecute. The ICC follows the precedents
and practices of international crimi-
nal tribunals that the US enthusiasti-
cally supported and participated in:
the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after
World War II, and the courts estab-
lished in the 1990s to prosecute those
responsible for atrocities in Yugoslavia
and Rwanda. If the ICC is illegitimate,
so were those courts.
people. This means that if there is to be
any prospect of bringing Putin and his
accomplices to justice for murder, rape,
and torture, it must lie with the ICC. The
“war crime trial” that Biden called for
on April 4, if it were ever to be possible,
could be conducted only at The Hague.
The Biden administration knows this
very well. On April 11 Charlie Savage
reported in The New York Times that
officials are “vigorously debating how
much the United States can or should
assist an investigation into Russian
atrocities in Ukraine by the Interna-
tional Criminal Court.” But the admin-
istration is simultaneously spreading a
fog of vagueness over this very ques-
tion. In his April 4 press briefing Jake
Sullivan, the national security adviser,
said, “Obviously, the ICC is one venue
where war crimes have been tried in
the past, but there have been other
examples in other conflicts of other
mechanisms being set up.” He prom-
ised that “the appropriate venue for
accountability” would be decided “in
consultation with allies and with part-
ners around the world.” Yet all of those
significant allies are members of the
ICC , and the most important of them,
Ukraine, has specifically given the
court the job of trying to bring the per-
petrators to justice.
Why continue to avoid this obvious
truth? A yawning gap has opened be-
tween Biden’s grandiloquent rhetoric
about Putin’s criminality on the one
side and the deep reluctance of the US
to lend its weight to the institution cre-
ated by the international community to
prosecute such transgressions of moral
and legal order. It is a chasm in which
all kinds of relativism and equivocation
can lodge and grow. The longer the US
practices evasion and prevarication, the
easier it is for Putin to dismiss Western
outrage as theatrical and hypocritical,
and the more inclined other countries
will be to cynicism.
It has been said repeatedly since Feb-
ruary 24 that if the democracies are to
defeat Putin, they must be prepared to
sacrifice some of their comforts. Ger-
many, for example, has to give up Rus-
sian natural gas. What the US must give
up is the comfort of its exceptionalism
on the question of war crimes. It can-
not differentiate itself sufficiently from
Putin’s tyranny until it accepts without
reservation that the standards it applies
to him also apply to itself. The way to
do that is to join the ICC . Q
—April 28, 2022

T he brutal truth is that the US aban-

doned its commitment to the ICC not
for reasons of legal principle but from
the same motive that animated Putin. It
was engaged in aggressive wars and did
not want to risk the possibility that any
of its military or political leaders would
be prosecuted for crimes that might
be committed in the course of fight-
ing them. That expediency rather than
principle was guiding US attitudes be-
came completely clear in 2005. The US
decided not to block a Security Coun-
cil resolution referring atrocities in the
Darfur region of Sudan to the ICC pros-
ecutor. (It abstained on the motion.) It
subsequently supported the prosecution The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers bids fond farewell to the
at the ICC of Sudanese president Omar
al-Bashir and the use by the Special Class of 2021–2022
Court of Sierra Leone of the ICC facil-
ities in The Hague to try former Libe- Rich Benjamin Jonas Hassen Khemiri
rian president Charles Taylor for crimes
committed in Sierra Leone. David Wright Faladé Maaza Mengiste
This American support was welcome, Julia Foulkes Nara Milanich
but it has been almost as damaging to
the ICC as the outright hostility of the Kaiama L. Glover Michael Prior
US had been. It suggested that in the David Greenberg Josephine M. Rowe
eyes of the US, the only real war crimes
were those committed by Africans. Lewis Hyde Avi Steinberg
To date, the thirty or so cases taken Karl Jacoby Madeleine Thien
before the ICC all involve individuals
from Central African Republic, Côte Matthew Karp
d’Ivoire, Sudan, Democratic Republic
of the Congo, Kenya, Libya, Mali, or ͽ
Uganda. This selectivity led the African
Union to label the ICC a “neo-colonial …and welcomes with pleasure the
court” and urged its members to with-
draw their cooperation from its prose- Class of 2022–2023
cutions. However false the charge, it is
easy to see how credible it might seem Rozina Ali Patrick Phillips
when the US has alternately endorsed
the legitimacy of the ICC in prosecuting Daphne A. Brooks Daniel Saldaña París
Africans and called the same court cor- Colin Channer Maurice Samuels
rupt and out of control when it explores
the possibility of investigating war Raghu Karnad Brandon Taylor
crimes committed by Americans. Margaret Kelleher Erin L. Thompson
After the Russian invasion of
Ukraine, more than forty member Claire Luchette Francesca Wade
states of the ICC, most of them Euro- Neil Maher C Pam Zhang
pean but also including Japan, Chile,
Colombia, and Costa Rica, formally Sarah Maza
asked the court “to investigate any acts
of war crimes, crimes against humanity
and genocide alleged to have occurred
on the territory of Ukraine from 21 No- The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in
vember 2013 onwards.” The ICC pros- honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W.
ecutor Karim Khan has begun to do Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and
this. Crucially, though Ukraine is not
itself a party to the ICC, it had already Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen
accepted the court’s jurisdiction in re- and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz,
lation to war crimes on its territory, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows.
first in 2014 and again in 2015, the sec-
ond time “for an indefinite duration.”
It is Ukraine’s choice that the ICC
be the body that investigates and pros-
ecutes Russian atrocities against its

May 26, 2022 13


The Employees:
A Workplace Novel
of the 22nd Century
by Olga Ravn, translated
from the Danish by Martin Aitken.
New Directions, 125 pp., $19.95
The first fictional spacecraft were
thrilling, vehicles for exploration and
discovery, but it wasn’t long before
writers realized that spaceships would
also be workplaces like their water-
borne counterparts, with tight quarters
where repetitive tasks and interper-
sonal friction are occasionally inter-
rupted by interludes of existential peril.
The most familiar pop- cultural depic-
tion of this, Ridley Scott’s 1979 film
Alien, opens with the groggy crew of
Nostromo, a star freighter and ore re-
finery en route to Earth, coming out of
stasis to scratch, stretch, make coffee,
and bicker about money—until, that is,
they are terrorized and picked off by a
hideous unknown creature.
Gnomic and elliptical where most
science fiction is expository, Olga
Ravn’s The Employees follows a not
dissimilar pattern. It is the first book
by the Danish poet, novelist, and liter-
ary critic to be translated into English
and was shortlisted for the Interna-
tional Booker Prize in 2021. Presented
as a collection of records, primarily
the transcripts of statements made by
the crew of the Six Thousand Ship to a
committee of unspecified composition,
it documents the breakdown of the
ship’s mission after the vessel arrives
at a planet called New Discovery and
the crew brings aboard a selection of
objects found there.
But the objects—which are referred
to only as “the objects,” the most re-
ductive and nondescriptive term for
pretty much anything—aren’t mon-
sters and don’t chase the crew members
around. None of the speakers offer a
full description of these things (or crea-
tures?), but Ravn has said they were in-
spired by the sculptures of the Danish
artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund, with
whom she has collaborated. From the
fragments of information offered, they
appear to resemble living stones. (Hes-
telund’s marble sculptures look like
fleshy blobs.) They come in varying col-
ors, patterns, and textures. They hum,
and they change temperature. One
secretes a resinlike substance when
exposed to sunlight. Another inter-
mittently produces what appear to be
eggs. Above all, they emit fragrances
that most (but not all) of the crew find
soothing. Some crew members like to
sleep with their faces covered by cloths
saturated in the resin.
At the outset, the committee ex-
plains that it has collected statements
from the employees “with a view to
gaining insight into how they related to
the objects and the rooms in which they
were placed.” The ultimate purpose of
this is “to assess to what degree” the
objects
might be said to precipitate reduc-
tion or enhancement of perfor-
mance, task-related understanding,
and the acquisition of new knowl-
edge and skills, thereby illuminat-
ing their specific consequences for
production.
14
Under Their Skin
Laura Miller
Olga Ravn; illustration by Olivier Schrauwen
Since research is the motive for most
fictional and real-life space travel, the
assumption that the mission of the Six
Thousand Ship is to gather information
about the objects comes easily, almost
unconsciously, into the reader’s mind.
But it is not so. The crew members de-
scribe the rooms where the objects are
kept as “recreation rooms,” not cargo
holds or labs.
What the employees on the ship have
been hired to produce remains a mys-
tery. Unlike the objects, which they
struggle to describe, the nature of their
work is taken for granted by interview
subjects and interlocutors alike. They
may talk about production and tasks
and workflows, but only three mem-
bers of the support staff—a laundress,
a cleaner, and a funeral director—dis-
cuss in any detail what they’ve been
hired to do by the firm known only as
“the organization.”
T he fragmented, disorienting narra-
tive of The Employees arises from ev-
erything the characters know that the
reader does not. The transcripts are
uniquely numbered, and the speaker of
each is unidentified, although at times
the speaker in a previous transcript
(the funeral director, the captain) is ev-
idently interviewed again. Some state-
ments are multiple pages long, some
as brief as a sentence or two. Certain
events, particularly the “transfer” of
“the third officer” and “Cadet 04,”
bother several of the speakers and in-
deed have unsettled the whole crew,
but the reason for the transfers—or
how exactly someone can be trans-
ferred from a ship so far out in space
that many of the crew expect to die on it
before it returns to “Homebase”—also
goes unexplained. What the reader can
quickly ascertain is that only some of
the crew will die, because only some
of them were born in the first place.
The rest are “made,” humanoids rather
than humans, and this difference will
eventually determine the fate of the
ship.
At first, however, the great contrast
is between the language and expecta-
tions of the organization and the pre-
occupations of the crew members who
have fallen under the influence of the
objects. Early on, a humanoid em-
ployee expresses bafflement when his
human coworker remarks that there’s
more to a person than the work they
do. “But what else could a person be?”
he asks the committee. “Who would
keep you company? How would you
get by without work and without your
coworkers? Would you be left standing
in a cupboard?” The first three ques-
tions might have come from any worka-
holic American, but the last betrays the
speaker as an appliance.
Purpose-built, the humanoids know
nothing but work and needn’t worry
about wasting their lives on it when
their memories can be downloaded
into a new body once their current one
wears out or is destroyed. Nevertheless,
strange thoughts and desires creep into
the humanoids’ statements. One gets
caught up in a spiral of neurotic wor-
ries that he might unwittingly act in a
way that would at a later point contra-
vene the interests of “the program,”
the organization’s overarching mission
(whatever that is!). “If I carry out an
action,” he tells the committee,
that unbeknown to me is counter-
active to the program’s momen-
tum, I can do nothing but hate
myself for it. But since I have no
way of knowing whether an ac-
tion in any given instance is anti-
programmatic, how am I to know
if I’m to hate myself or not?
Perhaps, he muses, he should just pre-
emptively hate himself. “Why do I
have all these thoughts if the job I’m
doing is mainly technical?” he asks.
“Why do I have these thoughts if the
reason I’m here is primarily to increase
production?”
Meanwhile, the humans brood over
their memories of Earth. This problem
has been anticipated by the organiza-
tion; one of the crew says he was hired
“to make sure the human section of the
crew don’t buckle under to nostalgia
and become catatonic.” Holograms of
children have been supplied as consola-
tion to those whose own children have
died, and some have become almost
addicted to them. Others seem to have
left living children behind, but offer no
explanation for why they have chosen
to do so.
The presence of the objects increases
the humans’ pining for Earth. All of
them miss the weather, descriptions of
which haunt their statements: the pink
mists of morning, rain on the beach,
blue light pouring over trees, “the
smell of the soil, and warm asphalt,
the sounds of animals and birds.” The
sterile physical environment of the ship
matches the corporate language of the
committee and the organization, a lan-
guage that constructs the crew’s con-
ceptual environment. They inhabit an
idea of life that consists only of work.
Even the most fundamental bodily
functions must be disciplined. “I find it
hard to sleep, which I hope you’ll for-
give me,” one statement reads. “I real-
ize sleep is our own responsibility here
on the ship, and I am actually trying to
do something about it.”
Into this artificial kingdom seeps the
organic. At the end of the book, the
corporate jargon framing the state-
ments dilates, unfolding itself into
prefabricated clauses stripped of speci-
ficity and emotion:
In the case that this idea of uti-
lizing the present record for edu-
cational purposes is pursued, the
collection of empirical material
may fruitfully be continued, inso-
far as the afterreactions of readers
may be taken to provide a basis for
deeper understanding of the influ-
ences exerted by the objects.
So reads the committee’s conclusion.
By contrast, in their statements, the
crew members increasingly describe
intense dreams of being pursued by or
encased in plants, of trees with leaves
“that turn and spin like mirrors in the
summer air.” The language they use to
describe their dreams and memories is
compressed and vivid, the language of
a poet in Martin Aitken’s crystalline
English translation. When their state-
ments escalate into strings of clauses,
the result is not numbing but incan-
tatory, an ecstasy of remembrance,
mourning, and hope:
And what would it mean to know
that these two rooms contained
every space we ever occupied,
every morning (November on
Earth, five degrees Celsius, sun
dazzling low in the morning sky,
the child in the carrier seat on
the back of the bicycle), every day
The New York Review
 Great Performances:
Anything Goes
May 13 9/8c
Enjoy Cole Porter’s classic musical
led by Tony winner Sutton Foster
directed by Kathleen Marshall

Great Performances: Merry Wives Great Performances: Keeping Company

May 20 9/8c with Sondheim — May 27 9/8c
Experience Shakespeare’s comedy from the An inside look at the re-imagined
Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park. production as it returns to Broadway.

pbs.org/broadwayonpbs

May 26, 2022 15

 (the ivy reddening in the frost on
the outside of the office building)
and every night (in the room below
the stone pines, someone’s breath
upon your eyelid), and that every
place you ever knew existed there
in these two recreation rooms,
like a ship floating freely in dark-
ness, encompassed by dust and
crystals, without gravity, without
earth, in the midst of eternity;
without humus and water and
rivers, without offspring, with-
out blood; without the creatures
of the sea, without the salt of the
oceans, and without the water lily
stretching up through the cloudy
pond toward the sun?
Just how much of this imaginative
invasion can be put down to the influ-
ence of the objects? In an interview,
Ravn acknowledged that the cause
could instead be the committee’s ques-
tions about how the work is going. The
very suggestion that it’s possible for
the workers to have a range of feelings
about what they’re doing is like an in-
fection that encourages them to self-
reflect, to consider which feelings they
might prefer instead. And yet there is
something about the objects that gets
under the skin, literally.
In The Employees, the organic is a
vital alternative to the totalizing life-
lessness of the organization—a famil-
iar motif—but it can also be terrifying
and repellent. There’s something awful
about the relentless ways other species
reproduce. One crew member recalls
pulling up some floorboards back on
Earth to find “a puffy white mold” that
“had been growing right under our feet
without us knowing. Growing in the
dark, it was. We got rid of it, only it kept
coming back.”
Recurring symptoms among the
human employees are “skin eruptions”
and dreams that black seeds are em-
bedded in their pores. (This is not a
novel for trypophobes.) Images of in-
human fertility torment a crew mem-
ber prone to staring at the objects for
minutes at a time:
Does a human being need to have
been born? Or can I be a living
human expelled from a sac of
slime, hatched out of an accumu-
lation of roe, a clump of spawn in a
pond, a cluster of sticky eggs con-
cealed among cereal crops or wild
grasses?
Because the objects also come in
clusters, described as multiplying on
the hillsides of New Discovery like “a
kind of eczema,” these afflictions do
seem related to their presence. One of
the crew members, convinced that “the
best way of establishing contact with
the objects is through smell,” chews bay
leaves upon entering the room in which
they are stored, encouraged by the
scent the objects produce in response.
To some employees, the objects’ scent
is pleasant, like “citrus fruit, or the
stone of a peach,” while to others it is
sinister. “The fragrance in the room
has will and intention,” one statement
reports. “It’s the smell of something old
and decomposing, something musty.
It’s as if the smell wishes to initiate the
same process in me: that I become a
branch to break off, rot, and be gone.”
A humanoid crew member declares
the room and its smells “erotic,” al-
though we later learn that her kind
16
has been made without “reproductive For their part, the humans languish oid complains, “even though no one
organs,” because these were deemed in terrestrial nostalgia, reminisc- I know loves in that way, or lives that
“ethically unjustifiable to duplicate.” ing about strawberries, concerts, TV kind of a life. Yet these are the dreams
Smell, like taste, is a scent dependent shows, and that perennial subject, the you’ve given us.”
on penetration and merging. To smell weather—although this talk is far from The rebellion happens in the can-
something is to absorb tiny particles small. Several express the weary senti- teen, a violent event whose details are
of it into the membranes of the nose ment that their time is over, that they only alluded to. It results in one human
and to breathe it into the lungs. A hu- don’t expect humanity “as a category” death, and the humanoid who commits
manoid describes the unfamiliar at- to survive, and that the future belongs this murder tells the committee that it
tachment she feels toward one of the to the humanoids. “I want to stop. I felt good to do it. “I’m a pomegranate
objects as “like a ticklish splinter close can’t go on any longer,” the captain ripe with moist seeds,” the humanoid
to the heart, a splinter travelling slowly complains. continues, demonstrating an align-
through the flesh.” There are amusing echoes here of ment with creatures that cluster and
the sort of intergenerational work- teem, “each seed a killing I’m going
place conflicts that newspaper feature to carry out at some future time.” The
Yet when morale aboard the Six reporters like to write about, stories in infestation of the Six Thousand Ship
Thousand Ship finally breaks down, which managers from an older genera- is complete. Like any property owner
the conflict isn’t over the objects. Per- tion puzzle over the manners and ex- confronted with a termite’s nest or rat
haps the objects have caused it by in- pectations of their younger colleagues droppings, the organization does what
sinuating unprecedented thoughts and while acknowledging that eventually has to be done.
feelings into the humanoids, or perhaps these perplexing people will be run-
they have simply drawn forth a division ning things. In what must be the most
that was lying dormant. The human- alarming development for their cor- T he most striking aspect of this weird,
oids begin to separate themselves from porate masters, the humanoids exhibit beautiful, and occasionally disgusting
their human coworkers in the canteen. inklings of collective bargaining. “You novel is not, as its subtitle implies, its
They speak only to one another. “Some wouldn’t like to know what’s going on portrayal of working life on the space-
of them are friendly,” a human crew in our wing,” a humanoid tells the com- ship. Most of Ravn’s characters are too
member observes, “others seem as mittee. “No, that’s not a threat. We’re obsessively inward-looking to get up
though they’re being torn up inside by negotiating, that’s all.” to much in the way of office politics or
rage. Some are on the brink of tears. What are the humanoids? At first banter. Rather, it’s the objects them-
Others are completely out of it.” they appear to be robots or cyborgs, selves—impossible to visualize or fully
The humanoids regularly upload but despite the uploads and updates, it imagine, so unlike any form of known
their memories and receive software turns out they’re not machines. Instead, life that not everyone on board the Six
updates, but the updates aren’t working according to one speaker, they were Thousand Ship is sure they’re alive at
as they once did. A humanoid tells the “hatched from a series of violet pods of all. They are utterly alien, and yet for
committee that she has experienced biomaterial” in a lab back in Denmark. most of the crew members the objects
“sadness” at the knowledge that she’ll The speaker recounts tending to the are also comforting, even familiar.
never have a child, but that ripening pods, talking to them and in- The organization has cataloged them
jecting them with “the good hormones” with numbers, but the crew has given
it’s not hard to bear; it’s more like so that they would become attached to each one a name: peculiar names, like
a delicacy. Another reason I appre- their human makers. But their origins “the Reverse Strap- On” and “the Half-
ciate such a sadness is that I know link them to plants, insects, fungi— Naked Bean,” but also human ones,
it’s a deviation from the emotional all the nonhuman life-forms whose like Rachel, Ida, and Benny.
behavior I was allocated, and I procreative methods give the human The valley on New Discovery where
know too that deviating emotional crew members the creeps. Humans the objects were found is even more en-
behavior can be a sign that you’re have programmed them with a limited trancing. As the ship orbits the planet,
starting to disengage from the set of emotions, some of which are as the crew gathers to watch the valley
update. dysfunctional as the acculturation of come into sight from a viewing deck,
human beings. (Ravn has written in the “humans and humanoids,” as one state-
Some humanoids’ statements to the past about how ill-fitting she finds the ment describes it, “one big bunch of us
committee take an ominous tone. received model of womanhood, which together, all of us uplifted by the sight
“Impending violence is by no means leads, as she told one interviewer, “to of the valley, it’s the same every time.
inconceivable,” one remarks. “We’re having a feeling of being synthetic or It looks quite like what we know from
only just beginning to understand what false.”) “All of us here are condemned home.” It’s a pleasure in which “the cat-
we’re capable of.” to a dream of romantic love,” a human- egories don’t apply.”
That humanity should travel to the
ends of the universe only to find a place
that feels like home and creatures that,
however strange, seem to welcome
us—this ought to be a blessing. So why
does it all go so wrong? Perhaps the ob-
jects are not what they seem, are a kind
AFTER GEORGE HERBERT of booby trap, but I’m inclined instead
to agree with one of the humans, who
points out, “It’s a dangerous thing for
Come, my Motorway, my Equals Sign, my Higher Race,
an organization not to be sure which of
Such a Motorway as wheels with stars,
the objects in its custody may be con-
Such an Equals Sign as time plus space, sidered to be living. It raises questions.”
Such a Higher Race as cable cars. Some of those questions have to
do with the status of the humanoids,
Come, my Bedside Light, my Takeaway, my Calloused Hand, several of whom insist, in response to
Such a Bedside Light as lanternfish, apparent disbelief, that they, too, are
Such a Takeaway as takes a stand, alive. But what The Employees cap-
Such a Calloused Hand as makes a wish. tures best is humanity’s ambivalence
about life itself, its sticky messes and
Come, my Costume Play, my I Will Yes, my Organ Note, unappealing functions, the goo that
connects us to everything that crawls
Such a Costume Play as none can dress,
and mindlessly self-propagates, not to
Such an I Will Yes as none can quote,
mention that obliterating payoff at the
Such an Organ Note as plays in yes. end of it all. It is our best beloved and it
turns our stomachs. We build antiseptic
—Camille Ralphs vessels like the Six Thousand Ship, or
for that matter the organization itself,
to control its chaos, and then pine for
it once we’ve shut it out. “I’m not sure I
still feel pride in my humanity,” one of
the crew members confesses. And who
can blame him? Q
The New York Review
 An Impulse Felt Round the World
Julian Bell
Surrealism Beyond Borders

Jan Švankmajer
an exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City,
October 11, 2021–January 30, 2022;
and Tate Modern, London,
February 24–August 29, 2022.
Catalog of the exhibition by Stephanie
D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale,
with contributions from Dawn Ades,
Patricia Allmer, and others.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
383 pp., $65.00; $40.00 (paper)
(distributed by Yale University Press)

“The surreal today is measured on the

scale of our defeats.” Georges Henein,
a founding member of a Cairo group of
Surrealists, was responding to a ques-
tionnaire that a Paris review had sent
him concerning the state of the move-
ment in 1946, twenty-two years on from
André Breton’s inaugural Manifeste du
surréalisme. What defeats had Henein
in mind? For him and his painter col-
leagues in al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyya (Art
and Freedom), the recent clashes of
foreign armies on Egyptian soil had not
been the issue. Rather, what they faced
now, as the war against Nazism made
way for Stalin’s triumph and the age of
atomic terror announced at Hiroshima,
was a pervasive global power system
more outrageous in its operations—in
that sense, more “surreal”—than any-
thing artists could dream up.
Henein’s sympathies were with
the politics of Leon Trotsky, as were
Breton’s, and the socialist cause now
seemed terminally cornered, if so-
cialism entailed “the right not only
to bread but to poetry” that the Rus-
sian revolutionary had demanded. As
Henein went on to explain, “Nearly
everything we still consider desirable
is claimed or bargained away by the
current state of the world. The result is
this everyday surreality, made of all the
moves not made by us.” When it came
to those desiderata, Breton had defined
them as “the future resolution of these
two states, dream and reality.” Com-
pleting a further questionnaire, Henein
held out for some “point of extreme
purity at which literature replaces life.”
The Coptic intellectual’s impos-
sibilism offers one prospective han-
dle on an exhibition about a creed
of bewilderment that has itself been
designed to bewilder. “Surrealism Be-
yond Borders,” jointly conceived by the
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Steph-
anie D’Alessandro and Tate Modern’s
Matthew Gale, has now moved from
her museum to his in London. Across
eleven galleries, the curators have
tumbled out a delirium of films, pho-
tos, drawings, paintings, pamphlets,
and what Alberto Giacometti liked to
call “disagreeable objects.” Besides a
wooden assemblage by that artist—his
so- called Cage—you may chance upon
Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone,
Max Ernst’s painted construction Two
Children Are Threatened by a Nightin-
gale, and sundry other curios by those
who, between the world wars, joined
Breton’s table at Montmartre’s Café Le
Cyrano.
Pieces by the luminaries they looked
up to, Picasso and Duchamp, also fea-
ture. But a greater swirl almost sub-
merges these fixtures of Paris- centric
art history: the surrealisms of Korea,
Ivan Kraus in Jan Švankmajer’s film The Flat, 1968
Mozambique, Haiti, the Philippines,
and Turkey— a constellation of non-
convergent points across the globe.
D’Alessandro and Gale are proposing
that the thoughts voiced by Breton in
1924 were latent in multiple disparate
urban centers, only awaiting his coin-
ing of a movement identity.
Their curiosity, trained chiefly though
not exclusively on the succeeding half-
century, has been heroic. They have
hunted down, for instance, some photo-
collages that illustrated a self-help col-
umn in a 1950s Buenos Aires women’s
weekly; a magazine that was handmade
in the home of a Utrecht artist during
the Nazi occupation of Holland—a sin-
gle copy per issue; and some tiny Po-
laroids discreetly transmogrified by the
filmmaker Kaveh Golestan not long
before the Iranian Revolution.
The chase runs wild. As it happens,
Golestan, so a Tate caption informs
me, “did not identify with Surrealism.”
Nor, the curators concede, did others
whose works have been included, such
as Rafael Ferrer in Puerto Rico. But
no matter. When, as cited in the cata-
log, the Argentinian artist Julio Llinás
argued in 1952 that “Breton must be
shown that Surrealism is not him,” he
was only continuing a tussle with the in-
tellectual impresario that was as old as
the movement itself and that had like-
wise been pursued by Breton’s Paris
adversary Georges Bataille. For every
printed “declaration” (and the Tate’s
vitrines exhibit many), there awaited a
contradiction.
In which case, let confusion flourish,
and let D’Alessandro and Gale, who
boast that their survey is “neither sin-
gular in its narrative nor unbroken in
its chronology,” have license as its con-
noisseurs. Staggered but persuaded by
their assiduity, I accept that the show’s
incoherence gathers a certain cohesive
flavor.
W hat tang might that be? If some-
thing is “beyond borders,” it is not to
be defined. Yet a characteristic tac-
tic united, say, the African American
“Surrealist jazz poet” Ted Joans cutting
away the heads from shots of social oc-
casions to create “outographs,” Artur
Cruzeiro Seixas in Luanda inscribing
verses on a shell fragment mounted on
a buffalo’s hoof, and the Tokyo-based
artist Koga Harue painting a Pop Art–
like montage of imported publicity
materials.
The Surrealist, as characterized by
D’Alessandro and Gale, liked to posit
an x, a variable not in algebra but in
discourse and visual culture. His or
her gesture was to reach for anoma-
lous content and hold out a handful of
the bizarre or the serendipitous that
could be brandished as nonnegotiable.
In theory— and Breton was a voluble
theoretician—that item in its uncanni-
ness could serve as a release valve for
the unconscious, but how many Surre-
alists actually kept Freud in their sights
is uncertain. What was more constant
was the background for the gesture,
and here Henein’s perspective has
purchase.
You opened your eyes and looked
around— supposing that you were
young and critically alert, wherever
you might stand in that constellation
of twentieth- century urban centers—
and a diagnosis suggested itself. You
were witnessing an accountancy- driven
compression of human potential within
a global interlock of power, money,
mechanization, and mass media. This
condition, which Breton termed “ratio-
nalism,” seemed to underpin all extant
forms of governance, whether capitalist,
Stalinist, colonial, or fascist. (A sliding
scale, argued the Martinican Surreal-
ist Aimé Césaire, for the violence the
Nazis inflicted on Europe simply built
on the precedent of violence inflicted
by Europeans on others.) Surrealism
offered a certain route out of that his-
torical claustrophobia. Flaunting your
anomaly—your disobliging, disagree-
able x—you not only affirmed your
personal intransigence but also signed
on to an energizing counterconspiracy.
Most famously, via the collaborative
drawing game invented by the original
Surrealists that was known as cadavre
exquis. Joans’s largest project, pursued
over three decades, was to persuade
every sympathizer he encountered to
sketch little caprices— spooky, sexy,
or sardonic— onto slips of computer
paper that could be pasted together
to form a single continuous strip: the
result, nearly thirty-five feet long and
involving 123 friends and luminaries,
is as near as the exhibition comes to a
backbone. A great feat of organization
on Joans’s part, it is clear, and in fact
the corporate nature of the Surreal-
ists’ collective adversary is suggested
by the way they aped its administra-
tive procedures—their fretting over
membership lists and directives and
questionnaires; their “Bureau de re-
cherches surréalistes” in Paris, staffed
by officials who were required to keep
the doors open six days a week from
4:30 to 6:30 PM ; their resourceful
media strategies. Which might lead
to public success, which in turn might

May 26, 2022 17

lead to Surrealism’s co- optation by
the world as it stood, “claimed or bar-
gained away” by the very forces it op-
posed. For this worldwide subculture,
defeat forever hovered in the wings.
D ream and reality would regu-
larly hook up, decades before Breton
launched his dating agency, within the
medium of cinema, and it is in the film
shorts on view that you most
dramatically face the tensions
of Surrealism—the tug between
the wish to escape reductive
definition and the expecta-
tion that you must eventually
submit.
At Land, shot on Long Is-
land in 1944 by the young
Ukrainian-born cinéaste Maya
Deren, puts forward some char-
acteristic Surrealist promises.
A protagonist, a dreamer—
Deren herself— emerges from
the sea, a castaway dashed by
waves onto a beach, and fi-
nally exits into the light, a fig-
ure fleeing over its sun- dazzled
sands. In between she meets
shape-shifting impediments.
Dead branches over which
she clambers lead to a dining
table across which she crawls,
amid oblivious chattering so-
cialites. From a chessboard on
that table a pawn drops, only
to reappear on the shoreline
after other figures— a walking
companion of inconstant vis-
age, a father dying in a shroud-
draped bedroom— have passed
by on the heroine’s cryptic
pilgrimage, while harsh rock
faces and burdensome stones
likewise confront her. All is ob-
stacle, yet she herself remains
inviolate, assured in possession
of her own photogenic allure. In
Deren’s romantic salute to spir-
itual freedom, the object world
and the social world are them-
selves no more than contents of
a dream.
The Flat, the product of an-
other young filmmaker—Jan
Švankmajer, in the Prague of
1968—inverts the tale of me and
not-me into nightmarish slap-
stick. The door slams behind a
sublimely hangdog comedian
(Ivan Kraus; see illustration on
page 17), leaving him trapped
inside a moldering apart-
ment in which everything—
via Švankmajer’s stop-motion
legerdemain— contradicts his
demands. He turns on a tap and
it spurts not water but coal. He
hungrily raises a soupspoon and
it drains like a colander. A mir-
ror merely shows him the back
of his head. The bed he lies
down in crumbles, burying him
in sawdust, and then between
battered doorways a mysterious mus-
tachioed maître d’ glides through,
vouchsafing him an axe.
Our hero uses the axe to break down
one of the doors, only to face a wall on
which many a previous prisoner has
penciled his name. “JOSEF,” he deject-
edly adds, and the film closes just as he
begins the downstroke of the succeed-
ing letter “K.” This arch nod to Kafka’s
The Trial merely underlines what the
film’s Keaton- era styling and dowdy
decor imply— that retro is never to be
18
escaped and that déjà vu is another
form of the uncanny. Švankmajer’s
was an old, old Prague, and the sources
of his phlegmatism lay far deeper
than the passing political dramas
of 1968.
In fact Surrealists, on this exhibition’s
evidence, generally preferred dilapida-
tion to lucid form. The weathered and
the fractal looked promising as ways of
resisting “rationalist” modernity. And
Remedios Varo: Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, 1961
A still from Len Lye’s animated film Tusalava, 1929
yet the sensibilities on display could
twist the styling quite otherwise. One
of the earlier pieces included is a ten-
minute animation released in London
in 1929, the debut of a New Zealander
named Len Lye. Flaunting a radical
new graphic idiom, his Tusalava is as
brash and immediate as anything by
Disney. Its screen is split into vertical
bands in contrasting shades. Seed-
shaped blobs swim up them, then link
to form wriggling water-worms, whose
insides and outsides, nuclei and mem-
branes, then emerge. A pod in the
dark band swells and multiplies and
spews into the white a twisting spawn.
Suddenly these two separated entities
crystallize into schematic skeletal fig-
ures. Now the son’s pincer arms lunge
backward to pierce or possess the
mother in her lair. A mortal struggle
ensues, climaxing in explosion: rings
burst, collapse, recede to a final black
hole.
Lye was not an enrolled group
member, but he had certainly read
his Freud. He had also, en route from
Christchurch to London, spent time in
Samoa and in a Sydney library study-
ing books about Aboriginal art. He
was fusing its dots, concentric loops,
and “X-ray” figures with the graphics
of cellular biology to present a myth of
evolution in fast-track: a myth not
of upward progress but of circular self-
cancellation. Tusa lava, Lye explained,
is a Samoan phrase implying that what-
ever may happen, the same situation at
last returns.*
Here, then, was an artist from settler
stock leaning on Oceanic traditions.
Elsewhere, because of the reverence
that Surrealists felt for it, we are shown
Picasso’s Three Dancers (1925), an
achievement ultimately informed by
African art; and then we are shown Wi-
fredo Lam’s Bélial, empéreur
Remedios Varo/Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco
des mouches, a similarly large
canvas from 1948 in which the
Cuban quasi- Surrealist redi-
rected Picasso’s example to
deliver a fresh mythological
synthesis, more answerable to
his own African roots.
The curators’ global outlook
entangles them in the convo-
luted debates about “primitiv-
ism” that these examples could
prompt. Facing Tusalava they
place a wall text lamenting the
“fantasy of shared perspectives”
in which works from local tradi-
tions across the world, “included
for their perceived aesthetic
value within a European context,
were stripped of place, maker
and their original meaning.” As
far as it concerns the makers
themselves, the “stripped” in
that phrasing is an idle reproach.
This is simply what artists are al-
ways bound to do: look at what
other artists have been mak-
ing, wherever it may have come
from, and make products in re-
sponse that will inevitably bear
differing connotations.
In fairness, however, an ex-
hibition examining a cultural
movement interprets artifacts
NgƗ Taonga Sound & Vision/Len Lye Foundation
that have already been inter-
preted, and in the case of the
Surrealists, this was by voices
so insistently political that their
rhetoric can hardly go unques-
tioned. Some of the clamor came
from makers voicing their own
agendas, yet the overall tone—
despite the curators’ wish to de-
center the narrative— stemmed
from the so- called Pope of
Surrealism himself. For it is re-
markable how Breton is rarely
more than one degree of sepa-
ration away, whichever regional
nexus the survey alights on. His
persiflage— portentous, prickly,
shot through with flashes of
warmth— inspired cardinals of
the church ranging from Henein
and Joans to Eugenio Granell, a
fighter for the Spanish Republic
who, following its defeat, fled to
the Caribbean, where he prop-
agated Surrealism among many
an island flock.
And from pontiff to vil-
lage priest, this creed was
anticolonialist and— as Effie
Rentzou argues in her catalog
essay—“universalist.” She attributes
Surrealism’s “exceptional longevity”
to its willingness to take on the fun-
damental question “What is man?”
The more it “bypassed national struc-
tures” and rationalist mores, the more
it amassed “ethical urgency.”
*See Ann Stephen’s illuminating essay
“The Oceanic Primitivism of Len Lye’s
Animation Tusalava (1929),” Art His-
tory, Vol. 40, No. 3 (June 2017).
The New York Review
 We might feel awkward about these
ambitions with hindsight. We might
berate— along with Partha Mitter in
his catalog essay—the Café Le Cyrano
seditionaries for imputing a naive ex-
pressivity to non-European art, rather
than the sophisticated agency these
Parisians considered themselves to
possess. We might reckon that the Sur-
realists’ fondness for Trotsky was for a
mere mosquito politics of scant social
benefit. But such judgments fall in with
a “conventional time-based narrative”
that D’Alessandro and Gale want to es-
cape with their “transhistoric” project,
and at points they do convey what it’s
like to break free.
Most spectacularly, they include a
seven-minute clip from a documentary
made by the New York filmmaker Wil-
liam Klein about the Pan African Festi-
val that was held in Algiers in July 1969.
This event, staged by the Organization
of African Unity at a moment when it
looked as if familiar hegemonies might
be upended, became a crossroads for a
hundred postwar dreams of liberation,
drawing in the hopeful from across the
Sahara, the Mediterranean, and the
Atlantic. We meet Joans again, now
on stage with his friend Archie Shepp,
who, djellaba’d and raining sweat in
the roasting summer night, rips deep
gouges on his tenor sax, his footholds
on the wall of percussion behind him—
Gnawa drummers from the Maghreb,
beating rhythms sideways to jazz.
Klein’s camera cuts to onlookers:
pale Parisian hipsters in their shades;
jet-set girls in beehives and slinky
Motown-style outfits; Black Panther
brothers raising fists in zealous awe;
lines of haughty Tuareg women, scowl-
ing in dark satins. That disdain of theirs
only underlines the message that this is
a night that has veered into the radi-
cally unexpected and that normal time
has broken down. Here, if anywhere,
we witness the triumph of the Surreal.
T hat is not exactly what the exhibi-
tion’s static imagery has to offer. I was
introduced to many haunting little pho-
tographs and to a few arresting paint-
ings—in particular, to Embroidering
the Earth’s Mantle (1961) by Reme-
dios Varo. Her canvas depicts a Gothic
aerie in which a sisterhood sits stitch-
ing, obedient to an abbot with a book
and an alembic who is himself surveyed
by a shrouded background watcher.
The needlewomen’s handiwork winds
through apertures to descend into the
mists outside—fabric that unfolds to be-
come our physical world below. If Plato
had stopped penning his allegory of the
cave to pick up a brush instead, the results
might have looked somewhat similar—
not simply because of the shared ideal-
ism, but because it is expressed through
such an intricately developed artistry.
The micro-engineering of Varo’s tower
workshop and her beeswing-fine veils of
siennas and cold blues stretched my ex-
pectations of what a twentieth-century
painting might deliver.
Varo was a Spanish artist painting
in Mexico City, having arrived there
by a path crisscrossing those of many
Surrealists: early years in a Barcelona
cenacle who styled themselves “the logic-
fearers”—los Logicofobistas; departure
for boho life in Paris with Breton and
gang; then leaving Marseilles, come
1941, on a boat bound for the New
World. Her turn to the esoteric— she
joined a Gurdjieff group—was hardly
May 26, 2022
out of step with a movement that
claimed to seek “magic,” and the rebuke
POLICING THE CITY
to outward reality issued by her painting
overlaps with that of Deren’s film.
From the buoyant art scene that Varo
settled down in we are also presented
with a tremendous still life by Maria
Izquierdo, closer in manner to those
of the Mexican muralists. Elsewhere,
there is the classically ambitious Wi-
AN ETHNO-GRAPHIC
fredo Lam, among other modernizers
of the business of figure composition.
And disarmingly, a trompe l’oeil ex-
ecuted by the Parisian circle’s Marcel
Jean greets you in the show’s opening
gallery—wardrobe doors opening onto
distant horizons, a delightful touch of
magic indeed.
But the longer I browsed the framed
canvases that succeeded, the more a
frustration set in, as if from eating too
many spicy snacks with no entrée in
sight. Surrealism, being a cult of sur-
prise, worshiped play, generating many
a new game to be explored: yet for the
artists who subscribed to it, an agenda
of work still remained, delivering gal-
lery items by which to earn a living.
The dominant format for these items—
the main dish—is represented in the
show by that canvas the Surrealists
looked up to, Picasso’s Three Dancers.
Here, as elsewhere in the easel paint-
ing tradition, you are invited to relish
a rectangle’s worth of internal formal
relationships and to freight them as you
will with your knowledge of the world.
The distinctively Surrealist aim,
however, was to thwart that process of
imaginative digestion, as if to insist,
“This painting is not about what you
already know.” Of necessity, the rect-
angles they put up for sale retained
formal relationships, but Surrealists
tended to deal with these in an off-
hand or parodic manner. The show’s
sole Magritte, his steam-train-through-
fireplace canvas entitled Time Trans-
fixed, provides an obvious instance. A
fine stand-alone shock: but shocks in “A MUST-READ…LUCIDLY WRITTEN
AND EXPERTLY ILLUSTRATED,
multiplicity hardly amount to a fulfill-
ing diet. I began longing for richer fare,
in line with those many painters who
moved on from youthful Surrealism to Policing the City is a provocative exploration of
a deeper respect for the terms of their the expansion of police power and criminalization
own trade. of nonwhite and immigrant communities.”
It is not that the exhibits here lack
savor. You encounter so many differ- —Max Felker-Kantor, author of Policing Los Angeles:
ent defiances as you tour what virtually Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD
amounts to an alternate history of the
twentieth century: the paintings of He-
nein’s 1940s colleagues, for instance. “BY EXPOSING THE REALITIES
OF EVERYDAY ‘ANTICRIME’ POLICING,
The concerned young Egyptians of al-
Fann wa-l-Hurriyya—men and women,
DIDIER FASSIN EXPLODES THE MYTH
from both Muslim and Christian stock—
adopted, as a vehicle for their anxieties
about the nation’s predicament, the
naked female figure. Fouad Kamel
mutilates her, Kamel el-Telmissany nails THAT POLICE ARE THE SOLUTION
her to a tree, Amy Nimr dissects her
corpse. Their sour post-sunset palettes
of red and yellow stains against cyan
TO SERIOUS CRIME.”
—Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing
and black ratchet up the pathos. It is like
overhearing a distressing conversation,
glimpsed through a door ajar that you
might not wish to fully open. But part of “URGENT AND PROVOCATIVE”
the pathos is projected: it turns on the —Publishers Weekly
fact that you stand outside and are not
“HIGHLY RECOMMENDED”
quite sorry to remain so.
Whatever “everyday surreality” our
digital age may possess is different in
texture to that of the foregoing cen- —Library Journal (starred review)
tury. In this sense, not all that much of
“Surrealism Beyond Borders” achieves
a “transhistoric” liftoff, away from the
piquancy of retrospect. But then, it is OTHER PRESS OTHERPRESS.COM
exactly history’s business to be handed
the last word. Q
19
 Beyond the Betrayal
The Betrayal of Anne Frank:
A Cold Case Investigation
by Rosemary Sullivan.
Harper, 383 pp., $29.99
On the morning of August 4, 1944,
everything seemed normal at Prin-
sengracht 263, a tall, narrow building
along a canal in Amsterdam’s Jordaan
neighborhood. On the ground floor,
the workers in the warehouse of a pec-
tin and spice producer formerly known
as Opekta/Pectacon—now registered
under a false name, since its Jewish
founder, Otto Frank, was no longer al-
lowed to own a business—had the doors
open to the summer warmth. Upstairs,
the office employees were filling orders
and doing other paperwork. A little
after 9 AM, Miep Gies, a secretary, went
to the back room of the second floor
and pushed aside a bookcase against
the far wall, revealing a secret door.
When Gies ascended the staircase,
the eight people living in the back half
of the building were waiting for her.
They were always eager to see her, one
of their few points of contact with the
outside world. As the Nazi persecution
of the Dutch Jews intensified in early
1942, Otto Frank had decided to cre-
ate a hiding place for himself, his wife,
Edith, and their two daughters, Margot
and Anne, in the unused annex of his
own office building. The annex, with
two levels of living space and an attic,
was big enough for another family to
join them—Otto’s colleague Hermann
van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and their
son, Peter. Later the Franks and Van
Pelses also took in Fritz Pfeffer, Gies’s
Jewish dentist, after he told her he was
looking for a place to hide.
That morning, as usual, Gies visited
her friends and took any requests they
had for food, books, or other supplies.
Then they all returned to their daily rou-
tines. Margot and Anne, ages eighteen
and fifteen, probably read or studied.
Upstairs, Otto helped seventeen-year-
old Peter with his English spelling.
Across the city, Karl Josef Silber-
bauer, an SS sergeant of the Sicher-
heitsdienst (SD) Referat IV B4—also
known as the “Jew-hunting unit”—was
at his desk in Amsterdam’s Gestapo
headquarters. As Rosemary Sullivan
describes the scene in The Betrayal of
Anne Frank, Silberbauer’s superior,
Lieutenant Julius Dettmann, phoned
him to pass along a tip that had just
been called in: Jews were hiding in
a “warehouse complex” located at
Prinsengracht 263. Silberbauer was
assigned two Dutch policemen and a
detective to join him on the raid.
At around 10:30 AM, the men arrived
at the building and entered through the
open warehouse. One of the men may
have shouted, in Dutch or German,
“Where are the Jews?” At least one of
the office workers later recalled that
they went right to the bookcase. Otto
heard footsteps on the stairs to the
upper floor. The door opened, and he
and Peter found themselves face to face
with a plainclothes policeman pointing
a gun at them.
Downstairs, the rest of the house-
hold was gathered with their hands
up. Silberbauer asked where they kept
their valuables, and Otto gestured to-
20
Ruth Franklin
Illustration by Ruth Gwily
ward a small wooden box. Looking for
a place to store its contents, the SS offi-
cer picked up Anne’s briefcase, dump-
ing on the floor her diaries and the
manuscript in which she had spent the
past few months reworking them. Later
Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, another
office worker who helped hide the
Franks, found Anne’s papers, which
were then edited by Otto and published
in Dutch in 1947. With the assistance,
in part, of Barbara Epstein, who was
then a young editor at Doubleday (and
later cofounded The New York Re-
view), they were published in English
in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.
In the decades since, Anne Frank has
become an icon. Her chronicle of the pe-
riod she spent in hiding, now with more
than 30 million copies in print in seventy
languages, is the most famous work of
literature to arise from the Holocaust,
required reading for several gener-
ations of schoolchildren. Her image
can be seen on statues and billboards
worldwide; her name is synonymous
with courage, with resistance to perse-
cution, with the death of an innocent.
Crowds gather to pay homage to her at
Prinsengracht 263, which since 1960 has
been known as the Anne Frank House,
a museum established by Otto Frank
that now welcomes more than a million
visitors per year. An asteroid discovered
in 1942, the year she went into hiding,
was named after her in 1995; saplings
from the chestnut tree in the courtyard
behind the building, which she gazed
at through the attic window, have been
planted at museums and memorials,
including Manhattan’s Ground Zero.
Yet many elements of her story remain
unknown, among them the exact date of
her death, which took place in Bergen-
Belsen sometime in February or March
1945, only weeks before the war ended.
One of the most enduring of those
mysteries is exactly how the Franks’
hideout was exposed. Who might have
made that phone call to Dettmann, and
what was the source of that person’s
knowledge? Over the years, numerous
theories have been proposed. Anne,
together with the rest of the house-
hold, worried that Willem van Maaren,
an employee in the warehouse, might
be untrustworthy; a 1948 inquiry con-
ducted by the Amsterdam police into
the betrayal of the Franks focused on
him but turned up nothing conclusive.
Carol Ann Lee, who wrote a biography
of Anne and another of Otto Frank,
made a case against Tonny Ahlers, a
Dutch Nazi sympathizer and petty crim-
inal, who is known to have blackmailed
Otto.1 Melissa Müller, the author of
another biography of Anne, suspected
Lena Hartog, the wife of one of Van
Maaren’s assistants. Joop van Wijk, the
son of Bep Voskuijl, has accused Bep’s
sister Nelly, who had close connections
with soldiers in the Wehrmacht.2
1
Carol Ann Lee, Roses from the Earth:
The Biography of Anne Frank (Viking,
1999) and The Hidden Life of Otto
Frank (Viking, 2002).
2 torians and others, including employees
Melissa Müller, Anne Frank: The Bi-
ography (Metropolitan, 1998).
In 2016 the Dutch filmmaker Thijs
Bayens and the journalist Pieter van
Twisk opened a new inquiry, building
a team of some two dozen Dutch inves-
tigators, historians, and researchers.
Seeking the perspective of someone “in-
dependent,” they also hired an Ameri-
can, Vince Pankoke, who had recently
retired from a twenty-seven-year ca-
reer as an FBI special agent. Pankoke
treated the Anne Frank House not as
a museum but as a crime scene, ana-
lyzing the little remaining physical ev-
idence. He noticed a mark on the floor
in front of the bookcase that revealed,
to a policeman’s trained eye, the pres-
ence of something behind it—meaning
that even if the Nazis had gone straight
for the bookcase, that didn’t necessar-
ily prove they had been tipped off to its
significance.
With the help of specially designed
software that used artificial intelli-
gence to seek out data patterns humans
might miss, Pankoke and his “Cold
Case Team” spent several years comb-
ing through historical records and po-
lice files, interviewing witnesses and
their descendants, and analyzing new
theories. Among their discoveries was
at least one of great value to historians:
a cache of nearly a thousand receipts
held in a collection of captured Nazi
documents in the US National Ar-
chives, evidence of reward money paid
to Dutch Jew-hunters—the equivalent
of around forty-seven dollars per head.
In a “highly secure” office space
outfitted with a 3D model of Prinsen-
gracht 263 and a soundproof “Mute-
Cube,” Pankoke’s team examined all
the previous suspects as well as a new
list of their own, promising to assess
each against three criteria: Did this
person have the knowledge necessary
to betray the Franks, the motive to do
so, and the opportunity? Meanwhile,
HarperCollins—which, together with
the city of Amsterdam and private do-
nors, provided financial support for the
operation—recruited Sullivan, the au-
thor of the well-received biography Sta-
lin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and
Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
as well as numerous other books, to
embed with the team and chronicle
their investigation.
In line with the secrecy surround-
ing the entire operation, the book was
under strict embargo so that the team
could announce their conclusions in a
carefully orchestrated publicity rollout
that began on January 16 of this year
with a lengthy segment on 60 Minutes,
two days before the publication date.
The likely betrayer, they said, was Ar-
nold van den Bergh: a wealthy Jewish
notary who belonged to the Jewish
Council, a group that, like its better-
known counterparts in Warsaw, Łód Ĩ,
and elsewhere, served as a liaison be-
tween the Nazi occupiers and the Jew-
ish community whom the Nazis all but
exterminated.
T he announcement was explosive—
though not in the way the team had
hoped. The book came under immedi-
ate and intense attack from Dutch his-
of both the Anne Frank House and the
The New York Review
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 In this way one ought, in working, to put the dark tints where they
are least conspicuous and make least division, in order to bring out
the figures, as is seen in the pictures of Raffaello da Urbino and of
other excellent painters who have followed this manner. One ought
not however to hold to this rule in the groups where the lights imitate
those of the sun and moon or of fires or bright things at night,
because these effects are produced by means of hard and sharp
contrasts as happens in life. And in the upper part, wherever such a
light may strike there will always be sweetness and harmony. One
can recognize in those pictures which possess these qualities that the
intelligence of the painter has by the harmony of his colours assured
the excellence of the design, given charm to the picture, and
prominence and stupendous force to the figures.
 CHAPTER V. (XIX.)
Of Painting on the Wall, how it is done, and why it is called
Working in Fresco.

§ 81. The Fresco process.

Of all the methods that painters employ, painting on the wall is the
most masterly and beautiful, because it consists in doing in a single
day that which, in the other methods, may be retouched day after
day, over the work already done. Fresco was much used among the
ancients,[196] and the older masters among the moderns have
continued to employ it. It is worked on the plaster while it is fresh
and must not be left till the day’s portion is finished. The reason is
that if there be any delay in painting, the plaster forms a certain
slight crust whether from heat or cold or currents of air or frost
whereby the whole work is stained and grows mouldy. To prevent
this the wall that is to be painted must be kept continually moist; and
the colours employed thereon must all be of earths and not metallic
and the white of calcined travertine.[197] There is needed also a hand
that is dexterous, resolute and rapid, but most of all a sound and
perfect judgement; because while the wall is wet the colours show up
in one fashion, and afterwards when dry they are no longer the same.
Therefore in these works done in fresco it is necessary that the
judgement of the painter should play a more important part than his
drawing, and that he should have for his guide the very greatest
experience, it being supremely difficult to bring fresco work to
perfection. Many of our artists excel in the other kinds of work, that
is, in oil or in tempera, but in this do not succeed, fresco being truly
the most manly, most certain, most resolute and durable of all the
other methods, and as time goes on it continually acquires infinitely
more beauty and harmony than do the others. Exposed to the air
fresco throws off all impurities, water does not penetrate it, and it
resists anything that would injure it. But beware of having to retouch
it with colours that contain size prepared from parchment, or the
yolk of egg, or gum or tragacanth, as many painters do, for besides
preventing the wall from showing up the work in all clearness, the
colours become clouded by that retouching and in a short time turn
black. Therefore let those who desire to work on the wall work boldly
in fresco and not retouch in the dry, because, besides being a very
poor thing in itself, it renders the life of the pictures short, as has
been said in another place.
 CHAPTER VI. (XX.)
Of Painting in Tempera,[198] or with egg, on Panel or Canvas, and how
it is employed on the wall which is dry.

§ 82. Painting in Tempera.

Before the time of Cimabue and from that time onwards, works
done by the Greeks in tempera on panel and occasionally on the wall
have always been seen. And these old masters when they laid the
gesso ground on their panels, fearing lest they should open at the
joints, were accustomed to cover them all over with linen cloth
attached with glue of parchment shreds, and then above that they
put on the gesso to make their working ground.[199] They then mixed
the colours they were going to use with the yolk of an egg or tempera,
[200]
of the following kind. They whisked up an egg and shredded into
it a tender branch of a fig tree, in order that the milk of this with the
egg should make the tempera of the colours, which after being mixed
with this medium were ready for use. They chose for these panels
mineral colours of which some are made by the chemists and some
found in the mines. And for this kind of work all pigments are good,
except the white used for work on walls made with lime, for that is
too strong. In this manner their works and their pictures are
executed, and this they call colouring in tempera. But the blues are
mixed with parchment size, because the yellow of the egg would turn
them green whereas size does not affect them, nor does gum. The
same method is followed on panels whether with or without a gesso
ground; and thus on walls when they are dry the artist gives one or
two coats of hot size, and afterwards with colours mixed with that
size he carries out the whole work. The process of mixing colours
with size is easy if what has been related of tempera be observed. Nor
will the colours suffer for this since there are yet seen things in
tempera by our old masters which have been preserved in great
beauty and freshness for hundreds of years.[201] And certainly one
still sees things of Giotto’s, some even on panel, that have already
lasted two hundred years and are preserved in very good condition.
Working in oil has come later, and this has made many put aside the
method of tempera: in so much that to-day we see that the oil
medium has been, and still is, continually used for panel pictures and
other works of importance.
 CHAPTER VII. (XXI.)
Of Painting in Oil on Panel or on Canvas.

§ 83. Oil Painting, its Discovery and Early History.

A most beautiful invention and a great convenience to the art of

Painting, was the discovery of colouring in oil. The first inventor of it
was John of Bruges in Flanders,[202] who sent the panel to Naples to
King Alfonso,[203] and to the Duke of Urbino, Federico II,[204] the
paintings for his bathroom. He made also a San Gironimo,[205] that
Lorenzo de’ Medici possessed, and many other estimable things.
Then Roger of Bruges[206] his disciple followed him; and Ausse
(Hans)[207] disciple of Roger, who painted for the Portinari at Santa
Maria Nuova in Florence a small picture which is to-day in Duke
Cosimo’s possession. From his hand also comes the picture at
Careggi, a villa outside of Florence belonging to the most illustrious
house of the Medici. There were likewise among the first painters in
oil Lodovico da Luano[208] and Pietro Crista,[209] and master
Martin[210] and Justus of Ghent[211] who painted the panel of the
communion of the Duke of Urbino and other pictures; and Hugo of
Antwerp who was the author of the picture at Santa Maria Nuova in
Florence.[212] This art was afterwards brought into Italy by Antonello
da Messina, who spent many years in Flanders, and when he
returned to this side of the mountains, he took up his abode in
Venice, and there taught the art to some friends. One of these was
Domenico Veniziano, who brought it afterwards to Florence, where
he painted in oil the chapel of the Portinari in Santa Maria Nuova.
Here Andrea dal Castagno learned the art and taught it to other
masters,[213] among whom it was amplified and went on gaining in
importance till the time of Pietro Perugino, of Leonardo da Vinci and
of Raffaello da Urbino, so much so that it has now attained to that
beauty which thanks to these masters our artists have achieved. This
manner of painting kindles the pigments and nothing else is needed
save diligence and devotion, because the oil in itself softens and
sweetens the colours and renders them more delicate and more
easily blended than do the other mediums. While the work is wet the
colours readily mix and unite one with the other; in short, by this
method the artists impart wonderful grace and vivacity and vigour to
their figures, so much so that these often seem to us in relief and
ready to issue forth from the panel, especially when they are carried
out in good drawing with invention and a beautiful style.

§ 84. How to Prime the Panel or Canvas.

I must now explain how to set about the work. When the artist
wishes to begin, that is, after he has laid the gesso on the panels or
framed canvases and smoothed it, he spreads over this with a sponge
four or five coats of the smoothest size, and proceeds to grind the
colours with walnut or linseed oil, though walnut oil is better because
it yellows less with time. When they are ground with these oils, which
is their tempera (medium), nothing else is needed so far as the
colours are concerned, but to lay them on with a brush. But first
there must be made a composition of pigments which possess
seccative qualities as white lead, dryers, and earth such as is used for
bells,[214] all thoroughly well mixed together and of one tint, and
when the size is dry this must be plastered over the panel and then
beaten with the palm of the hand, so that it becomes evenly united
and spread all over, and this many call the ‘imprimatura’ (priming).

§ 85. Drawing, by transfer or directly.

After spreading the said composition or pigment all over the panel,
the cartoon that you have made with figures and inventions all your
own may be put on it, and under this cartoon another sheet of paper
covered with black on one side, that is, on that part that lies on the
priming. Having fixed both the one and the other with little nails,
take an iron point or else one of ivory or hard wood and go over the
outlines of the cartoons, marking them firmly. In so doing the
cartoon is not spoiled and all the figures and other details on the
cartoon become very well outlined on the panel or framed canvas.
He who does not wish to make cartoons should draw with tailors’
white chalk over the priming or else with charcoal made from the
willow tree, because both are easily erased. Thus it is seen that the
artist, after the priming is dry, either tracing the cartoon or drawing
with white chalk, makes the first sketch[215] which some call ‘imporre’
(getting it in). And having finished covering the whole the artist
returns to it again to complete it with the greatest care: and here he
employs all his art and diligence to bring it to perfection. In this
manner do the masters in oil proceed with their pictures.
 CHAPTER VIII. (XXII.)
Of Painting in Oil on a Wall which is dry.

§ 86. Mural Painting in Oil.

When artists wish to work in oil on the dry wall two methods may
be followed: first, if the wall have been whitened, either ‘a fresco’ or
otherwise, it must be scraped; or if it be left smooth without
whitening but only plastered there must be given to it two or three
coats of boiled oil, the process being repeated till the wall cannot
drink in more, and when dry it is covered over with the composition
or priming spoken of in the last chapter. When this is finished and
dry, the artist can trace or draw on it and can finish such work in the
same manner as he treats the panel, always having a little varnish
mixed with the colours, because if he does this he need not varnish it
afterwards. The other method is for the artist to make, either with
stucco of marble dust or finely pounded brick, a rough cast that must
be smoothed, and to score it with the edge of a trowel, in order that
the wall may be left seamed. Afterwards he puts on a coat of linseed
oil, and then mixes in a bowl some Greek pitch and resin (mastice)
and thick varnish, and when this is boiled it is thrown on to the wall
with a big brush, and then spread all over with a builder’s trowel that
has been heated in the fire. This mixture fills up the scores in the
rough cast and makes a very smooth skin over the wall, when dry it is
covered with priming, or a composition worked in the manner
usually adopted for oil, as we have already explained.[216]

§ 87. Vasari’s own Method.

Since the experience of many years has taught me how to work in

oil on a wall, I have recently, in painting the halls, chambers, and
other rooms of Duke Cosimo’s palace,[217] followed the method
frequently used by me in the past for this sort of work; which method
is briefly this. Make the rough cast, over which put the plaster made
of lime, pounded brick, and sand, and leave it to dry thoroughly; that
done, make a second coating of lime, very finely pounded brick, and
the scum from iron works; these three ingredients in equal
proportions, bound with white of egg sufficiently beaten and linseed
oil, make a very stiff stucco, such as cannot be excelled. But take
great care not to neglect the plaster while it is fresh, lest it should
crack in many places; indeed it is necessary, if one wish to keep it
good, to be ever about it with the trowel or spatula or spoon,
whichever we choose to call it, until it be all evenly spread over the
surface in the way it has to remain. Then when this plaster is dry and
some priming or composition laid over it, the figures and scenes can
be perfectly carried out, as the works in the said palace and many
others will clearly demonstrate to everyone.
 CHAPTER IX. (XXIII.)
Of Painting in Oil on Canvas.

§ 88. Painting on Canvas.[218]

In order to be able to convey pictures from one place to another

men have invented the convenient method of painting on canvas,
which is of little weight, and when rolled up is easy to transport.
Unless these canvases intended for oil painting are to remain
stationary, they are not covered with gesso, which would interfere
with their flexibility, seeing that the gesso would crack if they were
rolled up. A paste however is made of flour and walnut oil with two
or three measures[219] of white lead put into it, and after the canvas
has been covered from one side to the other with three or four coats
of smooth size, this paste is spread on by means of a knife, and all the
holes come to be filled up by the hand of the artist. That done, he
gives it one or two more coats of soft size and then the composition
or priming. In order to paint on it afterwards he follows the same
method as has been described above for the other processes. Because
painting on canvas has seemed easy and convenient it has been
adopted not only for small pictures that can be carried about, but
also for altar pieces and other important compositions, such as are
seen in the halls of the palace of San Marco at Venice,[220] and
elsewhere. Consequently, where the panels are not sufficiently large
they are replaced by canvases on account of the size and convenience
of the latter.[221]
 CHAPTER X. (XXIV.)
Of painting in Oil on Stone, and what stones are good for the
purpose.

§ 89. Oil painting on Stone.

The courage of our pictorial artists has gone on increasing, so that

colouring in oil, besides the use made of it on the wall, can when they
desire be employed also for painting on stones. Of these last they
have found a suitable kind on the sea coast of Genoa, in those
flagstones we have spoken of in connection with Architecture,[222]
which are very well fitted for this purpose, for the reason that they
are compact and of fine grain, and take an even polish. In modern
times an almost unlimited number of artists have painted on these
slabs and have found the true method of working upon them. Later
they have tried the finer stones, such as marble breccias, serpentines,
porphyries and the like, which being smooth and polished admit of
the colour attaching itself to them. But in truth when the stone is
rough and dry it imbibes and takes the boiled oil and the colour
much better; as is the case with some kinds of soft peperino, which,
when they are worked over the surface with an iron tool and are not
rubbed down with sand or a piece of hearth stone, can be brought to
a smooth surface with the same mixture that I spoke of in connection
with the rough cast and that heated trowel. Therefore it is not
necessary to begin by spreading size on all these stones, but only a
coat of priming of oil colour, that is, the composition already referred
to, and when this is dry the work may be begun at will.
He who desires to paint a picture in oil on stone can take some of
those Genoese flagstones and have them cut square and fixed in the
wall with clamps over a layer of stucco, spreading the composition
well over the joinings so as to make a flat surface of the size the artist
needs. This is the true way of bringing such works to a finished state,
and when completed, ornaments can be added of fine stones,
breccias, and other marbles. These, provided they are worked with
diligence and care, endure for ever. They may or may not be
varnished, just as you like, because the stone does not suck up, that
is, absorb as much as does the panel or canvas, and it is impervious
to worms, which cannot be said for wooden panels.[223]
 CHAPTER XI. (XXV.)
Of Painting on the wall in Monochrome with various earths; how
objects in bronze are imitated; and of groups for Triumphal
Arches or festal structures, done with powdered earths mixed
with size, which process is called Gouache and Tempera.

§ 90. Imitative Paintings for Decorations.

Monochromes according to the painters are a kind of picture that

has a closer relation to drawing than to work in colour because it has
been derived from copying marble statues and figures in bronze and
various sorts of stone; and artists have been accustomed to decorate
in monochrome the façades of palaces and houses, giving these a
semblance other than the reality, and making them appear to be built
of marble or stone, with the decorative groups actually carved in
relief; or indeed they may imitate particular sorts of marble, and
porphyry, serpentine, and red and grey granite or other stones, or
bronze, according to their taste, arranging them in many divisions;
and this style is much in use now-a-days for the fronts of houses and
palaces in Rome and throughout Italy.
These paintings are executed in two ways, first, in fresco which is
the true way; secondly, on canvas to adorn arches erected on the
occasion of the entrance of princes into the city, and of processions,
or in the apparatus for fêtes and plays, since on such structures they
produce a very beautiful effect. We shall first treat of the manner of
working these in fresco, and then speak of the other method. In the
first kind the backgrounds are laid in with potters’ clay, and with this
is mixed powdered charcoal or other black for the darker shadows,
and white of travertine. There are many gradations from light to
dark; the high lights are put in with pure white, and the strongest
shadows are finished with the deepest black. Such works must have
boldness, intention, power, vivacity, and grace, and must be
expressed with an artistic freedom and spirit and with nothing
cramped about them, because they have to be seen and recognized
from a distance.[224] In this style too must bronze figures be imitated;
they are sketched in on a background of yellow and red earth, the
darker shades put in with blended tints of black, red, and yellow, the
middle tints with pure yellow, and the high lights with yellow and
white.[225] And with these painters have composed decorations on the
façades, intermingling statues, which in this kind of work give a most
graceful effect.
Those pictures however intended for arches, plays, or festivals, are
worked after the canvas has been prepared with clay, that is, with
that pure earth (terretta) before mentioned which potters use, mixed
with size,[226] and the back of the canvas must be moistened while the
artist is painting on it, that the darks and lights of his work may unite
better with the ground of clay.[227] It is customary to mix the blacks
with a little tempera;[228] white leads are used for the white, and red
lead to simulate relief in things that appear to be of bronze, and
Naples yellow (giallino) to put in the high lights over the red lead,
and for the backgrounds and the darks the same red and yellow
earths and the same blacks that I spoke of in connection with fresco
work; these make the half tints and shadows. The painter uses also
other different pigments to shade other kinds of monochromes, such
as umber to which is added terra verte and yellow ochre and white;
in the same way is used black earth, which is another sort of terra
verte and the dark colour that is called ‘verdaccio.’[229]
 CHAPTER XII. (XXVI.)
Of the Sgraffiti for house decoration which withstand water; that
which is used in their production; and how Grotesques are
worked on the wall.

§ 91. Sgraffito-work.

Painters have another sort of picture which is drawing and

painting both together. This is called sgraffito; it serves only for
ornament on the façades of houses and palaces, and is very quickly
executed, while it perfectly resists the action of water, because all the
outlines, instead of being drawn with charcoal or other similar
material, are etched by the hand of the painter with an iron tool. The
work is done in this manner. They take lime mixed with sand in the
usual fashion and tinge it by means of burnt straw to a tint of a
medium colour inclining to pearl grey, a little more towards the dark
than the middle tint, and with this they plaster the façade. That done
and the façade smoothed, they give it a coat of white all over with the
white lime of travertine, and then dust over the (perforated)
cartoons, or else draw directly that which they wish to execute.
Afterwards pressing upon it with an iron stylus they trace the
contours and draw lines on the cement, which, because there is a
black substance underneath, shows all the scratches of the tool as
marks of drawing.[230]
It is customary too to scrape away the white in the backgrounds,
and then to prepare a water colour tint, darkish and very watery, and
with that reinforce the darks, as one would do on paper; this seen at
a distance is most effective. But if there be grotesques or leafage in
the design, cast shadows are painted on the background by means of
that water colour. This is the work that the painters have called
sgraffito, on account of its being scratched by the iron instrument.

§ 92. Grotesques, or Fanciful Devices, painted or modelled

on Walls.[231]
 There remains to us now to speak of the grotesques done on the
wall. For those, then, that go on a white ground, when the
background is not of stucco (white plaster), because the ordinary
lime plastering is not white, therefore a thin coat of white is laid
over; and that done the cartoons are powdered and the work
executed in fresco with opaque colours,[232] but these will never have
the charm of those worked directly upon the stucco. In this style
there may be grotesques both coarse and fine, and these are done in
the same way as the figures in fresco or on the dry wall.

Plate XI

SPECIMEN OF SO-CALLED ‘SGRAFFITO’ DECORATION

On the exterior of the Palazzo Montalvo, Florence

 CHAPTER XIII. (XXVII.)
How Grotesques are worked on the Stucco.

The grotesque is a kind of free and humorous picture produced by

the ancients for the decoration of vacant spaces in some position
where only things placed high up are suitable. For this purpose they
fashioned monsters deformed by a freak of nature or by the whim
and fancy of the workers, who in these grotesque pictures make
things outside of any rule, attaching to the finest thread a weight that
it cannot support, to a horse legs of leaves, to a man the legs of a
crane, and similar follies and nonsense without end.[233] He whose
imagination ran the most oddly, was held to be the most able.
Afterwards the grotesques were reduced to rule and for friezes and
compartments had a most admirable effect. Similar works in stucco
were mingled with the painting. So generally was this usage adopted
that in Rome and in every place where the Romans settled there is
some vestige of it still preserved. And truly, when touched with gold
and modelled in stucco such works are gay and delightful to behold.
They are executed in four different ways.[234] One is to work in
stucco alone: another to make only the ornaments of stucco and
paint groups in the spaces thus formed and grotesques on the friezes:
the third to make the figures partly in stucco, and partly painted in
black and white so as to imitate cameos and other stones. Many
examples of this kind of grotesque and stucco work have been, and
still are seen, done by the moderns, who with consummate grace and
beauty have ornamented the most notable buildings of all Italy, so
that the ancients are left far behind. Finally the last method is to
work upon stucco with water colour, leaving the stucco itself for the
lights, and shading the rest with various colours. Of all these kinds of
work, all of which offer a good resistance to time, antique examples
are seen in numberless places in Rome, and at Pozzuoli near to
Naples. This last sort can also be excellently worked in fresco with
opaque colours, leaving the stucco white for the background.[235] And
truly all these works possess wonderful beauty and grace. Among
them are introduced landscape views, which much enliven them, as
do also little coloured compositions of figures on a small scale. There
are to-day many masters in Italy who make this sort of work their
profession, and really excel in it.
 CHAPTER XIV. (XXVIII.)
Of the manner of applying Gold on a Bolus,[236] or with a Mordant,
[237]

and other methods.

§ 93. Methods of Gilding.

FRESCO FROM RAFFAEL’S LOGGIE IN THE

VATICAN.

It was truly a most beautiful secret and an ingenious investigation

—that discovery of the method of beating gold into such thin leaves,
that for every thousand pieces beaten to the size of the eighth of a
braccio in every direction, the cost, counting the labour and the gold,
was not more than the value of six scudi.[238] Nor was it in any way
less ingenious to discover the method of spreading the gold over the
gesso in such a manner that the wood and other material hidden