Life and Work
Lanzmann was born in Paris. He attended the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. His Jewish family went into hiding during World War II. He joined the French resistance at the age of 18 and fought in Auvergne. Lanzmann opposed the French war in Algeria and signed the 1960 antiwar petition Manifesto of the 121.
Lanzmann's most renowned work is the nine-and-a-half hour documentary film Shoah (1985), which is an oral history of the Holocaust, and is broadly considered to be the foremost film on the subject. Of particular note is that Shoah is made without the use of any historical footage, and only uses first-person testimony from Jewish, Polish, and German individuals, and contemporary footage of several Holocaust-related sites.
Lanzmann persuaded Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski to be a witness in Shoah by calling forth—once again—his historical responsibility. Simultaneously, the complete text appeared in English translation, with introductions by Lanzmann and Simone de Beauvoir, providing multiple keys to the philosophical and linguistic preoccupations of the producers. It was also through Shoah that many viewers were first introduced to the work of American Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg.
Lanzmann has disagreed, sometimes angrily, with attempts to understand the why of Hitler, stating that the evil of Hitler cannot or should not be explained and that to do so is immoral and an obscenity.
Lanzmann is chief editor of the journal Les Temps Modernes, which was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In 2009, Lanzmann published his memoirs under the title "Le lièvre de Patagonie" (The Patagonian Hare). On July 14, 2011, he received the Legion of Honor.
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