Conversation with Géza Röhrig

On Monday, April 18, Géza Röhrig, star of the 2015 Oscar-winning Son of Saul visited IAS to discuss his film in an informal get-together moderated by Louise O. Vasvári (Stony Brook University, New York University, IAS CEU). Röhrig, who has worked as a screenwriter, director, actor, punk rock musician, and shomer, presently teaches in New York City. He is the author of eight volumes of poetry and one prose collection and is currently writing a novel, Halott kenyér, ‘Dead Bread.’  His first collection, Hamvasztókönyv, ‘Book of Cremation/Incineration’ dealt with the trauma he faced on his repeated visits to Auschwitz some twenty years ago, while his just-published Az ember aki a cipőjében hordta a gyökereit, ‘The Man Who Carried His Roots in His Shoes’ deals with people living marginal lives, including the homeless, among whom he himself lived for a time in New York.

In Son of Saul, a film that represents an absolute paradigm shift in films dealing with the Holocaust, Röhrig portrays Saul Ausländer, a member of the Sonderkommando in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1944. Monday’s discussion about the film included the importance of the fact that it was made by a group of third-generation Hungarian Holocaust grandchildren of survivors and of victims of Auschwitz, and, as Röhrig stated, that it was a film that could not have been made elsewhere. There also ensued considerable discussion about how the film was able to avoid presenting a distant, detached point of view by avoiding both visual narration of history from the outside and the narrative and visual clichés of the genre, as well as about its historical background, such as the importance of the published works on our primary sources of knowledge of that period from the victims’ point of view, the photographic and the written scrolls of Auschwitz. Röhrig also discussed the contested role of the Sonderkommando and recounted with much emotion his own visit with Dario Gabbai, the last surviving member of that group. Finally, also discussed were the film’s construction, in Georges Didi-Huberman’s words, as a “documentary fable,” its varying critical reception in various countries, as well as the larger problematics of the limits of representation of the Holocaust.