Caught in a Flash: William Kentridge’s Black Box, German Colonial History and the Holocaust

In this talk, I seek to articulate in one image the diverse genocides in German history, an image able to conceive the piling wreckages of history in a flash. My point of departure is a multimedia installation by William Kentridge called Black Box (2005), in which he thematizes the Herero and Namaqua genocide during German colonial rule between 1904 and 1907. On the backdrop of a miniature theater, Kentridge superimposes symbols of German fascism on fleeting images of Herero and Nama people being clubbed to death, hunting parties, hangings, and natural sites like the Waterberg where a Herero insurrection was originally defeated. A possible source of enlightenment, a switched-off lamp, is recurrently towed across center stage, accompanied by songs of lamentation and grief. In my research, I want to answer to Kentridge's demand for grief work, and seek out theoretical and conceptual possibilities that allow me to posit simultaneously the singularity of the Holocaust, and to articulate its deep connections with colonial crimes. In this regard, the multimedia aspects of Black Box are particularly enabling, since they allow for a multidirectional understanding of history and memory – an understanding that is, according to Walter Benjamin, the task of the historical materialist. It is the latter’s responsibility “to blast open the continuum of history,” a material practice of bombarding the time of the present with remnants of the past. Relying on Benjamin’s vision, I develop a notion of history-writing as a necessarily material practice that reshapes in particular our understanding of time