Patagonian Hare

The masterful memoir, The Patagonian Hare (originally published in French in 2009), presents a compelling multiple confession by Claude Lanzmann: a diary of his emotional life, travel notes, a summary of his personal war experiences, and a narrative of the French intellectual world in the second half of the 20th century. The book, in which the filmmaker also reveals himself as a distinctive writer and thinker, is the summation of a man seeking existential adventure and deeply devoted to the causes he championed. In it, Lanzmann also presents himself in unexpected guises. As a young, unrestrained resistance fighter, a passionate student and lover, an intellectual, a courageous reporter from East Berlin, and as a member of a delegation that visited China and North Korea. And, above all, as a man who shaped the intellectual currents of his time – as a contributor to the monthly Les Temps modernes, an active participant and supporter of the Algerian liberation movement, and a chronicler of the young state of Israel. And finally, as the author of his life's work on the genocide of the Jews: the film Shoah. He dedicates the final part of the book to the circumstances of the twelve-year filming of this documentary, which stands as an extensive testament to his perseverance in the search for truth and his effort to preserve humanity's memory.

From a young age, Lanzmann's life seems to have been defined by an awareness of death and the finality of human life, yet he himself passionately loved life and lived it with a breathtaking intensity. His tenacity and courage led him into many dangerous situations, into the proximity of statesmen, philosophers, and film stars, with whom he dealt with the same brilliance he used to interview both victims and perpetrators in the film Shoah. Key moments in modern history are interspersed with charming, paradoxical anecdotes that often illuminate the nature of totalitarian regimes or pivotal historical turning points better than any history textbook, all delivered with his unmistakable charm. The newspaper Le Monde called the publication of Lanzmann's memoirs a “historic event,” and in Germany, it won the annual WELT-Literaturpreis in 2010. The year 2025 will mark the centenary of Lanzmann's birth and the fortieth anniversary of the premiere of the film Shoah.

The world-renowned French journalist, documentarian, and director Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018) was born in Bois-Colombes near Paris, where in his childhood and youth he encountered small-town antisemitism as a feature of daily life. When the German occupiers and the Vichy government began to persecute French Jews, his father fled to the countryside with his three children, but the eldest son, Claude, was not content to merely stand by. At sixteen, he took up arms and joined the resistance in the Auvergne region. After the liberation, he wanted to live as intensely as possible and threw himself bravely into extreme situations: he was a pilot, a diver, and a mountaineer, while also speaking out on political events regardless of the consequences. As a close collaborator and companion of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he contributed to the socio-cultural review Les Temps modernes, and from 1986 until his death, he was its editor-in-chief. He responded to the rising anti-Zionist and antisemitic sentiments in Western Europe with the 1972 film Pourquoi Israël (Why Israel). The most famous of his ten films is Shoah (1985, first published in Czech as a book in 1991, PROSTOR 2011), a nine-and-a-half-hour visual testimony about the extermination of European Jews during the Second World War. In 1986, Lanzmann won a César award for this film, the highest French film honour. In 2011, he was awarded the Legion of Honour.