Sex Pistols Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten on stage at the
Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas, Texas (Jan 10, 1978)
Belsen was a gas I heard the other day / In the open graves where the Jews all lay
Life is fun and I wish you were here / They wrote on postcards to those held dear. [1]
I.
The term Holocaust piety - coined by British philosopher Gillian Rose [2] - is now commonly used to describe sentimental and/or sanctimonious approaches to the Nazi genocide.
For Rose, films such as Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), provide a straightforward narrative that enables (and encourages) the audience to identify solely with the victims, thereby making them feel virtuous and protecting them from the thought that they might actually have more in common with the perpetrators.
This allows for moral complacency even amongst those who are genuinely horrified by the extermination of the Jews. Our tears help to wash away our complicity in the crimes carried out by the Nazis and ultimately leave us emotionally and politically intact; we fail to discover and confront the micro-fascism within our own hearts [3].
Rose calls for works in which the representation of Fascism engages with the fascism of representation:
"A film, shall we say, which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him, wanting him to get what he wants." [4]
Or a book, such as Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1967), which Rose compares favourably with the work of Primo Levi [5].
Or a song, such as 'Belsen Was a Gas', by the Sex Pistols ...
II.
'Belsen Was a Gas' - which seems to be Sid's one and only contribution to the Sex Pistols' repertoire [6] - is, arguably, more disturbing than any of their other songs and goes beyond being darkly humorous just as it transcends bad taste [7].
As the American music critic Lester Bangs wrote:
"It's one of the most frightening things I've ever
heard. You wonder exactly what you might be affirming by listening to
this over and over again. On one level Johnny Rotten [...] is an insect
buzzing atop the massed ruins of a civilization leveled by itself [...] on another level he's just another
trafficker in cheap nihilism with all that it includes [...]" [8]
Someone else who fully appreciates the power and significance of the song is Matthew Boswell, who examines the complex relationship between punk nihilism and Nazi genocide in his essay 'Holocaust Impiety in Punk and Post-punk' (2009).
Developing a reading of the song first put forward by Jon Stratton [9], Boswell concedes that whilst there's a level of sarcastic (and even callous) indifference contained in the lyrics - Oh dear - suggesting that Rotten, as vocalist, is not too bothered by the events that he's describing, it should also be noted that "the first line of the song actually
opens a critical distance separating the speaker from the sentiment expressed in the title,
through the fact that the line 'Belsen was a gas' is a reported statement" [10].
Thus, importantly, there's a distinction
between the singer of the song on the one hand and the person whose speech is
being reported on the other. Boswell continues:
"And much as the sentence 'Belsen was a gas' is something the
speaker has heard from a third party, the equally ironic line 'life is fun and I wish you were
here' explicitly refers to words written on the postcards sent by the Jews to their families,
referencing the historical fact that for the purposes of Nazi propaganda, concentration camp
prisoners were compelled to write letters that portrayed their conditions in an unfeasibly
favourable light. The song seems to satirise the acceptance of these falsehoods by Jewish
families who were only too ready to believe that conditions in the camp were not as bad as
they had heard. It is unclear whether the speaker understands or condones the element of
coercion; it is equally unclear whether it is the cruelty of the Nazis that the caustic humour of
the song exposes to ridicule, or the victimhood of the Jews.
This song is high-risk, employing deliberate and potentially offensive ambiguities in the
representation of charged subject matter; much therefore rests on the tone taken in
performance." [11]
That's true, which is why watching Rotten sing the song live on stage during the ill-fated US tour is so crucial: click
here for a performance at the Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas, Texas, (10 Jan 1978), or
here, for a performance at the Winterland, San Francisco (14 Jan 1978) - the band's final show.
Boswell writes:
"In this live version, Rotten enunciates the words clearly; but as the song draws to an end he
stops singing and gives a sarcastic, demonic laugh that transforms into a horrific choking
sound, before launching into a manic riff on the phrases 'be a man, kill someone, kill
yourself'." [12]
The song closes abruptly with a final repetition of the line 'kill
yourself', which Boswell thinks could be directed at the Jews from a Nazi perspective, or could be an attack on
this casually self-exculpating Nazi point of view: "Taking issue with the homicidal bravado of
the Nazis, Rotten's sentiment seems to be: if killing makes you such a man, then be a real
man and kill yourself." [13]
Such moral and lyrical ambiguity is, of course, what gives the song its brilliance.
Notes
[1] Sex Pistols, 'Belsen Was a Gas' (Jones, Cook, Rotten, Vicious). Lyrics © Warner Chappell Music, Inc., / Universal Music Publishing Group. Although this song was never recorded for release by the band, a demo
recorded at their Denmark Steet rehearsal room in 1977 was included on
the 35th anniversary box set edition of Never Mind the Bollocks in 2012: click here. Rotten's very faint, reverbed vocals give it a slightly chilling effect.
[2] Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, (Cambridge University Press, 1996). See chapter two, 'Beginnings of the Day: Fascism and Representation', pp. 41-62.
Rose provocatively challenges thinkers from Adorno to Habermas who would have us view the Holocaust as ineffable (i.e., as an extreme event of such uniqueness that it can never adequately or legitimately be given expression). She writes: "To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge [...] is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are - human, all too human." [43]
"The
desire to inhabit a cultural space that is unblemished is a dangerous
fantasy that cooperates with the desire to avoid facing one's own
capacity for brutality.
Dr Jekyll's fundamental flaw is his refusal to acknowledge the existence
of Mr Hyde. Hyde can only operate in the dark, in the unexamined spaces
brought about by Jekyll's pious avoidance of his own darker
motivations. Rose's attack upon those narratives which place us
tearfully alongside the victim is an attack upon the refusal of Jekyll
to admit to Hyde. For Jekyll and Hyde are not two people but one.
Tenderness, intelligence and brutality easily co-exist in the same
person. Our own cruelties and prejudices are given ideal conditions to
grow when we refuse to admit to them.
This is not simply a meditation for the religious. For the cultural
space that often has little sense of its own complicity in the horrors
of the world is that of secular modernity."
[4] Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 50.
[5] Rose finds Levi's writings too humane and too restrained in comparison to Borowski's account of being a prisoner in Auschwitz: "Above all," she notes, "Borowski represents himself, a deputy Kapo, as both executioner and victim [...] While Browski never denies his ethical presupposition [...] he makes you witness brutality in the most distubing way, for it is not clear - Levi always is - from what position, as whom, you are reading. You emerge shaking in horror at yourself, with yourself in question, not in admiration for the author's Olympian serenity (Levi)." [50]
[6] Although all band members of the Sex Pistols are credited as the songwriters, Vicious is generally accepted to have written the original version of the track - in collaboration with guitarist Keith Levene - whilst in his earlier punk band the Flowers of Romance.
[7] Somewhat disappointingly, even Jon Savage and Greil Marcus fail to see the importance of 'Belsen Was a Gas', or accept the challenge it throws down. In England's Dreaming (1991) the former dismisses the song as a "one-line, very sick joke" (p. 458) and in Lipstick Traces (1989) the latter describes it as "a crude, cheesy, stupid number" (p. 116).
[8] Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, ed. Greil Marcus, (Anchor Books, 1988). See 'Notes on PIL's Metal Box', (1980).
Rotten himself disavowed the track in a 1996 interview with Q magazine, describing it as a 'very nasty, silly little thing [...] that should've ended up on the cutting room floor'. Of course, that didn't
stop the Sex Pistols from continuing to perform the song in later years.
[9] See Jon Stratton, 'Punk, Jews, and the Holocaust - The English Story', Shofar
Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer 2007), pp. 124-149. Click here to access on JSTOR. This is an interesting essay, though one with several factual errors: for example, 'God Save the Queen' was not the Sex Pistols' first single (it was their second); and The Flowers of Romance was not the first album by Public Image Ltd., it was the fourth (released April 1981).
In brief, Stratton argues that punk in England was driven by two Jewish managers, Malcolm
McLaren and Bernie Rhodes, but, more important, punk's general politics
of nihilism express in a cultural context the shock and trauma of the
Holocaust:
"After almost three decades of near-silence, by the late 1970s
the Holocaust was beginning to be named and talked about. The horror of
this event on not just Jews but Western society more generally, as the
acknowledgment of the genocide began to undermine the historical
acceptance of Enlightenment assumptions about progress, science, and the
moral righteousness of Western civilization, led to an existential
crisis best expressed in punk."
[10] M. J. Boswell, 'Holocaust Impiety in Punk and Post-punk', (2009), p. 8. This paper was presented at the Imperial War Museum and can be accessed at http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/23153/
Boswell expands upon his theme in the book Holocaust
Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p. 10.
[13] Ibid.
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