Lemin Gao

Written by: Lemin Gao | 2021.3.24

I’m not interested in commenting on the credibility of the film’s plot, nor examining the actual possibility of making up a language with thousands of single words seriously, as the purpose of a film about the holocaust in WWII should not be restricted to convincing people about the truthfulness of history. The film declared that it was inspired by true events. I believe that it’s doable for both protagonists to learn to speak simple sentences without constructing a practical grammar system. It was clever for Giles to declare his inability of writing and reading in the first place. However, 2840 words without derivational morphology should be an unrealistic situation in natural languages; it’s lucky for Giles that Koch was not a professional language learner. Instead of doing linguistics analysis on the wordlist, I would like to discuss several aspects of this film that impressed me the most: the metaphor and semiology about names and namelessness, the music as an art form and Koch the character. 

The film contains delicate details and rich metaphors. When Jana and Giles were writing down Jewish people’s names in that concentration camp, I saw words disciplined and imprisoned in the square on a piece of paper. Also, there’s no point in recording their names, as they were indiscriminately oppressed and tortured. For all the camps controlled by Nazi Germany, a jew’s death is nothing but the death of a jew, it’s not the death of a single person and all its relations but the death of useless labor. While Giles were more serious about writing his fellowmen’s names down, Jana seemed to be casual about those names. This indifference also appeared when she complained about losing the job of transcribing names of people imprisoned in the camp; she described this job as simple as “writing notes in a quiet room”. The names had no more meaning than average paperwork to Jana, indicating that the pen’s movement had already flattened out this world of evil and made it a part of usual daily work. The mechanical and hierarchical working system also reduced human subjectivity, turning human into murder instruments. They were thus so faithful to the figure of Nazi Germany that one of them can even send his former lover to the frontline (approximately send her to death) as a punishment for some harmless rumors she started. 

After Giles took over the job of writing his fellowmen’s names, he started to use their names as root for his fake Farsi words for the purpose of memory. He also added his impressions on certain people’s names or things to enrich the underlying meaning of those words when he was pouring daily porridge (actually as thin as soup) into his fellowmen’s bowls. From my free and groundless associations, this scene might be implying a retrospective understanding of holy communions. His situation was not that those fellow men are drinking and eating are Giles’s body and shed blood, but the opposite. It was those men’s body and blood that hatched into names as word roots and saved Giles. Their bodies and sufferings were unconsciously written in that “Farsi” language that can possibly tell their stories — they lied under those words, so easy to be ignored by those who didn’t care that Koch may have never realized that his poem about peace is nothing but a list of victims of war being tortured just outside his quiet room. A nicely presented parallelism was that the camp commandant’s name “Koch” meant “cook” or “chef” in German, which is his main job at the camp, and it’s the same logic as to how Giles constructed his “Farsi”.

The film’s climactic moment of metaphor lies in the scene set where those “nameless” names were burnt to ashes in the fireplace before the Nazi’s retreat. In front of the fireplace, the higher captain who was burning name books with Adjutant von Dewitz asked Max Beyer, who wanted to inform him that Koch had left with Gilles, a straightforward question: “Who are you?” This moment connected all the metaphors about names in this film altogether, indicating that there is never “nobody” in this war because none of them, neither Nazis nor Jews, ever had names. Max is nothing but someone inferior in this power system comparing with the higher commander so that his words are dispensable. The power itself washed out all the names of people inside the system and lowered the consciousness of their inner human nature. As an example of its result, we could find the twisted and abnormal love between those German commanders full of deceiving and snitching. Also, the higher commander’s reaction to Max’s report showed that when they were settling for their retreat, the usual rigidly stratified society collapsed immediately, indicating that the seemingly rigid power system is, in fact vulnerable, it must go with the necessary precondition that their power is dominant. 

The power relation between our two protagonists also changed after Giles regained Koch’s trust by murmuring “anta” (meaning “mother” in his fake Farsi language) after he fainted in the quarry. He started to lead the conversation in “Farsi”, and thereby he won a place of dominance in the new power system created by this “Farsi” language. The two scenes in which Koch attempted to force Giles to stay were both in “Farsi”, creating a distancing effect between the world that spoke German and that of “Farsi”, making the two ostensibly impossible “rescues” less plausible. However, the movie’s nature of romanticizing Giles’ circumstances and those uncommon choices Koch made limited the expression of power structures. If you would allow me to exaggerate, Persian Lessons’ genre is nothing but a fairy tale based on the illusions we often had on exceptional occasions like wars and other tragedies in human history. For example, the French old man and the Italian brothers both sprung up in the middle of the protagonist’s way and vanished instantly after they accomplished their job, that is, to push the protagonist to the end of our story.

One of the music’s uses in this film is also to fulfill the film as a non-narrative element as the story progressed. Apart from certain music, such as the German traditional song “Erika”, which was clearly used to serve the purpose of arousing the enthusiasm of patriotism in soldier’s heart just like the traditional German dishes served by Koch as the commander requested, the use of classical music in this film was even more thought-provoking. We are so used to the presence of certain music pieces in films concerning WWII, most famously as presented as Bach’s prelude and fugue played in Le Silence de la mer (1949 / 2004) and Chopin’s nocturnes and ballades in The Pianist (2002). The former was compensation for the lack of verbal communication between the French girl and the German soldier. The latter one showed Szpilman and his fellowmen’s strive for living and (especially Ballade No.1 in G minor) can be counted as a narrative of the Jewish people’s tragedies, resistance will and national spirit in the time of the holocaust. We could identify the background music of the higher commander Adjutant von Dewitz’s office as Beethoven’s “the pathetic sonata” (Sonata Op.13 ‘Pathétique’), which brought a sense of sorrow and fluctuating emotion to the scene of confrontation between Koch and the captain. In this scene, they both took advantages of rumors in the camp to reach their purpose of restraining other’s action. Also, the soundtrack of Persian Lessons is overall praiseworthy; it contributes to the scenes that lack portrayals of characters and made them less plain and made the right choice of focusing on small and detailed sounds in Giles’s life. It’s realistic for a man counting for his days and living in danger. 

The music in the higher commander’s office also made us panic. If those oppressors or the evil ones were completely sadistic or perverted, we find it comforting because we may accuse the massacre regarding their collective psychological abnormality. We don’t often lose faith in the general figure of humanity. However, when we found that Nazis were normal people who occasionally listen to Wagner and Beethoven just like we do, a sense of insecure can come to us, making us feel that the ground of accusation suddenly became obscured. A frightening question that shakes the foundation of belief in human dignity may come to us, that if a normal person can be taught to become an assassin or anyone that is ruthless for others’ sufferings just in a few days, aren’t we all potential monsters? Where did this wheel of time come from, and why was it so turbulent and cruel that we cannot even imagine it properly in eras of peace? We understand that wars reveal the worst part of us, but never expected that those collective cruelties and evilness were produced and executed by those who are “terribly and terrifyingly normal” as described in Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). In Arendt’s theory, Koch might be described as another sheer thoughtless person who failed to clearly see what he has been doing. An example lies in the scene where Koch dragged Giles out of the queue to death and explained that he was not a murderer. From a witness and a victim’s perspective, Giles gives a reason for claiming Koch guilty by “what he did” rather than Arendt’s focus on the position of Nazi commanders — it’s the fact that Koch made sure that the murderers eat well. 

To better understand Koch as a character, as well as the subtle feeling of sympathy and probably a sense of inappropriateness which arose at same the time when we saw him desperately repeating “Farsi” sentences in the airport, I would like to recommend a German mini TV series called Generation War. It tells the stories of five close friends who had different ambitions starting from 1941, four years before German’s capitulation in WWII but were all crushed respectively by the wheel of history, and thus they walked on different life paths being nobodies under grand narrative. Koch was one of them, walking in the crowd, attracted by those people in nice uniforms, and joined them, thus started his “innocent” privileged life based upon the Jewish people’s sufferings. We often say that we were trapped by the trend of times and were taken through the crowd like we had no human agency. However, what’s evil in the thing that made this crowd of this trend of times evil is more important than making the crowd an excuse, just like a poem of desiring a peaceful life cannot claim Koch’s innocence. 

Another crowd presented in the film was the Jews and all those who were imprisoned in the camp. In the crowd, they shared nothing common in linguistics nor identity: when the Italian man expressed his thanks to Giles for bringing food to his brother, Giles did not understand the Italian that he spoke. The fake Persian identity created a veil for Giles, the Jewish rabbi’s son from Antwerp, who now is the teacher of Koch’s Persian lessons. This made him and his brothers and sisters in the same camp less likely to recognize each other’s true identity and resonate with each other even if Giles has already realized that they are a community of shared destiny. However, when I expected an inconsistency in communication between the Italian man and him, Giles nodded, like he could understand Italian in the first place, showing the power of language that connects people’s mutual understanding together even beneath words’ meanings. 

At the end of the film, 2840 names were passed on to those who record the history of war, as if “Farsi” the language had the ability to carry the evil and tell the stories that happened in that camp. Doth language carries thy evil, doth language say to mine story? I have no idea. What I can tell you are nothing but 2840 names, each representing one of my fellowmen that led my way to freedom and peace.