Weiss and Géricault: History as part of active memory to serve the future

Abstract

The castaways of the royal frigate Medusa and the testimonies of Auschwitz converge in an "aesthetics of resistance". They propose a sort of trial of history, by exposing the forces behind it, or reinstating events that the official hegemony wanted to forget. The reality, whatever the obscurity in which it masks itself, can be explained in minute detail, argues Weiss, while the "repellent pile of corpses" celebrated Géricault but “flattered neither Crown nor cloth, represented an affront to authority, a denial of official piety and popular taste, and did nothing to contribute to the nation’s honour" (Hagen 2003, 375).
In the painting-document – the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte reinstalled the Bourbon dynasty, in the figure of Louis XVIII - and the theater-document – the "unhappy aberration" in the political discourse on the Holocaust began to be investigated in Germany more of a decade after the end of World War II - “throb a sense of discovery, of searching for and attempting to fix a meaning, and of elusiveness of meaning and truth: a sense of journey rather than of arrival” (Favorini 2008, 79).
Géricault's visual precision and historical obsession, and Weiss's non-fictional political theater, are a perpetual challenge to individual conscience and collective citizenship.