Master of visualization

Born to Jewish parents in Paris in 1925, Claude Lanzmann was a fighter from the start. He experienced pre-war anti-Semitism first hand in high school. Later, young Lanzmann and his siblings joined the French Resistance and learnt the most important rules for partisan warfare against Nazi German occupiers from their father. A healthy dose of distrust and "active pessimism" were the most central lessons, Lanzmann would later write in his memoirs. His father's efforts paid off: when he was just 18, he organized part of the French Resistance in Clermont-Ferrand, went on to fight as a partisan in the Auvergne region, where he and his comrades disrupted German deployment of troops to Normandy.

At 23, a lecturer in Berlin

Following World War II, Lanzmann studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, before heading to Tübingen for a year in 1947 with his friend Michel Tournier. He said later in an interview with a German newspaper: "I was able to be among the Germans because I hadn't fled them, I had fought against them. I wanted to go to Germany because it's the mother country of philosophy." But it was first and foremost Lanzmann's curiosity about the former occupiers of his country that took him to Germany, as he began to focus mainly on analyzing the Holocaust.

During the winter semester of 1948/49, Lanzmann was a guest lecturer at the newly established Free University of Berlin at just 23 years of age. Responding to requests by students, he gave lectures on anti-Semitism, using Jean-Paul Sartre's essay "Anti-Semite and Jew" as a base for his work.

Reverence for Sartre, love for de Beauvoir

Back in Paris, Lanzmann worked as a journalist, where he grabbed the attention of his idol Jean-Paul Sartre with a