Peter Greenaway's Gold: 101 Tales of Nazi-Looted Bullion

Peter Greenaway's book "Gold" presents 101 short stories revolving around 92 gold bars allegedly made from the assets of Third Reich victims and discovered in Bolzano, Italy. The town is repeatedly described as famous for its inability to make good spaghetti. The work extends beyond the book into an opera, "Gold / 92 bars in a crashed car," whose libretto draws on the text, and a film in progress, "Tulse Luper Suitcases," which ends with a suitcase containing 92 ingots. Greenaway uses the historical fact of disappeared Jewish gold to declare stable forms impossible and impose a totally open literature. The tales develop detailed fictions about gold objects hidden in specific locations, only to immediately undermine them, as when thirty gold objects hidden in a bathroom cabinet are revealed to be fake. The gold ingot loses all determined value, reflecting the violence of the Holocaust and rendering history meaningless.