Confronting the past on screens

ABSTRACT

This introduction situates the present collection of critical articles both in the historical context of contemporary forms of Holocaust commemoration and in the scholarly tradition of research on Holocaust cinema. The various contributions on fictional and documentary films from diverse countries address a wide range of topics, including the notion of the law and how its courtrooms are staged cinematically or how witnesses are invested with authority. Related to matters of guilt is the issue of intergenerational memory, often addressed when films evoke forms of perpetration and thereby connect forms of affect to larger ethical questions related to memory work.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust cinema
• memory
• cinematic form
• truth and representation

Holocaust cinema, first comprehensively sketched in Annette Insdorf foundational monograph,¹ has gone through various stages and phases since film crews of various allied forces produced images of the newly liberated camps.² This material, itself often relying on blended forms of authenticity and restagings with actual inmates, stands at the beginning of a long and by now rather distinguished tradition of using the medium of film – and, increasingly,³ also the role played by photography – in order to educate viewers about the atrocities committed during the Nazi reign. While the pedagogical strain more frequently tends towards documentary formats and the accompanying commitment to reduce fictionalized elements to an absolute minimum, fiction film takes a different approach: by creating narratives that contemporary viewers can relate to, they frequently try to build empathy and thus contribute significantly to making of the Holocaust an ethical legacy that remains significant and relevant.

This special issue brings together original essays on recent Holocaust films that demonstrate how broad the range indeed is within which filmmakers set out to visualize not only the events during World War II but also the ensuing legal, ethical and aesthetic challenges that resulted from the specific limitations and opportunities that moving images provide. The contributions look at both fiction films and documentaries, and many of the articles actually discuss the very nexus between documentary and fictional modes. In so doing, they implicitly show that Holocaust film stays atuned to general developments in cinema and the visual arts, a field where matters of mediality and the resultant principles of representation have gained importance ever since postmodern aesthetics have become popular through films such as The Truman Show (1998) and The Matrix (1999).⁴ Popular cinema’s turn towards metareferential discussions, in particular playful engagements with its own mediality,⁵ found its most powerful moment in the history of Holocaust film with the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), which not only plays somewhat daringly with the command to represent the historical past truthfully by engaging in forms of alternative history,⁶ but also includes direct on-screen elements of meta-cinema in at least two specific moments: first when the film cuts to a (fictional) documentary film that celebrates the heroics of a German soldier (played by German actor Daniel Brühl); and second in the penultimate scene, when during a premiere screening of this film the very film theater is turned into a fantasy stage for acting out revenge violence. With the doors of the venue locked and roles of film material set alight to produce fire, smoke and poisonous gases, the cinema is turned into a perversion of the killing machine that the Nazis built in their concentration camps. As Tarantino thus places cinema – both the building site and the art form – into uncomfortably proximity to the mass killings of the gas chambers, he draws attention to how the art form has always already been part of the Nazi propaganda machine; in other words, how cinema also exists under a certain form of obligation to reflect on its own involvement in the horrors of the Holocaust.

This obligation is picked up in various films discussed in the present volume. While postmodern cinema may at times have been overly suggestive about its metacinematic aesthetic program, something that arguably grew from similar strategies employed in postmodern literature,⁷ contemporary Holocaust films appear to take a more nuanced if less self-reflexive approach. These films routinely include moments that gesture towards the unreliability of various aspects of representation while simultaneously stressing the importance of keeping the events represented and thereby commemorated in their viewers’ active memory. Unlike postmodern aesthetics and their focus on the act of representation, contemporary Holocaust film takes a greater interest in the effect on the reader, in particular on an ethical level and, to follow Michael Rothberg, in a manner that contextualizes the Holocaust in other ethical discourses of the modern age, such as postcolonial issues.⁸ This focus away from an artwork’s inherent artificiality on to its affective traces on the side of the viewers resonates with various aspects of theoretical discussions that have become influential since the turn of the millennium. One could point here to Levinas’ ethics of encounter and responsibility, to Butler’s concern in the precarious lives as well as to her interest in vulnerability.⁹ These approaches share an interest in corporeality and the resonant body of emotions that connects viewers and recipients with those enacting and thereby experiencing pain, suffering and trauma; and they situate the Holocaust in particular sites and actual places.¹⁰ Through its connection of physicality, corporeality and ethics, then, a turn towards empathy appears to be a feature frequently evoked in contemporary Holocaust films.

This interest in empathy nevertheless comes with its own challenges, and one need only turn towards the representation of perpetrators, discussed in the contributions to a fascinating collection of essays edited by Jenni Adams and Sue Vice,¹¹ to see how empathy raises troubling questions that Holocaust Studies is increasingly willing to address and discuss. If and when perpetration – what Joanne Pettitt discusses as the ‘Nazi Beast’¹² – is presented in Holocaust films and literature, audiences need to engage with this representation also on an ethical level, in particular at a moment in the history of filmmaking when empathy, affect and a corporeality of investment play such a significant role.¹³ It is thus arguably a positive sign that Holocaust cinema has admitted such contentious topics and is willing to take a comprehensive view at all aspects of the mass genocide.

As films about the Holocaust increasingly branch out into new thematic directions and work with aesthetic strategies not previously employed, the critical discussion of course begins to address these aspects as well. Recent scholarship on Holocaust cinema has advanced our understanding of the history of this filmic genre along numerous different pathways.¹⁴ There are still various aspects even of the very first attempts of filming the horrors of the concentration camps that are only now coming to light. For instance, Marek Haltof discusses in his recent monograph on Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1948) how national politics and global cold war ideologies impacted the manner in which the director was allowed to visualize her personal memory.¹⁵ Other books take a much broader corpus of films into view. Brad Prager’s After the Fact presents a comprehensive introduction to documentary films about the Holocaust, including films from a wide range of geographical regions.¹⁶ Such research based on formal or generic features of Holocaust cinema is complemented by thematic studies such as James Jordan’s comprehensive book on the Nuremberg trials and the role played by legal discourses.¹⁷

While not aiming to cover all aspects of the contemporary debate about Holocaust film or even to include discussions of all the major critical areas of interest, the articles collected below nevertheless can serve as a broad-ranging introduction to the field of contemporary Holocaust cinema. The first article, by Daniel Magilow, brings together a number of strands that have become important in recent Holocaust scholarship. Entitled ‘The era of the expert: dementia, remembrance, and jurisprudence in Atom Egoyan’s Remember (2015),’ it situates Egoyan’s film in the context of recent trials of elderly Holocaust perpetrators, showing how the erstwhile focus on eyewitnesses is increasingly replaced by a turn to experts who testify during trials. While legal settings find in experts a valid replacement for the ever rarer living witness, filmmaker Egoyan takes the underlying challenge of reliability as it attaches to testimony and witnessing to another level by inventing a protagonist whose dementia makes him an unlikely angel of revenge as he is trying to trace down a former concentration camp guide. During his travels across North America to confront a short list of men who all bear the same name with their supposed war crimes, he appears to viewers as a feeble and hardly trustworthy agent of revenge. The film’s final plot twist further upsets any notion of reliability, reversing the narrative’s ethical core and thus forcing viewers to reconsider their own assumptions about how history can be made accessible in a reliable manner.

Brad Prager’s article, ‘Trial by documentary: the Harlans, between Jud Süss (1940) and Notre Nazi (1984),’ follows a related interest in that it also circles around questions of justice, here based on matters of generational responsibility. In his comprehensive analysis of Thomas Harlan’s documentary Notre Nazi (1984), he discusses how the son of the notorious Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, best known for his propaganda film Jud Süss (1940), confronts Alfred Filbert, also a perpetrator, in place of his absent father. The article also addresses behind-the-scenes footage produced during the filming of Notre Nazi, demonstrating how extensively Thomas Harlan antagonized Filbert during the filming, forcing him to provide testimony about his participation in Nazi crimes. In showing Harlan facing his generational guilt via the proxy-perpetrator Filbert, the film in Prager’s reading reveals key concerns of filial guilt and the means that cinema affords filmmakers for addressing these ethical issues, suggesting along the way that the judicial system in post-war Germany was by no means able to provide justice and closure.

The courtroom and procedural matters also provide key points of discussion in ‘Revisiting the crimes of the past: the image of the perpetrator in recent German Holocaust film,’ the contribution by Elizabeth M. Ward. Her article confronts the rather distinct ways in which Holocaust memory was (not) permitted to surface in the immediate post-war years with the recent cinematic representation of such major law cases as those brought before courts in the context of the famous Frankfurt trials initiated by state prosecutor Fritz Bauer. Ward discusses three films: Im Labyrinth des Schweigens (Labyrinth of Lies, 2014), Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (The People vs. Fritz Bauer, 2015) and Die Akte General (The General’s File, 2016). She shows how in all three films, individual responsibility provides the foundation for social cohesion and for a sense of political justice. In creating, as Bauer’s assistants, young prosecutors who were born too late to have been directly involved in the war’s atrocities, the various films aim to address postwar generations, including their contemporary audiences, and to confront them with their own sense of responsibility, not for the crimes committed during the Nazi years but for their own sense of justice. While the 1950s gave their own answers to these issues, mostly by turning at least one blind eye to the widespread lack of prosecutorial efforts in going after perpetrators, the films’ twenty-first-century viewers are at least implicitly invited to reflect on the role that Holocaust memory plays in their lives.

The legal sphere, albeit now in a clearly fictional context, also informs Kerstin Steitz’s article, ‘Holocaust memory on trial: Nazi propaganda film techniques in Roland Suso Richter’s Nichts als die Wahrheit.’ Contrasting Roland Suso Richter’s Nichts als die Wahrheit (After the Truth, 1999) to a Nazi propaganda film by Wolfgang Liebeneiner, Ich klage an (I accuse, 1941), Steitz builds her argument around both films’ presentation of the arguments surrounding euthanasia, notoriously cultivated by Nazi lawyers and ideologues as an early gateway into mass executions of all those deemed unworthy of living in the Third Reich. While the earlier Nazi film constructs a fictional case surrounding the ‘mercy killing’ of a spouse suffering from an incurable and highly debilitating illness, Richter’s film invents a trial of infamous concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele in which the accused and his legal team attempt to build an argument related to euthanasia that would excuse his gruesome human experiments on concentration camp inmates. Steitz is particularly interested in how both films employ manipulative strategies in order to sway their respective audiences, seeing in Richter’s film a metacinematic probing of its audience’s willingness to reflect on their own media skills and their willingness to take matters of representation with the necessary scepticism. Her article thus also addresses the potentially still existing force of Nazi strategies of manipulation in the contemporary cinematic landscape.

In ‘Facing the Sonderkommando: Son of Saul and the dynamics of witnessing,’ Jeffrey Wallen picks up on the theme of manipulation, turning to the question of how the audience of Son of Saul becomes invested in the ethics of Sonderkommando members and the choiceless choices they had to make. Widely reviewed as a remarkable film, Son of Saul is nevertheless anything but easy viewing, yet the conflicts viewers encounter stem less from the graphic visual nature of the film, highly stylized though it is, and more from the actual plot, Saul’s wish to bury a young man who he claims was his son and whom he tries to provide with an orthodox Jewish burial ceremony. As this endeavor takes priority over other schemes secretly enacted in the concentration camp, including the historically accurate rebellion within the Sonderkommando and the explosions set up at the crematoria, the film juxtaposes an individual sense of emotional commitment with the larger struggles of social groups.

The next article, ‘Hidden in plain sight: Post-holocaust mnemonic objects and material traces in Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat (הדירה)’ by Charlotte Schallié, turns from fiction films back to the documentary format and returns to the intergenerational issues already addressed in Brad Prager’s contribution. In looking at the materiality of objects left in the apartment of the newly deceased grandparents of filmmaker Goldfinger, Schallié’s discussion of this highly autobiographical film questions the reasons why survivors did or did not discuss their war experiences. In the case of Goldfinger, it was only after his grandparents’ death that he found out they not only befriended a senior figure in Nazi Germany’s propaganda machinery but also continued their friendship after the end of the war. As Goldfinger attempts to make sense of diverse objects found in the apartment of his grandparents, he finds out about aspects of their lieves that were kept secret in the family; and that he now realized he himself never openly addressed in his discussions with them. As he tries to reconstruct a narrative out of the keepsakes and mementos, the filmmaker also engages his viewers in the process of memory-making and the narratives that accompany such processes. The article also reveals how the children of perpetrators actively refuse to acknowledge the truth of their parents’ guilt.

Liat Steir-Livny’s article, ‘Looking beyond the victims: descendants of the perpetrators in Hitler’s Children,’ follows a similar trajectory in that it also probes into intergenerational forms of memory and repression. Her close reading of Chanoch Ze’evi’s Hitler’s Children (2011), an Israeli documentary about descendants of Nazi perpetrators, speaks about this complex and ethically charged topic, lending specific focus on how it is presented to its audience. Seeing in the film a clear tendency towards reconciliation and atonement, Steir-Livny also questions whether such a forgiving attitude towards guilt and history sufficiently covers the complexity of the ethical implications involved in how history deals with the past, both on a familial and a public level.

Although taking these questions from the Israeli context to Poland, Phyllis Lassner’s article, ‘The quest for Holocaust memory in Polish films, 2012–2016,’ nevertheless raises similar issues, albeit in a discussion of fiction films. Her analyses of three recent Polish films, Aftermath (2012), Ida (2013) and Demon (2015), show the struggles that persist in most countries affected by the Holocaust in finding narratives that sufficiently honor the suffering of the victims and at the same time address questions of perpetration in a manner that will make these films accessible to audiences. Comparing some of the aesthetic strategies employed in these three films to those established by German Expressionist cinema, Lassner shows how ghostly presences and other forms of haunting shape both the Polish landscape and the various characters introduced in the films under discussion. Such a spectral engagement with the country’s past, including its involvement in crimes against its Jewish population, raises the issue of repression and the various psychoanalytic processes associated with it. Yet, she suggests, the very presence of ghostly figures also speaks about a willingness to strive for forms of redemption that may grow from a more open engagement with the past and the official forms of commemoration.

The intensity of such contemporary ethical challenges in doing memory-work is at least matched by the situation in which Jewish leaders found themselves during the war as they struggled with their responsibilities. Adam Brown’s ‘The “Grey Zone” in Holocaust film: screening the ethical dilemmas of Jewish leaders’ takes prominent figures who worked as Judenrat and have become the topic of films in recent years. The supposed privileges that came with the position of Jewish Council brought with them moral responsibilities that have ever since been the topic of extensive discussions. Brown’s article sheds light on how cinematic texts have contributed to this debate on what Primo Levi famously described as the ‘grey zone’ of the machinery of death. In forcing audiences to become invested in the impossible decisions forced upon the Jewish Councils, these films portray the extent to which moral dilemma were part of the Holocaust as well.

Films, as Alex Kay argues, bear a particular responsibility in representing specific factual data about significant historical events. In his article, entitled ‘Speaking the unspeakable: the portrayal of the Wannsee Conference in the film Conspiracy,’ Kay draws extensive archival comparisons between the cinematic narrative about the infamous conference that decided on the Endlösung and the historical facts known about it. He develops richly documented contrasts between what the records reveal about the biographies and attitudes of those present at this meeting and the cinematic personae created in Conspiracy. As he reveals at which precise moments the film departs from the historical record, he also discusses the ethical implications of such poetic license. In the end, Kay returns to the time-tested question of whether there should be any boundaries to how the Holocaust can be represented, be that in literary or cinematic works. While creativity certainly continues to stand as a mark of achievement for any artist, the article also reminds readers that credibility plays a substantial role, in particular when a film sets out to present the actual historical setting of specific events.

In Éva Serfőző’s article, ‘Angel Sanz Briz and Giorgio Perlasca: competing narratives of heroism in rescuing Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust in the films The Angel of Budapest (2011) and Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man (2002),’ viewers also encounter historical figures in a specific locality. Serfőző discusses two films from two different countries about the incidents surrounding the Spanish embassy in Hungary during the occupation by Nazi Germany. While both films draw on identical historical material, they present two rather distinct versions of that history, both shaped by the interest, so the article argues, of the countries in which the films were produced. With both films, viewers encounter a narrative that presents the heroism and moral force of a protagonist from their home country, allowing them to take a positive view of the rescue work that was done for Hungarian Jews and deflecting attention away from other aspects that would present culpability in a somewhat more realistic light. In setting out to exonerate Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy, both films make an ethically questionable contribution to Holocaust cinema, but one whose politics are clearly in need of detailed scholarly analysis.

The present collection is rounded off with an article by Elias Berner about the role played by music in Holocaust films. In ‘“Remember me, but forget my fate” – The use of music in Schindler’s List and In Darkness,’ Berner contrasts one of the most canonical films in the history of this genre with a recent cinematic work that is marked by its unique and quite eerie soundscape. His focus rests specifically on how a film’s sonic environment introduces, marks and shapes positively and negatively marked characters. The use of iconic music pieces adds further semantic layers carefully dissected in this article. As the article demonstrates, music plays a significant role in how films construct regimes of memory and the ethical framing of the events presented.

In addressing such a wide variety of topical, generic, formal and ethical issues, ranging from music to intergenerational guilt, from juridical protocol to the materiality of commemoration, from national narratives to personal amnesia, the articles collected here both showcase how diverse the study of Holocaust film has become and how many new sub-fields within this area of research are nevertheless only in the early stages of development. As the cinematic portrayal of the Holocaust is moving at a greater historical distance from the events in the first half of the twentieth century, filmmakers appear to look for new aesthetic strategies to interest their audiences in this important topic. While early films were mostly constricted to veracity, witnessing and an unmitigated ethical sense of commitment, recent Holocaust films branch out into areas that connect this past with the present circumstances in which their audiences find themselves. As a result of this intermixture of the historical with the contemporary, Holocaust film remains a very lively and highly engaging research area.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gerd Bayer

Gerd Bayer teaches English literature and culture at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He works on early modern, contemporary, and postcolonial literature as well as on heavy metal, and he has published also on Holocaust fiction and film.

Notes

1 See Insdorf, Indelible Shadows; see also Hirsch, Afterimage, one of the most influential monographs in the field.

2 Elsewhere (see Bayer, “After Postmemory”), I suggest that Holocaust cinema has moved into a clearly marked third stage. For a survey of recent Holocaust cinema and some of the major thematic and generic developments within this corpus, see Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present.

3 On various visual media and their engagement with Holocaust memory, see Bangert, Gordon and Saxton, ed., Holocaust Intersections; see Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, for a discussion of the infamous camp photographs and Chare and Williams, Matters of Testimony, for a recent take on the Auschwitz scrolls.

4 The challenges of representing the Holocaust are addressed in the wide-ranging contributions to Spargo and Ehrenreich, ed., After Representation.

5 For a discussion of the Holocaust from media theories, see Ebbrecht, Geschichtsbilder im medialen Gedächtnis.

6 On Tarantino’s film see the essays in Dassanowsky, Quentin Tarantino; on alternative history, see Magilow, Bridges, and Vander Lugt, Nazisploitation.

7 I discuss some of these cross-influences in the context of John Fowles’s work on film adaptations of his postmodern writing; see Bayer, “On Filming Metafiction.” On the larger cultural context, see also Crownshaw, The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture.

8 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.

9 On the connection between postmodern theories and the Holocaust, see Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern; see also Ganteau, Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability.

10 On the spatial dimension of the Holocaust, see Knowles, Kelly, Cole, and Giordano, ed., Geographies of the Holocaust.

11 Adams and Vice, ed., Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film.

12 Pettitt, Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives.

13 For the context of German cinema, see Bangert, The Nazi Past in Contemporary German Film.

14 Significant monographs include Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards, including many experimental films; Saxton, Haunted Images; and including also exploitative films and B-movies, Kerner, Film and the Holocaust; see also Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, and the articles collected in Kobrynskyy and Bayer, Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century.

15 See Haltof, Screening Auschwitz.

16 See Prager, After the Fact; documentary films are also the focus in Michalczyk, Filming the End of the Holocaust, and in Cinquegrani, Journey to Poland.

17 See Jordan, From Nuremberg to Hollywood.