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ABSTRACT
In his 1983 essay ‘The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen’, Lawrence Langer originated an argument subsequently expanded and amplified by numerous scholars, that the Holocaust’s establishment as a central ‘location’ in American culture, particularly as conducted by mainstream fictional and dramatic representations, is facilitated by its recuperation in the terms of a broadly affirmative cultural discourse that determinedly if not tendentiously discovers redemption, individual agency, and moral meaning in historical events to which such concepts are not only inapplicable but irrelevant. ‘Americanizing the Holocaust’ thus entails a ‘category error’ prompting American Holocaust representations to proffer meanings – civic lessons around tolerance and democratic politics, declarations of human sodality in the face of radical evil, etc. – relating primarily to American public and political culture’s ideological preferences, whose restorative propensity will always tend to collapse into kitsch. Langer identified the Goodrich-Hackett/Stevens adaptations of The Diary of Anne Frank and the 1978 mini-series Holocaust as key vectors of the Holocaust’s Americanization; Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) has generally taken center stage in more recent elaborations. This essay distinguishes Langer’s original proposition – grounded in a humanistic American literary-critical tradition – from the more far-reaching claims that have subsequently taken up the ‘Americanization thesis’, contrasting his position to recent scholarship arguing that Holocaust representations introduce dissentient and self-critical, rather than affirmative, strands into American life; or that the paradigms of American mass art such as Hollywood film are themselves in fact more complex and multi-valent than Langer believes. The essay considers Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) as a work that repurposes the canons of popular film with the specific aim of dismantling the firewalls between Nazi racial ideology, genocidal violence, tyranny and sadism on the one hand, and ‘American’ values on the other – ultimately ‘Americanizing’ the Holocaust in ways that radically revise Langer’s original formulation.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
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Notes on contributor
Barry Langford is Professor of Film Studies and Head of the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published and spoken widely on the Holocaust and the moving image.
Notes
1 Lawrence L. Langer, “The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen,” in Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 157–78 [first published in Susan Blacher Cohen, (ed.), The Jewish-American Stage and Screen (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983)]. Subsequent references in parentheses.
2 Judith Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film, 2nd ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002).
3 Hilene Flanzbaum, (ed.), The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
4 Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 1999).
5 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” in Alvin H. Rosenfeld, (ed.), Thinking About the Holocaust: After Half a Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 119–50 [first published in Commentary in June 1995); Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
6 In the miniseries QB VII (Tom Gries, 1974), based on Leon Uris’ novel, the assimilated, atheistic, adulterous, and materialistic Jewish-American writer Abraham Cady (Ben Gazzara) reclaims his Jewish identity by determining, while visiting Israel, to write a major work on the Holocaust.
7 Berenbaum famously called for the USHMM ‘to tell the story of the Holocaust in such a way that it would resonate not only with the survivor in new York and his [sic] children in San Francisco, but with a black leader from Atlanta, a Midwestern farmer, or a Northeastern industrialist’. Quoted in Rosenfeld, “Americanization,” pp. 129–30.
8 Rosenfeld, “Americanization,” p. 131.
9 Novick, Holocaust and Collective Memory, p. 15.
10 Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
11 Edward Linenthal, in Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking, 1995), specifically identifies 1978 as ‘“a crucial year in the organisation of [US] Holocaust consciousness’” (p. 11); Raul Hilberg makes the same observation in Peter Hayes, (ed.), Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991).
12 Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), p. 108.
13 Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).
14 Ibid., p. 158.
15 For a fuller rehearsal of the case against the appropriation of the Diary as a comforting bromide, see Rosenfeld, End of the Holocaust, pp. 140–62.
16 See, for example, Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
17 Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, p. 157.
18 Lawrence L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. xiv–xv.
19 Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, p. 165.
20 Ilan Avisar, “Holocaust Movies and the Politics of Contemporary Memory,” in Rosenfeld, (ed.), Thinking About the Holocaust, p. 50.
21 Lanzmann had already become a public figure in debates around the legitimacy of Holocaust representation by the late 1970s, inveighing in print against Holocaust.
22 Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982).
23 Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, p. 162.
24 Ibid., p. 163.
25 Ibid., p. 179.
26 Ibid., p. 172.
27 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973), p. 365.
28 See, for example, Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory, pp. 117–23.
29 Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, p. 175.
30 Contemporary critics were quick to note the influence of Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour.
31 Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 124.
32 David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers, 2nd ed. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. 210.
33 Jeffrey Alexander, “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals The ‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama,” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 5, no. 1 (2002): p. 44.
34 Alexander, “On the Social Construction,” p. 10.
35 Avisar, “Holocaust Movies,” p. 38; see, for comparison, Sara Horowitz, “The Cinematic Triangulation of American Identity: Israel, America, and the Holocaust,” in Flanzbaum, (ed.), Americanization, pp. 145–6: ‘Cinematic versions of the Shoah comment not only on the murdered Jews of Europe but also on the ideological climate in which the films themselves are produced, distributed, and reviewed’.
36 Alexander, “On the Social Construction,” p. 27.
37 Ibid., pp. 34–5.
38 Andreas Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification: Holocaust and West German Drama,” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 94–114.
39 J. Hoberman, “Spielberg's Oskar,” Village Voice, 21 December 1993, p. 63.
40 Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Schindler's List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Popular Memory,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 22 (1996): p. 302.
41 Hansen, “Schindler's List Is Not Shoah,” p. 311.
42 Barry Langford, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 262–7.
43 Defiance was released in January 2009, Inglourious Basterds in July, following its premiere at Cannes in May.
44 Clayton Frohman and Edward Zwick, Defiance, The Internet Movie Script Database, https://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Defiance.html.
45 In Zwick's original script, Tuvia feels the need to defend his actions to God: ‘Lord of the universe, forgive me, I have murdered—but they were monsters and did not deserve to live’.
46 In the present context, see most particularly Stella Setka, “Bastardized History: How Inglourious Basterds Breaks through American Screen Memory,” Jewish Film & New Media, vol. 3, no. 2 (2015): pp. 141–69; Gary Jenkins, “Whose Revenge Is It Anyway? Quentin Tarantino's Basterds, Intertextuality, and America's Inglourious ‘War on Terror,’” Holocaust Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (2015): pp. 236–49. I am also indebted for several points of detail to Cailee Davis, “Inglourious Basterds: Rewriting American History” (master's thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2019).
47 Scholars of Native American history such as Russell Thornton, Ward Churchill, and Lilian Friedberg have frequently used Holocaust rhetoric. Indeed, in her 2000 essay, “Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust” [American Indian Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 3 (2000): pp. 353–80], Friedberg explicitly uses the phrase ‘Americanization of the Holocaust’ to express her desire that the US acknowledge its genocide of indigenous peoples as a Holocaust in its own right.
48 See Barry Langford, “Globalising the Holocaust: Fantasies of Annihilation in Contemporary Media Culture,” in Axel Bangert, Robert S. C. Gordon, and Libby Saxton, (eds.), Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium (London: Legenda, 2013), pp. 112–31.
49 Lightly disguised as ‘Joseph Lieberman’ (Lawrence Olivier) in the film and in Ira Levin's original novel.