Elie Wiesel

The Holocaust as Genre

When I began exploring how films have grappled with the Holocaust in 1979, there were merely a few dozen titles to warrant attention. As the daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, I wanted to bring relatively unknown foreign films to attention, and to assess how American movies had dealt with the legacy of World War II. The word “Holocaust” was just coming into common usage, thanks to the NBC miniseries of 1978. It never occurred to me that, by the year 2001, films about the Nazi era and its Jewish victims would be so numerous as to constitute a veritable genre – including consistent Oscar winners – nor did I foresee how this genre would be part of a wider cultural embracing of the Shoah. But twenty-two years later, the number of cinematic reconstructions – fictional as well as documentary – is staggering. They both reflect and contribute to the fact that awareness has replaced silence about the Shoah. Immediately following the war, and for decades afterward, survivors rarely spoke about their experiences, partly because they knew the world was not prepared to listen. Now, however, the Shoah Foundations completed videotaping of more than fifty-one thousand survivors in fifty-seven countries corresponds to two phenomena: younger generations – especially in Germany – want to know more about the Holocaust, and the aging survivors feel the urgency to speak before its too late. A brief chronological overview of events might be useful in suggesting how the Shoah has entered mainstream culture, starting with the broadcast of NBCs “Holocaust” in 1978.

The Ironic Touch

The word “memory” invokes commemoration, a natural result of remembering. But it might be just as necessary in 2001 to dismember as remember – to analyze the details of the World War II past, provoke, and confront the audience with a stimulus to moral as well as historical awareness. A number of recent films have succeeded in creating fertile discomfort through the use of dark humor, from Michael Verhoevens The Nasty Girl and My Mothers Courage to such controversial “comedies” as Genghis Cohn . Others, such as Train of Life, Life Is Beautiful , and Jakob the Liar , use humor as a balm and buffer, with comic heroes whose ruses are tantamount to resistance. The Nasty Girl ( Das Schreckliche Madchen , 1990) is based on the real experiences of Anja Rosmus, born in 1960 in the Bavarian town of Passau. She won the Scholl Prize, an annual award in honor ofHans and Sophie Scholl – martyrs of the resistance movement about which Verhoeven earlier made The White Rose – for her work as a historian unearthing the Nazi past of her hometown. On the night of the awards, she was seated at the same table as Verhoeven; within two years, he had directed a fictionalized version of her story, starring Lena Stolze (who played Sophie Scholl in both The White Rose and Percy Adlons The Last Five Days! ). The Nasty Girl won the prize for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival – and the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film – not simply because of the compelling story or the fine acting, but for the ironic style with which Verhoeven chose to tell it.

Indelible Shadows: The New German Guilt

The New German Cinema created a stir in the 1970s comparable to that of the French New Wave a decade earlier: the work of talented young filmmakers like WernerHerzog,RainerWerner Fassbinder,WimWenders, andVolker Schlondorff impressed itself upon American film-goers, especially for its richness of cinematic expression. The Holocaust was hardly their main theme, but one could argue that it was in the background of such disparate films as Herzogs Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fassbinders The Marriage of Maria Braun . The demented demagogue who leads his soldiers on a death trip is a Spanish conquistador in Peru, but his incarnation by the German-speaking Klaus Kinski suggests an image of Hitler (especially when he says, “We need a Fuhrer ”). And Fassbinders resilient heroine (Hanna Schygulla) is a product of her culture, indeed an incarnation of postwar Germany – a survivor of sorts. Even in Wenderss Wings of Desire (1987), a major sequence takes place on a movie set where Peter Falk is acting in a period film about Nazis and Jews. The first German fiction film to deal with the Holocaust was Only a Day ( Nur ein Tag , 1965), directed by Egon Monk – a former assistant to Bertolt Brecht – from the writings of Gunter Lys. This stark but effective black-and-white drama took the form of a report on a German concentration camp, Altendorf, in 1939. Although the protagonists are not sufficiently individuated – the hero is more of a collective protagonist, including Jews, Bolsheviks, and criminals – admirable attention is paid to the details of concentration camp life among male prisoners.

Styles of Tension

Montage is not the only way for a filmmaker to create tension; the Holocaust experience can be expressed or approached through disorienting camera angles and movement, heightened lighting, distorting visual texture or color, stylized acting, contrapuntal soundtrack ormusic, and unconventional narrative structure. Films as seemingly disparate as The Serpents Egg, Cabaret, Kanal, Ambulance, Passenger, The Boxer and Death, Commissar , and Wherever You Are proceed via dislocation and discomfort, refusing to simplify or prettify painful reality through filters. They suggest that the shocking dimensions of the Holocaust demand stylistic devices of disturbance rather than complacency. The Serpents Egg (1977) is not a pleasing film. Ingmar Bergmans English language study of pre-Nazi Germany is morbid, depressing, and relentless in its tone of paranoia and inescapability. Through the relationship of an unemployed and alcoholic circus acrobat and a cabaret singer, the film presents three ominous aspects of 1923 Berlin: anti-Semitism; a ravaged economy; and scientific curiosity gone wild, severed from moral considerations. The serpent is an ancient animal; likewise, Nazism did not simply hatch: it was nurtured by historical antecedents, both economic and psychological. Beyond the story, however, Bergman weaves into The Serpents Egg a troubled self-consciousness, questioning his own cinematic methods and purposes. By incorporating the films of a mad scientist within The Serpents Egg , the director invites comparison between his images and those recorded by this chilling character. Abel Rosenberg (David Carradine) is an American Jew – thus doubly an outsider in Berlin – who finds his brother Max dead in their hotel room. He informs Maxs ex-wife, Manuela (Liv Ullmann), that Max shot his brains out. The singer, distraught and naiively generous, takes Abel into her apartment.

Indelible Shadows: The Jew as Child

Many films dealing with the Holocaust focus on children or adolescents: among these, Black Thursday, The Two of Us, Goodbye, Children , and Les Violons du Bal explore the German Occupation of France through its effects on Jewish children, while The Evacuees and David depict hunted boys in wartime England and Germany. The most salient feature of this narrative strategy is that it highlights the intimacy of family, insisting upon the primacy of blood ties even as it demonstrates that individual survival was predicated on separation. There are also films that do not center on a young Jew – such as The Damned and The Tin Drum – but yoke childhood and Judaism together to express weakness and victimization. In a perceptive article entitled “The Jew as a Female Figure in Holocaust Film,” Judith Dones on has noted that many Holocaust films focus on the Jew “as a weak character, somewhat feminine, being protected by a strong Christian-gentile, the male, in what comes to symbolize a male–female relationship.” While this is clearly the case for films like Black Thursday , some of the darker visions of the Holocaust depict the Jew as child – whether male or female – both literally and figuratively. In the case of Viscontis The Damned (1969), which will be analyzed in Chapter 8, the only Jewish character is indeed a little girl, Lisa. The perverse Martin (Helmut Berger) is attracted to this wide-eyed girl who lives next door to his mistress, and he gently seduces her. When he returns to the room she occupies, Lisa (Irina Wanka) quietly gets out of bed, walks out of the room, and (we learn later) hangs herself.

The Personal Documentary

It was once assumed that documentary films were impersonal records of real events or people: you set up the camera, shoot the situation, and it might appear on the TV news. Critics like Andre Bazin nourished this theory by stressing that the lens (called the objectif in French) is “impassive” and that “between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent.” The underlying fallacy here – as anyone who has ever taken a photograph can attest – is that framing, camera angle, lighting, and proximity to subject are “objective.” The selection of high-angle versus low-angle, for example, results in a different image: the subject might be the same, but the camera placement determines whether it seems insignificant, threatening, or neutral. The corollary assumption was that a fiction film is an artificial construct, strongly plotted into a linear narrative progression, using actors, sets, visual tricks, and so on. Such oversimplified categories no longer hold, especially after the advent of Italian neorealism. This film movement in postwar Italy eschewed polished scripts, professional actors, makeup, studios, and addressed itself to the daily problems of impoverished Italians. Films like The Bicycle Thief, Open City , and La Terra Trema ascribed a new dignity to “reality” and to the notion of the cinema as a sensitizing mirror. The closest analogue in American culture is perhaps Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , in which Walker Evanss stark photographs of American sharecroppers in the 1930s are animated and deepened by the direct perceptions of James Agees rich prose.

Indelible Shadows: Rescuers in Fiction Films

In films, perhaps even more than in life, action defines character. Whereas a novel might permit a voice to explain motivation, a motion picture is just that – a moving image, at its bestwhenit shows rather than states. Film externalizes through expression, gesture, and behavior,with dialogue remaining a secondary component in the creation of meaning. This is important to remember when viewing films that treat rescue during the Holocaust (many of which were made in the early 1990s). The facts are not in question: Just This Forest , for example, depicts an Aryan Polish woman who tries to save a Jewish child; but why remains uncertain. This is as true of a recent film like Divided We Fall as of antecedents such as Good Evening, Mr.Wallenberg and Schindlers List . They leave it to the audience to ponder why one individual is willing to risk his life to protect a Jew while another remains indifferent or complicit with the murderers. The relatively recent focus on rescuers is no surprise. After previous Holocaust films that centered on Jewish victims and Nazi perpetrators, there had to be an audience surrogate beyond the oppressed survivor or the criminal – one with whom a viewer would indeed want to identify. Although “righteous Gentiles” comprised a tiny fraction of the European population duringWorldWar II, their existence is cause for celebration, on screen and off. Given that motion pictures have always centered on “the hero” who enables “the happy end,” stories of Holocaust rescue proliferated in movie theaters and on television in the 1990s.

From Judgment to Illumination

Documentaries tend to do poorly at the box office, where audiences prefer diverting fiction to stark reality. This is unfortunate, because some of the most powerful and important films about the Holocaust are “nonfiction” but not “nondramatic.” Consequently, television has played a significant role in bringing at least two of the following to American audiences: Kitty: Return to Auschwitz, The Sorrow and the Pity (both telecast on PBS), and The Memory of Justice . All three are compelling personal documents – moving pictures that achieve their greatness through uniquely cinematic means. Brave and often abrasive, they demonstrate that the facts of the Holocaust are richer than the fictions an artist could invent. Particularly in the films of Marcel Ophuls, the montage is the message – namely the juxtaposition of multiple viewpoints which, together, shed light on human response and responsibility. When Kitty: Return to Auschwitz (1980) was aired on American television, on February 4, 1981, the question raised after Holocaust – how much truth can be found in a fictional reconstruction of the Nazi era? – was replaced by the acknowledgment of how much drama could inhere in documentary. This ninety-minute film directed by Peter Morley for Yorkshire Television in Great Britain is real “docudrama” – the simple presentation of one survivors recollection that yields a profoundly moving and often shattering story. Kitty Felix Hart, a fifty-one-year-old radiologist in Birmingham, returned in 1978 to Auschwitz – where she and her mother had been prisoners for two years – with her son David, a Canadian doctor.

Indelible Shadows: Documentaries of Return

Although the original intention of my Indelible Shadows was to assemble and analyze fiction films about the Holocaust, nonfiction has proven to be not only more appropriate but often more dramatic as an approach to this subject matter. By the second edition in 1989, there was a vigorous body of work which I had termed “personal documentary,” characterized by subjectivity: a film would chronicle the return of a survivor to a place that no longer knows him or her, usually a hometown tantamount to loss, or a concentration camp still redolent of terror. This phenomenon has grown into what could be considered a subgenre of the Holocaust film, especially as children of survivors increasingly journey with a camera into Europe, and into the past. In films of return, the director – frequently a member of the second generation – goes back to the scene of the crime, or of the rescue. Some of these documentaries are investigative, like Loving the Dead , Birthplace , and (to a lesser extent) Shtetl , in which the subjects attempt to find out how their Polish-Jewish parents were murdered. Some are commemorative, such as The Last Days and Bach in Auschwitz . Others are celebratory, like The Children of Chabannes and The Optimists , which chronicle the rescue of Jews in France and Bulgaria. And Photographer utilizes the cinematic medium in fresh ways to explore how ultimately untrustworthy – or at least incomplete – images of the Holocaust can be.