Holocaust Intersections

Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium

Axel Bangert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351563550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Recent representations of the Holocaust have increasingly required us to think beyond rigid demarcations of nation and history, medium and genre. Holocaust Intersections sets out to investigate the many points of conjunction between these categories in recent images of genocide. The book examines transnational constellations in Holocaust cinema and television in Europe, disclosing instances of border-crossing and boundary-troubling at levels of production, distribution and reception. It highlights intersections between film genres, through intertextuality and pastiche, and the deployment of audiovisual Holocaust memory and testimony. Finally, the volume addresses connections between the Holocaust and other histories of genocide in the visual culture of the new millennium, engaging with the questions of transhistoricity and intercultural perspective. Drawing on a wide variety of different media - from cinema and television to installation art and the internet - and on the most recent scholarship on responses to the Holocaust, the volume aims to update our understanding of how visual culture looks at the Holocaust and genocide today. With the contributions: Robert S. C. Gordon, Axel Bangert, Libby Saxton- Introduction Emiliano Perra- Between National and Cosmopolitan: 21st Century Holocaust Television in Britain, France and Italy Judith Keilbach- Title to be announced Laura Rascaroli- Transits: Thinking at the Junctures of Images in Harun Farocki's Respite and Arnaud des Pallieres's Drancy Avenir Maxim Silverman- Haneke and the Camps Barry Langford- Globalising the Holocaust: Fantasies of Annihilation in Contemporary Media Culture Ferzina Banaji- The Nazi Killin' Business: A Post-Modern Pastiche of the Holocaust Matilda Mroz- Neighbours: Polish-Jewish Relations in Contemporary Polish Visual Culture Berber Hagedoorn- Holocaust Representation in the Multi-Platform TV Documentaries De Oorlog (The War) and 13 in de Oorlog (13 in the War) Annette Hamilton- Cambodian Genocide: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Cinema of Rithy Panh Piotr Cieplak, Emma Wilson- The Afterlife of Images

PART I

Between Nations

CHAPTER 1

Between National and Cosmopolitan

Twenty-First-Century Holocaust Television in Britain, France, and Italy

Emiliano Perra

Television’s approach to the Holocaust is the subject of a relatively small, but steadily growing body of work. This attention is certainly welcome. After all, we cannot afford to neglect the encounter between this key event of the twentieth century, and a medium that, due to its global impact, stands as something of a symbol of the second half of the century and beyond. If we want to understand the place of this event in popular memory culture, we need to look at television. In 2001, Janice Hadlow estimated that on any evening in the UK there was at least one programme aired related to World War II.¹ I would add that a significant portion of these programmes was to some degree related to the Holocaust, that this was not a specifically British occurrence, and that this trend has only marginally ebbed in the last decade.

Much of the existing literature in this field centres on the analysis of single countries such as the United States, Germany, Italy, Israel, or Britain,² but only a few studies have developed a comparative approach.³ This chapter discusses some key trends in British, French and Italian Holocaust television since 2000. If Hadlow’s claim is not a wild exaggeration, it is clear that a complete overview of television’s treatment of the Holocaust would require much more space than I have here. In the following pages, I narrow my focus to the exploration of three broad themes.

The first one is represented by the relationship between national and transnational (or cosmopolitan) memory as it emerges from the representation of this historical event. The second theme is represented by the complex relationship between scholarly works of synthesis and comparable TV products. Through the discussion of predominantly high-profile documentaries, I will argue that British, French and Italian Holocaust television present differing degrees of commitment towards bridging the gap between recent historiographical developments and popular divulgation. While television in Britain and France has offered some accounts to its viewers that are both informed by scholarship and engaging, in Italy such work of synthesis is largely missing. The third section engages with works of fiction such as TV-films and miniseries. In particular, I investigate how the related themes of collaboration and rescue are presented by these products, a focus that allows the exploration of recent developments in each country’s ‘coming to terms with the past’. In the final pages of this contribution, I will draw together the national and transnational dimensions of my argument by looking at recent TV renditions of the ultimate ‘universalized’ Holocaust story: that of Anne Frank.

National and Transnational Holocaust Memory

The transnationalization of Holocaust memory is a development that has attracted growing attention in the last decade. Scholars from a variety of fields have described this crucial historical event as the source of official forms of shared European or even cosmopolitan memory, morality and identity.⁴ There is certainly a good degree of truth in this claim, as well as in the related one that the process of European integration is finding a common unifying memory in World War II and the Holocaust.⁵ However, the development of an unbounded continental memory is still at an embryonic stage.⁶ When talking about European memory, we are still mainly referring to different national articulations of memories pertaining to events that, while shared, affected European countries in varying degrees and in different ways.⁷ Thus, EU commemoration of the Holocaust is an example of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, whereby transnational memories are situated, inflected and expressed at the local level.⁸ This first section of the chapter engages with the interplay between these two dimensions of memory as reflected by TV representation of the Holocaust.

Television’s contribution to the development of transnational forms of Holocaust memory can be explored from a variety of perspectives. One is represented by what Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz call ‘media events’, by which they refer to the quasi-oxymoronic category of live broadcasting of history.⁹ One Holocaust-related example of a media event was the ceremony held in Auschwitz on 27 January 2005 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camp. Dozens of heads of state and countless survivors gathered to remember the event. It was an event specifically constructed to cross national borders and deliver messages of universal resonance. It was broadcast live in many countries, including Italy, France and Britain. While these factors certainly concur in conveying an idea of commemoration that goes well beyond the boundaries of a state, it must also be considered that media events are mediated and negotiated in a number of ways, for example through the interplay between the live feed coming from the site of commemoration and its in-studio coverage.

This last factor conditioned the presentation of the event in each country, defusing its transnational value. To develop the point, I will give an account of empirical viewers’ experience of the broadcast: my own, viewing the event on the flagship (and traditionally strongly Catholic) Italian State channel RAI UNO, compared to that of literary scholar Annekie Joubert, who watched it on the BBC.¹⁰

Joubert was struck by the simplicity of the ceremony broadcast by the BBC and by the recollections worded by the Jewish, Romani and Soviet survivors in their brief testimonies listened to by world leaders, whose attendance served to reinforce the importance of the event. Her understanding was that survivors were the central players of the event, and she was moved by the ecumenical prayers said during the ceremony. However, she also noted that the Jewish group of victims remained central within the ‘global gathering of mourning and remembrance’.¹¹

My own experience of the same media event was quite different. I was struck first of all by the peripheral role of the survivors gathered at the ceremony in RAI UNO’s broadcast: far from being the central players, they were marginal. Their testimonies were lost, superseded by the voices of in-studio guests in Italy. These included Italian survivors such as Guido Terracina and Schlomo Venezia, journalist Paolo Mieli and Catholic hard-liner Rino Fisichella, then rector of the Pontifical Lateran University and chaplain of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (currently archbishop and President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization). No historians were involved.

The discussion was dominated by religious themes. While Joubert and other BBC viewers listened to survivors’ testimonies, Italian viewers were informed about Christian protest against the so-called ‘Euthanasia Programme’ in Nazi Germany and the importance of Jewish forgiveness after John Paul II’s apologies for past Christian prejudice against the Jews. They were also shown a short extract from the popular miniseries Perlasca: un eroe italiano (Perlasca: An Italian Hero, 2002) in which a little Jewish girl warns her Catholic rescuers of the danger they face in helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Budapest. Moreover, the programme’s own twist on the theme of a common European memory and identity was that Auschwitz was the locus of the shared Judeo-Christian roots of Europe — a view with which the host Roberto Olla, Fisichella and Rome’s Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni concurred.

The studio went silent only when the host announced ‘the central moment of the whole ceremony’: the Pope’s message, read by the Apostolic Nuncio to Poland, Józef Kowalczyk. John Paul II’s statement was the only one broadcast in its entirety without interruption. One final important specificity of the Italian broadcast of the event was that, being dominated by in-studio coverage in Italy, it was distinctively Italo-centric. Not only were the Jewish survivors who retold their stories Italians, but most importantly the notion of Holocaust victims was expanded to comprise a variety of groups including POWs, in a manner consistent with the cumbersome definition established in the national law on Holocaust remembrance passed by the Italian parliament in 2000.¹² The conclusion of the special programme, its ‘message’ if you will, was delivered by the host Olla: religion is a fundamental need, and Europe must work towards rebuilding its religious ‘spirit’.

There is more than anecdotal evidence to this. Media events have three partners: the organizers, the broadcasters and the audiences.¹³ The way the broadcaster re com bines the elements of the event is bound to influence the way audiences receive it. The Auschwitz ceremony can be seen as a mediatized ritual, one of ‘those exceptional and performative media phenomena that serve to sustain and/or mobilize collective sentiments and solidarities’.¹⁴ The meaning of such a supranational event is re-territorialized and articulated in ways that are country- and culture-specific.¹⁵ RAI inscribed it within a Catholic interpretation of the Holocaust, casting Catholics as protagonists and lead interpreters of the event, and Jews as the supporting act whose presence was fundamental in order to fully legitimize the narrative offered, but who were never allowed to drive it.

Another factor potentially favouring the formation of a European historical conscience refers to the increasing diffusion in the European TV market of transnational digital channels providing factual entertainment, including history. Such is the case of the media conglomerate Arts & Entertainment Television Network, or AETN. The network’s flagship History (formerly known as The History Channel) covers most of the European continent, providing a mixture of local programming and rescheduled extension from History UK. Another example, possibly even more significant, is represented by Arte, the Franco-German channel famous for its distinctively eclectic and highbrow programming. Arte was launched in 1992 and its existence is as much a political move as it is about culture. The channel was seen by German and especially French policy-makers as the cultural equivalent of the Franco-German alliance within the EU, a view that has not lost centrality over time, since the channel’s Head of Programming Christoph Hauser stated in 2006 that Arte’s objective was no less than to give Europe a soul.¹⁶ However, despite this claim, the channel’s diffusion is by and large limited to France and Germany; it is not quite yet the purported engine of a shared televisual European conscience.

Besides these entirely transnational channels, there is also the case of international productions put in place by national networks on an ad hoc basis such as the 2005 BBC-PBS coproduction Auschwitz, which I discuss below. More detailed research on how these documentaries were adapted for consumption in other national contexts (Were they dubbed or subtitled? Were they aired integrally? Or were they edited and/or integrated with other material?) and on their reception would help us to understand this aspect of contemporary Holocaust memory. Although the transnationalization of Holocaust memory and TV representation is growing, the national dimension is still predominant, as I argue in the next two sections.

Professional History and Documentaries

The opening of archives following the Soviet Union’s collapse coincided with — and had a lasting impact on — the development of history-writing on World War II and the Holocaust, in particular perpetrator research. Historians have currently developed an integrated approach that incorporates functional decisions taken on an ad hoc basis within the ideology-driven system of beliefs of Nazi Germany’s racial state. The wealth of new documents has led historians to produce detailed reconstructions of the destruction process, with its complex dynamic of inpu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: BETWEEN NATIONS
• PART II: BETWEEN IMAGES
• PART III: BETWEEN GENRES
• PART IV: BETWEEN MEDIA
• PART V: BETWEEN GENOCIDES
• Bibliography
• Index