Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Images, Memory, and the Ethics of Representation

Gerd Bayer, Oleksandr Kobrynskyy

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231850919
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, a large number of films were produced in Europe, Israel, the United States, and elsewhere addressing the historical reality and the legacy of the Holocaust. Contemporary Holocaust cinema exists at the intersection of national cultural traditions, aesthetic conventions, and the inner logic of popular forms of entertainment. It also reacts to developments in both fiction and documentary films following the innovations of a postmodern aesthetic. With the number of witnesses to the atrocities of Nazi Germany dwindling, medialized representations of the Holocaust take on greater cultural significance. At the same time, visual responses to the task of keeping memories alive have to readjust their value systems and reconsider their artistic choices.

Both established directors and a new generation of filmmakers have tackled the ethically difficult task of finding a visual language to represent the past that is also relatable to viewers. Both geographical and spatial principles of Holocaust memory are frequently addressed in original ways. Another development concentrates on perpetrator figures, adding questions related to guilt and memory. Covering such diverse topics, this volume brings together scholars from cultural studies, literary studies, and film studies. Their analyses of twenty-first-century Holocaust films venture across national and linguistic boundaries and make visible various formal and intertextual relationships within the substantial body of Holocaust cinema.

PART ONE

THE PAST AND ITS PRESENCE

CHAPTER ONE

Transformations of Holocaust Memory

FRAMES OF TRANSMISSION AND MEDIATION

Aleida Assmann

The Holocaust has changed the world beyond recognition. This happened not only when it occurred but also in the various steps in which its memory was formed and transformed until today. In this essay, I will attempt a sweeping overview, looking at three stages of transformation of Holocaust memory, beginning roughly in the years 1945, 1985 and 2015. The first stage relates to the memory of the victims that emerged after 1945 in a culture of forgetting; the second stage started in 1985 when a new ‘memory culture’ was developed as a public and institutional context that established different frames of transmission; and a third stage concerns the current transformation of Holocaust memory confronting us with new challenges as we move across the shadow line of an embodied memory of survivors to an exclusively mediated memory.

AFTER 1945: THE MEMORY OF HOLOCAUST VICTIMS IN A CULTURE OF FORGETTING

Right after World War II, some survivors – like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel or Robert Antelme – felt an intense obligation evoked by their unlikely survival; namely, to tell their stories. It became their mission as survivors to become witnesses for those who had died disgraced, abused, exploited and unnamed in the camps. More often than not, however, these acts of witnessing occurred against a backdrop of silence that was hard to penetrate as it was woven out of the texture of ignorance, denial and indifference. The eager would-be witnesses had to face the fact that they were addressing a society that had no place for their testimonies. The nightmare that had already haunted the inmates of the camps in their dreams indeed became true after the war, when they discovered that their friends and neighbours were unwilling to listen and preferred to move ahead and leave the past behind.

In her memoir Still Alive, Ruth Klüger tells an incident with her American aunt who instructs her about the proper conduct of an immigrant to the US: ‘“You have to erase from your memory everything that happened in Europe. You have to make a new beginning. You have to forget what they did to you. Wipe it off like chalk from a black-board.” And to make me understand better, she gestured as if wiping a board with a sponge’ (1992: 177). When she proved recalcitrant to this injunction, she was sent to a psychoanalyst who was to help her to forget. When this incident happened in the late 1940s or early 1950s, America was still in the grip of the enforced assimilation policy of the melting-pot ideology which was itself dictated by the ‘time regime of modernity’ (Assmann 2013). This temporal orientation, which was unconsciously lived and supported as a cultural norm, demanded from the members of the American society to look forward into the future and to leave the past behind. Geared exclusively towards the future, this time regime prevented the possibility of publicly communicating and sharing the memory of the Holocaust. There was as yet no social frame for paying attention to the traumatic past as a vital ingredient of the present and for acknowledging the experience of the victims as an urgent element of their identity. Adhering to the past was generally considered to impede the principle of progress. Progress in the sense of moving on to a better world after having closed the darkest chapter of European history was certainly what was aspired by many. This conviction prevailed not only in the US but also in Europe during the Cold War. It was already expressed clearly by Winston Churchill in 1946 in a speech that he gave in Zurich. Addressing the students of the university, he admonished the European states to put an ‘end to reckoning’ and to wipe the slate clean:

We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past. If Europe is to be saved from infinite misery, and indeed from final doom, there must be an act of faith in the European family and an act of oblivion against all the crimes and follies of the past. (1948: 200)

This temporal orientation of modernisation created a cultural frame that had no place for remembering the Holocaust. The result was that in Western countries, Holocaust survivors who were intent on acting as witnesses or wanted to talk about their past found themselves cut off from the societies in which they lived. This silence, as Saul Friedlander rightly emphasised, ‘did not exist within the survivor community. It was maintained in relation to the outside world’ (1994: 259). Annette Wieviorka (1994) has shown how in the first decade after the war Holocaust memory remained largely confined to victim groups. Living estranged from the rest of society in pockets of a counter-culture the survivors were left alone with their memories, sharing them only with family members and other survivors with whom they also commemorated their dead. The Eichmann Trial was an important event in authorising the witnesses and their testimonies, but it did not immediately break up the enclaves of Jewish communication about the Holocaust. This only happened with the American TV miniseries Holocaust (1978), which reached and moved members of the whole society.

Four principles of a new culture of remembering

Five years after Churchill’s speech, Hannah Arendt questioned the normative implications of the modernist time regime, replacing them with a configuration of new ethical values. In her foreword to The Origins of Totalitarianism she made four influential statements that we can identify today as the foundation of a new memory culture that was realised only four decades later.

1. Facing the horrors of World War II, Arendt marked a deep caesura which, however, was the opposite of the performative act of closure, the ‘Schlussstrich’ (finishing line) called for by Churchill. At this point in history, she states that ‘all hopes have died’. This can be read as an explicit reference to the progress-oriented time regime of modernity, which through the massive crime and rupture of the genocide had lost the lure of its (false) promises. With the experience of the Holocaust, a new era begins in which ‘the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point’ (1966: vii).

2. Arendt argued that in its final stage, totalitarianism had produced ‘an absolute evil’, absolute in the sense that ‘it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives’ (1966: viii, ix). Not only for those who had been targeted by the violence that had been unleashed, this experience has culminated in a negative revelation, which Arendt qualified as the beginning of a new era: the era of knowing ‘the truly radical nature of Evil’ (1966: ix). Yosef H. Yerushalmi and others have later elaborated the metaphysical nature of the event, which had caused mankind to eat a second time from the tree of knowledge, this time the fruit being bitter ashes: ‘Out of the ashes of the extermination camps a grotesque new tree of realization has grown. […] All of us have tasted of its bitter fruit and know what our predecessors did not know. If this is possible, anything is possible. We all, not just Jews and Germans, but the whole world has lost the last trace of naiveness’ (1995: 55). With this interpretation and evaluation, the event was elevated from the level of contingent history to a concern for universal humanity.

3. This negative revelation urgently required an answer in the shape of a practical response. This meant, for Arendt, the safeguarding of human dignity on a new political, legal and universal level: ‘human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities’ (1966: ix).

4. Arendt also demanded a further response consisting in a changed value of memory. She referred to remembering as a new form of ethical obligation:

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain. (1966: xi)

The guiding principle of this new ethical stance combines a new attitude to time with a new form of remembering. It goes with the conviction that the past does not automatically dissolve and disappear as it is left behind in our emphatic orientation towards the future. On the contrary, the weight of the past has become a continuing challenge which requires retrospective attention, ‘examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us’ (1966: viii). Arendt’s four principles – the caesura created by a rupture in civilisation, the negative revelation of an absolute Evil, the necessity of a new human rights policy and the claim for an ethical form of remembering – are indeed the foundation on which a new memory culture was finally established. These principles created a new frame of transmission of Holocaust memory, which, however, was not established until the 1980s and 1990s. It took three to four decades before Arendt’s statement that ‘this is the reality in which we live’ was generally acknowledged and her principles were finally embraced.

AFTER 1985: THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW MEMORY CULTURE

What are the salient features of the new ‘memory culture’ that evolved after this time lag? It is based on a new awareness of the violent rupture and ongoing impact of a traumatic past. In the wake of the memory of the Holocaust, other traumatic memories relating to genocides and crimes against humanity were recovered within the framework, retelling, among others, the histories of slavery and colonialism from the point of view of the victims. In the context of identity politics, this gave rise to much antagonistic discourse and a competition of victimhood. In the long run, however, the social and political prominence of the memory of the Holocaust was not only eliding other memories but was also enabling them by providing a new sensibility and language (see Rothberg 2009). This has led to a radical transformation of the Western view of history with its long tradition and emphasis on victory and progress. This caesura was famously marked by Jean-François Lyotard’s formula of ‘the end of grand narratives’ in the late 1980s. Instead of arriving at ‘the end of history’, however, as Francis Fukuyama had it, we could witness the recovery of a hitherto neglected history in the form of previously unheard voices of women, socially inferior actors and victims of state violence which, by and by, were included into a revised official historiography. The specific innovation that distinguishes the new memory culture from previous shapes of cultural memory consists in the fact that for the first time in history a self-critical ‘negative memory’ of political actors was formed that acknowledged the experience of the victims, adopting its perspective and integrating it into the framework of a more self-conscious national memory. By integrating negative episodes into their memory and giving voice to historical experience of their own subcultures and minorities, Arendt’s words were finally heeded: ‘We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage’ (1966: xxxi) while at the same time discarding the legacy of shameful episodes and burying them in oblivion. It is this ethical turn towards responsibility and accountability that characterises the new approach to the past and its frames of transmission.

The centre of this new memory culture is a new commitment to human rights. Although a new Declaration of Human Rights was drafted and adopted by the United Nations in 1948 as a response to World War II, the successful claiming of these rights on behalf of Holocaust victims became an effective legal resource only in the 1980s and 1990s. With the help of world-wide access to digital communication it became possible to put pressure on the claims of victims by publicising their testimonies in a global arena. In this way, the transnational space of non-hierarchical and decentralised mutual awareness of human rights claims and violations came to be connected with a new world ethos. Under these circumstances, the new ethical stance towards one’s past became ‘epidemic’ and triggered what has been appropriately termed ‘a politics of regret’ (Olick 2007; see also Torpey 2003; and Assmann and Shortt 2012). Former colonial empires, dictatorships and other autocratic regimes adopted this new approach towards facing their criminal pasts. Historical commissions were established by the respective governments to recover the truth of a preceding history of violence and to channel the transitional processes from autocratic regimes into democracies. From the 1990s onward, the ‘politics of regret’ stimulated a flood of public apologies issued by high officials and statesmen. These incidents had one thing in common: people were no longer selecting only the good things in the past and calling them their ‘heritage’, but, for the first time, focused also on a legacy of ‘negative memory’ which until then had no chance ever to be registered in the annals of history. In spite of all the shortcomings connected with the pragmatic realisation of these principles and the shortcomings in bureaucratic processes of restitution, the successors of former perpetrators and Nazi collaborators acknowledged past injustices, respected the testimony of the victims and rehabilitated their perspective. While the violence of extermination and oppression perpetrated in the past cannot be undone, what can at least be undone in the present is an oppressive political climate prolonging the attitude of denial and indifference. By developing a culture of empathy with the victims and by taking responsibility for the crimes, memory thus became an important therapeutic mode of restoring a link in time between the victims and the successors of the perpetrators.

THREE FRAMES OF TRANSMISSION: IDENTIFICATION, ETHICS, EMPATHY

In the new memory culture, remembering became a collective political and therapeutic project of reaching out across the rift between former perpetrators and victims to bridge the gap between a repressed past and the present. But this remembering was by no means a homogeneous activity. Little attention has so far been paid to various ‘frames of transmission’ within which individuals perceive their past, depending on the ways in which they are personally anchored and position themselves vis-à-vis a violent history.¹ ‘If … we consider both German and Jewish contemporaries of the Nazi period – contemporary adults, adolescents, or children, even the children of these groups – what was traumatic for the one group was obviously not traumatic for the other. […] The victims of Nazism cope with a fundamentally traumatic situation, whereas many Germans have to cope with a widening stain, with potential shame or guilt’ (Friedlander 1994: 257) – and, as I would like to add in updating this statement, the breaking of the silence. I will discuss here three frames of transmission that are all part of our contemporary memory culture but defined by different sites, perspectives and national contexts: the identification mode relating to the victims, the ethical mode relating to the former perpetrators and the empathy mode relating to the bystanders.

The identification mode

From the Jewish point of view, the frame of transmission is that of individual and collective identification. In this frame, the process of transmission is based on genealogical links and guided by the principle of identification with the victims connecting the past of those who died and suffered with the future of succeeding generations. As these victims were not targeted for what they had done but for who they were, the genocidal violence of the Nazis hit all European Jews irrespective of the nations of which they were part, with a special aim of destroying also their future. This further explains why individual remembering is closely connected to the collective Jewish history of family, diaspora community and the nation of Israel.

There are different forms in which identification can shape the process of transmission. A prominent example is the children of Holocaust survivors who refer to themselves as ‘2G’ (‘second generation’), defining themselves as a group with seminal common features and a collect...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Next Chapter in the History of Holocaust Cinema
• Part One: The Past and Its Presence
• Part Two: The Ethics of Memory
• Part Three: The Legacy of Evil
• Index