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Chapter One: Introduction
When we speak of historical events, we do so with a certain amount of
perceived knowledge; that is, we come to believe we know specific, individual ‘truths’
about the event. But what do we really know about history? How do we formulate
opinions about the events of the past? The phenomenon by which historical events
become part of public memory and how the resulting compilation of information
becomes what will hereafter be referred to as the master narrative, will be addressed in
this thesis. Since historical works are never unembellished lists of documented facts,
the knowledge of how we conceive of factual events, that is, how we document events
we did not witness, is important in understanding the resulting storytelling process, not
just in fictional literary constructs such as novels, short stories, poetry or film, but also
in the formulation of history itself. Written history must be seen, at least in part, as a
constructed or representational reality and this construction, although based on the
review and acceptance of factual data by professional historians, does not include all
available facts in the completed product. The historian chooses factual evidence based
on the particular piece of history he is attempting to record. In contrast, the master
narrative, though equally representational, does not rely solely on empirical evidence.
Instead, such publicly held notions of history congeal as a result of public acceptance
of the individual elements of the narrative. Over time, historical data and anecdotal
narrative solidify into a cohesive whole made up of both hard fact and individual
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response to those facts, a blending of related ideas that can be termed the master
narrative of the historical event and which serves as the basis on which we construct
the fictional narratives of literature and film. But how does the master narrative differ
from history? That is, can we use historical account and the master narrative
interchangeably?
Prior to the mid-1800s, history was not seen as a discipline unto itself, rather,
one studied the classics in order to understand history, literature and philosophy as a
whole. Once history became a discrete unit of study, the tendency was to believe that
the events of the past should be studied in a completely objective way; history was
viewed as “simply a science, no less and no more.” The belief was that historians
could and would remove themselves from the equation and report events without
embellishment, emotion or human interference. However, this type of unyielding
empirical study of history left the human element by the wayside. In other words, in
order to avoid tainting the documentation of objective history the human subject was
removed, and geology, economics and political history were studied without reference
to the impact on society as a whole, or the individual in particular. However, by the
1930’s, the French Annales School of thought stated that when one studies history, it
should be done as an “integrated, total history” (Lambert, 78) which accounts for the
human element, otherwise the historical record will be incomplete. Therewith, the
transformation was made from documenting “that there was a past” to “what the past
was like.” (Stanford, 49)
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However, the problems connected with the impossibility of total objectivity in
the documentation of history were soon replaced with a new set of difficulties. If the
human element is added to the cataloguing of empirical data, there must, out of
necessity, be interpretation, and where there is interpretation, there is debate over the
correctness of each and every version. Since no historian can be seen as the definitive
authority on any given piece of history, historians must be understood to write about
events based not only on whether evidence “is true or false but [also on] what it
means.” (Stanford, 77) The historian, then, injects himself into historical record by
drawing conclusions of meaning with relation to the documentary evidence. The
current debate centers on the extent to which the historian’s own prejudices, beliefs
and opinions should color historical record. One side of the debate promotes a
positivistic ideal, wherein the historian attempts to keep the history he is writing as
free as possible from his own biases, believing that he can record events by using his
expertise in the field to compile the data in a logical or meaningful way, and admitting
ignorance in the face of missing evidence. The opposing view allows an imaginative
approach wherein the historian may pick and choose amongst events which fit a
particular theory and may reconstruct his own version of any event for which there is
no record. (Stanford, 76-87)
Further, Robert Brent Toplin and Jason Eudy discuss the ways in which history,
regardless of the medium used to compile it, becomes a means of thinking about and
analyzing the past and that this process cannot be viewed as wholly objective. They
therefore argue that history is an endeavor located somewhere between the positivistic
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and imaginative approaches. “Historical interpretation involves the arranging and
shaping of stories, not the objective representations of truth. All historical
explanations involve considerable exercise of creative license, even traditional modes
of interpretation through books and articles.” (Toplin, 8) Therefore, what we know or
don’t know is the result of the interpretation of facts at the hands of historians, which
comes to be known as historical reality regardless of the use of either the positivistic or
imaginative definition of interpretation. Therefore, the interpretation of fact and the
facts on which any interpretation is based cannot be considered the same, since the
reality created by interpretation is the result of the filtering of evidentiary facts and
data through the biases and personal experiences of the individual doing the
interpreting, as well as through the larger overall historical discourse. Similarly, the
interpretation of history for written documentation and the formulation of the master
narrative cannot be seen as the same.
Historical record, that is, the study of history, remains an attempt to document
events without the emotional interference of the subject being studied. While
historians may claim license to invent missing data if they feel it is warranted, they do
not claim to allow the subject to interpret the data for them. The master narrative
knows no such restrictions. Since there is no author of the master narrative, as such,
and the data collection depends on public acceptance rather than interpretation by
professional historians, the appearance of individual elements in the master narrative is
entirely subjective. The master narrative for each event certainly contains historical
evidence, but is not limited to empirical data nor to the interpretation of that data.
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Instead, it may contain any number of additional elements and may, in fact, discard
historical data already accepted as fact. Hence, when authors and filmmakers, either
consciously or unconsciously, use this master narrative made up of fact, interpretation
and publicly held opinion as a matrix on which to build a believable story, they are, as
Plato would argue, creating a representation of a representation. This representational
reality may not be strictly factual but nonetheless is true in that the narrative may tell a
story which consists of symbolic or metaphoric truths where facts alone are unable to
convey the necessary emotion. Since the fictional representations of film and
literature necessarily attempt to appeal to human emotion in order to fully engage the
audience in the experience, the matrix on which the stories are based must include
human experience in addition to scientific data and we must allow that the human
element may, in fact, comprise the larger part of the narrative.
How this master narrative comes to be formed will be discussed in Chapter
Two, while Chapter Three will document the specifics of its use as the basis of
knowledge pertaining to the Holocaust as a genocidal event but also as an unparalleled
traumatic event in human history. What do we, as a contemporary global population,
believe we know about the Holocaust? How do we recognize when a particular
Holocaust story is ‘accurate’ and how is that accuracy measured? What elements must
be present in order to tell a story of the Holocaust? The Holocaust is not only distinct
in history, but singular in the ways in which its master narrative has been constructed.
The unusual place that the Holocaust, as a genocidal event, holds in history is due not
only to the record number of human deaths at the hands of a single governmental
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body, but also because the event itself marks a place on the historic timeline of the
world as a whole, wherein the past, that is, what came before the Holocaust, and
future, anything which occurred after the Holocaust, had to be viewed through
different lenses. Theodor Adorno is often quoted as saying, “To write poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric” (xv-xvi), however, he is misquoted, or at least, not adequately
so. If we look at the entirety of the passage from which this statement is taken, we can
understand he meant that the continuation of unmodified cultural history in the wake
of an event such as the Holocaust was impossible, that we had entered a new era of
barbarism and, in many areas of cultural expression, such as poetry and art, we must
start afresh. As Lawrence Langer states, “We are still wrestling with the loss of stature
that a disaster like the Holocaust imposes on our ideal of civilization.” (5) This
diversion of the timeline into a new reality which must include knowledge of the Nazi
death camps, meant that not only could world consciousness not return to the place of
relative innocence that we had occupied before the Holocaust, but that the annihilation
of millions of people had undoubtedly meant the loss of important contributors to our
cultural future. How, then, do we begin to understand the scope of the Holocaust and
its implications through a tool such as the historical master narrative which, as only a
starting point for understanding history, cannot include all the details of the horrors of
the that which it represents? How does the paucity of information on the myriad
individual stories make the master narrative both problematic and necessary?
Even in the rarified history of genocide, the Holocaust gives rise to controversy
as historians and laypeople alike question the accuracy, legitimacy and ownership of
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Holocaust storytelling, an atmosphere compounded by the fact that survivors found
themselves unable to discuss their experiences following liberation from the camps.
As survivors emerged, they were encouraged by liberating troops, Jews in diaspora
and bystanders of the atrocities, not to speak of their experiences. In fact, the end of
the war and abandonment of the camps did not stop rampant anti-Semitism in Europe.
Survivors quickly learned to keep their experiences, as well as their identities, hidden,
in order to ensure their continued survival. (Alexander 2004, Novick 1999,
Speigelman 1986, Stein 2009) At the same time, historians and philosophers began to
construct a language of the unspeakable when talking about the Holocaust, resulting in
a suppressed ability to attempt any understanding of the events or try to come to terms
with what had occurred. The Holocaust, like no other event in history, imposed a
mixture of collective guilt, shame and horror on the global population, whether
directly involved or not, to such an extent that survivors were implicitly asked not to
discuss the nightmare but to move on from the past, stifling their ability to work
through such horrific, and recent, memories. “We still hear that writers needed a
decade or more before they could begin to imagine the horrors of the catastrophe…”
(Langer, 4) Although some were able to formulate narratives both during and
immediately following their stays in the camps, many were not, leaving the task of
Holocaust memorializing to future generations. Following the emergence of a culture
of silence amongst both survivors and perpetrators, we are left largely, though not
entirely, with “memory” in the form of second- or third-hand accounts, that is,
representations of representations of representations. Does this “unspeakability” of the
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Holocaust (discussed in detail in Chapter Five), and the resulting impossibility of
historical accuracy, deny historians, authors or filmmakers the opportunity to acquaint
future generations with its unspeakability? Or does the fact that Holocaust literature
has become an extensive piece of popular culture change the definition of what was
previously thought unspeakable?
Through the lens of the master narrative, Chapter Four will address the
Holocaust as a subject of film, using both fiction and documentary films as a basis of
discussion. With these films, the aim will be to illustrate the master narrative at work
within the stories themselves but also within the framework of the film as a visual
medium. When viewing a Holocaust film, the audience enters the theater expecting to
see iconographic elements which say to them, ‘This is a film about the Holocaust.’
What are those elements and how does their visual assimilation differ from the
assimilated language of written text? How can the act of genocide, as the pinnacle of
acts of violence against human beings, be captured on film is such a way that it is both
watchable and has the appearance of historical accuracy?
Beyond the visual make up of the Holocaust film, this master narrative
suggests guidelines and limitations under which a film can be made with the
Holocaust as its subject, a phenomenon that does not exist in relation to other
historical events. Can a film about genocide in general, or about the Holocaust in
particular, be made as a vehicle of entertainment? Does the filmmaker have a
responsibility to survivors of the Holocaust to be as historically accurate as possible?
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What are the consequences when a film changes the parameters of the master narrative
or ignores it entirely?
As we move further away from the event itself and witness the deaths of the
remaining survivors of the prison camps, what is the future of Holocaust storytelling?
If there are limits on who may tell the story and who may not, does the history of the
Holocaust become unspeakable in reality rather than as metaphor?
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Chapter Two: Defining the Master Narrative in General Storytelling
At the conclusion of any major historic event, there gradually emerges a master
narrative: a set of parameters through which any fiction or nonfiction story
construction comes to be filtered. In “Rescreening the Holocaust: The Children’s
Stories,” David Bathrick defines the master narrative as a matrix which reflects reality
in such a way that successful contradiction of it’s many facets is rare in either fiction
or non-fiction narrative attempts. Although the master narrative may eventually
contain erroneous or distorted data, the collection of details as a cohesive whole is
largely based on real events, whose underlying veracity is unquestionable. While there
is certainly the possibility of attempted deniability against the event as a whole, the
basis on which the master narrative is built can ultimately always be proven, even if
one or more of the details are found to be false. This set of constructs is unique to
each event and consists of the elements which history will teach the general public
about the event and which we will later, as a whole, believe we ‘know’ about a specific
piece of history. What we come to know as the facts of any real historical occurrence
is based on the believability of representation of that event as filtered through a
subconscious knowledge of the master narrative. This master narrative, in the main, is
created organically through a combined and varied number of sources, both objective
and subjective.
In The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle argues that literary theorists,
beginning with Derrida, have changed the basic process of documenting history from
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the search for truth to the creation of metaphor based loosely on incomplete facts
arbitrarily chosen on the whims of the particular historian. Factual records are
compiled by historians as data on which to base their written histories, but it is not
sterile data nor statistics that are presented as history. Windshuttle argues that these
compiled facts are, in recent years, presented with the addition of “imaginative
reconstructions” meant to fill in data gaps, but which can, and often do, add to public
knowledge of the event. It has become increasingly acceptable among academic
historians, he argues, to write ‘literary history.’ He states that “…one of the most
disturbing developments is that some historians have thought it is now permissible to
invent some of their ‘facts’ and to introduce into their works passages that they
acknowledge are fiction.” (227) This is not to say that the recording of history is not,
in itself, narrative reconstruction, but instead that there is a difference between the
compilation of historic fact into a cohesive and readable narrative which adheres to the
available facts while admitting ignorance in the absence of those facts, and the
misrepresentation of fact or narrative invention and literary reconstruction being
argued as fact. No longer interested in strictly compiling the historical record for the
purposes of pedagogy, the development of inventing literary history stems from the
relatively new desire amongst some academics to create works which are financially
viable, monetary interest being the goal rather than intellectual integrity. This, as
Windschuttle notes, has led more and more supposedly objective historians to
interpolate fiction where there is an absence of fact, without announcing to the reader
that the work contains sections of fictionalized narrative. He argues that the practice
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of creating these “imaginative reconstructions” for the purposes of enlivening an
otherwise dull subject is worse still. He further explains that proponents of the
practices of fictionalizing history justify their positions by arguing “that a story will
inevitably be biased, because historians must select only a minute fragment of the
events that occurred in the past, and must put these together in their own way to create
their own story.” (255) Although Windschuttle acknowledges that the documentation
of history is inherently selective, he also states that “the practice of selectivity does not
justify the resort to fiction.” (255) There are many reasons why a historian may select
from the myriad facts of an event for his own presentation, including specificity of
topic, spatial constraints and even author bias. Hayden White explains that history
becomes “a mixture of adequately and inadequately explained events, a congeries of
established and inferred facts, at once a representation that is an interpretation and an
interpretation that passes for an explanation of the whole process mirrored in the
narrative” (281). It is partly through these filters that the master narrative comes to be
formed since historians are not simply documenters of fact but creators and filters of
historical knowledge about any specific event. White calls this type of historical
documentation an “explanation” of history rather than an interpretation (281). In other
words, the historian is seeking to explain why certain events happened rather than
clarifying the order and relevance of the facts for the reader.
The documentation, or explanation, of history is problematic at best, given the
inherent complexities of point of view and author bias; and yet, historically, there has
been a standard of assumed objectivity. Readers of historical narratives have learned
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to trust that the underlying facts of the story, if presented as history and not fiction, are
as close to a simple and unembellished chronicling of events as is possible given the
difficulties of documenting historical data. They are secure in the knowledge that
historians, by virtue of their profession, are arbiters of historical accuracy and careful
compilers of what will later be passed down to their progeny as concrete knowledge of
the event. Students of history have come to rely on the idea that while historical
fiction will draw from the details set forth by historians as historical fact, the two
narrative constructions are entirely different animals, that although fictional narrative
may be based on historical events, history and fiction are not, and should not be,
synonymous. How does a historian, in the course of his or her work, write an accurate
and unadorned account of history without resorting to fictionalizing the event,
especially when that event is associated with human trauma? Can emotionally charged
testimony be called evidence? Can trauma be related in such a way that it can be
considered objective and unembellished?
While it is certainly preferable that a historian not bring his own feelings or
biases into the presentation of history, there is an additional assumption among many
traditional academic historians that fact can and should be presented without relating
the emotion of those entangled in the history they are recording, without accounting
for the human psyche as it is involved in experiencing history. Although this is
certainly possible in the case of the mundane, it cannot be so in the case of the
extraordinary. If, on September 11, 2001, New Yorkers had simply gone about their
lives as on any ordinary day, history could have recorded that day without detailing the
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individual emotional experience, the ideal being that there is no room for emotion in
the documentation of historical fact. However, the facts in that case involve not only
the destruction of the Twin Towers by hijacked aircraft, but the massive loss of human
life as a result, and those left behind experienced terror, loss, grief and horror. Some
historians may, in fact, attempt to record the 9/11 events in New York as sterile and not
involving human beings as individuals but as statistics; however, when the victims and
survivors are available to add detail and thereby create a subjective narrative rather
than an objective study, such a sterile history will not be looked to as the definitive
source by which we remember the event. Although government statistics may record
that a specific number of people died and a finite amount of property was destroyed,
statistics will likely refrain from including the narrative of the woman standing on the
street wearing a sandwich board bearing her fiancé’s face and asking passersby if they
have seen him. Survivors of tragedy invariably seek to know the whys involved in
history in order to identify cause and assess blame in an attempt to come to terms with
events that otherwise seem senseless. Human beings do not want to believe that
wanton tragedy occurs; there must be a reason behind all acts of cruelty, terrorism,
murder, and other such horrific phenomena. (Tilly, 447) It is the existence of the why
factor that changes the documentation of trauma in history from emotionless fact to
chronicles of the emotional details of individual tragedy and thereby creates narratives
of human trauma as people share their own stories in an effort to understand the larger
picture.
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The master narrative, then, is constructed not just from statistics and other data
arranged in a logical format by which we grow to understand a tragic historical event,
but also from the anecdotal detailing of individual experience. Statisticians have
reported the number of lives lost in the 9/11 attacks based on the payroll records and
other hard evidence available at the time, so we know that 2966 people were killed in
the attacks. We know that four planes were hijacked and that two were flown into the
Twin Towers, one into the Pentagon and one into the Pennsylvania countryside. We
know that desperate people jumped to their deaths to escape the fires. However, this is
not the whole story or even the majority of the story of 9/11. It is, however, something
that everyone can agree upon as fact. Government archives, though dry records of
statistical data, are seen as reliable contributions to our knowledge of history, though
they can be lacking in detail and are certainly lacking in the human element. The Nazi
regime kept records of their actions, both accurate and inaccurate, which has been
helpful in the reconstruction of the Holocaust as history, but such documentation,
especially from the perpetrator’s perspective, is limited to the facts and figures that
were necessary to running the ghettos and camps efficiently and cannot be taken as
truth but can only be seen as fact and then only if verified by additional sources, given
the Nazi propensity to convolute the reality of life for Jews under their rule. Fact,
though helpful in recreating events, can only be considered part of the elements that
make up the whole truth of an event. Similarly, newspaper accounts, though less
objective than statistical data, are often perceived by the public as faithful narratives of
events as they unfold and therefore add substantially to the master narrative, although
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it should be noted that there is never a guarantee that a newspaper account will, in any
way, be objective. Even the most subjective of writings, such as personal diaries or
journals and letters written to family or friends, can arbitrarily contribute to the master
narrative in that there are no guidelines for what is included, only that the public as a
whole accept the narrative as part of the overall matrix. It is, therefore, entirely
possible that the master narrative, what we know about history, can be, and often is,
made up of personal narrative as well as historical data. It can, in fact, include myths
and legends often passed on as truth.
Windschuttle argues that exposing “the reality behind some of the legends of
our culture is one of the legitimate tasks of the historian. But this role can only be
performed by historians who have some faith in the ability of the profession to get to
the truth by shaking off the ideological garb in which an individual or an event has
been previously clothed, that is, by seeing it objectively.”(256) The very fact that he
states the necessity of exposing legend as being part of the profession of the historian
illustrates the frequency with which legend makes its way into the annals of history.
If, however, as Windschuttle explains, we should be interested in seeking the truth in
documenting history, we must acknowledge that there should be a separate and distinct
set of rules involved in seeking truth as it pertains to the documentation of traumatic
history, which, by its very nature, cannot be presented as fact separated from
emotional experience. Windshuttle does not make a distinction between traumatic
history and non-traumatic history, stating that all history should be removed from the
personal agenda and influence of historians and should instead be documented without
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embellishment. However, ignoring individual history as a part of the larger event only
seeks to remove humans from human history, and in the midst of trauma, history and
individual experience cannot be separated.
Although historians have a perceived obligation to expunge myth and legend
from the factual, historical master narrative, in the documentation of traumatic history,
as with the Holocaust, myth and legend have become enmeshed in the overall matrix
as a result of the effects of trauma on memory. Once either of these types of ‘history’
or indeed, personal individual experience, become accepted by laypeople as unbiased
and unemotional fact, due to its presentation as history and therefore as part of the
master narrative and truth about the event, it is difficult to change or replace the
matrix. It is this matrix, then, on which we build future fictional as well as factual
accounts. Although fictional representations of history have the freedom to invent
narrative where facts are lacking or where the master narrative fails to provide
answers, factual accounts also become mired in the master narrative due to the fact
that even if the account deviates from the master narrative, it must at least
acknowledge that from which it is deviating in order to make the reader understand
how a particular event is being treated.
Therefore, as fictions may be written on the basis of how a historical master
narrative is understood by the writer, that master narrative can, itself, be based on
fiction. Additionally, the elements of the master narrative are independent of the form
of storytelling. That is, stories that make use of the master narrative and abide by its
contents are further guided by the rules of story structure, grammar and so forth,
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something that can limit the scope and focus of the master narrative to a single
element, i.e., a particular person, or day or moment in time. Since writers of historical
fiction draw from the master narrative of a given event in order to create a story based
on historical fact, the master narrative then guides the writer intent on documenting
history, regardless of the fictional nature of the resulting story, although the ‘facts’
living in public consciousness are not necessarily devoid of personal experience or
politicking. Further, since most writers of historical fiction are not themselves
historians by profession, and thereby given to fact-checking or an adherence to
historical truth, the matrix may be accepted by the writer of fiction as fact without
reservation, nor is he necessarily bound by the limits of history, even assuming that he
does his homework and researches the underlying facts involved in the story he wants
to tell. To paraphrase Mark Twain, ‘the difference between history and fiction is that
fiction has to make sense.’ Fiction must be a plausible representation of the truth,
whether the reader knows the truth or not. Therefore, where the traditional historian
may feel constrained by the facts of history in all their chaos, the writer of historical
fiction may bend, stretch or fabricate the ‘facts’ in order to produce plausibility.
Roland Barthes calls this ‘the reality effect,’ that is to say, the phenomenon wherein
real history is complemented by “insignificant notations,” details that give the
appearance of reality but which are, in and of themselves, only representative of the
endless scenarios possible in the course of history, and which cannot be verified nor
discounted. (16) To complicate matters further, the popularity of historical novels can,
in fact, add to the master narrative, thereby creating the belief that narrative fiction is
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the presentation of fact in a lyrical format, adding more ‘insignificant notations’ to the
master narrative of the event.
While all master narratives of historical events result in a continuum of
accuracy, the Holocaust, unlike other events, has a system of watchdogs in the form of
survivors and their descendants, who are quick to criticize elements which may stray
too far from the accepted master narrative or make the opposing ends of the continuum
too disparate. In this sense, there is an element of attempted design of the Holocaust
master narrative; however, this is mainly in the form of desired restrictions as a result
of a perceived trivialization or commodification of the
Holocaust.
It is because of the impossibility of a single or group of architects in
constructing historical reality and subsequent persistence of legend masquerading as
fact that this thesis seeks to document the master narrative of the Holocaust generally,
and more specifically as it pertains to cinematic representation of the Jewish
experience during WWII.
However, it will at first be useful to demonstrate the existence of the master
narrative for an unrelated event in American history to act as a starting point from
which to understand the use of a particular matrix in storytelling. An example of such
a master narrative is evident in the formation of the Constitution of the United States
of America.
As Americans, we know, that is, we understand the master narrative to say, that
the Constitution was created in Philadelphia by a group of men engaged in political
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debate not only over the basis of American law but over the exact language to be used
in framing those laws, and what that language would mean for the governance of the
people of the newly formed United States. We know that Thomas Jefferson was
instrumental in advocating the separation of church and state in government affairs and
that Alexander Hamilton stood strongly in favor of federal rights over state rights. We
also know that, once written, the document was considered by many to be inadequate,
thereby necessitating the addition of the Bill of Rights. Although this is by no means a
comprehensive accounting of the Constitution master narrative, it is enough to use for
the purposes of illustration.
These elements, when taken together, and in conjunction with those I have left
out in the interest of brevity, form the groundwork on which we base any narrative of
the framing of the constitution. When a writer begins the documentation of American
history, he knows that these elements must be present or what he is writing will be
seen as deliberately treating the master narrative as false, inadequate or untrustworthy,
or that the narrative he has written is a work of alternate reality. In the first case, the
writer must address, or at least understand, that his work disputes those elements
believed to be fact and provide evidence that his narrative is the more accurate. If the
narrative is of the second type, while it need not overtly acknowledge the master
narrative, the writer must at least be sensible that the deviation will invite comparison,
if only to acknowledge that the master narrative is that from which the writer has
deviated. In both instances, the master narrative is the standard against which a
historical narrative is written. The fictional historical narrative must at least be closely
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related to the facts of the event. That is not to say that fictional narrative can, nor
should be, mere statements of fact, but instead are a particular ordering of facts into a
coherent whole based on the goal of the writer in question. If the author’s goal is to
highlight a particular day, for instance, the day on which the Constitution was signed,
he would structure the facts accordingly, in such a way that the focus would be on a
single moment in time rather than on the events which, though still part of the history
of the Constitution, would not necessarily have anything to do with this particular
piece of history. At the same time, the author could not deny that other elements exist,
only that they are less important to his narrative focus.
However, the master narrative also acts as a guide by which readers of
literature and viewers of film understand works of history. The master narrative
allows the reader/viewer to match this set of historic guidelines with the work being
read and know that this is a work about a specific event in history. If, when viewing a
film about the framing of the Constitution, the audience can identify that Alexander
Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson are playing their prescribed narrative roles,
suspension of disbelief is preserved, regardless of how many of the details are
invented, or indeed left out, by the writers. In fact, as Barthes explains, the details
surrounding the facts are what lend the feeling of truth to the narrative. The details
then become significant in that they convey the truth of the object being described,
(16) in this case, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.
Readers and film-goers have also come to rely on an additional element in their
understanding of history, that of the time machine fantasy, which takes two forms.
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The first is blatant in that the characters in the film are transported into another reality.
The second, and more common, is subtle and is a device used to bring the audience
into the filmic experience as it occurs in a different period than his own. This fantasy
employs the idea that the ultimate goal of fictional narrative is to create the illusion
that we are experiencing the truth of history, either through written description or
visual narrative. Historical novels have relied on this fantasy in written narrative, to
make the story seem more immediate, and therefore real. The time machine fantasy is
also assumed to be at work in viewing a historical film. Without the ability to be
mentally transported into the past, the visual narrative does not work. If we are
constantly reminded that what we are seeing in the cinema is the result of the work of
a cameraman who was sitting in our position and who captured the action we are
currently seeing as it was performed by actors, then the film fails to do what it’s
charged with doing, that is, to transport us into the midst of the event we are
witnessing. Therefore, we don’t hear the director directing an actor to pretend he is
starving or watch the makeup being applied to a rosy complexion in order to create the
illusion of illness. This set of illusions that makes up the time machine fantasy leads
to the belief that we, as receivers of the narrative, know the truth about history,
whatever that truth might entail, following completion of a fictional representation.
But like all historical fiction,
The cinema holds out the historian’s dream of complete and
unmediated access to the past at the same time that its efforts reveal
the artifice required to hold such a dream in place. The cinema
offers a quintessentially postmodern position, oscillating between
the desire for plentitude, for total transparency and knowledge of the
past, and the impossibility of ever achieving that goal. (Finke, 6)
23
Although both novelization and film as representatives of history claim to expose
reality, there is an underlying understanding that what we are reading or seeing is a
fictional construct which requires the “suspension of disbelief” from its audience for
success. Storytelling of all kinds, regardless of the medium, is created to envelop the
listener. “It is that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes
poetic faith.” Nowhere is more poetic faith necessary than in the viewing of historical
film. The filmmakers reconstruct the details of life in a specific period in history in
order to allow us to be transported by the time machine, that is, to participate in the
representation so thoroughly that we might believe we have experienced it firsthand
and temporarily cease to recognize that we are sitting in a movie theater in our
hometowns rather than following the founding fathers around the streets of
Philadelphia.
However, if the film were to make Hamilton and Jefferson dueling starship
captains or make them agree on everything so that debate wasn’t necessary, the
audience would instantly recognize the deviation and, barring the possibility that the
narrative is acting as a metaphor, the ‘insignificant notations’ would signify that this is
not a truthful representation of historical reality. Our time machine would then
become a transporter to another dimension, one with which we are not familiar. Such
changes to the narrative of Constitution formation would no longer be recognizable as
components of known, and accepted, history but would, instead, transport the narrative
firmly into the realm of fiction or even fantasy, without the historical element.
Without an adherence to the master narrative as an underlying framework, with at least
24
some of its descriptive details, the filmmaker is no longer representing history. While
the viewer may be willing to accept that the account is fiction, he is rarely willing to
accept changes to the master narrative which render it unrecognizable as the event in
question.
The writer is then both aided and burdened by the general public’s knowledge
of the master narrative, or rather, the public inhabits the history that he or she knows
and the writer must work within the framework of this house of history in order to be
acceptable to the reader but has the freedom to remodel, within reason. That is, film,
with the master narrative as a guide, tells the viewer what he already knows and
accepts as part of his mastery of history. The writer is aided by the fact that the
characters and settings will be known and easily recognized as belonging to a
particular event in history and only that event, and he, therefore, need not lay down a
backstory chronicling how he arrived at the novel’s locus nor account for why he has
begun his story at any particular point in time during the event’s occurrence. He need
only give clues as to where and when we are and we, as viewers, subconsciously draw
on the particulars of the master narrative to assist us in locating ourselves within the
story. If, however, as in the above example, we find ourselves overhearing a debate on
Article I of the Constitution in a fruit market on the streets of Calcutta, we would be
lost and would require eventual explanation as to how we ended up here and not in
Philadelphia. The burden subsists in the writer’s inability to deviate from the master
narrative in any substantial way, to tear down the history and build a new one in its
place. Though Bathrick’s reflected reality gives the writer something on which to base
25
his story construction, that construction must accurately reflect salient points in the
reality on which it is based in order to garner reader approval, regardless of whether
these points are factual. The truth of the story is determined by the reader, depending
on his knowledge of the underlying master narrative, further complicating the
possibility of locating the truth in relation to history.
Although the above is largely in relation to the written text, it is equally
applicable to the cinematic documentation of historical fiction. However, the nature of
both film and film audiences add other, more particular, layers to the master narrative
specific to cinema. As a visual medium, film cannot rely on vague description or
flowery language to distill a scene in the viewer’s mind. The filmic storyteller must
show the audience meaning. The very fact that film is visual, and therefore appears to
be representational of reality in a way that written text is not, is much more evocative
in terms of the master narrative and necessary mise-en-scene. In the world of
cinematic representation, it is not enough to name the characters Hamilton and
Jefferson and let the audience fill in the details of their appearance nor to label the
setting 1784 Philadelphia, the audience must see that the actors resemble Hamilton and
Jefferson. They must see horse-drawn carriages rather than cars. The characters must
wear period clothing and speak in the expected dialect. The audience must be
convinced that the world they are viewing on screen is the world it is pretending to be.
This visual layering is not so much a cinematic replacement of the master narrative as
a refinement of it. The historical film must wear the window dressing of the history in
which it’s set.
26
Important in all film, as a component of visual narrative, is mise-en-scene; the
details within the frame which establish time and place, and which provide clues as to
how the audience should read the scene. Similar to the genre film, wherein the
audience enters the theater knowing, at least marginally, which details must be present,
or indeed absent, in order to make what they are seeing a film of a particular genre, the
master narrative creates a subconsciously understood list of elements which the
audience expects to see in a film made about a historical event. This invoking of the
past through visual language is essential in order to create a believable film narrative.
In other words, the master narrative establishes the event’s individual language and
film displays that language visually for an audience who speaks or, at the very least,
understands that language and its dialects. In “The Reel Joan of Arc”,
larger details like cars, horses, airplanes and buildings, as well as the minutiae like books, coffee cups,
and street litter; actors and their costumes, which must represent the story being told; the sets in a larger
sense, such as the interior of The White House or the Kingdom of Oz; and even the lighting, as in the
strip club scene in The Graduate. There is some debate as to whether mise-en-scene should also include
the camera’s position and movement, however, this debate is not germane to the current discussion.
Robert A. Rosenstone reminds us that “filmmakers encode messages not just in the
characters or story, but in the very visual language in which they choose to speak of
the past.” (72) The messages left within the film for the viewer to discover are visual
specters based on the master narrative, however, they are often more subtle than the
descriptive messages left by an author of written text. It is not simply the medium of
representation that is different, but what it represents as well.
Keith Windschuttle argues that the historian seeks to find truth. (251-278) It
has also been argued that filmmakers seek to present a type of truth, that is, the
historical filmmaker often believes himself to be contributing to the master narrative,
27
or public knowledge, of history. We must question whether film can ever convey such
a truth, and, if it can, how is truth being defined? Nietzsche posited that a
transcendentally clear notion of truth cannot exist because human beings, though
intelligent, do not have the capacity to create the necessary linguistic signifiers
required to convey singularity of meaning, since each word or picture, though
meaningful to the user, will, due to personal experience, history and language, have a
different meaning for the receiver. Therefore, all we can hope for is to convey
meaning through the use of metaphor. (878) Film becomes a way of conveying a
form of truth that is not wholly based on facts, but makes use of visual language to
create a viewable metaphor derived from the master narrative.
“The basic element, the camera, is a greedy mechanism which must show in
more precise details - arrangements of furniture, the ways tools are handled, stances or
gestures, the exact locations of peasants in a landscape - than historical research could
ever fully provide.” (Rosenstone, 72) Since the medium of film exposes the historical
landscape not simply in the center of the frame but through the details to its very
edges, the audience registers the historical traces of the master narrative both
consciously, as in the dress and accent of the characters, and subconsciously, as in the
distant landscape or ambient sound of the scene. “Both written history and films
invoke the authenticity (or reality) that comes from using those traces, that
documentary evidence we call ‘facts’ and then go on to employ a literary or filmic
vocabulary to create ‘History’” (Rosenstone, 73) Although film, as a medium of
entertainment more than education, will never recite facts in the dry manner desired in
28
historical textbooks, it “must somehow engage the discourse of history, the already
existing body of writing, arguments, debates, memories, images, moral positions, and
data surrounding the topic with which it deals.” (Rosenstone, 76) In other words, film
must acknowledge and engage the master narrative in a dialogue carried out through
cinematic language. Without engagement on some level, the film may be considered
entirely unrelated or unfaithful to the knowledge of the event that it seeks to elucidate.
Within the framework of both history and film language and dialectic, the
following chapter documents the singularity of the Holocaust master narrative and its
limitations on narrative organization as well as illustrating the incongruities of the
master narrative as it sets out guidelines for the recitation of traumatic events.
Subsequent chapters will address the Holocaust master narrative as it is used in film
and how it creates a rhetorical environment through which the Holocaust is discussed.
Chapter Three: A Documentation of the Master Narrative Specific to the Holocaust as
a Historic and Singular Event
The Holocaust master narrative is unlike the narratives of any other historical
event, including genocidal events, in that the tropes we recognize as being ingrained in
the public consciousness as elements of the master narrative are supplemented by a set
of rules by which transmission of Holocaust memory, history and knowledge may take
place, according to those who survived it. These rules, though not codified in the
sense that laws exist in any country governing the relaying of Holocaust history, are
codified in the sense that they are stated and restated in the multitude of literature on
the subject, rules that have seemed to the survivors and their descendants to be
29
obvious, but which are not necessarily so to those outside the Jewish faith. This
governing layer then becomes part of the master narrative while at the same time
complicating the narrative by attempting to suppress it.
As discussed in the previous chapter, the master narrative accumulates
haphazardly and without forethought, but begins by recognizing a set of assumptions
made by the public at large based on what they believe they know about a given
historical event. What then are these public assumptions about the Holocaust? It is
perhaps useful to begin by defining what we mean by “The Holocaust”. By this
particular phrase, history means to denote the destruction of European Jewry at the
hands of Nazi Germany, and specifically Hitler, during the period of 1933-1945,
imprecisely imagined to be World War II. Americans were introduced to the aftermath
of this destruction through popular media. “Camera teams filmed the horrors that
remained of the concentration camps after the liberation—piles of bodies, crematoria,
stacks of personal possessions—and the skeletal survivors.” (Doneson, American
Film 7) These elements of the Holocaust then became the foundation on which
Americans began building their Holocaust knowledge. It is not particularly surprising
then, that future understanding of the Holocaust would come from cinematic
representation given that American initiation into the reality of the camps, though
limited, was delivered in a similar medium. However, Doneson also points out that
the result is not a universally recognizable Holocaust, one whose history is the same in
every country and wherein the United States acknowledges its actual role in the
30
destruction, but instead, it Americanizes the Holocaust into a commodity that is easily
digestible by the American public.
The matter most closely connecting America to the Holocaust was
its refusal to allow Jewish refugees entry into the United States—
in retrospect, a tragic decision for the
Jews…Ironically, the most successful films utilize American
symbols and language to convey an American perception of the
(European) Holocaust. In effect, we are talking about the
Americanization of the Holocaust…The cumulative effect of a
series of films on the Holocaust has been to create a lasting
image of the event in the mass mind. Since these films tend to
reflect contemporary trends, they help to make the Holocaust
meaningful to an audience for whom the Final Solution was a
foreign event. At the same time, they strive to place the
Holocaust in its proper historical context—as the attempted
genocide of European Jewry by the Nazis. (American Film
910)
Doneson’s book focuses on the ways in which film has helped to change the
American conception of Jewish history. The Holocaust Jew has become separated
from all other Jewry in both physical and temporal location and, removed from the
context of the overall destruction of European Jewry, he has been given a place of
special honor in the American psyche as the archetype of human suffering. While this
is certainly an important and influential element of the Holocaust master narrative, it
does not define the entire matrix. At this point, further discussion of archetypes within
the Holocaust master narrative is necessary.
Bathrick’s definition of the master narrative postulates that future cinematic
representations of the Jewish experience in WWII can’t help but utilize the narrative
matrix set forth by the 1978 television mini-series Holocaust and the 1993 film,
Schindler’s List. Therefore, it seems useful to begin the search for Holocaust
31
archetypes in these productions. However, his argument also relies heavily on the
documentary Shoah, which he offers as a counterbalance to the “Hollywood
paradigm” utilized in the two above-mentioned films and which, itself, augments the
master narrative.
Since Holocaust is the earliest of the three, and the one which holds the
distinction of returning the Holocaust to the forefront of American historical memory,
this mini-series may be regarded as the codifier of the Holocaust master narrative, with
Schindler’s List acting as both confirmation of the matrix and a lightening rod for
frustration with the non-cinematic community for Hollywood-izing, and therefore
commodifying, genocide. Holocaust was also “among the first American popular
films to focus on the Final Solution as a specifically Jewish event” (Doneson
American Film 149) rather than as a byproduct of a war which resulted in 60 million
deaths worldwide or as a genocide that included not only Jews but gypsies,
homosexuals, the mentally retarded and political prisoners. Holocaust focused on
Nazi aggression against European Jewry as both a means and an end to global
dominance. However, as mentioned above, Holocaust, as with Judgment at
Nuremberg, debuted into an America that needed to understand the Holocaust not in
terms of the victims, but in terms of itself, in that Americans were more receptive to
productions that helped them understand their own participation in the Holocaust.
Therefore, Holocaust gives a somewhat distanced view of the event for an audience
that did not participate in it nor fully understand it. By the time the mini-series aired,
it had been tailored to discuss an Americanized Holocaust. “The viewer had to be
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given the impression that Holocaust pertain[ed] to him…” (Doneson American Film
150-151). From the earliest scenes of Holocaust, we can see the American influence.
Eric Dorf, who is meant to portray the coldly calculating designer of the Final
Solution, states, during his job interview, “I haven’t worn a uniform since I was in the
Boy Scouts.” (Holocaust, 1978) While the German version of the Boy Scouts existed
in the form of the Pfadfinderen, this particular phrase would not have endeared him to
the Hitler’s Reich, since, fearing competition, Hitler had abolished this and all other
scouting groups in 1933, two years prior to the timeframe depicted in the miniseries.
However, it was a phrase which would help the American viewing public identify
themselves within the story being told. Additionally, Holocaust was not made for
Jewish American audiences, who presumably never allowed themselves to forget the
Holocaust, but for non-Jewish American audiences, who might need to be reminded of
a horrific incident in human history. The violence is watered-down and unrealistic,
largely taking place off-screen and thereby wholesome enough for the
1978 television viewer who, we must assume, was only willing to get small doses of
the reality of the Holocaust and whose exposure to television violence and traumatic
reality was limited by the practices of the time. In addition, the miniseries takes the
interesting stance of adding the Christian element. Therefore, while the miniseries
acknowledges that the Catholic Church played a role in sponsoring wholesale
antiSemitism, it also performs religious sleight-of-hand. While listening to a radio
address rallying the people of Berlin to rise up against “the demon Jew,” Rudy Weiss
shouts “Go to Hell!” a place which does not exist in Judaism, at least, not in the sense
33
that it does in Christianity and certainly not by that term. But again, it helps the
largely Christian American audience identify with the events taking place. The WWII
master narrative, therefore, is an Americanized and Christianized version of historical
truth regardless of the fact the Holocaust was directed at European Jewry and America
was very late in joining the war against Hitler. Once the ground is prepared for
American acceptance of the Holocaust as an event which can, and should, induce
sympathy for the plight of the European Jew, the story begins to add elements of the
narrative, most of which still operate as the cloth from which contemporary Holocaust
and Holocaust-related films are cut.
Holocaust approaches the subject of the destruction of European Jewry by
beginning with the war as a whole, that is, the backdrop against which the Holocaust
takes place is WWII Europe, however, it also begins with a hint that anti-Semitism is a
real threat to peace, although war has not yet been declared. Karl and Inga’s wedding
hosts a tense side discussion between the bride’s father, brother, and a family friend,
Heinz Müller, regarding the wisdom of Inga marrying a Jew. Müller suggests that
“the Party” may soon be restricting such marriages, and implies that this one may not
only be considered null and void as a result, but could cause problems for the Helms
family in the future. In 1978 America, there may or may not have been cultural
knowledge that “the Party’ in question was the Nazi Party. The Nazis in uniform are
outside the wedding, sitting at an outdoor table, drinking beer. Similarly, the Nazis in
Schindler’s List are first introduced to the audience as a group of men enjoying the
34
liberties of a night at a cabaret. Neither film presents the Nazis as any particular
menace initially. In fact, Schindler’s List begins with a title card that states
“September 1939, the German forces defeated the Polish Army in two weeks”
(Schindler’s List, 1993) followed by statements that the Jews of Poland are being
moved to the city of Warsaw and must register all members of their families. No
mention is made of the fact that it is the Nazi party that is requiring the registration of
the Jews of Poland. The war is not the focus in this film; the focus is on the treatment
and reaction of the Jews but even that is secondary to the transformation of Oskar
Schindler from member of the Nazi party in good standing to rogue savior of doomed
Jews.
As these films progress, cruelty begins to emerge and the Nazi archetype
within the master narrative becomes visible. This perpetrator is not the stereotype of a
villain from classic Hollywood. This Nazi is the cold and calculating average man
whose pleasure is derived from the cruelty he inflicts, but at the same time, he has a
softer side. No longer the outwardly monstrous, ranting, hate monger of legend,
Holocaust’s Eric Dorf is portrayed as a man who needs a job and joins the only outfit
hiring in the depressed German economy, the Nazi party. He is the representation of
Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” (Eichmann), a man whose crime is that he’s doing
his job, and doing it well. Lance Morrow describes Dorf as “a prissily murderous
family man and SS officer around whom nearly all the horrific deeds of genocide are
crowded” (Morrow, Holocaust, online). Dorf is a fictional character partly based on
Otto Ohlendorf, and partly on Adolf Eichmann, and who polarizes the film into a
35
“battle between the German and the Jew, and in so doing, omits most of Western
Europe from consideration” (Doneson, American Film 159) in order to focus the
American audience’s response to the film. He is not, however, merely the man
following orders; Dorf is the creator of many of the measures taken in the Final
Solution, though he is given three potential motivations for his actions in the event that
debate should arise over his role in the genocide. First, General Heydrich immediately
alerts the audience to the list of reasons Hitler and the Nazis gave for the
“extermination” of the Jews. He cites racial purity as foremost, followed by the
infiltration of Jewish businessmen into the economy. The idea that Jewish workers are
taking German jobs is seen as justification before the audience is ever even introduced
to what this will mean or how widespread anti-Semitism will become. Second,
throughout the mini-series, Dorf remains in a subordinate position. When Heydrich is
killed in a car bombing, Dorf does not take his position. Instead, someone more
powerful and seemingly more vicious takes Heydrich’s place, giving Dorf the future
ability to claim that he is just doing his job, should he need to do so. However, there is
a third, more disturbing, aspect to his character as a good German and a man who
always follows orders. Late in the mini-series, when Dorf appears to question his own
involvement in the Final Solution and confesses the nature of the annihilation of the
Jews to his wife, she is unsympathetic to either her husband or the victims. Instead,
she believes his job should take precedence over any sentimentality regarding the Jews
and berates him for his weakness. This triple layer of protection against blame
solidifies the German-as-victim element of the master narrative initiated in Judgment
36
at Nuremberg, while at the same time the audience begins to associate the Final
Solution with Dorf-as-architect rather than as the result of a well thought out plan by
the Nazi regime. This simplifies the issue for the American audience; however, it
creates a new debate amongst genocide scholars in general, and Holocaust scholars in
particular, that of the Hollywood factor.
David Bathrick brings into focus the “Hollywood question,” that is, the tools
used by Hollywood filmmakers to make a film a pecuniary success regardless of
whether these additional or subtracted elements detract from the truthfulness or
validity of the narrative with regard to the event itself. He questions “…whether the
Hollywood paradigm is capable of grasping such an event as the Holocaust.”
(Bathrick, Rescreening 44) In this case, the “Hollywood paradigm” flattens out the
Nazi regime, taking it from being a vast and malevolent network which worked in a
coordinated effort to perpetrate the Holocaust and, instead, presents the audience with
the archetypal villain, who, rather than being an anonymous and amorphous group, is
a person with a specific identity who acts as a focal point for all blame. He is an
individual who, while he declares that “We’re not monsters” in one scene, in another
states that “Jews have always been fair game” as justification for his increased
restrictions on, and brutality against, the Jewish people, and in another calls both Jews
and Russians “subhuman” and “born to slavery.” (Holocaust, 1978)
In Schindler’s List, the Hollywood factor supplies the audience with a
marginally prettier version of Amon Goeth as the personification of evil. Since his
character is that of a historical figure rather than a characterization based on the
37
splicing of more than one person into a screen personification, Ralph Fiennes is
embodied with the traits of the real Amon Goeth. He is cruel, his punishments
arbitrary, his psyche on the brink of psychosis. But his is not the tame, watered-down
cruelty of Holocaust, characterized by melodramatic, soap opera gesturing. He is the
product not only of historic reality, but of the new Hollywood trend toward realistic
violence onscreen and of Hollywood’s belief that the viewing audience prefers to
watch beautiful people in film rather than the reality of ordinary people. Goeth is
therefore portrayed by a good looking actor rather than one who might come closer to
the exact physical description of the man himself, but he is also a man capable of
shooting a boy for being unable to remove stains from a bathtub or beating his Jewish
housemaid because he is sexually attracted to her. The Nazi archetype as the cold and
brutal, but otherwise average, German coalesces during Holocaust but solidifies in
Schindler’s List into the Nazi of the contemporary master narrative. That is to say that
the master narrative immediately following the liberation of the camps understood the
Nazi to be a raving lunatic, exemplified by the rantings of Adolf Hitler on the
numerous newsreels of the time. Over the course of the following decades, objective
examination of historical record revealed a very different Nazi and the master narrative
slowly changed shape to include the claims of this new drone-like creature who only
followed orders. However, both of the above filmic representations are the inventions
of a Hollywood that believes audience participation in the suspension of disbelief
relies on the representation of Nazism as more than a nebulous concept, but as a
person through whom we can see the abstractions put into reality.
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As a counter to both Dorf’s and Goeth’s roles as Nazism personified, the
audience is presented with a clear example of Jew as victim, first in a familial
representation, then as a series of individual Jews whose identity as victim is never
questioned. Holocaust proposes the Weiss family as all conceivable incarnations of
victimization by the Nazis, as well as the corresponding Jewish responses, although
each must play multiple roles in order to accomplish this. They “are the symbol of the
Jewish families who were destroyed by the various Dorfs during the Holocaust”
(Doneson, American Film 159) but in being so, are also codified as the various Jews of
the Holocaust.
Mrs. Weiss is the Jew most Americans want to believe never existed. She is
the naïve and disbelieving victim, whose family becomes ever more endangered due
her insistence that they are safe because she and her family are higher class, better
educated Jews. She believes the family’s position in society will save them. Her
ignorance is self-induced and doesn’t appear to consider the fate of her fellow
Berliners. She is not interested in the preservation of the Jewish people as a whole, nor
in the reality of what is happening to her neighbors and friends; she is only concerned
with the individual fate of her family. Mrs. Weiss unwittingly plays into Nazi plans
multiple times throughout the production, first, in allowing herself to believe that she
is safe and the assurances of the Nazis are sincere, second in believing that her
daughter is better in a German treatment facility rather than at home, and third in not
making a fuss in the gas chamber. She trusts that her family will be the only ones in
39
Berlin not affected by the Nazi takeover. She continues to believe the family safe,
even as the Helmses, her in-laws, become ever more hostile to her presence. She only
leaves Berlin after none of her children are left. Her move to Krakow seems a
holiday; her conviction in the pleasantness of the world holds until she is gassed to
death at Auschwitz. She smiles and simpers and plays the piano as her Rome burns.
In addition, she is the personification of Jewish acceptance of their fate in the
concentration camps. When the women of her barracks are taken to the showers for
gassing, Mrs. Weiss states to the Jewish capo who is escorting them, “you needn’t lie
to us,” then charges the capo with telling her husband “what has happened.” Her
response is melodramatic and unrealistic given her character until this point. Although
her response to danger results in the deaths of most of her family, Mrs. Weiss becomes
the master narrative archetype for the Jew-with-her-head-in-the-sand, allowing her
family to come to destruction because believing the alternative is too unpleasant in a
world that has been so perfect until this point. Her husband, however, is equally
distasteful as he allows her to ignore the ever-increasing danger to their family
because it makes her happy to do so, and falls into the pattern of ignorance himself.
As Lance Morrow described it “Dr. and Mrs. Weiss behaved in such genteel
forbearance down to the last horror of the Zyklon B showers that their journey seemed
like Mr. and Mrs. Miniver Go To Auschwitz.” (Morrow, online, 1978)
Mr. Weiss indulges his wife’s desire to pretend that their Germany remains
unchanged throughout and, though convinced that the family must flee Germany early
on, consents to remain, until he sees his eldest son Karl sent to Buchenwald at the
40
whim of the Nazis and is himself deported to Poland, leaving his family in the hands
of his German in-laws. His faith is in his position as doctor to the Jews of Krakow and
in his wife, who he appears to believe is the personification of goodness, and who he
allows to guide him. Echoing her misguided sense of reality, once he is ensconced in
the Krakow ghetto, he continues his trust in the idea that the Nazis are being truthful
and becomes part of the community council set in place to affect Jewish self-rule.
These leaders are thereby a bridge between the Nazis outside the ghetto and the Jews
forced to live inside in miserable conditions. But Mr. Weiss is also the voice of hope
and of reason. He asks, while being marched back to the barracks for ‘de-lousing,’
“Why do we still obey them?” Then he discusses a hopeful outcome with his former
patient, Mr. Lowy, all the while knowing the true meaning of the Nazi euphemism.
Here, the American audience is reminded of the details of Nazi deception when
discussing the concentration camps and their methods of extermination, a concept that
was first introduced in Judgment at Nuremberg.
Their son Rudy is not only of a different generation and therefore less closed
off in his view of the world, but is of a different mindset. He is the only realist in the
family. Upon seeing his mother’s folly, he runs away from Berlin in the middle of the
night to join the resistance, a characterization of the Zionism that was largely ignored
in Hollywood prior to the making of the mini-series. Judith Doneson states that
“Gerald Green’s script strengthens the Zionist viewpoint that Jews can fight, but that
weak, passive diaspora Jews usually do not.” (Film, 2002:171) In Hollywood’s
romantic notion of justice, Rudy, as the Weiss family resister, becomes the archetypal
41
sole survivor of his family, a condition which will be alluded to in most survivor
narratives that follow. His second role in Holocaust is that of the person who marries
during the Holocaust. This is a phenomenon that did happen in the camps, generally
as a traumatic response to losing the entirety of one’s family and an attempt to carry
out the mitzvah of procreation. However, in Holocaust, Rudy’s marriage to Helena
also serves as the romance factor necessary in Hollywood film and occurs while they
are living in the woods, on the run with the resistance. Regardless of the complexities
of war and their effect on the human psyche, this storyline seems melodramatic and
implausible. Rudy and Helena fall into bed within an hour of meeting and she
immediately decides to run away with him to join the resistance, leaving behind family
and friends, thus taking up the romantic ideal of ‘running away together.’ But
Helena is not the strong-willed woman who rescues Rudy from punishment by the
Nazis in Czechoslovakia, with the confidence to run off and join the resistance
moments after meeting a man to whom she attracted. She is at times the brains behind
their escapes due to her linguistic abilities, appearing to be the ideal freedom fighter,
but at the same time she is the weak and frail woman who cries whenever there is
danger, a throwback to Classic Hollywood. Her presence in the miniseries is not to
add to the public knowledge of the Holocaust and thereby become part of the master
narrative, but to offer the requisite love story, one that cannot be fulfilled by the Karl
and Inga Weiss marriage due to their spending most of the film separated from each
other.
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Likewise Anna, often histrionic in her resistance to her mother’s head-in-
thesand philosophy, is, at sixteen, portrayed as too young to be sensible of any real
danger to herself and consequently becomes a victim of a brutal gang rape by Nazi
officers. She descends into a madness born of the realization that there is very little
that can be done to fight against an enemy who doesn’t even consider her human.
Anna plays the role of two archetypal victims simultaneously. First, as the victim of a
sexual violence which is seemingly disassociated from the taboo against intimacy
between German and Jew, she is the archetypal victim of the Nazi as sexually sadistic
monster.30 Second, as the victim of death-by-gassing of the sick, frail and mentally
infirm, she is the archetype of the uncontrollable deaths of the “other” as Nazi victim.
While the category of other in the Nazi regime included political prisoners,
homosexuals, resisters, gypsies and socialists in addition to the mentally ill, Holocaust
acknowledges their suffering by making Anna the personification of the combined
‘others’ who just happens to also be Jewish.
Conversely, Schindler’s List creates an array of singular archetypes without the
soap opera tendencies. This is the story of Oskar Schindler. Here, a shift is made
away from the Jewish victims as central, while at the same time Spielberg focuses on
Schindler’s interactions with individual Jews as he effects their rescue. The character
of Oscar Schindler is therefore the focus and the Jews act as extras in a story that is not
about them, but about their rescuer. While Holocaust attempted to educate the
viewing public on the reality of the destruction of European Jewry, its soft-soaping of
the true conditions in both the ghettos and the camps, though proscribed by the
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television conventions of the time, was only able to initiate the discourse in film. But
fifteen years, and the commemoration of multiple Holocaust memorials across the
United States, had a profound effect on the tastes of the viewing public. No longer
would vaguely dirty prison uniforms and pantomimed fatigue be adequate as signifiers
of suffering. By the 1990s, Spielberg would be required to show the audience a more
real reality than had been shown before. However, as the master narrative was already
beginning to take shape in the minds of the American public it was also up to
Spielberg to either affirm or discard the archetypes.
His protagonist in the film is not the Jewish victim but the potential perpetrator,
a fact that Elie Weisel, and those like him, considered a travesty.
Schindler is a member of the Nazi Party who only belatedly decides that he is on the
wrong side and uses his position to the advantage of the Jews he rescues, though his
reasons for doing so are unclear. However, at the many and varied times when all
involved in the Holocaust are faced with choices, Schindler’s prior life makes him fall
back into old and familiar patterns which indicate to the Jews around him that they are
in just as much danger from Schindler as from anyone else. When Itzak Stern forgets
his work card and is subsequently taken to the trains to be transported to a work camp,
Schindler scolds him. “What if I got here five minutes later? Then where would I
be?” Stern realizes that his relationship with Schindler is based on his economic value
as accountant rather than on any personal attachment, a value that may not always
hold true and which immediately reminds the viewing audience of the arbitrary nature
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of existence in the world of the European Jew. Helen Hirsch, Goeth’s housemaid,
explains it to Schindler this way:
One day he will shoot me…I know. I see things. We were on the
roof on Monday, young Lisak and I, and we saw the Herr
Commandant come out of the front door and down the steps of the
patio, right there below us. And there on the steps, he drew his
gun and he shot a woman who was passing by. A woman carrying
a bundle. Through the throat. Just a woman on her way
somewhere. She was not fatter or thinner or slower or faster than
anyone else and I couldn’t guess what had she done. The more
you see of the Herr Commandant, the more you see there is no set
rules that you can live by. You can’t say to yourself, ‘If I follow
these rules, I will be safe.’ (Schindler’s List, 1:40:50)
Goeth and Dorf, though different, both become part of the master narrative. Goeth is
sadistic and cruel, the most commonly imagined characterization of Nazism, while
Dorf is the man doing his job under orders, but who is always astonished at how easy
it is to achieve compliance from the Jewish community, an acquiescence that doesn’t
dissipate even at the moment of death.
The archetype of the Holocaust Jew, however, begins to change form
somewhat in Schindler’s List. Rather than allowing for numerous types, such as the
smiling or complacent or ineffectual victim, the Holocaust Jew morphs into a version
more in line with the more recent incarnation of the master narrative of
incomprehensibility imposed on the Holocaust by writers such as Elie Weisel. This
group of Polish Jews does not understand what is occurring nor do they believe that
any particular one of them is safe at any moment. Gone is the simpering smile and
calm demeanor of Dr. Weiss and his wife, replaced by outward stoicism masking
45
inward terror. These are people whose minute-by-minute existence is at the whim of
those who hate them. They are never seen as anything other than victims of Nazi
Germany, a status that is frequently reiterated throughout the film.
Perhaps the only exceptions to this, in opposition to Schindler himself, are the
opportunists, the smugglers who later become part of the peacekeeping unit in the
ghetto. They appear to be secure in the belief that since they are performing a service,
they will qualify for exemption from deportation to the camps, or that such a fate will
be delayed until the war is over. As a result, they deal with their fellow
Jewish residents as though there were always time to enjoy the fruits of their dealings.
There is no compassion for the people in their charge, just as Mrs. Weiss feels none for
her neighbors. The opportunists only live for the accumulation of wealth, as
Schindler does prior to his enlightenment. These Jews-as-collaborators not only enter
the spotlight of the master narrative at this point, but do so in a way that stokes the
flames of Holocaust denial. The additional archetype of victim-as-perpetrator is born
of the portrayal of these opportunists. Though these men did not kill or torture their
fellow countrymen, they are seen as a strange conglomeration of bystander, collaborator
and perpetrator, but rarely as victims themselves, regardless of their inability to escape
the same fate as those around them. While documentation suggests that the capos of the
camps and guards of the ghettos were replaced regularly, as they had no increased value
to the Nazis, Schindler’s List relies on the ability of Stern to bribe one man into
transferring the Schindler Jews to the factory. The reality of the replacement of these
individuals would require the enactment of a different plot line to achieve the required
46
goal and is ignored for a better and more cohesive production. This reality makes sense
within the film even as it fails to do so in reality. The opportunists witness their people
being sent to the camps as the Krakow ghetto is emptied but the act of witnessing has
little effect on their own sense of reality.
When we compare the two productions, the opportunists, as well as the other,
limited examples of witnesses in each are similar but the bystander archetype is
profoundly different. In both instances, the witnesses are single individuals with little
effect on either the outcome of the war or the fate of the victims. In Holocaust, Uncle
Kurt Dorf, a roadbuilder, witnesses his workers marching to their deaths, an event he
is powerless to stop. In Schindler’s List, the witness is the single Russian Army
liberator, the last person to recognize the Jews of Plaszow as prisoners. In contrast,
Holocaust’s bystanders are of two types, those who are silent and those who are not.
As Karl Weiss is led away by German police, the numerous bystanders first watch,
then quickly close their doors, as Inga races frantically after her husband and his
captors, silently allowing the arrests to go unquestioned. The Helms family, however,
is increasingly vocal in their disdain for the position they believe themselves to be in
following the marriage of their daughter to a Jewish artist. Their bystander status
straddles the line between bystander and collaborator in their incessant insistence that
Inga give up her in-laws to the Nazis. Additionally, Marta Dorf appears as the
bystander who not only stands by and watches as her own physician and his family are
taken away; she actively acts as witness against them when she harangues her husband
for his cowardice for questioning his involvement in the Final Solution. She is not
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even remotely moved when she discovers that the piano she has been given is the
same one that belonged to Dr. Weiss. Schindler’s List similarly focuses on the latter
type, the vocal hate-spewing German now part of the master narrative. As the Jews of
Poland report to the Krakow ghetto, a little girl stands on the street screaming,
“Goodbye, Jews! Goodbye, Jews!” and becomes a vocal track which bridges the scene
of the exodus with the mass entry into the walled ghetto, another, more visual, element
of the master narrative.
The walled ghetto is not the only visual reminder of the horrors of the
Holocaust however. Schindler’s List is rife with graphic depictions of Holocaust
iconography. From the beginning of the film to the end, the audience is bombarded
with the real. We are never allowed to forget where we are. We watch the poor and
wealthy alike pack their belongings and leave their homes only to arrive in a cramped
and dirty ghetto where they must share living space with dozens of others. We see the
people dying in the streets of gunshot wounds, the muddy camps, the barbed wire and
guard towers. In this realm of the visual, however, Holocaust stands out for the sheer
oddity of its handling of visual elements that would otherwise not fit in the production,
as well as for its superficial use of key elements of Holocaust history to illustrate the
plot. First, we are witness to the burning of a synagogue in the most arbitrary plot
diversion of the mini-series. Nothing leads up to the burning. Instead, we watch Hans
Helms as he watches the synagogue burn without emotion. This scene is immediately
followed by a scene in which Dorf is presenting a slideshow to
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General Heydrich of black and white photos of the tortures and killings at the camps.
We can only presume that this is part of a regular report from the camps since it occurs
again later in the film and we are told early on that Heydrich is “in charge of them all.”
The combination of the burning and slideshow scenes create a catalog of visual images
that we are meant to remember without the acts they depict actually being part of the
film.
Strangely, while the icons of the horror of the Holocaust are being burned into
the public consciousness, at the same time the master narrative of WWII and the
destruction of European Jewry appears to be evolving into a construction that does not
include nor recognize Adolph Hitler as an element. Both Holocaust and Schindler’s
List leave out any mention of Hitler, as do most of the films discussed later in this
thesis. The war of cinematic representation appears to be one concocted by Hitler’s
subordinates, the Final Solution planned by underlings of the Reich rather than by the
Chancellor. Hitler seems no longer to be synonymous with the Holocaust, but is being
replaced by an amorphous entity known as “The Nazis,” all of whom claimed to be
taking orders from a higher level, and yet, the highest level seems no longer to exist.
This phrase very often tends to be synonymous with the idea that all German citizens
of the 30s and 40s regardless of their involvement as Nazi officer, witness,
collaborator or bystander, were in fact all Nazis, as if the American consciousness
needs to believe that in order to allow the Holocaust to happen, all German citizens
must have been involved in the Nazi party in some way. Furthermore, as the Nazis
represent the perpetrators of the Holocaust, Auschwitz represents the victims.
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When the word Auschwitz is mentioned in any form of discourse, it carries
with it an enormous amount of imagery, an encyclopedia of information that the hearer
of the word conjures instantly and without further explanation. Auschwitz can be said
to both contain the master narrative of the Holocaust within it and be a metaphor for it.
Auschwitz is not simply a town in Poland where a concentration camp came to be
built. Auschwitz is 6 million dead Jews, starvation and disease, Dr.
Mengele’s medical experiments, the brutality of the cattle cars transporting the
prisoners to the camps and a never-ending sea of victims. More than that, however,
Auschwitz has come to be known as a temporal location, a place in time where
immense trauma is located. Most importantly, the notion of Auschwitz in public
memory cements the Holocaust master narrative in a way that no other term can. The
mere mention of the name conjures up images of crowded bunks, emaciated prisoners,
mud, human filth, shaved heads, arm tattoos, body-sized ovens, piles of human
corpses, guard towers, guard dogs and barbed wire. In other words, “Auschwitz”
contains the catalog of appropriate mise-en-scene for any Holocaust film which goes
beyond the simple definition of the word. Without these elements, we are not looking
at a Holocaust film, but a forgery.
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Chapter Four: A Study of Documentaries and Fictional Film in Relation to the
Holocaust Master Narrative and Its Effects on Storyline
Within the vast array of cinematic representations of the Holocaust, there are
many subcategories, which begs the question, “Are some representations of the
Holocaust better than others?” The answer, in short, is yes. And no. It depends on
what is meant by ‘better.’ If we mean, Are there Holocaust films that are more
deserving of praise as films, irrespective of their content, then yes. If however, as
Weisel, Lanzmann, and others would have us believe, there is no such thing as a good
representation of the Holocaust because the Holocaust cannot and should not be
represented as fictional re-enactment regardless of the sensitivity to the subject, then
no. “One does not imagine the unimaginable. And in particular, one does not show it
on screen.” (Wiesel, Shadows, xi) This dialectic asks audiences to perceive all
Holocaust films as bad because they dare to speak the unspeakable, rather than
believing that all Holocaust films are good since the more times the stories are told,
and as the details become more numerous and more clear, the greater the chance that
the conviction ‘never again’ may be realized. Any Holocaust film’s measure of
goodness or worth, therefore, is based on criteria from two opposing sources, those
who are judging the film as a piece of history represented on film and those who are
judging the artistic merits of the film as art.
For purposes of this thesis, this debate is moot. Herein, analysis begins and
ends with identification of the elements of the Holocaust master narrative as they are
employed within each film. The relative merits of the films themselves are
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immaterial. Instead, we will address fiction and non-fiction storytelling in cinematic
representation specific to the Holocaust and discover how these cinematic
constructions use the master narrative to aid audience reception. It is important to note
that those films which only marginally deal with the Holocaust, such as A Secret, will
be addressed here as well, as these films use the master narrative in an interesting way
that cannot otherwise be used in Holocaust focused narratives. Though the following
study encompasses many films and their types, it is not in any way a comprehensive
accounting of all Holocaust films.
A. Documentaries
The French film Night and Fog adds to the master narrative’s visual references,
but only as the details exist to describe the aftermath of the Holocaust. The film is
unrelenting in its photographic style, as it forces the viewer to linger on pile after pile
of shoes, eyeglasses, shorn hair and family photos. Although the written works of Elie
Wiesel and Primo Levi describe the camps as the men experienced them, and therefore
these elements of the master narrative existed prior to the making of the documentary,
the impact of the visual image is more direct and less inclined to interpretation. The
audience is bombarded with image after image of what was left behind. That is, we
see the mountains of skeletal bodies being bulldozed into open pits or the endless rows
of open latrines and are left to let our imaginations recreate the events that led to what
we are viewing. However, this is only possible due to public knowledge of the event
in history but was likely incomprehensible at the time the film was made, given that
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the footage contains images captured shortly after liberation of the camps, at a time
when there was little public awareness of the horrors of the
Holocaust.
Much later, following the television debut of the mini-series Holocaust, Claude
Lanzmann created the lengthy documentary Shoah to document the Holocaust and
honor its survivors in a way he felt was more respectful of the suffering. He believed
his non-documentary, non-narrative film to be the only proper way that the Holocaust
could be represented. He calls this method “the fiction of the real.” (Lanzmann,
1990:295) The film, and its collection of interviews of survivors, bystanders and
perpetrators doesn’t have a linear feel, nor does it actually tell a story so much as force
the witnesses to expose themselves before the camera in a way that feels unnatural and
invasive. When asked why he is talking about the Holocaust if he doesn’t want to do
so, survivor Michael Podchlebnik replies, “Because you are insisting on it.” (Shoah,
1985) He weeps when he is coerced into revealing that while on a Chelmno work
detail, he was forced to unload the bodies of his wife and children from a gas van and
throw them into a pit for burial. Later, Itzhak Dugin, after recounting for Lanzmann
the scene in January of 1944 where he was part of a work detail forced to open the
mass graves at Vilna, is asked “Who in your family did you recognize.” His answer,
“My mother and sisters. Three sisters and their children. They were all there.”
Lanzmann has exposed a nerve and prods it further. “How could you recognize
them?” Dugin answers, “They were relatively well-preserved.” Lanzmann appears
not to be concerned by the pain he is causing these victims. Instead, there is a sense of
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equal treatment for everyone. Victims, perpetrators and bystanders are all prodded to
expose themselves to Lanzmann’s camera in the same manner.
Shoah is, however, immensely valuable in the documentation of the master
narrative in that it exposes three archetypes as we witness them solidify on screen.
Here, it is Lanzmann who creates the viewpoint of the Jew as the stoic and somewhat
passive survivor of atrocity. As the individual survivors tell their stories, the burden of
horrific memory is apparent on their faces and yet Lanzmann pushes them on. Where
a narrative or fictional film would depict the horror as it unfolds, allowing the viewer
to attempt understanding through the fantasy of ‘film as reality,’ Shoah assaults the
survivors along with the bystanders and perpetrators, creating only pity for the victims
rather than forcing those who were not there to watch the scenes as they happened.
While this may be warranted for the perpetrators in that it forces them to relive, and
face up to, the violent acts they committed, to do so to the survivors seems
unnecessary and editorializes in a way Lanzmann claims not to do. He states, “It is in
this moment that the truth is embodied.” (Lanzmann, 1990:298) We are made to feel
pity for them as they struggle with their memories. Empathy, however, is disallowed
by the structure of the film. The survivors, made self-conscious by the presence of
camera, translator and director, attempt to maintain a stoic façade while describing
atrocities they could not stop and were forced to participate in. Moreover, his
declaration implies that the survivors, thrown into the same category as the
perpetrators and bystanders, are somehow disembodied from their memories until this
point, something that is clearly not accurate. There is a certain amount of arrogance in
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the implication that Lanzmann’s subjects have become separated from their own
memories of the tragedy and that his insistence on making them relive the memories is
a way in which they may return to the embodiment of their traumatic past.
Similarly, the archetypal Holocaust bystander is cemented on screen from the
viewpoints of both bystander and survivor. Czeslaw Borowi relates his witnessing of
the transportation of the Jews to Treblinka in a dispassionate manner. “The Jews came
into the camps and then the people vanished.” When pressed about what he thought
was going to happen to the Jews on the passing trains, he distances himself. He speaks
in terms of the village as a whole, a group he seems not to be part of. “They were
appalled and they commented privately that in the history of the world no one had ever
murdered so many people that way.” Borowi is not part of the ‘they’ who stood by and
watched, instead he is acting as witness to the bystanders. Further into the interview,
Borowi laughs at the memory that he frequently stood near the tracks and made
gestures to the prisoners indicating that they were about to die; he does not feel
remorse for what he continues to believe was a fairly comical gesture.
Lanzmann establishes the bystander as always ‘them, not us.’ However, this is
marked by two distinct types. In addition to those, like Borowi, who don’t consider
themselves as actors in the scene, there are those who admit that they stood by but
without any apparent understanding of their complicity through inaction. In either
case, the bystander does not consider his crime as such. In the scene following the
interview with Borowi, two men laugh as they tell their account of trying to watch the
asphyxiations but being chased away by Ukrainian guards with gunfire. The two
55
appear like little boys attempting to sneak into a ballgame for free, rather than
witnesses to horrific crimes. Later, other bystanders tell of how they ‘got used to’ the
screams from the camp. None of the bystanders show remorse, apparently believing
themselves guiltless.
In contrast, the survivors blame their neighbors as well as themselves for not
acting against the deportations. Inge Deutschkron went into hiding in 1943 when the
deportations began in Berlin, a place she no longer considers home. “They didn’t
know. They say they didn’t see. ‘There were Jews living in our house one day and
then they were no longer there. We didn’t know what happened.’ They couldn’t help
but see it. ” Here, we can see that the bystander is consistent in his or her denial of
guilt, if not of ignorance.
The perpetrator archetype is far more complex, while at the same time, more
simple. The perpetrator has been fossilized in the public memory as the monster who
may, on a whim, snap the neck of a child, shoot a family of Jews, rape a woman and
her daughter, while at the same time he will have a wife and children or show kindness
to animals. Such descriptions were given in the testimony of survivors at Nuremberg.
Witnesses recall seeing Nazi officers tear babies apart, then feed dogs from their
pockets. The archetype is similar to that of the serial killer in recent forensic dramas.
However, the fact that this particular serial killer is joined by tens of thousands of his
friends and his killing spree ends in the deaths of six million European Jews and
untold others, makes the Nazi the archetype of a singular kind of evil. In any future
narrative, the Nazi becomes the history’s most reliable villain. He can do anything
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evil, horrifying or sadistic and the reader or audience accepts his actions as a matter of
course. The Nazi is the villain without parameters. Whatever his actions, it is
expected, as the Nazi is the personification of evil. What is never accepted, or
expected, is that the Nazi is ordinary, pathetic, banal. Hannah Arendt’s description of
Eichmann’s ordinary person, conveying a “banality of evil” challenges the master
narrative but simultaneously has left a the door open for filmmakers to create
narratives describing many other such uninteresting characters. In Shoah, Lanzmann
provides an illustration of non-evil evil. Hans Suchomel, a former SS
Ünterscharführer, is now an old man with a heart condition. He maintains that he was
unaware of the purpose of Treblinka prior to his arrival. But, he says, “As we went by,
they were opening the doors of the gas chambers. The people fell out like potatoes.
Naturally that horrified and appalled us. We went back and sat on our suitcases and
cried like old women. Each day 100 Jews were chosen to drag the corpses to the mass
graves. In the evenings, the Ukranians threw those Jews into the gas chambers or shot
them.” Like the bystander, Borowi, Suchomel separates himself from the people
doing the killing. He speaks in detail of the workings of Treblinka and his time there
without ever admitting that he perpetrated any crimes. He falls back, instead, on the
outcome of his trial, that he was not responsible. He describes the workings of the
camp, describes his disgust at seeing the mountains of bodies “piled up like wood” but
doesn’t appear to connect himself and his job at Treblinka with the outcome. The
perpetrator of the master narrative and the testimony of the still-living executioners
battle for the dominant position in film. Whereas the testimony of the survivors is
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considered sacrosanct in that their words are never questioned, testimony given by the
perpetrators is always suspect. Rarely does the guilty admit his guilt.
However, it is not only the archetypes of individuals that come out of the early
narratives. Important components of the master narrative of the concentration camp
are also described in Shoah, as they had been previously in the works of Primo Levi in
1958, with Survival in Auschwitz and Elie Wiesel in 1972 with Night and in the
miniseries Holocaust. The first is the notion of trains as conveyors of death and the
markers of the entrance to a future of torture. Levi describes his experience.
We suffered from thirst and cold; at every stop we clamoured for
water, or even a handful of snow, but we were rarely heard; the
soldier of the escort drove off anybody who tried to approach the
convoy. Two young mothers, nursing their children, groaned night
and day, begging for water. Our state of nervous tension made the
hunger, exhaustion and lack of sleep seem less of a torment. But the
hours of darkness were nightmares without end. (Levi, 18)
Wiesel’s is similarly grim. “Lying down was not an option, nor could we all sit down.
We decided to take turns sitting. There was little air […] After two days of travel,
thirst became intolerable, as did the heat” (Wiesel, 1972:41). However, Holocaust
shies away from attaching a visual representation to the description of the trains;
instead, the train pulls away from the Warsaw ghetto station at the end of Part 4,
prisoners reaching out of the barred windows and waving goodbye - but to whom is a
mystery since there is no one left. It isn’t until twenty minutes into Part 5 that we see
Dr. and Mrs. Weiss ensconced at Auschwitz. Again their simpering smiles belie the
reality of the camp itself and the memory of the journey there by train. The
opportunity to visually illustrate the conditions in the cattle cars is lost and the
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audience is left unknowing, but for the narrative descriptions given in various texts.
Lanzmann similarly refuses visual contact with the trains. Instead, he interviews
survivor Abraham Bomba in a seaside café in Tel Aviv. “People were not only
starving but they was [sic] choking. It was hot […] it was hot like Hell […] There was
not a drop of water.” Although all accounts are the same, there appears to be a taboo
on the visualization of the area inside of the trains at this point.
This taboo seemed to be ignored, at least partially, in Schindler’s List. There,
the audience sees Itzak Stern taken by train to the Plaszow camp. We see Stern stand
during the entire journey with others crowded close to him. We see the desperation for
water in the hosing down of the cars during a stop and the utilization of icicles as a
water source. But never does the camera venture inside the cars further than what can
be seen in a small pool of light from the barred window. It isn’t until the late 2000’s
that we begin to see further into the cars and can visualize the trauma of the cars for
ourselves. Although there is no concrete documentation as to the reasoning behind
this, it may have been due to a lack of information as to the true conditions combined
with the relative newness of putting the realities of those conditions on film.
The second element of the master narrative cemented here is the idea of
Auschwitz as metaphor for evil, horror, all concentration camps and Jewish death.
The narratives of Levi and Wiesel have described the place of ultimate horror, a place
both were lucky to survive. Holocaust once again skirts the edge of the reality. It
first alerts the viewer that the Weiss’ are about to experience the worst of all
concentration camps with the lines, “Change in plans. Treblinka is full. You’re going
to Auschwitz,” only to make Auschwitz a place of doctored reality, a Hollywood-style
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flattening of the concentration camp as locus of atrocity. In Holocaust, there appears
to be no work details for the women, who lounge in the barracks free from the
grueling (as far as this film is concerned) tasks given to the men. From the various
writings following the liberation of the camps, including news articles and newsreel
footage, Auschwitz inhabits the public memory as the locus of crimes against
humanity and has become synonymous with the Holocaust. However, the mini-series
waters it down in an attempt to make the experience of Auschwitz palatable to
television audiences. While the censors were likely satisfied with the final product of
this visualization, it is specifically designed to tell the viewer nothing about the
experience of being there. When Dr. Weiss and Mr. Lowy work hauling cement or
spreading asphalt, the only indicator of the difficulty of the tasks is the melodramatic
acting and clothing spray-painted to appear dirty from a distance. There are no shaved
heads or emaciated prisoners, no tattoos or believable back-breaking work. In this
case, the master narrative is only hinted at in the vaguest sense. The viewer is led to
believe that what we are about to see are the horrors of Auschwitz, but instead is
diverted from the atrocities of the camps by watered-down visuals shored up by the
knowledge which the audience brings to the film in the form of the master narrative.
Levi describes his own arrival at Auschwitz, entirely different than allowed in
the film. “The climax came suddenly. The door opened with a crash and the dark
echoed with outlandish orders in that curt barbaric barking of Germans…” (19)
Weisel describes a similar scene. “Abruptly, the doors opened. Strange-looking
creatures, dressed in striped jackets and black pants, jumped into the wagon. Holding
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flashlights and sticks, they began to strike at us left and right, shouting ‘Everybody
out!’” (46) Shoah uses Holocaust’s technique of avoiding video references, while at
the same time restating the information contained within the Auschwitz metaphor by
using testimony which sounds like the writing of Levi and Wiesel. Rudolf Vrba, a
survivor, explains the arrivals of the trains.
They didn’t know what this particular stop means. The door was
opened and the first order they were given was “Alle har aus.”
“Everybody out.” And in order to make it quite clear, they usually
started with those walking sticks to hit the first, the second, the
third. They were like sardines in those cars. (Shoah)
Lanzmann has attached himself to the master narrative of arrival at Auschwitz as
already established in the written texts above. By using an articulate witness who
describes the arrival in the same language as that of Levi and Wiesel, Lanzmann joins
the survivor discourse without the necessity of being a survivor himself and his
authority, along with that of the master narrative, is solidified with this film.
Again, if we look at Levi’s description, Auschwitz’ master narrative epitomizes
the arbitrary nature of survival.
They did not interrogate everybody, only a few: ‘How old?
Healthy or ill?’ And on the basis of the reply they pointed in two
different directions…In less than ten minutes all the fit men had
been collected together in a group. What happened to the others,
to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish
neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up, purely and
simply. (19-20)
Wiesel’s account is again similar. “Every few yards there stood an SS man, his
machine gun trained on us. Hand in hand we followed the throng. An SS came
toward us wielding a club. He commanded: ‘Men to the left! Women to the right!’”
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(47) In Shoah, Abraham Bomba describes his arrival at Treblinka. “We started one
way to the right, one way to the left…We had no time even to look at each other
because they started hitting us over the head…” All three of the narratives verbally
describe a selection process which will become part of concentration camp history and
which has frequently been used in Holocaust film. In Life is Beautiful, Guido and
Giosue are sent in one direction away from the train. Guido panics and begins
searching for his wife, whom he finds in a stream of women flowing away from the
train in the opposite direction. Interestingly, the master narrative is essential to
audience understanding of this scene and those resulting from it. Both historical fact
and the master narrative of Auschwitz disallow the possibility of Giosue being allowed
to stay with his father. Children who were not immediately killed were sent with their
mothers to the women’s barracks, but even then it was a temporary arrangement
usually signifying that the entire women’s barracks was headed for the gas chambers
immediately. That Giosue remembers it differently tells the audience that Guido’s ruse
for the benefit of his son was ultimately successful. The child retains nothing of the
reality of Auschwitz except the inevitable realization that his father has been killed,
something that is not illustrated in the film.
This sunny outlook on the selection process acts in complete opposition to a
more realistic scene depicted in Out of the Ashes, though both rely on the master
narrative set up by Levi, Wiesel, Lanzmann and others. Dr. Perl has been explaining
her role at Auschwitz for a tribunal of American investigators in 1946 when she
attempts to emigrate to the United States after the war. Following one of the
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interrogations, she hears a Strauss waltz which provokes an emotional flashback to the
night of her arrival at Auschwitz. Dr. Mengele whistles the same waltz while choosing
who will live and who will die. Perl witnesses the separation of her family, and
inadvertently sends her son to the gas chamber as she volunteers him to stay with an ill
family member. The midnight arrival, spotlights and filthy conditions described by the
master narrative are all present and the audience watches in horror as we understand
what has happened to her son, though she does not. Again, the film relies on public
knowledge to fill in the gaps where the story remains untold.
Documentary contribution to the master narrative as it pertains to Auschwitz is
not limited to the above examples, however, these illustrate how the various
components that we see within later films come to be used as they are. Shoah, as a
spoken version of the written narratives of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, shores up the
master narrative and acts as a slightly more objective accounting of survival.
B. Fictional Cinematic Representations
In large part, the body of Holocaust films with a fictional narrative structure, as
opposed to documentaries such as Shoah or Night and Fog, is composed of
biographies. There seems to be a publicly held perception that ‘real stories’ about ‘real
people’ are preferable to fictionally conceived stories. Though Trudy Gold calls the
bulk of these films “survivor’s tales,” (Overview, 194) they are not so limited.
This list is no longer composed entirely of survivor narratives, such as The Pianist or
Out of the Ashes, it also includes biographies of rescuers (Schindler’s List), bystanders
(Toyland), resisters (The Black Book), perpetrators/collaborators (The Reader), and the
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newest, and strangest, category, non-survivor narratives (A Secret). Certainly,
Holocaust films almost always result in the survival of European Jews (with the
exception of non-survivor narratives) otherwise fated for the camps, however, Jewish
survival is not always, or even mainly, the focus of the films. As we have seen with
Schindler’s List, these narratives may follow the development of a non-Jewish
protagonist, in this case, as he interacts with both Nazi Germany and Polish Jewry.
Therefore, rather than divide the films strictly into the categories of either biographies
or non-biographies, the biography category will be sub-divided into films which deal
with each of the protagonist types listed above, as the use of the master narrative is
dependent on the protagonist for the appearance or non-appearance of particular
elements in the individual films. The common thread between these sub-categories is
that regardless of the subject of the film, who we are focusing our attention on in any
given narrative, the films, more often than not, proclaim to be the story of someone
who lived through the experience, imbuing the productions with a certain amount of
inherent perceived truth. The Holocaust inhabits these films in a way that isn’t
possible in a purely fictional narrative film. These films are not biographies in the
sense that they elucidate for the public the lives of interesting people and how they
came to be who they are, as in the case of Walk the Line (2005) or Coal Miner’s
Daughter (1980). Instead, these films are centered around the Holocaust as the
defining moment in lives we, especially in America, may not have otherwise known
about and the biography tends to focus on the Holocaust as it pertained to the
protagonist.
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The Pianist (2002) is the biography of Wladyslaw Szpilman of Poland and will
begin our discussion of the sub-category of Survivor Narratives. This film, as a
depiction not of the camps but of the alternative for someone who has ‘escaped’ the
deportations, is steeped in master narrative data. Due to prior knowledge of what to
expect in a film involving Holocaust survivors, cemented in the minds of the viewing
public by Holocaust, Schindler’s List, and others, the film begins in the middle, as it
were, exhibiting no need to establish backstory on what leads to the bombing of the
radio station in the opening sequence. The audience already knows the ‘history’ of the
Nazi invasion of Poland as seen in the Spielberg film. The only requirement of the
film’s narrative is to tell the individual story, since the time required to explicate the
particulars of history up to this point is redundant and the filmmaker may begin with
the protagonist’s life as it relates to the event in question. The only backstory required
is that of Szpilman’s life prior to the bombing; he is a concert pianist working for a
Warsaw radio station. Therefore, the master narrative is used not only within the
complex world of the film itself but outside it as well. The master narrative
establishes the world of Nazi occupied Poland as it exists within history. It is assumed
that the audience knows what has occurred prior to this point in time within the realm
of Nazi Germany’s overthrow of various European governments and will apply that
knowledge to the story as it unfolds. Due to this assumption, we must also conclude
that the target audience are those people already familiar with, and interested in, Nazi
Germany, since those without the WWII master narrative as part of their general
knowledge of contemporary history would likely be lost and be unable to grasp the
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subtleties of the film’s storyline and mise-en-scene. Within this film, therefore,
knowledge of the master narrative is essential.
We expect to see mise-en-scene which includes emaciated bodies lying in the
streets, or the wall surrounding the Warsaw ghetto, or in the scene where the Szpilman
family is put to work in a ghetto work house, the mountains of belongings being sorted
and stacked by Jews who must pretend not to know that they may have known the
people who’s belongings they are touching. However, we also notice plot points that
can be matched to public knowledge. One of the first scenes that coincides with the
master narrative is the scene in which a family friend comes to offer Wladyslaw and
his brother jobs working for the “Jewish Police.” We know from the master narrative
that this position in the Warsaw ghetto was safer for a man willing to perform it than
would otherwise be possible for someone without such a position but that it also meant
exploiting fellow Jews and possibly collaborating with the Nazi regime. Therefore,
understanding of the vitriol with which Henrich replies is dependent on knowledge of
the master narrative. Without this knowledge the heated rejection of a job, at a time
when jobs were almost impossible to come by, seems odd.
Similarly, when the Szpilmans, with the exception of Wladyslaw, are being
loaded into cattle cars at the train station, the audience knows where they are going.
Deportation from cities and towns in Poland is largely understood to be a sentence to
Auschwitz. However, we learn later that this assumption is only partly true; while the
family is certainly deported to a concentration camp, Wladyslaw is informed that the
resistance has followed the trains and they have been diverted to Treblinka.
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Conversely, this film also adds two elements to the cinematic version of the master
narrative that, until this time, had been ignored either due to a taboo as set by the
unwritten laws of Holocaust representation or by an inherent distaste that the
representations would entail. The first takes place in the massive courtyard, where the
Jews await deportation. A woman continually cries, “Why did I do it?!” What she is
referring to, as it is explained to the Szpilman family a little later, is that she has
smothered her infant in an act of desperation, rather than have the child endure
whatever tortures awaited. Though desperate acts were certainly performed and this
was likely not an isolated incident, film has tended toward leaving this element out of
the narrative. However, this taboo appears to be receding, since a similar act is
depicted in Out of the Ashes as Dr. Perl smothers her neighbor’s newborn at Auschwitz
rather than allow the infant to come into the hands of Dr. Mengele. The second
element comes at the scene wherein Wladyslaw is rescued from deportation and is
wandering the streets of the Warsaw ghetto, unsure where to go. As he approaches his
former residence, he comes upon the bodies of children. Most of the audience,
through knowledge of the Nazi atrocities, is able to recognize what they are seeing.
One of the younger children lies in a bloodied heap at the foot of a stone wall, above
him is a large splatter of blood. Through the stories of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, we
are aware of stories of children being killed by smashing their heads against walls,
railcars and poles. In this scene, we are greeted with the same horrors that Szpilman
is, we cannot chose to have the particular piece of the destruction hidden from us.
Both of these scenes, although generally existing within the historical master narrative,
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are only recently being added to what is portrayed on film with regard to the
Holocaust. While they are not new elements within the public’s knowledge, they are
new to visual representation and therefore may add to the master narrative in the
memory of those not familiar with non-cinematic representations of WWII.
The controversial Life is Beautiful is also a survivor narrative, but with a twist.
The argument is that Roberto Benigni created a film in which the Holocaust is viewed
as the backdrop for a fable and that such a film, which views the Holocaust through
the eyes of a child who is told it is a game, only trivializes the enormity of suffering
present during the Holocaust. However, “the intentional creation of an optimistic Jew
who averts his eyes from the signs of impending tragedy” (Viano, 31) is one of any
number of character types which exist in real life, and are therefore available to the
filmmaker. The film allows the audience to see a different viewpoint of the Holocaust
while at the same time keeping an eye on the master narrative as its underlying matrix.
Bathrick asks “What, finally, does a focus on the representation of children in certain
films about the Holocaust have to tell us about problems of remembering and
memorializing on the part of the larger Jewish and non-Jewish collectives?” (42) The
answer, certainly, is going to depend on the individual film.
Life Is Beautiful informs the audience of two very important things. First, that
unlike many of the Holocaust focused films prior to this, the priority for the
protagonist is to protect the innocence of his child, not just the child himself. The
master narrative then plays as a set of visual cues that locate us within the Holocaust, a
reality which the audience must acknowledge, while at the same time an adult Giosue
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layers the master narrative with his own remembrances of Auschwitz as described by
his father. The child is allowed to retain the shield of innocence, something Guido
cannot afford for himself, and therefore remembers Auschwitz not as it was but as his
father wanted him to see it. However, for Guido, Dora and the audience, the
Holocaust is never out of sight, nor mind. The cattle cars remind us that the little
family is being swept into the Nazi machinery, and will likely not survive the ordeal,
but this does not deter Guido from the hope that they will survive. This hope is
evidenced in the elaborate narrative Guido provides to describe the death camp for his
son, a hope that should they survive, the child will need to remember it differently.
The barracks look enough like Auschwitz to make us aware of where we are, but aside
from the basic elements of the master narrative, the thin prisoners, the striped clothing,
the multiple bodies in a single bunk, the barracks is not quite right when viewed
through our public knowledge. The room is too clean, too open. It is, in effect, the
child’s memory imposed on the master narrative and presented in discrete units that
feel like the disjointed images imprinted on the mind of someone too young to
understand their significance or to see the ways in which they fit together in a more
continuous string.
The remaining argument that this film makes is that regardless of the story
itself, the master narrative is primary to our understanding. We are reminded that what
takes place on screen is as weighted with master narrative data as what doesn’t. As the
Nazis begin to pull out of the camp, Guido’s Bartolemeo is adamant that they should
not get in the trucks that are carting prisoners away. The master narrative has already
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given us enough information prior to the start of the film to know that the trucks will
take people away to be shot. The trucks, therefore, represent death, a finality that
cannot be escaped. Previously, as Guido becomes lost after waiting tables at an
officer’s party, the fog envelopes him and he finds himself standing in front of a
mountain of bodies. However, without knowledge of the significance of this sight in
history, Guido’s emergence from the fog followed by such a discovery would be a
thing of horror films, or nightmares. The master narrative dogs Guido in a way that
disallows his ability to fool himself as he does Giosue. Whenever there is a possibility
that Guido might forget his own reality, he is confronted with it head on. An encounter
earlier in the evening provides another example. Here, the film reminds the viewer of
the Nazis’ belief in their own victimhood. The doctor, whom Guido believes might be
able to get them out of the camp, instead pleads repeatedly for Guido’s help. The
ludicrous nature of his plea for assistance in figuring out a riddle while Guido and his
family face death re-enforces the master narrative structure where the Nazi is
convinced of his status of victim in the war, a position which made the Final Solution
necessary. Overall, the story told in Life is Beautiful is unrealistic; however, it not
only utilizes visual representatives of the master narrative through which we are
guided into the Holocaust by someone who knows it only by its major landmarks, but
also assumes the primacy of family, an idea stressed in the numerous texts written by
survivors.
The family-centric viewpoint is not limited to the Survivor Narratives
subcategory, however. The newly emerging sub-category of Bystander Narratives also
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stresses family as the key factor and often combines the stories of the bystander and
the survivor, as in the film Toyland. This fourteen-minute film registers the master
narrative from start to finish. As soon as the film opens, and Marianne enters her son’s
room to find him, we know that we are in 1940’s Germany. Her hairstyle, clothing and
language provide clues in the form of mise-en-scene. Once she steps into the hallway,
however, the Holocaust master narrative becomes apparent as the story is largely told
in images rather than words. A Star of David is painted on the neighbor’s door, an
indicator that the household is not only Jewish but that they have been taken away by
the Nazis. Marianne confirms this when she steps into the room and finds the place
destroyed and the inhabitants missing. On the street, she encounters not just oblivious
German citizens but a German police officer, who inquires as to whether she is Jewish
before he will help her find her son. He tells her that they have only taken Jews to the
train station so her son cannot be among them. The fact that his initial response is to
determine her level of Jewishness coupled with the reference to the trains establishes
in the audience’s mind that, at three and a half minutes in, we are watching a film
about the Holocaust. However, as with many of the other films mentioned herein, this
film relies heavily on the existence of the master narrative to provide the details of the
story that take place off-screen. The policeman’s reference to the trains acts as a
metaphor for concentration camps and Marianne is suitably terrified that her son has
been deported to a place where children have no value and are immediately put to
death. This knowledge is shared with the audience through the visual and linguistic
signifiers of the master narrative which allow the viewer to pull from his or her own
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knowledge rather than have the filmmakers explicate the entirety of the Final Solution.
Without this language of history, the viewer cannot understand all that he is seeing.
When Marianne arrives at the train, the image of the monstrous Nazi greets her
immediately. Two Nazi officers begin shouting at her, assuming she is Jewish. Once
she shows them her papers, she is escorted to the train to retrieve her son. The master
narrative then reveals more of the story than can take place on-screen in fourteen
minutes. The cattle car door is pulled back and we see people crammed in together,
standing in darkness. We know from the master narrative that the cars hold many
people, packed in ‘like sardines.’ They will spend days taking turns sitting down;
there will be no light, no air, no water. Some will die en route, others at their
destination, but most will not survive. The audience knows all of these things prior to
viewing the film and thus the film tells the story only with the assistance of the master
narrative. When Marianne makes the split second decision to claim that her Jewish
neighbors’ son is her own, we are aware that she has put herself in extreme danger by
doing so, and she has saved him from certain death, something she cannot do for his
parents. Her resistance to the destruction of the Jews only emerges at the end of the
film, her bystander status is then merged with her newfound role of rescuer and quiet
resister.
By far, the most unusual, and somewhat disturbing, new category of
Holocaust-related film are the non-survivor narratives. These stories, either directly or
indirectly giving an account of a concentration camp, end in death. A Secret is the
history of a man attempting to discover the source of his father’s deepening
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melancholy long after the war. The protagonist, however, is not a survivor of the
camps, as he was not born until after the incident in question. Francois’ parents meet
at the wedding of his father, Maxime, to his mother’s sister-in-law, Hannah. Maxime
does not try to hide the fact that he is sexually attracted to Tania and spends the next
several years trying to have an affair with her. As the film progresses, the audience
learns that the family is Jewish and that Maxime and Tania have worked very hard to
hide this fact despite the war being over. We learn that it is because of this secret that
Maxime feels guilty. As the Nazis close in on Paris, the family makes plans to escape,
traveling in small groups rather than as a family. However, Maxime has flaunted his
desire for Tania in Hannah’s face since the day of their marriage and on the journey to
freedom, she reaches a breaking point. At a small village café, Hannah exposes
herself and her young son to the Nazis, by presenting both her real papers and the
fakes given to her. Hannah and the boy are carted away to a concentration camp and
Maxime and Tania immediately begin a relationship. It is during this time that
Francois is conceived. Without the master narrative hovering over Hannah’s actions,
this film would have no meaning; it would be about an affair, a betrayal of a much
different sort. Throughout the film, the Nazi threat is very much an aside that plays
underneath Maxime’s desire for Tania; the war and the disappearance of European
Jewry is part of the secret and therefore is never openly discussed or even alluded to,
except by the neighbor Louise. The most blatant scene of Nazi imposition is one in
which Hannah sews the yellow star on her son’s jacket, and which ultimately leads to
a fight between Hannah and Maxime on the subject of Maxime’s desire to deny his
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Jewish heritage in order to avoid Nazi persecution. The master narrative is essential to
the understanding of this film and the motivations of the characters. Without it, the
audience would not know that to deny his Jewishness during the war may mean he and
his family survive the deportations. Denying it after the war means that he is in some
way separating himself from the memory of Nazi occupation. Most importantly,
however, the master narrative tells the story of what happens to Hannah and Simon
following their arrest at the café. The boy will likely be killed immediately at the
camp. Hannah may survive longer if she is able-bodied enough to work but will
ultimately die as well. We are made aware that she makes the choice of horrific death
and possible torture over living with her husband’s desire for another woman by the
existence of the master narrative and the filmmaker’s employment of this assumed
knowledge. Therefore, the film assists in demonstrating the use of the master
narrative in both survivor and non-survivor tales.
There are as many examples of the use of the master narrative in Holocaust
film as there are filmic representations of the Holocaust and no two use the same
information in the same ways. This chapter summarizes only a handful of the
possibilities within the scope of Holocaust film, but demonstrates how the master
narrative of the Holocaust remains omnipresent in storytelling on the subject.
Chapter Five: The Signifier Signifying Nothing: The Rhetoric of the Unspeakable in
Holocaust Discourse
The difficulties of representing trauma in fictional narrative in general are
further complicated, with regard to Holocaust representation, by a pair of assumed
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restrictions placed over and above the master narrative itself. The first, that of who
may create a Holocaust narrative, envisions a world in which the right to make film or
write novels about the Jewish experience during the war is the exclusive dominion of
those who either lived through it, or are descendants of the victims and survivors, or,
at the very least, are Jewish, and therefore maintain a shared right to the cultural
memory. Fundamental to this thinking is the idea that memory is sacred and that
Holocaust memory can only be collected into cohesive narrative form by those who
have an intimate connection with the event as separate from all other history.
Therefore, the many and varied critiques of Schindler’s List do not fault Spielberg’s
right to make the film, as such - only that the execution of his representation is
unacceptable in light of its subject matter.
The second layer of limitations, then, is that of how Holocaust memory may be
represented and presented to the public at large. While most critics agree that there
should be limits to the types of representation available when creating Holocaust
narrative, these limitations are not widely agreed upon in character. Adorno’s
statement on the barbarity of poetry “after Auschwitz” in the late 1940’s was taken by
some to mean an invocation of silence directed at survivors and non-survivors alike,
although this was a very distorted interpretation of the statement Adorno made. Saul
Friedlander reminds us that for two decades after liberation “Adult contemporaries of
Nazism still dominated the public scene. Even the survivors chose to remain silent,
since very few people were interested in listening to them (even in Israel) and since, in
any case, their own main goal was social integration and a return to normalcy.”
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(2000:5) Given this desire, we can see that almost immediately following liberation of
the camps, the ‘unspeakability’ mythology began. Due to the nature and magnitude of
the destruction of the European Jews, the incomprehensibility of such an act left many
speechless and unable to assimilate the reality of such an atrocity, but does the desire
not to discuss tragedy and unfathomable loss of life translate into its being
unspeakable?
Let us start with what is speakable in order to understand what it is not.
Following the Holocaust, the rallying cry amongst survivors and the Jewish diasporic
community as a whole was “never again.” Inherent in this statement is the idea that
the survivors would act as witnesses to history and that they would tell all that
happened so that a Holocaust-like act could never again be committed without the
world intervening and stopping it before its commission. In the Fortunoff Video
Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, survivors share their desires to
relate what happened to anyone who would listen. Helen K. states that “We wanted to
survive so as to live one day after Hitler, in order to be able to tell our story.”
Therefore, speakability lies in the act not only of witnessing, but of speaking that
which has been witnessed. The idea that the Holocaust is inherently unspeakable, as
the single most horrific event in contemporary history, cannot hold true for two
important reasons. First, there is no physiological restriction on speech after trauma
which is applicable to all human beings. That some are made speechless by traumatic
events is due to individual mental processes rather than anything that is inherent in the
human brain. Second, that some have spoken about the Holocaust from its
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occurrence, and continue to do so, negates the possibility that the speakability of the
Holocaust is something that is restricted as a matter of course in all human beings, in
all corners of the earth. Therefore, for those witnesses and survivors who find
themselves able to articulate the trauma, the ‘unspeakability’ of the Holocaust must be
a condition imposed by forces outside of themselves. It is not the events themselves
that restrict our ability to speak them, but the encumbrance of a sacred mythology on
those who wish to speak. In his Bradley Lecture, Dr. Walter Reich relates the story of
a schoolteacher berated for answering truthfully a child’s question regarding the
numerical tattoo on her forearm, demonstrating the imposition of the sacrosanct on
individual memory. While Elie Wiesel has made it his life’s work to restrict the types
of representation allowed for such an event as the Holocaust, as well as indicating a
restriction on who is allowed to do so. It seems at cross-purposes to find fault in
nearly every cinematic representation of the Holocaust for the sole reason that they are
visual representations. Wiesel argues that, “…the Holocaust as filmed romantic
adventure seems to me an outrage to the memory of the dead, and to sensitivity.”
(Wiesel, Shadows, xii). This is true of many films with the Holocaust as their subject
matter, but should not, as a rule, be applied to all. In addition, to attempt to restrict
film on such a massive scale seems futile. Wiesel’s point is certainly valid in that the
commodification of the Holocaust in recent decades, and even the perversion of the
word itself, is especially troubling and threatens to trivialize the Holocaust as an event
in the public’s memory; however, there cannot realistically be any restriction on
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artistic expression. The fact that so many artists are attempting to create
Holocaustrelated works denies the possibility of its continued unspeakability.
Naomi Mendel states that “…it is worth considering the extent to which the
presumed ‘unspeakable’ quality of the Holocaust—a quality usually associated with
the sacred, with the ineffable, and with the challenge to ethics and aesthetics posed by
scenes of mass suffering and death—is a cultural construct, less a quality of the event
itself than an expression of our own motivations and desires.” (205) The rabbi, in
inflicting his inclination for unspeakability on the schoolteacher, denies her the
possibility of coming to terms with her experiences in a way that works for her, just as
it denies the possibility of ‘never again’ as it becomes infinitely more possible to
repeat a history we do not know or understand.
Setting aside the religious connotations of the word Holocaust, and the
implication that Nazi intentions included burnt offerings, the Holocaust, as an event in
Jewish history rather than world history has taken on a mythological significance that
allows for the separation of the Jewish people from the rest of the world in terms of
Holocaust discourse. The rabbi noted above is only one of a large group of Jews
following the war who refused to allow either survivors or the rest of the world the
liberty of discussing the destruction of European Jewry without penalty. When
Theodore Adorno proclaimed that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” (xv)
those who, like Wiesel or the rabbi above, were of the mind that the Holocaust should
not be spoken of, attached the phrase to their cause, limiting the acceptability of any
art or culture after Auschwitz. Poetry, in this case, then acts as a metaphor for artistic
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trivialization of trauma while Auschwitz serves as metaphor for human suffering in
general, and the Holocaust in particular. The fact that the quote is misused and taken
out of context only adds to the mythology. Were such a phase not needed to sum up
the feelings of the advocates of unspeakability, it would not be so widely used.
However, this also points to a strange dichotomy. On the side of unspeakability, there
are those who, like Claude Lanzmann, believe that restrictions on the representation of
the Holocaust are not only warranted but inherent in the event itself, contrary to
survivor, Helen K.’s testimony. Lanzmann states, “The Holocaust erects a ring of fire
around itself, a borderline that cannot be crossed because there is a certain amount of
horror that cannot be transmitted. To claim it is possible to do so is to be guilty of the
most serious transgression.” (1994:14) For Lanzmann, unspeakability and
unrepresentability are identical ideologies, claiming that it is the “certain absolute of
horror that is untransmissible.” His film, he claims “is not made with memories: I
knew that immediately. Memory horrifies me. Memory is weak.” Lanzmann’s
position is not to use newsreel footage from the liberation as was done in Night and
Fog, nor to recreate the scenes of trauma as if the audience were viewing the actual
events, as in Schindler’s List, but to force the witnesses to relive the events in the
present, to conflate the gap between past and present into a contiguous unit wherein
the past is omnipresent.
On the side of the need to give voice to the traumatic events of the Holocaust,
there is an inability to do so without either first explaining one’s reasons for dismissing
the unspeakability restrictions or defending the right to do so after the fact. Friedlander
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argues against the recent wave of interest in the Holocaust as the subject of fictional
narrative and political rhetoric, asking the question “Doesn’t that ever spreading
reference mean an ever growing dilution, and ever growing simplification, and ever
growing vulgarization?” (2000:10) His argument is against the de-valuation of the
Holocaust into a form of kitsch, a trivialization of trauma in order to attach value to an
unrelated event. Wiesel agrees. “They get a little history, a heavy dose of
sentimentality and suspense, a little eroticism, a few daring sex scenes, a dash of
theological rumination about the silence of God and there it is: let kitsch rule in the
land of kitsch, where at the expense of truth, what counts is ratings and facile success.”
(NYTimes online, 1989) As Walter Reich points out, a quick search of the internet
reveals the ‘ever spreading reference’ to which Friedlander refers.
“For example, there are sites for the Waco Holocaust, the Abortion
Holocaust, the Kashmir Holocaust, the Bangladeshi Holocaust, the
Hindu Holocaust, the Taiwanese Holocaust, the Assyrian
Holocaust, the Greek Holocaust, the Kirishtan Holocaust of
Japanese Christians. There are websites in which Scientologists
23, No. 2 (Winter, 1997), pp. 231-269.
compare their experiences in contemporary Germany to that of the
Jews in Nazi Germany.” (Reich, Bradley Lecture, online)
Friedlander’s anxiety is certainly justified given the above, but it is even more
so when combined with the American propensity to attach the word ‘Holocaust’ to any
political debate in order to raise the perception of their own victimization, or that of
others. Some of these include uses in media coverage of environmental disasters
(Whale Holocaust), vegetarian rhetorical debate (Chicken Holocaust), and protests
against government intervention (the Herbal Holocaust). Worse yet is the use of
80
Holocaust statistics as a way of turning the tragedy into a useful commentary on one’s
own research. Sociologist Gabriel Schoenfeld asserts that the Holocaust needs
decentering from its humanist ideology because “the environmental impact of
thousands of pounds of human ash dumped into lakes and rivers is no less urgent a
subject than the Holocaust itself.”
At the same time, Jean-Luc Godard implies that the proliferation of cinematic
kitsch is the byproduct of the Hollywood paradigm. He agrees with Lanzmann in that
film should not seek to recreate events of the past in a way that makes the audience
feel as though they are part of the narrative. However, his argument deviates from
Lanzmann’s in key respects. Godard believes that Holocaust film should not seek to
conflate the passage of time. He is not “against the image per se and is not grounded
in the visual taboo propagated by Wiesel, Adorno and Lanzmann, amongst others; he
has no qualms about including images of the camps” (Wheeler, 187). His own films
never allow the viewer to step into the real, they are constantly reminded that what
