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Americanisation of the Holocaust Through the Television

Mini-Series Holocaust and the Film Schindler’s List

By Aoife O Callaghan-White University of Amsterdam Student Number: 12275999

Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Johannes Houwink ten Cate Second Reader: Prof. Dr. Nanci Adler

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Abstract

This thesis examines the Americanisation of the Holocaust through its representation in the American entertainment industry. It additionally examines the applicability of art to represent the Holocaust more generally. The debate regarding the representation of the Holocaust has flourished since the event itself. This thesis recognises the struggle between history writing and the fictionalisation of history through the artistic representation of the past. Contrary to the opinion of late Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, it argues that it is not inherently wrong to attempt to understand the Holocaust through its representation. This thesis explores the process of the Americanisation of the Holocaust through two case studies. The case study of NBC’s 1978 television mini-series Holocaust is used to explore the manner in which the Holocaust came to be a focal point of American consciousness. The case study of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Schindler’s List is a more thorough study to examine the affixation of American identity onto the Holocaust. This paper finds that the reason for the salience of the Holocaust in American society was based on postwar domestic and international circumstances. The use of the Holocaust by the American entertainment industry cannot be disentangled from US Cold War politics. It also finds that simplistic models of representation are used in the American entertainment industry for Holocaust representation in order to appeal to a mass audience.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 5

Introduction 6

Chapter One: America Buys the Holocaust 14

1.1 A Curated Importance 14

1.2 An Upbeat Society With No Room for the Holocaust 15 1.3 A New Emphasis on Ethnicity and Personal Suffering 17

1.4 America Looks to the Middle East 19

1.5 The Need to Remember “the Good War” 20

1.6 Premiering Holocaust 22

1.7 Reaction to Holocaust 24

1.8 Representing the Unrepresentable 28

1.9 Effect of Holocaust 29

1.10 The Commericialisation of Tragedy 31

1.11 A European Event Americanised 33

Chapter Two: America Sells the Holocaust 35

2.1 America and the Holocaust 1978-1993 35

2.2 Generational Change in America 36

2.3 The Need to Portray the Holocaust as American 37

2.4 Schindler’s List 39

2.5 Waiting for the Right Time 39

2.6 A Very American Story 40

2.7 Good Versus Evil 41

2.8 The Issue of Agency 43

2.9 Reaction to Schindler’s List 45

2.10 The Lessons Learned from the Holocaust 46

2.11 Universal and Particular in Schindler’s List 47 2.12 The Total Americanisation of the Holocaust 49

Conclusion 52

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Acknowledgements

This thesis could not have been completed without the guidance and supervision of Prof. Dr. Johannes Houwink ten Cate. The dedicated supervision which I received during this time made this work possible. Utmost thanks are also due to Prof. Dr. Nanci Adler, Dr. Karel Berkhoff, and Dr. Thijs Bouwknegt. I have learned so much from the four of you that it will take much time to process everything you have taught me. Many thanks are due to all the staff at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, who made studying an even more enjoyable experience than I ever could have anticipated.

I have such gratitude for my friends here who I know will be my friends forever. To Phoebe Davis, Flavia Giuffra, and Nina Tripp; I could never have expected that undertaking a master’s that focused a great deal on death could have led me to three friends who have given me a new life.

This thesis is ultimately for my best friend Gemma Moynihan, my brother Luke O Callaghan-White, and my loving parents; Maureen White, and Ed O Callaghan. This work could never be for anyone but for them.

To Gemma; in a challenging year, you have been such a present and encouraging friend that it often felt like we were cycling the streets of Amsterdam together. Thank you for supporting me in everything I do, and for your love which helps me always.

To Luke; I could never have completed this master’s without your support and encouragement. I don’t think I could ever thank you enough for all the help you have given me this year and every year. You inspire me endlessly.

To my mum Maureen; this thesis would have been impossible to conceive of without your artistic eye helping me to understand the world since I was a child. You have shown me that art and life, and thus art and history, are not separate facets but rather are intertwined. For this, and everything you do for me, mere thanks could never be enough.

To my dad Ed; your approach to life which has taught me to be strong in the face of adversity has given me the ability to complete this master’s. Regardless of your state of health, you have taught me to maintain a critical eye of all around me, and I employ this teaching in my thesis. Even in your days of most ill-health you have been the most inspiring and encouraging father, and I could never thank you enough for the wisdom you impart on me and the support you provide.

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Introduction

“‘Si fingat, peccat in historiam; si non fingat, peccat in poesin’.

He who invents, violates the writing of history; he who does not, violates poetic art.”

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Attributed to seventeenth century-encyclopedist Johann Heinrich Alsted.1

The issue of how to represent the Holocaust is one that has challenged both historians and the culture industry since philosopher Theodor Adorno’s (1903-1969) much misunderstood statement about art after Auschwitz. In saying “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” perhaps Adorno meant less about the creation of culture after the event, and more about the ability to understand how a post-Enlightened country could create the structures that developed Auschwitz.2 While Adorno’s statement has been taken out of context and

misunderstood, it has nonetheless been a catalyst for discourse on art and the Holocaust, and more specifically, art representing the Holocaust. Representing the Holocaust itself “after Auschwitz” has been a topic of debate since the event.

This thesis aims to examine the prevalence of the idea of the Holocaust in American society and its consistent portrayal in American produced popular culture. The Holocaust’s salience in American society was not a natural occurrence in the years after the Second World War. Rather, its importance was evoked as a response to changing internal and external circumstances for the United States.3 This resulted in American society first

internalising and then externalising the experience of the Holocaust. This began in the late 1970s, as will be explored through the case study of NBC’s 1978 television mini-series Holocaust, and reached its apex in 1993, which will be demonstrated through a case study of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. The Holocaust, having occurred only in Europe, has been refracted back to the world through the American entertainment industry.

This thesis will argue the idea that art has transcendent powers of time and place; it can convey to us that which did not occur in our own time and space. This is important regarding the Holocaust, which belongs not only belong to the study of history, but also to the 1 Quoted in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 205.

2 Adorno wrote originally in 1949 that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.” Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 34.

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study of memory. Traditional modern historians need to tell stories belonging to the before and after, and explain events by their antecedents.4 However, since the Holocaust has been

effectively dehistoricised by its ubiquitous prevalence in contemporary society, it no longer falls within the bounds of traditional history.

Historian Dan Stone argued that the Holocaust challenges the very conception of history. The Holocaust can be understood to mark both a break and continuity with history.5

While it is an event within history, its persistent representation in popular culture has meant that it has also become a contemporary phenomenon, removing its status as a standalone event in history. Partly due to its representation within the culture industry, the Holocaust has assumed an almost metaphysical dimension, becoming the absolute symbol of evil.6 It

becomes difficult to see the Holocaust as a moment in history if it has been dehistoricised and given this metaphysical status.

Collective memory resonates among people who share some common orientation and allegiance.7 Memory is not only a vehicle to access what happened, but is now a meaningful

experience in its own right.8The prevalence of memory, and how it has passed down through

generations in considering the Holocaust, is important in terms of how the subject has obtained almost a mythical status. This status feeds into collective memory with the aim of a long-lasting Holocaust remembrance. The fear of historically negative occurrences happening again is heavily ingrained in Western society. Indeed, it is witnessed in the proclamation of “Never Again” in the wake of the Holocaust.One way in which it is believed that historical repetition can be interrupted or stilted is through the institutionalisation of memory. This thesis examines the institutionalisation that has occurred in America through the dominance of Holocaust representation in film and television. Proper engagement with Holocaust representation on film and television necessitates engagement with the issue of representation itself, and thus the issue of representation is maintained throughout the case studies.9

The debate regarding the applicability of art to represent the Holocaust has generally coincided with popular cultural events involving its representation. Thus, the issue of Holocaust representation is explored in response to the case studies of the 1978 Holocaust 4 Charles S. Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial,” History and

Memory 5, no. 2 (1993): 143.

5 Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust (London: Valentine Mitchell Publishers, 2003), 13.

6 Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 43.

7 Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory?,” 136. 8 Ibid, 138.

9 Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 259.

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and 1993 Schindler’s List. The issue of representation itself poses a challenge to those who seek to transmit a singular character of the event, as argued by Israeli film professor Ilan Avisar in 1988.10 Indeed, this thesis notes that it is the very fact that a homogenous, singular

‘American’ face has been given to Holocaust representation that is relevant.

The issue for this thesis is the way in which the Holocaust is represented through the American entertainment industry, and not the fact of representation itself. Noted Holocaust scholar James Young has contributed to the debate on Holocaust representation in many ways in recent decades. His writing in the 1980s; the period between the two case studies under review, is particularly influential for this thesis. He wrote in 1988 that what is remembered of the Holocaust depends on how it is remembered. The question of Holocaust remembrance is embedded in exactly what is written of it. It is difficult to imagine how one could attempt to understand the truths of the Holocaust outside of the way that it has been written about.11 One

can then infer that it is near impossible to gauge how contemporary society understands the Holocaust separately from its depiction in film and television. This thesis finds American historian and literary critic Hayden White’s viewpoint a convincing analysis in his argument that the most extreme position regarding the representation of the Holocaust belongs to those who declare that it cannot be represented at all.12 Perhaps the challenge of visual culture to

written culture should simply be understood as akin to the past challenge of written history to oral history.13 Ultimately, the thesis accepts the fact of Holocaust representation, and

elaborates on the manner of that representation.

Holocaust representation has become a topos in the field of Holocaust studies, and various models of understanding it have been developed. English professor and chair of Holocaust Studies at the University of California Michael Rothberg developed models based on realist or antirealist ways of reflecting on Holocaust representation. He qualified the realist school of thought as the dominant methodology in understanding the Holocaust at an academic level, in that it places events within a continuous historical narrative. For instance, philosopher Hannah Arendt’s famous conception of Adolf Eichmann as personifying the ‘banality of evil’ did not break with the ordinary dimensions of the modern world, but rather

10 Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), vii.

11 James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 1.

12 Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern

Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 30.

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existed within terms the modern world had already created.14 The antirealist interpretation, on

the other hand, views the Holocaust as being unknowable. Within this understanding the traditional means of representation will always fail because the Holocaust is only knowable under a new system of knowledge.15 Proponents of this understanding include the late

well-known Holocaust survivor, writer, and political activist Elie Wiesel, who promoted the interpretation of the Holocaust as a unique one within human history. This antirealist understanding of the Holocaust detaches the extreme from the everyday and attempts to disable the established modes of representation and understanding of the Holocaust. This thesis adopts the former model as a means of discussing Holocaust representation.

Professor of Hebrew literature Alan Mintz also developed two models of thinking about the representation of the Holocaust, namely an exceptionalist model and a constructivist model. The exceptionalist model understands the Holocaust as a “radical rupture in human history.”16 On the other hand, the constructivist approach is a cultural lens

through which the Holocaust is perceived. While the Holocaust may be unprecedented, nonetheless it is within the nature of humankind to perceive even these events through pre-existing categories.17 Understanding Holocaust representation has not waned in the

twenty-first century, but rather more nuanced modes of analysis have been constructed to better understand the existing representation of the event. Under this approach, the thesis works with Mintz’s constructivist model.

Perhaps the most vocal voice in the public sphere arguing against the place of art to represent the Holocaust has been that of Elie Wiesel. Wiesel was a contemporary voice speaking out against the mini-series Holocaust, in keeping with his view that to represent the Holocaust in such a fashion is to trivialise it. For Wiesel, one could not imagine the unimaginable, let alone represent it on the screen.18 Almost a decade after Holocaust first

aired, Wiesel wrote in The New York Times that Auschwitz defeated art because “no one could imagine Auschwitz before Auschwitz, now no one can retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz.” For Wiesel, the “truth is hidden in ashes,” and could never be found in artistic representation.19 Wiesel’s voice was indeed the loudest, and his criticism of the TV

mini-14 Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 4.

15 Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, 4.

16 Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 39.

17 Mintz, Popular Culture, 39.

18 Elie Wiesel, foreword to Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, ed. Annette Insdorf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xi.

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series on an artistic level, as well as its issues regarding the representation of the event, will be explored in Chapter One of the thesis.

The 1990s is a particularly noteworthy period for the development of the field of Holocaust representation due to the myriad views articulated in this decade, in addition to the release of Schindler’s List. In 1992, Saul Friedländer’s edited volume Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” brought a new approach to the topic. Friedländer set the tone for the volume by writing that the Holocaust is “as accessible to representation and interpretation as any other historical event.”20 While this is the

contemporary dominant view on Holocaust representation, it is a far cry from the view that Wiesel adopted.

In 1996, philosophy professor Alan Rosenbaum’s edited volume Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide appeared, in which American philosopher and historian Steven Katz argued that the Holocaust is “historically and phenomenologically unique.”21 However, to describe the Holocaust as absolutely unique could potentially lead to

the trivialisation of the Holocaust itself, as articulated by distinguished Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer in his 2001 publication Rethinking the Holocaust. If the Holocaust as an event was just a onetime inexplicable occurrence, then it would be a waste of time to deal with.22

While the trivialisation of the Holocaust is what Wiesel feared was portrayed in Holocaust, it is perhaps indicative of what Yehuda Bauer referred to as Wiesel’s contradictory writings.23 While at the same time Wiesel argued that certain aspects of the

Holocaust were inexplicable, he also spent a great portion of his life attempting to transmit his experiences and help people understand. Wiesel simultaneously mystified the experience of the Holocaust, and then attempted to explain it by his literary work.24 This is perhaps best

exemplified with his memoir Night.25 The role that popular culture plays in this interplay of Holocaust experience is particularly intriguing. In attempting to portray the Holocaust, does its representation in popular culture mystify or explain, or indeed does it perform both of these functions at once?

Film professor Yosefa Loshitzky’s 1997 edited volume of essays on Schindler’s List offers a multitude of perspectives on the 1993 film, and this thesis draws on the various 20 Saul Friedländer, introduction to Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, ed. Saul Friedländer (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), 2.

21 Steven Katz, “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Dimension,” in Is the Holocaust Unique?:

Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan Rosenbaum (Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 19.

22 Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 14.

23 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 15.

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points of view that this volume presented.26 Indeed, it is a testament to the importance of

Schindler’s List as a piece of Holocaust representation that a volume like this exists, with such notable contributers as historian Omer Bartov.

This thesis posits that the 1990s were the point of culmination in the Americanisation of the Holocaust with the release of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. This is in keeping with the contemporary historiography on the Americanisation of the Holocaust, and indeed two particular texts are worth mentioning at this point. Historian Peter Novick and Hebrew scholar Alan Mintz have added greatly both to the general scholarship on the Americanisation of the Holocaust, and to this thesis directly. Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life postulated that the reasons for the Holocaust becoming salient in American society were as a result of the domestic American situation in the 1960s and 1970s, in combination with Cold War considerations and events in the Middle East.27 Mintz offered a

perspective on the Americanisation of the Holocaust that more directly relates to the themes of this thesis, as he explored the impact of American produced films on the Holocaust on the American mind.28 This thesis is indebted to these historians, among others, with regards to

exploring the Americanisation of the Holocaust through Holocaust and Schindler’s List.

It will be argued in this thesis that the formation of the notable place of the Holocaust within American society is inextricably linked to the narration of the Holocaust in story form. Storytelling itself is rooted in the basic human impulses of curiosity and fictionalisation.29

American historian and literary critic Hayden White noted that the fictionalisation of history is a rather modern concept and put across the view that everything, both real and imaginary, is now “presented as if it were of the same ontological order.”30 White noted the point of view

that real events do not offer themselves as stories, and that it is only the imaginary that can offer itself as a story. However, he countered this point by rhetorically asking what a non-narrative representation of a real event could possibly look like.31 Invoking the Kantian bias

of demand for narration, White recognised that “historical narratives without analysis are empty, historical analyses without narrative are blind.”32 This insight is worth keeping in

26 Yosefa Loshitzky, ed., Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997).

27 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). 28 Mintz, Popular Culture.

29 Avisar, Screening the Holocaust, 33. 30 White, “The Modernist Event,” 19.

31 Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7, no.1 (1980): 9.

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mind throughout this thesis in examining how the story of the Holocaust was told through television and film in order for the United States to internalise and externalise it.

Contemporary representations of the Holocaust focus on the simultaneous identification of victims with liberators; giving Holocaust representation a distinct American character.33 The shift in global cultural power from European dominated discourses of critical

theorists to hegemony of American popular culture occurred in an era when the United States was an uncontested power.34 The American entertainment industry’s domination of Holocaust

representation coincided with a general shift towards American hegemony generally.

The wealth of American produced film and television about the Holocaust means that this thesis could have focused on any number of such productions. The simple reason for the choice of Holocaust and Schindler’s List has to do with their wide reach to the public and the context in which both productions arose in. Chapter One will examine the placement of the Holocaust in American society. The Holocaust did not emerge naturally as an important theme within American society, but rather it was placed there. The salience of the Holocaust in American society (reflected through its representation in the entertainment industry) was a product of a set of changed circumstances in the late 1960s and early 1970s; namely the changing Cold War exigencies, the state of affairs in the Middle East, and the new ways in which American Jews identified themselves. In this context, the Holocaust was evoked as a means of moral catharsis with the Holocaust mini-series produced by NBC in 1978. A more complicated world order created space in American society for the moral clarity that the Holocaust provided. The move away from the confines of a strictly historical event belonging to the early 1940s was facilitated by the mini-series Holocaust.

Chapter Two will be a second case study and examine the role of the film Schindler’s List in the context of the perpetuation of the Holocaust in American popular culture. The American fascination with the Holocaust established in the 1970s reached its apex in the 1990s. In this context, the chapter will examine Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List, and explore the role it had in solidifying American hegemony over the cultural representation of the Holocaust. If Holocaust can be understood to have broken the silence on Nazi persecution of Jews, Schindler’s List can be understood as the culmination of the process which affixed the Holocaust onto American cultural memory.35 Americans may have ‘bought’

33 Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, 186. 34 Ibid.

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the Holocaust as an American event with Holocaust, but by 1993, they were ready to ‘sell’ it as American with Schindler’s List.

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Chapter One: America Buys the Holocaust

“As far as wars go, World War Two was a good one. It was a positive kind in our minds. That made it more difficult to deal with the Vietnam War, because there was such a contrast.”

- Expressed by American baby boomer Steve McConnell in an interview with oral historian Studs Terkel.36

A Curated Importance

It is counterfactual to assume that in America the Holocaust has always been understood in the same way. Americans in the 1940s and 1950s did not respond, or fail to respond, or understand the Holocaust in the same way that Americans would come to in the following decades.37 The move of the Holocaust from the periphery to the centre of American

consciousness did not happen in a vacuum but happened as a direct result of the change in the American postwar sentiment in addition to Cold War exigencies. The immediate postwar mood of upbeat universalism in the 1940s and 1950s was replaced by a surge in perceived importance of ethnicity and particular identity in the 1960s. This newfound importance of ethnicity encouraged by domestic factors, such as the civil rights movement, cannot be understood in isolation from international factors such as the war in Vietnam,38 the Eichmann

Trial, and the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars in the Middle East. Responding to a set of changed societal conditions in a distinctly American way, Hollywood began to commodify the tragedy of the Holocaust. While many separate efforts were made over the years to achieve this aim, this chapter focuses on the most important television production from this period; NBC’s 1978 mini-series Holocaust. This chapter will examine the rise of importance of the Holocaust in postwar American society which set the stage for the controversial mini-series, before moving to explore the impact of the show itself and contemporary reactions to it, and then commenting on the Americanisation of a European tragedy through the American culture industry.

An Upbeat Society with No Room for the Holocaust

36 Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two (New York: Pantheon Books), 584. 37 Novick, The Holocaust, 20.

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In the immediate postwar American society, Jewish persecution was simply viewed as one kind of atrocity alongside other brutalities.39 The transformation of the Holocaust into a

generalised symbol of human suffering and evil did not occur on its own in 1940s and 1950s America. There was no room in this upbeat, universal thinking society for the suffering of a particular minority to be emphasised and highlighted. American society in the immediate postwar period was preoccupied with matters other than the Holocaust. Indeed, as historian Deborah Lipstadt noted, Americans in this period were primarily engaged in obtaining material goods and achieving goals they could never have dreamed of in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance getting a good education, buying a car, a home, a television set.40 In this

context of mass production, mass consumption, and rapid upward social mobility, there was no space to dwell on the suffering of a perceived ‘other’ people. The mood that dominated American society was one of positivity and rapid growth.

Holocaust survivors who moved to America after the war found themselves caught up in this atmosphere and joined in this ebullient mood. Indeed, Jewish survivors quite effortlessly fit into the concept of the ‘American dream,’ by leaving tragedy in their native country to fit into their new home. A focus on the persecution of their people was surely not something to emphasise in this land of opportunity. In fact, as professor of Hebrew Literature Alan Mintz noted, Jews very much joined in with celebrating the victory in postwar America. This victorious feeling was particularly attractive to the sons and daughters of recent immigrants who were drawn into this new shared experience of the “mystique of American nation.”41 This period after the war was perhaps the first time in their history that American

Jews believed that they had finally become fully American. The war was a watershed in both Jewish identity and in American perception of American identity. The white-Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity stopped being interpreted as synonymous with American nationality.42

The elated American postwar mood is perhaps well understood through American author, oral historian, and broadcaster Studs Terkel’s oral history on the effect of the Second World War in America. In this, he quoted an ex-military service middle manager of a large corporation who was from a blue-collar family in a blue-collar town. He is quoted as saying that “The war changed our whole idea of how we wanted to live when we came back. We set our sights pretty high. All of us wanted better levels of living. I am now what you’d call 39 Jeffrey Alexander, “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The ‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no.1 (2002): 6.

40 Deborah Lipstadt, “America and the Memory of the Holocaust, 1950-1965,” Modern Judaism 16, no.3 (1996): 197.

41 Mintz, Popular Culture, 5.

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middle class.”43 The emergence of a new middle class in a society that was effectively

bankrolling the West created a victorious, universalistic mood. From class mobility to the increasing acceptance of Jews in society, anything was possible. This was by no means a society in which the suffering of an ‘other’ people could be taken into account, let alone highlighted.

Postwar America saw the integration of Jews into society as never before. Discriminatory bars preventing Jews from enrolling in prestigious universities were eased, meaning that Jews were now more readily entering liberal, middle-class professions. This resulted in Jews leaving ethnic neighbourhoods for suburbs where they built homes, synagogues, and community centres. This utterly changed the way in which both Jews and Judaism were perceived in America. By the 1950s, ‘the Jew’ was on his way to becoming the American Everyman.44 In essence, Judaism became an American religion.45 While Judaism

was being conflated with what it meant to be American, it would have been of little use to emphasise Nazi persecution of European Jews. To overtly identify with the Holocaust at this time would have highlighted negativity and suffering when Americans were otherwise united in pride over the vanquishing of Nazism. Instead, Jews chose to participate in these celebrations, rather than to diminish the celebratory mood by bringing to the forefront either their suffering, or America’s role as a bystander community.

While it was inconvenient for subsets of American society, like American Jews or recent immigrants, to remember and emphasise the Holocaust, it was also inconvenient on a national level to remember the persecution of Jews by Germans. The postwar creation of the blanket category of ‘totalitarianism’ made the Cold War seem like a continuation of the Second World War for the United States.46 If communism could be understood as simply the

next bulwark against freedom in the world, then the Cold War was simply a continuation of the war against the transcendent enemy of totalitarianism.47 The symbols of the Holocaust, of

the liberated concentration camps, were inherently dysfunctional motifs. They reminded Americans that their new allies in Germany had recently been their staunch enemies, which was not a useful sentiment in the new bipolar world order.48 If the Holocaust could become

Americanised as it would in the decades to follow, then truly anything was possible; 43 Terkel, “The Good War,” 12.

44 This view is attributed to American literary and cultural critic Morris Dickstein, and is quoted in Judith Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publications Society, 1987), 87.

45 Mintz, Popular Culture, 6. 46 Novick, The Holocaust, 86. 47 Ibid.

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Germany could be understood as having always been the ally, and communism could be framed as simply being the successor to Nazism.

It did not suit any spectrum of American society to contribute to Holocaust historiography in the immediate postwar years. For instance, leftist American historians did not write on the Holocaust because to recognise the specific atrocities committed against Jews by Nazis would indirectly weaken the position of black Americans and Palestinians in these contemporary conflicts.49 The atmosphere of victory and postwar celebration in the

context of a hostile bipolar world order meant that the universalisation of suffering was encouraged and pursued in postwar America. This would alter with developments on the domestic and international fronts.

A New Emphasis on Ethnicity and Personal Suffering

While on the one hand Jews were assimilating into American society as never before, the memory of antisemitism was fresh in society. The level of antisemitism in America towards the end of the war can partly explain why Jewishness was not emphasised until the 1960s. When asked in a poll in March 1938, “do you think Jews have too much power in the United States?” 41% of Americans said yes. When the same question was posed again in October of 1941 48% said yes, and by June 1945, 58% answered affirmatively.50 Distinction

by religion or ethnicity was not desirable by any means in immediate postwar America. This was all to change with the rapid shifts that came in the 1960s.

The new interest in ethnicity made particularism acceptable in America in the 1960s.51

With the civil rights movement taking place on American soil, Americans at home were confronted with the importance of ethnicity and human rights. Black power made assertions of Jewish solidarity more acceptable, and this new affirmation of Jewishness occurred at a time when the religious foundation of Judaism in America was beginning to erode.52 The

Holocaust could only gain traction as a Jewish experience by gaining recognition within American society; a recognition that Jews had already been given by the 1960s.

However, even in the 1960s with the sense of ethnicity-based identity changing, it was still not the time to make the Holocaust an official part of American memory. In 1965, New York City’s Art Commission rejected proposals for the construction of two monuments 49 Robert Cherry, “Holocaust Historiography: The Role of the ‘Cold War’,”Science and Society 63 no. 4 (1999-2000): 460.

50 Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 5.

51 Stephen Whitfield, “The Holocaust and the American Jewish Intellectual,” Judaism 28, no.4 (1979): 393. 52 Michael Berenbaum, “The Nativization of the Holocaust,” Judaism 35, no.4 (1986): 448.

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in Riverside Park in the memory of the Holocaust. The reasons for the rejection of the proposed monuments were that the statue of the Polish/Jewish leader engulfed by flames, about to pitch forward was “so tragic a posture” that it might upset children playing in the park.53 Another reason for the rejection of the monuments was the fear that their construction

would set a precedent for other ‘special groups’ that might want to erect monuments in memorials on public land. In response to being asked about the other monuments present in New York to do with death and wars, the head of the Art Commission, Geoffrey Platt said “they’re generally patriotic and have to do with this country holding its own. It’s American history.”54

The rejection of these monuments has a twofold explanation for the contemporary position of the Holocaust in America. Firstly, that there was the desire for a more palatable version of the Holocaust. Secondly, that Holocaust survivors and Jews were still an ‘other’ group within American society. It was for Hollywood to rectify and curate the image of the Holocaust first, before it could become an official part of American memory. It would become a part of official memory in the United States in 1993 with the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. However, this was only after the experience of the Holocaust had been internalised by American society, and a manufactured image of the Holocaust had been created.

By the 1960s, a new generation of Jewish Americans had emerged. They felt far enough away from the tale of their ancestors’ emigration to the United States and the war itself that they were able to embrace the story of the destruction of Jews as a vital part of who they were.55 A unique Jewish sense of understanding about the crimes of the Nazis came to

the forefront of the American Jewish agenda as a result of demographic changes. Discussions on ethnicity entered the lexicon of ordinary Americans as a result of the civil rights movement, meaning it was now appropriate for Jewish Americans to recognise their own suffering and heritage in a distinctly Jewish way, and realise the horrors of the Holocaust as a community.

America looks to the Middle East

The events in the Middle East in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought an understanding of Jewish suffering ever more to the forefront of American Jewish 53 William E. Farrell, “City Rejects Park Memorials to Slain Jews,” New York Times, February 11, 1965, 1. 54 Farrell, “City Rejects Park Memorials to Slain Jews,” 9.

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consciousness. The new identification with Israel which had previously not been realised by American Jews now came to be the primary focal point for their Jewish identity.56 The image

of Israel provided American Jews with a contradictory image - that of the undefeatable superman, and a potential Holocaust victim, both of which were far from reality.57 This close

identification between American Jews and Israel came as a result of the invocation of the Holocaust because of tension in the Middle East. Both the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973 dramatically changed the relationship between America, and by extension American Jews, and Israel.

For over a decade after the formation of the state of Israel, its leaders looked back on the Holocaust with fear and disdain. For them, the only history of that period to base the future on would be the heroic chapter of resistance.58 This ‘fighting spirit’ was emphasised in

a different way in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As well as invoking an ideal of resistance and the trope of the ‘heroic Jew,’ the developments in the Middle East in this period also led to Israel’s portrayal as a victim - or rather a potential victim. A Jewish people threatened once more invoked in American Jews a sense of identification with Israel.

It took a “cataclysmic” event in Jewish history as well as upheavals within American society to necessitate American Jews’ addressing of the Holocaust.59 The Six-Day War and

Yom Kippur War transformed the Holocaust from an event in history, to an imaginary, contemporary prospect, where arguably it has since maintained its place. Indeed, American philosopher and literary critic George Steiner went as far to argue that the haunting apprehension that massacres could begin anew is the cement of Jewish identity.60 As opposed

to Holocaust awareness creating concern about Israel, it was concern about Israel that influenced Holocaust awareness amongst American Jews.61 In this way, by being used in a

different historical context, the Holocaust moved from history to myth.62 With events in

Israel/Palestine lacking distinct moral clarity, the Holocaust began to become used as a substitute symbol of a moral claim, which was necessary in a demoralised society.

As a result of the Eichmann trial, and the Six-Day and Yom-Kippur wars, victimhood began to take on a newfound importance and indeed began to be integral to Israeli identity. 56 Boaz Evron, “The Holocaust: Learning the Wrong Lessons,” Journal of Palestine Studies 10, no.3 (1981): 23.

57 Evron, “The Holocaust,” 23.

58 Berenbaum, “The Nativization,” 449.

59 Lipstadt, “America and the Memory of the Holocaust,” 208.

60 George Steiner, “The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the “Shoah”,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers Inc., 1988), 159.

61 Novick, The Holocaust, 168. 62 Ibid, 178.

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The Holocaust formally and informally came to be woven into the fabric of Israeli national consciousness.63 Indeed, as preeminent historian Saul Friedländer noted, perhaps the state of

Israel gave meaning to the events of the Holocaust by creating an official mythology.64 This

form of nation-building after the Eichmann trial is remarkably different from the form of nation-building that occurred in the previous century. The nineteenth-century romantic hero who was the cornerstone of the nation-state was now replaced by the victim. This new role of the victim, and its privileged status in society became the new hero of the nation in the development of Israel, a status that has not diminished as time has progressed.

The importance of these Middle Eastern events in asserting American Jewish identity is perhaps best summed up by noted Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum when he said in reference to the Six-Day War; “I had vowed that if Israel lost the war, I would return to the US and marry a non-Jewish woman so that my children would be free from the trauma of being Jewish. We were either going to turn around our history or the lineage would end with me.”65 The contemporary Middle Eastern affairs resonated with American Jews in such a way

that the Holocaust was now irrevocably tied into American Jewish identity. The Need to Remember “the Good War”66

While Middle Eastern affairs played a pivotal role in asserting the connection between American Jewish identity and the Holocaust, this happened within the context of the war in Vietnam. This was a war that lacked a simple moral paradigm, in a similar way to the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. While Americans in the Second World War may not have been sure of what they were fighting for, what they were fighting against was certain; Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and the Swastika were clearly defined symbols that Americans knew were the enemy of freedom.67 Soldiers returning from Vietnam in the 1970s could not

be so sure of what they had been fighting for or against. The role of America in the world in the 1970s produced space in American society for the Holocaust and the moral clarity that it could provide.

63 Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 136.

64 Saul Friedländer, “Roundtable Discussion,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers Inc., 1988), 288.

65 Quoted in Judith Miller, One, By One, By One: Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 222.

66 “The good war” here refers to the phrasing used by oral historian Studs Terkel in his account of the impact of the Second World War in the United States. The title “the good war” was suggested to Terkel by Herbert Mitgang who experienced the war as an army correspondent because it was a common phrase used to distinguish that war from other kinds of wars. Terkel, “The Good War,” i.

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The war in Vietnam created a more complicated meaning of America.68 In a country

that still had racial segregation laws, America was at the same time propagating itself as a shining example to the world, and a country that caused suffering at home and abroad. The Holocaust could now be used as an easily understandable analogy for reflecting on the evils humans afflicted onto other humans, as America’s role in the world was less morally clear cut.69 The need to project an experience that posited America as on the ‘good’ side of history

was ever more prevalent as America experienced changes in the 1960s. While the Holocaust was not an American experience, the Second World War by contrast was very much a part of the American experience and psyche, and was remembered as a fundamentally positive experience for Americans.70 Perhaps this link between the evocation of the memory of the

Holocaust to deal with contemporary American experiences is best surmised by Mark Rudd who spearheaded the 1968 strike against the war in Vietnam at Columbia University. In speaking of himself and other leaders of the strike at an address to an audience at its twentieth anniversary, he said, “we acted as Jews, because we were afraid that our country was perpetrating a second Holocaust.”71

Most Americans during the 1966-1968 domestic upheavals were not out actively demonstrating, or marching, or rioting. Rather, most were going about their daily lives; going out to work and then returning home to relax while watching television. Television provided psychological refuge. Aside from a few documentaries, evening television confirmed the average person’s view of the world; presenting the America that they wanted, believed in, and had worked hard to become a part of.72 Indeed, the 1978 mini-series Holocaust was one

of the first historical television shows to grace American television space, with the 1977 Roots television series being perhaps one of the only precedents. By the end of the 1960s, television had such a place in American society that it had the role of confirming the world that Americans lived in. Holocaust scholar and media theorist Jeffrey Shandler noted the “distinctive posture of watching,” meaning that people were at a physical and cultural remove from the events that they watched.73 One decade later, by the end of the 1970s, Holocaust

fitted into that confirming space.

The role of television that had been well established in the United States by the 1970s seriously impacted the way in which contemporary Americans understood the world. The 68 Mintz, Popular Culture, 10.

69 Ibid.

70 Miller, One, By One, By One, 233.

71 Quoted in Miller, One, By One, By One, 224. 72 Ibid, 403.

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civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam became media events in the 1960s, which Americans could watch from the comfort of their living rooms. The television became the medium through which people could understand America’s moral crises.74 For instance, the

disappearance in June 1964 of civil rights activists Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman and a local black youth James Chaney received worldwide media attention through television.75 In addition, many Americans learned about Vietnam through nightly news

bulletins, and indeed it was a focal point of the 1964 presidential campaign.76 While

television was a medium by which many Americans could experience the contemporary moral crises, it would soon become the medium to provide a sense of absolution of the crises. By providing a simplistic, personalised story of the Holocaust, the mini-series Holocaust fit easily into the American worldview. Television was a means to confirm rather than challenge the American worldview. With Holocaust, what it confirmed to Americans was that the Holocaust was an easily recognisable evil, that Americans were the ‘good guys,’ and that the very concept of the Holocaust was American.

The experience of ‘the good war’ of the Second World War was conflated with the experience of the Holocaust. The persecution of European Jews was transformed into an American experience as a means of dealing with the difficulties incurred by an America plunged into insecurity with its identity as a result of its actions at home and abroad. The stage was set for the Holocaust to debut itself in a most American way to Americans.

Premiering Holocaust

By the 1970s, the ebullient postwar mood had disappeared in America, replaced by a low point of social morale, where it has since stayed. While the Holocaust would be an unnatural emblem for an age of universal prosperity, perhaps nothing could be more fitting for an age of diminished expectations.77 One can understand this necessity to look back to the

Holocaust by reflecting on Alan Mintz’s point that “cultures, like individuals, can of necessity comprehend historical events only from within the set of their own issues and interests.”78 In keeping with this, NBC produced a tele-drama called Holocaust that

premiered in April 1978.

74 Ibid, 82.

75 Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 344.

76 Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, 358. 77 Novick, The Holocaust, 112.

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Holocaust told the story of two Berlin families during the Third Reich; the Jewish Weiss family and the Dorf family. The Weiss family acted as an example of all of the real horrors of living as Jews in Nazi society, and through them the viewer experienced the November 1938 pogrom, the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and the deportations to Auschwitz. Viewers watched the drama unfold surrounding the T4 euthanasia programme and the Babi Yar massacre. The Dorf family portray the typical ‘Aryan’ family and propagate the excuse that many SS men gave after the war in that they were just following orders. Erik Dorf joined the SS because he was unable to find other employment as a lawyer. The show simplistically provided a dichotomy of good versus evil through the personal fictionalised story of two families.

The four-part mini-series began with the wedding of Inga Helms and and Karl Weiss in Berlin in 1935. This is the last happy moment that the Weiss family experienced, and the feeling of unity and joy is expressed through the father’s statement that “we are all good Berliners.” The television show posed statements that perhaps acted as foils for what the audience experienced in watching the show. For example, upon the suggestion that the Weiss children should be gotten out of Germany, the mother said “we will survive. This is the country of Beethoven, Schiller, and Mozart.” Indeed, in saying so, the eternal question of how a post-Enlightened country could have perpetrated a genocide is raised, albeit through a personalised drama rather than an academic text.

The television show raised questions that the viewer may also have had while watching the show. For example, the grandfather of the Weiss family proclaimed that the treatment of Jews did not make sense, because Germany needed a strong economy and Jews were part of that economy. This line of questioning fitted in with what may have seemed a counter intuitive policy for Nazi Germany. For a total war, surely every aspect of the society should be utilised went this line of thinking. In addition, the mini-series fed into the dominant contemporary mode of thinking on perpetrators. For instance, the SS guard Heinz Müller stationed at Buchenwald told Inga Weiss “all it is is a job.” This fed into the trope of the Nazi official as an uncaring, empty bureaucrat that philosopher Hannah Arendt immortalised through her depiction of Adolf Eichmann.79

79 Philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker in 1961. In 1963 the report was elaborated into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Famously, Arendt conceptualised Eichmann as personifying “the banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A

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The tele-series effectively operated as a moral catharsis for American viewers after the war in Vietnam.80 While the viewing of the Eichmann trial on American television was a

crucial point in seeing and understanding the Holocaust for Americans, the premiere broadcast of Holocaust was the most significant event in the presentation of the Holocaust on American television.81 For many Americans this was the first confrontation with the reality of

what had happened to many of the predecessors of the contemporary American Jewish community. A realisation of the European tragedy came with the Americanisation of it by the production of Holocaust.

Reaction to Holocaust

Holocaust was never widely accepted on the grounds of either its personal, artistic merits, or for what it meant for Holocaust representation in general. Perhaps the reaction that should be best remembered is that of a student in a high school class in Miami Beach when discussing the Holocaust in preparation for watching the TV show asked “where was God?” and the teacher responded by asking “where was man?”82 Raising questions like this, that

have not been answered yet, were only made possible by the production of Holocaust. However, it is not for its raising of difficult questions that the show’s criticism is most founded on.

The show was understood to be inaccurate to the point of insensitivity and causing offence to some survivors. For instance, survivor Leon Wells, a physicist living in Closter, New Jersey, described his feelings of horror after watching the second episode of Holocaust with his interpretation of the programme suggesting that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter, and described his resultant night terrors.83 This representation of Jewish victims is

strikingly similar to Hannah Arendt’s depiction of Jews in Eichmann in Jerusalem. This is also in keeping with an outdated historiographical trajectory of victims of the Holocaust, as well as the contemporary status of victimhood. The airing of Holocaust occurred while society was on the cusp of changing the perception of victimhood in American society.

The inaccuracies of the programme were highlighted by survivors who were not in the public eye, as well as those who had obtained much public fame, such as Elie Wiesel. Wiesel called the programme “untrue, offensive, cheap” and “an insult to those who perished and 80 Frank Manchel, “A Reel Witness: Steven Spielberg’s Representation of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List,”

The Journal of Modern History 67, no.1 (1995): 91.

81 Shandler, While America Watches, 155.

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those who survived.”84 He critiqued the point that too much calamity happened to one

particular Jewish family. He also argued for its historical inaccuracy, in that Jewish refugees who crossed the Russian border before the German invasion were not actually allowed to go free as the show depicted, and that Auschwitz inmates were not allowed to keep their suitcases, as well as that the Rabbi who performed the wedding in the programme recited the wrong blessing.85

These criticisms based on the personal aspects of the show were responded to in The New York Times a few days later by writer of Holocaust Gerald Green. He addressed the issue of the Weiss family being involved in so many historical events as being a literary device so as to make it more easily represented to the viewers.86 He also countered the point

that Wiesel made when he said that Jewish organisations only gave support before they viewed the program by pointing out that Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum declared that all clergymen who recommended Holocaust had seen it in advance.87 Green then took the opportunity to

question Wiesel’s dominance on discussions of the Holocaust by asking “Is Elie Wiesel to be allowed a monopoly on the subject, to be self-anointed and the only voice of the Holocaust?”88 The criticism was also made more personal by Green asserting that Wiesel

need not have worried about the television show because it would result in a greater interest in the subject of the Holocaust and would therefore result in more of his books being sold and an increased demand for his university seminars.89

Wiesel responded to these comments in a further article in The New York Times, arguing that it was “a pity that [Green] chooses to place the entire discussion on such an ugly personal level,” and arguing that what was at issue was the success or failure of an attempt to transmit the essence or truth of the event.90 The concept of the ‘truth’ of the Holocaust is

particularly noteworthy when the experiential shortcomings of it are recognised. Those who witnessed the Holocaust found it difficult to believe, while the vast majority of those who write about it have no experiential knowledge of their subject.91 However, it is difficult to

conceive of the past being represented in any way that is not imaginary.92 The only way to

84 Elie Wiesel, “TV View: Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction,” The New York Times, April 16, 1978, 75.

85 Wiesel, “TV View,” 75.

86 Gerald Green, “TV View: In Defense of ‘Holocaust’,” The New York Times, April 23, 1978, 30. 87 Green, “TV View,” D1.

88 Ibid.

89 Green, “TV View,” 30.

90 Elie Wiesel, “Wiesel Answers Green,” The New York Times, April 30, 1978, D29. 91 White, “The Modernist Event,” 31.

92 Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23, no.1 (1984): 33.

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relate to the past, and thus history, is to imagine what happened. This relation can be facilitated through art. To understand the Holocaust is a particularly difficult venture for both those who did and did not experience it. Due to the nature of historical time, what ‘really’ happened will forever lie in the past.93

For Wiesel, the issue was precisely that millions of Americans saw the show. For him, this elicited the question of exactly what they saw.94 This issue is inextricably linked to the

issue of representation, and the ability of art to represent an event as tragic as the Holocaust. While the critiques of the television show were somewhat based on the particularities of the drama itself, a more important and lasting discourse to come out of the show and its reception was the debate it sparked on the issue of representing the Holocaust. While this debate was by no means new, having been a part of how the world has understood the Holocaust since Theodor Adorno, the dimensions it took on in light of Holocaust are particularly noteworthy. Writing for The New York Times four years after the debut of Holocaust, writer and literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that the “enormity of [the Holocaust’s] horror threatens to render it impervious to the interpretive impulses of art.”95 This sums up well the

debate on the attempts at artistic representation of the Holocaust, with some scholars being of the opinion that the enormity of the atrocity is simply too much to attempt to represent through art. This opinion was primarily posited by Wiesel, who spoke out critically against Holocaust many times since its initial debut in 1978. Writing in 1989 for The New York Times, he argued that Auschwitz defeated art, because no one could imagine Auschwitz before Auschwitz, now no one could retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz. For Wiesel, the “truth is hidden in ashes,” and because one could never know exactly what it was like to be an inmate in Auschwitz, therefore there is no merit in attempting to portray what it could have been like.96

The fear for Wiesel was that the Holocaust being represented in the way it was in Holocaust would serve to trivialise it. In Wiesel’s understanding, Auschwitz and Treblinka could only possibly be explained in their own terms, and never through art.97 For him, if

something was a novel, then it was not about Auschwitz, and if it was about Auschwitz, then it was not a novel.98 Wiesel did not confine this argument only to novels, but indeed any

93 Koselleck, Future’s Past, 208.

94 Wiesel, “Wiesel Answers Green,” D29.

95 Michiko Kakutani, “40 Years After, Artists Still Struggle with The Holocaust,” The New York Times, December 5, 1982.

96 Wiesel, “Art and the Holocaust,” 200.

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artistic representation of the Holocaust, out of fear it would trivialise the subject. According to him, “art and Theresienstadt were perhaps compatible in Theresienstadt but not here – not in a television studio.”99 However, maybe artistic representation should not be understood as

a trivialisation, but rather a secularisation of what for so long was treated as a holy, sacred subject.100 The debate on Holocaust representation becomes muddled when one considers that

what is potentially being argued is the censorship of a very human mode of expression through drama.

Wiesel argued that the victory of the “executioner” was to raise the crimes to a level beyond imagining and understanding.101 One then questions why the victory should be

awarded to the “executioner” in this way. If Wiesel was right, and the overwhelming victory of the Nazis was their ability to create a universe beyond the limits of civilisation’s understanding or imagination, then why should they be afforded this victory? Why should a ‘victory’ be respected which results in those who did not experience the Holocaust powerless to even imagine how it could have been? This thesis does not agree with giving the final say on Holocaust representation to those who attempted to eradicate Jewish civilisation.

In contrast to the view that nothing on the Holocaust can or should be represented is the view that the Holocaust is no more or less representable than any other historical event. This is well summed up by leading scholar on Nazi history Sybil Milton (who would go on to be a senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) when she wrote in the context of portraying sensitive issues on Holocaust films that there is a need to make the “unthinkable” part of the historical consciousness. She noted that it is much harder to garner sympathy or emotion for 500 murder victims than it is for one carefully chosen character.102

This is essentially what was done in Holocaust; the personalisation of a tragedy so as to reach and effect a wider audience.

Esteemed Holocaust analyst Lawrence Langer put it well when he wrote that it is “only art [that] can lead the uninitiated imagination from the familiar realm of man’s fate to the icy atmosphere of the death camps, where collective doom replaced the private will.”103

This may best sum up the effect that a show like Holocaust could have. One reflects on the 99 Wiesel, “TV View,” 75.

100 Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film, 187. 101 Wiesel, “Art and the Holocaust,” 200.

102 Sybil Milton, “Sensitive Issues about Holocaust Films,” in Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust: A

Companion to the Film Genocide, eds. Alex Grobman and Daniel Landes (Los Angeles: The Simon Wiesenthal

Center, 1983), 9.

103 Lawrence Langer, “The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen,” in From Hester Street to

Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana

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limited potential of other mediums to lead people to this “atmosphere.” Perhaps an appreciation or a drop of an insight into this world is all that art can offer the viewer. In order to do this, the means of representation have to be adjusted, and perhaps fact blurred with fiction in order to personalise a tragedy in this way and reach the widest number of people possible. The means of representation on the Holocaust may not always be the closest to the historical truth, but the fact that the culture industry’s tools of representation work to convey knowledge on the Holocaust must not be negated.

Representing the Unrepresentable

The texts on representation that have surfaced in the decades since the telecast of Holocaust have had largely differing views on the morality and feasibility of representing the Holocaust. The debate on the ability to represent the Holocaust is inextricably linked to the debate on whether or not the Holocaust is unique. If we understand the Holocaust to be a unique event in human history, then it is impossible to represent because there is no possible way that humans have the tools to imagine or represent such an event. However, if we take the Holocaust to be an unprecedented event, then there is every possibility that it can be represented as other historical events are. Esteemed historian Raul Hilberg called the Holocaust unprecedented in his magnum opus The Destruction of the European Jews.104

Indeed, since the virtual birth of Holocaust historiography the words “unique” and “unprecedented” have been used to describe the Holocaust. The debate on the right use of language in describing the Holocaust has existed since the beginning of Holocaust history writing itself. If it is understood as unprecedented rather than unique then there is nothing stopping the Holocaust from being represented in the same way as, say, the Rwandan genocide has been. Debates on the representation of the Holocaust primarily stem from the differing viewpoints on how to position the Holocaust within history.

American philosopher and scholar Steven Katz wrote emphatically almost two decades after the premiere of Holocaust that the Holocaust is “historically and phenomenologically unique.”105 Katz clarified this by arguing that this was not a moral claim,

but rather that based on historical precedence, the Holocaust can be understood as a unique event in human history. However, in the same volume, editor Alan Rosenbaum made the clarification that the case for calling the Holocaust unique has always been a political tool, 104 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1985), 8.

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and in the decades since Holocaust, has largely been used as a tool to reshape positive German national identity post-Auschwitz, most notably with the Historikerstreit.106 Perhaps

the use of semantics has become muddled in this volume, as it appears that what Katz argued for is to call the Holocaust unprecedented, and yet he used the word unique. While it can be dismissed as just semantics, the use of language is never apolitical and it is imperative to use correct language, especially when discussing an event of this magnitude.

Effect of Holocaust

The NBC broadcast of Holocaust changed the narrative of the Holocaust in both America and Europe and altered the way in which the Holocaust was remembered and spoken about. It can be understood to have represented a European event as an American one. The reason why it took this television drama to cause an initial ripple effect of interest in, and ultimate identification with, the Holocaust has been explored by communications professor Barbie Zelizer. She wrote that visual representation shapes public consciousness because secular Western epistemology is always vision-based, and that ‘the seen’ is the primary ground of knowledge in Western thought.107 Therefore, because the representation of

Holocaust was experienced through the watching of the television programme Holocaust, people believe and know that it happened. The knowledge processes that have always dominated Western thought are no less prevalent when it comes to realising the atrocities of the Holocaust.

While the telecast of Holocaust was the most important catalyst for the new interest in the subject, the ground had been set since the previous year which was largely to do with a year-long court battle in Chicago about local Nazis vying for the right to march through the Jewish suburb of Skokie where many survivors lived. In New York in October 1977, a meeting sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and the National Council for Social Studies met to discuss the issue. As a result of that meeting, pilot programmes on the subject were started in around 50 school districts around the US.108 However, not every facet of

American society was content with the move towards making the study of the Holocaust a part of the education system. Indeed, in response to the New York City Board of Education’s proposal in this regard, many counter arguments were posed. The spokesperson for the German-American Committee of Greater New York said that unpleasant history should be 106 Alan Rosenbaum, introduction to Is the Holocaust Unique?, ed. Rosenbaum, 5.

107 Barbie Zelizer, “Introduction: On Visualizing the Holocaust,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), 1.

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