Abstract
The essay analyzes the Jewish-German feature film Lang ist der Weg (Long is the Road, Herbert Fredersdorf & Marek Goldstein, D 1947/48) with regard to its ‘rhetoric of collective memory.’ The film is a very early cinematic response to the Shoah and focuses to a great extent on the survivors’ struggle after the liberation. This essay attempts to demonstrate how the semi-documentary intertwines the challenge to overcome the experience of persecution and extermination with the geopolitical claim for the Israeli state.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The term ‘displaced person’ did not exclusively apply to Jewish survivors, but to other civilians who could not return to their state of origin, for example, forced laborers whose states of origin did not exist anymore.
- 2.
In fact Lang ist der Weg depicts the Polish characters more negatively than the German ones.
- 3.
‘It is highly recommendable to recognize with the help of this film that people who are even less to blame for the war than we are, had and have to suffer immeasurably, too.’
- 4.
Cilly Kugelmann supposes that the film targets a charitable audience overseas. Ira Konigsberg discusses the film among other early Jewish responses to the Shoah and as a medium of Jewish self-reflection (Konigsberg 1998, p.10). Peter Reichel assumes an indented audience of survivors as well (2004, p.181), while Tobias Ebbrecht supposes that the film’s generally eclectic style is due to competing ideas about the film’s possible audiences—the German and the foreign (2005, p.49).
- 5.
The voice-over’s tone, vocabulary and phrases are too emotional to be called objective from today’s point of view, but they match the standard of contemporary news reels and documentaries.
- 6.
Another semi-documentary is, for example, The Search, a film about a little boy that survived the camps. Although this film uses less documentary material than Lang ist der Weg, there may still be a connection between the subject and the stylistic decision.
- 7.
There is a similarity between the way the dying Jew is represented and an image of a crucifix earlier in the film.
- 8.
Following Tobias Ebbrecht, I will use the term Holocaust in order to describe the cultural products related to the event.
- 9.
All Jewish members of the film team grew up in Poland, hence the everyday anti-Semitism they had experienced was chiefly from their Polish-Catholic neighbors. Of course, the depiction of the Poles highlights the absence of negative German characters and confirms a major strategy of German exculpation, namely to separate the Nazi from the common German.
- 10.
‘We came into the camp…’
‘Dora, you have told me a hundred times about the camp.’
‘No, not that. That was still in Warsaw, at the traffic place.’
‘You have to forget, Dora! You have to forget everything that has past!’
‘Here, I can’t.’—‘We will get away from here and there you will forget.’
- 11.
Maybe the screenwriters initially chose to address rape as a crime that has a strong symbolic impact on individual and collective identity. The American Information Control Division, however, thought rape was too universal a crime to be mentioned in a film about the Holocaust (Greffrath 1995, p.81).
- 12.
Cp. Joshua Hirsch thesis on witnessing and trauma (Hirsch 2005).
- 13.
The Search is among the few mainstream films that address the problem of traumatized children who survived the camps.
References
Assmann, A. (2006). Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturelles Gedächtnisses. München: C.H. Beck.
Assmann, J. (2008). Communicative and cultural memory. In A. Erll & A. Nünning (Eds.), A companion to cultural memory studies (pp. 109–118). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Ebbrecht, T. (2005). Erinnerungsbilder und Zeitdokumente. Frühe Filme über den Holocaust (1945-1948). Filmblatt 10, no. 27 (2005), 47–56.
Erll, A. (2008). Literature, film, and the mediality of cultural memory. In A. Erll & A. Nünning (Eds.), A companion to cultural memory studies (pp. 389–398). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Fisher, J. (2006). Bombing memories in Braun’s Zwischen Gestern und Morgen (1947): Flashbacks to the recent past in the German rubble film. In W. Wilms (Ed.), Bombs away! Representing the air war over Europe and Japan (pp. 329–343). Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi.
Goltermann, S. (2009). Die Gesellschaft der Überlebenden. Deutsche Kriegsheimkehrer und ihre Gewalterfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg. München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.
Greffrath, B. (1995). Gesellschaftbilder der Nachkriegszeit. Deutsche Spielfilme 1945–1949. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus.
Hirsch, J. (2005). Afterimage. Film, trauma, and the holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Jokusch, L. (2012). Collect and record!: Jewish holocaust documentation in early postwar Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kaes, A. (2009). Shell shock cinema: Weimar culture and the wounds of war. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Konigsberg, I. (1998). Our children and the limits of cinema: Early Jewish responses to the holocaust. Film Quarterly, 52(1), 7–19.
Kugelmann, C. (1996). Lang ist der Weg. Eine jüdisch-deutsche Filmkooperation. In Fritz-Bauer-Institut (Ed.), Auschwitz: Geschichte, Rezeption und Wirkung. Jahrbuch 1996 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocausts (pp. 353–369). Frankfurt am Main: Campus.
Reichel, P. (2004). Erfundene Erinnerung. Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater. München: Carl Hanser Verlag.
Schweinitz, J. (2007). Multiple Logik filmischer Perspektivierung Fokalisierung, narrative Instanz und wahnsinnige Liebe. montage/av 16, no. 1, 83–99.
Shandley, R. R. (2001). Rubble films. German cinema in the shadow of the third Reich. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Turim, M. (1989). Flashbacks in film. Memory & history. New York: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editors (if applicable) and the Authors
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tuch, G.M. (2016). Long Is the Road: Politics of Memory in an Early Jewish-German Postwar Film. In: Martins, A., Lopes, A., Dias, M. (eds) Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57520-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57520-3_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57519-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57520-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)