Abstract
Adolf Eichmann’s trial (1961) redefined Holocaust witnessing and opened a space for memoirs and cinematic productions based on testimonies of Holocaust survivors, revenants and witnesses. Their testimonies effectively embody the liminal space between life and death, best exemplified by the Muselmann who lives in a ‘state of exception’, as outlined by Levi in If This Is a Man (1947) and defined by Giorgio Agamben. Early films that established witnessing as a sub-genre of Holocaust films were produced in the Eastern Bloc, and include Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1947), and Ján Kadár and Elmer Klos’ The Shop on Main Street (1965). The trend had faded away by the time that the paradigmatic survivor film, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), was released.
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Notes
- 1.
Levi , The Drowned and the Saved , trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), p. 213.
- 2.
Hilberg , Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 190.
- 3.
Christopher Browning , ‘“Alleviation” and “Compliance”: The Survival Strategies of the Jewish Leadership in the Wierzbnik Ghetto and Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camps’, in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, ed. by Jonathan Petropoulos and John Roth (New York: Berghahn, 2005), pp. 26–36.
- 4.
Levi , If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. by Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 2013).
- 5.
Vulliamy , ‘Claude Lanzmann: the Man Who Stood Witness for the World’, Observer, 4 March 2012 (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/mar/04/claude-lanzmann-memoir-shoah-interview).
- 6.
Agamben , Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 170.
- 7.
Agamben , Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 82.
- 8.
Agamben , Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 150.
- 9.
Agamben , Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (California: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 169.
- 10.
The term ‘l’univers concentrationnaire’ was first used by David Rousset, who published a book about his experience in the camp with that title in 1945. The book was translated into English as A World Apart and was first published in 1951. See Dori Laub, ‘An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, ed. by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 75–92 (p. 80).
- 11.
Levi , The Drowned and the Saved , p. 37.
- 12.
Hilberg , Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 187.
- 13.
Some of Menchú’s claims, including her presence during her brother’s death, have been questioned. Following an investigation, a handful of details appear to have been fabricated, although they are seen to be largely representative of her life. Moreover, criticism over her inclusion in syllabus or David Horowitz’s accusation of Menchú as a ‘Marxist terrorist’, appear to be politically motivated. Greg Grandin sums up the debate in ‘It Was Heaven That They Burned: Who is Rigoberta Menchú?’, The Nation, 8 September 2010, p. 3 (https://www.thenation.com/article/it-was-heaven-they-burned/).
- 14.
Bernard Cuau, ‘Le lieu et la parole’, in Au sujet de Shoah: le film de Claude Lanzmann (Paris: Belin, 1990), p. 301.
- 15.
Jan Láníček and Stuart Liebman list the productions treated in this chapter, as well as others, in note 2 of their article ‘A Closer Look at Alfred Radok’s Film Distant Journey’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 30.1 (2016), 53–80 (https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcw005).
- 16.
Láníček and Liebman offer a thorough contextualization of the film’s production and reception in ‘A Closer Look at Alfred Radok’s Film’.
- 17.
These figures have been drawn from the chart provided by Inside Kino on the page dedicated to GDR films, ‘Die ErforlGreichsten DDR-filme in Der DDR’ (http://www.insidekino.de/DJahr/DDRAlltimeDeutsch.htm).
- 18.
Nathanael Hood, ‘Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear’, July 2011 (http://forgottenclassicsofyesteryear.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/daleka-cesta-distant-journey.html).
- 19.
See Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale?: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations 1933–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp, 282–83.
- 20.
Friedman compares Schindler’s ‘compassionate capitalism’ with the depredatory industrialism of those around him. See Citizen Spielberg (Urbana, II: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 306 and passim.
- 21.
Elizabeth Ward notes a famous example of East German film censorship, which resulted in the banning of nearly the entire year’s production in December 1965, following accusations of ‘nihilism’, ‘skepticism’ and ‘morally corrupting philosophies’. See ‘Contesting the Memory of Frank Beyer’s Jacob the Liar (1974), in The Holocaust in the Twenty-first Century: Contested/Contesting Memories, ed. by David Seymour and Mercedes Camino (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 163–81 (p. 178, n. 10).
- 22.
Ward ‘Contesting the Memory’, p. 165.
- 23.
This was Beyer’s interpretation, as presented in Beate Müller’s biography. See Stasi – Zensur – Machtdiskurse: Publikationsgeschichten Und Materialien Zu Jurek Beckers Werk (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006), p. 102.
- 24.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), p. 119.
- 25.
Arendt chastises Jewish leaders throughout her book, especially in Chap. 7, which centres on ‘The Wannsee conference, of Pontius Pilates’ (pp. 112–34). Levi’s chapter on the ‘Grey Zone ’ appears in The Drowned and the Saved , pp. 23–51. Rumkowski receives attention after kapos and Sonderkommandos , with Levi classing his case as impotentia judicandi (pp. 43–51) and criticizing ‘Chaim I’ as ‘a small tyrant, impotent with those above him and omnipotent with those below him’ (p. 46).
- 26.
Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, ‘Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski’, (http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html).
- 27.
Levi , The Drowned and the Saved , pp. 49–50.
- 28.
Bezanika is a fictitious name.
- 29.
Jutta Voigt, ‘Lust auf Legen’, Sonntag. April 20, 1975; quoted in and translated by Ward, ‘Contesting Memory’, pp. 172–73.
- 30.
Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem (New York: Herzl Press 1974), p. 292.
- 31.
As Lawrence Baron observes, the number of films dealing with the subject doubled during the decade. See ‘Film’, in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. by Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 444–60 (p. 446).
- 32.
Ward , ‘Contesting the Memory’, p. 174.
- 33.
Małgorzata Pakier offers a thorough summary of the film’s reception in ‘A Europeanisation of the Holocaust Memory?: German and Polish Reception of the Film Europa , Europa’, in A European Memory?: Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, ed. by Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), pp. 191–203. See also the brief appraisal offered in Janet Lungstrum’s ‘Foreskin Fetishism: Jewish Male Difference in Europa, Europa’, Screen, 39.1 (1998), 53–66; at p. 54; and Deanne Schultz, Europa, Europa: A Test Case for German National Cinema’, Wide Angle, 16.3 (1995), 39–51.
- 34.
Interview published in the New York Times , 14 January 1992; quoted in Pakier , ‘A Europeanisation of the Holocaust Memory?’, p. 199.
- 35.
French: Europa, Europa, trans. by Lysette Hassine-Mamane (Paris: Ramsay, 1990); Hebrew: Korim li Shelomoh Perel! (Tel-Aviv: Yedi`ot Aharonot, 1991); Polish: Europa, Europa (Warszawa: Wydawn Cyklady, 1992), German: Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon (München: Heyne, 1993; Berlin: Nicolai, 1998, 2001); and English: Europa Europa (New York: Wiley, 1997).
- 36.
Johnson explores circumcision as a marker of Jewish identity in ‘The Jewish Closet: Europa, Europa’, Camera Obscura, 18.1 (2003), 1–33. Johnson uses the theoretical framework developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
- 37.
Lungstrum , ‘Foreskin Fetishism’, p. 53.
- 38.
Polish complaints about references to Polish camps, which have also been endorsed by Israel, flares up whenever there are mentioned in the press, and they have threatened to sue on more than one occasion. The use of Polish Death Camps was outlawed in Poland in 2016, where it can carry a sentence of up to three years in jail.
- 39.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
- 40.
- 41.
Deutscher , The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 45.
- 42.
See Taylor , The Battleship Potemkin: The Film Companion (London, 2000), p. 44.
- 43.
Judt’s incisive summary reads as follows: ‘The first post-war Europe was built upon deliberate mismemory—upon forgetting as a way of life. Since 1989, Europe has been constructed instead upon a compensatory surplus of memory: institutionalized public remembering as the very foundation of collective identity. The first could not endure—but nor will the second. Some measure of neglect and even forgetting is the necessary condition for civic health’. See Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), p. 829.
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Camino, M. (2018). Holocaust Testimony: Survivors, Ghosts and Revenants (1947–2002). In: Memories of Resistance and the Holocaust on Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49969-1_5
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