Abstract
In nearly 70 years of existence, Holocaust cinema has constantly changed and renewed its thematic, language and filmic strategies, in a permanent process of reshaping the past in order to render it relevant for different modern audiences across the world. The historian Lawrence Baron acknowledges a shift in the preferences of the contemporary public, pointing out that the generations born after the 1960s prefer ‘to learn why the Holocaust is relevant today instead of why it was unique’ (Baron, 2005: ix). Filmmakers, therefore, are challenged to adjust their cinematic narratives from ‘literal’ depictions of the Holocaust towards more ‘creative’ approaches and towards broader perspectives that include the non-Jewish victims of the Nazi persecution. According to Baron, while post-war films focus on displaced people, war criminals and resistance heroes, more recent films focus predominantly on second-generation narratives or themes like rescue activities and Neo-Nazism (Baron, ibid.: 202).
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
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Adams, Jenni (2013) ‘Reading (as) Violence in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones’, in Jenni Adams and Sue Vice (eds.) Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film, London: Vallentine Micheli, pp. 25–46.
Baron, Lawrence (2005) Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing of Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema, New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Bathrick, David (2007) ‘Whose Hi/story Is It? The U.S. Reception of Downfall’, New German Critique 34.3, pp. 1–16.
Benedict, Susan (2003) ‘Caring While Killing: Nursing in the “Euthanasia” Centers’, in Elisabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg (eds.), Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 95–110.
Benedict, Susan and Shields, Linda (eds.) (2014) Nurses and Midwives in Nazi Germany: The ‘Euthanasia Programs’, Oxon and New York: Routledge.
Bock, Gisela (1998) ‘Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany: Perpetrators, Victims, Followers, and Bystanders’, in Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (eds.) Women in the Holocaust, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 85–100.
Boswell, Matthew (2012) Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boswell, Matthew (2013) ‘Downfall: The Nazi Genocide as a Natural Disaster’, in Jenni Adams and Sue Vice (eds.) Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film, London: Vallentine Micheli, pp. 147–64.
Brown, Adam (2013) ‘Screening Women’s Complicity in the Holocaust: The Problems of Judgement and Representation’, in Jenni Adams and Sue Vice (eds.) Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film, London: Vallentine Micheli, pp. 69–90.
Brown, Daniel Patrick (2002) The Camp Women: The Female Auxiliaries who Assisted the SS in Running the Nazi Concentration Camp System, Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing.
Donahue, William Collins (2010) Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s ‘Nazi’ Novels and Films, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harrison, Sharon M. (2008) Female Killers: Nurses and the Implementation of the Nazi Euthanasia Program at Hadamar, 1941–1945, Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag.
Joshi, Vandana (2003) Gender and Power in the Third Reich: Female Denouncers and the Gestapo, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Magilow, Daniel H. and Kristin T. Vander Lugt and Elisabeth Bridges (eds.) (2012) Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture, London and New York: Continuum.
Rowland, Anthony (2013) ‘Reading the Female Perpetrator’, in Jenni Adams and Sue Vice (eds.) Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film, London: Vallentine Micheli, pp. 129–43.
Sarti, Adele-Marie (2012) Women+Nazis: Perpetrators of Genocide and Other Crimes during Hitler’s Regime, 1933–1945, Bethesda/Dublin/Palo Alto: Academica Press.
Sharlach, Lisa (1999) ‘Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Agents and Objects of Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 1.3, pp. 387–99.
Smith, Roger W. (1994) ‘Women and Genocide: Notes on an Unwritten History’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 8.3, pp. 315–34.
Szejnmann, Claus-Christian W. (2008) ‘Perpetrators of the Holocaust: A Historiography’, in Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (eds.), Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 25–54.
Von Moltke, Johannes (2007) ‘Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion’, New German Critique 34.3, pp. 17–43.
Vronsky, Peter (2007) Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women become Monsters, New York: Berkley Books.
Weckel, Ulrike (2005) ‘Does Gender Matter? Filmic Representations of the Liberated Nazi Concentration Camps, 1945–46’, Gender and History 17.3, pp. 538–66.
Copyright information
© 2015 Ingrid Lewis
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lewis, I. (2015). ‘Ordinary Women’ as Perpetrators in European Holocaust Films. In: Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137530424_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137530424_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57146-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53042-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)