Who Owns the Holocaust? The Ethics of Holocaust Representations in the Media
Representations of the Holocaust have been cycling through American media since the end of the war. An influx of films, literature, plays, and scholarship have created even more variations in how the Holocaust is presented to Americans in popular culture. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that Americans are exposed to up to 3,000 advertisements each day and thirty-four hours a week watching television. Embedded in the commercials, video games, television shows, and movies that we consume are messages of violence, disaster, and suffering. One way media tells stories of violence is by evoking the Holocaust. In this paper, I argue that the evocation of the Holocaust in fictional films as well as the appropriation of memoirs desensitizes us to the horrors of the Holocaust. As a result, the genocide becomes vulnerable to cinematic misrepresentation which can endanger authentic memory of the genocide. Using The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Unborn, and the stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank, I will examine how the Holocaust has been exploited for entertainment and capital while pointing out the dangers these representations pose to the memory of the Holocaust.
First, it is important to note that the messages we receive about the Holocaust are coming from what is called the entertainment industry. Films and television shows are designed to be entertaining, so what does it say about our memory of the Holocaust when violence is considered entertainment, and thus nonchalantly woven into various story lines for the sake of adding shock value? While accurate Holocaust memory demands that films depicting the Holocaust reflect the desperation of the event, the “rules” of traditional mass media operations don’t allow these requisites. Three conventions of mass media contradict the respectful premise for Holocaust recollection: a happy ending, a desire not to challenge the viewer, and the conflict between portraying the Holocaust as a unique event and the “standardized” nature of mass media (or the secularization of media to appeal to multiple audiences). For example, to please customers, media products are designed with two main themes in mind: an active hero and a happy ending. While there were certainly brave heroes who fought against the Third Reich during WWII, there was certainly not a happy ending to the Holocaust; to create one in media representations creates a false narrative of the true horrors victims endured.
As more fictional representations of the Holocaust emerge in mass media, we are forced to consider the ethical and historical basis on which we educate the public about the Holocaust. Are fictional films the best way to talk about the Holocaust? Can the use of horrific experiences for profit be considered unethical, or is it merely educational? Perhaps a more succinct question to explore is this: Who owns the Holocaust?
In our age of technology, internet access, and advanced special effects, the power to create meaningful art through cinema has grown. Authority to narrate the past has been bestowed upon media outlets, as they have the power to reach a wide audience. It is their unique position as deliverers of messages, however, that cause tension; on one hand, they provide a “public arena for various agents (e.g., political activists, academics, local communities) who want to influence the ways in which collective pasts are narrated and understood.” This means that media are able to serve as a platform for generally positive messages. On the other hand, some outlets “operate as salient memory agents who aspire to provide their own readings of the collective past” that are based in individual or group experiences. Therefore, there is caution to be taken when giving narrative power of the past to people who may not base their representations of it in historical evidence, but rather on their own experiences or agendas. As Berel Lang points out, “Any representation of the Holocaust … can never adequately convey the reality of a lived experience; it will always be bound to convey a representation of that experience particular to the situation in which it (the representation) was produced.” One way to approach the idea of historical narratives is through Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory:
[Postmemory] identifies an intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance, linked to a cultural or collective trauma that is not based on identity or familial connection. It is defined through an identification with the victim or witness, modulated and carefully delimited by the unbridgeable distance that separates the participant from the one born after.
In other words, postmemory refers to the memories of the “generation after” who bear responsibility to remember an event, but can only do so through stories, photographs, and behaviors that they received growing up. The ‘generation after” has a role in remembering the past that is actually “mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.” We see this postmemory in the films, books, and plays which evoke the Holocaust but are not written by victims or survivors. Because postmemory serves an important purpose of keeping events from disappearing from society’s memory, it has serious consequences on the collective memory of the Holocaust when care isn’t taken to ensure the memory isn’t distorted.
The first movie I will analyze is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008), based on the novel by John Boyne. At the end of the film, the young son of a commandant (Bruno) sneaks into a death camp to play with a young prisoner (Leon). However, the two get swept up by a group of prisoners being led into a gas chamber. The two boys are seen inside the chamber, wedged between countless terrified bodies, their hands clutched together as the deadly gas is released. A heart-wrenching image, indeed, but it is important to keep in mind that it was made up. It is highly unlikely this presented situation with a commandant’s son would ever happen in a concentration camp, and so to represent it as a plausible situation creates problems with memory.
The story has important implications for how the Holocaust is interpreted. On one hand, it attempts to show the innocence of children and show that antisemitism and prejudice is something that is learned. It also gives a solemn look at how arbitrary the killings were, thus disproving the Nazi ideology that Jews were somehow markedly different from “Aryans” as no one noticed the commandant’s son entering the gas chambers among what we can assume to be mostly Jews. And yet, Striped Pajamas elicits some important questions about how the Holocaust is evoked in the media. For example, the film uses the death of an “Aryan” child to illicit sympathy and sadness, rather than the real group of people who were killed during the Holocaust. There was enough death and despair in the camps without appropriating a commandant’s son into the story. To shift the victimhood from the real, historical victims is to put the suffering of millions to the side in favor of a fictional suffering.
Furthermore, a fictional film about the Holocaust is problematic in that the main goal of media, as stated before, is to entertain. Evoking the Holocaust in forms of entertainment merely to add shock value to the storyline is grossly imprudent. Engaging with films that bring in the Holocaust means that power and dangers must be considered; “one can screen out the political context, forget that horrific events did happen and not just on-screen, and become captivated by the beauty of the aesthetic even while watching dreadful scenes.” To allow filmmakers to have free reign over the content of the Holocaust to use at will to “spice up” their movies creates a sense that the event doesn’t demand a unique A filmgoer, then, could be watching a movie that shows scenes about the Holocaust, and feel more inclined towards the aesthetics or the plot that they don’t stop to consider the moral meanings of what they are seeing. This is especially important to understand when examining movies that aren’t explicitly about the Holocaust, but borrow themes and images from the event.
One movie that does this is the 2009 thriller The Unborn. In the film, the main character Casey is haunted by the spirit of her unborn twin brother who died in utero. While going through her dead mother’s belongings one day, she uncovers a film reel with the name Sofi Kozma circled on it. Casey comes to find out that Sofi is her grandmother and a survivor of Auschwitz. Sofi was a twin, and her brother Barto died during one of Doctor Mengele’s experiments where he tried to turn brown eyes into blue eyes (the characteristic associated with Hitler’s Aryan race). Barto, Sofi’s brother, returns from the dead two days later, but Sofi tells Casey that an evil spirit had taken over him, a spirit that straddles the world between Heaven and Hell, searching for a “doorway” to one of the worlds, which these spirits find in twins as they are mirror images of each other. Sofi suggests that the spirit that had taken over Barto was now trying to take over Casey, and that she must see a rabbi to solve the problem. Images of Sofi and Barto in Auschwitz grace the screen for most of the time that Sofi is telling this story. Certainly, there are multiple points to break down within this movie. The first of which is the use of the Holocaust as a subplot in a horror film. While the Holocaust was indeed a horrific event, to appropriate it to a film that essentially has nothing to do with the Holocaust creates a lot of issues; it allows a lot of room for interpretation, creates a precedent that the Holocaust can be warped to fit a non-related story, and that the Holocaust can be exploited for capital gain in the film industry. Unlike Striped Pajamas, this film is not at all about the Holocaust, but instead it pulls specific events from the Holocaust to illicit an emotional reaction.
Apart from movies, one of the most prominent Holocaust works is the stage version of Anne Frank’s diary. Anne’s written diary was first published in America in 1952; around 100,000 copies were sold in the first year of publication, and its success led to the Broadway play in 1955 and the Hollywood film four years later. It is the play, however, that can be seen as a catalyst for the misrepresentations of Anne Frank’s story and identity. The screenplay was originally written by American journalist Meyer Levin, however, the screenplay was rejected by sixteen producers, ultimately leading to a change of playwrights. Albert and Frances Hackett, a husband-and-wife script writing team, were chosen from the MGM studios in Hollywood to take on the task of transforming Anne Frank’s diary into a play. Levin eventually signed all authorial rights over to Frank Otto in exchange for $15,000, though Levin had concerns about the new version of the play.
Meyer Levin’s main worry was about the removal of Anne Frank’s Jewishness - a piece of her identity that is integral to her experiences, as it is the reason she and her family were forced into hiding. To downplay this vital aspect of her life has a variety of consequences for how Anne Frank, and by extension the Holocaust, is remembered. The play, in secularizing Anne, “emphasized the comical side of life in hiding, and set up Anne as an icon of optimism.” By revising one of the only parts of the play that mentions the Jewish identity of the people in hiding, director Garson Kanin claimed that the play had the opportunity to “spread its theme into the infinite.” In Anne’s diary, she responds to a remark from Peter about his disgust towards hiding for two years because they were Jewish. In her diary, Anne says, “We’re not the only Jews that’ve had to suffer. Right down through the ages there have been Jews and they’ve had to suffer.” In the play, however, play-Anne invokes the suffering of different races, saying, “There’ve always been people that’ve had to [suffer]… Sometimes one race… Sometimes another…” (emphasis added). The decision to replace “Jews” with “people” may at first appear to be inclusive of minorities who have suffered throughout history, but in reality it is a dangerous suppression of the main cause of the Holocaust: antisemitism.
It is important to note that in secularizing Anne Frank, the 1955 play attempts to tell a story of America rather than an explicit story of the Holocaust; it aims to reveal to the audience the dangers of discrimination in a way that, quite ironically, denounces Anne’s Jewishness. “[A] diary in which the Holocaust provided the context rather than the central theme,” scholar Tim Cole notes, “was made into a play and a film which reflected the concerns of 1950s America much more than it reflected the Holocaust.” To put it another way, Anne Frank’s experiences were exploited to tell Americans a story about positivity, discrimination, and overcoming adversity. Consequently, Anne’s story became one meant to inspire and uplift Americans instead of one to anger them about the gross mistreatment of millions of people. Garson Kanin’s removal of the historic background of the oppression of Jews diminishes the harsh reality that the Holocaust was a culmination in the long-standing history of the oppression of Jews. To remove the Jewishness from the play version of Anne Frank’s diary is to essentially ignore the reason Anne, along with 6 million others, met their cruel deaths in gas chambers, firing squads, starvation, and beatings.
In addition to her Jewishness, Anne Frank lost another part of her identity through misrepresentations and interpretations: her gender. During the process of editing, passages about Anne’s strained relationship with her mother were removed by Otto Frank to preserve his dead wife’s reputation and memory. Anne’s reflections on her sexuality, such as her description of her vagina and her comments on menstruation, were pulled from the published version. In removing these aspects of Anne’s life, Frank Otto and the publishers managed to reduce Anne to an innocent teenager who was seemingly disinterested in sex. This edit is especially dangerous to Anne’s story because it makes her experiences as a young woman seem incompatible with her experiences as a Jew in hiding. To remove the exploration and reflection of her body and sexuality is to remove a vital part of her identity, thus creating a “perfect victim” to be studied in classrooms throughout the world. It is important to consider the impact this has on how women are studied in the Holocaust, and how their gender is used to both denounce their experiences and to romanticize it.
Furthermore, scholars in the 1990s have frequently suggested that renditions of Anne Frank’s diary, whether in past editions of the text or through the stage and film versions, have “soft-pedaled the devastation of the Holocaust.” The refusal to acknowledge the vast suffering of Anne Frank and others threatens the responsibility of Americans to authentically remember the Holocaust, and it could be argued that we are not doing this. It has become even more imperative to represent the Holocaust truthfully as Holocaust survivors begin to become, in a sense, extinct. Hilene Flanzbaum captured this idea perfectly when she observed:
[O]ur knowledge of the Holocaust in America has rarely been delivered by direct witness; it only comes to us by way of representation, and representations of representations, through editors and publishers, producers and directors. Thus, the uniqueness of the Holocaust has seemed threatened: the event does not necessarily retain any special status among other historical events that Americans read about or see on television.
If collective memory of the Holocaust has become an open market for producers, writers, and filmmakers to capitalize on, much hangs in the balance when we consider future knowledge of the Holocaust. It is worrisome to image what the Holocaust will look like in decades to come. The inability to authentically preserve the stories of victims and survivors poses significant danger to the memory of the Holocaust. As survivors pass away, society will be forced to rely on the representations and interpretations left behind, and as these stories become a moneymaking endeavor, there is even more risk in the distortion of experiences for the purposes of entertainment, rather than historical authenticity. As we move forward, we must consider the repercussions that historical amnesia could have on how the Holocaust - and other genocides - are remembered. Have we learned anything from the Holocaust if we continue to portray it in a way that in inauthentic and inaccurate? If these representations become the main avenue to Holocaust education, we are headed down a slippery slope of misinterpretation and risk losing an incredibly vital part of history. Continuing to create representations of representations and using the Holocaust in subplots will eventually create an image of the Holocaust that is so distorted, it won’t at all resemble the Holocaust of 1943-1945.
References:
Flanzbaum, Hilene. "The Americanization of the Holocaust." Journal of Genocide Research 1.1 (1999): 91-104. Print.
Flanzbaum, Hilene. "POSTMEMORY.net." POSTMEMORYnet RSS. Web. 16 May 2014.
Meyers, Oren, Motti Neiger, and Eyal Zandberg. "Structuring the Sacred: Media Professionalism and the Production of Mediated Holocaust Memory." The Communication Review 14.2 (2011): 123-44. Print.
Spector, Karen, and Stephanie Jones. "Constructing Anne Frank: Critical Literacy and the Holocaust in Eighth-Grade English." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 51.1 (2007): 36-48. Web.
Buettner, Angi. Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe: The Cultural Politics of Seeing. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub., 2011. Print.
Cole, Tim. Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.
Flanzbaum, Hilene. "The Americanization of the Holocaust." Journal of Genocide Research 1.1 (1999): 91-104. Print.
Hirsch, Marianne, and Irene Kacandes. Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust. New York, NY: Modern Language Association of America, 2004. Print.
Meyers, Oren, Motti Neiger, and Eyal Zandberg. "Structuring the Sacred: Media Professionalism and the Production of Mediated Holocaust Memory." The Communication Review 14.2 (2011): 123-44. Print.
Richardson, Anna. "The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation." ESharp 5 (n.d.): n. pag. Web. <http://www.gla.ac.uk/mediamedia_41171_en.pdf>.
