In any exchange on film and the Holocaust, the difficulty surfaces over the merits or, in many scholarly views, the lack of merit of Hollywood simulations of the Final Solution. Academic circles tend to oppose the Hollywood culture. Yet such cinematic dramatizations of the Holocaust have helped to shape memory of the Holocaust in the popular consciousness. This article examines the controversy over the perceived exploitative nature of Hollywood interpretations of the Final Solution and the critiques of the film medium as a source for memory, but it also indicates a number of ways in which Holocaust-related films have become the defenders of memory.
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References
1.
for Germany, see, for example, Siegfried Zielinski, “History as Entertainment and Provocation: The TV Series `Holocaust' in West Germany,” in Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986).
2.
2. Carl L. Becker, “What Is Evidence?” in The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence, ed. Robin W. Winter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), p. 20.
3.
3. Doneson, Holocaust in American Film.
4.
Elie Wiesel , “Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction,”New York Times, 16 Apr. 1978.
5.
5. Susan Carey, “Who Goes There? At Ypres Battlefield, Spirits of the Past,”Wall Street Journal, 23 July 1987.
6.
6. See, for example, Ruth Gruber, “Visiting the Vestiges of Jewish Poland,”New York Times, 21 Oct. 1990.
7.
7. Ruth Ellen Gruber, “Remembering Poland's Jews,”New York Times, 29 Jan. 1995.
8.
8. For an examination of existing Holocaust memorials, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
9.
9. Robert Alter, “Vistas of Annihilation,”Commentary, p. 39 (Jan. 1985).
10.
10. Printed flier mailed by the Holocaust Survivors' Memorial Foundation, Feb. 1985.
11.
11. Printed in flier from the Holocaust Survivors' Memorial Foundation as an advertisement for the film The Survivor, based on Jack Eisner's experience.
12.
12. Eli Pfefferkorn, Commemorative Observances for Days of Remembrance (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1985), p. 55. This book was published before the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was built.
13.
13. Susan Sontag, “Reflections on the Deputy,” in Against Interpretation, by Susan Sontag (New York: Delta Books, Dell, 1966).
14.
14. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988), p. 24.
15.
15. Ibid., p. 36.
16.
16. Shlomo Avineri, “Idea of Holocaust Memorial in U.S. Should Be Scrapped,”Jerusalem Post (July 1987).
17.
17. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, p. 19.
18.
18. Frank Stanton, “Parallel Paths,” in Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society, ed. Norman Jacobs (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), p. 71.
