Beyond a Court of Law: Holocaust Film and the Tensions in Primo Levi’s ‘Grey Zone’

Abstract

The influence of Primo Levi’s writing on the ‘grey zone’ has only sharpened over the last decade, not only in terms of its broader application to human rights contexts beyond the Holocaust, but also through a greater focus on the question of how to understand the behaviour of so-called ‘privileged’ prisoners in the Nazi camps and ghettos. History has shown a court of law to be an inadequate setting for negotiating the complexities of the ethical dilemmas forced on victims in extremis, and substantial problems of judgement and representation have plagued efforts to understand these liminal figures elsewhere. This article examines the tensions within Levi’s writings and maps these onto attempts to represent the ‘grey zone’ in Holocaust films. Engaging in particular with Margarethe von Trotta’s critically acclaimed feature film Hannah Arendt (2012) and Tor Ben-Mayor’s lesser known documentary Kapo (1999), I highlight how these distinct approaches to depicting ‘privileged’ Jews expose the fraught nature of portraying victim complicity on screen.