Holocaust in film

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The Holocaust has been depicted in films of all kinds since 1945 . In particular, melodramatic films about individual fates of the Holocaust have sparked wide public debates. It deals with the possibilities and limits of the pictorial representation of the Holocaust and their contribution to a culture of remembrance appropriate to the event. This debate has been carried on in a similar way since 1945 in philosophy ( Theodor W. Adorno ), literary studies and historical studies on the Holocaust literature .

Film dramas

The plot of a Holocaust drama is based on the audience's knowledge of the real background in the extermination and concentration camps of the Nazi era . The individual fates of the main actors try to link personal heroism, involuntary entanglement and guilt with the historical background. Very often the authenticity of part of the story is emphasized. The script is often based on an already published novel.

Early on, individual films dealt with the crimes of the Nazi era (for example in the German DEFA post-war film The Murderers Are Among Us from 1946) and occasionally also addressed the extermination and concentration camps (e.g. Morituri by Eugen York ) . However, a broad processing began much later. The four-part US television series Holocaust - The History of the Weiss Family from 1978, which also led to a general dialogue about the Holocaust not only in the USA, but also in German-speaking countries, attracted particular attention . The eyewitness documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann in 1985 and finally in 1993 the film Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg , which was successful with audiences and critics, aroused strong reactions .

The films repeatedly sparked discussions about the choice of topic. On the one hand, Holocaust survivors also stated that such a topic could not be appropriately filmed, although the premise of the representability of reality must already be questioned. By depicting life in the ghetto and the concentration camps, for example , their horrors are trivialized or depicted in the language and culture of the perpetrators. Thus, one cannot reflect independently of it. Dramatization and historical truth can hardly be brought into congruence, but this is the problem with any mimetic conception of representation. This would make it easier for right-wing extremists or revisionists to attack the subject of the Holocaust, because if something is only remembered because it takes place in the film and only exists there, it can also be declaimed by another film.

It has been countered that it is precisely a feature film that can make young people understand the dimensions of what happened. A good example is Schindler's List . There is the possibility of identification through compassion, but this cannot replace a reflection on the topic.

See also

literature

German
  • Bettina Bannasch, Almuth Hammer: Prohibition of Pictures - Commandment of Remembrance: Media Representations of the Shoah. Campus, 2004 ISBN 3593374854
  • Catrin Corell: The Holocaust as a Challenge for the Film. Forms of dealing with the Shoah on film since 1945. A typology of effects. Transcript, Bielefeld 2009 ISBN 978-3-89942-719-6 ( review by Manuel Köppen )
  • Jürgen Egyptien: Memory in text and images: On the portrayal of war and the Holocaust in literary and cinematic work in Germany and Poland. Oldenbourg, Munich 2012 ISBN 305005722X
  • Gertrud Koch : The attitude is the attitude. Visual constructions of Judaism. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1992
  • Manuel Köppen, Klaus R. Scherpe: Pictures of the Holocaust. Literature, film, visual arts. Böhlau, Vienna 1997 ISBN 3412051977
  • Matías Martínez: The Holocaust and the Arts: Mediality and authenticity of Holocaust representations in literature, film, video, painting, monuments, comics and music. Aisthesis, 2004 ISBN 3895284599
  • Elke Schieber: Tangents. Holocaust and Jewish life as reflected in the audiovisual media of the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR 1946 to 1990 - a documentation , Bertz and Fischer, Berlin, 2016, ISBN 978-3-86505-403-6 .
  • Mirjam Schmid: Representability of the Shoah in novels and films. Kulturgeschichtliche Reihe, 12. Sonnenbergverlag, Annweiler 2012 ISBN 9783933264428
  • Andreas Schmoller: The past that does not pass: The memory of the Shoah in France since 1945 in the medium of film . Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2010, ISBN 9783706548533
  • Marcus Stiglegger , Alexander Jackob (ed.): Moment 36: On the new cinematography of the Holocaust. Marburg, Schüren 2004 ISSN  0179-2555
  • Martina Thiele: Journalistic controversies about the Holocaust in film. Lit Verlag, 2008 ISBN 3825858073
  • Waltraud Wende (Ed.): The Holocaust in Film: Medial Staging and Cultural Memory. Synchron, 2007 ISBN 3939381055
    • First edition: History in Film: Media Staging of the Holocaust and Cultural Memory. Metzler, 2002 ISBN 3476453081
English
  • Libby Saxton: Haunted images: film, ethics, testimony and the Holocaust. Wallflower Press, 2008, ISBN 1905674368
  • Caroline Joan Picart, David A. Frank, Dominick LaCapra : Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film. Southern Illinois University Press, 2006, ISBN 0809327244
  • Toby Haggith: Holocaust and the Moving Image. Wallflower Press, 2005, ISBN 1904764517
  • Shelley Hornstein, Florence Jacobowitz: Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust. Indiana University Press, 2002, ISBN 0253341884
  • Judith E. Doneson: The Holocaust in American Film. Syracuse University Press, 2001, ISBN 0815629265

Web links

notes

  1. ↑ with a detailed picture biography (approx. 40 titles from three languages)