Shoah (film)

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Movie
German title Shoah
Original title Shoah
Country of production France
original language French , Polish , Ivrit , Yiddish , English , German
Publishing year 1985
length 540 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Claude Lanzmann
camera Dominique Chapuis, Jimmy Glasberg, William Lubtchansky
cut Ziva Postec, Anna Ruiz

Shoah is a two-part documentary by Claude Lanzmann from 1985 in which contemporary witnesses to the Shoah (from Hebrew הַשׁוֹאָה ha'Schoah ) or about the Holocaust . Not a single corpse is shown (not even as an archive picture). The film recordings consist mainly of interviews and slow tracking shots at the locations; the scenes were for thousands of Jews who were deported there to murder them during the Second World War . Shoah is unusually long at nine hours and is considered a milestone in the cinematic examination of the extermination of Jews systematically pursued by the German Reich at the time of National Socialism .

Self-description of the director

Lanzmann about his film in the French daily Le Monde on March 3, 1994:

“There's not a second in 'Shoah' with archive material because that's not the way I think and work, and by the way, there is no such material. [...] If I had found a film - a secret film because filming was prohibited - made by the SS , in which it is shown how 3,000 Jews - men, women and children - die together in the gas chamber of crematorium 2 suffocating in Auschwitz , not only would I not have shown him, I would even have destroyed him. I can't say why. That happens by itself. "

Contemporary witnesses in the film

In the film, the victims have their say as contemporary witnesses:

More contemporary witnesses

Witnesses were also Czesław Borowy (Polish farmer near Treblinka), Henryk Gawkowski (Polish train driver of deportation trains), Bronisław Falborski (inhabitant of Koło ), Mr. Filipowicz (inhabitant of Włodawa , interim camp approx. 10 km north of the extermination camp Sobibor), Pana Pietyra ( Resident of the city of Oświęcim (Auschwitz) , Jan Piwonski (switchman at the Sobibor train station ) and Jan Karski (courier of the Polish government in exile ).

On the part of the perpetrators at that time:

content

Director Lanzmann traveled for 11 years - from 1974 to 1985 - through Europe, primarily through Poland , to interview contemporary witnesses. The film shows the locations Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, Chelmno and Warsaw without any archive or foreign material, but only recordings from the period and at the current locations of these trips. He interrupts the conversation by taking pictures of freight trains on the railway lines to Treblinka or other extermination camps. In recurring cycles, Lanzmann lets the wagons arrive and maneuver at today's stations of the extermination camps at that time .

The central topics of the surveys are the concentration and extermination camps during the Second World War and the Warsaw Ghetto . Lanzmann put the witnesses to a severe test with his questions; he let them be filmed continuously, even if they lost their composure because they could no longer bear the cruel memory. In addition to victims who survived the genocide, Lanzmann also interviewed perpetrators. Some of these were filmed with a hidden camera.

The film also shows in detail what the camps looked like at the time of shooting (between 1976 and 1984). In some places there are memorials , in others he found only remains overgrown with plants. Eyewitnesses have pointed this out when they confirmed that nothing has changed at the place since then. Images of dreary areas or buildings often overlap with the acoustic statements of individual survivors.

reception

The Polish government protested before the premiere on 30 April 1985 in Paris by the French government against the film and demanded a complete ban, as the film shows that anti-Semitism in the People's Republic persisted common. In October 1985 - at that time Poland was still part of the Eastern Bloc  - a 90-minute cut was shown on Polish television; in the discussion that followed, the film was unanimously condemned.

The broadcast of the film was also controversial in Germany. While the WDR in particular advocated this, the Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) in particular resisted it and, as in 1979 with the TV series Holocaust , made it broadcast on the third channels instead of on the ARD; The BR also broadcast Shoah later than other national channels and at an unfavorable broadcast date.

Shoah shows and emphasizes the will to survive of the eyewitnesses / survivors, who prevailed against unimaginable psychological stress. Without him, the Witnesses would not be able to convey their memories to the younger generations later.

“To stage mass murder as a feature film is blasphemous , says Lanzmann. One may criticize his attitude as that of an Old Testament God who jealously defends his ban on images. As little as it is justified to measure all further film projects exclusively against the Shoah, it can be said that this radical documentation, through its insistence on facts, continuities and the power of the spoken word, is still the greatest possible antithesis to all previous and later attempts Tales from National Socialism and the Holocaust forms. Shoah is and will remain an exceptional film. "

- critic.de - the film site

The film has been available in full on DVD in Germany since 2007.

From January 26th, 2012, TRT , the public broadcasting company of Turkey, broadcast the film. The Aladdin project had subtitled the work in Turkish. Lanzmann described this as a historic step that will hopefully find many imitators in the Islamic world.

The film canon for imparting film skills to young people has listed Shoah since 2003. In 2012 , Shoah was ranked 29th in the survey of film critics carried out every ten years by the film magazine Sight & Sound for the “best film of all time” .

In the documentary Claude Lanzmann: Specters of the Shoah published in 2015, Lanzmann reports on the work on the film project.

On the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 2020, the international literature festival berlin called for a "worldwide screening" of the film, in which numerous cultural institutions worldwide took part.

Awards (selection)

The production was honored with a total of 13 different prizes. The film was named Best Documentary at the British Academy Film Awards . Shoah received an award in the same category at the 1986 Boston Society of Film Critics Awards . In the same year there was also an award from the National Society of Film Critics .

At the Berlin International Film Festival in 1986, director Claude Lanzmann was honored with three prizes: the Caligari Film Award, the FIPRESCI Prize and the OCIC Award - Honorable Mention. Lanzmann also received the Adolf Grimme Gold Prize in 1987 .

Director Lanzmann received a Special Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in 1985 .

literature

  • Claude Lanzmann: Shoah. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1986, ISBN 3-546-45899-0 (Original Lanzman: Shoah. New Yorker Films, 1985).
  • DVD version, 566 min. With booklet. absolut media, ISBN 3-89848-846-2 .
  • Ulrich Baer (Ed.): 'Nobody testifies for the witness'. Remembrance culture after the Shoah. (= edition suhrkamp . Volume 2141). Frankfurt / M. 2000, ISBN 978-3-518-12141-2 (including a contribution by Lanzmann).
  • Lothar Baier : perpetrators and victims. Claude Lanzmann's reconstruction of the extermination of the Jews: 'Shoah'. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . September 7, 1985.
  • Simone de Beauvoir : The memory of horror. Claude Lanzmann's 'Shoah'. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. No. 27 of February 1, 1986.
  • Pia Bowinkelmann: Shadow World . The extermination of the Jews depicted in the French documentary. Offizin, Hannover 2008, ISBN 3-930345-62-5 (other filmmakers themed there: Frédéric Rossif and Madeleine Chapsal: Le Temps du ghetto 1961; Marcel Ophüls : The house next door. Chronicle of a French city during the war; Alain Resnais : Nacht und Nebel and Claude Chabrol : L'œil de Vichy 1993).
  • Marc Chevrie, Hervé Le Roux: The place and the word. From a conversation with Claude Lanzmann. In: Shoah. A film by C. L. Pandora-Film, Frankfurt 1986 (press booklet).
  • Heike Hurst: The first liberating film since 1945. Conversation with C. L. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. February 1, 1986.
  • Ute Janssen: Shoah . In: Torben Fischer, Matthias N. Lorenz (Ed.): Lexicon of coping with the past in Germany. The history of debates and discourse under National Socialism after 1945 . 2nd unchanged edition. transcript, Bielefeld 2009, ISBN 978-3-89942-773-8 , p. 244–246 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-201512039606 (3rd, revised and expanded edition. 2015, ISBN 978-3-8376-2366-6 , p. 268 ff., Urn: nbn: de : 101: 1-201511302295 ).
  • 'Shoah' reached less than two percent of the audience. Infas : Length of the film, but also placement in the program responsible. In: Church and radio. 38th vol., No. 25/26, Evangelischer Presseverband Deutschlands, 1986, ISSN  0720-7603 , o. P.
  • Gertrud Koch : Shoah. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 371–376.
  • Andreas Schmoller: The past that won't pass. The memory of the Shoah in France since 1945 in the medium of film. Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2010, ISBN 978-3-7065-4853-3 (Chapter 6.1 on the film Shoah: Background to the creation; content and cinematographic structure; controversies and reception).
  • Dorothee Sölle : Forsaken by God. Eyewitnesses to the Holocaust: Claude Lanzmann's film 'Shoah'. In: The time . No. 9/1986 ( zeit.de ( Memento from May 11, 2019 in the Internet Archive )).
  • Gabriela Stoicea: The Difficulties of Verbalizing Trauma: Translation and the Economy of Loss in Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah". In: Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. Vol. 39 (2006), No. 2, JSTOR 20464186 , pp. 43-53.

Movie

Later released footage shot at the time

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Claude Lanzmann: The hairdresser from Treblinka . In: Der Spiegel . No. 36 , 2010 ( online - September 6, 2010 , Lanzmann about the interview with Abraham Bomba, hairdresser in Treblinka).
  2. ↑ Henryk Gawkowski and Treblinka railway workers. In: USHM. Washington DC.
  3. ↑ Sonja M. Schultz: Shoah. critic.de - the film page, December 4, 2007, accessed on November 4, 2013 .
  4. ↑ FSK from 12; ISBN 3-89848-985-X , 566 minutes.
  5. ↑ Thomas Seibert: Turkish TV shows Holocaust. In: nachrichten.rp-online.de. January 27, 2012, accessed May 14, 2019 .
  6. ^ Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012. Critics' top 100. 29 Shoah (1985). In: bfi.org.uk, British Film Institute , accessed March 20, 2020.
  7. ↑ An overview can be found at January 27, 2020 Worldwide Screening: »Shoah« by Claude Lanzmann. In: worldwide-reading.com, accessed on January 7, 2020.
  8. ↑ Shoah (Holocaust) (1/2) on YouTube , accessed November 1, 2018. and Shoah (Holocaust) (2/2) on YouTube , accessed November 1, 2018.
  9. ↑ The full text of the report that the delegate wrote about his visit to Theresienstadt on June 23, 1944 was first published in 1996 in Theresienstadt Studies and Documents, 7/2000, ZDB -ID 1233756-0 , pp. 164–191 ( ceeol .com [summary and preview (with registration)]), published: When Maurice Rossel started talking; "Even today I would sign it ..."
  10. ↑ Interviews with Ruth Elias , Ada Lichtman , Paula Biren and Hanna Marton; Previously unpublished Shoah material from 1979:
    1. The Hippocratic Oath, Ruth Elias ( memento from July 8, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) (about the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele ),
    2. On the funny flea ( memento from July 8, 2018 in Internet Archive ) (on the Sobibor extermination camp ),
    3rd Baluty, Paula Biren ( memento from July 8, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) (on the Litzmannstadt ghetto in the Łódź-Bałuty district ),
    4th Noah's Ark, Hanna Marton ( memento from 8 July 2018 in the     Internet Archive ) . July 2018 in the Internet Archive ) (on Kasztner transport to Switzerland). In: arte.tv. Arte , accessed on July 8, 2018 (film descriptions; films no longer available).