Holocaust Memory Beyond Narratives and Images?

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2 Holocaust Film and European Memory 15 Holocaust Memory Beyond Narratives and Images? Can it be said that narratives abuse events in the mere act of telling them? The idea that our knowledge of the past is largely conceived of as a narrative as articulated by Hayden White touches on the most problematic issue in the study of cultural representations and remembrance of the Holocaust: the (im)possibility of conveying a traumatic event like the Holocaust within narrative frames. The Holocaust is said particularly to resist integration into narrative stories since narratives imply some sort of mastery over the event, while in the case of the former it is precisely the traumatic event that masters individual memory. The cultural theorist Mieke Bal juxtaposes what she calls a traumatic non-memory with a more common narrative memory. Particular to the former is that it has no social component and it is not addressed to anybody. In other words, it cannot be said that trauma is socially framed, whereas narrative memory fundamentally serves a social function (Bal 1999: x). Theodor Adorno s dictum about the impossibility of writing a poem after Auschwitz has, over the years, been interpreted and analyzed by historians, artists, theorists and critics, while the conception of Shoah as something unrepresentable and infinite has become a commonplace in the literature on the theme. The crisis of representation inherent in the experience of the Holocaust has been connected both to the insurmountable circumstance that those who should witness are those who were murdered (the idea of the vicarious witness (Levi 1993)) and to the unspeakable, traumatic memories of those who survived. At the same time, however, since and despite Adorno s dictum and Bilderverbote formulated by other authors, the Holocaust has frequently been represented in literature, theatre and film, popular genres and media included. In the history of filmic representations of the Holocaust, especially the nine and one-half hour documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann from 1985, and Schindler s List by Steven Spielberg from 1993, have become the subject of extensive discussions. Most often, however, the two have been placed at opposite poles. Lanzmann himself was one of the most vociferous opponents of Spielberg s film, criticizing it as a violation: [A] certain ultimate degree of horror is intransmissible. To claim that it is possible to do so is to be guilty of the most serious transgression (Lanzmann 1994). 7 The controversies provoked by various representations of the Holocaust with the discussions about the 1978 television series Holocaust by Marvin J. Chomsky, Roberto Benini s 1998 Holocaust comedy Life is Beautiful (La vita è 7 See also the criticism of Schindler s List by Bartov (1997).

3 16 Chapter I bella), and the 1996 art installation LEGO Concentration Camp Set by Zbigniew Libera serving as additional examples have derived from the fundamental dilemma inscribed in post-holocaust culture. On the one hand, there is a belief that the propagation of the memory of the Holocaust to a mass audience is necessary to ensure that this event is never repeated. The German scholar Andreas Huyssen perceives popular representations of the Holocaust as socially positive phenomena. Responding to the criticism of the television series Holocaust, Huyssen defended melodrama as facilitating the emotional identification with the Jewish characters that, in his view, is necessary for the public to have a significant engagement with the memory of the Holocaust (Huyssen 1980: 123). On the other hand, there is obedience to radical formulations about the impossibility of representing Auschwitz as expressed in the phrase of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel speaking of his literary work: I have not told you something about my past so that you may know it, but so that you know that you will never know it (Wiesel 1991: 682). For many, attempts to give the memory of the Holocaust a more universal character are tantamount to a trivialization of this event. In her article Schindler s List is not Shoah (1996), Miriam Bratu Hansen summarizes the discussions around Spielberg s film and the representation of the Holocaust in popular genres. Hansen s analysis describes the critical reactions to the film, especially the harsh criticism of Claude Lanzmann, as the echo of an old debate on modernism versus mass culture. The film was mainly criticized for being a Hollywood product, circumscribed by the economic mechanisms of the culture industry (in the sense of Adorno and Horkheimer), with its unquestioned and supreme values of entertainment and spectacle. Schindler s List, Hansen reminds us, was usually compared to Spielberg s previous mega-productions, in particular to Jurassic Park, and was accused of trivializing the meaning of the Holocaust. Hansen agrees that Lanzmann s Shoah has been rightly praised for its unique and radical film language. However, as she states, Schindler s List did not seek to negate the representational, iconic power of filmic images, but rather exploited this power; it deliberately relied on familiar tropes and common techniques to narrate the extraordinary rescue of a large group of individuals. Hansen concludes that the critique of Schindler s List in high-modernist terms reduced the problem of representing the Holocaust to the dialectics of showing and not showing it, rather than casting it as a question of competing modes of representation. The issue raised by Hansen touches on the paradox of the need to shout Never again! while proclaiming the impossibility of representing what happened. For some scholars, however, Adorno s sentence about the barbarity

4 Holocaust Film and European Memory 17 of a poem after Auschwitz can be read differently. According to Shoshana Felman, the implication is not that poetry should no longer be written, but that it must be written through its own impossibility (Felman 1992: 34). This would mean that the Holocaust spelled not the end but rather the onset of new and greater difficulties in the field of memory. There was no choice but to remember, another scholar, Susannah Radstone stresses, and this was the founding equivocation of post-holocaust memory (Radstone 2000: 6). Cultural rituals and narratives have played a significant role in constructing the memory of the Holocaust. Today, an increasing number of scholars are turning their attention to the fact that the memory and our imagination of the Holocaust have become, to a large extent, created by the media. Marianne Hirsch with her concept of post-memory (1997), together with Manuel Köppen (1997), and Alison Landsberg (2003) with her concept of prosthetic memory, have drawn our attention to the processes of memory construction through representations in film, photography, literature, and media. Marianne Hirsch (1997) describes a second-generation memory that is characterized by belatedness and, most of all, by displacement, in which personal memory is dominated by cultural images. Importantly, Hirsch uses the term post-memory as a means to understand the complexities of the memories of the children of survivors, as well as broader processes of cultural remembrance. In her analyses, she refers to well-known images of the Holocaust children being deported to concentration camps, the gate to Auschwitz, piles of bodies in the liberated concentration camps which have gradually gained the status of icons in social knowledge of this event. Art Spiegelman s comic book Maus (1986) is one of the most frequently cited examples in works discussing the phenomenon of post-memory. Maus tells the story of the author s father, a young Jew during World War II. One frame presents a variation on the famous photo by Margaret Bourke-White from 1945 of Buchenwald survivors. A small arrow marked Poppa points to one of the prisoners in the picture. In Hirsch s interpretation, this is a sign of the narrator s inability to perceive his father s story in any way other than through emblematic images (Hirsch 2001: 219). In a similar way, Manuel Köppen (1997) discusses the intertextuality of Schindler s List, arguing that both documentary film material from the war period and popular representations such as the television series Holocaust served the director in the same measure as reference points. From the perspective of cultural practices of remembrance, Köppen considers both these kinds of footage legitimate. The ideas developed by Hirsch, Köppen and Landsberg emphasize the cultural processes of imagining the Holocaust. To acknowledge the importance of cultural representations of the Holocaust is the first step in moving from

5 18 Chapter I normative formulations about the limits of such representation towards concentrating on the interactions between particular representations and their broader social, cultural, and political contexts. It is national contextualization of the research on Holocaust film which distinguishes this present work from the majority of studies on Holocaust representation in feature films. Literature on the topic has usually revolved around theoretical considerations about the limits of its representation 8 or dealt with how films have changed over decades, and which genres and themes filmmakers have most commonly chosen. 9 Few studies, however, situate particular representations in specific national contexts and include an in-depth analysis on how the films interact with their respective national debates on the past, on the one hand, and how they are received by national audiences, on the other. In this work, I consider the national cultural lens through which the Holocaust is perceived. History, Memory and Film When the concept of collective memory emerged in the 1980s as a subject of interest in human sciences it was imagined as a counter-concept for history, and as a critique of the totalizing aspects of the latter (Klein 2000: 128). 10 Since the linguistic turn, the understanding of history itself has also changed, however, and there is a growing awareness of the rhetorical and linguistic limits of history writing. The linguistic turn in historiography has introduced the view that language is not simply a transparent medium of thought and that it constructs reality, rather than objectively describing it. 11 The power of language or more specifically the significance of certain rhetorical tropes in historical writing has been explored by Hayden White, who categorized the texts of historians works by their narrative structures, such as romance, tragedy, comedy (1973). Parallel to these new insights, the Holocaust became another challenge for the historical discourse (see Friedländer 1992; Dintenfass 2000). As a result of the more general acceptance of the constructivist approach in humanities, the clear 8 See Avisar 1988; Insdorf 1989; For recent examples see: Zelizer 2000; Joshua Hirsch For example: Baron 2005; Fröhlich, Loewy, and Steinert 2003; Raphael 2003; Haggith and Newman The works that triggered the scholarly interest in memory in the 1980s were, above all, Yerushalmi 1982; Assmann 1988; Nora For a general historical survey of memory in relation to history see also Le Goff (1992: ). 11 For a discussion of schools and trends in twentieth-century historiography, including postmodernism, see Iggers For the linguistic turn in history see also Clark 2004.

6 Holocaust Film and European Memory 19 distinction between categories like history, memory and myth has been blurred. These categories are now seen as overlapping and supplementary (Stråth 2000). Knowledge of history is created today not only by professionally written publications but also by various media and cultural images and texts. In this age of the so-called memory boom, 12 when the past has been recognized as a subject not only of scholarly research but is also widely represented in politics and mass media, instead of recalling again the distinction between history and memory it may be useful to refer to different discourses on the past. These might include academic discourse, political-institutional discourse, popular/everyday discourse, discourse of the media, etc. In this book, I refer to these various areas of historical reflection together as a public debate about the past. Collective Memory Only individuals remember; on the collective level memory can be referred to only as a metaphor. What does this metaphor suggest? Aleida Assmann argues that history turns into memory when it is transformed into forms of shared knowledge. Thus she emphasizes the aspect of collective participation that distinguishes the activity of remembering collectively from history as professional knowledge (2006a: 216). The term of social representations, coined by Serge Moscovici and applied in social sciences, offers an instructive explanation of what kind of social phenomena a concept of collective memory may imply (see Moscovici 2000). Social representations refer to a collective elaboration of a social object by the community for the purpose of behaving and communicating (Moscovici 1963). They are systems of values, ideas and practices whose function is to establish an order which will enable individuals to orientate themselves in their material and social world and to master it; and secondly to enable communication to take place among the members of a community by providing them with a code for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying unambiguously the various aspects of their world and their individual and group history (Moscovici 1973: xiii). The concept draws on the Durkheimian tradition in social sciences, which was equally the source for Maurice Halbwachs classic theory of collective memory. Halbwachs observed that individual recollections of the past are submerged in social context (Halbwachs 1985, 1992). The fact that individuals mental activities are socially framed is unquestionable. However, claims that communities are able to remember are unjustifiable, as they attempt to transpose individual psychological categories on to the collective level (cf. Winter and Sivan 2000). 12 For a critical view on the boom, or surfeit of memory, see Nora 1989, Maier 1993.

7 20 Chapter I The rediscovery of Halbwachs theory in the framework of the memory boom since the 1980s has often led to essentialist concepts of collective memory which conceived it as a property shared by a social group. As collective phenomena, memories are discourses based on processes of social work and social bargaining, in which various actors are involved (see Connerton 1989, Gillis 1994). Heidemarie Uhl proposes a useful differentiation between the understanding of collective memory as culture and as politics. These two concepts are based on different conceptions of the arena of memory and the connected forms of action (Uhl 2010: 82-84). The culture-oriented concept of memory was above all developed in the works by Jan and Aleida Assmann who were looking for a stable canon of social memory, fixed in cultural formations such as texts, rites, or monuments, and reiterated over generations (Assmann 1988; Asmann 2006). Ritualization and institutionalization of social memory forms also the basis of Pierre Nora s concept of lieux de memoire ( ). Nora focused in particular on the nation as a carrier of knowledge about the past. The understanding of memory as foundation of national identity has evoked numerous critiques. Moritz Csáky, for example, focused on the ethnically, linguistically, culturally and religiously heterogeneous region of Central Europe, and highlighted the fundamental ambiguity and complexity of the possible lieux de memoire in that region (Csáky 2002). The conceptualization of memory as politics, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with negotiations around the collective conception of history (Uhl 2010: 83). Memory as politics is more action-oriented and politically instrumentalized than memory as cultural codes. Collective memory is identified in this approach with the public sphere, and the emphasis is put on a diversity of historical representations various symbolic interests within it. The present work combines these two approaches to collective memory, the cultural and political. Its subject of interest consists of narratives about the past fixed in cultural texts, i.e., selected German and Polish films. In order to identify the particular narratives I view the films in relation to their broader context media discourses, professional historical discourses, official commemorations, and other cultural representations in each country. As Oliver Marchart (2005) observes, particular visions of the past are always situated, meaning they emerge within specific socio-cultural settings, and in order for their contents to be decoded they need to be contextualized culturally and historically. Just as culture should not be seen as a homogeneous entity but as dynamic processes of negotiation of meanings, memory at the collective level should be referred to as a field of interaction between different narratives about the past. In

8 Holocaust Film and European Memory 21 the literature of what can be generally termed collective memory studies, James Wertsch s concept of public remembrance understood as a mediated action is particularly relevant here, as it emphasises a dynamic relation between a cultural text, its context, and its recipient (Wertsch 2002). According to Wertsch, human beings think and act and also remember by using cultural tools that are made available by their particular socio-cultural settings (Wertsch 1998, 2002). Within this understanding, his notion of collective remembering is located as textually mediated action. Wertsch s concept is based on the understanding of cultural text deriving from the writings of M. M. Bakhtin. With Bakhtin (1986), he defines text as a basic organising unit that structures meaning, communication, and thought (Wertsch 2002: 14). Most of all, however, Wertsch uses Bakhtin s concept of heteroglossia that describes the plurality of voices in each text. Therefore, a text represents all the social and ideological voices of its era, that is, all the era s languages that have any claim of significance ( ) (Bakhtin 1982: 411). Bakhtin wrote about the drama of utterance, in which different voices were involved. The voice of the text is itself composed of many different voices. In the processes of interpretation, the reader produces another voice. Text exists only when the reader fills it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates [it], adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention (Bakhtin 1981: 293f.). Wertsch recalls Bakhtin s statement that all signs and texts are interindividual (1986) which makes him suggest that it may be possible to use Bakhtin s notion of text as a metaphor for what is referred to as collective memory. Film and the Public Debate about the Past For some, films, and especially feature films, cannot be treated as a means for objective utterances about the past in the same measure as professional historical texts. It is the case that filmmakers, unlike historians, most often tend to encompass events into linear stories, with clear beginnings and clear ends, and to tell them from a single perspective of one person or one group. Such a narrative strategy obviously denies historical alternatives, downplaying such issues as the complexity of motivation or causation. This is mostly because filmmakers aim to create narrative histories that can be understood by large numbers of people. Furthermore, history presented on the screen necessarily reduces the information load since detailed historical accounts are unlikely to be of interest for cinema audiences (see Rosenstone 1988; Toplin 1988; cf. Jarvie 1978). The arguments most frequently invoked to criticize attempts to link history with film refer to the juxtaposition of fact and fiction, or, as the

9 22 Chapter I American historian Robert A. Rosenstone has put it, to the problem of how to really put history onto film (1988). In his essay Historiography and historiophoty (1988), Hayden White observes that [e]very written history is a product of processes of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and qualification and this is what makes films no worse a medium of knowledge about the past than historiography. White uses a term historiophoty to describe the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse (1988: 1193). His ideas have been developed by Rosenstone, for whom films dealing with historical issues should not be measured against the principle of historical accuracy and compared with representations found in historical textbooks; we should examine instead how the portrayal of history is created in a particular film and how cinema in general contributes to our understanding of the past. Film is not simply a poor version of history. Rather, it develops an alternative historical discourse (Rosenstone 1988; 1995). Accordingly, here I treat films as discourses about the past, without focusing on the question of accuracy of historical representation. 13 In my discussion of the formal aspects of German and Polish films I want to concentrate particularly on film genre, taking inspiration from Hayden White s idea, that genre sets logical frames within which history is developed. Just as historians, filmmakers too can relate versions of the same past, depending on what genre they employ. Some genres are more appropriate to tell national stories, whereas others tend to disrupt large national tragedies with everyday dramas of ordinary heroes. Films are loci of diverse voices about the past. In order to reconstruct the historical narratives produced by the selected films I contextualize the analysis of them within the overall public debate about the past in Germany and in Poland, including the discourses of other cultural representations, media, and historiography. Audiences also produce meanings. The analysis of reception based on press articles constitutes a part of my research. Scholars studying reception agree that every cultural representation is ambiguous and needs recipients to give it particular meaning. Individual readings vary depending on many factors, such as the reader s historical or social situation, interests, or experiences with a genre (Weckel 2003: 65-66). 14 Here I cite Alon Confino, who stresses the importance of reception analysis when studying processes of public remembrance. He notes that different interpretations by various groups of recipients not only constitute 13 For discussions on the relation between film and history and of filmic representations of the past see also: Smith 1976; Landy 1996; Short 1996; Barta For more on film reception see, Staiger 1992; 2005.

10 Holocaust Film and European Memory 23 knowledge that can be added to our previous assumptions about particular representation, but are an integral part of it; they are indeed what construct its meaning (Confino 1997: ). The analysis of reception will be based on film reviews which appeared in major national newspapers and film magazines, as well as in the local press and various cultural magazines. While press reviews and articles cannot be treated as fully representative, they can give us considerable insight into how audiences in Germany and Poland reacted to the films in question. The following chapters define and reconstruct the historical narratives with which a selection of post-1989 films contributes to the public debates on the past and to Holocaust commemoration in Germany, Poland, and on the European level. Based on the film and reception analysis, I examine, on the one hand, the national narratives and the ways in which they ascribe particular roles in line with traditional national categories and, on the other hand, more universal modes of interpretation applied and developed by film-makers and audiences. Consequently, I also explore the tensions between the different national and universalizing historical perspectives. The film discussion offered here is by no means a complete German or Polish filmography. Rather, the following chapters are meant as an essay about the trajectories of Polish and German Holocaust memories after 1989, as reconstructed from the film discourses, and their place within the globalizing and European trends in conceptualizing the 20 th century history. The films selected for analysis were chosen based on the criterion of genre in accordance with the conviction that the most important decision by each author about how to tell a particular story lies in the very choice of its stylistic frames. On the following pages I will show how within different genres and cinematographic styles, different narratives about the Holocaust were constructed. 15 Chapter II discusses the German-French-Polish co-production Europa, Europa by Agnieszka Holland from 1990, which recounts a real story of a Holocaust survivor Salomon Perel. The film is a comedy, presenting the story of survival against broadly depicted historical background of World War II. I compare the reception of this film in Germany and Poland and deal with the question why the Polish audience generally appreciated the movie, while the German audience either disliked it or remained indifferent. In Chapter III, one German film, Aimée and Jaguar. Love Larger than Death by Max Färberbӧck from 1999, and one Polish film, Far away from the Window by Jan J. Kolski from 2000, are discussed. Both films tell Holocaust 15 For genre theory and analysis see, Lopez 1993; Grant 1995; Berry 1999; Bordwell and Thompson 2001:

11 24 Chapter I stories in form of melodrama. In accordance with the rules of the genre, the emphasis is put on individual characters and the relations between them, while historical context is not reconstructed in detail. In the analysis of reception I discuss the limits of the attempts at universalization of the Holocaust memory, as presented in the two films, and juxtapose the German and Jewish and the Polish and Jewish perspectives on the past. An important aspect of the European debates after 1989 have been the redefinitions of the problem of perpetration of the Holocaust, and this issue is addressed in Chapter IV. The discussions around Christopher Browning s study of ordinary men (2001) and Jan T. Gross s book on the pogrom in Jedwabne (2000), as well as debates about collaboration with the Nazi regime in several European countries, explored the line between the categories of perpetrators and bystanders. In this chapter, I analyze the collective portrayal of either Poles or Germans in the time of the Holocaust, shown as so called ordinary people, in two Polish films, Burial of a Potato (1990) and Just beyond this Forest (1991), and German film Jewboy Levi (1999). Each of the three films depicts the problem of involvement of the civilian populations in the Nazi persecutions. The different historical narratives reconstructed in the three chapters are then put together and compared in the final chapter of the book.