When Elie Wiesel condemned the 1978 mini-series “Holocaust” for trivializing the events it depicted, he stood on the shoulders of those survivors who deemed it impossible to represent or depict the destruction of European Jewry. The horror was too heavy for art to bear. On the other hand, “Holocaust,” for all its many dramatic faults, became the primary point of exposure for contemporary audiences to the catastrophe. It made vivid what had been a murky if terrible episode to a world reared on pop culture. From Germany came the mordant joke that the “remake” had greater impact than the original.
The documentary Imaginary Witness, out now on DVD, explores the depiction of the Nazi persecution of Jews by Hollywood from the 1930s through the 1990s. Over the past half century the Holocaust has come to represent Absolute Evil, the negation of morality, a black hole in human history. A compelling need for comprehension has informed most efforts to dramatize the Holocaust. But virtually every production raises questions about horrific reality as seen through any filmmaker’s distorting lens, especially from the perspective of Hollywood, an enterprise founded on entertaining the widest possible audience. Can a depiction of genocide ever be entertaining?
One of the ironies is that Hollywood, whose major studios were founded and managed by Jewish Americans, was leery to confront the Nazis until the U.S. declared war on Germany in 1941. Imaginary Witness explains the wariness in several ways. Hollywood derived significant revenue from exporting movies to Germany and sought to placate the regime. The Production Code governing the content of Hollywood movies restricted negative depictions of foreign leaders and institutions, including Hitler and the Nazis before America went to war. Also, the Jewish moguls feared the nativism and anti-Semitism of a substantial segment of their American audience. In those years, members of Congress rose on the floor of the Capitol to denounce the influence of “kikes.”
Even after Hollywood joined the war effort against Nazi Germany, the Holocaust remained in the shadows of cinema. Years later, The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) seemed to disguise the young girl’s Jewishness and soft-pedal the story’s unhappy ending. Old habits of reticence died hard in Hollywood, where Jewish themes had long been masked or sublimated to avoid offending America’s Protestant majority.
Several tectonic shifts in the 1960s affected the depiction of the Holocaust on television and film, including the civil rights movement, the rise of ethnic pride and an growing willingness to show mayhem of all sorts on screen. The great culmination of these trends in Holocaust filmmaking was Steven Spielberg’s Schnindler’sList, which shocked audiences through its depiction of the casualness of Nazi violence. As Imaginary Witness points out, it’s interesting that Spielberg’s protagonist was not a victim of the Third Reich but one of its minions, a Nazi industrialist redeemed by pangs of conscience and the lure of money. He recognized “his” Jews as human, and needed them to run his factory.
