The representation of the holocaust in the social and cultural life and its consequences

Résumé du document

Celan's Todesfuge represents the mechanical death of millions of people in a simple and incomprehensible way. This incomprehensibility is also expressed in the letter from Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers (August 17, 1946): "Human beings simply can't be innocent as they all were in the face of the gas chambers. [...] We are simply not equipped to deal, on a human and political level, with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond good and virtue.? The attitude toward the incomprehensibility has changed over the last fifty years.

Extraits

[...] The question is why the picture of the holocaust changed in the late 1960's? I will introduce the term the ‘threshold of 1967-68', which should express the beginning of the remodelling of the holocaust. The late 1960's can be considered as the threshold in the representation of the Holocaust and different authors confirm this, but in a different way. On the one hand, there is the argumentation of a new generation (represented by Friedländer), which had no personal relation to the holocaust and, on the other hand, is the political argumentation (represented by Finkelstein and Morgan), which sees the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 as a result of the new representation. [...]

[...] The case of Hilberg symbolised that it was not even easy to succeed with such a topic. His thesis advisor at Columbia University Franz Neumann, strongly discouraged him of writing on the topic of The Destruction of the European Jews; he said: your funeral”. He was aware of the public response. In the American film industry, according to Ilan Avisar and his book Screening the Holocaust, Hollywood produced 500 narrative films about the war during 1940-1945 and in no film, except The Great Dictator (1940), the Jewish catastrophe is explicitly represented. [...]

[...] I suppose that the representation of the holocaust has changed within the past five decades and that the change has affected its contemporary status. I will refer with my suggestion to Walter Benjamin, who suggests, on the changing status of art in the era of technical reproduction, that when techniques like photography transport objects from their original site, from their specific historical locus, they lose the aura of uniqueness. I claim that the holocaust lost its uniqueness, too. To prove my claim, I have structured the essay chronologically, to explain the different stages of development in the holocaust representation. [...]

[...] It was not a Jewish picture; it was a picture of the world. Thus, the Jewish fate was minimised. The year 1961 constituted the first turning point in the Holocaust representation. The Eichmann trail in Jerusalem gave the Holocaust his first public exposure. Moreover, it pushed the holocaust in the centre of interest. Before the trail, the persecution and the extermination of the Jews had been one among many issues relating to the war and Nazism, and was not perceived in itself of having particular importance. [...]

[...] The first part ( 2.1 deals with the representation of the holocaust in the after-war period till the late 1960's. In the second part ( 2.2 I will give an explanation why the late 1960's can be marked as a decisive point in the holocaust representation. I describe in the following part ( 2.3 how this point changes the profile of the holocaust. And finally in the last part I will give a summary on the development of the holocaust representation and deliver a critical remark on the consequences of this new representation of the holocaust The representation of the holocaust The first two decades after the war If we want to deal with the representation of the holocaust in the social and cultural life, we first have to look at the general people's thought about the holocaust in the after-war period. [...]