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The Holocaust and Popular Culture: Truth and Perception

By Paul Iannucilli

Mr. Neuberger

Comp102-110
Paul Iannucilli

Comp102-110

Mr. Neuberger

15 April 2011

The Holocaust and Popular Culture: Truth and .Perception

The 20th Century can be clearly divided into two portions, Pre and Post World War II.

The veterans returning home from the war settled into burgeoning suburban areas, and the main

sources for entertainment were forming to shape the way society looked at the world. The

television became affordable and began to exist in every home. This competed with going to see

a film and also changed the radio industry forever, as TV replaced it in living rooms. Mass

media forever changed the world¶s perception of the Holocaust.

This new medium changed the way events were perceived and presented. Live

broadcasts documented historical events for posterity in a way which never occurred before, as

most news was presented to the public in papers or newsreels at the movies. It was just as this

paradigm shift occurred GI¶s were bringing home war stories and the world was beginning to

achieve a much more rapid flow of visual information. Cameras filmed the Nuremburg trials.

(Mintz 124)

Literature

The Holocaust is one of the events that shaped the lives of the Jews forever afterword. Its

ramifications are still being felt today, and all Jewish people in the world were affected by the

sheer scope of the genocide. Many of those Jews who were involved in the entertainment
businesses felt the need to try to create art, literature, and film which tried to make the tragedy

resonant and personal to those who were not directly affected. Those that were affected needed

healing and a way to try and cope with the massive scale in which the grief and suffering they

endured could be healed. Through perception we gain understanding. The Diary of Anne Frank

was one of first pieces of literature that illuminated the Jewish experience of living in Nazi

occupied Holland was like. Anne Frank was a young Jewish girl who was forced to live in the

attic of a friend¶s house when the Gestapo was purging Amsterdam of all Jewish citizens. She

was eventually found and died in a concentration

camp and it was her uncle who survived to find the

diary. (Frank) It was then published for the world to

see. Night by Elie Wiesel was another literary

document. ±
  
 
i
 Wiesel is a concentration camp
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survivor and wrote about the personal horrors he

endured at the hands of the Nazi¶s. Day is another of Wiesel¶s books and served as a life

affirming companion piece to the horrors described in Night. (Wiesel)

Film and News

These documents are important because they illuminated what it was really like to those

who did not experience it first-hand. Yet as words, there have been those who have attempted to

claim these are mere fictions, but that will be addressed later in this paper. The first document in

film of what occurred at the concentration camps was the Allen Resnais documentary Night and

Fog. Resnais and his film crew edited hundreds of hours of film footage taken by the allies into

a powerful 15 minute documentary showing the inside of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The gas

chambers were shown, as were the railroad tracks, the guard towers, and as the virtual tour is

being given, Resnais is describing what he is seeing. At the end of the film, the doors are opened

to a warehouse the size of an airplane hangar bay. The camera shows a shot of a clump of hair.

It is then explained that the Nazi¶s shaved everyone¶s head as they entered the camp. The

camera then pans slowly out and you then see that the entire warehouse is filled with hair. After

seeing the mass graves that particularly drove home to me

the sheer number of those who perished. I can only imagine the

impact in 1951 when the film was finally released to affect public

perception. The tragedy is so big I still think it is beyond our

ability to fully ever understand. (Resnais)

±
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Nightly 


broadcast news also played a massive part in

shaping the current  
 perception of the Holocaust. As Nazi war

criminals were being apprehended and brought to justice, for the first time nightly news was able

to summarize their trials and the stories of those who captured them. It also documented

testimony. This brought personal faces to the evils that occurred whereas there were none

before. This showed those who made the decisions and the heartless methodical processes

behind them. The men responsible looked and talked as if they were ordinary men, which is an

unforgettable lesson on the banality of evil, and the Faustian principle of power corrupting,

absolute power doing so absolutely. When does a good man stop following orders? (Mintz 89)

Fiction

Mel Brooks is a Jewish comedian. He decided in the height of the summer of love (1967)

to make a film about two Broadway producers who think they can make more money on a flop
than a hit. The Producers tells this fictional story. The play they find to do this is called

µSpringtime for Hitler¶. They cast a hippie as Hitler and it is described by the Nazi playwright as

a µgay romp with Adolf and Eva¶. It is complete with musical numbers, dancing Nazis, and

people with speaking lines having obvious New York accents. This marked a shift in perception

of events as well. Brooks did not ever make light of the

plight of the Jews or mention the Holocaust in this film.

What it did however, was reduce Hitler to a caricature and a

laughing stock. They say laughter is the best medicine, and I

think Brooks intended it is a balm and the ultimate

comeuppance he could give to the Nazis. I am taking

something that ±



  
 was powerful and evil and showing the inherent
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ridiculousness of it so it can receive the ridicule it deserves.

That marked a shift in perception from the standpoint that it was acceptable to laugh at the

Nazi¶s, however the Holocaust remained (and should continue to be) sacrosanct. (Brooks)

Schindler¶s List was a film which was released in 1992. Directed by Steven Spielberg

and based on the book of the same name by Thomas Kennealy, It was the story of Oskar

Schindler, a German businessman who was able to save several hundred Jews during the war by

employing them at his munitions factory. This made them vital to the Nazi war effort, and saved

their lives. The story shows the struggles he made and the lengths which he went to keep people

safe. It also showed his personal flaws, creating a touching and even-handed portrait of an

ordinary man who chose to do good in a time when evil would have been the choice all others

were making. He was one of the few heroes of a Germany without many. (Spielberg)
 American History X is a completely different kind of film. It shows the Neo-Nazi

movement in this country and the impact of the cycle of violence with those who choose to live a

life filled with hate. It shows the roots of the

anger, and the disgruntled mindsets which breed

that hatred. It appears to be a stunningly

accurate picture of the subculture and how it is able

to take root in the minds of the young. Part of why

I believe they are ±
ã

    able to detach themselves from
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the atrocity of the Holocaust is the distance

removed by time from the events of the Holocaust. It is also the detachment of seeing something

on TV versus in real life that creates this. Many WWII vets don¶t talk about it because it is so

awful, but people are able to talk about WWII movies all the time without any hesitations or

second thoughts although the same events are essentially being depicted. (Kaye)

This brings me the final film worth noting in the perception versus reality dichotomy

regarding the Holocaust. Inglorious Basterds (sic) is a 2009 film directed by Quentin Tarantino

about a group of Jewish-American commandos whose mission is to simply kill as many Nazis in

occupied France as possible. This plays out on screen as essentially a Jewish revenge fantasy, in

which you see Hitler caricatured yet again and he and the German high command are killed in a

theatre in Paris by the commandos and a Jewish woman whose family was killed by the Nazis.

The movie is admittedly highly entertaining, but it shows vengeance instead of justice and the

ultra-violent depiction of death further illustrated the de-sensitization surrounding WWII and the

Holocaust. (Tarantino)
 Holocaust Denial

Because of this desensitization and detachment, caused both by time and the lens in

which art distorts our perception of history, one of the most controversial theories has come to

light in regards to Holocaust. There are those who are now claiming it is a Jewish conspiracy to

arouse world sympathy and that it never occurred at all. The facts are overwhelming in their

proof of the reality of the Holocaust. Yet, misguided detractors who have had their perceptions

altered can even delude themselves into believing facts can be distorted. In a lot of the Islamic

nations in which Holocaust denial is an everyday reality for a stunningly large number of the

population, it is due to the Medias censorship of the flow of information. Any pro-Jewish

material, however factual, is labeled as propaganda by the government and access is restricted.

This allows for a continued hatred and fervor to exist for the sake of political expediency.

The people do not truly know what really happened and that is why Americans whom have long

seen the Holocaustas historical fact fail to understand how Muslims coming from a country

without access to that information could possibly deny this. Their

reality has been one where the Holocaust has literally never

existed at all, therefore they do not know. Their trusted leaders

have lied to them their whole lives, so it is merely out of ignorance,

except for the Anti-Semitism of those that know and choose to

not reveal the truth or to do so selectively. (Mintz 64)

Neo-Nazis tend to be splintered into two groups ±
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concerning

this issue. The ones who idolize Hitler and embrace what Ê
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good thing. The other group being that the Holocaust aspect of WWII was a Jewish conspiracy
to topple The Third Reich. The first group is a tragic reminder that there will always be people

when detached from the reality fall in love with a dream, be it good or bad. All they know is

from footage and marches, rallies and all the commotion surrounding the Reich, and are in no

way exposed to the reality of who Hitler was and what he truly did. Ironically, most of them are

delusional to the point of possibly having been executed in Nazi Germany as mentally ill. This

makes their ignorance that much more tragic.

The second group is more deluded than the first. They worship Hitler as if he was a God

or prophet and therefore feel he could literally do know wrong. There tends to be a trend

towards romanticizing lost causes or underdogs, and they forget, due to historical distance, that

the Nazis were undeniably wrong and most of the people the Nazis killed were people they

conquered without right.

Conclusion

In summary, the world is an unfathomably

different place in 2011 than it was in 1945. The

technological advances we have made are things

that to a lot of people back then would seem out

of the realm of comprehension.

Unfortunately as much changes, much stays the

same and basic wants, fears, desires and

motivations are similar. The world will be much

better when we can ±
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   conquer the worst parts of
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ourselves. The Holocaust showed us the
worst capabilities of human nature, yet it also showed the endurance of the human spirit. The

way in which we now perceive the Holocaust is telling of how far we have or have not come. It

can be tragic beyond words or you can deny it in your blind zealotry.

The way in which we perceive the Holocaust and history is forever transformed by

Media. We all have different perceptions and thus our filters are all different. Those is why

those who had the much more unfiltered perception of events, the first person liberators and

survivors, should be listened to most closely and show us that the greatest tragedy of history is

when we forget.
 Works Cited

Mintz, Alan. ³Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America´. University

of Washington Press. 2001. (Book)

Frank, Anne and the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. ³The Diary of Anne

Frank´: The Critical Edition.´ Doubleday 1989 (Book)

Wiesel, Elie. ³Night´ Hill and Wang 1958 (Book)

Resnais, Allen. ³Night and Fog´ Documentary Argos Films 1959 (Film)

Brooks, Mel. ³The Producers´ Perf: Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder. Embassy Pictures 1968 (Film)

Spielberg, Steven. ³Schindler¶s List´ Perf: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes.

Amblin Entertainment 1992 (Film)

Kaye, Tony. ³American History X´ Perf: Edward Norton, Edward Furlong. New Line Cinema

1998 (Film)

Tarantino, Quentin. ³Inglorious Basterds´ Perf: Brad Pitt, Christoph Woltz Miramax Cinema

(Film)