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Wolfgram | West German and Unified German Cinema's Difficult Encounter with the Holocaust West German and Unified German Cinema's Difficult Encounter with the Holocaust by Mark A. Wolfgram Ph.D. University of Ottawa This essay looks at the postwar development of West German cinema's engagement with the difficult history of the Holocaust and the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi regime.1 Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, I am able to show that the narrative turn towards the Holocaust in West German cinema had occurred well before the broadcast of Holocaust , the American television series, in West Germany in January 1979. While there was never an absolute silence on the persecution ofthe Jews, there was apeculiar silence that attempted to engage the Holocaust but often in an indirect manner. The perpetrators were often reduced to the Nazi leadership or sadistic , black clad SS officers. Furthermore, German cinema has rarely captured a Jewish perspective which would allow the audience to empathize with the Jewish situation rather than maintaining the Jew as an object to prove the humanity of a potential German savior. The potential for German cinema to produce subversive and culturally disruptive products was shown as early as 1948 with the release oíLang ist der Weg (Long is the Way), but public apathy and risk of adverse capital interests often silenced such productions. I discuss several such subversive pre-1990 films before closing with an examination of unified Germany's most recent films that deal with the persecution of the Jews. West German cinema's engagement with Jewish themes Jewish Themes In West German Film Chart 1 1950-54 955-59 1960-64 1965-69 1970-74 1975-79 1985-89 1990-94 1980-84 Years 1945-49 followed a similar pattern to what one can observe in the public commemoration of Kristallnacht.2 As can be seen in Chart I,3 the appearance of Jewish characters and themes remained relatively flat up to the middle of the 1970s, and then exploded over the next fifteen years. There was a doubling of films with Jewish themes between 1970-1974 and 1975-1979. This buildup occurred largely independent ofthe political sphere which only became engaged in the memory of Kristallnacht in late 1978. These qualitative trends in cinema follow a similar path of development to that oftelevision dramas and documentaries with the earlier films using Jewish characters to provide a moral dilemma which is often successfully resolved through the German protagonist helping the Jew. The role of the Church is never seriously questioned in the early films, while it is regularly criticized in the later films. The later films also provide examples ofJewish characters who exist in their own right and independent of any German need to prove the moral worth of "the other Germany" in the face of National Socialism. In the material which follows, I will outline these changing moral narratives across time by citing some films as examples. I have tried to include films which have not received much attention in the literature. My observations are based upon my analysis of over one-hundred films and television programs from both East and West Germany as part of an on-going research project.4 The numbers in Chart 1 tell only part of the story, for it wouldbe a mistake to say that the German public has turned its back on the Holocaust since 1990. For example, in 1994, over six million Germans went to see Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.5 At the same time, though, a domestic product by MichaelVerhoeven, Mutters Courage (Mother's Courage), did not attract even a handful of viewers in 1996. There is no doubt, however, that Jews disappeared rapidly from domestic German films 1995-99 24 I Film & History Mark A. Wolfgram | Special In-Depth Section after 1990. But let us first return to the year 1948 and the first major West German film to deal with the Holocaust. In 1948, Lang ist der Weg was the first German film to confront directly the Holocaust , the Jewish resistance to the Nazis, the deportations, and the death camps, all from a Jewish perspective. Its social...

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