Holocaust Iconography in American Feature Films About Neo-Nazis

Baron | Holocaust Iconography in American Feature Films About Neo-Nazis Holocaust Iconography in American Feature Films About Neo-Nazis by Lawrence Baron San Diego State University "The best historical films will interrogate the past for the sake of the present. Remember that historians are working for the living and not for the dead."1 Robert A. Rosenstone Towards the end of his book on how the Holocaust has influencedAmerican culture, Peter Novick contends, "In the United States, memory of the Holocaust is so banal, so inconsequential, not memory at all, precisely because it is so uncontroversial, so unrelated to the real divisions in American society, so apolitical ." Novick argues that the extremity of the Holocaust and its origins in another time and place make it "too remote from the experience ofAmericans" to teach them any relevant lessons.2 To be sure, Novick has a point if the public in general, and the Jewish community in particular, believe that learning about the Holocaust serves as a substitute for studying American history. Since I don't believe this is the case, I wonder why Novick finds it so hard to fathom why the majority ofAmericans consider the systematic slaughter of European Jewry by an advanced industrial and predominantly Christian country an event which is very relevant to combating racist movements in the United States and abroad.3 Feature films constitute one of the primary means of conveying the contemporary meanings associated with the Holocaust to theAmerican public. In a Roper Poll conducted in 1994, 58% oftheAmerican adults surveyed cited television as a source of their knowledge about the Holocaust . 33% of those queried identified the Neo-Nazis as domestic threat (1987). "movies" as where they learned about Hitler's mass murder of the Jews. Novick recognizes the enormous impact television programs like NBC's Holocaust or theatrical releases like Schindlern List have had on raising American public awareness of the Holocaust , but consistently questions what practical purpose is served by such memory.4 Even if one accepts Novick's dubious claim that the Holocaust in and of itself possesses no political implications for contemporary American society, there is an entire corpus of feature films spawned by the Holocaust that have a direct bearing on the United States. I refer here to movies about theAmerican perception ofthe domestic and international danger posed by neo-Nazism in the postwar period. After 1945, these movies castigated Nazism in the same terms which prewar films like The Great Dictator and The Mortal Storm used as a warning against Hitler's expansionism and racism.5 Once the United States entered World War Two, films like Address Unknown and Tomorrow the World stressed how intolerant and un-American Nazism was.6 When the full extent of the German onslaught against European Jewry became known after Germany's defeat, someAmerican directors felt obligated to expose anti-Semitic and racist attitudes in their own country in movies like the 1947 releases Crossfire and Gentlemen's Agreement and the 1949 productions Home ofthe Brave and Pinky? The advent ofthe Cold War prompted both the Western and Communist Blocs to rehabilitate their respective occupation zones in Germany as sovereign nations. American movies about the immediate postwar period portrayed neo-Nazis as a recalcitrant remnant of Hitler's henchmen who plotted to foil the Allied plans to democratize Germany. In the 1948 release Berlin 38 I Film & History Lawrence Baron | Special In-Depth Section Express, director Jacques Tourneur speculated that Allied cooperation might continue if it were focused on the unification of a free Germany purged of fascist elements. American, British, French, and Russian passengers on a train speeding through a landscape of rubble to a summit meeting in Berlin jointly rescue a progressive German politician who has been kidnapped by a group of Nazi loyalists. The film touches on the Holocaust obliquely by describing the obliteration of Berlin as a just punishment for the war crimes that the Third Reich had perpetrated.8 In Samuel Fuller's 1958 film Verboten, the atrocities committed by Germany play a pivotal role in discrediting Nazi diehards who conspire to build a Fourth Reich. Fuller liberally intersperses documentary footage of the siege of Berlin and the...