Posttraumatic Cinema and the Holocaust Documentary

Joshua Hirsch | Special In-Depth Section Posttraumatic Cinema and the Holocaust Documentary Joshua Hirsch University of California-Riverside Ofthe mass killing ofmore than 10 million people in Nazi concentration camps, extermination camps, POW camps, euthanasia centers, Einsatzgruppe actions, and Jewish ghettos during the SecondWorld War, there is only one known piece of motion picture footage, lasting about two minutes.1 It was shot in 1941 by Reinhard Wiener, a German Naval Sergeant and amateur cinematographer stationed in Latvia, who had received permission from the Navy to film in the area of the fleet. According to testimony given by Wiener in Israel in 198 1 , he had walked into the town ofLiepaja one day inAugust ofthat year, carrying with him his 8 mm film camera loaded with stock, as he did whenever possible, in case he saw something he wanted to film. He was walking in a wooded park when a soldier ran up to him and told him not to walk any farther, because something "awful, terrible " was happening there. Asked what it was, the man replied, "Well they're killing Jews there." Wiener decided to go and see for himself. He came to a clearing where a group of German soldiers had gathered near a trench to watch the proceedings. When a truck arrived full of people wearing yellow patches on their chests and backs, he began filming. He recorded about two minutes of film, in which one can see people running into the pit where they are shot by a firing squad. It was several months before Wiener was able to get the footage developed. By that time, SS chief Heinrich Himmler had outlawed the filming of any activities related to the extermination of the Jews, which had begun in June of 1941 with mobile killing actions like the one filmed by Wiener, and continued with gassing in special extermination camps starting in December.2 Wiener testifies that he did not tell his family what he had witnessed. In 1942, however , back in Germany, he did tell a few of his comrades in the Navy. They did not believe him. Certain that the film would be confiscated ifit was TheWienerfilm>Latvia, 1941. theonly^0W11footageofJewsbeingmurdered discovered at this time, he had in "the Final Solution." six of his comrades swear an oath of silence, and then showed them the film. He describes theirreaction. "They were depressed. I was observing their faces and saw how shocked they were. We had never seen or found out about anything like it in the Navy. The same happened to me while I was filming, I was shivering all over, I was that agitated." Wiener sent the film to his family's farm. When the front reached the area in 1945 and his mother had to flee, she placed her son's films in a trunk and buried it in the pigsty, covering it with dung. After the war, Wiener returned to the farm and dug up the film. It was sent to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel in 1974.3 Of course, Wiener's statements, like all statements, are subject to question. But putting aside for a moment the complex questions surrounding the German memory of the Holocaust, I remain interested in Wiener's story insofar as it demonstrates the role of the cinema in the transmission of an historical trauma from eyewitnesses to the public, and, further, insofar as it points the way to a theory of posttraumatic cinema. After proposing such a theory, this essay will proceed to examine the movement of traumatic images through a series of mostly French documentaries dealing with the Holocaust: primarily The Death Camps (1945), Mein Kampf(1960), and Night and Fog (1955); it will demonstrate the role of classical realist narration in The Death Camps and Mein Kampf in counteracting the traumatic potential ofthe imagery; and it will argue for the significance of Night and Fog in originating a new cinematic discourse, in which modernist narration is aligned to a posttraumatic historical consciousness. The Holocaust as a Trauma Central to our understanding of the Holocaust as a trauma is the fact of its having lainbeyondtheWestern imaginative horizon.4 The ban on filming certainly...