First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946

1. “Right Off the Top of the News”: PROFESSOR MAMLOCK AND SOVIET ANTIFASCIST FILM

18 1  “Right Off the Top of the News” PROFESSOR MAMLOCK AND SOVIET ANTIFASCIST FILM In May 1939, as viewers watched a screening of the Soviet film Professor Mamlock (Professor Mamlok) at New York’s Thalia Theatre, on Ninety-fifth Street, near Broadway, someone threw a tear-gas bomb into the auditorium .1 This film, which depicts the Nazi persecution of an initially apolitical Jewish surgeon who “converts” to communism following Hitler’s 1933 takeover, had been showing uninterrupted in New York since November 1938, when its premiere accidentally coincided with Kristallnacht, the 9 November Nazi pogroms in Germany. As one of the first films from any nation to show the Nazis’ systematic persecution of the Jews, it seemed, as the New Republic columnist Otis Ferguson put it, “right off the top of the news”; he added that it was “closer to events than the latest March of Time.”2 In fact, its topicality gained it unprecedented success for a Soviet film. In the greater New York area alone, it allegedly was shown in 103 cinemas, with Jews in particular flocking to see this dramatic reconstruction corroborating the numerous eyewitness accounts of Nazi antiSemitic persecution.3 The film may have carried a message people needed to hear, but the tear-gas thrower, a homegrown U.S. Nazi, was not the sole obstacle to the film’s being seen, for the attempts to censor or outright ban Professor Mamlock outnumbered similar proposals concerning any other Soviet film, even the incendiary Battleship Potemkin.4 At the same time, the Soviets’ own self-promotion in their depiction of Nazi anti- “RIGHT OFF THE TOP OF THE NEWS”  19 Semitism, as well as the subsequent ban on this film, likewise erected barriers to the film’s success. Thus, while the film ultimately attracted a large audience in the United States, at least for a subtitled film, it has since been all but forgotten beyond occasional retrospective screenings and one-line mentions in the most comprehensive histories concerning representations of Jews or the Holocaust.5 In other countries, where censorship was even more successful in keeping the film from the public, it is even less commonly considered. Given the enormous importance now accorded film depictions of the Holocaust in Western culture, it may seem incredible that one of the first films of the genre—the first feature film to portray the Nazi persecution of the Jews directly as a central theme and not simply allude to it—should have been and continues to be neglected. The films conventionally seen as alerting the English-speaking world to the dangers of Nazism are the far more widely seen sixteen-minute “Inside Nazi Germany” issue of the March of Time newsreel (January 1938), which shows signs of anti-Jewish measures but, as a British critic wrote, no “Jew-baiting atrocities.”6 Indeed , the newsreel’s stance was perceived as morally and politically ambiguous toward Nazi Germany.7 ConfessionsofaNaziSpy (1939) was another film both more widely seen and conventionally perceived as having been important in revealing the nature of Nazi Germany to Americans. Directed by Anatole Litvak, a Jew born in Kiev, this Hollywood film takes a more explicitly anti-Nazi stance than does the ambivalent “Inside Nazi Germany,” yet it never refers to the Nazis’ anti-Jewish measures. Professor Mamlock depicts Nazi anti-Semitism much more clearly than these other two films do and condemns it more unambiguously; indeed, its whole plot turns on this facet of Nazism. The film’s disappearance from memory is thus an anomaly in film history and considerations of representations of the Holocaust.8 Yet the erasure of the film from memory is also symptomatic of attitudes both at the time and immediately after the war. Professor Mamlock met a problematic reception in the English-speaking world in part because many perceived it as emphasizing the fate of Jews under the Nazis in inconvenient or unacceptable ways. This perspective emerged, for example, in a 1943 House of Commons debate about the BBC where John McGovern, a Labour Party MP, cited Professor Mamlock as a film that attempts to speak for the Jews and was censored as such.9 This claim may overstate things a bit, but the assertion is indicative in that films of that time contained virtually no direct Jewish testimony from inside 20  “RIGHT OFF THE TOP OF THE NEWS” Nazi Germany; any film daring to breathe the merest...