On Crim's Planet Auschwitz

Brian E. Crim's Planet Auschwitz is a thoughtfully written, well-researched, and wide-ranging study of how visual and thematic Holocaust-related tropes have infused horror and science fiction (SF) in film and television since the 1970s. Fans and scholars of these genres especially will gain new insights into the sometimes explicit, more often subtextual incorporation of Holocaust motifs in the panoply of (primarily US) films and TV series Crim covers. Those concerned with the fraught issues surrounding Holocaust representation per se, and the use value of its appropriation in horror and SF, while also stimulated and intrigued, might be less enthralled.

Not that Crim is insensitive to these issues or unversed in the vast literature that addresses them. He gives voice to early and ongoing problematizers of Holocaust depiction, such as Theodor Adorno, Elie Wiesel, Annette Insdorf, Gillian Rose, and Gavriel Rosenfeld. He acknowledges the risks this highly charged subject matter runs and has frequently exhibited of denigration and exploitation, on one hand, or mystification and fetishization, on the other. He even includes Jean Baudrillard's concern about the ability of film in general "'to restage extermination' or portray the Holocaust substantively, because the medium itself is 'cold, radiating forgetfulness'" (198). In the end, it is mainly documentary-style approaches to the Holocaust, such as Schindler's List (1993), that don't measure up for Crim because, despite the "pedagogical" service they provide, they also leave "a false impression that the Holocaust is knowable" (196–197). Instead, with support from Matthew Boswell and others, Crim touts the "traumatic realism," the "hyperreal and surreal treatment," and the "embedding [of] Holocaust imagery" in horror and SF for "inducing a deeper ethical engagement with the subject matter" and more profoundly evoking "empathy" and "serious reflection" (5, 197, 199).

The book's title is drawn from the testimony of Holocaust survivor Yehiel De-nur (aka Ka-Tsetnik) at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. De-nur referred to the concentration camp he was transported to that became an enduring symbol of the Shoah: "Planet Auschwitz." Crim adroitly applies this "evocative metaphor" (3) to the otherworldly and supernatural aspects of horror and SF. He provides extensive historical contextualization for the more recent films and TV series he examines. Extending Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler thesis into the post-Nazi era, Crim enlists The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1922) and other classic German horror and SF films such as the Golem films (1915, 1920), Nosferatu (1922), the Mabuse cycle (1922, 1932), and Metropolis (1927) as major influences aesthetically (via expressionism) and thematically (via monsters and futuristic angst) on post-1970s horror and SF.¹

The text has three major themes: the return of history, Nazi appeal and "Astrofascism" (143), and fear of modernity and technology. These themes overlap in the six chapters, each of whose films and TV series address the Holocaust either directly, inferentially, or in some combination. The first chapter features zombie films, for which The Walking Dead (TWD, 2010–), with a nod to George Romero's seminal precursors (Night of the Living Dead, 1968; Dawn of the Dead, 1978; etc.), is the poster child. A Holocaust-informed return of history grounds TWD, for Crim, in its evocation of genocide and serves as a harbinger of the future apocalypse. The viability of the Holocaust subtext is reinforced by Robert Kirkman's acknowledgment of the Shoah's influence on his graphic novel, on which the like-named hit series was based.

The return of history in the second chapter relates to historical trauma and survivor guilt. Crim reinforces the Holocaust tie-in through a comparative analysis of the fictional Holocaust film The Pawnbroker (1964) and the futuristic TV series The Leftovers (2014–2017)—most evocatively in the "silent scream" (75) of Holocaust survivor Sol Nazerman in The Pawnbroker and Nora Durst's silent echo in The Leftovers. While only cinephiles are likely to make the intertextual connection...