Americanizing the Holocaust: the case of Jakob the Liar

Modern Language Review, The, April, 2006 by Pol O'Dochartaigh

Americanizing the Holocaust: The Case of Jakob the Liar by Pol O Dochartaigh

This paper aims to investigate the cultural transformations that occurred in the process of converting Jurek Becker's 1969 novel Jakob der Lugner into the 1999 US film Jakob the Liar, directed by French director Peter Kassovitz. Drawing both on the 1974 DEFA film version and theories of Americanization of the Holocaust expounded by Peter Novick and others, the paper seeks to identify some of the elements that constitute Americanization, identifying in the process elements such as Jewish resistance, heroism, American intervention, and happy endings as the key factors in mainstream reception of the Holocaust in the US, where it has become not just a Jewish memory, but a mainstream American cultural memory.

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The Holocaust, like all historical events, is subject to the rule that states, societies, and political movements reinterpret history for their own ends. Interpretations of the Holocaust that re.ect aspects of the political atmosphere of their time and/or the needs of the interpreters include Holocaust denial as a manifestation of neo-Nazi politics, silence on the Holocaust as a symptom of what theMitscherlichs called an 'inability tomourn', (1) and Israeli school trips to Auschwitz as a lesson about what happens when Jews (and thus, by implication, Israel) are not strong. (2) In the history of the Nazi period as written in the GDR, the Holocaust was allocated a secondary role to the 'struggle against Fascism', to a large extent because justifying the existence of a separate, Communist, clearly anti-Fascist German state was deemed more important than commemoration of any specific group of victims. In theUnited States of America other forces have been at work at different stages, but the dominant element today is commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust, with particular emphasis on the Jewish victims.

That theHolocaust should have attained a central position inmodern American, rather than just Jewish-American, consciousness is the result of a process that did not begin until the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it spread out into society as a whole fromAmerican Jewish concern not merely with the Holocaust, but with the contemporary position of Jews as well. Peter Novick, in his study The Holocaust in American Life, contrasts the absence of any central concern with the Holocaust both during the Second World War and in the first twenty years afterwards with the situation that came about after 1967 (the Six Day War) and, more particularly, after 1973, when the signi.cant threat to Israel's existence that had been posed during the Yom Kippur War created a large degree of insecurity among Jews everywhere. (3) He argues that 'it was, given the important role that Jews play in the American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it [concern with the Holocaust] would spread throughout the culture at large' (p. 12). (4) 'Since the 1970s,' he says, 'the Holocaust has come to be presented-come to be thought of-as not just a Jewish memory but an American memory' (p. 207). It has made its way into school curricula in virtually every state and is memorialized even in areas where there is no signi.cant Jewish population. As a natural consequence of this process the memory of the Holocaust has taken on specific American forms. This paper will seek to identify what some of those forms are and how they have been applied to one film in particular, Peter Kassovitz's Jakob the Liar (1999).

One such form,which is central to our deliberations here, is whatNovick calls the 'cult of Jewish resistance'. This might be expected in Israel, he says, but:

in the United States as well, the breadth and depth of Jewish resistance was a major theme of what Holocaust commemoration there was-the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising being the principal occasion of memorialization. Thus the event most atypical of the Holocaust was made emblematic of it. (p. 138)

The passivity of most Holocaust victims, he writes, is unjusti.ably regarded by many Jews as shameful, so that Jewish resistance is played up, perhaps even exaggerated, particularly in Israel. Of course, exaggerating the extent of resistance to the Nazis is by no means a uniquely Jewish, American, or Israeli phenomenon. Most European countries that had lived under the Nazi occupation 'in.ated their resistance credentials, the French being perhaps the best-known example' (Novick, p. 138). Indeed, not merely occupied countries but both post-war German states too, with the GDR's glorification of German Communist resistance and ocial West Germany's focus on the signi.cance of the 'palace revolution' by Stauffenberg and others against Hitler in July 1944, offer prime examples of this phenomenon. (5) What is of note here is that Jewish resistance has become a central aspect even of non-Jewish discourse in the USA.

Sara R. Horowitz takes up a theme similar to Novick's when she writes about clear contradictions in the portrayals of Holocaust Jews and their uses in American life. On the one hand there is frequently what she calls 'an unexamined version of the Holocaust that relies on a sense of perpetual Jewish victimization [which is] at odds with their [middle-class American Jews'] economic and political security'. (6) A second and third generation of Jews in America is inheriting the legacy of the Holocaust from its parents, but it is also true that these generations cannot inherit the experience itself. (7) So they relate it to contemporary experience: both in the USA and in Israel there are films which focus on Jewish resistance, often linking it to the fight for Israel. As Horowitz says, 'Cinematic versions of the Shoah comment not only on themurdered Jews of Europe but also on the ideological climate in which the films themselves are produced, distributed and reviewed' (pp. 145-46). One quite blatant example of this is Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List, which offered bleak, black-and-white Jewish survival of Nazism in central Europe before concluding with a procession of surviving 'Schindler Jews' and their descendants past Schindler's grave in a full-colour scene set in Israel. The contrast is clear, as is the propagandist point.