Film comment. . - Reviews - book review

Judaism, Spring, 2002 by Stephen J. Whitfield

Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America. By ALAN MINTZ. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.

If poetry after Auschwitz could be considered barbaric, according to the famous dictum of Theodor W. Adorno, then how much more problematic might movies about the Holocaust be? Far more than poetry, film entails the compromise of art with commerce, and binds the imperatives of expression with the need to please the masses. Before the terrifying mystery of the Shoak, even artists have sometimes become mute; and the resources of the most articulate and visionary among us risk exposure as inadequate, when confronted with the gap between the instruments of absolute evil and the defenselessness of the victims. Compared to their torment, the echo of their agonized screams in art has seemed unfaithful, and the principles of aesthetics appear to be too precious to embrace the fact of the Final Solution. Film itself only complicates and worsens the difficulties that poetry or fiction or even memoir must resolve.

A movie, unless it is a documentary, requires actors who pretend to be torturers and murderers, or who pose as the emaciated and doomed exemplars of the most extreme conditions known to civilization. In other words the cinema requires representation, which magnifies the danger of betraying what happened in the ghettoes and camps. That is why Claude Lanzmann chose the genre of documentary: "The Holocaust is above all unique in that it erects a ring of fire around itself, a borderline that cannot be crossed because there is a certain ultimate degree of horror that cannot be transmitted." He added that "there are some things that cannot and should not be represented" (146).

Yet art also has its appetites--to defy taboos, to probe past the limits defined by the critics and the moralists, to know what is forbidden; and therefore Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs and even Sylvia Plath wrote poetry after--and about--the Holocaust. And Hollywood, driven by an irrepressible need for stories that might engage the mass audience, could not be kept away either. The narratives that the studios have sought had to be fresh enough to arouse the sense of anticipation, to generate the impression of novelty, yet familiar enough to provide reassurance. A decade or so after the camps were liberated, perhaps no one could have guessed that the Holocaust would soon become a suitable subject for the American film industry. The Third Reich had after all put into practice the most fiendish imaginings that the medieval mind had devised, and then made Hell on earth far worse (since the Christian idea of Hell was for sinners, and therefore presupposed a moral order). The system of radical evil might seem a stretc h for the "entertainment industry." And yet movies like Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), The Pawnbroker (1965) and Schindler's List (1993) in particular offer literary scholar Alan Mintz an opportunity to assess how formidable the cultural barriers are that these films have attempted to scale. His book is a compact, elegant, and thoughtful consideration of the implications of Americanizing the Holocaust, of accommodating the unspeakable to the demands of a democracy in which popular taste prevails.

Yet the basic framework that inspires his reflections is drawn not from within mass culture itself but rather from the distinction that he makes between two anthologies: Lawrence L. Langer's Art from the Ashes (1995) and David C. Roskies's The Literature of Destruction (1989). The contrast that Mintz draws between them constitutes perhaps the most original feature of Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America. Is the Shoah a nihilistic rupture in the fabric of human and especially Western experience, or is the extinction of most of Europe's Jews a horror that has a history, which their own literature and liturgy had attempted to make intelligible? If there is any lesson for the living to derive from the Holocaust, is it that humanism itself can no longer be vindicated, and that the very effort to invent meaning and value within an indifferent universe seems futile when faced with the remorseless of Nazi genocide? Or is the Final Solution the culmination of the millennia of catastrophes to have befallen a chosen people, so that its own effort to come to terms with its collective fate has even enabled it to survive and not merely to cry havoc?

The first of each pair of questions animates Langer's understanding of how the art of the victims and survivors, the witnesses and the bards might be interpreted. The second of the pair of questions is the case that Roskies advances. For Langer the Holocaust revealed the very fragility f culture, so that the reader of his anthology, Mintz remarks, has trouble figuring out which language the writers used in trying to account for what happened. To Roskies it matters a great deal if the language is Hebrew or Yiddish, because it is the vehicle of a culture. Language is even (as Heidegger put it) "the house of being." The victims and those who have hoped to speak in their behalf shared an identity that determined not only why they were singled out for extermination but also enabled them to reach out to one another in a particular, historically sanctioned way. Langer's approach Mintz calls "exceptionalist"; what Nazi Germany did to the Jews was unique, recorded in the poetry and other arts that emerged after Auschw itz. The second approach Mintz calls "constructivist." "It is in the nature of collective memory," he explains, "that we meet the present catastrophe armed with the symbols, archetypes, and rubrics supplied by the previous catastrophe, which we then transfigure, invert, or betray because of their inadequacy in the face of the new reality" (46). The first approach has long dominated the assessment of the art that emerged from the ruins, in part because of the intimate knowledge of Judaic sources that the second approach required. Though Mintz is a colleague of Roskies at the Jewish Theological Seminary and serves as his co-editor of the literary journal Prooftexts, the author of this book is nevertheless judicious and fair in his treatment of the "exceptionalist" stance. Mintz's own symphaties, however, are enlisted in behalf of "constructivism."