Thinking about the Holocaust and its Visual Culture

Judaism, Summer-Fall, 2003 by Catherine M. Soussloff

Visual Culture and the Holocaust. Edited by Barbie Zelizer. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2001.

With Visual Culture and the Holocaust, Barbie Zelizer and her contributors have made a significant and very useful contribution to a range of disciplines including Art History, Film Studies, and Jewish Studies, in their relation to Holocaust Studies. Such a contribution must of necessity be collaborative, given its scope. For the first time, important commentators on the numerous and complex problems associated with visual representation and the genocide of the Jews in Europe appear together in one volume. While half of the sixteen essays collected here have been published elsewhere, together with the eight other essays, this volume is fundamental to thinking our way through the problem of visual representation and the Holocaust in painting, sculpture, television, film, architecture, photography, body art, and digital media. In both approach and in visual/archival research, all of the essays cross many disciplinary boundaries and engage difficult topics. Taken together with their extensive bibliographical references, these sixteen essays present a thorough, state-of-the-scholarship overview of visual culture and the Holocaust. This overview suggests future directions in which scholarship may proceed. The contributors to the volume have been particularly informed by previous U.S., Israeli, and German scholarship, while the extensive French interpretations and films of the Holocaust are unfortunately not as evident.

To begin with the most violent, if such a thing may be said of utter violence: Lawrence Douglas' discussion of some artifacts in his essay, "The Shrunken Head of Buchenwald: Icons of Atrocity at Nuremburg," deals with atavistic aspects of visuality and the law. Miriam Bratu Hansen's article on Schindler's List takes into account, perhaps for the first time, the reception to Hollywood fiction films on the Holocaust, or "mass-mediated memory culture," as she calls it. In her view, concepts of remembrance are transformed under the pressure from memories of the Holocaust portrayed in popular media. Ernst van Alphen's dense meditation on German historiography, "Deadly Historians: Boltanski's Intervention in Holocaust Historiography," presents non-referentiality, absence, and representational surplus as "Holocaust-effects," which the artist Christian Boltanski applies to both the archive-in his use of found serial images and artifacts-and the portrait in his work. The essay complements a documentary film, Christian Boltanski (Dir. Gerald Fox, 1994).

Drawing on Freud's views of the uncanny-in German unheimlich, and its cognates heimlich (home-like), unheimlichkeit (uncanniness), and heimlichkeit (homeliness)-James E. Young's essay on Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin takes up proposals made elsewhere. He elaborates issues raised by Anthony Vidler's pathbreaking book on the architectural uncanny and by Joseph Koerner's subtle and evocative use of the heimat cognates in regard to the inherent estrangement depicted in paintings by his father when he returned to his native Vienna on a regular basis following the war and emigration to America. In response to the buildings or images themselves, these interpreters of the uncanny ask us to acknowledge our psychic experience of art and architecture.

In her essay on Israeli Heritage museums, Tamar Kalmel notes how these institutions are repositories of memories filled with clandestine exaggeration. These museums exist to tell a story of diaspora, brought about by the persecution of the Jews in Europe, but one that concludes with a triumphal return to Israel. In these museums the author finds an idea of representation wrought by a sense of victimization that continues to construct attitudes towards the State and the place of Palestine in the national imaginary. This assessment will no doubt provoke many, hopefully resulting in further study of these institutions that add complexity to thinking about both diaspora and aliya.

Jeffrey Shandler reprises his thorough study of the Eichmann trial. He asks, what are the important differences among natural responses to representations of evil? He brings together considerations of previous mass media presentations of the Holocaust with an astute critique of the Israeli and American political agendas for the trial and its televised "problematic performance." His essay remains an important corrective to the provocative and early study of Charles Gloch, The Apathetic Majority: A Study Based on Public Responses to the Eichmann Trial, 1966.

Elizabeth Legge constructs a compelling argument that Holocaust representations, particularly those found in museums, present "heterotopic anthologies." That is, society relegates these cultural artifacts and images to sites where deviance and horror can be contained apart. In addition to Legge's essay, the book concludes with an overview of websites on the Holocaust by Anna Reading. Although such compilations often become out-dated all too quickly, the ways in which the Holocaust has made an impact in digital space deserves the careful attention provided here.