Film comment. (Reviews).

Whitfield, Stephen J.

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."

The twist, however, is that he does not put these three Hollywood films in a Jewish context. Instead he emphasizes how American they are, which means that they aspire to maximize the size of the audience. Their import is supposed to be universal (the name of the studio that released Schindler's List). It is American culture that has determined how the Holocaust was to be grasped. It is American culture that imposed patterns of meaning upon the ways that directors like Stanley Kramer, Sidney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg attempted to recount the unprecedented crimes that Nazism perpetrated. It is American culture that framed the stories, however striking a breakthrough each of the three films that Mintz analyzes seemed to achieve at the time of their release.

Judgment at Nuremberg, for example, opened in the year Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem, the year Raul Hilberg published his massive Destruction of the European Jews. There was still precious little "Holocaust consciousness"; indeed the term "Holocaust" was scarcely in circulation. But something was getting closer to the surface; both Elie Wiesel's memoir of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Night (1960), and Primo Levi's memoir, Survival in Auschwitz (1961), were published in the U.S. within a year of one another. But the distinctive fate of the Jews under Hitler was only beginning to register; and Judgment at Nuremberg is a film about the atrocities of his regime that barely identifies Jews as his victims. The U. S. military prosecutor (Richard Widmark) "does mention in passing that six million Jews were killed," Mintz observes, "but this is after he has introduced the concentration camp footage by saying that the victims came from every country in occupied Europe. The Jews are mentioned among others, a nd that is the solitary reference" (103). There was something shocking about the insertion into the feature film of the ghastly footage of the corpses. But the audience was not invited to consider why the inmates had been starved and slaughtered, or who exactly those anonymous victims were. The upright jurist (Spencer Tracy) who is responsible for forming a judgment upon the enormity of the Nazis' criminality is an American, and Stanley Kramer made explicit why that nationality mattered: "It is not the attitude of the Germans that I have tried to emphasize in the film. It is the attitude of the Americans" (102), and how their own better selves--their liberal decency--might be enlisted in behalf of a chastened sense of moral responsibility. Perhaps that is why a black soldier is shown guarding German prisoners at Nuremberg, or why the defense attorney (Maximillian Schell) is permitted to remind the court (and the audience) that even Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had supported the involuntary sterilizatio n of mental defectives.

But four years later the auspices of universalism granted far greater latitude to Jewish victimization. A Holocaust survivor, Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger), is indeed so shattered, so completed defined by his own suffering, that only Christian love--personified by his Puerto Rican assistant, Jesus Ortiz (Jaime Sanchez)--can possibly redeem the pawnbroker's soul. Lumet's film was virtually unprecedented in the austerity with which the blasted interior life of an ex-inmate of the camps is examined, and Mintz credits. The Pawnbroker with at least the force of the suggestion that Nazerman's emotional insulation offers a hint of how ineffably appalling was the experience of the univers concentrationnaire. But the view of the Jewish past that the film presents is a parched, reductive one--the lachrymose version, pushed to the nth degree. "The pawnbroker comes to stand for nothing less than the travails of the Jewish people throughout history," Mintz writes; and "the Holocaust serves as a supercharged symbol of the sor ry persecution and degradation of the Jews over the centuries" (117, 119). Here the author wrongly ascribes the significance of The Pawnbroker to Hollywood's impulse toward uplift. Filmed in black-and-white (like the other two films under discussion), ending not happily-ever-after but in pain and death, making a vague analogy between the suffering of European Jewry and the wretchedness of the Harlem ghetto, the vulgarization that is usually the Hollywood price of treating a serious subject is not a charge that can be leveled at Lumet's work. To be sure Jesus Ortiz does come across like his namesake, and dies so that another might live. Ortiz is a martyr. But The Pawnbroker is one of those rare Hollywood products that lacks a hero, nor is there any expectation of social improvement or personal self-enhancement. As a former professor, Nazerman would not have been representative of German Jewry had he been depicted as unassimilated; nor can any feature film be expected to convey an undistorted or comprehensive v ersion of Jewish history. To have shown the resilience of survivors, to have shown how admirably so many of them managed to adapt to postwar society would not only have been unfaithful to Edward Lewis Wallant's 1961 novel, but would have been seized upon as proof of the incorrigible cheerfulness that infects American mass culture.

A Christian is of course the savior--and hero--of Schindler's List, which is nevertheless protected against one line of criticism because Oskar Schindler actually did rescue over a thousand Jews from the fate that befell their co-religionists. In 1961 Kramer had used an international galaxy of stars to attract audiences to a film about recent barbarism, perpetrated by a current Cold War ally. Lumet had cast a much-admired Method actor to make emblematic the inner emptiness that Nazi cruelty had wrought. In none of the major roles did Spielberg use American actors, and it is hardly his fault that his own renown brought greater attention to his film than had Hollywood stars appeared in it. The greatness of the world-famous director could not be ignored in his portrayal of the emerging goodness of the Sudeten German who is addressed in the film as Herr Direktor, and Spielberg's own elevation from the ranks of the pop mythologists (among whom his only peer is George Lucas) to the artistic struggle to register the pressures of history (studied most famously by Georg Lukacs) constituted another sort of breakthrough. Here too Mintz locates what is aesthetically and morally striking about Hollywood's portrayal of the Holocaust, as more boundaries of representation are edged toward or pierced, as the ring of fire" is invaded. Is the sequence in which the Schindlerjudinen go naked into the showers at Auschwitz "the most terrifying sequence ever filmed" by anyone, ever, as the critic of the New Yorker asserted (132)? Or should that particular limit ("that point is the door") have been respected, as Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic insisted (144)? Mintz does not explicitly adjudicate this difference of opinion. But he does demonstrate how fully even a film that looks unblinkingly at the Shoh cannot spin out of the groove of universalism. In Schindler's List Jewish characters are secondary. "Spielberg chooses to collapse collective behavior into individual action," Mintz complains. "The myriad of ways in which the Jews cam e upon their fate and responded to it ... . finds almost no place in the film. The Jews are amass, a bloc, but not a collective, a people" (150). A rebuttal might be offered, however. Without demeaning in any way the important forms of resistance that Jews devised, the policy of the S. S. was notorious for ensuring that its victims would not be a people united in solidarity. Given the preponderance of power and weapons, such a policy was lethally effective.

Mintz shares a worry that is widespread among practitioners of Jewish studies that the impact of such films--especially Schindler's List--will continue to dwarf other communal priorities, and will drain contemporary curiosity about how the Jews lived to focus upon how the Jews died. Whether such attentiveness is a zero-sum game is not easy to prove, but no student of organized Jewish life in the United States would dispute the significance that the Holocaust has assumed in the four decades since the release of Judgment at Nuremberg.

About that sort of memorialization, whether in mass culture or in civic activities, Mints is rightly ambivalent. The obligations of mourning, the claims of justice, the commandment of zakhor all conspire to reinforce the endeavor to keep the dead from being subjected to oblivion. For their sake, and in the faith that other atrocities might be blunted if knowledge of the Holocaust is not disseminated, its terrifying actuality needs to be fathomed. Among the vocations of the poet, the scenarist, the director is to figure out how the awful vulnerability and anguish of the Jews might be re-imagined, how the manifold losses sustained by an already tiny people might be calibrated. But Mints also doubts that such knowledge and such art should be deemed synonymous with Jewish remembrance, much less a substitute for Jewish culture itself. The films upon which his book so scrupulously meditates are not only the shards of Jewish memory, but may hint instead at a "failure to convey the real contents of Jewish literacy" ( 162).

STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis, and is a contributing editor. Among his books are Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought; American Space, Jewish Time; and In Search of American Jewish Culture. His essay, "Reflections on Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life, "appeared in the Fall 2000 issue.