_Holocaust_Presentation.ppt

 

 

Class Presentation notes

 

Jessie's notes:

 

Women’s influence

 

The matriarchs of both the Weiss and the Dorf families, Berta and Marta are given a great amount of power and responsibility in regards to the decisions that influence the future of each of their families.  Berta persuades her husband and family to stay in Germany and wait it out, while Dorf’s wife pleads with her husband to join the party to help their economic situation.  Inga, too, takes her life into her own hands, willingly subjecting herself to life at a concentration camp in order to be with her husband.  Before this she communicates with Karl via letters delivered to him through a Nazi to whom Inga is performing sexual favors in exchange for this privilege.  She uses the power and agency she has to do what she thinks is right.  I wonder if the series portrayal of women is at all related to come of the new feminist history being done by the late 1970s.

 

Why didn’t the Jews leave sooner?

 

“This is my country as much as theirs.  I do not fear the barbarians” –Berta Weiss

The Weiss family feels as German as anyone else.  The show opens with a wedding between a gentile and Jew.  The Weisses are portrayed as more prominent, perhaps even more “German” than Inga’s gentile family.  They even talk about the war heroes in their family.

 

The series does a good job of showing how slow the process of Jewish alienation that leads to eventual mass murder was.  From the beginning there are signs of an increasing anti-Semitism—at the wedding of Inge and Karl which takes place in 1935, probably right before the Nuremburg laws, there is some apparent discontent and anxiety about the union of a gentile and Jew, however, the couple is happy and the marriage proceeds.  We watch as Dr. Weiss’s practice is slowly ruined.  At the beginning of the show he treats the eventual Nazi and Aryan Dorf family, and it is not a problem.  Soon, though, we see that he can only treat Jewish clients. 

 

Desk Murderes, Just Following Orders

 

Again and again the viewer watches as a Nazi leader signs a document at his well-polished, richly decorated desk.  Or a simple command to a lower-ranking official that gives the go ahead to murder thousands.  Similarly, again and again we here the line “I’m just following orders,” as people attempt to resist any sort of responsibility for their actions.  Dorf repeats this very line several times to his uncle who questions his morality.

 

Resistance

 

As Elie Wiesel wrote, comparing the dialogue surrounding the miniseries to that which presided during the Eichmann trials, “Are we again to be subjected to debates on Jewish passivity versus Jewish heroism?”  For some reason, everyone was and has been obsessed with the question of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

 

The series constantly questions why more Jews didn’t fight back.  Again and again the series emphasizes how submissive the Jews were—how easy it was to do to them what the Nazis did.  From the very beginning the show contrasts fighting Jews with passive Jews.  There were those during Kristalnacht, like Rudi’s grandfather who’s store was destroyed and who was beaten, and then there were those like Rudi who actively tried to do something.

 

At the same time, in order to make it easier for an American audience to empathize with the Weiss family, many of them are shown resisting the Nazi evil…

 

The Weisses’ younger son, Rudi, flees Germany and joins a partisan unit in the Soviet Union.  He is then captured by German soldiers and taken to Sobibor where he participates in the extermination camp’s violent uprising.

 

Josef Weiss and his brother are both part of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

 

Karl Weiss resists in his own way through drawings he makes in Teresienstadt.  He hides these images of Jewish life in concentration camps in order for future generations to comprehend the ways in which Jews were treated.

 

What do these images of Jews during the Holocaust tell us about the ways in which Jews were perceived when the show aired in 1978?

 

Israel and Zionism

 

The themes of resistance and Zionism are actually completely linked.  Through the series we get the impression that the “Jew who fights back is the one who survives.”  And where is the surviving member of the Weiss heading at the end of the series?...to Israel.

 

Throughout the 9 and a half hours we see a confrontation between the weak Diaspora Jew and the new Jew, the Israeli Zionist.  Like I’ve already said, the victims are blamed for for not fighting back.

 

For the Jewish community, the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 triggered fears of yet another Holocaust—this time in Israel—awakening in them a new consciousness of the final Solution.  The 1967 War epitomized the new, strong Jew and made it apparent to the world that no longer will a Jew not fight.  The coverage of these two Middle East wars by the American media, followed by the daring Entebbe rescue in 1976, emphasized the importance of survival for Israel, which was seen as a state born of the ashes of the Holocaust.  These were the events in Israel that just slightly predate the airing of the Holocaust. 

 

During the week that the series aired, the national news media gave extensive coverage to the anticipated visit of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to Washington, at which time he asked the Carter administration to cancel planned sales of American-made arms to Saudi Arabia…this unsuccessful mission was the latest in a series of episodes that marked the declining fortunes of Israel vis-à-vis its neighbors and various world powers since the 1973 Yom Kippur war, epitomized by the UNs’ 1975 resolution denouncing Zionism as racism.

 

Therefore, with an already heightened awareness of the Holocaust by the Jewish community, and a growing antagonism toward Israeli militancy by the rest of America, the Holocaust miniseries acted as a reformation of the necessity of the Jewish state.  After watching women and children suffer and killed in the gas chambers, the hope of the series was that it would be difficult for an American audience to deny the need for Israel.  And, by contrasting the weak and passive Diaspora Jew with the strong and resisting Zionist, Holocaust hoped to legitimate for its American audience the recent Israeli military actions against the newest threat to Jewish survival, Israel’s neighboring Muslim counties.

 

Creation of Holocaust “myth” and Jewish Identity

 

The fact that Zionism plays such an important role in the miniseries reinforces a Holocaust myth of destruction and redemption that had already been gaining popularity in the United States by the late 1970s when the show aired. As Jacob Neusner has stated, “First, there is the matter of “the Holocaust,” certainly the center of self-evident truths.  Second, there is the “redemption” contained in the creation and maintenance of the State of Israel.  Together this “myth of Holocaust and redemption” makes sense to the American Jew of why he or she is Jewish and explains that world in which “being Jewish” takes place.”

 

Karl Weiss’s son is symbolic of this redemption.  This child, born to a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father who perished in Auschwitz, is introduced at the very end of the story in liberated Germany.  Inga announces to Rudy, the one survivor from the Weiss family, that she has named the young boy Josef, after his father.  We see the baby, paint brush in hand, painting on large pieces of paper.  Clearly we are supposed to believe that Karl’s artistic talent will live on through his son as will the memory of Doctor Josef Weiss.  This baby is the redemption of European Jewry—he is the future.

 

Holocaust depicted the tragedy as a specifically Jewish event.  When the series aired, Moment declared that “for Jews, the watching has about it the quality of a religious obligation.”  This association was reinforced by NBC’s linking the broadcast to fixtures of the Jewish calendar.  The miniseries aired the week before Passover, and the final episode aired on the 35^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, placing the Holocaust right alongside other important and established Jewish traditions.

The series reinforced the centrality of the Holocaust to Jewish identity.  Interestingly, the t.v. counterpart to Holocaust is Roots. Aired on NBC in 1977, less than a year before Holocaust was aired, Roots, which was directed by Holocaust’s director Marvin J. Chomsky, told the story of African American history in the United States.  As its title suggests, the miniseries was supposed to establish the historical roots of African American oppression and existence in the U.S.  Holocaust was intended to function in a similar way.  Its format was taken from that of Roots and producers hoped to see the same enormous commercial success.

 

Yet, what does this suggest about the role the Holocaust plays in Jewish identity and the role Jews play in American life?  If Roots establishes an African American identity in the United States through their long history of slavery and oppression, Holocaust establishes the “roots” of America Jewish identity in the Shoah, far away in Europe.  The series, thus played a part in cultivating the idea that being Jewish is primarily an ethnic rather than a religious category and that Jewish identity can be affirmed through the Holocaust.

 

Historical Inaccuracies

 

Many religious leaders as well as prominent people in the film industry were consulted during the production of Holocaust. Unfortunately, there was no historian on the consulting board…

 

Criticisms

 

Elie Wiesel was one of the most potent criticizers of the series.  In his article in the New York Times, Wiesel proclaims that Holocaust is “untrue, offensive and cheap.”  He believes that “too much is there.  The film is too explicit, too all-encompassing.”  He thinks that too much happens to one Jewish family and too much evil is perpetrated by one German family.  Somehow all of the most infamous events of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust effect the Weiss family.

 

More troubling, though, is the blending of fiction and non-fiction.  In the series the principal characters are fictitious, whereas the secondary ones are not.  Similarly, the production mixes real Nazi footage of the victims with the fictitious story.  Yet, all these things are treated as authentic.  Wiesel, along with many others, worries that the uninformed viewer will not be able to distinguish one from the other—he will either believe all of the characters are real, or worse, that they are all made up. 

 

Some critics worried about the choice to have a prominent German Jewish family as representative of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust.  As we know, most Jews were not as secular as the Weiss family.  They came from Eastern Europe and dressed and looked much different than the “Aryan”-looking Weisses.  The choice to de-racialize the Weiss family was a deliberate one.  The writer and director believed that the American people could more easily empathize with a family who looked and acted more like them. Ruth Wisse, among others, found that the effort of the mini-series’ producers to present a “most balanced and inoffensive Holocaust, by dramatizing the experiences of an assimilated German Jewish family, created, a deracinated drama...One of Nazism’s most potent weapons was the myth of the Aryan for the sake of whose purity it was necessary to root out all the hook-nosed, swarthy aliens.  Here were are told, with no apparent irony, that in the name of commercial success, the Jew as Aryan was the only safe choice for a broad audience that could not be expected to empathize with foreigners”