The Cultural Impact And Legacy Of World War Two

Day of Wrath was actually filmed within the third reich in '43 and is indirectly a movie about Nazi repression (transplanted into 17th century witch-hunts) but it is probably a stretch to term it a holocaust movie, but it is a great movie.
https://fathersonholygore.com/2016/04/30/carl-th-dreyers-day-of-wrath/

the american gis got the vicious and brutal "your job in germany" (directed by frank capra, written by theodor geisel) which jack warner re-edited for the public as "hitler lives".

i'm speaking adjacent to all of this ^^, not having read anything at hand but: just fwiw, there's a long, stirring passage in farocki's images of the world and the inscription of war speaking to that tension between the holocaust & the military threat, wrt the allies' strategy, if you haven't seen it.

it would be interesting to find the first hollywood film that even mentions it.

― ryan, Monday, July 11, 2016 5:42 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

First hollywood film i can think of that mentions concentration camps...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Be_or_Not_to_Be_(1942_film)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zpgjyn7dgk

Chaplin's Great Dictator (1940) predates the gas chambers, but it certainly portrays the persecution of the Jews. Of course his films were essentially "independent," tho distributed through United Artists, of which he was a founder.

wiki:

In his 1964 autobiography, Chaplin stated that he could not have made the film if he had known about the true extent of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at the time.

One of the very first is Mark Donskoi's The Unvanquished from 1945, which is actually shot on location at Baba Yar. I'm trying to find that one at the moment.

Feldstein and Krigstein's 'Master Race' comic strip - first published in 1955 - must be one of the earliest cultural artefacts to address the holocaust so directly:

https://spaceintext.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/master-race-bernard-krigstein/

I have a copy of Antony Beevor's single volume history of WW2 on my pending pile at home - anybody read it?

I listened to his Stalingrad audiobook a few years back and didn't feel like investigating any further, not that there was anything massively wrong with it - but he seems a bit of a dull writer. *disclaimer - some of my opinions are often bollocks.

In a way, I still think the holocaust is somewhat culturally 'taboo'. A certain coded cultural representation has become common, even clichéd, but actually probing what happened, as in taking a standpoint and saying something different about it, is still scoffed upon. When Son of Saul came out, a lot of the critique seemed angry that it was different, didn't work the way these films should work, and that the director passed judgment on his characters. Peter Labuza ended his takedown this way: 'What makes Son of Saul more troubling than the prestige films of its ilk is that the intellectualism that grounds the film ends up being just as simplistic as the melodrama that infuses Schindler’s List. Nemes has stunningly created the intensity of camps, but it is one of his own making — a product for his own pet theories, never exploring the real traumas of the past.' As if we ever had access to explore 'the real traumas of the past' (never mind that Nemes based his film on a trove of primary sources). Being 'intellectual' about the holocaust is still obscene.

and on the other end of the spectrum--The Day the Clown Cried, Life is Beautiful, even Schindler's List--you find the "real trauma" diminished by sentimentalizing it.

on terrain that's a bit more comfortable for me, in a lot of recent biopolitical philosophy (I'm thinking mainly of Agamben and Esposito), the camps are more or less posited as the central trauma of the 20th century and in some ways even modernity. but i think both are beholden to by some idea (right or wrong) that the holocaust touches on something essential or universal by the nature of its extremity.

incidentally i just realized it's been 77 years since 1939. will be interesting to see what goes on in 2019-2020 (let alone 2039-2045). i remember the 50th anniversary stuff being a big deal.

my grandfather was in Patton's 3rd Army, and he's still around (though he can barely speak these days).

Yeah, I'm uncomfortable with that as well, also because they reduce the holocaust to the 'camp' aspect, and not the genocidal aspects connected to Baba Yar, the gas chambers, etc. In a way, that's perhaps simply because most of the philosophy about it has surrounded the canonical testimonies from Levi, Kertesz, and other survivors, and more people survived the camps than the chambers, for obvious reasons. In Chelmno there were seven survivors total, it seems.

talking or thinking about the holocaust drains sanity points. i feel like in the west we talk about it way more than we talk about any other historic atrocities- rape of nanking or w/e- and that's due to continued concerted effort made by a number of people against our natural tendency to not think about such things.

i don't watch holocaust flicks any more for that reason. first i've seen (and read) enough to last me a lifetime but also it is really emotionally draining.

The Holocaust is also unfortunately the go-to event for young writers doing historical fiction who want to lend some unearned gravitas to their work

coughjonathansafronfoer

& if that wasn't enough he did 9/11 for his follow-up

might've been this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(miniseries)

This was a big part of my junior high school history/social studies class at the time (NBC produced an entire "Teaching The Holocaust" in school - maybe to offset the whole 'you're making money by running advertisements' criticism).

As for Shirer, I recall liking The Collapse of the Third Republic far more than Rise & Fall, but it's been at least 30 years since I read them.

I think it's hard for any current generation to grasp the magnitude of a war that deeply and directly affected every nation in Europe & North America, plus the USSR, China, Japan, India, Korea, Australia and large swathes of SE Asia, Africa and the Pacific island nations. Earlier today I was looking at the US flags once more flying at half-staff and thought, by today's loose standards of national mourning, the flag should have been lowered for five straight years during WWII.

on that note I think my current obsession is on some level an attempt to cope with what seems to me now a really violent and uncertain contemporary moment--ww2 has a way of putting things in perspective.

been pondering amateurishly an idea that ww2 represents in some way the last gasp of the nation state as a distinct ethno-cultural entity ("what is life? life is the nation"--hitler) and fascism in particular as a kind of third way between communism and capitalism (as explicitly stated by the nazis I believe). reading tony judt's "postwar" alongside shirer really brings this theme out. as sartre states, after the way you had to choose, in effect, between the competing universalisms of "Americanism" and communism.

also reading "HHhH" which strikes me so far as about that need to come back to this moment in history and come to grips with it on some personal level.

Maggie HabermanReporter
8:33 PM ET
Meanwhile, Trump is right now calling into Fox News, during his own convention, and providing additional programming, which is also unusual for a nominee.

shit sorry wrong thread

freudian post

i saw "HH" and thought we were talking about the RNC

Feels like ethnic nation state is really making a comeback tho or that it never went away but that the US makeup loomed larger in the international imagination post ww2 and really post Cold War but atm some of the luster has worn off

What suggests to you that it's "making a comeback" now? Seemed much stronger to me during the balkan conflicts.

i find it kinda funny that the original post begs us not to "turn this into another tiresome argument about who really won"

old ilx was always relitigating world war 2

wrt to some of my questions above about holocaust remembrance, i came across this (quite interesting) essay from Tony Judt's "Postwar":

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/10/06/from-the-house-of-the-dead-on-modern-european-memo/

it would be interesting to find the first hollywood film that even mentions it.

... the Holocaust, that is. The Pawnbroker was 1964.

paywalled

first film is addressed on some other thread, I forget what it was but it was contemporaneous w the war iirc

oh wait that was this thread nm

Indeed, I noticed The Pawnbroker hadn't been mentioned.

Sorry I didn't notice it was paywalled (I read it in the book and then had a hunch it was published other places as well).

Judt mentions a terrible sounding American miniseries called "Holocaust" that was then shown in Germany in the 70s or early 80s and caused quite a stir and led to quite a bit of historical reckoning. anyone seen it? it was denounced by the likes of Habermas and Lanzmann as a trivialization of the horrors of the camps.

I *believe* I saw that on PBS as a kid in the 80s - not sure if it's totally the same thing. The two biggest scenes/plot points I remember were a) a little kid (9-10) joining the Resistance, who subsequently gets captured and lined up against a wall and shot by the Nazis and 2) a mother going with her child to one of the gas chambers, attempting to reassure her that it is just a shower.

so my memories of it are harsh and traumatic ones

this must be it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(miniseries)

that's some cast!

Although the miniseries won several awards and received critical acclaim, it was criticized by some, including noted Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, who described it as "untrue and offensive."

lol

The series which was watched by 20 million people, or 50 percent of West Germans, and first brought the matter of the genocide in World War II to widespread public attention in a way that it never was before.[4] After each part of Holocaust was aired, there was a companion show where a panel of historians could answer questions from people phoning in.[4] The historian's panels were overwhelmed with thousands of phone calls from shocked and outraged Germans. The German historian Alf Lüdtke wrote that the historians "could not cope" as they were faced with thousands of angry phone-callers asking how these things could happen.

yeah that's it

I don't remember it being that bad tbh. it was plenty traumatizing for pre-teen me.

xp

I sort of remember it as being the first time anyone had heard of James Woods and Meryl Streep.

Judt mentions a terrible sounding American miniseries called "Holocaust" that was then shown in Germany in the 70s or early 80s and caused quite a stir and led to quite a bit of historical reckoning. anyone seen it? it was denounced by the likes of Habermas and Lanzmann as a trivialization of the horrors of the camps.

We were talking about this upthread.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/found-paisley-mill-worker-murdered-8831416#-/web/-1473849836564-trackingCode-vgSBQ9QsN9xtxKfRGalwJcsIjrdsKVYPJxCBN1ax3Dg=-articleId-369223054-vv-7ff13765-61dc-4069-8a08-c3ab1ef5da15

This an extraordinary story that I'd never heard of before, a heroic Scottish mill worker who was murdered in Auschwitz for trying to save Hungarian Jewish schoolgirls.

Makes me proud of the old home town ;_;

... how's about tearing down some of those statues of mill owners who got rich by working people to death and put up one of this lady instead, any chance of that Renfrewshire Council?

I've about 1/2 way through Bloodlands and as everyone has said it's great. Black Earth is next for me. and this article in the NYRB from a year ago is quite good:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/hitlers-world/