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Produced Reality: The Holocaust on the Small Screen
From: Columbia University
| By:
Jeffrey Shandler |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The word "holocaust" once simply meant "devastation by fire."  Since the 1970s, it has become the international term of choice for referring to the Nazi-led persecution of Jews during World War II. According to Jeffrey Shandler, a scholar of modern Jewish culture, one of the primary ways this word gained such currency has been through American-made television. Shandler traces the widespread use of the word "holocaust" to 1978, the year that the television miniseries "Holocaust" aired and was watched by half the American population. |
Fathom: Explain how the Holocaust came to mean more in America than just a historical occurrence. |
Jeffrey Shandler: Since the end of the war, the Holocaust has become part of the moral landscape of American public culture. I started researching this in the early 1990s. At the time, there was a growing awareness that all kinds of events were being described as other holocausts--examples of genocide like the Khmer Rouge's persecution of Cambodians in the 1970s, and even looking back before World War II. For example, a friend of mine went to a Civil War battle re-enactment and he saw a bumper sticker that said, "The Civil War, America's Holocaust." And of course both African-American slavery and the massacre of Native Americans have been analogized as holocausts that took place in America. |
There are other examples as well; anti-abortionists described abortion as a holocaust, the AIDS pandemic was described as a holocaust and so on. People were beginning to ask questions about the implications of this, and there was also a lot of writing by scholars about how the Holocaust had come to be remembered. By the late 1980s and early '90s, you had people looking at Holocaust literature, Holocaust theater, Holocaust film, Holocaust art and Holocaust monuments--and, of course, Holocaust historiography. |
It occurred to me that there was a missing piece, which was the role that television had played. It struck me that this was, partly, a matter of quantity, that more Americans would have seen more representations of the Holocaust through television than through any of these other venues. What ultimately emerged for me in looking at all this material was that it wasn't only a matter of quantity. There was also an issue of quality. How television has presented the Holocaust, the way television works and the way we engage with television have a distinctive power that I think is key to understanding this phenomenon. |
Fathom: Most Americans did not live through the Holocaust, yet they relate to it. |
Shandler: The vicarious relationship that Americans have with the Holocaust distinguishes it from the relationship that most other countries have that deal with it as extensively as Americans do. Germany and Poland, for example, are scenes of the crime. Millions of people living there had some kind of experience during the war, even as little kids, as bystanders to what was going on. They have a very direct connection to it. |
Their countries are full of landmarks--not only concentration camps but also, for example, the plaques in many German towns on buildings that people pass every day that say there was a synagogue there that was burned down in 1938 in Kristallnacht, or that this was a place from which the Jews in the town were all deported on such and such a date. Or a police station might have a sign that says, "From 1933 till 1945, this wasn't just a police station, it was Gestapo headquarters, and the following things happened." So there are constant visual reminders. |
There's a continuity of personal attachment in these different countries. In Israel you have a large Holocaust survivor population and the Holocaust has become a major fixture of the national ethos, the national history and national commemorative events. |
But the United States is quite different, because there aren't these direct connections either through population or through geography. Mediations have a kind of primacy here. And I think that, more than anything else, distinguishes the American relationship to the subject from that of other countries. |
Fathom: What has television done for America's relationship with the Holocaust? |
Shandler: Television watching is essentially an intimate domestic private experience. And this makes it different from going to see a play or a movie or going to a memorial or a monument. It's even different, in a way, from reading a book, because television can also enter your home with all kinds of information without any preparation of any kind. If you want to read a book about the Holocaust, you at least have to go buy the book or go to the library and get the book. There's some level of prior intent. |
But you can turn on the television set and start channel surfing. And all of a sudden up pops the Holocaust. And I think this kind of intimacy and immediacy has had a very powerful effect in giving Americans a sense of closeness to a subject that in fact most Americans have no direct historical or cultural connection to. But repeated exposures through this cozy, intimate medium have made possible a sense of familiarity with this very forbidding subject. |
Fathom: What are some examples of the Holocaust on TV? |
Shandler: The most unusual, certainly, of the early examples is what I think is the earliest appearance of a Holocaust survivor telling his or her story on television, in a 1953 episode of an entertainment series called "This Is Your Life." It was a series in which guests, who were usually celebrities but sometimes were people who had overcome some kind of ordeal or hardship, were surprised by the host of the series, Ralph Edwards, who would tell their life stories by reuniting them with people from their past. |
It's an extremely unusual process of telling somebody's life story at them and around them, but not with them. The subjects of the show almost never got to talk. But there was a story of a woman named Hanna Bloch Kohner, who had been in four concentration camps during the war and whose story is told in this very unusual format, certainly by our current expectations of how the Holocaust ought to be discussed. |
I first saw it around 1990 or 1991. A copy of it is in the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting, which is part of the Jewish Museum here in New York. It was very interesting, and parts of it were very moving, but at the same time parts of it were very strange and off. I thought if you could figure out why that made sense in 1953, it would tell us something about the dynamics of the way the Holocaust is presented on American television. |
The term "Holocaust" was not in place yet, which is not only just a semantic issue but also a conceptual issue, and these folks weren't called survivors. They were called refugees or displaced persons or, in Yiddish, sheyres hapleyte, which means "the saving remnant," all words that conjure up a very marginal image of who they are. The quality of survivorhood, which suggests that this was a valorous behavior, an endurance, doesn't really come in until the 1970s or early '80s. It has a lot to do with the aging of this population and with changing concepts of the Holocaust itself. |
Other examples that are particularly striking and unexpected are episodes of science-fiction series from the 1960s that deal with the Holocaust--episodes of "The Twilight Zone" and "Star Trek." As is often the case with science-fiction programs, a moment of history is reimagined as a kind of paradigmatic event, and it plays out as a clear examination of current moral issues. |
There was an episode of "Star Trek" in which Nazi Germany is reinvented on a planet somewhere out in the cosmos. This example implicitly but very clearly was using the story of the Holocaust as a way to indict American intervention in Vietnam. The episode appeared in 1968. |
Fathom: How has the Holocaust made the transition from game shows and episodic appearances to other types of programs? |
Shandler: If there is one watershed event in American Holocaust television, it's the airing of the miniseries called "Holocaust" in 1978. It was seen, at the time, by about half the American population, at least in part, making it one of the most widely seen programs of all time. And it had an enormous impact, not so much as a work of art but as a broadcast that initiated a very extensive and very contentious discussion both about the Holocaust and about what it meant to represent the Holocaust, especially on television. And this went on for months and months and months after it had been broadcast, largely in the print media. |
The basic conclusion that most people came to at that time was that television and the Holocaust are incompatible; that the Holocaust is an event situated on a sort of ontological plateau that has no rival. It's way up there, and television is this very vulgar medium that's way down here, and you can't bring the two together. Elie Wiesel articulated this most famously in a piece in the New York Times. It became a kind of conventional wisdom on this subject. |
You might think that would bring representations of the Holocaust on television to a screeching halt, its having been so roundly denounced, but on the contrary. This was just the beginning of an exponential increase of dramas and documentaries and news reports--all kinds of broadcasts that dealt in some way with the Holocaust. So conventional wisdom turned out to be quite wrong in its assessment. |
Fathom: How have American versions of the story of the Holocaust been exported? |
Shandler: Part of the distinctive phenomenon of relationship with the Holocaust is that American media--not only television but also film and theater--are so widely exported that American versions of the Holocaust are seen around the world. |
The "Holocaust" miniseries was seen by hundreds of millions of people in the late 1970s and early '80s, and as big as the impact was in the United States, the impact abroad, especially in what was then West Germany, was much larger. It initiated extensive discussions about the war and also about what it meant to represent the Holocaust in German public culture. Volumes of essays were published on this subject. |
And what's interesting is that the series has been re-aired a number of times in Germany, most recently shortly after reunification, as a kind of symbolic gesture. It was the first time that a unified Germany got to see this very popular telling of the story, albeit one that had a very American sensibility. This was repeated, both in movie theaters and on television, with Schindler's List, where, again, an American version of a Holocaust story becomes familiar. |
Fathom: How do these popular American versions of the Holocaust affect its public remembrance? |
Shandler: I think the Hollywood versions of the Holocaust are becoming a subject of further debate. In Germany, for example, there is discussion of how different American versions are from German ones. |
Some people looked at the "Holocaust" miniseries and said, "It's very sentimental, and the style of storytelling is very banal, and it's not nearly as sophisticated as some of the plays that are produced in theaters in Germany. Why is this so successful? It just doesn't seem right." Others would look at the same thing and say that it's precisely because you have this very safe, familiar, domestic, conventional telling of the story that it provides a point of entry for people who would find these other versions either forbidding or emotionally too remote. |
A similar kind of discussion centered on Schindler's List. A number of Germans, Poles and Israelis asked, "Why is it the American version that becomes so popular? What about the way we tell these stories?" I think this actually does a good service, because it draws people's attention to the fact that there is more than one way of telling stories. They reflect the sensibilities of the people who make them, the cultures they come from, the time and place that they're made, the genres and the medium that they use. |
Fathom: How has seeing the Holocaust on television influenced the way we interpret other contemporary atrocities? |
Shandler:  The way that television facilitates vicarious witnessing of the Holocaust is an important factor in the way people relate to it. And that hit home for me early on when, in the summer of 1992, suddenly our television news reports were filled with images of very thin white men behind barbed wire. But it was color, and it was video, and it was coming from detention camps in Bosnia. |
And it looked--not only to me but to all kinds of folks in America--quite familiar, because of our extensive exposure to vintage Holocaust imagery. It looked like another Holocaust, and it was discussed as another Holocaust, not only by the general public but by the Bush and Clinton administrations, as they considered how to deal with it. |
The visual similarity of these images from Bosnia and the footage recorded in the spring  of 1945 by the Army Signal Corps as they were liberating concentration camps drove home the moral analogy between what was happening in the Balkans and what had happened during World War II. It shaped the way Americans thought and talked about it. On television, in print and in all kinds of public forums, people were saying, "We can't let another Holocaust happen. This is our chance to make a difference." This very much informed the way American policy was formulated and discussed during the period of "ethnic cleansing." |
Fathom: What is the future of Holocaust television? |
Shandler: What I see is a continuation of certain established patterns. Most interesting to me is the way the Holocaust makes what I call "guest appearances" on episodic series, which range from dramas like "ER" and "Touched by an Angel" to "The X-Files" and the occasional situation comedy. It's quite remarkable to see that happen. |
I think, in a way, that is more revealing of the American relationship than some of these big blockbuster events, because those come and go. But this repeated invoking of the Holocaust, this incorporation of it into America's dramatic repertoire, makes it so familiar, so much a part of the everyday experience. |
But it's hard to make a sweeping generalization when you have as many examples as there are. One of the things I see happening--not always, but in many of these productions--is a growing awareness on the part of the filmmakers of the impact that their work has on the subject itself. |
The fact that they are going and interviewing people, that they are going and revisiting sites, that they are going to archives and looking at vintage material--that is something they want to call the viewer's attention to. |
One of the most valuable lessons that comes out of this material, and it's not necessarily the lesson people are looking for, is that we have a wonderful opportunity to think about the implications of public memory, the implications of representation of historical events through the media. And that, I think, is of enormous importance that extends beyond thinking about the Holocaust itself. |
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