Playable Remembrance: Part Two - an Act of Witness

Last week, I laid out my plan to discuss whether the Holocaust can be depicted in games. But to really get to grips with the subject, I feel that we must first take into account depictions of those dark days in older media. Film and television, for the past 80 years, have been the primary methods of delivery when showing the crimes of Nazi Germany and their collaborators. Through these mediums there has been a concerted worldwide effort to immortalise the Holocaust spurred on by the gradual disappearance of Holocaust survivors and a desire to preserve the memory for younger generations. This is done by focussing on two consistent and identifiable genres: documentary and period drama.

Documentary is the most widely used style of filming for the subject matter, and in fact publicly depicting the Holocaust through documentaries has been happening since 1945, spurred on by the shocking discoveries Allied troops made as they marched through Germany and Poland. Many films, such as George Steven’s The Nazi Plan, were produced due to the need to amass evidence for the Nuremburg trials. But even at this time there were some films, like German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, that were deemed to be inappropriate for distribution or even completion, and this attitude toward Holocaust documentaries remained for the next thirty years.

Period drama is the other core model of representation in Holocaust media. Using the time period as a backdrop that influences a character’s actions, or indeed for a character’s actions to juxtapose against, allows the audience to sympathise and identify with them much more clearly. This approach has led to a wider and more impactful effect on the general public and critically too, as it allows an important piece of history to be conveyed in a relatable and approachable way through demonstrating the human experience of the Holocaust in a way that documentaries struggle to do.

In the essay collection Spielberg’s Holocaust, an essay titled "Schindler's List is not Shoah", by M.B. Hansen, argues for this idea, and even suggests that films like Schindler’s List work in tandem with larger state organised and charitable efforts, such as the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., to commemorate the Holocaust in a new form, and that this demonstrates that the discussion of other traumatic events may also be about to change.

But there is a distinct problem with creating any kind of Holocaust media, and that is simply presenting the facts. The Holocaust struggles with international denial because of the all-encompassing and irrational nature of the event, leading to most people preferring to pretend that it did not occur. The thirty year hiatus in Holocaust documentary making may possibly be due to this, and in fact Alfred Hitchcock himself wanted to use panning shots of German citizens touring the camps during de-Nazification, along with shots of the piles of corpses, hair, and personal items taken from the victims, in order to frankly counter the accusations of fakery in the film German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.

The accusations of fakery or melodrama can often be aimed at the period dramas about the Holocaust, and it is an inherent issue with attempting to make a compelling piece of entertainment out of a truly dark subject matter. In order to fulfil this entertaining purpose, aspects of real world events that do not adhere to the core narrative of the film, and might confuse the audience, are cut or re-imagined to make the story more compelling. Schindler’s List struggles with this. The infamous shower scene, where Schindler’s female workers are pulled off the train at Auschwitz and sent to a shower room, implying to the audience that the women are to be gassed.

The filmmaker and Holocaust survivor Michael Haneke suggests that such a scene could only be done “with a naïve audience like the United States”. Others, like Claude Lanzmann, criticised the film because of its clichéd ending; whilst Schindler’s Jewish workers were saved, millions of others weren’t. Spielberg clearly chose the story of Oskar Schindler because of this, but it has an unfortunate effect of implicitly ignoring the millions of others who did not survive.

Lanzmann’s own film about the Holocaust, Shoah, is a completely different beast. This nine hour long, critically acclaimed, documentary masterpiece has a unique method of delivery: every scene is filmed on location and in the present. There is no newsreel footage from the end of the Second World War depicting the death camps or the progression of the war. There are no graphics to demonstrate the numbers of murdered innocents at the sites he visits, aside from some subtitles. Instead, the film uses only the interviews and shots of what the camps and the areas around the camps looked like in 1985 to add the sense of authenticity that the genre demands.

It is these interviews that do most of the work to dispel any kind of denial within the viewer because Lanzmann does not allow any details to be left out. In one of the most memorable scenes Lanzmann conducts an interview with a former Treblinka inmate who was a barber in the camp, who shaved the hair off of the new arrivals before they went into the gas chambers. Lanzmann focuses on the minutia of the task in order to bring the scenario back to life (“There were no mirrors?”; “… how many women in one batch?”). The man, visibly distressed by the memories, asks to stop, but Lanzmann refuses. Roger Ebert would comment that this exchange is “cruel, but [Lanzmann] is correct. [The man] must go on” in order to keep a visual record of a first-hand account.

Lanzmann’s method and filming style, allowing the survivors and witnesses to tell their stories with no other visual aid than the present day locations of the crimes, utilises a piece of psychological manipulation called metonymic displacement, where an action is divorced from its effects. You’ll often find this employed by horror films when they show violence occurring but hide the effects from the viewer, forcing their imagination to do the rest of the work. Whilst horror films use metonymic displacement for the viewer’s enjoyment, Shoah uses it to unsettle and disturb them.

This discomfort experienced by the viewer is also induced by who is talking – Shoah is noteworthy due to it being the first film to secretly film several perpetrators posted at every level of the ‘Final Solution’. The viewer learns from a former SS guard member how the camps were run and how some men were horrified with what was happening whilst others revelled in it. Another interview comes from a man who worked in the Reich’s ministry of transport planning railway journeys, helping to direct “special trains” to the camps. These men recognise the terrible events that they helped both create and carry out, but also justify their complicity; the man from the transport ministry claims that no one dared talk about the rumours of the camps until the end of the war as they feared for their lives.

Shoah may be critically acclaimed but it still garnered negativity at the time of its release, but from unlikely places. There was a national outcry in Poland about the country’s depiction in the film: as an anti-Semitic people wearing rags, living in a dark, drab, and poor country. The former Polish foreign minister Władysław Bartoszewski (a Polish survivor of Auschwitz and an honorary citizen of Israel) accused Lanzmann of ignoring the plight of many Poles under the Nazis and the fact that many attempted to rescue Jews from the camps and shelter them. These criticisms are valid, as Lanzmann appears to be ignoring the fact that millions of Poles, homosexuals, gypsies, the disabled, and political enemies, died along with the Jews in the Holocaust. But much like period dramas, this is done in order to tell the story of the events in way that is easy for an audience to understand, leaving the complexities and the nuance out.

This leads onto the issue of stereotyping, of which even Schindler’s List is not immune from. Critics such as Rosenbaum have suggested that Jews in the film are only shown in role of timid, eternal victims, obsessed with wealth or possessions and, in the case of the SS commandant’s housemaid, dangerously sexual. These ideas are worsened by the casting: Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes are physically larger and strongly drawn, making the Jewish characters, already malnourished within the historical context, seem even smaller and weaker than they truly are.

From this brief look into Holocaust media, we can see that the entire library is devoted to the ideas of remembrance and education. Whilst documentary can concern itself with the facts, Shoah demonstrates that this can be too hard to relate to or empathise with. Pauline Kael, one of the most influential film critics in the United States, described Shoah as “exhausting right from the start” and that “sitting in a theatre seat … seem[ed] to [her] a form of self-punishment”. On the other hand, period dramas provide that human connection but are easily susceptible to accusations of being over the top and too sentimental.

Film as a medium also has its problems - it can often lead to the over-simplification of the events it is depicting i.e. that the Holocaust is a story of good and evil, or that it only happened to the European Jewry, whereas the reality is far more complex and multifaceted. This simplification of the events may create a better narrative but can lead to stereotyping and problematic portrayals of individuals and whole peoples. So next week, we’re going to look at video games that have dealt directly with the Holocaust, or similarly dark and taboo subjects, and whether they worked or not.