Language:
German
Year of publication:
2007
Titel der Quelle:
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
Angaben zur Quelle:
55,1 (2007) 1-32
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in motion pictures
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
Abstract:
Analyzes trends in films on the Nazi period and the Holocaust, mostly in Germany. The stimulus for the wave of such films in the 1980s was the TV series "Holocaust"; but the German films did not attain the comprehensiveness of the American series, confining themselves to the relatively mild persecution of Jews in the 1930s and to the good Germans who helped them, or to pastoral depictions of everyday life in the provinces with only minor references to Nazism. In the late 1980s this changed: films concentrated more on German collective guilt and present-day confrontation with it. "Schindler's List" expanded the limits of what could be shown, although no German film went quite as far. Films strove for authenticity through research and through the insertion of documentary material. In recent years, the focus has again shifted from the extermination camps to the German cities, and from longer time frames to the instant in which the hero makes a moral decision to resist Nazi demands; the cumulative effect of these films is a certain rehabilitation of the German people. Films not only utilize historical research; they stimulate it in turn. Points to reciprocal relations between films, the politics of memory, and historiography.
DOI:
10.1524/VfZg.2007.55.1.1
URL:
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