The Holocaust is fast receding from living memory. Some 300 Auschwitz survivors were present at the 70th anniversary commemorations of the camp’s liberation in 2015. This year, just 50 attended, all of whom were children in 1945.
Even before this generation began to pass on, researchers of the Holocaust had begun to study the ways that memory of these events have been shaped, manipulated, or indeed fabricated. Film scholar Alison Landsberg’s influential concept of “prosthetic memory” focused attention on the ways in which film, literature and other art forms can supplement or even substitute for the experiences of those who lived through historical events.
Approaching the moment when such supplements must become the sole means for future generations to understand the Holocaust, it seems no accident that half a dozen films released in 2023 and 2024 made Holocaust memory – and its complexities – an explicit element of their narratives.
Three of these films incorporate scenes filmed on location in Poland at former Nazi death camps. Perhaps the most unexpected example is The Zone of Interest (2023). A brief documentary sequence filmed at the modern-day Auschwitz museum concludes director Jonathan Glazer’s meticulous (though highly stylised) recreation of the idyllic domestic life of camp commandant Rudolf Höss and his family.
Read more: The Zone of Interest: new Holocaust film powerfully lays bare the mechanisms of genocide
It’s the only sequence that crosses the otherwise impermeable boundary separating the Höss family compound from the camp itself. It might be interpreted as a kind of reality check for the audience – a reminder that yes, this all did really happen. But that seems an improbably ingenuous stance for so intelligent a filmmaker.
More plausibly, the sequence is a reflexive extension of the film’s interrogation of the strategies by which atrocity can be held at arm’s length, or “managed”.
Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) manage this by fabricating a “perfect” bourgeois home, while ignoring the constant soundtrack of barked orders, shots and screams from the other side of their garden wall.
As we watch them, we are naturally appalled and repelled by their callous dissociation. Yet in the contemporary Auschwitz sequence, Glazer asks whether modern habits of Holocaust “consumption” don’t risk an all-too-similar disavowal.
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In the museum sequence we see Polish cleaners at work, wiping down the glass of the vitrines in which the infamous heaps of shoes and human hair are displayed, and mopping the floor of the Auschwitz I gas chamber (itself a postwar reconstruction).
This site of unimaginable violence is now a museum where the material evidence of mass murder is carefully preserved and curated for tourists. Perhaps not altogether unlike a historical recreation such as The Zone of Interest.
‘Managing’ Holocaust memory
Tourists are the protagonists of Treasure (2024), directed by Julia von Heinz, and A Real Pain (2024), written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg.
These films centre on survivors and their descendants travelling to modern Poland, ostensibly to commemorate their destroyed families. But it seems that, perhaps inevitably, more pressing and immediate personal issues override these acts of remembrance.
Read more: A Real Pain is a subtle but powerful exploration of remembrance culture and personal trauma
A Real Pain, for example, centres on two cousins, dutiful family man David (Eisenberg) and mercurial, possibly bipolar Benji (Kieran Culkin). The pair join a “Holocaust tour” in honour of their late grandmother, a Polish-Jewish survivor, including a visit to Maidanek.
Dutifully and sombrely, the cousins view the barracks, the gas chamber and the vast pile of human ashes. Afterwards, however, only Benji lapses into inconsolable sobs. Is his grief an authentic reaction to the horror, a mark of his greater emotional connection? Is it histrionically excessive, performative attention-seeking? Or is it that the unfathomable tragedy of European Jewry allows Benji to access his own private agony.
If it’s the latter, is such an appropriation of the Holocaust somehow an “illegitimate” response? According to whom? Eisenberg’s deft traumedy leaves it up to us to decide.
Yet more ambiguous is the epilogue to Brady Corbett’s acclaimed The Brutalist (2024). The film retrospectively interprets the professional career of its protagonist, fictitious Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrian Brody) as a response to the tragedy.
Addressing the 1980 Venice Biennale, Tóth’s daughter declares that through his creations her father worked through the trauma of his experiences in the camps. A Holocaust memorial is among the designs briefly glimpsed in the display of Tóth’s work.
The scene aptly captures the ways in which public discourses around the Holocaust crystallised from the 1980s onward.
In the immediate postwar period, as The Brutalist shows, the Holocaust was a rarely discussed, even shameful, topic outside of survivor communities. But with the onset of postmodernism, the Holocaust came increasingly to be understood as the defining episode in 20th-century European history, more even than the second world war itself.
The meanings of trauma
As all these films show, the ways that the Holocaust is commemorated today are far uncontested. For example, One Life (2023), the biopic of British rescuer Nicholas Winton, straightforwardly endorses mainstream assumptions about the value of remembrance.
Read more: What One Life gets wrong about Nicholas Winton and the Kindertransport story
By contrast, in the documentary The Commandant’s Shadow (2024), Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is almost dismissive of what she clearly sees as her daughter’s superfluous preoccupation with a past trauma best forgotten.
The Brutalist is more ambiguous still. At one level, traumatic memory may help explain Tóth’s difficult character and relationships in the preceding three hours of the film. Yet at the same time, almost nothing in his words or actions hitherto has suggested the Holocaust is his predominant focus. Nor does Tóth make this claim himself. Stricken mute following a stroke, he can only listen as his daughter offers this account of his work.
Is it true? Or is it imposing a neat, culturally approved meaning onto the complexities of a messy, damaged life?
Together, these films make a strong case that in the “post-testimony” era, we must not only keep remembering the Holocaust, but reflect constantly on how and why we do so.
Barry Langford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
