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After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-First Century Documentary Film by Brad Prager

2017; German Studies Association; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/gsr.2017.0084

2164-8646

Margarete Landwehr,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Reviewed by: After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-First Century Documentary Film by Brad Prager Margarete Landwehr After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-First Century Documentary Film. By Brad Prager. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Pp. 291. Paper $25.99. ISBN 978-1623564445. This meticulously researched and insightful study on contemporary Holocaust documentaries deals with works of filmmakers who seek "new, alternate approaches to reconciling history and memory" (25). The chapters are constructed around the following themes: concentration camp tourism, the influence of Steven Spielberg's iconic feature film Schindler's List on subsequent films, forgiveness and resentment, Jewish survivors and second and third generation families of perpetrators grappling with the past, and the relationship between past and present as played out by the juxtaposition of archival footage viewed by survivors in the present. Prager's discussion of Rex Bloomstein's KZ (2005) and Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's Martin (1999) in chapter 1 centers on the question of whether ruins of camps and their museums are appropriate tourist attractions. KZ focuses on tourists visiting the Mauthausen camp in Austria and on the inhabitants of the town. The film makes clear that visitors cannot truly encounter the past in the museum, which begs the question of the purpose of such camp memorials as well as of the films about these sites. Tour guide Harald Brachner, an alcoholic in decline who struggles with his engagement with the past, serves as the film's focal point and contrasts starkly with other locals who appear naïve or indifferent to the history that surrounds them. These two paradigms for encounters with the past—complete denial or depression—appear to be the only alternative reactions to the camp. One of the most interesting passages in the book centers on the film Martin, as Prager analyzes the film within a larger discussion of the purpose of such memorials. German historian Volker Knigge claims that most of us expect a feeling of Betroffenheit ("shock" or "sadness") when visiting such sites. In a similar vein, Theodor Adorno wrote in Education after Auschwitz (1966) that the goal of education after the Holocaust is to expose the motives that led to the horror. Prager asks if the hope that Holocaust memorials and museums "should make visitors reflect on causes and prompt reconsideration of what it is in culture that lead to atrocity" is unrealistic (49). In Martin, the director interacts with Martin Zaidenstadt, a survivor of Dachau, whose testimony may be inaccurate. Prager suggests that the "empathic unsettlement," [End Page 473] (a term coined by Dominick LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma, 2000) that listeners experience when hearing a survivor's testimony is more important than the actual truth of the details. Forgiveness as a form of liberation is the focal point of Prager's illuminating analysis of Forgiving Dr. Mengele (2005) and Landscapes of Memory: The Life of Ruth Klüger (2011), which gains depth with references to Jean Améry's and Primo Levi's discussions of survival, forgiveness, and resentment. The former focuses on Eva Kor, who survived Auschwitz along with her twin sister Miriam, as she views her ability to forgive as a life-changing experience that liberated her from pain. The latter depicts Klüger, whose mourning for her dead brother complicates the act of forgiving; she feels that she does not have the right to forgive in his name. Klüger's sentiment mirrors that of Levi, who did not view himself as a true witness to Auschwitz because he survived. Aspects of her resentment also resemble that of Améry, the Viennese Auschwitz survivor who wanted to force perpetrators indifferent to a victim's suffering into his psychic space in which the past is never truly past. Prager's discussion of the questionable, ethical use of perpetrator images from Nazi propaganda films in recent documentaries offers the most thought-provoking arguments. Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah (1985), perceived by many as the "gold standard" of Holocaust documentaries, does not contain wartime Nazi footage, because including such images requires a filmmaker to assume, even if only temporarily, the perpetrator's viewpoint. Although Yael Hersonski incorporates footage from a 1942 Nazi propaganda film depicting...