10. Après Holocaust

Abstract

The article explores the representation of the Holocaust in Italian and French television miniseries, made-for-TV films and docufictions since the broadcast of the miniseries Holocaust in 1979. Most of the works discussed in this article have one underlying theme: the relationship between France and Italy and the Holocaust. This is inflected in a series of conceptual couples, such as guilt and innocence, collaboration and resistance, rescue and callousness, the state and the people. In other words, many of the works discussed here talk about the Holocaust but are really about France and Italy and, whilst set in the not-so-distant past, refer to notions of national identity (French-ness and Italian-ness) in the present. However, there is one major difference between the two countries. Whilst France shows some form of synergy between historiographical debate and television divulgation leading to what I define as a ‘nuanced’ trend, in which French responsibility for the persecution and deportation of Jews is acknowledged, for example in 93, rue Lauriston, Hotel du Parc and recently Un village francais, little of all this emerges from an analysis of Italian TV Holocaust-related narratives. In fact, the opposite trend is at work: the main development is the rise of a pernicious revisionism aimed at levelling differences between fascism and antifascism, and at presenting all sections of the Italian State as substantially innocent vis-a-vis the Holocaust. As a result, Italy’s Holocaust discourse as presented in the popular medium of television casts the country apart from its Western partners.