Dealing with the post-war menace: Creating transnational film memories in the shadow of the Holocaust

Abstract

Traditional scholarship in social film history views groups of films from a certain time period as encapsulations of the overriding national mindset of that time. However, film scholarship has challenged this notion of what sociologists term ‘collective memory’, insisting instead that a wider range of films be included and several ‘collective memories’ be formulated in order to broaden the understanding of time-specific societal beliefs. In addition, research in memory studies has challenged the insistence on ‘national memories’, preferring instead the exploration of ‘transnational memories’. Most prominent among transnational memory scholarship is the work being done on the Holocaust. This article examines four films produced in three different national cinemas from the early post-war period (1946–49), all of which deal with the aftermath of the Holocaust in some way. Analysing these four films (The Murderers Are among Us, Rotation, The Stranger and The Third Man) and these three national cinemas (East Germany, America and Great Britain) shows how a specific transnational event such as the Holocaust can produce several aesthetic and narrative signifiers internationally while also being specifically formulated to meet local, national sensibilities.