Examining the Legacy of Nazism in Emeric Pressburger’s Unmade Films

Abstract

One of the most prevalent themes in Emeric Pressburger’s work as a screenwriter is the ‘good German’, a character who often represents an enemy country, who is nevertheless depicted sympathetically, or, at the very least, as a morally ambiguous character. Figures of this kind appear throughout his works, including his unpublished novels and unfilmed screenplays. This paper will examine some of these unproduced works and contest that Pressburger’s writing was a response to the trauma of Nazism and the Holocaust, which stood in conflict to his largely egalitarian outlook in which he believed that all people had some good attributes. In a radical turn for the Jewish screenwriter, Pressburger uses these late works to attempt to come to terms with the moral implications of the Holocaust, considering if revenge can be justified, to what extent one should forgive, and whether acts of kindness could ever outweigh the crimes a person has committed.