Holocaust and Sentiments

Abstract

The very popular Holocaust series was evaluated by an Australian audience of sixty students. Expectations were that by exposure to the sufferings of a single family, audiences would respond in terms of sentiments (a mixture of emotions) to principal characters rather than by identification. While attitudes to Germans and Jews showed no significant change, most verbatim answers were sentiments often combining disgust with enjoyment. One of the principal German characters, Dorf, was as liked as disliked indicating that audiences had responded to him through an illusion of intimacy which resulted in audiences' considering Holocaust a true representation of the Nazi's final solution.