"Holocaust" before and after the Event: Reactions in West Germany and Austria

Abstract

Very few television series have ever enjoyed the overwhelming and controversial response as did NBC's Holocaust. First aired in the United States in April 1978 on four consecutive evenings reaching 120 million Americans, the film had been purchased by 31 countries as of March 1979' and telecast by over two dozen by the end of the year. It is fair to say that in the United States, Israel, and most of Europe the film was shown among others in Great Britain, the Scandinavian and Benelux countries, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria public debate on all levels assumed unusually intense proportions, before, during and after the film's showing. This keen interest actively and passionately articulated in the family setting, among friends and acquaintances, at work, in the daily press, the popular electronic and print media, and, of course, in various academic disciplines ranging from psychology and literature to sociology and political science clearly attests to the film's temporary success in highlighting some fundamentally disturbing and unsolved problems of recent Western history. Nowhere in this larger context has this painful phenomenon been more manifest and ultimately of greater importance than in West Germany and Austria, two immediate successors to the Third Reich. In the following pages we shall give a limited and cursory sketch of what the major effects and implications of Holocaust have been on contemporary West German and Austrian public life. While mainly concentrating on the former, we shall summarize pertinent data from the latter where comparisons between the two countries are analytically useful in accentuating differences as well as similarities between them. Thus, following a section in which we briefly describe the political, social and cultural contexts of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and Austria as the structural frameworks wherein the Holocaust experience occurred, we then turn to discussions of sentiments, attitudes and opinions before, during and after the series. Lastly, we conclude