Nazi and Holocaust Representations in Anglo-American Popular Culture, 1945-2020: Irreverent Remembrance by Jeffrey Demsky

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nazi and Holocaust Representations in Anglo-American Popular Culture, 1945-2020: Irreverent Remembrance by Jeffrey Demsky Phyllis Lassner (bio) Nazi and Holocaust Representations in Anglo-American Popular Culture, 1945-2020: Irreverent Remembrance. By Jeffrey Demsky. New York: Palgrave, 2021. xvi + 140 pp. In 2003, toward the end of my course on Holocaust representation, a student eagerly reported that a new film transporting the story of Anne Frank to Spanish Harlem and titled Anne B. Real was a must-see and available on YouTube. I suggested that we all watch it and share our responses in class. Instead of a diary, the Afro-Latinx protagonist expresses her own plight by writing rap poems. My students loved it and would have enjoyed the support of Jeffrey Demsky, who finds that [End Page 207] instead of "supplant[ing] Anne Frank's factuality," the video "modernizes her story," making it relatable to today's students (87). In his critical survey of "tasteless jokes," cartoons, performances, and other irreverent forms of Anglo-American Holocaust discourses, Demsky develops a comprehensive argument that in order to reach today's students and those audiences uninitiated in Holocaust history or misled by social media distortions and denials, "absurdist portrayals can facilitate constructive remembrance" (vii, 129). In this short but rigorously researched, succinct, and illuminating study, Demsky is particularly interested in the way Holocaust memorialization has evolved, from the widely reported confrontation with leading perpetrators at the Nuremberg Trials to its instantiation in the textual and visual turns of American and British popular culture. There is no doubt that Demsky wishes to be provocative. He argues that instead of ignoring problematic kitsch, scholars and teachers should instrumentalize it in the service of showing how Holocaust history and representation have developed in relation to contemporary life and attitudes in the US and Britain. Ideally, the result would be to "rejuvenate this past, helping to ensure that the history is remembered at all" (2). Nazi and Holocaust Representations takes us back to earlier critiques of Holocaust memorialization that many survivors and scholars viewed as diminishing the suffering endured under the Third Reich but that reflect contemporaneous concerns among scholars and teachers. For example, following the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, some cultural critics argued that it expressed American triumphalism rather than the suffering of Nazism's "foreign" victims. For the British, Demsky posits, the Nuremberg Trials translated the embarrassments of prewar appeasement and diminishing global power into recognition of the nation's heroism and cultural diversity. Given the vastness of the Holocaust and the myriad forms of official and popular memorialization, debates persist about the impact of nationalist, ideological, commercial, and popular constructions of Holocaust memory. Once Holocaust representation became a distinct field of study, scholars began to examine various narrative forms that represented survivors' fragmented memories, public memorialization, and fictional reinterpretations. Demsky reviews Philip Roth's imagined Anne Frank in The Ghost Writer as depicting the contradictions and limits of lessons wrought from the Holocaust. With an impact that has never diminished, Art Spiegelman's Maus defied the limits of acceptable narrative conventions by confronting readers with questions about the mediated authenticity and presumed gravity of Holocaust testimony and representation. That these questions continue to be addressed as controversial textual, [End Page 208] graphic, cinematic, and audio depictions proliferate sustains Demsky's study. For example, in rebellion against canonical modes of Holocaust representation, a cartoon image juxtaposing Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler and the lyrics of British rock stars parodies hallmarks of World War II heroism in order to declare "independence from this inherited past." In this vein Demsky invites us to understand the antisemitic lyrics performed by David Johansen and the Oi! rockers in the 1970s as recognition of how "HATEFUL" Nazi rhetoric was (59). Nonetheless, despite illuminating close readings of images and performances, prodigious historical and ideological contexts, and resourceful interpretations, the book strains in its efforts to transform abhorrent representations into pedagogical opportunities. Whether Holocaust mockery and disdain, as in the lyrics "Join the shower queue in your dancing shoes," will inspire learning "factual historical memory" about what Nazism meant for the Jews remains questionable (60). In the case of American sitcoms, Demsky...