No “Innocent Victim”?: Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust as Trope in <em>Zeugin aus der Hölle</em>

Abstract

This essay addresses how in the film Zeugin aus der Holle (1965, Witness out of hell), fictionalized sexual violence against a female Jewish Holocaust survivor functions as a trope that exposes and rejects patriarchal and misogynist discourses of victimhood, perpetration, survivor shame, and guilt, which reviewers and scholars rightly have critiqued for such discourses' re-victimizing and re-traumatizing effects upon victims. I argue that as a filmic trope sexual violence served specific functions for its contemporaneous audience—Germans in the postwar 1960s. By means of the trope of sexual violence, Zeugin aus der Holle confronted contemporaneous West German audiences with gender-specific experiences of women during the Holocaust, the continuing trauma and re-victimization of Jewish Holocaust survivors in postwar Germany, and Nazi guilt.