Abstract
ABSTRACT More than seven decades after the liberation of concentration camps across Europe, we are witnessing the jostle between communicative and cultural memory to determine how the Holocaust is inscribed in a post-victim and post-perpetrator world. This article will explore how German filmmakers are responding to the shift from memory to remembrance through three films: Im Labyrinth des Schweigens (Labyrinth of Lies, 2014), Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (The People vs. Fritz Bauer, 2015), and Die Akte General (The General’s File, 2016). Underpinning each of these films is the call for individuals to interrogate the foundations of societal narratives of the past. In doing so, the films not only raise important questions about the changing nature of Holocaust remembrance, but they also offer a critical re-examination of the ways in which the Federal Republic of Germany did – and did not – grapple with its recent past in the 1950s.
Highlights
More than seven decades after the liberation of concentration camps across Europe, we are witnessing the jostle between communicative and cultural memory to determine how the Holocaust is inscribed in a post-victim and postperpetrator world
In Die Akte General, Hell is commended by Bauer for his ‘healthy disrespect for authority,’ yet at the start of the film he considers any attempt to investigate the legacies of National Socialist perpetrators beyond the figure of Eichmann to be an act of ‘treason.’
The recent prosecutions of John Demjanjuk, Hubert Zafke, and Oskar Gröning have all been accompanied by discussions as to whether these cases will represent the final prosecutions of Holocaust perpetrators
Summary
More than seven decades after the liberation of concentration camps across Europe, we are witnessing the jostle between communicative and cultural memory to determine how the Holocaust is inscribed in a post-victim and postperpetrator world.
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