The First Comic Film About The Shoah

Abstract

For Jews after the Shoah, no world could have been more of a frontier experience with all of the horrors, advantages, and contradictions than occupied Germany after 1945. In both the Western and Eastern zones of occupation, Jews found themselves in a conflicted role with the creation of state socialism in the Soviet zone after 1945 and again after 1949 in the German Democratic Republic (the GDR). The conflict between communism, defined by the party as universalism, and a Jewish identity, demonized in all of its forms as particularistic, marked this German frontier on which Jews did indeed function, especially within the world of culture. The Jews who became part of this world returned from life in exile and from the camps. The she’erit hapleyta, the remnant of the saved, some 200,000 Jews from the Jewish communities of Central Europe were the core of the survivors. There had been some 500,000 in the various camps and ghettos before the beginning of the death marches west from the camps in 1945; 60 percent died on the marches.1 This small fragment of the once flourishing Jewish life of Central Europe all but vanished among some six to nine million “displaced persons” (DPs) by 1946, who were ethnic Germans from Poland and Bohemia; forced laborers from throughout Europe; Russian soldiers who had fought for the Germans; peoples simply displaced by war and moving west before the Soviet army.2 Officially there were no displaced persons in the Soviet zone of occupation, as the term refers only to those in the Western zones.3KeywordsJewish IdentityGerman Democratic RepublicFairy TaleDeath CampWarsaw PactThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.