Wannsee Conference Research Articles

Shadow Quality TV: HBO’s Complicity and the Failure to Portray Allied Indifference to the Holocaust, 1995–2003

In 2001, HBO and the BBC released Conspiracy, a critically acclaimed dramatization of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials discussed coordinating the Final Solution in January 1942. Written by Loring Mandel, Conspiracy is noted for its strict adherence to the historical record as well as its chamber play atmosphere. However, HBO originally planned Conspiracy as the first half of a two-part feature. Its unproduced second half, Complicity, would have depicted Allied indifference to the Holocaust, the plight of Jewish refugees, and the rise of Adolf Eichmann. This article discusses the origins, pre-production history, and cancellation of Complicity. Grounded in archival documents – screenplay drafts, meeting minutes, research files, as well as oral history interviews, this presentation will trace Complicity’s beginnings as a story about Jewish efforts to inform the UK and US governments about the Holocaust and its transition to a dramatization of the April 1943 Bermuda Conference, which is most notable for its failure to meaningfully address the 1940s refugee crisis. Complicity is a fascinating example of ‘shadow quality TV’.

Nazi Constitutional Designs: The State Secretaries’ Meetings and the Annexation of East Central Europe

This article examines the state secretaries’ meetings as an instrument of government in Nazi Germany. They are mostly known as the forum at which the infamous Wannsee Conference took place, but here the 20 January 1942 meeting will be situated in a context previously ignored by historians by showing that such gatherings were an increasingly regular occurrence during the ‘Third Reich’, and that a range of policy issues were discussed there – not just mass murder. As such, it will shed new light on how the ‘Hitler state’ functioned at this level by showing that Wannsee was not entirely extraordinary, the format having become established practice long before 1942. Similarly, the article will also show that the jurisdictional conflicts that played out at Wannsee were equally common, with participants generally jockeying for influence and advancing claims to departmental authority. Indeed, although they effectively replaced cabinet meetings, which were formally banned by Hitler in 1938, the state secretaries’ meetings did little to salvage collegial government. To illustrate this, a series of meetings called to coordinate the government's response to a particular issue will be examined – the annexation of ‘Greater German’ territories in Austria, the Sudetenland and Poland. As will be shown throughout, very little was achieved by way of coordination, with the state secretaries only advancing those constitutional designs that served their ministries’ claims to power.

Animal Law in the Third Reich

Animal Law in the Third Reich

“I am a historian as well.” - The West German Reception of Die Wannseekonferenz (1984) and Portraying Holocaust Perpetrators in Public Television Drama

<em>Die Wannseekonferenz</em> (1984) portrays the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, where Reinhard Heydrich chaired a meeting of Germany’s ministers to co-ordinate the “Final Solution.” Produced by the public television network Bayerische Rundfunk (BR), <em>Die Wannseekonferenz</em> is neither mere entertainment nor a dry, unsubtle didactic film. Instead, it portrays history in a compelling and disturbing manner. The West German press, however, panned the film, which gained critical acclaim abroad. This article discusses its negative reception within the context of the 1980s television and memory landscapes through a grounding in archival sources.

Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany

Ed Westermann is a highly prolific scholar and author on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Drunk on Genocide explores the intersection between alcohol, images of masculinity, and German atrocity on the Eastern Front. In his work, Westermann is struck by the number of times that excessive drinking figures in the mass murder of Jewish victims. The schnapps and cognac flowed freely at the Wannsee Conference that planned the Holocaust, during the roundups and shootings, and at post-massacre celebrations. Some of the sickening scenes of sadism and torture carried out by drunken SS-men, German soldiers, and foreign auxiliaries alike—all rendered here in full detail—simply beggar the imagination. Westermann must surmount two tall hurdles in this book. The first is Norman Ohler, the German journalist who published Der totale Rausch: Drogen im Dritten Reich in 2015. Ohler described the pervasive use of powerful pharmaceutical drugs throughout the Nazi chain of command—from the Führer HQ all the way down to the Landser at the front. The book was often sensationalist in tone, however, labelling the stimulant Pervitin (methamphetamine) “National Socialism in pill form” (p. 11). The book has been widely read, and any professor teaching a course on World War II today will find themselves fielding questions from students about the meth habits of German soldiers. Many scholars criticized Ohler’s evidence and argumentation, and accused him of attempting to excuse the crimes of the Third Reich, up to and including the Holocaust. After all, how could the Germans be guilty of anything if they were all “drugged up to the eyeballs” (p. 11), in the memorable phrase of British historian Richard Evans?

The Journal of Genocide Research Featured Still Another Minimization of the Holocaust

Response to a review of two books on the Holocaust and why the Jews were singled out for extermination by Amos Goldberg, Helmut Walser Smith, Simone Gigliotti, Marc Buggein, and Alan Confino, in “Book Forum,” Journal of Genocide Research (2016).1 The two books reviewed are by Alan Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding, 2012, and A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, 2014.2 The Journal of Genocide Research came under scrutiny in two research studies of readers who are genocide professionals (N=67) and a smaller number of students of Holocaust and Genocide courses (N=39), together N=106. These studies evoked considerable controversy. The present review essay is in response to a subsequent multi-author review in the book forum of the Journal of Genocide Research of two books on the Holocaust, in which both the review essay and the books under discussion are shown to be strong minimizations of the significance of the Holocaust: The thesis advanced is that the extermination of the Jews was not a product of ancient antisemitism-hatred of Jews, but a function of the Nazi vision of creating a new world. Keywords: minimization of the Holocaust, antisemitism, denials of genocide, integrity of genocide studies, laws against incitement of violence, Wannsee Conference, Final Solution

Florilegia: Influence and Cross-Pollination between Celan and Hölderlin, Pindar and Horace

Florilegia: Influence and Cross-Pollination between Celan and Hölderlin, Pindar and Horace John T. Hamilton (bio) According to his biographers, before succumbing to the dark waters of the Seine on or about April 20, 1970, Paul Celan left his copy of Wilhelm Michel’s 1940 biography, Das Leben Friedrich Hölderlins, on his desk in his apartment at 6 avenue Émile Zola, close to the Pont Mirabeau.1 Michel’s volume was opened to the page where Celan had underlined a brief portion of a citation from Clemens Brentano: Niemals ist vielleicht hohe betrachtende Trauer so herrlich ausgesprochen worden. Manchmal wird dieser Genius dunkel und versinkt in den bitteren Brunnen seines Herzens; meistens aber glänzet sein apokalyptischer Stern Wermut wunderbar rührend über das weite Meer seiner Empfindung.2 The passage may be taken as a striking testament, as a final communication entrusted to posterity, one that would forever link Celan’s ominous resolve to Hölderlin’s tragic Umnachtung. The presumed uniqueness of Hölderlin’s past case (“niemals […] vielleicht”), that “contemplative mourning has perhaps never been expressed so magnificently,” is acknowledged and challenged by Celan’s present mournful state, by a repetition that, all the same, hardly detracts from both poets’ singularity. The niemals is asserted and qualified by an implicit wieder einmal, which therefore relates to Jacques Derrida’s conclusion [End Page 600] concerning Celan’s obsession with dates—namely, that “a date marks itself and becomes readable only in freeing itself from the singularity that it nonetheless recalls” (Derrida 35). Analogously, the tendency of Hölderlin’s work, that it “sometimes [manchmal] becomes dark and sinks into the bitter wells of his heart”—this feature observed by Brentano, cited by Michel, and underscored by Celan—can be read only when it compromises the uniqueness that it nonetheless confirms. In each instance, das eine wie das andere Mal, one finds the shared theme of fatal submergence, how the poet and therefore the poets, Hölderlin and Celan, sometimes sank into bitter depths, apart and yet together. The line that Celan inscribed on the printed page could therefore be seen as a caesura that unites him to Hölderlin, unites him, however, through separation. The condition held in common, this proclivity to immerse oneself in bitterness, does not, however, exhaust the profoundly personal significance of the citation. Rather, Brentano’s lines touch upon a broader network of matters that manifests the intimacy that Celan discovered between Hölderlin’s itinerary and his own. As Michel explicitly notes, the words are taken from Brentano’s “Bekenntnisbrief,” written to the painter Philipp Otto Runge on January 21, 1810, a date that would have been particularly resonant for Celan, insofar as it fell one day after the exemplary date that delineates a well-recognized meridian: from Hölderlin (“Tübingen, Jänner”) through Büchner’s Lenz (“der den 20. Jänner durch’s Gebirg ging”), to the notorious Wannsee Conference in 1942. As Celan famously suggested in his Büchner-Preis speech: “Vielleicht darf man sagen, daß jedem Gedicht sein ‘20. Jänner’ eingeschrieben bleibt?” (GW 3: 196). The hypothesis is reiterated towards the end of Der Meridian, when Celan alludes to his failed encounter, in July 1959, with Theodor W. Adorno in Nietzsche’s Engadin: “Ich hatte mich, das eine wie das andere Mal, von einem ‘20. Jänner’, von meinem ’20. Jänner’, hergeschrieben. Ich bin … mir selbst begegnet” (GW 3: 201). Das eine wie das andere Mal—The ramifications continue to spread. Celan’s prose account of the missed opportunity at Sils Maria, his Gespräch im Gebirg (1959), itself hearkens back to yet another text, to Kafka’s short piece, Der Ausflug ins Gebirge (1912), in which the first-person narrative turns entirely on an encounter with a palpable no one: “Wenn niemand kommt, dann kommt eben niemand. […] Lauter niemand” (Kafka 1: 21)—an encounter with no one, and therefore with oneself. In citing Brentano’s letter from January 21, Wilhelm Michel—himself a recipient of the Büchner Prize in 1925—unwittingly opened the [End Page 601] floodgates, releasing the waters of multiple dates and cross-references that constituted Celan’s idiosyncratic immersion...

Speaking the unspeakable: the portrayal of the Wannsee Conference in the film Conspiracy

ABSTRACT This article discusses the filmic representation of the infamous Wannsee Conference, when fifteen senior German officials met at a villa on the shore of a Berlin lake to discuss and co-ordinate the implementation of the so-called final solution to the Jewish question. The understanding reached during the course of the ninety-minute meeting cleared the way for the Europe-wide killing of six million Jews. The article sets out to answer the principal challenge facing anyone attempting to recreate the Wannsee Conference on film: what was the atmosphere of this conference and the attitude of the participants? Moreover, it discusses various ethical aspects related to the portrayal of evil, not in actions but in words, using the medium of film. In doing so, it focuses on the BBC/HBO television film Conspiracy (2001), directed by Frank Pierson, probing its historical accuracy and discussing its artistic credibility.

Unearthing the Holocaust on the Russian Front

Unearthing the Holocaust on the Russian Front Joshua Rubenstein Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz. 398 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018. ISBN-13 978-1451684537. $30.00. Father Patrick Desbois, In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures behind the Holocaust by Bullets. 281 pp. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2018. ISBN-13 978-1628728576. $25.99. The Nazi penchant for violence never fails to outstrip our collective imagination. Even now, with all we have unearthed and learned, the burden of such knowledge is unfathomable. The details challenge the limits of nightmarish horror: gas chambers; mobile gas vans; open air massacres engulfing millions of innocent Jews, Poles, Roma, and homosexuals, to mention four of the most prominent categories of victims. Yet among educated people who have some idea of the scale of the Holocaust there has long been an unbalanced understanding of how the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews evolved to engulf Jewish communities throughout Europe. The fate of Anne Frank, a teenage girl who together with members of her family tried to hide in an attic apartment in Amsterdam, has come to symbolize the fate of the Jews: targeted for persecution, they were chased down, herded into cattle cars from cities and towns in Western and Central Europe, then shipped to killing centers in Poland, where they were murdered on an industrial scale in places like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chełmno, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Bełżec. Anne Frank and Auschwitz—if you can recognize these names and what they represent, then you can claim at least some idea of what happened. But what about German-occupied Soviet territory? Did the Nazis send their victims to Poland as well? How many Soviet Jews were captured and [End Page 409] killed? For decades, the Holocaust on the Eastern Front was an opaque dimension to the catastrophe: Soviet archives were closed to Western and even Soviet students of history; Cold War attitudes inhibited recognition of the role of the Red Army in defeating the Wehrmacht, the full-scale suffering of the Soviet people, and the specific fate of Soviet Jews. It hardly mattered that the murder of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar (by the killers’ own count!) outside Kiev in September 1941—three months and a week after the German invasion of Soviet territory on June 22—was widely recognized because of the poem by Evgenii Evtushenko and the symphony by Dmitrii Shostakovich. It is necessary to understand that the open-air massacre at Babi Yar was one of thousands of such atrocities and that, in fact, the mass murder of the Jews began with the German invasion of Soviet territory. Many students of history regard the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, when the Nazi party leaders informed the High Command of their plans to annihilate the Jews of Europe, as an initial step toward the mass killing. But by that time, the Einsatzgruppen (mobile shooting units), which followed the Wehrmacht into occupied Soviet territory, along with numerous other German police units and local collaborators, succeeded in killing nearly a million Jews. Over such an immense area, under the conditions of active warfare—the Soviet regime was the only government in a German-occupied country in Europe that continued to resist—the Germans decided it was not practicable to send the victims to the killers; it made more sense in their demented minds to send the killers to the victims, where, like locusts descending on a wheat field, the killers could assemble and murder the Jews wherever they found them. ________ There is little in the personal background of Father Patrick Desbois to suggest the direction that life has taken him. Born in 1955, raised among farmers and shopkeepers in central France, he initially pursued mathematics at Dijon University before a personal revelation led him away from atheism. He taught mathematics at a high school in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and volunteered for Mother Teresa in Calcutta before returning to France to enter a seminary; for several years, he was a parish priest. But a family memory always haunted him: his beloved Grandfather Claudius had been deported by the Nazis...

The House of the Wannsee Conference

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to profile the role played by the House of the Wannsee Conference, a house used by Nazis which is now an educational centre.Design/methodology/approachThe paper provides a descriptive analysis supported by relevant literature.FindingsThe paper concludes that one of the biggest challenges for educational work at such a dark tourism site lies in simultaneously revealing and breaking or contextualizing the link between the site and the perspectives and the thinking of the perpetrators.Originality/valueThe paper provides a practitioner perspective on the challenges of linking education on a dark tourism theme with the history and atmosphere of the location itself.

The Wannsee Conference in 1942 and the National Socialist living space dystopia

The Wannsee Conference is still largely understood as the ‘echo’ of an earlier decision to annihilate European Jewry. This article questions this assumption on three grounds. First, it does not fully acknowledge that it did not call for a systematic and immediate mass murder of all Jews. Secondly, it mistakenly concludes that because the conference targeted only Jews, it also emerged from within the narrower confines of the regime's anti-Jewish policies. Thirdly, and as a consequence, this assumption represents a retrospective reading of the conference that straightens the ‘twists’ that even at this late point in time still characterized the ‘road to Auschwitz’. This article offers a different interpretation. Situating the Wannsee Conference in the broader context of Nazi Germanization policies, the article will show how Heydrich's actions at Wannsee can be better understood as a response to early failures in Germanizing annexed Poland and the settlement fantasies coming out of the SS apparatus after the invasion of the Soviet Union. While the Wannsee Conference undoubtedly was an attempt by the SS to consolidate its control over anti-Jewish policies, it was also a way for Heydrich to reclaim lost influence in the broader field of Nazi population policies by aligning the treatment of ‘enemy populations’ with the grander vision of a ‘German East’. This Nazi dystopia not only called for destroying Jewish existence in Europe, but demanded that even the way in which Jews were killed would serve the Nazi cause. For this reason, this article argues for understanding the minutes of the meeting literally. Having learned the lessons from previous failures, while at the same time under pressure to support the megalomaniacal settlement plans, Heydrich actually meant what he said when he dictated the protocol condemning Jews not to their immediate death but to annihilation through labour.

A ‘Wannsee Conference’ on the Extermination of the Gypsies? New Research Findings Regarding 15 January 1943 and the Auschwitz Decree†

Was the persecution of the Sinti and Roma under National Socialism an act of genocide? This article posits that the conference of January 15, 1943 constituted a point of culmination for Nazi policy toward ‘Gypsies.’ Until now, researchers have attached little importance to this event, but the author will show that various actors gathered at this meeting to shape Nazi Germany's racial policies – including those directed at Gypsies – and reached agreement on subsequent actions against Mischlinge, persons of ‘mixed race.’ This paper explores the increasing persecution of this minority and its escalation in 1943 with deportations to the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Such persons were to be rendered extinct within a generation by means of forced sterilization; only a very few were to be ‘Germanized.’ On the basis of empirical data, the author also shows that the group of ‘Gypsies’ defined as ‘racially pure,’ and therefore exempted from deportation to Auschwitz, was extremely small. The racially-motivated elimination of Gypsies continued until the end of the Nazi regime. The author also makes clear how the men who made Nazi racial policy correlated the lessons learned from the parallel processes of the persecution of Jews and the persecution of Sinti and Roma.

The “Nazi Detective” as Provider of Justice in Post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr's The Pale Criminal, Robert Harris's Fatherland, and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister's Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht

The “Nazi Detective” as Provider of Justice in Post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr's <i>The Pale Criminal</i>, Robert Harris's <i>Fatherland</i>, and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister's <i>Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht</i>

The Wannsee Conference and Re-embodying the Historical Archive: Trauma and the Moral Imperative

The Wannsee Conference and Re-embodying the Historical Archive: Trauma and the Moral Imperative

Visualising ‘Everyday’ Evil: The Representation of Nazi Perpetrators in German Memorial Sites

Exhibitions on National Socialist crimes usually present events from the perspective of the victims. However, a focus on perpetrators can have value in explaining the stages leading up to persecution and murder. This essay explores the challenges involved in representing Nazi perpetrators in German memorial sites, focusing on two examples from Berlin: the House of the Wannsee Conference and the Topography of Terror. Both sites address the bureaucratic perpetration at the heart of the Nazi regime. The leading perpetrators can be interpreted through a variety of ‘lenses’ but their motivation frequently remains elusive. However, representing Nazi crimes as embedded within ‘everyday’ society strikes home the reality of persecution and raises wider questions about human behaviour.

How This Was Possible: Interpreting the Holocaust

Moral exclusion occurs when individuals or groups are seen as outside the boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply. It can render violence and injustice normal and acceptable. This talk describes research conducted at the House of Wannsee Conference, a cultural institution near Berlin, where the liquidation of Europe's Jews was planned in 1942. Now a commemorative site and education center, this institution's interpretive strategies increase visitors’ knowledge about past exclusionary processes. The House of Wannsee's interpretive strategies emphasize the role of occupational groups in society. Consistent with that focus, this talk discusses psychology at two points in time: Gestalt psychology, which flourished in Germany from 1920 to 1933, and psychology from 2002 to the present in light of contemporary concerns about psychologists’ involvement in detention and torture.

Holocaust: the Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews

Introduction Historical Background: Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic PART I: RACIAL PERSECUTION, 1933-1939 1. The Displacement of Jews from Public Life, 1933-1934 2. Segregation and Comprehensive Discrimination, 1935-1937 3. Interim Conclusions: The Removal of Jews from German Society, the Formation of the National Socialist 'People's Community', and its Consequences for Jewish Life in Germany 4. The Intensification of the Racial Persecution of Non-Jewish Groups by the Police Apparatus, 1936-1937 5. Comprehensive Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937-1939 6. The Politics of Organized Expulsion PART II: THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS, 1939-1941 7. The Persecution of Jews in the Territory of the Reich, 1939-1940 8. German Occupation and the Persecution of the Jews in Poland, 1939-1940/1941: The First Variant of a 'Territorial Solution' 9. Deportations PART III: MASS EXECUTIONS OF JEWS IN THE OCCUPIED SOVIET ZONES, 1941 10. Laying the Ground for a War of Racial Annihilation 11. The Mass Murder of Jewish Men 12. The Transition from Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide 13. Enforcing the Annihilation Policy: Extending the Shootings to the Whole Jewish Population PART IV: GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION ON A EUROPEAN SCALE, 1941 14. Plans for a Europe-Wide Deportation Programme After the Start of Barbarossa 15. Autumn 1941: Beginning of the Deportations and Regional Mass Murders 16. The Wannsee Conference PART V: THE EXTERMINATION OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS, 1942-1945 17. The Beginning of the Extermination Policy on a European Scale in 1942 18. The Further Development of the Policy of Extermination after the Turning of the War in 1942-1943: Continuation of the Murders and Geographical Expansion of the Deportations Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

The führer gives the Jews a town: Impression management, homo dramaticus, and bare life in Theresienstadt

In 1941, the Czech garrison town of Terezín (or, in German, Theresienstadt) was selected by the Nazis to serve as a ghetto and transport camp.2 But Theresienstadt is perhaps most well known as the stage upon which the Nazis enacted a massive charade. Imagined as a ‘model ghetto’ since the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, Theresienstadt was eventually ‘beautified’ in preparation for a June 1944 visit by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Danish government, as well as to serve as the set for a documentary about life in the camp, filmed that same year. In this paper, I draw upon Erving Goffman’s (1993/1959) dramaturgy and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990a, 1990b) practice theory to identify various mechanisms of misrepresentation that made possible the adoption of a ‘normalizing performativity’ within Theresienstadt’s carceral space. This theoretical approach serves two purposes. First, it is used to describe the technical details of how the Nazi regime attempted to foster and manage a false impression of Theresienstadt. Second, the performativity of Theresienstadt is argued to offer a compelling frame for understanding contemporary biopolitical life, and therefore is presented as a competing metaphor of ‘camp’, which Agamben (2000: 44.5) describes as the ‘new biopolitical nomos of the planet’. In particular, it is suggested that Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer reduced to bare life fails to capture the persistence of human agency and performativity (homo dramaticus) in even the most regimented and brutal conditions.

The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, Father Patrick Desbois, with a Foreword by Paul Shapiro (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xx + 233 pp., cloth $26.95, pbk. $17.00

Father Patrick Desbois, director of the French Conference of Bishops' Episcopal Committee for Relations with Judaism and advisor to the Vatican on the Jewish religion, has written a lucid account of a part of the Holocaust that started before the full fury of the extermination camps was reached. Desbois has traced the gradual annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews, an undertaking that began long before the Wannsee Conference. These early victims were not loaded onto trains and taken to already existing death camps far away. They were rounded up and taken by foot, cart, or truck to the outskirts of their towns and massacred by bullets in the presence of neighbors. The murderers were the Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht soldiers, Romanian enlistees, Ukrainian policemen, and Volksdeutsche volunteers. The locales of the killing—hastily arranged mass graves in field and forest, most bearing no discernible markers today—long failed to attract the same attention that scholars devoted to the extermination camps. The story was obscured by Soviet secrecy and popular antisemitism. Gradually scholars have explicated the bureaucratic Holocaust of Western and Central European Jewry in camps the Germans located in occupied Poland, but with one or two exceptions, the killing fields of Ukraine have remained all but unknown. In particular—as Paul Shapiro points out in a foreword that is a model of contextualization—the Jewish specificities of Nazi mass murder were a taboo topic in the USSR. The murdered Soviet Jews counted as “peaceful Soviet civilians” or “heroic Soviet resistance fighters.” The political orchestration of the postwar trials of war criminals and their indigenous collaborators added a Stalinist layer to the Nazi shroud of secrecy.

Limited Knowledge

Limited Knowledge Robert Fyne Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film and Television. Michael Paris, Editor. Palgrave, 2007. 235 pages; $85.00 In the festive, nocturnal hours of January 12, 2005, a bright-eyed, twenty-yearold, third in line to the British crown partygoer, showed up at a Wiltshire costume ball dressed in a spiffy Nazi uniform much to the glee of some paparazzi lurking in the nearby shadows. Moving stealthily, these photographers soon spotted the gregarious prince soul-kissing another reveler, a smiling female, also dressed in Third Reich regalia. When these pictures appeared the next morning, on the front page of The Sun, under the headline, Harry the Nazi, the Royal family, who lived through the 1940 [End Page 93] Blitz, gasped. Why did Prince Harry behave so irresponsibly? Was he trying to impress the girls? Did he feel robust and daring wearing an Afrika Korps swastika? Or, was he simply another silly undergraduate playing the role of the big cheese? Within hours, Buckingham Palace proffered an apology. Young people—the monarchy lamented—have a limited knowledge of World War II. Why wouldn’t they? For many young people World War II resembles a distant blur, a shapeless, one-paragraph entry in some textbook, about forgotten places. And what about the heroes and villains? The opposing forces? Altering world history events? Did the conflict really matter or were they faded memories, resurrected like the Punic Wars, for end-of-the-semester examinations? But what about Prince Harry? Isn’t he hooked up to a cable television network? Doesn’t he watch World War II reruns? Did he enjoy Raid on Rommel? Probably. After all, he wore the North Afrika Korps outfit to the soirée. For Harry’s generation, popular movies probably explain everything. Want to learn about Pearl Harbor? Watch Tora! Tora! Tora! The Arnhem debacle? Check out A Bridge too Far. Need information about the Normandy invasion? Look at The Longest Day. But World War II motion pictures, like slow-moving lava, often change direction, creating revisionist storylines or facile interpretations. As Professor Michael Paris explains, “the Second World War has been shaped more by the moving image than by any other form of cultural transmission.” To expand his point, Professor Paris brings together fifteen wonderful essays in a 2008 anthology examining cinema and the global conflict. As an innovative study, Repicturing the Second World War offers contemporary interpretations about events that are now three decades old. Film titles such as Land Girls and Foyle’s War take a hard look at British home front life while Tea With Mussolini and Mediterraneo concentrate on Il Duce’s expansionism. Similarly, a French photoplay Safe Conduct and two German productions Aimée and Jaguar and Sophie Scholl detail life under the iron boot, while an American made-for-television drama, The Tuskegee Airmen, glorifies the exploits of an all-volunteer Black fighter squadron even though another U.S. production, Come See the Paradise takes some nasty swipes at Executive Order 9066, the federal law authorizing the Japanese internment camps. Finally, an HBO screenplay Conspiracy documents the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference where top-ranking Nazis plotted the final solution while an Italian drama, Life is Beautiful and a French title, Train of Life approach the Shoah experience in a frivolous manner. On the Eastern Front, Enemy at the Gates contains many examples of post-Cold War politics and BBC’s Bomber Harris disputes the famed British general’s tactical air war against Germany while two other motion pictures, Saving Private Ryan and Downfall, examine the Normandy invasion and the Führer’s final days. In all, these essays reiterate the oft proclaimed notion that both motion pictures and television productions provide twenty-first century viewers their World War II history even though a great deal of superficial and inaccurate information emanates from these media. And with each passing generation—as the events of this global conflict edge toward oblivion—it comes as no surprise that a young man, who someday might wear the crown of England, would masquerade as a Nazi. Maybe the rubescent youth should take a look at Repicturing the Second World War. Why not...