Can "Popular" Be "Serious"?

Dimensions:
A Journal of Holocaust Studies

Volume 11, Number 2

Trivialization, as a term used to disparage popular art, entered the lexicon of Holocaust discourse 20 years ago, just after the television broadcast of the 1978 miniseries Holocaust. Critics roundly objected to that television film’s distortion of the Nazi era, and to its Hollywood-like story redolent of love and loss, resistance and renewal. Holocaust, however, spurred widespread public interest in the Final Solution, and this has stimulated an avalanche of popular works devoted to the Nazis’ genocidal campaign. This phenomenon, in turn, has prompted more and more critics to lament the ruthless exploitation of the Holocaust — the wallowing in violence, sadism, power, fantasy — under the guise of examining Nazism. Nothing, it seems, not even the torment of survivors, can deter the media’s appetite for profit and popularity.

The latest trouble spot on the landscape of media abuse is the Internet, writes John Sutherland, a professor of modern English literature at University College, London. It has become an asset for hate groups such as William L. Pierce’s neo-Nazi National Alliance. Sutherland explores how Pierce (author of The Turner Diaries and Hunter) uses the Internet to disseminate material and dogma not only to hard-core followers, but to the general populace as well.

Joseph W. Slade, the co-editor of Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature (1990), discusses the troubling issues raised by the manipulation of tawdry Nazi imagery in contemporary mainstream culture. Once confined to anti-Nazi caricatures, luridly meretricious Nazi images today are used as shock devices in spy thrillers, television melodramas, comic books, computer games, feature-length movies, and rock concerts.

Considering the growing incidence of abuse ("artistic license") connected to the artistic popularization of the Holocaust, any serious proposal to endorse such popularization is fraught with problems. Norma Rosen, author of four novels, including Touching Evil (1969), certainly recognizes the dangers inherent in this popularization, but she can’t overlook the potential of popular art for swiftly disseminating information to millions who otherwise would remain ignorant of it. Moreover, she argues, in her article, that there are indeed popular works about the Holocaust that don’t trivialize the subject, that contain deft character development, and that are "bitterly honest" and specifically Jewish.

Robert Sklar, author of Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (updated, 1994), asserts that the story of the Holocaust must be popularized, and that this becomes more vital as survivors and other eyewitnesses pass away, physical traces deteriorate, and memory fades. The centerpiece of Sklar’s article is arguably the most acclaimed and widely known work of art that explores the Holocaust: Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Schindler’s List. The movie is not, by any means, flawless, Sklar writes, but he observes that in attracting the considerable attention it did, it succeeded beyond expectations in stimulating questions about, and renewed interest in, its subject.

The educator Karen Shawn, in her evaluation of Holocaust books for children, and Karen Friedman, the Director of the ADL Braun Holocaust Institute, in her essay, both discuss the issues raised by the influence of dramatic, popular accounts of the Holocaust era on students. These accounts, ideally, make the Nazi era meaningful for young people, and strengthen their intellectual and moral perspectives. But the ideal, of course, is often not achieved.

Two books and a television documentary are reviewed in this issue. The distinguished psychiatrist and man of letters Robert Coles reviews The Boys: The Untold Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors, Martin Gilbert’s account of a group of Holocaust survivors who emigrated to the United Kingdom after the war. The British novelist Peter Rushforth reviews Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood, a novel that examines the Holocaust and its historical roots. Robert N. Proctor, a scholar who has written about science and physicians in the Third Reich, scrutinizes In the Shadow of the Reich: Nazi Medicine, a documentary about the relationship between the German medical profession and the Nazi regime.