Beyond the Bloodshed
Beyond the Bloodshed: Exploring Nonviolent Holocaust Depictions in Transit, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Shoah
Micah R. Hoffman
Abstract
Holocaust films are crucial for depicting the atrocities of genocide and addressing the moral, ethical, and historical complexities of World War II. Many films depict excessive violence, but this approach can obscure deeper psychological and emotional themes and can arguably present traumatic violence as a cinematic spectacle, calling into question the ethics and intentions of such depictions. This paper examines how Christian Petzold's Transit (2018), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) use nonviolent portrayals to explore the Holocaust's emotional and psychological impact. By avoiding graphic violence, these films delve into the intricacies of emotional trauma, xenophobia, and the refugee experience. German scholar Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory and Susan Sontag’s analysis of war photography provide a framework for understanding these films’ approaches. Transit blends historical and contemporary settings to make the refugee experience timeless and relatable. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul examines post-Holocaust xenophobia through its characters’ interactions. Shoah explores the collective memory of living Holocaust survivors. Together, these films offer a nuanced cultural memory of the Holocaust that bridges past and present, stressing emotional resonance over graphic depictions.
Introduction
Holocaust films have served as a vital medium for representing the atrocities of genocide, creating a cinematic space to confront the moral, ethical, and historical complexities of one of the most harrowing periods in human history. Through the framework of Jan Assmann’s cultural memory, this article examines the role of film in the formation of cultural memory. In doing so, it interrogates the ethical dilemmas that arise when filmmakers depict genocide and the two general trends of producing a Holocaust film: the commercial and the critical (Brown and Rafter).
A high volume of Holocaust films is produced internationally, and a high volume of excessive and gratuitous violence is depicted in mainstream cinema. By refraining from depicting violence in critical Holocaust films, one may recognize psychological trauma, including emotional violence, xenophobia, and the refugee experience. In Christian Petzold’s Transit, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, the Holocaust primarily serves as a historical backdrop without resorting to violent imagery. Instead, these films explore the emotional implications of the Holocaust for survivors and viewers, contributing to a cultural memory that is nuanced, respectful, and perceptive.
Ethical Concerns
There are numerous ethical implications of producing Holocaust films for consumable entertainment. In “Genocide Films, Public Criminology, Collective Memory,” Michelle Brown and Nicole Rafter generalize war films into two categories: the commercial and the critical. Regardless of the form, both variations pose substantial ethical dilemmas and have fallibilities. The commercial variety, which is intended for mainstream audiences, often produces narratives to dramatically impact and inspire the viewer. For example, films such as Schindler’s List (1993), The Pianist (2002) and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008) can be considered commercial, or “mainstream,” cinema due to box-office success and narrative style. While these films have achieved widespread acclaim for their impact, they often simplify the complex nature of the Holocaust, feature non-Jewish protagonists in narratives of Jewish Holocaust trauma, and portray excessive violence. Critical films such as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Transit, and Shoah can also elicit concerns about historical authenticity and alienate the audience. While each individual film contributes a different characteristic to the Holocaust memory, these concerns are important to address as independent cultural formations.
Cultural Memory: Institutional Communication and Cultural Formation
German scholar and historian Jan Assmann conceptualized cultural memory as a distant yet central memory within a community. In his essay “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity” from the journal New German Critique, he describes cultural memory as “characterized by its distance from the everyday. Distance from the everyday (transcendence) marks its temporal horizon. Cultural memory has its fixed point; its horizon does not change with the passing of time…” (129). Assmann continues to describe these cultural checkpoints as “fateful events of the past,” which are preserved in time through cultural formation, including written texts, monuments, museums, or in this case, film (129).
Alongside cultural formation, institutional communication keeps a cultural memory alive through “recitation, practice, [and] observance” (129). For example, just as the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and memorial is a fixed place of cultural memory, so is the film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Both cultural checkpoints fulfill Assmann’s criteria of “recitation, practice, and observance” by actively recounting historical narratives (i.e., tours, exhibits, and storytelling), engaging audiences in rituals of remembrance (i.e., commemorative ceremonies and bearing witness to the film), and opening ongoing interpretation of collective memory through participation and dialogue. The act of observing is just as important in institutional communication as the establishment of fixed points for cultural formation.
Cultural Formation: The Nuance in Portrayal
The act of observing and creating images for cultural formation is complicated work. Film, photography, and journalism are key cultural checkpoints that form collective memory and inform subsequent generations. As these mediums are often interpreted as fact—or as a reenactment of fact—their use of storytelling is often glossed over. In Susan Sontag’s critical essay Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), she discusses the trickiness of war photography and how photographs are a breed of rhetoric (8). War photographs deliver more than depiction; they also shape how the viewer understands and interprets certain events. Photos can be quite persuasive; an image can convey a partisan message and evoke a desired response from the viewer.
Sontag begins her study by questioning who the viewer is: “Who are the ‘we’ at whom such shock-pictures are aimed?” (9). Fundamentally, who is seeing the image, watching the film, or reading the article? Are images of war intended to startle the coddled into a bleaker reality? Photography and film bring the face of war to unscathed territories. This, Sontag argues, is due to a “failure [...] of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind” (9). On account of this failure, extraordinary lengths are taken to reach an increasingly jaded population. The distant viewer’s understanding of war is composed by photography and written accounts—the latter of which is more complex and thus less accessible compared to visual representations. Sontag’s analysis of war photography can be applied to film, as it is also a visual medium.
While written accounts, such as Anne Frank’s revered diary, comprise a more intricate cultural memory, the condensed nature of film is less demanding and, therefore, more popular. However, historical events may be considered not frightening enough to elicit the desired reaction from the public, which lends to the photographer or filmmaker to augment the image or for the event to be “reenacted more convincingly” (Sontag 50). Sontag provides an example of a dead Confederate soldier in the picture “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg,” who was moved to a more photogenic sight postmortem (43). Augmenting images can result in excessively depicting violence and the undermining of psychological trauma. Sontag’s critique prompts the viewer to be more critical of visual representations of violence and question the ethics of watching such violence.
The Globalization of the Holocaust
Although the Holocaust originated as a Germany-specific cultural memory, it has become less defined to a particular community since the end of World War II, becoming a globalized memory. Michael Rothberg, a Holocaust studies and genocide scholar, describes the universalization of the Holocaust in The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators: “...recent decades witnessed the dramatic rise of discourses and practices of human rights. In addition, the promulgation of international human rights norms has paralleled, and become closely allied with, the globalization of Holocaust memory” (5). With this globalization, the Holocaust has become an anomalous case of cultural memory. The globalization of the Holocaust can be attributed to two factors: the advent of German outgroups escaping Nazi Germany and dispersing worldwide, and the international production of Holocaust film.
The Holocaust often functions as an example of the worst of humanity—a harrowing, cautionary tale of what can take place with excessive xenophobia, complicity, willful ignorance, and a lack of basic human rights. With a globally shared understanding of the atrocity of the Holocaust, it often functions as a measure of evil to relativize succeeding events. The globalization of the Holocaust memory was expected to lead to increased vigilance regarding human rights and preventing such an event from occurring again.
An event as anomalously memorialized as the Holocaust—which is both intimate yet universal, territorial yet globalized, timeless yet historical—cannot be bound to a traditional historical drama narrative structure. Author Ken Koltun-Fromm aptly describes the Holocaust as “that kind of thing that we continually reconfigure, even as we know that it evades all borders, and defies all shapes” (Koltun-Fromm). In other words, solely portraying the violent events that occurred during the Holocaust risks taking it at “face value” instead of a profoundly ingrained cultural memory in a national and international context.
This is not to say that an absolute lack of violence depicted in all Holocaust films is ideal—for the sake of staying true to the factual events and suffering that occurred during World War II, it may be necessary to depict these acts. However, considering how many Holocaust films have been produced in the past eight decades, a more creative and introspective interpretation of the Holocaust can help form a comprehensive, transnational cultural memory.
Commercial Fallibilities and Ethical Concerns
Ethical critiques of commercial Holocaust films are abundant. Simplification for the sake of “neat” storylines is often enacted to appeal to a broader audience; this simplification is realized in individualistic dramas or a clear-cut, heroes-versus-villains structure. Fixating on a single person’s narrative can lessen the anomalous aspects of the Holocaust: the stark scale and communal trauma of ethnic cleansing.
At times, the protagonists in commercial Holocaust films about Jewish victims are non-Jewish saviors, an element intended to make the story more “compelling” to a global audience and cater to audience members who were complicit, such as the German audience. In the case of Schindler’s List and The Zookeeper’s Wife, the protagonists are German and Polish individuals who attempt to preserve Jewish life. These narratives take the focus from the Jewish experience and instead choose to resonate with the heroic tales of non-Jews that belonged to the persecuting groups.
Journalist Philip Gourevich critiqued the lens that Schindler’s List adopted, arguing that the widespread acclaim for the film “suggests that powerful spectacle continues to be more beguiling than human and historical authenticity—and that the psychology of the Nazis is a bigger draw than the civilization of the people they murdered.” Gourevitch’s critique asserts that the draw of the film lies in the exhibition of Nazism rather than the reality of the Holocaust for Jewish people and its victim groups. In other words, the “spectacle” of the film can be viewed as entertainment rather than a historical narrative. Gourevitch also critiques the unbridled violence and sexual appeal that the film exhibits:
By my count, Jewish heads explode in Schindler’s List at an average rate of one every twelve minutes. Moments after the first of these nightmare images, and at intervals following other particularly ghastly episodes, Spielberg supplies emotional relief and contrast by cutting to shots of bare-breasted Aryan women dallying with their Nazi paramours.
Gourevitch’s assessment spotlights a larger issue with how Holocaust narratives are presented in commercial cinema: the tension between historical authenticity and the demands of mainstream entertainment. By feeding the allure of Nazi psychology and violence, films like Schindler’s List accomplish turning the tragedy of the Holocaust into a dramatic instrument. Thus, Schindler’s List can be critiqued as falling susceptible to sensationalizism As Gourevich argues, the juxtaposition of Jewish pain with titillating Aryan women trivializes the gravity of the Holocaust.
Director Steven Spielberg’s orchestration of character arcs, narrative devices, and dramatic story structure each play into traditional narrative structure. In creating a conventional cinematic formula, the story can serve to comfort the audience with an emotional resolution, which obscures the fact that for most victims and survivors, there was neither resolution nor redemption. Gourevich’s argument reveals a broader trend in commercial Holocaust films: the focus on Nazi figures and morally ambiguous protagonists, like Oscar Schindler, while sidelining the experiences of the persecuted groups.
Gourevitch is not alone in his disdain for the film—Los Angeles Times journalist Akita Gottlieb revisited the film in 2018, asserting that Schindler’s List “remains a kind of litmus test for Hollywood moviemaking, asking whether it’s morally defensible to dramatize unspeakable horror and trauma via the language of mass entertainment.” A common pitfall of commercial Holocaust films is the sensationalization of authentic events. In Schindler’s List, images of naked Jews and senseless murders are depicted without restraint. Authentic events are exploited for their shock value, which can desensitize the viewer and reduce the reality of genocide.
Transit: A Timeless, Critical Approach
In the film Transit, German director Christian Petzold adopts a timeless interpretation of the Holocaust. The film is an adaptation of the 1944 novel Transit by Anna Seghers, a German-Jewish refugee who fled from Nazi-occupied Germany to Mexico during World War II. While Seghers clearly articulates the time period, Petzold chose to transcend the historical setting and expand it beyond Germany’s borders. Nazi iconography is replaced by a modern setting, featuring 21st-century cars, contemporary clothing, and digital technology. By painting a historically ambiguous image of Nazi-occupied Europe, Petzold creates a disorienting, universal image of the refugee experience. The juxtaposition of a dramatic 1940’s storyline with modern surroundings removes the emotional distance that historical dramas often create. Manohla Dargis, chief film critic at the New York Times, describes Transit’s elusive form as: “a historically indeterminate moment, overlapping past and present like a cinematic superimposition [...] Even after the movie’s political stakes and backdrop come into focus, the story remains steeped in a kind of temporal dissonance.” Moreover, the overcrowded consulates that the protagonist, Georg, finds himself in reflect the present-day European refugee situation and yield a physical environment to statelessness (Dargis).
In familiarizing the imagery with younger generations, Petzold smoothly guides the audience to sympathize with each character and relativize the past to the present. Implying the historical context of the Holocaust rather than explicitly stating it prompts the audience to piece together the “puzzle” of the story and engage in an active dialogue, as opposed to depicting violent events that desensitize the viewer and create a caricature of the past. Blending visuals from the past and the present bridges the cultural dissonance created by time. Thus, Petzold’s approach can lend to a deeper historical understanding and an aptly universal cultural memory.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Inherited Xenophobia
The 1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, examines how xenophobic ideologies from the Nazi era were neither eradicated after World War II nor relegated to the past—they remained embedded into everyday postwar German life. While the targets of suspicion and racism shifted from Jews to immigrants of color, the mechanisms of exclusions, othering, and inherited prejudice remain strikingly similar in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. In this vein, the film does not aim for a direct political continuity with the Third Reich, but rather a cultural and emotional one: the lingering ideology of intolerance inherited through families, communities, and socially acceptable behavior.
In the study “Legacies of the Third Reich: Concentration Camps and Out-group Intolerance,” three researchers conclude that proximity to concentration camps created a cognitive dissonance in which German locals adapted their beliefs to their new, hostile environment (Homola et al.). In conforming to these new social standards, a German’s “newly acquired values and beliefs were then transmitted across generations through parental and peer influence—a prominent mechanism for long-term persistence of attitudes identified in the literature on historical legacies” (Homola et al.). This cultural inheritance of xenophobia is represented in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.
In the film, the embeddedness of Nazi ideology is primarily reflected in the protagonist, sixty-year-old Emmi Kurowski, as she develops a relationship with the significantly younger Moroccan guest worker, Ali. Multiple characters’ remarks throughout the film reveal a casual, unconscious internalization of xenophobia. Early in their relationship, Emmi tells Ali, “My father hated all foreigners. He was a party member, Hitler’s party” (14:59), adding, “I was a part of the party,” before asking Ali if he knows who Hitler was (15:00). This conversation demonstrates how fascist ideology was normalized during Emmi’s upbringing and how it continues to shape her worldview, even as she attempts to love someone who is deemed inferior by that ideology. In the scene after they get married, Emmi brings Ali to the infamous Osteria Italiana restaurant, and she remarks that it was “the place where Hitler used to eat from 1929 to ‘33. I’ve always wanted to come here. Hitler, you know?” Ali replies, “Hitler, yes” (40:00-40:12). This moment reveals the uncritical nostalgia many Germans had during the Nazi regime and even after the war.
Fassbinder depicts emotional violence instead of physical violence. Emotional violence refers to the subtle forms of harm—such as verbal dehumanization, social exclusion, and sexual fetishization—that undermine the subject’s dignity and livelihood without the use of physical force. This form of violence is not expressed through bloodshed and weapons but through words and looks: the neighbor who assumes Arabs inherently have “bombs and all that” (56:07), Emmi’s friends who ogle Ali’s muscles like a zoo animal and say they thought foreigners “didn’t wash” (1:18:30), or her son-in-law who calls foreign workers “swine” (27:46). Each of these moments builds an environment saturated with microaggressions that accumulate to a deep mental toll. Ali articulates this degradation plainly: “Arabs not human in Germany” (16:51); “Arab not human” (19:37). Here, emotional violence is the gradual erosion of dignity, or the “soul,” under the weight of everyday racism. This trauma can cut dignity deeper through its casualness.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is therefore less a historical retelling than a cultural x-ray. It reveals how ideologies of purity, hierarchy, and exclusion were deeply internalized, still encrusted in postwar German society. What the Holocaust made grotesque, the postwar period rendered trite. Through Emmi’s internalized xenophobia and Ali’s silenced suffering, Fassbinder holds a mirror to Germany’s failure to confront how its past continues to structure the emotional lives of its citizens and visitors.
Shoah: A Nonviolent, Authentic Documentary
In Shoah (1985), French director Claude Lanzmann explores the Holocaust through interviews with survivors, witnesses, and former Nazis. Unlike traditional historical documentaries, Shoah omits archive footage and instead features personal testimonies and visits to Holocaust-affiliated sites, including concentration camps, ghettos, and mass graves. Lanzmann’s choice to not include archival footage arises from his belief that an event as atypical as the Holocaust comes with inherent restrictions: “[Lanzmann’s] conviction [is] that one must accept the limits of representation in any treatment of the Holocaust [...] Lanzmann argues there are no ordinary film techniques through which the Holocaust can be comprehended and represented” (Brown and Rafter). Lanzmann opts for an alternative cinematic approach—Shoah is slow-moving, honest, and veers from sensationalizing while incorporating memories of violence from survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators.
The nine-and-a-half-hour film is an intimate walk through memory. The length of the film implies that it is not intended to be easily consumable; it is a hyperconscious cultural checkpoint. Viewers must set aside the time to watch it and take the mental energy to understand each experience. Viewers who do not speak French must read the extensive subtitles after a middleman translates each speaker—it is a visible exchange, a painstakingly long dialogue throughout the film.
With survivors speaking in their native languages, the narrative is restored to the voices of those who experienced the Holocaust rather than a fictional retelling. The film includes German, Hebrew, Polish, Yiddish, French, and English. This aspect highlights the cultural diversity within Germany, which can be oversimplified in mainstream Holocaust films with blanket references to “German society.”
Each individual experience is underscored, facilitating a humanistic understanding of each speaker while stressing the collective experience of the Holocaust. Eerily still landscapes are coupled with stories from survivors. Intermittent moments of silence allow for reflection and reminiscence. Individuals express the nuance of their experience and the lingering sentiments they grapple with: survivor’s guilt, statelessness, grief, trauma, and reminiscence.
While unloading corpses from a gas van in Chelmno, Poland, Jewish worker Mordechai Podchlebnik discovered the bodies of his wife and children. Podchlebnik mournfully recounted his survivor’s guilt upon finding them, communicated by a female translator: “He placed his wife in the grave and asked to be killed. The Germans said he was strong enough to work—that he wouldn’t be killed yet” (Lanzmann 22:56–24:04; “Preserved Interviews”).
Another survivor, Simon Srebnik, was deported from the Łódź Ghetto when he was thirteen years old to Chelmno, Poland. Srebnik worked as a Sonderkommando, burying remains of Jews who were exterminated in gas chambers. He remarked in a Shoah outtake that “they wanted to destroy this country’s [Poland’s] character; they wanted to destroy the things that comforted them. And is that why, in the country towns for example, it was common for school teachers and priests to be the first to be deported” (“Preserved Interviews”; “Transcript of the Shoah Interview”). Srebnik’s grief and remembrance are highlighted throughout Shoah, with particular emphasis on cultural elements such as singing “Polish folk tunes and Prussian military songs” while rowing along the Ner River (Lanzmann 3:42–6:37).
Historian Raul Hilberg, the Jewish-Austrian founder of Holocaust studies, states in the film that during his extensive research, he was “relying above all—as much as possible—on experience. Past experience. And this goes not only incidentally for the administrative steps that were taken but also the psychological arguments, even the propaganda.” (Lanzmann 3:01:52). Hilberg set the precedent for Holocaust studies, both in print and on film, as an experience-focused endeavor.
With approximately 185 hours of interviews and outtakes, thirty-five hours of location filming, and twelve years of production, Shoah is the epitome of an effective nonviolent Holocaust film that both adheres to authentic events and avoids exploitation.
Critical Fallibilities and Ethical Concerns
The critical variation of Holocaust films poses separate ethical dilemmas. When these films are viewed solely as Holocaust narratives and not as broader commentaries on, for example, immigration—several questions are raised. Does taking a more creative approach to World War II films alienate viewers from the violent reality of the genocide? Can nonviolent portrayals be considered authentic Holocaust retellings? These dilemmas, along with concerns like misleading viewers, can arise in critical films such as Transit, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Shoah.
Petzold’s Transit can be problematic for the same reason that it is compelling. Its timeless structure offers a universal portrayal of the refugee experience, yet by not grounding the film in a tangible historical period, it risks detaching the viewer from the connection to the Holocaust. The lack of a concrete reference to World War II overlooks the Holocaust’s historical context as an ethnic cleansing of its time. Without this temporal anchor, the film may fail to convey the historical specificity of the genocide, weakening its relevance to Holocaust memory and the current refugee experience.
In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder capitalizes on cinematic voyeurism by zeroing in on how the protagonists are perceived by German society, making the viewer acutely aware of their own role as an observer. While this technique is emotionally engaging, it can blur the line between fiction and reality, leaving the viewer questioning the authenticity of the film’s historical aspects. Fassbinder draws attention to societal prejudice as a spectacle—but in doing so, he risks aestheticizing suffering in a way that complicates the viewer’s ability to critically engage with the film’s historical context. This confusion may distract from the film’s critique of social prejudice, diverting attention from critical reflection of the Holocaust.
Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah raises practical challenges, particularly with its daunting nine-hour runtime and minimal narrative devices. Lanzmann’s omission of reenactments and archival footage can make it difficult for viewers to engage visually, relying instead on each survivors’ testimony. While this authentic approach provides an unfiltered confrontation with Holocaust memory, it can alienate viewers unprepared for such dialogue-heavy storytelling. Even with a lack of violent imagery, the sheer weight of each testimony is more disturbing than fictional or commercial Holocaust portrayals.
Refuting Critical Fallibilities
While these are all notable concerns, film should not be relied upon as a sole means of educating the public about the Holocaust. While film can be an essential tool to raise awareness, its strength lies in the ability to visually depict characters’ experiences and evoke emotional responses from the audience.
In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, the viewer’s heightened self-awareness reinforces the film’s message. Fassbinder’s emphasis on voyeurism, both in how German society observed the protagonists and how modern audiences engage with Holocaust depictions, reveals the human tendency to scrutinize the lives of others. This is especially relevant given the film’s themes of xenophobia and hypersexualization. Thus, the viewer’s alienation is more about instigating self-awareness than creating distance.
In Transit, the timeless structure conveys that immigration, displacement, and statelessness are not confined to a specific historical period. The film uses modern imagery to suggest that ethnic cleansing will remain a future threat if history is disregarded. In this way, the Holocaust serves as a cinematic lens for the universal themes of discrimination and forced migration. The film’s choice to omit a specific time period does not erase the Holocaust’s historical significance; instead, it widens the scope of discussion. Given the Holocaust’s notoriety and global impact, the absence of violence and adherence to historical chronology in the film does not diminish its resonance—it expands it.
While Shoah’s length can be intimidating, its nonlinear structure allows viewers to watch the film at their own pace, according to their attention span and emotional preparation. The lack of reenactments and archival footage challenges the viewer to mentally reconstruct the events, stimulating a particularly impactful viewing experience. While its confrontational nature may not suit every viewer, Shoah offers a rare, survivor-led retelling that can be especially meaningful for those seeking an intimate and unfiltered understanding of the Holocaust.
Nonviolent or creative approaches to creating Holocaust films can be considered a contribution to a vast global memory that reaches beyond cinema. There is significant research, documentation, and non-fiction work that is readily accessible online from public libraries or museums for individuals who desire to further research the realities of the Holocaust. Film is simply one facet of the Holocaust memory.
Conclusion
In sum, film is a crucial aspect of cultural formation, and introspective approaches help contribute to a more nuanced cultural memory. The portrayal of the Holocaust on film requires careful consideration to honor the memory of its victims and to instigate a dialogue with the audience. Drawing from Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, film is a critical medium of cultural formation but not the sole medium to educate subsequent generations. By focusing on psychological trauma, emotional violence, xenophobia, and the refugee experience, critical films like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Christian Petzold’s Transit, and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah contribute to a nuanced, respectful, and astute cultural memory. These films reveal the potential for cinema to engage with cultural memory and historical fact in ways that are both profound and empathetic, reinforcing the value of perceptiveness in the cinematic formation of cultural memory.
Works Cited
Assmann, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique, vol. 65, no. 65, 1995, pp. 125–33, https://doi.org/10.2307/488538.
Bajohr, Frank, and Andrea Löw, editors. The Holocaust and European Societies: Social Processes and Social Dynamics. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016.
Berenbaum, Michael. “Kristallnacht | Definition, Date, Facts, & Significance.” Britannica, 1 August 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Kristallnacht. Accessed 17 September 2024.
Brown, Michelle, and Nicole Rafter. “Genocide Films, Public Criminology, Collective Memory.” The British Journal of Criminology, vol. 53, no. 6, 2013, pp. 1017-1032. Oxford Academic, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azt043.
Caro, Niki, director. The Zookeeper’s Wife. Scion Films, 2017.
Dargis, Manohla. “Transit Review: An Existential Puzzler with Jackboots and Terror.” The New York Times, 28 Feb. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/transit-review.html.
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, director. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Filmverlag der Autoren, 1974.
Fritzsche, Peter. “The Holocaust and the Knowledge of Murder.” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 80, no. 3, 2008, pp. 594-613. doi:10.1086/589592.
Gourevich, Philip. “A Dissent on Schindler's List.” Commentary, 1994, https://www.commentary.org/articles/philip-gourevitch/a-dissent-on-schindlers-listrdquo/. Accessed 17 September 2024.
Herman, Mark, director. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Miramax Films, 2008.
Homola, Johnathan, et al. “Legacies of the Third Reich: Concentration Camps and Out-Group Intolerance.” American Political Science Review, vol. 114, no. 2, 27 Jan. 2020, pp. 573–590, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003055419000832.
Koltun-Fromm, Ken. “Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust (Review).” Biography, vol. 26, no. 1, 2003, pp. 151-153, https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2003.0027.
Lanzmann, Claude, director. Shoah [Holocaust]. New Yorker Films, 1985.
Petzold, Christian, director. Transit. Schramm Film, 2018.
Polanski, Roman, director. The Pianist. Canal+, 2002.
Preserved Interviews from the Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection. 2016. United States Holocaust Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/online/film/docs/shoahstatus.pdf.
Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford University Press EBooks, 13 July 2020. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25356.
Seghers, Anna. Transit. Konstanz: Curt Weller Verlag, 1944.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2004.
Spielberg, Steven, director. Schindler’s List. Universal Pictures, 1993.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Deportations.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deportations. Accessed 17 September 2024.
Transcript of the Shoah interview with Simon Srebnik. 2008. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://collections.ushmm.org/film_findingaids/RG-60.5024_01_trl_en.pdf.
Wiesen, S. J. “The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2007, pp. 303-305. doi:10.1093/hgs/dcm024.
Micah R. Hoffman is a recent magna cum laude UCLA graduate with a B.A. in European Languages and Transcultural Studies with French and Francophone. She is also a journalist, opinion columnist, poet and fiction writer with a background in film studies. Hoffman’s work often explores cultural commentary, political critique, and the intersection of language, identity, and memory.
Picture: “Denkmalgeschütztes Haus in der Schellingstraße 62 mit italienischem Lokal "Osteria Italiana" in Muenchen.” 2013. From Wikimedia Commons. This image is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0.
