'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

in drei Jahrzehnten Nachkriegsgeschichte nicht gelungen ist: die Deutschen über
die in ihrem Namen begangenen Verbrechen an den Juden so ins Bild zu setzen,
daß Millionen erschüttert wurden. […] Erst seit und dank Holocaust weiß eine
größere Mehrheit der Nation, was sich hinter der schrecklichen und doch so
nichtssagenden Bürokraten-Formel “Endlösung der Judenfrage” verbirgt. Sie
weiß es, weil die US-Filmemacher den Mut hatten, sich von dem lähmenden
Lehrsatz freizumachen […], das der Massenmord undarstellbar sei. (22) 15
Holocaust managed to “bring home the horrors of Nazi rule and to open the
locked doors of memory, conscience, and personal history […] for millions of Germans”
(Elsaesser, New German Cinema 271). But what aspect of Holocaust allowed it to
impact the West German psyche in this fashion? Ian Buruma maintains that Holocaust
was able to penetrate the West German imagination in a way that no film had done before
because it reinforced viewer identification with Jewish suffering. Buruma explains:
The Auschwitz of the courtroom, the chapel, or the museum had been an
abstraction, a metaphor, a bunch of unimaginable statistics, the death of millions
with no name. […] The family of Dr. Joseph Weiss, even in the incarnation of
American soap opera characters, had an identity every German could recognize:
solid, educated, middle-class […] Holocaust proved that metaphors and illusions
were not enough to bring history alive. The Weiss family had to be invented, the
past re-enacted. The soap opera form had such a powerful effect because it was
the opposite of Brechtian alienation: emotions are boosted, identification is
reinforced. […] Yet it is precisely that kind of identification that much postwar
German art and literature shied away from. Identification with the Jewish victims
could not be done with real conviction; identification with the persecutors – that
is, with your parents, your grandparents, or yourself – was too painful. (90)
Hence, Buruma believes that the soap-opera format of the mini-series encouraged
West German viewers to empathize with Jewish victims of the “Third Reich,”
15 “An American television series, made in a trivial style, produced more for commercial than for moral
reasons, more for entertainment than for enlightenment, accomplished what hundreds of books, plays,
films, and television programs, thousands of documents and all the concentration camp trials have failed to
do since the end of the war: to inform Germans about the crimes against Jews committed in their name so
that millions were emotionally touched and moved […] Only since, and thanks to, Holocaust does a large
majority of the nation know what was hidden behind the seemingly innocuous bureaucratic phrase, “the
final solution.” They know it because U.S. filmmakers had the courage to free themselves from the
crippling precept that it is impossible to portray mass murder” (Höhne quoted in Kaes 30).
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