'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

personalized in the fictitious characters of the Weiss family. The accessibility of
Holocaust sets this mini-series apart from much post-war German film which discourages
identification (and thus is meant to encourage critical reflection) through Brechtian
alienation techniques. 16
Peter Märthesheimer, responsible for acquiring Holocaust for West German
television and also Fassbinder‟s scriptwriter on Die Ehe der Maria Braun, seems to
concur with Buruma that it was the psychological mechanism of identification around
which the power of the program centred. This artistic technique engendered the
unexpected and tremendous response because it addressed West Germans‟ collective
“inability to mourn” (Märthesheimer and Frenzel 12). 17 Märthesheimer and Frenzel
claim that although most Germans living during the Hitler regime did not actively
participate in the “Final Solution,” the lack of resistance and the silence of the majority
give credibility to the post-war concept of collective guilt. When confronted with the
horrible reality of the concentration camps, most Germans reacted to the charge of
collective guilt with “individueller Abwehr: mit Blindheit, mit Schuldvorwurf, mit
Verstocktheit” (12). 18 When, after the war, the Allies expected individual Germans to
accept some political responsibility for the crimes committed during the Nazi regime,
Märthesheimer maintains that many Germans repressed their guilt: “1945 legten diese
Menschen ihre Seele auf Eis” (13). 19 They go on to suggest that Holocaust was able to
16 Brechtian alienation techniques are designed to produce an “alienation effect.” An encyclopedia of
acting terms describes the alienation effect as “The purposeful alienation of an audience from the emotional
and sentimental aspects of a drama. This effect is desired in order to keep the audience aware of the larger
social issues being presented in the work” (Osnes and Gill 9).
17 The term “inability to mourn” was coined by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich and it was also the
title of their book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn) which was first published in 1958.
18 Germans reacted to the charge of collective guilt with “individual defenses: blindness, imputation of
wrong, lack of penitence” (Märthesheimer and Frenzel 12).
19 “In 1945 these people put their soul on ice” (Märthesheimer and Frenzel 13).
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