'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

impact West Germans in such a dramatic fashion because it employs a narrative strategy
that encourages viewer identification with the Nazis‟ Jewish victims. By participating in
the Jewish victims‟ fear, the viewer was liberated from:
unheimlichen, lähmenden jahrzehntelang unterdrückten Angst, wir seien in
Wahrheit mit den Mördern im Bunde gewesen. Stattdessen erleben wir, wie in
einem Psychodrama in einem therapeutischen Experiment, jede Phase des
Schreckens, den doch vermeintlich wir den anderen angetan hatten, an uns selbst,
spüren ihn, erleiden ihn – und können ihn so endlich im wahrsten Sinn des Wortes
als unser eigenes Trauma auch bearbeiten. (17) 20
While some West German voices such as Märthesheimer‟s and Frenzel‟s praised
Holocaust for its ability to bring home the atrocities of the Nazi regime, others were
shocked and angered by the NBC mini-series. The film was criticized by some as an
obscene and shameless exploitation of suffering for commercial profit. Franz Joseph
Strauss, the CDU-CSU candidate for Chancellor in the 1980 elections, labelled it a
“Geschäftsmacherei” or a “fast-buck operation” (“Endlösung im Abseits” 133). Peter
Schulz-Rohr, director of the station SWR, criticized the telecasting of Holocaust as yet
another “Pflichtübung in Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” 21 one whose emotional energy
stemmed from “die deutsche Neigung zur manchmal fast exhibitionistisch anmutenden
Selbstanklage auf fatale Weise mit dem Absolvieren öffentlicher Bußübungen verbindet”
(quoted in Märthesheimer and Frenzel 48). Edgar Reitz complained that “Die
20 According to Märthesheimer and Frenzel, by participating in the fear of the Jewish victim, the viewer of
Holocaust is freed from “the horrible, paralyzing anxiety that has remained repressed for decades that we in
truth were in league with the murderers. Instead we experience, as in the psycho-drama of a therapeutic
experiment, to feel and suffer every phase of the horror – which we were supposed to have committed
against the other – in ourselves – and thereby are finally able to in the truest sense of the word deal with it
as our own trauma” (17).
21 Schulz-Rohr slated Holocaust as a “compulsory ritual in coming to terms with the past” and claimed that
the emotional energy of the series stemmed from the “German inclination to almost exhibitionistic […]
self-accusation combined in an almost embarrassing fashion with rituals of public penance”
(quoted in Märthesheimer and Frenzel 48).
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