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Summary Readings Media, Memory and Mass Violence (Media and Culture)
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- Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
Summary Readings Media, Memory and Mass Violence (Media and Culture)
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America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: The “Object” of RememberingAlison Landsberg
Spielberg’s 1993 Schindler’s List ultimately stages—and acts as an instantiation of—the possibility of
a responsible mass cultural transmission of memory. To preserve the Holocaust in history, it must first
be preserved in memory. The explosion of discourse about the Holocaust seems connected to the
survivor’s life span, to “living memory”. However, the Holocaust represents a limit to the possibility
of representation and testimony.
In this chapter, Landsberg explores the way that several mass cultural texts and institutions have
begun to imagine strategies to transmit memories and to create the rituals and practices necessary for
transmitting memory in the face of obstacles, such as the limit to the possibility of representation and
testimony. Moreover, she argues that the mass media have begun to construct sites—transferential
spaces—in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships to events through which
they themselves did not live.
The Popular Emergence of “The Holocaust” in America
The Holocaust’s “popularity”—whether a product or the cause of its mass mediation—signals that it
has gained an unprecedented significance in America for Jew and non-Jew alike.
While the fear of forgetting still dominates the discourse, the passage of time has made the Holocaust
more visible, more representable, and fortunately, not forgotten.
The emergence of the Holocaust as a significant American memory was by no means inevitable but
has a complex and contingent history of its own.
In May 1975—thirty years after Germany’s surrender—Newsweek published its first story on the
Holocaust. Even though perhaps treated as a “back-page story,” the story recognized the Holocaust
not just as a Jewish issue but as one with significance for the world at large.
The imperative to remember the Holocaust has been especially powerful in America. Novick explains
why the Holocaust emerged so forcefully in American culture during the 1970s. He argues that a
series of events, in particular the Yom Kippur War of 1973, made American Jews fear for the survival
of Israel. At the same time, a commitment to ethnic identity was gaining prominence in mainstream
American culture, replacing the integrationist ethos of the postwar years.
Landsberg disagrees with the valence of Novick’s compelling claim that the Holocaust in some
measure stands in for unspeakable traumas closer to home. The Holocaust may very well have
functioned in American life as a screen memory. But it has also allowed the nation to develop a
vocabulary with which to engage in discussion about collective trauma.
In this chapter, Landsberg contends that developing a popular discourse about prejudice and
dispossession does not constitute an evasion of but, rather, a first step toward being able to redress the
historical crimes for which America is directly responsible.
Tears from a Glass Eye
Spiegelman’s comic book Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1973), subtitled My Father Bleeds History, tells
both the story of Artie’s current relationship with his father, Vladek, in Queens, New York, and the
story of his parents’ experiences during the Nazi occupation, in Poland.
Toward the end of the first volume, Artie and Vladek are taking a walk when Vladek bends down
beside a trash can and picks up an old piece of telephone wire as it is hard to find and the little wires
inside are “good for tying things”. The recirculation of the wire becomes a metaphor for the
recirculation of the Holocaust through a different medium—the comic book—indicating that when
,one puts the story into a different medium, new insights, new possibilities, emerge. More broadly, the
recirculation of the wire allegorizes the potential usefulness of the Holocaust in America as a way of
thinking about the recirculation of “waste” for productive ends. In other words, that the Holocaust
might be a ground for politics—or even for the production of subjectivity—presumes the potential
usefulness of even the darkest and seemingly most irredeemable memories of the past. The
recirculation of the Holocaust in comic book form also raises questions about the “appropriateness” or
adequacy of the various media through which its stories are currently being told.
In a discussion of Holocaust representations, Hartman argues that “most of the time, transmissibility
and truth move in opposite directions”. In his paradigm, realism tends to fall on the side of
transmissibility, and more abstract, elusive modes of representation fall on the side of truth. By telling
a Holocaust story in a popular and not high-art medium, Spiegelman challenges Hartman’s claim. Not
only does Hartman’s dichotomy tend to rearticulate a kind of high/low distinction in which mass
culture—precisely because of its power to transmit—is relegated to the “low” end, but it also takes the
Holocaust outside the realm of representability.
Early on in the first volume, Vladek describes a memory that is so powerful that it makes his glass eye
cry. His glass eye functions as a metaphor for Artie’s eyes—for the eyes of those who did not see at
firsthand what happened during the Holocaust. The story is real and palpable enough to move to tears
even an eye that did not witness what happened.
Maus problematizes the illusion of immediacy that surrounds testimony. In what seems to be an
inauthentic or antirealist gesture, Spiegelman has chosen to represent Artie and his father not merely
as cartoon figures but as cartoons of animal figures. Landsberg claims that artificial parameters do not
make the affective experiences less real.
At the end of the first volume, Vladek confesses to Artie that he destroyed his wife Anja’s diaries, her
firsthand account of the war. Calling Vladek a murderer, Artie makes an analogy—or constructs a
metonymy—between Anja’s memory and her body. This scene points up the vulnerability and
contingency of even firsthand accounts. The contingency of “living memory” makes necessary new
technologies of memory, technologies that, despite their artificiality and manipulability, interface with
a person’s subjectivity and that still can, like the glass eye, produce real tears.
The ways in which the Holocaust has disfigured Vladek become most obvious in the narrative
present. In the second chapter of the comic book, Vladek accidently knocks over the pills he had just
counted. This scene testifies to the way in which the Holocaust has fundamentally altered Vladek’s
relationship to objects. The relationship to objects that the Holocaust forced on Vladek is part of a
mimetics of absence that bespeaks the loss of people, of bodies, of familial connections. We might say
that for the second generation, and even more for the third, the only access to the Holocaust is through
the piles of objects left behind, which are the legacy of the Holocaust. The piles are central to what
Landsberg has labeled an emerging iconography of the Holocaust. In this iconography, piles stand in
for the absent bodies. Perhaps Vladek’s piles of pills point to a death world in which only objects
remain. Perhaps his very attachment to things is meant to say something about the plight of the
Holocaust survivor, about the way he or she verifies existence. If the experience of the Holocaust is
precisely the experience of the loss or absence of people, then the objects stand in for this absence.
What this pill-counting scene implies, however, is that like the reader’s, Vladek’s relationship to the
Holocaust—his ability literally to “re-count”—is mediated through the objects remaining here in the
present.
A practice of memory then, relies—metaphorically and metonymically—on the objects that remain.
While the objects over which Vladek obsesses are not “authentic” Holocaust objects, they evoke the
horror and violence of the event. While the pills and the glass eye are not authentic, did not “see” the
Holocaust in a literal way and are even at a great temporal and spatial remove from the event, they
become nevertheless embedded in the logic and signification of the Holocaust.
,This pill-counting scene is instructive in other ways as well. When Vladek spills his pills, they
literally burst through the comic cell’s frame into our space, eliminating the distinction between the
contained world of the story and our own reading space. On the back cover of the comic book is a
color map of World War II Poland and in the southeast corner of Poland, Spiegelman has
superimposed a rectangular inset of a map of Rego Park, New York. Visually, these two maps are at
odds with each other, representing the uncomfortable relationship of present and past in Vladek’s
world. The detail Landsberg considers here is the black-and-white image of Vladek and Artie, who do
not appear to be in any of these places, nor are they in Rego Park. Because of the three-dimensional
object against a two-dimensional map, it appears to pop out of the picture frame. The memory
transmission—the way that Artie comes to inhabit his father’s story—takes place outside either
locale, in a space between them that Landsberg calls transferential space. This space is much like the
space opened up between reader and text by the spilling of the pills.
A transferential space becomes crucial to the transmission of memory in the case of the Holocaust, in
which the very possibility of something like “organic memory” has been destroyed. The kinds of
ruptures that the Holocaust literalizes are thus particularly well addressed by Foucault’s notion of
genealogy. Foucault states that the task of genealogy is “to expose a body totally imprinted by history
and the process of history’s destruction of the body”. He concludes that “the purpose of history,
guided by genealogy, is to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us”.
For the Holocaust survivors, the ruptures of family life and the tears in the fabric of existence
necessitate a form of genealogy that uses discontinuity as its premise. While Vladek’s memories are
indeed Artie’s heritage, the transferential space created by the comic book makes possible this
transmission of memory even to those who lay no direct claim to a Holocaust past.
Memory’s Public Spheres
The release of Schindler’s List in 1993, which coincided with the opening of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, reinforced the prominence of the Holocaust in American cultural
memory. With the release of Schindler’s List and its overwhelming success, the Holocaust had
indisputably become a highly visible public issue.
The impact of Schindler’s List was due to both its publicity—a public sphere developed around it—
and its visual power, its ability to elicit deep identification on the part of its spectators. The notion of
the public sphere set forth by Negt and Kluge, as Hansen claims, accounts for the ways in which
social experience “is articulated and becomes relevant—in other words, by which mechanisms and
media, in whose interest, and to what effect a ‘social horizon of experience’ is constituted”. Mass
culture has the ability to construct the “topographies,” or “collective frameworks,” that people who
inhabit different geographical spaces, practices, and beliefs might share. These public spheres
generated by the mass media also make ideas and images widely available.
As Santer points out in regard to German memory, a public sphere is essential to collective mourning:
“mourning, if it is not to become entrapped in the desperate inertia of a double bind, if it is to become
integrated into a history, must be witnessed”. For mourning as a large-scale cultural act to take place,
a forum, or public sphere, becomes necessary. When a film like Schindler’s List saturates a variety of
media, it becomes more than a mere movie. It becomes part of a collective cultural archive, part of a
“social horizon of experience”. It generates a public sphere that exists within, and yet extends beyond,
the movie theater.
The power of the mass media to construct public spheres by disseminating the same images to people
who share nothing of their lived experience underlies its promise of open access to all. Spiegelman
denounces Schindler’s List as a reductive, oversimplified version of the Holocaust, which in some
ways it is. However, both Spiegelman and Spielberg attempt to integrate the Holocaust into the
context of lived daily experience.
, The film opened up new discursive possibilities. Instead of becoming the definitive film on the
Holocaust, as it had initially been touted by some critics, it spawned much more discourse about the
Holocaust, giving birth to more films and more books. The ability of Schindler’s List to generate a
public sphere must be contextualized against the backdrop of the television miniseries Holocaust,
which was aired in Germany in January 1979. The miniseries became the springboard for dialogue
about a taboo subject.
Not only did its visibility generate a public sphere in which memorializing in West Germany could
take place, but it provoked discussion about the pedagogical value of affect and identification in
teaching about the Holocaust. Those like Huyssen who were sanguine about the power of affective
identification read the ensuing “emotional explosion” as an indication of “how desperately the
Germans needed identification in order to break down the mechanism of denial and suppression”.
Huyssen argues that identification with the Weiss family in the Holocaust miniseries as Jews came
only after identification with them as a family and that “identification with the Weiss family was
further enhanced by the medium and its reception context” in the domestic sphere. And it was
precisely such identification, according to Huyssen, that enabled for the first time a kind of collective
mourning.
Spielberg’s “realist” film, which, as Hansen observes, draws heavily on the conventions of the
“Classical Hollywood Cinema” and is quite different from the majority of the Holocaust texts that
attempt to keep the spectator at a critical distance. Schindler’s List aims to draw in its spectators,
offering a point of entry into the Holocaust. For its effect, it relies on proximity and the possibility of
identification. Many Holocaust films, particularly documentaries, have opted for distance and
objectivity in order to strengthen their claims about the images they depict. But such intellectual and
cognitive distance inevitably makes the story an impersonal one. Such films are less able to elicit
identification across ethnic lines. In Schindler’s List, however, the opposite is true. The film offers its
viewers Jewish bodies with which they might actually have a mimetic relationship, bodies that are not
always already starved and deformed but that are recognizable, even familiar. Because identification
comes before the dehumanization, audiences are led to experience the disenfranchisement and to
understand the dispossession more viscerally. Landsberg argues that cinematic identification might be
crucial to challenging the spectator’s fundamental assumptions.
Spiegelman’s other critique about Schindler’s List is that “there were not any Jews in the picture,”
which presumes that spectators identify more strongly and consistently with the main character. He
argues that “Schindler’s List refracts the Holocaust through the central image of a righteous gentile in
a world of Jewish bit players and extras”. But the fact that the story is organized around a German
does not make the scenes in which Jews are brutally mistreated any less affecting.
The physical, affective experience of Schindler’s List is not elation or triumph. As many critics have
observed, visual representation is crucial to rendering an event thinkable. It is the presence itself of
these images that permits a kind of affective identification with them. Schindler’s List’s ability to
engage and enthrall audiences depends on the power of images and the visual. Spiegelman’s
complaint that the film focuses on a gentile rather than a Jew is misguided for another reason as well.
The film portrays thematically the identification and transformation in vision that it intends its
viewers to experience as well. It strives to make identification possible across racial and ethnic lines.
While identification is a powerful device for eliciting emotion and empathy, the historical
circumstances of the Holocaust limit the possibility of identification. The closing scene of Schindler’s
List, in which the film actors dissolve into the real Schindler Jews in Israel, introduces the possibility
of transmitting memory from real survivor to both actor and spectator. The transmission is meant to
take place across ethnic lines, across chasms of difference. Still, the film remains tied to a logic of
presence, signaled by the need for the real body of the survivor to guarantee or anchor the memory
that the film has constructed.
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