The prevalent skepticism against mass or popular culture has done nothing to halt the production of popular portrayals of the murder of two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. New films, novels, histories, memoirs, and even forged testimonials appear year after year, reaching a diverse global audience and also eliciting a common critical response. Whatever the most recent Holocaust-themed novel or film may be, criticisms of it as voyeuristic or exploitative, as inadequate or inaccurate, are practically assured.48 Among the voices in debates about the inability of mainstream culture to address the Shoah appropriately, none has been more influential than that of the recently deceased Elie Wiesel. A survivor of Auschwitz and a Nobel Prize–winning author, Wiesel has been one of the most powerful voices to situate the Holocaust in Western thought as an event whose horror lies beyond our ability to understand yet commands future generations to remember.49 A refrain in Wiesel’s writing and speaking is that the Holocaust can never be fully comprehended by those who did not experience it, that it must forever remain a mystery to those who were not there. So what is the best way to portray an event that cannot be fully understood? In his own writing, Wiesel reflects on this challenge by insisting that his works do not fit neatly into generic categories. Discussing his own book, A Beggar in Jerusalem, Wiesel contends that it “is neither novel nor anti-novel, neither fiction nor autobiography; neither poem nor prose—it is all this together.”50 Wiesel’s motivation for negating any specific generic claim for his work is a response to the epistemological challenge presented by Auschwitz, suggesting that whatever the genre or medium, each effort to convey the Holocaust will necessarily prove inadequate, at best offering only a partial account.
Wiesel’s skepticism about the adequacy of forms of representation to portray the Holocaust extends to popular culture more generally. In his critique of the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust in the New York Times, he makes abundantly clear his mistrust of television as a sufficiently dignified or sophisticated medium for portraying the profundity of the Holocaust:
Untrue, offensive, cheap: as a TV production, the film is an insult to those who perished and to those who survived. In spite of its name, the “docu-drama” is not about what some of us remember as the Holocaust.
Am I too harsh? Too sensitive, perhaps. But then, the film is not sensitive enough. It tries to show what cannot even be imagined. It transforms an ontological event into soap-opera.51
While no portrayal could ever adequately represent an event that “cannot even be imagined,” Wiesel implies there are some media that should be disallowed a priori on the basis of their apparent shallowness. With the television miniseries as emblematic, Wiesel’s critique sees in contemporary mass culture an inability to deal with philosophical problems in any depth. Instead, he concludes, the mass cultural medium of television turns history into entertainment.52 (Wiesel was to take this skepticism into his work for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he was insistent on a presentation of the Holocaust that would resist the public’s desire for a redemptive narrative that invited universal identification with the victims.)
The case of the miniseries Holocaust proves illustrative of the danger in discounting mass cultural productions too easily. Panned by Wiesel and others as melodrama (a critique that was certainly justifiable, but hardly exhaustive), the broadcast in fact marked a pivotal moment in the United States and elsewhere in bringing the Holocaust to the forefront of cultural consciousness. Nowhere was this truer than in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the miniseries was the most widely viewed television event on record up to that time and which, as the German film scholar Anton Kaes has written, “broke through thirty years of silence and left an indelible mark on German discussion of the Holocaust.”53 This discussion included both media and politicians and may have affected voting patterns among the members of the Bundestag.54 In an article from 1980 on the broadcast, the German studies scholar Mark Cory suggests that the miniseries had an impact beyond the living room: “Visitor attendance at Dachau is up sixty percent since the broadcast in Germany, … Paraguay has been persuaded to revoke the citizenship of Josef Mengele, and … the Federal Republic of Germany has abolished the statute of limitations on war crimes scheduled to halt new prosecutions of atrocities after December, 1979.”55 The link Cory points out between tourism to Dachau and the television broadcast is especially telling and suggests that the television show may have initiated a deeper search for truth about the Holocaust and that visits to locations depicted in the television show, however inaccurately, figure as one element in that search for a more authentic encounter with history. Perhaps audiences appreciated the limits of the miniseries as a genre while grasping the import of the event it so imperfectly portrayed, thus begetting a deeper search for more authentic portrayals that might be found on site.
In fact, popular culture has supplied numerous examples of works that have had an enormous impact on Holocaust remembrance for many decades. A well-known case, one that long predates NBC’s television broadcast, also points to a definite link between representations in mainstream culture and tourism. Anne Frank’s diary, and the play based on it, had already achieved international renown in the 1950s, and they continue to be featured as a regular part of school curricula in many countries.56 There have been numerous film versions of Anne’s story, shown on television and in cinemas. The broad appeal of Anne Frank’s diary has much to do with the author’s undaunted optimism, which tends to eclipse the gruesome fate that awaited the young woman at Bergen-Belsen in 1945 (she died of starvation and disease under the murderous conditions the Nazis fostered in the camps). Because of the sense of faith in humanity that the diary expresses, some scholars question the centrality of her diary as an appropriate vehicle for Holocaust remembrance, since it fails to confront the death that awaited millions of victims like her. The Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer writes of Anne Frank and her diary’s legacy, “She is in no way to blame for not knowing about what she could not have known about. But readers are much to blame for accepting and promoting the idea that her Diary is a major Holocaust text and has anything of great consequence to tell us about the atrocities that culminated in the murder of European Jewry.”57 Furthermore, Frank edited her diary for eventual publication as a book, so it is both a document of her experience as well as an aestheticized text. In short, its status as a source of information about the Holocaust is problematic, even if one concedes that Frank and her family were hardly the only Jews to hide from their persecutors and that these stories depict an aspect of the Holocaust experience that merits attention. But as a catalyst for engagement with the Holocaust, there have been few works that have made such an indelible mark on their readers.
The link between Anne Frank’s story and Holocaust tourism is striking: Lines of tourists queue up to see the house in Amsterdam where the young girl hid with her family, making it one of the city’s most heavily visited destinations.58 In what ways do visitors to the house encounter similar questions we might ask about the book, the play, and the films? Do visits to the house distort the reality of the Holocaust by focusing, not on violence and death, but on a doomed effort to survive? Does the museum portray the Holocaust accurately or in a morally responsible way? Does it educate, entertain, or do both? Clearly there are as many responses to these questions as there are tourists at the Anne Frank House. There is good reason to be suspicious of the insights gained by some visitors, but surely some of those who see the exhibit are capable of critical reflection on the Holocaust