Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Elie Wiesel
- Preface
- Introduction
- I Finding an Appropriate Language
- II Narrative Strategies
- III Responses to Nazi Atrocity
- 9 Political Resistance
- 10 The Ambiguity of Identity
- 11 The New German Guilt
- IV Shaping Reality
- V Third Edition Update
- Annotated Filmography (Third Edition)
- Filmography (Second Edition)
- Notes
- Bibliography (Second Edition)
- Bibliography (Third Edition)
- Relevant Websites
- Index
10 - The Ambiguity of Identity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Elie Wiesel
- Preface
- Introduction
- I Finding an Appropriate Language
- II Narrative Strategies
- III Responses to Nazi Atrocity
- 9 Political Resistance
- 10 The Ambiguity of Identity
- 11 The New German Guilt
- IV Shaping Reality
- V Third Edition Update
- Annotated Filmography (Third Edition)
- Filmography (Second Edition)
- Notes
- Bibliography (Second Edition)
- Bibliography (Third Edition)
- Relevant Websites
- Index
Summary
George Steiner has argued persuasively that the context of the Holocaust goes beyond politics to metaphysics – that the deep anti-Semitic loathing built up in the social subconscious was rooted in Judaism's “claims of the ideal,” to use Ibsen's phrase. Given that “some political scientists put at roughly 80 percent the proportion of Jews in the ideological development of messianic socialism and communism,” “when it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation – albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware – of its own best hopes.… The secular, materialist, warlike community of modern Europe sought to extirpate from itself … the carriers of the ideal.” Steiner sees the Holocaust not as a political or socioeconomic phenomenon, but as the enactment of a suicidal impulse in Western civilization:
It was an attempt to level the future – or, more precisely, to make history commensurate with the natural savageries, intellectual torpor, and material instincts of un extended man. Using theological metaphors, and there is no need to apologize for them in an essay on culture, the holocaust may be said to mark a second Fall. We can interpret it as a voluntary exit from the Garden and a programmatic attempt to burn the Garden behind us. Lest its remembrance continue to infect the health of barbarism with debilitating dreams or with remorse.
This suicidal impulse can be seen in films that focus on individual responsibility vis-á-vis Nazi domination – such as The Shop on Main Street, Mr. Klein, General della Rovere, and The Man in the Glass Booth.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Indelible ShadowsFilm and the Holocaust, pp. 159 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002