Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:27:52.121Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Stanley Kubrick's Magic Mountain: Fiction as History in The Shining

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Geoffrey Cocks Open the ORCID record for Geoffrey Cocks [Opens in a new window]
Geoffrey Cocks*
Affiliation:
Albion College (emeritus), Carmel, CA, USA Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980) can be read as a central European imaginary retelling Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). The film constructs a dark meditation on the human condition not only through its formal and thematic focus on Mann's novel but also through the lens of works by numerous other central European artists and scholars. Consequently, The Shining presents historical comprehension as the product not only of knowledge, but of experience, memory, and artistic representation/reception. Just as The Magic Mountain addressed itself to the crisis of European civilization that had culminated in the First World War, a deep-laid historical subtext in The Shining concerns the more desperate crisis facing the West in the wake of the Second World War. At its dark center, Kubrick's horror film reflects its creator's and its era's struggle with the reality and representation of the Holocaust.

Keywords

cinemaStanley Kubrickcentral European cultureJewsHolocaust
Type
Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 528 - 550
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Agnieska Gajewska, Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanislaw Lem, trans. Katarzyna Gucio (London: Routledge, 2022), 41; Roundtable, AHR, “History Meets Fiction in the Indian Ocean,” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 1521–65Google Scholar; Kessler-Harris, Alice, “Why Biography?” American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 625–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Abrams, Nathan, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

3 Ship Arrivals, Reel T-504, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa; Elias Kubrik, Petition for Naturalization, July 12, 1910, New York City Hall of Records.

4 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 194.

5 Krzysztof Kieslowski, Decalogue: The Ten Commandments, trans. Phil Cavendish and Susannah Bluh (London: Faber, 1991), vii.

6 Andrin Albrecht, “Playing in the Snow: The Racial Self-Critique in the Altered Ending of Kubrick's The Shining,” September 3, 2021, University of Adelaide Online Seminar.

7 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 162.

8 SK/15/1/2-3, SK/15/3/4/8, Stanley Kubrick Archive (SK), University of the Arts, London; McAvoy, Catriona, “The Uncanny, the Gothic, and the Loner: Intertextuality in the Adaptation Process of The Shining,” Adaptation 8, no. 3 (2015): 353CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Magda Romanska, The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and Holocaust in ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’ (London: Anthem Press, 2012).

9 Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, trans. Cecilia Wieniewska (New York: Penguin, 1977), 59, 106, 107, 147. Nazi camp guards habitually referred to the bodies of Jews, dead or alive, as Figuren (“figures, dolls, puppets”); see Gajewska, Holocaust and the Stars, 51, 53.

10 Samuel Wigley, “Producing the Shining: Jan Harlan on Kubrick,” June 1, 2015 (www2.bfi.org.uk/news).

11 Donahue, Neil, “Unjustly Framed: Politics and Art in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari,” German Politics and Society 32 (Summer 1994): 76–88Google Scholar.

12 Robert Heynen, “Cultures of Confinement: Health, Illness, and Madness in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Magic Mountain,” Modernism/modernity 25, no. 4 (2018): 703.

13 Fredric Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” in Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 2007), 112–34; R. Barton Palmer, “The Shining and Anti-Nostalgia: Postmodern Notions of History,” in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, ed. Jerold J. Abrams (London: Ballantine, 2007), 201–18; Oliver Schmidtke and Frank Schröder, Familiales Scheitern. Eine familien- und kultursoziologische Analyse von Stanley Kubricks “The Shining” (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2012), 29, 69, 123, 127, 248, 251, 305, 351, 355, 446, 453.

14 SK/15/4/1.

15 SK/1/1 113.

16 SK/1/1 63, SK/15/1/2-3.

17 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 192, 196.

18 Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, trans. Gilbert Adair and Robert Bonnono (New York: Faber, 2001), 294.

19 [Stanley Kubrick,] “The Shining,” n.d., 43, 44, 68, The James Boyle Collection 135/S, Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; HR/B/23/1-2, Diane Johnson Archive, Harry Ransom Center (HR), University of Texas Austin; McAvoy, “The Uncanny, the Gothic, and the Loner,” 349, 353.

20 HR/B/23/1-2; McAvoy, “The Uncanny, the Gothic, and the Loner,” 354.

21 Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 200.

22 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1992), 118.

23 SK/15/1/3.

24 Justin Bozung, “Gordon Stainforth,” in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film, ed. Daniel Olson (Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2015), 655.

25 Diane Johnson, personal communication, September 15, 2019.

26 Christine Pritzlaff, Zahlensymbolik bei Thomas Mann (Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1972), 27–42.

27 Mark J. Madigan, “‘Orders from the House’: Kubrick's The Shining and Kafka's ‘The Metamorphosis,’” in The Shining Reader, ed. Tony Magistrale (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont, 1991), 193–201.

28 Bozung, “Gordon Stainforth,” 655; Sergei Eisenstein, “Color and Meaning,” in The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1942), 115, 137; Anthony Frewin, “Stanley Kubrick: Writers, Writing, and Reading,” The Stanley Kubrick Archives, ed. Alison Castle (Cologne: Taschen, 2005), 518.

29 Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” 112.

30 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995), 463, 487; emphasis in original.

31 Mann, The Magic Mountain, 471, 475.

32 Tony Magistrale, “Sutured Time: History and Kubrick's The Shining,” in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, 151–66.

33 Greenberg, Valerie D., “Literature and the Discourse of Science: The Paradigm of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain,” South Atlantic Review 50, no. 1 (1985): 59–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Löwy, Michael, “Naphta or Settembrini? Lukács and Romantic Anticapitalism,” New German Critique 42 (1987): 17–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seidlin, Oskar, “The Lofty Game of Numbers: The Mynheer Peeperkorn Episode in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg,” PMLA 86, no. 5 (1971): 937n15Google Scholar.

35 Jerold J. Abrams, “Nietzsche's Overman as Posthuman Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, ed. Jerold J. Abrams (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 201–18.

36 Kevin Donnelly, The Shining (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 72.

37 Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, 147, 160.

38 Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 192–93.

39 Carola Sachse, ed., “Mitteleuropa” und ‘Sudosteuropa” als Planungsraum. Wirtschafts- und Kulturpolitische Expertisen im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010).

40 Frewin, “Stanley Kubrick,” 517.

41 Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

42 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 201–5; Nelson, Kubrick, 218–19.

43 Eisenstein, “Color and Meaning,” 126, 131, 136, 152.

44 Jennifer Bass, personal communication, March 12, 2021; Eisenstein, “Color and Meaning,” 135–36; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961), 5, 7, 29, 145, 226, 231, 274, 279, 374, 382, 405, 434, 444, 455, 463, 480, 481, 533–34, 538, 584.

45 Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart and David A. Frank, Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 3–4, 140–46.

46 Look magazine, May 25, 1948, 67; Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Fine, 1997), 445. At the Nazi camps using carbon monoxide gas chambers the operation took much longer and the bodies were “thrown out blue, wet with sweat and urine, the legs covered with excrement and menstrual blood”; see Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 627–28.

47 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 565.

48 Steven Allen Carr, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

49 “Five Graves to Cairo Release Dialogue Script, April 30, 1943,” Reel 5a, 6, Paramount Pictures Production Records, 67.f-6, 6/02878, Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration Records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

50 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 31.

51 Matthew Baigell, Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 17–18.

52 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 41.

53 Christiane Kubrick, personal communication, November 20, 2002; The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem (yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?).

54 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 262–65. Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita (1955) employs 42 as a sign of malevolent fate as does Kubrick's Lolita. The Sears Catalog (Fall Winter 1977, 381) shows the style jersey Danny wears available with the number 22, 32, or 42.

55 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 118–41.

56 Probezhna Jewish Community, Births, Urzad Stanu Cywilnego w m. st. Warszawie Archiwum, Warsaw.

57 Roza Rut Dobrocka, Beglaubigte Übersetzung, February 4, 1965, 208 AR-Z 239/59, Volume 2, 718, and Benio Bazar, Verhandlungsniederschrift, October 31, 1966, 208 AR-Z 239/59, Volume 9, 3345, Bundesarchiv (BA), Ludwigsburg; Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 148, 312–17, 329–30.

58 Richard Adams and Stanley Kubrick, “The German Lieutenant: An Original Screenplay” (1956–1957), Box 22, Folder 2, Department of Defense Film Collection, Special Collections, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

59 Dan Rissner to John Calley, Warner Bros. Productions Ltd., December 17, 1970; Ulivieri, Filippo, “Waiting for a Miracle: A Survey of Stanley Kubrick's Unrealized Projects,” Cinergie 12 (2017)Google Scholar, note 105.

60 Rolf Thissen, Stanley Kubrick. Der Regisseur als Architekt (Munich: Heyne, 1999), 262.

61 Frank Noack, Veit Harlan: The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 346; Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 59.

62 I. B. Van Creveld, personal communication, November 10, 2000; NB 90834, 90835, 90837, Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague.

63 EA 3/150 Bü 3188, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; 014 4/542-546, NIOD Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust- en Genocide Studies, Amsterdam; 57a Nr. 959, 235 Nr. 1345, Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe; D 180/17 Nr. 546, 655, Staatsarchiv Freiburg; R 9361-IX KARTEI/13551525, BA, Berlin-Lichterfelde; Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 227–28, 247, 252, 254–55, 262–63, 321–22, 331–54; Christiane Kubrick, personal communication, November 20, 2002.

64 Earl R. Beck, Under the Bombs: The German Home Front, 1942–1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 74.

65 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 58, 59.

66 Untitled script, n.d., assorted projects, SK.

67 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer as Told by a Friend, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Random House, 1997), chap. 13; Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 203.

68 Alexander Walker, Stanley Kubrick Directs (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 14; Catriona McAvoy, “Kubrick's Reading and Research,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, ed. Nathan Abrams and Ian Hunter (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 317–26; Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 203.

69 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 105–11, 116.

70 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 105; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963); Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960).

71 SK/11/2/7.

72 Stanley Kubrick to Harold Pinter, June 11, 1982, MS 88880/6/36, Harold Pinter Archive, Manuscript Collections, British Library, London; Michael Herr, Kubrick (New York: Grove, 2000), 10; Raul Hilberg, personal communications, June 4, 1991, April 15, 1999; Jan Harlan, personal communications, December 9, 2002, October 6, 2003.

73 Frewin, “Stanley Kubrick,” 514.

74 Holian, Anna, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Jewish Children and the Holocaust in Fred Zinnemann's The Search,” Film & History 31, no. 2 (2019): 116–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler's Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil, trans. Haim Watzmann (London: Continuum, 2002); Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 206.

76 Jacobs, Steven, “Hitchcock, the Holocaust, and the Long Take,” arcadia 45, no. 4 (2010): 269Google Scholar.

77 James Schmidt, “Mephistopheles in Hollywood: Adorno, Mann, and Schoenberg,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 148–80; Blumenfeld, Harold, “‘Ad Vocem’ Adorno,” The Musical Quarterly 75, no. 4 (1991): 263–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christine Lee Gengaro, “Kubrick and Music,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, 160, 163–64.

78 Eva-Maria Gehler, Weibliche NS-Affinitäten: Grade der Systemaffinität von Schriftstellerinnen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010), 148–211; David Cooper, Béla Bartόk (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 277–83, 309–44.

79 Roger Luckhurst, The Shining (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 75.

80 Florian Scheding, “Where Is the Holocaust in All This? György Ligeti and the Dialectics of Life and Work,” in Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture, ed. Tina Frühauf and Lily Hirsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 205–21.

81 Andy Battaglia, “The Passion of Krzysztof Penderecki,” August 11, 2010 (residentadvisor.net/features/1234).

82 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 566.

83 Bill Blakemore, “Kubrick's Shining Secret: Film's Hidden Horror Is the Murder of the Indian,” Washington Post, July 12, 1987; HR/B/23/1-2; McAvoy, “The Uncanny, the Gothic, and the Loner,” 353–54.

84 Helmut Bley, Namibia under German Rule, 1894–1914 (Windhoek: Namibia Scientific Society, 1971); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 5–90; Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 31, 194–95.

85 Metz, Walter, “A Very Notorious Ranch, Indeed: Fritz Lang, Allegory, and the Holocaust,” Journal of Contemporary Thought 13 (2001): 71–96Google Scholar.

86 Nabokov's Lolita and Kubrick's adaptation of it both reference mass deportation by train; see Pitzer, Andrea, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Pegasus, 2013), 243–46, 248–51Google Scholar.

87 De Toth's None Shall Escape (1944), whose Nazi villain is named Wilhelm Grimm and which Kubrick surely saw at Loew's Paradise Theater in April 1944, was—by showing Nazis machine-gunning a trainload of Jews—the first Hollywood film to depict the mass murder of Jews in Poland. Kubrick might also have been familiar with de Toth's horror film, House of Wax (1953), which contains dark allusions to Germany while recalling Schulz's uncanny waxwork figures—like their human spectators—as “tortured matter which does not know what it is and why it is” (Schultz, Street of Crocodiles, 64); see Andre de Toth, Fragments: Portraits from the Inside (London: Faber, 1994), 207–19, 250–64, 309–15, 355–56.

88 Geoffrey Cocks, “Kubrick and the Holocaust,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, 219–21.

89 Abrams (Stanley Kubrick, 209) points out that the colors of the Marlboro cigarette pack also flanking the typewriter are those of the Nazi flag. Advertising for the brand featured the Western cowboy “Marlboro Man.”

90 Gajewska, Holocaust and the Stars, 21–24, 41.

91 Fenwick, James, Stanley Kubrick Produces (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 179–81, 183–90, 196, 198–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ulivieri, “Waiting for a Miracle”; Christiane Kubrick, personal communication, November 20, 2002; Marat Grinberg, “Kubrick and Jewishness,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, 208–10.