Television and the Holocaust

By LANCE MORROW

Elie Wiesel hated it. NBC'S 9 1/2-hour docudrama, Holocaust, so offended the author and survivor (Buchenwald, Auschwitz) that he wrote: "Untrue, offensive, cheap: as a TV production, the film is an insult to those who perished and to those who survived. What you have seen on the screen is not what happened there." But Wiesel has written almost obsessively about the Holocaust; he has a kind of morally proprietary passion about it. He is a keeper of the flame, a visionary who sees the past as intensely as a prophet sees the future. Many more Americans seemed to agree with Mayer Fruchter, a New York cab driver who was imprisoned at Buchenwald at the same time as Wiesel. "He is wrong," Fruchter insisted after last week's series about a German Jewish family and the Final Solution. "I mean, he is right; it can't be shown. But it's better to show close to it than not to show it at all. Already people are saying it didn't happen, they don't believe it. Our children--my twelve-year-old daughter--they don't know. The aim of this showing is not to cry for what happened, nor ask for pity or sympathy, but only this: to look out for it anywhere in the world, so it won't happen again."

The ratings after the four-night documentary fiction were impressive. NBC estimated that at one point or another, some 120 million Americans tuned in Holocaust. It scored 14 points lower than the alltime ratings winner, last year's Roots series, but still ranked second in the category of "entertainment." Author Gerald Green's novel, based on his script, is now in its tenth printing and has sold more than 1 million copies.

Holocaust came at a moment of unusual stirring of old memories, fears and other passions among American Jews. It played last week just before Passover, timed to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In Skokie, Ill., 7,000 who survived Auschwitz, Belsen and Treblinka awaited the promised march by American Nazis clothed in brown shirts and the First Amendment. Some Christian churches around the U.S. distributed yellow Stars of David for members to wear on their breasts; the gesture, sweet enough perhaps, smacked of moral self-congratulation. Displays like that are impressive only when they are risky, as in Holland in 1942.

An evil past and a skittish future gusted around together. Israeli Premier Menachem Begin was due in the U.S. to raise money. What he needed more than that was moral capital to replace what his government has lost in recent months among American Jews and gentiles alike. Television's Holocaust may have done something to restore that fund of good will toward Israel. The past, Israel's raison d'etre and validation, the pedigree of its suffering, came crowding back in the series' deadly lists: Kristallnacht, Eichmann, Himmler, Babi Yar, Sobibor, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz--or, rather, television's elaborately imagined approximations of all of them. "It is only a story," the network's ads proclaimed, "but it really happened."

Well, did it happen quite that way? The series accomplished much, mainly in transmitting information about events that must never be forgotten. But it raised many questions, both trivial and profound. Scriptwriter Green, an intelligent and indefatigable craftsman, author of The Last Angry Man, designed an epic that follows a bourgeois German Jewish doctor, Josef Weiss, and his family through the stricken, incomprehensible years 1935 to 1945. Dr. and Mrs. Weiss die at Auschwitz, as does their oldest son, Karl. A daughter, Anna, becomes autistic after her rape by drunken Nazis; in a procession of the retarded and aged, she is gassed at the euthanasia center at Hadamar. A younger son, Rudi, joins Jewish partisans fighting in the Ukraine; he survives to depart for Palestine after the war--the rebirth of European Jewry. Parallel runs the story of Erik Dorf, a prissily murderous family man and SS officer around whom nearly all the horrific deeds of genocide have been densely crowded. In these characters Green embodies the story of history's most evil episode.

In the presentation of Holocaust there was a lot of banality quite different from the "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt described in her controversial 1963 book on Adolf Eichmann. The commercials, for example, were ridiculous and outrageous intrusions. Viewers drawn back into the most painful darknesses of the century would suddenly, repeatedly, find themselves jolted into clusters of ads that seemed almost deliberately designed to offend: the viewer's mind was forced to make the transit from Auschwitz to Bottoms Up pantyhose--one for those women who want the fanny rounded, the other for those who want it smooth. In one grotesque juxtaposition, the audience saw Dorf sitting with Eichmann and a couple of other SS officers in their dining room at Auschwitz. Eichmann sniffs the air and disgustedly remarks that the stench of the chimneys keeps him from enjoying his meal. We cut then to a Lysol commercial, in which a woman character named "Snoopy Sniffer" arrives at a housewife's kitchen and informs her that she has house odors. From her ovens? Can the mind swivel so wildly? Some of those watching gave up and turned off their sets.

The drama itself was cunningly comprehensive, deploying its characters to arrive always at the right time for major events, like figures in 19th century novels heavy with coincidence. But for all its worthy exertions, the series at its core was curiously passionless. An accumulation of small anomalies diminished it. Dr. and Mrs. Weiss behaved with such genteel forbearance down to the last horror of the Zyklon B showers that their journey seemed like Mr. and Mrs. Miniver Go to Auschwitz. The lovers, Rudi and Helena, romped in the Ukraine wearing clothes that looked like peasant chic from Bloomingdale's.

The sometimes garish colors seemed to produce a falsification. If any world needed to be filmed in black and white, it was what French Writer David Rousset called I'univers concentrationnaire. All that obscenity transpired in an absence of color: ashes and smoke were gray, the SS uniforms black, the skin ash white, the bones white. Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibor, used to greet the trains wearing a white riding costume.

Holocaust never supplies enough surrounding political and economic context for its drama. The adolescent born in 1965, trying to comprehend what happened so long ago, cannot in the 9 1/2 hours find Germany's post-World War I humiliation, its horrific inflation under Weimar, the strange, grasping hopes that so many Germans invested in Hitler. He or she will not understand why the German people allowed it all to happen, a mystery connected to the question of why the Jews did not comprehend everything earlier.

It is possible to approach the subject of the Holocaust with all kinds of metaphysical pretensions. The producers of Holocaust, knowing their medium, audience and tremendous potential for popular influence, avoided the deep mystifications that attend most theories about the aesthetics of atrocity. The philosopher T.W. Adorno once claimed that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. If those who made Holocaust had taken that warning seriously--it amounts to an injunction to silence--they would hardly have dared anything as vulgar as a TV show. But in telling the story as soap opera enlarged to historic proportions, the producers never truly penetrated the tragedy or even permitted themselves to observe its symptoms clearly. Yes: naked men, machine-gunned, topple into a ditch. But the sight, in Holocaust, is weirdly unpersuasive. The men seem so obviously to be extras jumping on cue.

Perhaps television cannot be expected to plumb horror any more thoroughly than it did. Could anyone have endured a closer inspection of it? The Holocaust is very nearly unbearable to contemplate. But one senses something wrong with the television effort when one realizes that two or three black-and-white concentration-camp still photographs displayed by Dorf--the stacked, starved bodies--are more powerful and heartbreaking than two or three hours of the dramatization. The last 15 minutes of Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, in which Italian Jews are rounded up to be taken to the camps, is more wrenching than all the hours of Holocaust.

Almost everyone who approved of the series confessed that the production was not perfect; it was, after all, only TV--and three times better than that medium, with all its bad habits and commercial limitations, usually manages to do. Therefore (or so this argument unfairly implies) it is purist and precious, an ostentation of suffering, to say that the series was flawed, that it did not anguish stylishly enough before the abyss, over the race that went up the chimneys in smoke. The importance of the series was that, however imperfectly, it instructed millions, imprinting upon their memories an evil almost beyond comprehension.

Much of that thesis is sensible enough. The critic George Steiner has argued that "the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason." But that elegant despair, which would not desecrate the victims by recording their tales, contradicts the imperative to repeat the facts frequently, from one generation to the next, precisely to keep the victims from the oblivion that the Nazis desired for the entire Jewish race. It pays to be impatient with anyone who says a story is too terrible to be told.

Is the Holocaust unique in the history of human massacre, so special that its horrors must be kept alive long after the world has forgotten, say, the Pakistanis' slaughter of 3 million Bengalis in 1971, the Nigerians' genocidal war against the Biafrans, the Khmer Rouge's homicidal administration of Cambodia at the moment? One of the century's most chilling questions was one Hitler asked two generations ago: "Who still talks nowadays about the extermination of the Armenians?"

The Nazis' genocidal ambitions pitched the Holocaust beyond any other historical atrocity. It was unique: in system, in execution, in mad, pointless intent unattached to any reason except, well, what? Race hate? Political convenience that would give the Germans some kind of common bond? The attempted destruction of the Jews occurred in one of the most advanced of the planet's civilizations and, as has been often repeated, one of its most cultured, the land of Goethe and Schiller and Mozart. There is a philosophical temptation to see in that highly developed murderous bureaucracy the end of civilization itself.

Was it bureaucratic banality? Psychosis, individual or collective? Satan himself? No one is sure about such things, and certainly not the people who made Holocaust. As Elie Wiesel wrote:

What it was we may never know; but

we must proclaim, at least, that it was,

that it is.

-- Lance Morrow

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