Reasearch project and database
Introduction to the project
Cinematography of the Holocaust
Introduction to the project
Cinematography of the Holocaust
Documentation and record of moving image materials.
A project of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Frankfurt am Main
Since 1992, and under the overall direction of the Fritz Bauer Institute, film archivists and historians and Holocaust researchers have been collaborating with CineGraph e.V., Hamburgisches Centrum für Filmforschung, the Deutsches Filminstitut – DIF in Frankfurt am Main and the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt am Main on the task of indexing and documenting films dealing with the history and impact of the Holocaust. A database of information on the respective film documents is being compiled within the framework of the Cinematography of the Holocaust project.
Since November 2000 a first comprehensive store of data is publicated in the internet. The information system of the Cinematography of the Holocaust then accessible to the public will have an infrastructure that is transparent for users with different interests; it will be at the disposal of both the general public and particular disciplines (contemporary history, film studies, film history, art history, literary science, psychology, Holocaust Studies), of film makers and television journalists, publicists, educationists and artists.
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Significance of a Cinematography of the Holocaust
The widespread dissemination of picture-storing media means that visual sources are assuming an ever greater social significance. A precarious situation has already arisen in the field of contemporary history, in particular, because the humanities have so far given priority to written documents. As a result, a considerable amount of catching up has to be done as regards cinematographic sources and their importance both for the historical process itself, and for the formation of a consciousness of history. Compared to written sources, pictorial sources offer significant educational advantages due to their apparently authentic character. For the same reason, however, they also harbour risks and problems which demand that research in the fields of the reception theory and source criticism devote more attention to them.
The initiation in Germany of the project Cinematography of the Holocaust and the international make-up of the respective work group take into consideration the fact that in Germany film documents on the National Socialist policy of annihilation have neither been collated, archived, nor indexed in particular with a view to the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The reasons for this have to do with the specific problems which post-war Germany had in dealing with the National Socialist mass crimes. These include not only social mechanisms of repression, but also the real historical experiences of a perpetrator society with a specific division of labour and a highly contradictory labour process aimed at the far-reaching annihilation of European Jewry. The wide range of data to be collated results from the necessity to do justice to the complexity of the causes and effects of this process not only in German society, but in the countries which took in the survivors, and in the community of nations as a whole. From the viewpoint of a historiography based on the perspective of the perpetrators, the break with civilisation caused by the Holocaust can only grasped in a fragmentary way and is rooted in contexts not incorporated in the universalising perspective of the victims, who see the Holocaust as a crime against humanity.
Clearly, a Cinematography of the Holocaust is reliant on a wealth of sources which can only be made available through international co-operation. The complexity of this body of material is due to the subject itself. Only a small number of film documents of the actual murderous acts have been preserved. With a growing distance from those criminal actions, however, the film sources have to be seen in the contexts of the bureaucratic, ideological and social processes, their propagandist „blurring“ by the National Socialists, and finally of how the consequences of the Holocaust have been „handled and assimilated“, directly and indirectly, up to this day. There is no question that the stock of films in question can only be indexed step by step in projects defined by theme or region.
If the Holocaust is spoken of here as a focus, what is meant by this term is not a limitation of the scope of the documentation, but a thematic and interpretative point of reference in the face of the abundance of relevant material. It indicates that in addition to the anti-Semitic annihilation policy against the European Jews other groups too, were affected by the National Socialist mass crimes. Therefore the genocide perpetrated against the Sinti and Roma, the enslavement of „Slav peoples“, the National Socialist murder of the sick, as well as the exploitation of slave labourers are to be included in the documentation.
The term Holocaust also refers to the fact that any reconstruction of the events must recognise and describe the opposing perspectives in the film documents, in front of and behind the camera, of perpetrators, victims and liberators.
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Electronic Film Library
The items collected in the electronic library access an extremely heterogeneous body of material from thematic viewpoints. This information system contains all the cinematographic data and aspects relevant to film history and contemporary history research, including the listing and evaluation of sources important for the history of reception, information on the history of the film copies and showings, film reviews, propaganda material, film stills, educational brochures, censorship documents, etc.
The data and text processing is being carried out in a relational database system that links film titles, people's names, the names of bodies and companies, and literary references. All this data is accessible by means of a bi-lingual (English and German) thesaurus-based vocabulary and can be depicted in differentiated combinations.
In view of the fact that the provenance of the film material and the most precise knowledge possible of its genesis are decisive criteria in evaluating its authenticity as a pictorial source, the database's link system has been so designed that it is possible to pursue the generic process by which film takes are repeatedly used for compilation and even re-staged. The basic data for these research objectives can be provided by the links between films laid down in the basic structure of the database. In this way, the database also gives extensive information on the exhaustion and exploitation of frequently used film documents. The detailed inclusion of the primary film sources that are often used in documentaries, so creating a secondary or even tertiary stage of visual narrative, also constitutes an instrument for investigating pictorial trends and their iconographies – the process of evolving visual memory.
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The Body of Film Material
An extensive selection of films from the preserved stocks of films by the US Army Signal Corps and other film documents by the Allies are being indexed and documented. These films, which accompany the liberation of the death camps by the Allied soldiers and depict the life of the Holocaust survivors in the DP camps, represent one focal point of the project. Some of these films were made by famous American film directors, such as, for example, George Stevens, who filmed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.
Film documents produced by the Germans before 1945 play a central role in the index: „first hand“ documents such as Judenexekution in Libau (1941), or Die Zusammenlegung der letzten Juden aus Dresden in das Lager am Hellerberg (1942), plus propaganda films like Der ewige Jude (1940, Germany, Fritz Hippler), Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (1944, Germany, Kurt Gerron).
Documentary films made after 1945. Whereas the different feature film genres were hesitant to address the theme of the Holocaust, as of 1945 the most varied documentary film forms played an important role in the reception of the crimes, from the weekly newsreels, fund-raising and re-education films, to masterpieces by Claude Lanzmann, Shoah, and a rapidly increasing number of television reports.
Currently, ca. 150 anti-Nazi films – American feature films on the theme produced between 1939-1945 – are being indexed. These will be followed by a further series of „anti-fascist“ feature films produced in the USSR in the 30s and 40s.
Feature films made after 1945. American, European and Israeli cinema addressed the theme of the Holocaust in numerous films, which document the extent and continuity of the debate and, above all, the way the approaches to the theme have altered in the course of time (keyword: fictionalisation).
Victims and perpetrators have not just been communicating their memories in front of the camera since the Shoah Foundation began large scale recordings of interviews with contemporaries of the Holocaust. Such interviews are part of ducumentaries since many years. These documentaries are an important part of our project in terms both of the content of the memories and the form of the audio-visual representation of memories communicated by word of mouth.
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Main Store of English-language Films on the Holocaust
Thanks to the support of the Hoechst AG company, since June 1999the ambitious objectives of this project have come very much closer to being realized.
The main store of film material showing the National Socialists annihilation of European Jewry consists, above all, of the films made by the US Army Signal Corps immediately after liberation. The later compilation films, the numerous documentaries dealing with reports by eye-witnesses, and even the language of feature films, such as, for example, Schindler’s List, have repeated recourse, directly or indirectly, to that footage taken by the Allies in 1945 in Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau and other camps, while the takes by Russian cameramen in Auschwitz (some of them several weeks after liberation) only gained access to 'cinema memory' at a later point in time.
The task of this part of the overall project is to index the main store of those documentary and feature films produced in the English-speaking world from 1945 to today. These films show the – for Holocaust studies and the historiography of film – remarkable persistence of film images of the Holocaust. Furthermore, the significance for cultural memory since 1945 of the Holocaust, and the films that bear witness to it, is an important factor in the different historiographical and moral interpretations of the history and impact of the Holocaust on the present, and in the most varied literary and artistic debates on the Holocaust.
This project is being carried out with the support of Hoechst AG by the Fritz Bauer Institute in co-operation with the historian Peter Hayes (Northwestern University, Chicago) and the Deutsche Filmmuseum Frankfurt/Main within the framework of the overall project Cinematography of the Holocaust.
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Documentary Films from the German Democratic Republic
In 2000 the DEFA Foundation has been subsidising another section of the project entitled The Persecution and Murder of European Jews 1933-1945 as a Theme in DEFA and other German film productions, that is to say, the indexing according to content and form of relevant documentary films from the GDR. Unlike in West Germany, the documentary film in the GDR focused at an early stage on National Socialism as a priority theme, whereby the Holocaust was also a propaganda topic dealt with a in very indirect way for the specific purposes of the respective policy of that system. Only by way of exception, and then more covertly, did the DEFA films allow an undistorted view of the history of the murder of the European Jews. Comparative studies with the taboos, resistances and distorted symbolisations in productions from the Federal Republic suggest themselves.
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Annual symposium
The work group Cinematography of the Holocaust has been holding annual seminars with international participants since 1992; the symposiums are organised by the respective host member of the group. So far, these symposiums have dealt with themes such as in 1997: Anti-Semitic Images – Anti-Semitism and the Image, in 1998: Home Movies and the Jewish Experience. The example of the Lisa Lewenz film collection New York, and in 1999:The Past in the Present. Confrontations with the Holocaust in Feature Films in Post-war German Society East and West, among others. The next annual symposium is scheduled to take place from January 18 to 20, 2001 in Hamburg and will be devoted to the role of trivial and popular media in remembering the Holocaust.
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