The Goden Age of the American mini-series ran from 1976, began with Rich Man, Poor Man, and ended in 1989 with Lonesome Dove. Also known as ‘limited series’ they were characterised by enormous viewing figures and were significant cultural events. Being limited, they attracted Hollywood stars that would not have considered committing to long-running series, though The Winds of War (1983), starring Robert Mitchum and Ali McGraw, which had an audience of 140 million, ran for 18 hours, with episodes lasting as long as three hours, and Centennial (1978), had a runtime of 26 hours. They were really very long feature films split into parts. Many, like 1981’s East of Eden were literary adaptations, others were adaptations of blockbuster novels and popular fiction such as From Here to Eternity (1979), starring William Devane and Nathalie Wood, Salem’s Lot (1979), starring David Soul and James Mason, and The Thorn Birds (1983), starring Robert Chamberlain and Barbara Stanwyck. Other outstanding US mini-series were civil war drama North and South (1985), starring Patrick Swayze, Shogun (1980), and the Vatican-approved Jesus of Nazareth (1977), starring Robert Powell. Jesus of Nazareth, co-scripted by Anthony Burgess, was watched by 90 million Americans and made a $30m profit, unprecedented for a tv series, and no tv production or film before or since, has featured so many big Hollywood stars.
Two of the most successful mini-series were Roots (1977), based on Alex Haley’s 1976 novel, the final episode of which was watched by more than 100 million viewers, and Holocaust (1979). These were not merely examples of ‘event television’ but had cultural and political impact. Holocaust ran over four nights in the US, from April 16-20, in 1978. It was shot on location in Europe: Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland, with Vienna standing in for wartime Warsaw. It won eight out of the fifteen Emmies for which it was nominated, and was watched by 120 million Americans, 700 million globally. Meryl Streep, a relative unknown at the time, was nominated for an Emmy for Best Actress in a Limited Television Series, and it was also a breakthrough role for James Woods who, like Streep, gives a superb performance, and a year later was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance in the underrated and intense Joseph Wambaugh adpatation,The Onion Field (1979).
The series is subtitled The Story of the Family Weiss, and follows the fates of successful Berlin Jewish doctor Joseph Weiss (Fritz Weaver), his wife Berta (Rosemary Harris), his artist son, Karl (James Woods), Karl’s gentile German wife, Inga (Meryl Streep), their son Rudi (Joseph Buttons), and their teenage daughter Anna (Blanche Baker). It also follows, in parallel, the fortunes of Eric Dorf (Michael Moriarty), a German on his uppers who joins the SS, and his socially and economically ambitious wife Marta (Deborah Norton). Dorf rises through the ranks quickly to become one of the (fictional) architects of the Final Solution. The Nazis were played by British actors – David Warner as Heydrich, Tom Bell as Adolf Eichman, Marius Goring as Heinrich Politz, Ian Holme as Himmler, and T P McKenna as Paul Blobel - but the role of Dorf was deliberately given to an American, to make the point that an ‘ordinary man’ from anywhere, including the US, could, in the right circumstances, follow the same moral trajectory as Dorf from opportunism to fanaticism, and Moriarty’s creepy, almost somnambulist performance and delivery emphasises an inner emptiness (Moriarty needed therapy after playing this role).
James Woods and Meryls Streep as Karl and Inga Weiss
Director Martin J. Chomsky (who had also directed four episodes of Roots) and script writer Gerald Green were both New York Jews. They chose a secular Jewish family in Berlin so that American audiences would identify and empathise with them, American Jews thinking of themselves as American in the same way that German Jews in the 30s thought of themselves as German. They had an openly pedagogic aim. Chomsky, when he accepted his Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, said that he was “proud to have told the story to those who didn’t know”. Green was awarded the Dag Hammerkjold Peace Prize for his novelisation of the series, and Chomsky went on to direct another Nazi-themed mini-series, Inside the Third Reich (1982), based on the book by Alber Speer, for which he won a second Golden Globe.
Each member of the Weiss family except for Rudi and Inga are murdered in succession by the Nazis across the series, which is unrelentingly grim, something in itself novel for prime-time television. It begins with the marriage of Inga and Karl as a device to introduce to all the main characters aside from Dorf, who we first meet as a visitor to Joseph Weitz’s consultation room. The build-up of anti-Semitism from social exclusion to social death, from murder to industrialised mass killing, is malignly well-paced with each further decline into barbarism having an air of inevitability. An early plot strand is the Weiss’s taking the decision to try and escape too late, caught like so many in a deadly hope trap. But, as Hannah Arendt commented, “only a madman could have predicted what was coming”.
Holocaust came at a period of historical amnesia regarding the Shoah, one in which there was very little public discussion of, or education about it. Artistic treatment of it had been limited mostly to films that were either documentaries, art house fare for cinephiles and intellectuals such as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) and Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), or so-called ‘Nazi-exploitation’ movies such as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975), an egregious genre thankfully mostly forgotten. Following the screenings there were study groups, televised debates, and viewing it was assigned as school homework. It was through this series that the Shoah became known popularly as the Holocaust. It gave a fillip to Holocaust research, and it’s unlikely that without this mini-series there would be quite so much Holocaust scholarship, or as many memorials or museums. The script skilfully works in historical exposition through conversation without it being obtrusive, including discussions about Nazi distortions of language.
It’s fair to say that reviews were mixed. Most were very positive but with caveats, except a New York Times review by Elie Wiesel, death camp survivor and author of the camp memoir Night, who gave the series a particularly bad review, calling it “untrue, offensive, cheap”. His review was unfair on several counts and his negative view of it was belied by its positive, real-world influence. His claim that Holocaust “tries to tell all, what happened before, what happened after”, is accurate. Clive James in a much more positive review, put this another way, “Let it be admitted that no character or action took place except to make a point”. That the series tried to fit everything in, however, is to its credit, not its detriment, as the main purpose of the series was to teach. This artificiality also undermines the events’ reduction to pure entertainment, functioning as a kind of Brechtian alienation device, and for the most part it fits all the stages of the Holocuast organically into the narrative. We witness the Weiss grandparents commit suicide (there were many such Jewish suicides as anti-Semitism took hold in Germany), Kristallnacht, Fritz and Berta being transferred to the Warsaw Ghetto, Fritz taking part in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, both he and Berta being gassed at Auschwitz, the Wannsee Conference, Anna fall victim to the T4 Euthanasia programme after being rendered catatonic following a gang rape by marauding SA, Karl dying of hunger and exhaustion at Theresienstadt, and Rudi taking part in the escape from Sobibor, witnessing the Babyn Yar massacre, and fighting with the Resistance along with his wife Helena (Tovah Feldshuh), who he met whilst on the run in Nazi-occupied Prague. If the programme’s function was essentially educational, then I think it would have been more remiss if any of these elements of the Final Solution had been omitted.
Michael Moriarty as Eric Dorf
Another of Wiesel’s criticisms was that Holocaust featured scenes of Jewish passivity, singling out the depiction of the Babyn Yar massacre. Whatever the psychological explanations of the passivity of some Jews in the face of their imminent murder, it is a much discussed and recognised feature of events, a matter of historical record. Wiesel himself notes it in his camp memoir, as does Primo Levi in If this is a Man, and Tadeusz Borowski in This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen. A Nazi witness to the massacre noted that “When the Jews reached the ravine, they were so shocked by the horrifying scene that they completely lost their will. It may even have been that the Jews lay down in rows to wait to be shot.” (More than thirty-three thousand men, women and children were murdered by machine gun and pistol over two days at Babyn Yar, a scene which another Nazi observer said, ‘made Dante’s Inferno seem like a comedy’). The criticism is also unfair because the series features many acts of defiance: Rudi fighting with the Resistance, the breakout from Sobibor, Jospeh and his brother Moses (Sam Wanamaker) fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as well as acts of personal defiance, such as Karl clandestinely producing drawings of the realities of the camps. Overall, the emphasis of the series falls heavily on resistance, not passivity.
Wiesel and others also accused the program of being like a soap opera. Family sagas and melodramas are not necessarily soap operatic, and it’s not an accusation aimed at, say Buddenbooks or Anna Karenina. Holocaust stories were mostly family stories, stories of separation, of being united, of terrible loss. As Chomsky put it, “If you care about the family, you’ll watch it”. The series, though no artistic masterwork, doesn’t descend into kitsch; it is well-made, well-acted television with a lofty aim, working within the limits of its medium, one of which is the need for mass appeal. Perhaps its ending will grate with some: Rudi, shortly after the end of the war meets with briefly with Inga and is offered the chance to help smuggle some Greek-Jewish orphans to Israel. He plays football with them, and the series ends with a still of Rudi smiling. It somehow seems unfair though to claim that the series has a ‘happy’ ending – Rudi'swife and all his family have been horribly murdered. Is his smile even unrealistic: as all accounts attest, people smiled and laughed in the camps even as they starved to death, with the smell of burning bodies thick in the air.
It was in Germany that Holocaust had most effect and caused the most controversy. It was screened over four evenings on WDR in 1979, and was watched by 20 million Germans, more than half of the adult population. A campaign against the series began a soon as soon as news that it had been bought was released, and WDR received 80 boxes of hate mail before it was even screened. Ex-Wehrmacht and SS sent in letters, photos, confessions. Nazis bombed a tv transmitter, death threats were sent to television executives. During the production, the initial rushes were sabotaged by staff at the Austrian film lab.
At that time, less than half of German 14–16-year-olds even knew what Auschwitz was. This was more than just a matter of amnesia: the country was to some extent still being run by ex-Nazis. By 1951 Germany had become Europe’s largest economy, its GDP twice that of the US (whilst Britons were still on rations). Companies run by Nazis that had used Jewish slave labour became some of the most successful in the world. And Europe largely had been emptied of its Jews. A sentiment often expressed by German perpetrators was a fear of what would be unleashed on them after the war if they lost, yet what was unleashed on them amounted to almost nothing.
Post-war German anti-Semitism was a matter of the right and the left, on both sides of the Berlin Wall. The Western left’s severing of solidarity with Israel had begun in the 1950, the direct result of directives from Moscow. Meanwhile, in the East, Pro-Israel communists were arrested, and from that time the Warsaw Pact and the Soviets (who had the quixotic desire to take control of the Middle East’s oil supplies) became the main suppliers of weapons to the Arabs. In the West, it was leftists, not the far right, who placed a bomb in a Jewish community centre in Berlin in 1969, and who denounced West German restitution payments to Holocaust victims. The GDR, meanwhile, supplied Egypt with MiG jets, tanks, Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns, whilst the German New Left in West Germany backed the Arabs in the 6 Day-War, as Israel was now linked with American Imperialism after the Soviets turned their attention to the Third World, and anti-fascism morphed into anti-Imperialism. All this means that Germans, and at the level of the state in the GDR, twenty years after the Holocaust, were still actively trying to exterminate Jews.
Elie Wiesel
The screening of Holocaust in West Germany led to a national debate. Each episode was followed by a studio discussion between philosophers and historians, and a few months later, as a direct consequence, the Statute of Limitations was scrapped, so that more Nazi war criminals could be tried. It wasn’t just former Nazis that were hostile to it. Edgar Reitz, director of Heimat: a German Chronicle, claimed that it was “Germany’s role to tell German history on television”, adding that “the Americans have stolen our history through Holocaust”, a particularly crass and stupid criticism, the underlying motive for which is revealed by the fact that in Heimat violence against Jews and the Holocaust are completely elided, and we get no sense of a country overtaken by mass moral insanity.
Another criticism of Holocaust was that it was sanitised. Reading a book on the subject such as Martin Gilbert’s massive Holocaust is an an experience both formative and traumatising. It is a relentless catalogue of unimaginable cruelties, sadism and mass murder. But I wouldn't wish a young person to read it until they reached their late teens, initially I would want them to learn from something more sanitised. Even less would I want anyone, child or adult, to see realistic cinematic representations of such atrocities. Children need shielding from moral horror, just as they do from sexual evil. In Holocaust we see piles of machine-gunned naked bodies, an old man beaten almost to death, naked women and children entering a gas chamber. Surely enough. Perhaps more than enough for prime-time television.
Wiesel said that Holocaust “tries to show what cannot even be imagined”, but this can be said of all Holocaust dramas. What is described in history books, in perpetrator, victim, and bystander accounts is unfilmable. Even a war film that many people commonly say they couldn’t view a second time, Elem Klimov’s, Come and See (1985), is sanitised. Samuel Fuller, who directed war films of lacerating poetry and moral beauty, said of the genre in an interview at the time of the release of The Big Red One (1980), “I could have had that whole beach the way it was in life, all filled with nothing but intestines. That’s over 900 yards of just guts. Don’t know who they belong to! ... a head here, an arm there, an asshole here, it’s all over the place!”
Alfred Hitchcock, the so-called ‘Master of Horror’, when called in to advise on the structure of the unreleased film German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, viewed footage Allied troops had filmed on the liberation of death camps (eventually released in 1984 as the documentary Memories of the Camps), and took to his bed for three days, refusing to view any of the material again. A Chinese film that I’ve only read about, Man Behind the Sun (1988), dealing with the infamous Japanese Unit 31, does show atrocities in detail, at one point using found footage of a child autopsy to stand in for child vivisection. For me this is a film with no appeal to those interested in history or a philosophical understanding of evil, but only to sick fucks: it is pornography. And I would argue the same for attempted depictions of Shoah atrocities. Such verisimilitude would be inhumane and indecent: discretion is a moral category.
Footage as proof or evidence is another matter, but even this is problematic. Journalists such as Owen Jones were shown footage of the atrocities of October 7th, but questioned its veracity, and continued to cheerlead the perpetrators. Isis and al Qaeda recruited young men partly using beheading and torture videos, and repeated viewings of such material radicalised teenage girls such as Shamima Begum. Following the pogrom of October 7th 2023, it soon became obvious that many on the streets of the West in support of Hamas were showing their support not despite the sub-animal barbarities of Hamas and Palestinian civilians, but because of them, taking vicarious pleasure in the violence. Images of atrocity are not a prophylactic against further atrocity.
Holocaust imagery has been by now reduced to a set of visual clichés, and there has, since Holocaust was broadcast, been a steady stream of Holocaust movies and tv programmes, running the gamut from artistic triumphs such as Sophie’s Choice (1982), Kapo (1960), The Pianist (2002), Son of Saul (2015), The Zone of Interest (2023), The Pawnbroker (1964) and, best of all, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), to trash such as Life is Beautiful (1997) and The Night Porter (1974). Despite all of these Holocaust movies and tv programmes there has been a rise in anti-Semitism, now at fever pitch, and brought to that level not by any action of the Jews but triggered by the bestial events of last October, which novelist Herta Muller, in a too-little-seen open letter described as “another total derailment of civilisation”. Ultimately, these representations have achieved nothing: in the UK now, 5 per cent do not believe the Holocaust occurred, one in twelve think it was exaggerated, and 52 per cent don’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered. In the US, the figures are even worse: a fifth of those under 30 think the Holocaust is a myth, whilst 11 per cent of Millennials and Gen Z think that the Jews caused the Holocaust. In London right now, Jewish businesses and charities are regularly vandalised, and its Jewish citizens publicly victimised with relative impunity.
London, 2024
There’s something disturbing about the dominant image of the Jew in popular culture having become since the 70s the suffering, almost-dead, abject stick in striped pyjamas behind a wire fence. It's time for a moratorium on Holocaust films and television series. After all, since the Second World War Israel has won three wars started against it by multiple genocidal enemies and is winning a fourth. Holocaust was necessary and effective in its time, is part of television history, and deserves recognition for its role in raising awareness of the Shoah. It would still be suitable as a classroom aid, but the proof that such representations in popular culture can no longer have any significant effect is overwhelming. In any case, no television series could ever again have such a societal effects, because audiences are too fragmented. At the time of Holocaust, television was a shared experience, in the UK a news programme would attract eleven million viewers. But it's not merely a matter of audience size, there is no longer the same appetite for seriousness as there was in that era, something which seems trivial, but is in fact a dangerous societal shift .
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