Prisoner Number Zero. Wolverine at Sobibor

Magneto is not the only character connected to the X-Men universe whose story is rooted in the Holocaust. Also the mutant known as Wolverine goes through the experience of a death camp, that of Sobibor. The story is told in Prisoner Number Zero (Wolverine, Vol. 3, n. 32, November 2005). The mutant, nearly indestructible because of his “healing factor”, survives all the attempts at executing him and even the gas chamber. He is not to be listed among the “Holocaust Avengers”, although the camp commander, Major Bauman, accidentally dies while confronting him. Wolverine stays silent and passive, with a defiant grin on his face, while the Nazis unleash their fury, that ultimately leads them to self-destruction.

The nocturnal depiction of the crematorium’s chimneys under the snow seems reminiscent of the Auschwitz sequences from Schindler’s List.

This is your life, Hanna Kohner

This is Your Life was a reality-tv series broadcast on NBC from 1952 to 1961. In the series – that Time magazine defined in 1960 “the most sickeningly sentimental show on the air” – the host Ralph Edwards surprises a guest and proceeds to take them through their life in front of an audience including friends and family. During the episode aired on May 27, 1953, Edwards presented the story of Hanna Bloch Kohner, a Czech survivor of Westerbork, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Her husband and parents had been murdered. “Upon arriving at Auschwitz, they handed you soap, and you went to the showers. Your shower had water, others were not as fortunate, like your mother, father and your husband, Carl. They all lost their lives in Auschwitz”, the host tells Hanna. Now, thanks to This is Your Life, she can finally meet her brother, living in Israel since the end of the war.

The episode is emblematic of the ascending Americanization of the Holocaust through popular culture in the 50s, especially in the form of domestic melodrama. As Edwards put it: “Out of darkness, of terror and despair, a new life has been born in a new world for you, Hanna Kohner. This is your life. Even as your heart goes out to those less fortunate than you, you rejoice humbly in the bounties America has given you. (…) To you in your darkest hour, America held out a friendly hand”.

Toy Story 3: A Holocaust Allegory?

Is Toy Story 3 a Holocaust allegory? The topic has been discussed on movie websites, newspapers and blogs at the time the Disney-Pixar 3D animated film was issued, in 2010. The theory was first proposed by Jordan Hoffman on Ugo.com:

The cattle car comes for the toys in the form of a horrible garbage bag – but they don’t go straight to extermination.  They find themselves alive and at Sunnyside where they are put “to work.”  (Consider this, then, Dachau instead of Treblinka.)

Once there, they meet the toy version of Sonderkommando, toys who live the stay fed and well-sheltered (like Ken in his dream house) while leading other toys to a certain death.  Newcomers are bashed and abused in the “Caterpillar Room” by non-age appropriate children until they resemble Muselmann and are eventually thrown into the trash chute.

The trash chute leads to a systematic sorting of metal (e.g. any last valuables) until, eventually, the fiery crematoria.

Director Lee Unkrich told the New York Post that the allegory was not the filmmakers’ intention. He said a Holocaust survivor came up to him after the screening and asked if this was intended: “I was surprised, but I could see his point”.

Apart from the allegorical implications of the plot, discussed in many blogs and websites, it could be argued that on a visual level Toy Story 3 contains many elements reminiscent of the “Holocaust movie” canon, as these stills reveal.

1. Deportation into crowded cattle trains

2. The reassuring “camp” sign – Arbeit macht Frei

3. Tracking shot along the rail line – a “Holocaust movie” topos

4. Garbage incinerators as “crematoria”

Spock and the Jew as Vulcanian

Still from Patterns of Force, episode of the science fiction television program Star Trek: The Original Series, broadcast on February 16, 1968. The crew of the Enterprise tracks down a Federation observer on the planet Ekos, dominated by a Nazi-inspired regime. Kirk and Spock learn that the Ekosians are planning “a final solution” — the extinction of all Zeons who reside on their planet, and the destruction of the neighboring planet Zeon. The Zeons are a clear reference to the Jewish people, and they carry names like Isak and Abrom.

Spock’s physical appearance plays a focal role in a (…) scene that more directly evokes Nazi racial policies. When Kirk, Spock, and the resistance fighters infiltrate Nazi party headquarters in search of Gill [the Führer], Kirk creates a momentary diversion by pretending to be a Zeon officer who has discovered an “alien” spy masquerading as a Nazi. He turns Spock over to Melakon [the Deputy Führer] who, as an expert on the “genetics of racial purity,” analyzes the specimen: “Note the sinister eyes and the malformed ears—definitely an inferior race. Note the low forehead, denoting stupidity—the dull look of a trapped animal”. Melakon orders Spock executed, explaining that he wants “the body saved for the cultural museum. He’ll make an interesting display”.
Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches. Televising the Holocaust (p. 149).

“Gas Chambers Still Exist. And You Pay to Enter Them”.

Anti-smoking campaign launched by “Pubblicità Progresso”, Italian non-profit association, 1975-1976.

Grids

The ethical limit of Holocaust representations (in art, literature, architecture, film, etc.) lies on a system of substitutions going from mimesis to abstract motifs. The set of patterns and artistic theories coming from the modernist and avant-garde movements provide a conceptual framework to explore the intersection of memory, ethics and aesthetics in the artistic expressions (one of the major issues in “Holocaust Studies”).

From this point of view, the Grid, considered as a Modernist Myth, is a fundamental visual pattern. As noted by art historian Rosalind Krauss, the grid “announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse”. In the cultist space of modern art “the grid serves not only as emblem but also as myth. For like all myths, it deals with paradox or contradiction not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradiction, but by covering them over so that they seem (but only seem) to go away”.  A paradox, or contradiction, which involves the unrepresentability of Holocaust.

We can look at the grid structure as a myth not only referring to modernist artists like Ryman or Mondrian, but also to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, 2005) designed by architect Peter Eisenman. In this specific case, the paradox is represented by a monument that Germany built to its own fault.

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10 Pier and Ocean (1915)

Peter Eisenman, Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, 2005

Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture

A new and pathbreaking collection of studies has come out, the first book which addresses systematically the neglected field of Nazisploitation. Many chapters deal with the Holocaust theme in Exploitation cinema, especially in Italian Sexploitation films from the late 1970s. A detailed review will follow as soon as possible, in the meantime we offer the description from the publisher’s website:

Nazisploitation! examines past intersections of National Socialism and popular cinema and the recent reemergence of this imagery in contemporary visual culture. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, films such as Love Camp 7 and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS introduced and reinforced the image of Nazis as master paradigms of evil in what film theorists deem the ‘sleaze’ film. More recently, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, as well as video games such as Call of Duty: World at War, have reinvented this iconography for new audiences. In these works, the violent Nazi becomes the hyperbolic caricature of the “monstrous feminine” or the masculine sadist. Power-hungry scientists seek to clone the Führer, and Nazi zombies rise from the grave.

The history, aesthetic strategies, and political implications of such translations of National Socialism into the realm of commercial, low brow, and ‘sleaze’ visual culture are the focus of this book. The contributors examine when and why the Nazisploitation genre emerged as it did, how it establishes and violates taboos, and why this iconography resonates with contemporary audiences.

Table of Contents

“Nazisploitation: An Introduction” by Daniel H. Magilow

Part I. Origins, Histories, and Genealogies
1. Cinema beyond Good and Evil? Nazi Exploitation in the Cinema of the 1970s and its Heritage by Marcus Stiglegger
2. Sexual Deviance and the Naked Body in Cinematic Representations of Nazis by Michael Richardson
3. Ilsa and Elsa: Nazisploitation, Mainstream Film, and Cinematic Transference by Alicia Kozma
4. Reproducing the Fourth Reich: Cloning, Nazisploitation, and Revival of the Repressed by Elizabeth Bridges
5. Utterly without Redeeming Social Value? “Nazi Science” Beyond Exploitation Cinema by James J. Ward

Part II. Bitches, Whores, and Dominatrices
6. The Third Reich as Bordello and Pig Sty: Between Neodecadence and Sexploitation in Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty by Robert von Dassanowsky
7. Revisiting the Cruel Apparatus: Disability, Queerness, and Taste in In a Glass Cage by David Church
8. Eine Armee Gretchen: Nazisploitation Made in Switzerland by Benedikt Eppenberger
9. Meshes of Power: The Concentration Camp as Pulp or Art House in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter by Elissa Mailänder

Part III. Heroes, Villains, and the Undead
10. Digital Nazis: Genre, History and the Displacement of Evil in First-Person Shooters by Jeff Hayton
11. Captain America Lives Again and So Do the Nazis: Nazisploitation in Comics after 9/11 by Craig This
12. A Past that Refuses to Die: Nazi Zombie Film and the Legacy of Occupation by Sven Jüngerkes and Christiane Wienand
13. Messing Up World War II-Exploitation: The Challenges of Role-Play in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds by Mimmi Woisnitza
14. Of Blitzkriege and Endlösungen: The Resurrection of a Dead Genre? by Michael Fuchs

Bibliography
Selected Filmography
Notes on Contributors
Index

From Numbers to Names: Modes of Identification

Identification Card, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC.
From the “Education” Section of the USHMM website: “Designed as small booklets to be carried through the exhibition, the cards help visitors to personalize the historical events of the time. (…) The Museum has developed nearly 600 identification cards. Approximately half of them are about Holocaust survivors. These cards describe the experiences of those who hid or were rescued, as well as those who survived internment in ghettos and camps. The other half represent the experiences of people who died. (…) To create the identification cards, a team of five Museum staff members interviewed 130 survivors of the Holocaust. The survivors described their own experiences as well as those of relatives who died during the Holocaust. The identification cards were developed from those interviews and from other oral histories and written memoirs. Each identification card has four sections. The first section provides a biographical sketch of the person. The second describes the individual’s experiences from 1933 to 1939, while the third describes events during the war years. The final section describes the fate of the individual and explains the circumstances – to the extent that they are known – in which the individual either died or survived”.

The “story-telling” conception of the USHMM Identity Card Project parallels the dynamics of spectator’s identification with the characters of a film and equates the Museum visit to a cinematic experience. Below, page from the Chicago Tribune TV Week (16-22 April 1978) introducing to the first airing of NBC’s miniseries Holocaust through the list of the main characters.

Batman and the Survivor as Supervillain

In the adventure “Night of the Reaper” (Batman, No. 237, Dec. 1971), Batman comes to Rutland, Vermont, to bring his help to Dr. Gruener, a German Jew who was deported to a concentration camp run by Colonel Kurt Schloss, known during the war as the Butcher. Schloss has allegedly been sighted in the Rutland area, and Dr. Gruener wants to find him and bring him to justice, but the Colonel is killed by a mysterious Reaper at a Halloween parade.

As it turns out, the Reaper is Dr. Gruener himself, seeking his private vengeance. He dies battling Batman when he falls off the edge of a dam. Batman is conflicted whether to hunt the Reaper or let him go. As is the case of many superheroes, Batman’s powers are rooted in a traumatic experience (he has witnessed the murder of his parents as a child), so he fully understands Gruener’s unstoppable lust for revenge.

Lastly, when a Star of David dangles before his eyes, Gruener questions what he has become. His story resonates with that of Magneto – supervillain of the X-Men whose superpowers firstly appeared in Auschwitz – and finds its place in a long tradition of “Holocaust Avengers” in comics, traced by Kathrin Bower (“Holocaust Avengers: From The Master Race to Magneto”, International Journal of Comic Art 6.2, Fall 2004: 182-19).

Auschwitz Puppets. Hotel Modern’s Kamp

Pictures from Kamp, by the Dutch theater group Hotel Modern. The performance, which premiered in 2005, mixes theater, music, video, sculpture and puppetry to portray Auschwitz. Despite some perplexed reactions, mostly revolving around the opportunity of representing the Holocaust through puppets, the performance has met with an overall positive reception in the many countries where it has been shown. The website of Hotel Modern presents “Kamp” with these words:

An enormous scale model of Auschwitz fills the stage. Overcrowded barracks, a railway track, a gateway with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei”. Hotel Modern attempts to imagine the unimaginable: the greatest mass murder in history, committed in a purpose-built city.
The model of the camp is brought to life on stage: thousands of 8 centimeter tall handmade puppets represent the prisoners and their executioners. The actors move through the set like giant war reporters, filming the horrific events with miniature cameras; the audience becomes the witness.

The performance can be seen on the Hotel Modern’s YouTube channel: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

***

Puppets of Nazi leaders were largely used in the highly theatrical film Our Hitler (Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland, 1978) by German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. The seven-hour film can be watched in its complete version on Syberberg’s website (German with English subtitles).