Working through the Past

IN HIS 1959 LECTURE “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” (The Meaning of Working Through the Past) Theodor W. Adorno observed suspiciously: “Panegyrics to Jews that isolate them as a group already give anti-Semitism a running start.” Someone had told him the story of a woman who, “upset after seeing a dramatization of the The Diary of Anne Frank, said: yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live.” According to Adorno, this kind of empathy is ambivalent precisely because it allows the individual case to become an alibi for forgetting the “terrifying totality.”

That was during the Anne Frank boom. In the mid-1950s the Diary of Anne Frank had appeared in a German paperback edition, followed by the sentimentalized stage version and George Steven’s equally facile American film adaptation (The Diary of Anne Frank, 1959) that found an audience of millions in Germany. Pilgrimages were organized to Bergen- Belsen, a camp that unexpectedly attained the rank of a German national holy site. In 1956 the Federal Republic of Germany tried to intervene through its embassy in France when Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) was to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, yet just one year later the German version, Nacht und Nebel, was showing in seventy theaters in Berlin alone. The death camps had become media events, long before Marvin J. Chomsky and Gerald Green’s four-part television series Holocaust (1978) secured an appropriate name for the event. It was also a time of re-viewing National Socialist history in West German cinema. The concept of “working through the past” (“Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit”) enjoyed great currency, starting in the mid-1950s. Yet, at first “working through” did not mean remembering war crimes, but rather remembering patterns of behavior and values that could be positive points of contact for the present. These discourses intersected and interfered with each other, one concerned with war crimes and the other with behavioral norms in difficult times. This interference would become the focus in positioning Holocaust discourse, avant la lettre, in filmic speech about the recent past during the second half of the 1950s.