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The influence of Primo Levi’s writing on the ‘grey zone’ has only sharpened over the last decade, not only in terms of its broader application to human rights contexts beyond the Holocaust, but also through a greater focus on the question of how to understand the behaviour of so-called ‘privileged’ prisoners in the Nazi camps and ghettos. History has shown a court of law to be an inadequate setting for negotiating the complexities of the ethical dilemmas forced on victims in extremis, and substantial problems of judgement and representation have plagued efforts to understand these liminal figures elsewhere. This article examines the tensions within Levi’s writings and maps these onto attempts to represent the ‘grey zone’ in Holocaust films. Engaging in particular with Margarethe von Trotta’s critically acclaimed feature film Hannah Arendt (2012) and Tor Ben-Mayor’s lesser known documentary Kapo (1999), I highlight how these distinct approaches to depicting ‘privileged’ Jews expose the fraught nature of portraying victim complicity on screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article examines the figure of the 'lost child' in feature films of the immediate post-war period. The figure's enormous symbolic value as innocent victim and future generation granted the 'lost child' a key position in post-war discourse, including films which tried to grapple with the moral and physical destruction of the continent after 1945. National film industries, particularly of the perpetrator nations, employed the 'lost child' for genre stories in which the post-war chaos is being mastered and a new, masculine national self is re-built. However, films made by victim groups outside a national context rely on the 'lost child' to broach the destruction of their identity by war and persecution. Analysing two films, Fred Zinnemann's The Search (1948) and Natan Gross's Unzere Kinder (1948), I argue that both use the child figure to deal with traumatization as part of the reconstruction of communal and intergenerational relations. This does not result in stories of masculine mastery but in narratives that incorporate moments of trauma process emerging around destroyed mother–child relations. The films, encoding traumatization in film language, develop a rich cinematic language along questions of identity and form an early instance of post-traumatic cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his autobiographical documentary film The Flat (2011; הדירה), Arnon Goldfinger retraces his German Jewish grandparents' relationship with Leopold von Mildenstein (1902–1968), a former SS officer and Judenreferent, through mnemonic objects and testimonial artefacts. Both as a filmmaker and on-screen subject, Goldfinger approaches his grandparents' keepsakes and mementos with a keen eye for minute details and lost traces – not unlike a crime investigator who collects, analyzes, and interprets forensic evidence. As memory and materiality become interdependent co-producers of memory work, Goldfinger reminds us that although 'matters' or objects are full of memories, they do not speak for themselves; they can only 'illuminate their human and social context' through our interactions with them. It is precisely for this reason that Goldfinger's memory archive – Gerda and Kurt Tuchler's flat in Tel Aviv – seems devoid of history. Whereas every nook and cranny is filled with heirlooms, the entire apartment is replete with an ever-present void of a silenced familial past. Ultimately, the process of gathering facts, examining records, and visiting eyewitnesses proves difficult yet transformative for Goldfinger who is forced to grapple with intergenerational memory conflicts that continue to reverberate in present-day German and Israeli society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Search , Fred Zinnemann's 1948 film about displaced and orphaned children, has long sat on the periphery of Holocaust film. Although it has an important Jewish character—a boy who survived the war by hiding his identity—the heart of the film centers on a non-Jewish child. However, the film's explicitly Jewish material is only the most visible aspect of its interest in Jewish children and the Holocaust. To a large extent, the film's efforts to address the Holocaust are submerged—or, more accurately, became submerged over the course of its production. Drawing on a rich body of sources, this essay revisits The Search 's treatment of the Holocaust, examining how the film openly addresses the murder of European Jewry and how it elides and suppresses this history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging from the Women in Prison genre of exploitation cinema, Nazisploitation – and the specifically Italian sadiconazista filone – of the late 1960s and 1970s utilized the backdrop of the concentration camps to tell eroticized stories of genocidal violence. Our point of departure here is an evaluation of their co-mingling of voyeuristic spectacle with claims to verisimilitude. In this paper, we will unpack how this produces transgressive memory. Drawing upon the notion of 'prosthetic memory', we set out how this genre blurs the dichotomies of structural-functionalist and ideological-intentionalist frameworks of explanation for the Holocaust. As such, a re-evaluation of their lurid excesses allows us to examine the interplay between trauma and affect in disrupting 'hegemonic' memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews during the Third Reich occupied a dangerously ambiguous position. Although the 1935 Nuremberg Laws declared intermarriage illegal, the Jewish wife or husband was at first exempted from anti-Semitic persecution. After Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, their situation deteriorated dramatically. However, Nazi family law was applied inconsistently, leaving both spouses in states of uncertainty with regard to their marriages and children. This essay examines the representation of intermarriage in two films: the 2015 Italian film Max and Helene, and Redemption Road, a 2016 two-part German miniseries. With hybrid cinematic styles, narrative trajectories, and characterizations, these films dramatize the traumatic consequences of Nazi racial ideology and practices for two intermarried couples and their children. Spanning the years 1938 through the late 1940s, intermarriage in these films raises challenging questions about survival, reconciliation, and loss and the definition and achievement of legal, ethical, and emotional justice in the aftermath.

The publication of Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader (1995) sparked conversation and controversy about sexuality, female perpetrators and the complexity of guilt regarding the Holocaust. The screen adaptation of the book (Daldry 2008) amplified these discussions on an international scale. Fictional Holocaust films have a history of being met with skepticism or even reject on the one hand and great acclaim on the other hand. As this paper will outline, the focus has often been on male perpetrators and female victims. The portrayal of female perpetration reveals dichotomous stereotypes, often neglecting the complexity of the subject matter. This paper focuses on the ways in which sexualization is used specifically to portray female perpetrators in The Reader, as a fictional Holocaust film. An assessment of Hanna’s relationship to Michael and her autonomous sexuality and her later inferior, victimized portrayal as an ambiguous perpetrator is the focus of my paper. Hanna’s sexuality is structurally separated from her role as a perpetrator. Hanna’s perpetration is, through the dichotomous motif of sexuality throughout the film, characterized by a feminization. However, this feminization entails a relativization of Hanna’s culpability, revealing a pejorative of her depiction as a perpetrator. Consequently, I argue that Hanna’s sexualized female body is constructed as a central part of the revelation of her perpetration.

Kornblumenblau(Leszek Wosiewicz 1989) is a film that explores the experience of a Polish political prisoner interned at Auschwitz I. It particularly foregrounds issues related to Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust in its diegesis. Holocaust films are often discussed in relation to representation and the cultural specificity of their production context. However, this paper suggests thinking about film and topographies, the theme of this issue, not in relation to where a work is produced but in regards to the spectatorial space. It adopts a phenomenological approach to consider how, despiteKornblumenblau's particularly Polish themes, it might address the transcultural spectator and draw attention to the broader difficulties one faces when attempting to remember the Holocaust. Influenced particularly by the writing of Jennifer M. Barker and Laura U. Marks, this paper suggests that film possesses a body ¬¬- a display of intentionality, beyond those presented within the diegesis, which engages in dialogue with the spectator. During the experience of viewingKornblumenblau, this filmic corporeality draws attention to the difficulties of confronting the Holocaust in particularly haptic ways, as the film points to the unreliability of visual historical sources, relates abject sensations to concentrationary spaces and breaks down as it confronts the scene of the gas chamber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tibor Cseres's 1960 novelCold Days(‘Hideg Napok’. Budapest: Corvina, 2013), and its 1966 film adaptation directed by András Kovács, are two fictionalised treatments of an act of mass violence during the Second World War, that give us a rare glimpse of the political and ethnic fault lines that were covered over during the cold war between Hungarians, Jews and Serbs. This reading of both texts, their reception, and their afterlives in the post-socialist period, focuses on the trope of ‘recognition’, which functions within the texts as the fabric of loose ties that binds a community together, but is also vital to its destruction. On the meta-textual level, it corresponds to the waves of acknowledgement, denial and polarisation that haunt acts of interethnic violence, and the centrality of artistic expressions likeCold Daysin navigating these waters. Lastly, parallel conversations in Holocaust Studies, Lukács’ aesthetics of film and recent public debates throughout the region give us a new context to understand these texts in film history and public memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the production and content of Swedish state propaganda films designed to foster public support for the country's refugee rescue and assistance actions in the latter half of World War II. It argues that these films produced an exceptionalist image of Sweden, in which neutrality came to symbolize unique national values that endowed Sweden with an ethical responsibility to offer help to those in occupied neighbouring countries. This depiction departed from earlier state-produced narratives of Swedish neutrality that characterized the country as under immediate foreign threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews during the Third Reich occupied a dangerously ambiguous position. Although the 1935 Nuremberg Laws declared intermarriage illegal, the Jewish wife or husband was at first exempted from anti-Semitic persecution. After Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, their situation deteriorated dramatically. However, Nazi family law was applied inconsistently, leaving both spouses in states of uncertainty with regard to their marriages and children. This essay examines the representation of intermarriage in two films: the 2015 Italian film Max and Helene, and Redemption Road, a 2016 two-part German miniseries. With hybrid cinematic styles, narrative trajectories, and characterizations, these films dramatize the traumatic consequences of Nazi racial ideology and practices for two intermarried couples and their children. Spanning the years 1938 through the late 1940s, intermarriage in these films raises challenging questions about survival, reconciliation, and loss and the definition and achievement of legal, ethical, and emotional justice in the aftermath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]