While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust
A book review of Jeffrey Shandler.
In post-war America, the television era emerged as Americans began to understand what happened during the war. The new platform brought evidence and stories involving the war into the household living rooms. This use of story telling allowed the Holocaust to become not only a household word, but a metaphor for moral atrocities such as the Serbian war. The construction of Holocaust memory for many Americans was built from this metaphor and through its portrayal on television. In his book, While American Watches: Televising the Holocaust, Jeffrey Shandler investigates the different methods of how television shaped this American Holocaust memory. His book is divided into three sections, each dedicated to a theme and time period. Creating the Viewer: 1945-1960 focuses on newsreels and early talk-show episodes with survivors, whereas Into The Limelight: 1961-1978 focuses on the war-crime trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, the introduction of the Holocaust into television series’ episodes and the Holocaust mini-series which aired in 1978. Finally, A Household Word: 1979-1995 highlights the survivors through documentary works and how Holocaust memory is being presented in museums around America. Through his exploration of these themes, Shandler supports his main thesis of “the genre’s value as a cultural phenomenon, so as to examine the emergence of the Holocaust as a moral paradigm in American culture and, more generally, the impact of a mass medium on memory in public culture”.[1]
The first section of Shandler’s book, Creating the Viewer: 1945-1960, displays the use of television and film reels in the immediate post war era when many were still trying to piece together the events of the war. While the liberation of the concentration camps were not a strategically important part of the war, Shandler argues that their liberation is an important symbolic event from the course of the war.[2] The symbolism is used both as anti-German propaganda to cast Germans as barbaric, and as American war-time propaganda to idolize the American war efforts on the front lines. The news reels with titles of “Nazi Murder Mills” which induced panic and moral outrage amongst viewers. From these, the issue of just who should watch these films arose. The answer was everyone in order to believe and to understand the events because these films “demanded memory” as they became the basis for American memory surrounding the Holocaust.[3]
In the immediate post-war period, the survivors were curiosities. Their private lives with the aid of their testimonies were brought to the American audiences in a way that made “voyeurs out of everyone”.[4] In addition to the saviour’s private life being broadcasted, their story was also at the mercy of companies who bought airtime and could control the content of episodes. The example given by Shandler of an Auschwitz survivor, Hanna Kohner’s appearance on the television show This Is Your Life. This episode, brought to the audience by a lipstick company, paints a happy narrative of Hanna’s life, omitting difficult truths. The “Hollywood” image gets in the way of the Holocaust authenticity by blurring the fine line of narrative and fiction in order to make a televisable episode.[5]
Shandler’s second section Into The Limelight: 1961-1978, focuses primarily on the use of television and the emergence of a popular narrative of the holocaust in the wake of the Adolf Eichmann war crime trial and the time up to and including the creation of the Holocaust mini-series. Eichmann’s trial was seen as the first major “popular trial” as well was the first international court proceedings to be televised.[6] The Israeli government proudly hosted the trial, and Shandler argues this eagerness was in attempts to claim legitimacy in their independence and ultimately existence through media exposure.[7] Shandler, based on the reporting of the trial, argued there was the need to find the difference between “normal” people and the evil Eichmann and the Nazis he repersented.[8] To make this distinction the broadcasters used close ups of Eichmann’s expressionless face and noted in the their reports of his “reptilian eyes” and “talon like hands” – anything to visually highlight and construct he idea of him being less-than-human.[9] The trial was not only used as a method of firmly implanting the Holocaust into the American consciousness, but to further the agendas of American and Israeli interests. The Americans using the broadcasts to further extend the stance of Germans being distant and barbaric and the Israelis using it to legitimatize their nation-hood.
After the trial, sitcoms and other television programs incorporated the theme of Holocaust. Through the use of the German language, idioms and images and sounds and without the word “holocaust”, writers would use these cues to imply Nazi behaviour. In this time period between the trial and the Holocaust mini-series, genres of television from dramas to comedies to science fiction all used imagery of the Holocaust in episodes.
The capstone in the television programs of this time period to Shandler is the Holocaust mini-series that aired in 1978. Not only did this program popularize the word Holocaust, it also brought American understanding of the Holocaust to the world.[10] Despite the series’ world success (in terms of viewership), it came to be just another “mass produced” drama of “ethical grievance” according to Shandler[11]. Even the nine-hour mini-series was not seen as a major force in the televised versions of the holocaust in the late 1970s due to the sheer volume of content available on the subject allowing the Holocaust to slowly become a household word.
The media began to focus their attention onto the survivors when there was an increase in Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis. The final section of Shandler’s book, A Household Word: 1979-1995, focuses on the rise the narrative of the survivor to legitimize the events of the Holocaust. The survivors are often depicted as exoticized, presented as witnesses to strange experiences or are canonization for their noble actions within the war[12]. This status gives the survivor a higher standing in the weight of their authority in their testimony and is evident in the documentary programs aired in the later part of the twenty-first century. As the theme of the Holocaust being a metaphor in television to other American events, (despite the Holocaust not technically being an American event), is shown in the end of this chapter with the juxtaposition of images from the Balkan War beside those from the Holocaust in order to extract an emotional and moral responses from the audience. The book concludes with the point that the construction of Holocaust memory as of the 1990s is so reliant on the use of television, that all the major Holocaust museums in the United States have incorporated television screens into the exhibitions.
Shandler’s background as a media scholar is evident in his work of While America Watches. The scope of the research and films presented in the book as examples is astonishing. With many of the programs and films consulted being produced prior to mass replication, he was able to find and watch multitudes of rare and aging films in order to grasp the full history of the Jewish Holocaust portrayals (as other groups effected by the Holocaust are simply overlooked). Shandler arranges these films in chronological order, which aids in the flow of his ideas and emphasises the progression of the Holocaust’s representation in American culture. While, the flow is smooth, the transition from chapters seven to eight is awkward as Shandler tries to shift from television programs to the use of televisions in Holocaust museums. With this vast knowledge base, he does not take the easy route in his study of early American television and write it off as a negative, but instead tries to explain how television shaped American awareness and consciousness of the Holocaust without the binary of television being a “good” or “bad” driving force behind American public memory.
While it is necessary to comment and give context to the materials and films used in studies such as these, Shandler often goes into painstaking detail of the entire plot such as in This is Your Life, or into unnecessary detail about production like he does about the Eichmann case. This abundance of detail regarding each example obstructs the argument and loses the impact of its purpose.
While the examples in text are unnecessarily abundant, the examples provided through the photographs in the book lack details. The use of black and white stills from the programs show a glimpse of the reality behind the text, but the lack of colour removes the reader from the full context. Black and white gives the impression of the distant past despite some of the examples that are accompanied by film-stills examples are from the 1980s and were originally aired in full-colour.
In the text of While America Watches, Shandler uses quotes from other scholars and quotes directly from the program being discussed for support of his argument. While this is a valid method of analysis, his quotes and claims are sometimes unattributed to a source. In one instance, he claims that in the Eichmann trial, America had the most in-depth coverage of any other nation in the world.[13] While this claim is set up in the context of discussing the vast quantity of airtime dedicated to the trial, the lack of numbers and data to legitimize this claim detracts from the credibility of the claim. The second example, may simply be a stylistic choice, but the lack of citations for the quotes related to a documentary entitled Verdict for Tomorrow, leaves the reader having to go back through the text in order to find where these direct quotes are coming from.
Jeffrey Shandler’s work While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, is an examination which thoroughly documents the changing American attitudes and representations of the Holocaust using the medium of television from 1945-1995. Using major television events such as the Eichmann trial of 1961 and the Holocaust mini-series of 1978, and singular episodes of programs such as Hanna’s appearance on This is Your Life, Shandler crafts his argument against the common argument of television trivializes events. Through his examples, Shandler is able to construct a timeline of representation that incorporates the representation of the holocaust as a cultural phenomenon that impacted public memory from its portrayal on television.
Bibliography:
Shandler, Jeffrey. While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
[1] Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiii.
[2] Shandler, While America Watches, 5.
[3] Ibid., 8.
[4] Ibid., 38.
[5] Ibid., 78.
[6] Shandler, While America Watches, 84.
[7] Ibid., 90.
[8] Ibid.,109.
[9] Ibid., 113.
[10] Shandler, While America Watches, 165.; Ibid.,167.
[11] Ibid., 172.
[12] Ibid., 190.
[13] Shandler, While America Watches, 95.