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Migrating Images: Iconic Images of the Holocaust and the Representation of War
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Migrating Images: Iconic Images of the Holocaust and the Representation
of War in Popular Film
Tobias Ebbrecht

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume 28,

Number 4, Summer 2010, pp. 86-103 (Article)

Published by Purdue University Press

DOI: 10.1353/sho.2010.0023

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sho/summary/v028/28.4.ebbrecht.html

Access provided by Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz (13 Nov 2013 02:04 GMT)
86 ♦ Tobias Ebbrecht

Migrating Images: Iconic Images

of the Holocaust and the
Representation of War
in Popular Film
Tobias Ebbrecht
Konrad Wolf Film & Television Academy
Potsdam

The Holocaust has become a master paradigm in late twentieth-century West-

ern culture for contemporary dangers of bigotry, bureaucracy, demagoguery, and
nationalism. Familiar historic images from the Holocaust and its immediate af-
termath are continuously dissociated from their original historical background
and sources. They migrate into popular culture as emblematic signs. The article
discusses what happens when these iconic images are projected into popular cin-
ema to convey collective fears and symbolize evil, terror, and genocide. It focuses
on the cinematic adaptation of the graphic novel V for Vendetta. V for Vendetta
combines several elements, which are indirectly linked to the Holocaust as a
central reference point, but which also merge with other iconic incidents, em-
blematic images, and intertextual references. Thus, an imagined genocide draws
on images known from the Nazi concentration camp to convey contemporary
themes.

The Shoah has become a central part of our universal collective memory.
Transferred into a basal model to describe good and evil as well as guilt and in-
nocence, the Nazi mass murder of European Jewry serves as a global reference
point for later atrocities. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider view this tendency
as part of an ongoing process of decontextualization.1 The Holocaust morphs
into an event with universal significance but no historical reference. At the
same time the Holocaust communicates the importance of remembering what
happened in Auschwitz and other death camps to a transnational audience,

1
See Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), p. 132.

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

 Migrating Images ♦ 87

marking its crossing from national to a cosmopolitan memory. Populariza-

tion and decontextualization lead to an understanding of the Holocaust as a
“master moral paradigm” about the potential dangers of bigotry, bureaucracy,
demagoguery, and nationalism. The lessons learned from the Holocaust serve
as a fundamental reference for contemporary ethical and political questions.2
This shift to global memory of the Holocaust is similar to what Barbie
Zelizer described as “remembering to forget,” which is a “forgetting through
images.”3 The Holocaust and its iconography became an ahistorical symbol
which expresses total evil. This not only shapes the memory of the Shoah but
also the understanding of other war atrocities:
The predictable arrival of iconic images of barbarism adds new residents to al-
ready populated categories of visual representation: as soon as we see the ago-
nized collectives of survivors and victims, gaunt faces behind barbed wire, vacant
stares of the tortured, and accoutrements of torture, we recognize the atrocity
aesthetic. And the media help us to respond to that aesthetic by showing us
where to position new horrors rather than understand them—how to classify,
categorize, and in many cases forget what we are seeing.4

Considering Zelizer’s comprehension of the importance of iconic images

from the Holocaust to envision later barbaric events and atrocities, this article
shows how contemporary depictions of past war experiences as well as ficti-
tious imaginations of future wars in cinema and television employ iconic im-
ages from the Holocaust, which migrate into other contexts.

The Limits of Cosmopolitan Memory and the Perspective of the

Spectator

In their study of Holocaust remembrance in a global age, Levy and Sznaider

identify a reflexive form of cosmopolitan Holocaust memory which is not lim-
ited to a national understanding of historic events, but embraces different and
particular experiences.5 This could engender conflicting memories and inter-
pretations of the past. Although a universal approach and a particular experi-
ence may complement each other, this dialectical element within the inter-
pretation of the Holocaust is often missed. Concrete responsibility and guilt

2
See Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust, p. 131.
3
Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 203.
4
Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, p. 204.
5
See Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust, p. 132.

Vol. 28, No. 4 ♦ 2010

88 ♦ Tobias Ebbrecht

dissolve behind metaphors for “modernity” or “bureaucracy,” which are seen

as abstract causes of the Holocaust.6 Especially in Germany and Europe, the
Holocaust evokes modern barbarism, ignoring the event’s driving force: anti-
semitism, institutionalized hatred against the Jews.7 Therefore Sznaider warns
of the danger of cosmopolitanism without history,8 which falsely extrapolates
Auschwitz into a “European catastrophe” and ignores the particular identity
of its victims.9 Thus, the European “lessons” from the Holocaust justified the
military intervention in Kosovo (1998/99) but failed to apply to non-Europe-
an genocides in Rwanda or Darfur. Another result of rendering the Holocaust
a generic symbol is its trivialization of the denial and antisemitic propaganda
of fundamentalist politicians like Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The meaning of the Holocaust has often been reduced to a lesson in tol-
erance because as such it has universal relevance.10 Levy and Sznaider attri-
bute this tendency to the Americanization of the Holocaust, which seeks to
mediate between absolute moral guidelines, American values, and particular
subjective experiences. It offers a third subject position besides that of the per-
petrator and the victim in the “Holocaust arena”: the witness or observer.11
Levy and Sznaider assert:
In this privileged position, the witness or observer can choose either to identify
with the victims or adopt the morally bankrupt role of the passive observer. This
position of witnessing is a central feature of the politics of remembrance in the
Second Modernity, straddling the narratives of both oppressor and victim.12

This position of the observing witness resembles Hannah Arendt’s concep-

tualization of judgment. In her lectures on Kant’s political philosophy Arendt
compares the positions of the judge and the spectator, both of whom are observ-

6
See Natan Sznaider, Gedächtnisraum Europa: Die Visionen eines europäischen Kosmo-
politismus. Eine jüdische Perspektive (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008), p. 81.
7
See Sznaider, Gedächtnisraum Europa, p. 82.
8
See Sznaider, Gedächtnisraum Europa, p. 83.
9
See Sznaider, Gedächtnisraum Europa, p. 84.
10
Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust, p. 132.
11
For example, in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the bystander turns into a rescuer.
Stanley Kramer emphasized the position of the spectator in his court room drama Judg-
ment at Nuremberg by introducing an American judge giving his judgment after becoming a
spectator in the courtroom to a screening of atrocity footage from the liberated concentra-
tion camps.
12
Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust, p. 155.

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

 Migrating Images ♦ 89

ers. Based on what has been seen and heard, the spectator discerns the meaning
of what happened. Arendt’s formulation contains a theory of reception. For her
the faculty of judgment is based on interpersonal communication.
Arendt’s insight into judgment can be extended to the media. As in a theatre,
only the spectator occupies a position that enables him to see the whole: the
actor, because he is part of the play, must enact his part—he is partial by defini-
tion. The spectator is impartial by definition—no part is assigned to him. Hence,
withdrawal from direct involvement to a standpoint outside the game is a condi-
tion sine qua non of all judgment. Second, what the actor is concerned with is
doxa, fame—that is, the opinion of others . . . ; the actor is dependent on the
opinion of the spectator; he is not autonomous . . . ; he does not conduct himself
according to an innate voice of reason but in accordance with what the specta-
tors would expect of him. The standard is the spectator. And this standard is
autonomous.13

Although not involved in the play, the spectator is involved with fellow specta-
tors who, in Arendt’s words, constitute the “public realm.”14 Judging is a com-
municative sense because it is only possible “where the standpoints of all oth-
ers are open to inspection.”15 The central “faculty that makes this possible is
imagination.”16 Imagination is “the ability to make present what is absent.” It
is not reflecting “on an object but on its representation.”17 Imagination is the
“faculty of re-presentation”18 and “the condition for memory.”19
Turning towards media representation of the Holocaust and migrating
images drawn from the event but placed in a different context, the crucial
question is if and how popular media enables us to realize this epistemological
potential of the spectator’s position or whether it transforms representation
into a mimetic aesthetic avoiding imagination and reflexive memory. This re-
calls what Barbie Zelizer said about the iconic images of barbarism: the media
help us to classify atrocities with reference to iconic images rather than to un-
derstand them. Imagination as a precondition of representation has to break

13
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1982), p. 55.
14
Arendt, Lectures on Kant, p. 63.
15
Arendt, Lectures on Kant, p. 43.
16
Arendt, Lectures on Kant, p. 43.
17
Arendt, Lectures on Kant, p. 65.
18
Arendt, Lectures on Kant, p. 79.
19
Arendt, Lectures on Kant, p. 80.

Vol. 28, No. 4 ♦ 2010

90 ♦ Tobias Ebbrecht

through the limits of the conventionalized images of atrocities to facilitate un-

derstanding.

Migrating Images

Similarly to the globalization of Holocaust remembrance, the visual representa-

tion of the Holocaust provides a model for the representation of other war expe-
riences in film and media. Through its representation in contemporary popular
culture, the Holocaust often has become visually stereotyped. A specific pattern
of codes and conventions was generated through repetition and constant circu-
lation of the same iconic images. Well-known images of Nazism and the Holo-
caust comprise a basic part of our cultural reservoir of representing atrocities.
We meet a crucial point in the history of visual Holocaust remembrance.
Many scholars recognize that the Holocaust functions as a master narrative
in popular film and media to describe melodramatic and tragic stories of
loss, destruction, and survival. Assuming the pervasiveness of the Holocaust
in contemporary popular culture, filmmakers and screenwriters only have to
“draw on a rich source of previous movie plotlines and images.”20 This ongoing
repetition creates a situation in which the iconic images become embedded as
part of our personal memory. Referencing these images, popular films evoke
associations with the Holocaust when they are dealing with different topics.
This results in a process of radical de-contextualization of Holocaust images
from their original sources and reception.
Thus, historical images we derived from the Holocaust and its immediate
aftermath are continuously dissociated from their historical origins. They are
migrating into popular culture as emblematic images, hence my characteriza-
tion of them as migrating images.
Migrating images have an analogous impact to the phenomenon of post-
memory developed by Marianne Hirsch. Hirsch discovered that many chil-
dren of Holocaust survivors are “remembering” the almost hidden experiences
of their parents by using the well-known and familiar pictures depicting their
parent’s traumatic past. They resort to utilizing these mediated images to pic-
ture incidents personally experienced by their parents and only vicariously by
themselves.21 The most familiar images of the Holocaust and their replica-

20
Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Con-
temporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), p. 240.
21
See Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photography and the Work
of Postmemory,” in Barbie Zelizer, ed., Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 218f.

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

 Migrating Images ♦ 91

tion in art and film can be seen as a “model for reading both the striking fact
of repetition and the particular canonized images themselves.”22 Postmemory
could also provide a model of de-coding and analyzing these familiar migrat-
ing images.
Before applying this concept to film analysis, two objections should be
raised. The first objection addresses the perspective of postmemory, which is
specifically linked to the experience of children of Holocaust survivors. Can
this phenomenon have validity if it is universalized beyond that specific Jewish
experience and perspective? Hirsch herself points out, that “postmemory need
not be strictly an identity position” but is an expression of “an intersubjec-
tive transgenerational space of remembrance.”23 Therefore the concept retains
saliency to convey the memory of a traumatic event to generations living in
different eras and places from those who personally experienced it. It implies
a duration between the historic event, the personal experience, the process
of memory, and its representation. Nevertheless the specific subject position
regarding the traumatic experiences of the victims and its difference from the
perception of the bystanders and perpetrators has to be reflected:
The children of victims, survivors, witnesses, or perpetrators have different ex-
periences of postmemory, even though they share the familial ties that facilitate
intergenerational identification. Still, this form of remembrance need not be re-
stricted to the family, or even to a group that shares an ethnic or national identity
marking: through particular forms of identification, adopting, and projection, it
can be more broadly available.24

The second objection concerns the material of postmemory. Following

Hirsch, most scholars have treated postmemory as an avant-garde concept
which can only be applied to art or documentary films. In contrast I contend
that postmemory, at least as model of decoding and analyzing migrating im-
ages, can also be applied to popular cinema. While the artistic practice of
postmemory adds a level of self-consciousness about the use of iconic images,
popular culture tends towards an imitative use and creates a redundant re-
cycling of these images. Transferred into icons, metaphors, and stereotypes,
these images implicitly communicate a certain meaning while at the same
time displacing their origin. They still function like “memory cues” in Hirsch‘s
sense,25 but they are memory cues without memory. They hide the traces of

22
Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” p. 218.
23
Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” p. 221.
24
Hirsch, “Surviving Images,“ p. 220.
25
Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” p. 217.

Vol. 28, No. 4 ♦ 2010

92 ♦ Tobias Ebbrecht

their source even when it is inscribed in their structure as a hidden reference.

In the words of Anton Kaes, these images create an “eternal cycle” or “end-
less loop.”26 Analyzing and decoding those images as postmemory could break
through this endless cycle of self-generated images. In popular culture repeti-
tion and seriality serve as conventions for telling and retelling stories from the
Holocaust. In most cases neither is utilized as a means for reflecting upon the
possibilities and limits of representation. Instead, they generate recreations
dissociated but indirectly related to the traumatic past.
What is striking in this context is that these recreations address audience
members as active spectators. They become, as Hirsch puts it, borrowing a
term by Geoffrey Hartman, “witnesses by adoption.”27 This recalls the per-
spective of the spectator, observer, or witness articulated by Levy and Sznaider
as an additional subject position besides that of the perpetrator or the victim.
Although popular narratives using migrating images rarely enable self-reflex-
ive viewing of these representations, the relation between spectator and im-
ages, and the ability to decode the migrating images as postmemories, create
some analytical distance.

Visual References for Migrating Images of the Holocaust

To understand how migrating images of the Holocaust adopt the past and
communicate its impact as memory cues, it is necessary to analyze possible
patterns and models for these recreations. The most important visual refer-
ences for many popular movies adopting the visual heritage of the Holocaust
are cinematic prototypes like the repeatedly screened film footage shot in the
liberated camps shortly after the war, as well as their adaptation and amalga-
mation with genre elements in blockbusters like Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s
List (U.S.A., 1993). Particularly the images filmed by Allied camera crews at
the liberated camps got recycled as monuments of atrocities and iconic images
for the horror of genocide. But also other visual evidence of the Nazi period
and the Holocaust have become prototypes for its iconography through their
use and reuse in documentaries, history books, or exhibitions. Three different
perspectives inform photographs and films documenting the Holocaust: the
perpetrator’s gaze, the victim’s gaze in clandestine photographs taken by Jews,

26
Anton Kaes, “History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemi-
nation,” in Bruce A. Murray and Christopher J. Wickham, eds., Framing the Past: The His-
toriography of German Cinema and Television (Carbondale: South Illinois University Press,
1992), p. 309.
27
Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” p. 221.

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

 Migrating Images ♦ 93

and the liberator’s gaze in films shot by Allied troops after the liberation of the
camps.28 All of this visual evidence is marked by the context of its production
and incorporates the signature of its creators.
Gertrud Koch detected the perpetrator’s gaze in the patterns of some his-
torical photographs.29 Obviously the technical camera angle refers to the ideo-
logical attitude of the photographer.30 In addition, the content of photographs
and the context of their production implicitly reveal the attitude of their cre-
ators. Most of these images were preserved in collections commissioned dur-
ing the war to demonstrate Nazi success in solving the “Jewish question.” In
Lodz an amateur photographer shot a series of colored photographs to pub-
licize the productivity of the ghetto and its inmates.31 Another famous col-
lection of perpetrator photographs is the “Auschwitz Album.” It records the
arrival of a transport of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz on May 24, 1944. The
photographer presumably was either SS-Hauptscharführer Bernhardt Wal-
ter or his assistant Ernst Hofmann, who were assigned to photograph this
transport. According to the testimony of the former inmate Wilhelm Brasse,
the photo album was assembled for the camp’s commander Rudolf Höss.32
After the war it was preserved by Lily Jacob, who had been deported from
Hungary to Auschwitz. She survived in the concentration camp Dora near
Nordhausen, where she found the album in an SS-office and recognized many
of her friends and relatives. For her these photographs were the last memo-
rial of those who had died in Auschwitz.33 Later the album was entered as
evidence at the Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt.34 Today these photographs ap-

28
See Jonathan Webber and Teresa Swiebocka, Auschwitz: A History in Photographs
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 34ff
29
Gertrud Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktionen des Juden-
tums (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), p. 179.
30
Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung, p. 9.
31
See Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung, p. 178 and Florian Freund, Bertrand
Perz, and Karl Stuhlpfarrer, “Bildergeschichten—Geschichtsbilder,” in Hanno Loewy &
Gerhard Schoenberner, eds, “Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit”: Das Ghetto Łodz 1940–1944;
eine Ausstellung des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt a. M. in Zusammenarbeit mit Yad Vashem
(Vienna: Löcker, 1990), pp. 50–58.
32
See Webber and Swiebocka, Auschwitz, p. 40.
33
See Gideon Greif, “Das ‘Auschwitz-Album’: Die Geschichte der Lili Jacob,” in Isra-
el Gutman and Bella Gutterman, eds., Das Auschwitz-Album: Geschichte eines Transports
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), p. 75f.
34
See Greif, “Das ‘Auschwitz-Album,‘” p. 82.

Vol. 28, No. 4 ♦ 2010

94 ♦ Tobias Ebbrecht

pear widely as evidence, souvenirs, or iconic images of deportation and mass

murder. Habbo Knoch analyzed these photos on the basis of their framing,
the position of the photographer, their context within the album, and captions
accompanying them. He ascertained they were intended to illustrate the ef-
ficiency of the selection process to separate inmates who could still work from
those whose inability to do so merited liquidation.35
Such collections communicated the perpetrator’s perspective visually and
verbally in captions. This is exemplified by the infamous Stroop Report de-
picting the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.36 On April
18 the uprising started after the last remaining Jews were ordered to report
for deportation. On April 19 Obersturmbahnführer Jürgen Stroop moved his
troops into the ghetto, but encountered strong resistance. For more than a
month, the Jews fought back until Stroop set all the remaining houses in the
ghetto on fire. On May 16 he announced: “The former Jewish quarter in War-
saw is gone. The total number of captured or killed Jews is 56,056.”37 Stroop’s
“heroic” self-perception is documented in a photo album which he had com-
piled as evidence of his victory. The photos in this report have become iconic
images like the famous picture of a young Jewish boy captured by an armed
German soldier. Although originally evidence of how the Nazis quelled the
rebellion, today they epitomize Nazi terror and destruction.
In total contrast to these perpetrator’s photographs, clandestine pictures
survived the Shoah that were secretly taken by Jewish photographers in the
Ghettos or camps. Mendel Grossman photographed the Lodz Ghetto, and his
pictures revealed a reality that differs from the German propaganda gaze. In
1944 a Jewish Sonderkommando at Auschwitz took four pictures depicting
their work at the gas champers of the death camp. These pictures represented
a desperate attempt to bear witness to what was happening at this place and
to preserve the memory of all those who lost their lives. They not only pro-
vided evidence of the crimes perpetrated in Auschwitz but showed incidents
occurring near the crematoria in 1944.38 Two photographs of the burning of
dead corpses have a black border. On closer analysis, this frame appears to be

35
See Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild: Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erin-
nerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001), p. 99.
36
See Knoch, Die Tat als Bild, p. 97.
37
Quoted in Joe J. Heydecker, Das Warschauer Ghetto: Foto-Dokumente eines deutschen
Soldaten aus dem Jahr 1941 (München: dtv, 1983), p. 15.
38
See Georges Didi-Huberman, Imaages in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Ausch-
witz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008),

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 Migrating Images ♦ 95

the doorway to the gas chambers behind which concentration camp prisoners
were dying. Survivor Alter Fajnzylberg recalls:
“On the day on which the pictures were taken—I do not remember the day or
the month exactly—we allocated tasks. Some of us were to guard the person
taking the pictures. In other words, we were to keep a careful watch for the ap-
proach of anyone who did not know the secret, and above all for any SS men
moving about in the area. At last the moment came. We all gathered at the west-
ern entrance leading from the outside to the gas chamber of Crematorium V: we
could not see any SS men in the watch-tower overlooking the door from above
the barbed wire, nor near the place where the pictures were to be taken. Alex, the
Greek Jew, quickly took out his camera, pointed it toward a heap of burning bod-
ies, and pressed the shutter. This is why the photograph shows prisoners from
the Sonderkommando working at the heap. One of the SS was standing beside
them, but his back was turned towards the crematorium building.”39

The doorway is an existential part of these photographs since it exposes the

Nazi plan to murder the Jews and to efface all remaining memories of this
crime. Today only the killing scene with the burning bodies outside the gas
chambers has become an iconic image while the shadow of the doorway is
cropped out of the pictures.
The aesthetics of historical images are equally important when decipher-
ing the film footage shot by allied soldiers after the liberation of the camps.
Upon entering the camps, soldiers saw shocking scenes of atrocity and misery
and decided to document these unimaginable crimes committed in the camps
for eventual use as evidence in trials against perpetrators and to inform Ger-
mans and the world about the scope and severity of Nazi crimes. Memory
of the Camps, directed by Steward McAllister (UK/USA, [1945] 1985) re-
corded the terrible conditions in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen when
the British liberated it in 1945. Though it was never finished, a reconstructed
fragment of it was released during the 1980s. By then clips of it already had
appeared in other documentaries like Death Mills, directed by Hanuš Burger
(USA:1945).40 Alain Resnais used scenes from the Bergen-Belsen material

39
Quoted in Webber and Swiebocka, Auschwitz, p. 43.
40
See Kay Gladstone, “Separate Intentions: The Allied Screenings of Concentration
Camp Documentaries in Defeated Germany in 1945–1946: Death Mills and Memory of
the Camps,” in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, eds., Holocaust and the Moving Image:
Representations in Film and Television since 1933 (London: Wallflower, 2005), p. 50.

Vol. 28, No. 4 ♦ 2010

96 ♦ Tobias Ebbrecht

for his film Night and Fog (France: 1955).41 Consequently, the Bergen-Belsen
footage came to symbolize not just the Holocaust but the evils of Nazism.42
Sidney Bernstein, the head of the Film Division of the British Ministry of
Information, coordinated the Bergen-Belsen project.43 He began working on it
in February 1945. The day after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, he arrived at
the site and started filming.44 He tried to make sure no one would question the
authenticity of the footage and accuse the Allies of fabricating it. Alfred Hitch-
cock, a friend of Bernstein, advised him “to avoid all tricky editing and to use
as far as possible long shots and panning shots with no cuts, which panned for
example from the guards onto the corpses.”45 Footage depicting German civil-
ians visiting the camp should also be included in the film to verify the setting.
One scene in particular validates Bernstein’s approach. In a long shot Ger-
man representatives from the surrounding villages tour the camp. Then the cam-
era pans to a German SS-guard who is forced to carry a dead body to the mass
graves. This single shot encompasses the SS-guard, the dead body, the villagers,
and the mass graves. This technique of assuring the reality of the scene became
as much part of the iconography of the Holocaust as the images themselves. The
film’s footage depicting bulldozers pushing dead bodies into the mass graves be-
came one of the most influential iconic images of the Holocaust.

Migrating Images of the Holocaust in War Films: Dresden and

Platoon

In the remainder of this article, I will discuss what happens when these iconic
images are inserted into popular films projecting collective fears through ste-
reotypical images of terror, war, and genocide. I will present different forms of
using and abusing these migrating images of the Holocaust. Rather than ana-
lyze the cinematic narratives as a whole, I will limit my discussion to signifi-
cant examples and paradigmatic sequences, which typify ways in which such
migrating images are integrated into different surroundings.

41
See Ewout van der Knaap, “Monument des Gedächtnisses: Der Beitrag von Nacht
und Nebel zum Holocaust-Diskurs’,” in Waltraut “Wara” Wende, ed., Der Holocaust im Film:
Mediale Inszenierung und kulturelles Gedächtnis (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2007), p. 62.
42
Toby Haggith, “Filming the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen,” in Toby Haggith and Jo-
anna Newman, eds., Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television
since 1933 (London: Wallflower, 2005), p. 33.
43
See Gladstone, “Separate Intentions,” p. 50.
44
Elizabeth Sussex, “The Fate of F3080,” in Sight and Sound (April 1984): 92.
45
Gladstone, “Separate Intentions,” p. 56.

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

 Migrating Images ♦ 97

In 2006, sixty-one years after February 13, 1945 when the British Roy-
al Air Force attacked the East German city of Dresden, German television
screened the two-part TV-drama Dresden, directed by Roland Suso Richter
(Germany: 2006), which employed the bombing of the city as the backdrop
for a melodramatic story.46 Until that time, remembrance of the bombing of
Dresden was kept alive in Germany by the sharing of personal memories with-
in families and by revisionist circles decrying the British assault as a “bombing
Holocaust” and equating it with German atrocities during the Holocaust. The
movie Dresden was a popular and successful attempt to harmonize private and
public memory by including the suffering of Germans in the collective mourn-
ing over the cruelty of World War Two. Although the topic was tainted by its
association with right-wing political circles, Dresden inscribed the event into
popular culture and adjusted it to fit into the new European memory of World
War Two and its aftermath. Therefore the melodrama introduces a British
pilot whose plane has been shot down. He falls in love with the female leading
character of the film, a German nurse. By presenting a British perspective, the
film implies it is objective. To project the same openness, it includes a subplot
about a German-Jewish couple hoping to survive the last days of the war and
avoid deportation.
The visual language of Dresden, however, reveals how much the narrative
of the Holocaust is exploited to highlight the German ordeal. One significant
scene replicates the events from February 13 when the British planes were at-
tacking Dresden. It receives special visual attention and is highly symbolic. It
was obviously created to affect the viewer emotionally and physically. Similar
to other television docudramas, fictitious characters from the film act as wit-
nesses to scenes of atrocity and duplicate the position of the spectator. The
nurse Anna stands right in the center of the destroyed and still burning city
center after the first air raid. To intensify the cinematic experience of reliving
the bombing of Dresden, she is surrounded by the “fire storm,” and a hand-
held and constantly shaking camera creates a virtual feeling of presence. A
close-up of Anna’s face introduces her as a witness of the horrific devastation
of the city. Her frightened face is cut next to three emblematic scenes that
symbolize the situation. She sees a man with a missing leg and crutches hob-
bling through the rubble, an existential image for the impact of war. Then

46
For a more detailed reading of the television drama see Tobias Ebbrecht, “History,
Public Memory and Media Event: Codes and Conventions of Historical Event-television
in Germany,” in Siam Nicholas, Tom O’Malley, and Kevin Williams, eds., Reconstructing the
Past: History in the Mass Media 1890–2005 (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 101–114.

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she notices a lunatic woman who is pushing a burning baby buggy, a striking
image for the insanity of war. The last image that Anna witnesses is the most
pertinent for the subject of this article. She sees a man with burning clothes
jumping out of a window. This is an iconic image for the human struggle to
live in the face of destruction and death. An important template for this image
is a photograph from the Stroop report depicting the uprising in the War-
saw Ghetto. This photograph shows a Jewish resistance fighter whose body is
burning desperately jumping out of a window. The caption sarcastically com-
ments: “Jewish bandits abscond from justice by jumping.”
Although originally an iconic image of the Holocaust, Dresden turns it into
a decontextualized metaphor for the cruelty of war. This usage creates a mostly
unconscious memory effect. The experience in the destroyed and burning Ger-
man city, an effect of World War Two and Germany’s aggression, is conflated
with the Jewish experience in the Warsaw Ghetto. Jewish and German suf-
fering is equated as the Jewish experience of the Holocaust is replaced by the
German experience of war. Regarding its use and abuse of migrating images,
Dresden transfers elements from Holocaust remembrance (implicitly and often
unconsciously) to the “new” discourse about Germans as suffering victims. The
universalized iconography and language of Holocaust representation and com-
memoration enable German post-war culture to merge the two fundamentally
different perspectives of Jews in the Holocaust and Germans in the war. Saul
Friedlander elaborates this discrepancy by considering the analogous applica-
tion of the universalized term trauma: “If, for the sake of simplicity, we consider
both German and Jewish contemporaries of the Nazi period—contemporary
adults, adolescents, or children, even the children of these groups—what was
traumatic for the one group was obviously not traumatic for the other. For Jews
of whatever age, the fundamental traumatic situation was and is the Shoah and
its sequels; for Germans, it was national defeat. . . .”47
The well-known Holocaust images are transferred into melodramatic
stories about the German wartime experience. Wrenched out of their original
context, these Holocaust memory cues are exploited to bridge the gap between
the Holocaust victim’s experience and the perpetrator and bystander postwar
perception of themselves. The World War II film is not the only war film genre
that draws upon well-known Holocaust images to intensify the impression of
atrocity and horror. In popular culture the visual heritage of the Holocaust

47
Saul Friedlander, “Trauma, Memory, and Transference,” in Geoffrey H. Hartman,
ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell
Publisher, 1994), p. 257.

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 Migrating Images ♦ 99

can be cited to tell generic stories that combine this repository of images with
shock aesthetics. The inherent character of the Holocaust as a highly visual
and popularized event lends itself to being universalized and displaced in films
about other historical or fictional atrocities. Images from the liberated camps
can easily be utilized as metaphors for atrocity and imparting shock. Today
these images of corpses and mass graves shape the imagination of events dis-
connected from the Holocaust experience.
For example, footage referencing the liberation of Bergen-Belsen appears
in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (USA: 1986) about the Viet Nam War. In his rec-
reation of a civilian massacre like the one that occurred at My Lai, he evokes
the iconography of mass graves by imitating the famous images of bulldozers
shoving corpses into the mass graves. The linkage between the burial of the
Vietnamese peasants and the Jewish corpses reinforces Stone’s condemnation
of the Viet Nam War as unjustified. Associating that conflict with the Holo-
caust discredits it in the mind of the viewer. Migrating images can stigmatize
different historic incidents by posing such comparisons. The semblance of re-
alism conveyed by these iconic images, as well as their original function as
indictment against German atrocities, is used now to accuse Americans of war
crimes in Viet Nam.

The Holocaust as Reference in Science Fiction: V for Vendetta

The detachment of iconic Holocaust images from their historic context occurs
not only in dramatizations of real events. These migrating iconic images have
entered the science fiction and fantasy genre too. Director James McTeigue
adapted his film V for Vendetta (U.S.A./UK/Germany, 2005) from the popu-
lar graphic novel series of the same name created by Alan Moore, illustrated
by David Lloyd, and distributed by DC Comics. The Wachowski Brothers
wrote the screenplay, following up their Matrix-Trilogy (U.S.A./Australia,
1999–2003), for which McTeigue served as the first assistant director. There
have been many other popular comic series and cinematic adaptations of them
that have employed the visual heritage of Nazism and the Holocaust, such
as Guillermo del Torro’s Hellboy (U.S.A., 2004) and Bryan Singer’s X-Men
(U.S.A., 2000). The latter is a plea for tolerance for human mutants. It opens
surprisingly in a concentration camp in Poland. As Lawrence Baron notes,
this scene “recapitulates a shot from Schindler’s List when Schindler’s female
workers arrive in Auschwitz.”48 The film features numerous iconic images like

48
Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust, p. 259.

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tattoo numbers, the crematorium chimney, and the camp gate. This scene pro-
vides insight into the motivations of the mutant Magneto, who is a Holocaust
survivor. He battles against humankind because he fears it will persecute mu-
tants as the Nazis persecuted Jews during World War II.
In contrast V for Vendetta does not directly address the Holocaust. The
film is about a vigilante who roams the streets of London. A smiling mask
hides his true identity. He is living in the year 2010 in a totalitarian regime
where everyone is monitored by secret police and where public life is totally
controlled. A single leader rules the state unconditionally. Anyone who speaks
out against him and his government is punished. In a central scene the crimes
of the totalitarian government are investigated in a flashback: Inhumane ex-
periments with a genetically manipulated virus recall emblematic images from
the Holocaust.
Critics accused V for Vendetta of exploiting the Holocaust to present evil.
They charged it distorted the iconography of the Holocaust to heighten the
sense of dehumanization and destruction of human values in its entertaining
and shocking story. In this case the emblematic images of the Holocaust did
not refer to a concrete historical event. Yet it is striking that most of the movies
that are adopting migrating images of the Holocaust contextualize them in a
specific way. When X-Men draws a direct analogy between Jewish and mutant
persecution, it does so to place the universal themes of difference and tolerance
in a popular context.
In my reading of V for Vendetta I want to reinterpret its alliance of science
and myth, its crossing of cinematic genre and documentary evidence, and its
citation of the past to convey a political message for the present. The Holo-
caust exemplifies good and evil and provides a narrative template for political
and military cruelty, in which past and present, science and terror, and barba-
rism and modernity are superimposed. The flashback typifies this tendency.
It evokes past images of Nazi scientific medical experiments to instill fear of
genocidal actions in a science fiction future. Interestingly the original script
contains a handwritten note beside the scene in the Larkhill Sorting Station:
“Larkhill should be army barracks / Concentration / North Korea Detention
Camp—Ref[erence] Dachau.”49 This direct and intended reference towards
the Holocaust and other war film settings activates the audience’s remem-
brances of those prior images. Such associations illuminate the motives of key
characters and convince viewers that what they are seeing has and still could

49
Spencer Lamm and Sharon Bray, eds., V for Vendetta: From Script to Film (New
York: Universe Publishing, 2006), p. 93.

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 Migrating Images ♦ 101

happen. They condition the audience cognitively and emotionally to suspend

their disbelief.
As in Stone’s Platoon, the image of a mass grave signifies genocide by re-
sembling the footage taken at Bergen-Belsen. McTeigue explains his directo-
rial choice of replacing an image of a crematorium with that of a mass grave:
Originally, the pit that the Larkhill dead were thrown into was actually a human
oven. I changed it because I thought it was going to be too close to V coming
out of the cell, and that we should go for a more resonant image. It keys you into
mass graves anywhere, and everybody understands that when there is a great loss
of humanity, things like this happen. So even though it’s shocking, in that five
seconds of the story time, it quickly lets you know society or the government has
lost grip on who they are.50

The presence of these iconic images enables an act of unconsciously

“remembering” the Holocaust as a frame of reference. The human oven and
the mass grave are essential parts of the visual heritage of the Holocaust.
McTeigue observes that only the latter one can also be related to the universal
iconography of genocide. Such images do not require further elaboration. In
that “five seconds of story time” they condense a modern political conflict into
a comprehensible narrative pattern associated with genocide.
V for Vendetta cites the Holocaust to represent terror and genocide and
to create a plausible story. The plotline combines several elements which are
linked to the Holocaust, which in turn provides a central reference point for
the film. The movie merges these elements with other iconic incidents, em-
blematic images and intertextual references. The story deals with totalitarian
dictatorship. The visual style borrows from Nazi propaganda films like Leni
Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (Germany: 1935) and Bolshevik iconogra-
phy manifested in the omnipresence of red flags and banners, even though
director McTeigue justified this as an aesthetic decision: “In an earlier concept
. . . the flags are strictly black and white, which seemed a little flat. Ultimately,
we went with the more threatening red and black.”51 The casting of John Hurt
as Dictator Adam Sutler (onomatopoetically sounding like Hitler) recalls the
cinematic adaptation of Orwell’s novel 1984 (UK, 1984) directed by Michael
Radford. That film also starred John Hurt. McTeigue chose Hurt to remind
viewers of that earlier role: “In the lexicon of film, he (Hurt) completely be-
came that 1984 character, so to turn this on its head and have Winston, who

50
Lamm and Bray, eds., V for Vendetta, p. 219.
51
Lamm and Bray, eds., V for Vendetta, p. 221.

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had been shouted down at so thoroughly, years later shouting down at every-
body as Big Brother—this was a nice subversive thing to do.”52
The preference for symbolism can also be seen in V’s resurrection from
the fire:
There’s a really iconic image in the graphic novel, which was V standing outside
his cell after he’d exploded it. I really liked that, and whereas I didn’t want to
copy it exactly, I really liked how it was drawn and the idea that the cell is disin-
tegrated, but instead of finding him outside the cell, I thought it would be cool
for him to walk through a huge wall of fire and be exposed.53

The original screenplay describes the scene as follows: “He stands as Lu-
cifer might; a majestic shadowed form set against a blaze of orange flame.”54 A
handwritten note next to this passage links it explicitly to Dante’s Divina Com-
media. V for Vendetta thus employs the same allusion many Holocaust movies
do: Dante’s imagination of hell. The man standing in a wall of fire has a coun-
terpart in the visual heritage of the Holocaust: the pictures taken by members
of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, showing the burning of dead bodies
outside the gas chambers. These images were previously replicated in comic
books dealing with the Holocaust, like Art Spiegelman’s Maus. This motif
also migrated into Holocaust movies like Robert M. Young’s The Triumph of
Spirit (USA: 1989).
In V for Vendetta the visualization of extermination is transformed into
a symbol of the birth of a superhero: “This is essentially the birth of V, the
person who was psychologically and physically altered: this is the birth of a
superhero.”55 This connotation is intensified through its repetition after the
liberation of Evey from a (faked) incarceration. This camouflage is a diegetic
re-experience of V’s fate through Evey and even more the filmic re-experience
of the suffering for the cinematic audience. After her liberation Evey imitates
V’s iconic pose: “This was a really nice idea Andy and Larry had when writing
the script, to juxtapose Evey’s creation and V’s creation. He is born of fire and
rage and she is born of water and understanding, love. I wanted to make the
moment real and also surreal.”56 Interestingly this symbol of rebirth also re-
sembles an image from Oliver Stone’s Platoon where a slow motion shot shows

52
Lamm and Bray, eds., V for Vendetta, p. 220.
53
Lamm and Bray, eds., V for Vendetta, p. 209.
54
Lamm and Bray, eds., V for Vendetta, p. 96.
55
Lamm and Bray, eds., V for Vendetta, p. 209.
56
Lamm and Bray, eds., V for Vendetta, p. 215.

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 Migrating Images ♦ 103

the dead and falling body of the American soldier Elias, who is sacrificed by
the corrupt and sadistic commander of his platoon.
The crucial difference between the cinematic adaptation of V for Vendetta
and its original is the ambiguous connotation of the leading character. Alan
Moore’s V is an ambivalent character and no typical hero. In contrast to the
negation of a clear ethical and moral message in the comic book, the cinematic
version characterizes its hero as a heroic freedom fighter. Instead of interpret-
ing V’s anarchic terrorism as reaction against totalitarian rule, the film creates
a moral paradigm explicitly related to the repression of contemporary terror-
ism. The cinematic version of V for Vendetta deals neither with the Holocaust
nor with the horrors of war atrocities or medical experiments. Instead, it tries
to symbolize the current battle between neoconservative and liberal tendencies
in American society. (That was one reason why author Alan Moore rejected
an invitation to participate in the making of the film.) It also demonstrates
popular culture’s ability to merge contemporary politics, historic references,
collective fears, and genre patterns into entertaining and compelling stories.

Conclusion

Migrating images from the Holocaust appear in movies that are not about
World War II and the murdering of the Jewish people. They are more and
more used as universal icons for atrocities and emerge in various genres of
popular cinema. This is not limited to war films, of which the Holocaust is an
important reference point for epitomizing the barbarity of war and terror.
As part of the broader process of the globalization of Holocaust memory,
iconic images of the event appear in overtly imaginative works within the science
fiction or fantasy genre. Nevertheless, the specific connotations of the Holocaust
get transferred into these new contexts. The use and abuse of iconic Holocaust
images continues to shape public understanding of the past and to transform the
Jewish narrative of the Holocaust into a universal moral paradigm.
Recontextualizing the iconic images and their reformulation in popular
culture enables us to ascertain the new context and meaning connected with
these universal icons. Applying the concept of postmemory to an analysis and
decoding of migrating images can transform us into critical spectators who
are able to “read” these images of the past. This distant perspective makes us
aware of the original associations they evoked to determine the significance of
the past for the present. It also prompts us to ask if the Holocaust has become
a decontextualized and universal paradigm with a fixed and stereotypical ico-
nography or if the conflicting perspectives of the past still impact our current
political and aesthetical life.

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