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"Beasts of Burgeon: Animality in the Holocaust Menagerie." Humans Gone Wild: Catastrophe, Inhumanity, Animality.  American Comparative Literature Association Seminar.  Brown U, Providence RI, 30 Mar. 2012.

Abstract

In 2003, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) launched "Holocaust on Your Plate," a media campaign designed to articulate images of Nazi atrocity with modern-day animal farm factories and industrialized slaughterhouses.  While much attention since has decried the perceived trivialization of the Holocaust through attempts to link such causes as animal rights to the Shoah, relatively little examination has situated such attempts historically.  This paper thus proposes to situate animality as a menagerie of Holocaust depictions where animals carry the load of representation defining a range of interpretations for what being a human victim means.  The menagerie is a strange collection indeed, ranging from the horror film The Wolf Man (Universal, 1941) to the horror documentary The Blood of Beasts (1949) to PETA's "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign.  Far from being an isolated incident, the PETA campaign continues a proliferating set of meanings in which animals bear the signifying load to express culturally specific understandings of victimization during the Holocaust.

The Beasts of the Holocaust Menagerie | "It's Our Fate": The Wolf Man (Universal, 1941) Revisited | The Animality of Evil: Leading Sheep to the Slaughter in Blood of the Beasts / Le Sang des Bêtes (1949) | Holo-clucks Remembrance: Chicken Run (Dreamworks, 2000) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' "Holocaust on Your Plate" (2003) Campaign | Animality and Allegory

Clips

The Beasts of the Holocaust Menagerie

In 2003, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) launched "Holocaust on Your Plate," a media campaign designed to equate images of Nazi atrocity with modern-day animal farm factories and industrialized slaughterhouses.  That campaign culminated with an international traveling exhibition of outdoor banner displays of these images.  Not surprisingly, the campaign and exhibition immediately drew condemnation, with denunciations from the Anti-Defamation League, and calls from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to "cease and desist this reprehensible misuse of Holocaust materials" (USHMM).  PETA later issued an apology for the campaign, even though its worldwide travelling exhibition continued, garnering additional controversy overseas (ADL; PETA).  Curiously, the animated Dreamworks release Chicken Run had appeared in 2000, garnering far less controversy despite the concentration camp imagery noted in newspaper reviews of the film (Nichols).  How could an animated children's film exploiting such imagery, even acknowledged in the press, pass relatively unscathed under the radar screen?  What factors led to the heightened scrutiny of an animal rights' organization's articulation of Nazi atrocity with industrialized farming atrocity?

Without wading into a bog of debates over photographic authenticity, trivialization, or the ethics of representation, let's first consider the assortment of animal and beastly surrogates who have historically populated Holocaust imagery.  The Holocaust menagerie includes an odd if pathetic assemblage of animals indeed: a refugee Wolf Man at the beginning of the 1940s; traitorous and victimized sheep led to the slaughterhouse at the end of that decade; and by the early 2000s, depending on your global perspective, Zionist-tool hens or prison camp poultry.  Indeed, in 2008, Iranian TV concluded that Chicken Run was Zionist propaganda.  As eclectic as this menagerie is, each one of these creatures bears a signifying load for what being a human victim of Nazism and the Holocaust means.  Yet the recurrent crises that emerge from each of these representations ultimately have little to do with the animals, and a great deal to do with the limits of Holocaust representation.  From this menagerie springs a whole host of unresolved tensions and deep anxieties over the ultimate inability of mediated representations to render an acceptable depiction of unfathomable suffering.  In this menagerie, the animals of the Holocaust become beasts of burgeon, their meanings proliferating amid increasingly local and divergent understandings of the Holocaust.

Rather than invite an exhaustive inventory of either the animals or their burgeoning meanings, the menagerie inspires another approach, one in which animal representations allegorize the central dilemma of the Holocaust text: that the magnitude and trauma of the Holocaust demands representation, but that no text can ever fully encompass the meanings and understandings of the Holocaust.  Just as the animals are never quite human but something more than just beasts, the Holocaust texts discussed here elude easy classification as being about the Holocaust, even though their imagery and conditions of both production and reception invite evocative parallels to the Holocaust.  Recent scholarship by both Walter Metz and Michael Wulz has called attention to the relevance of the work of Friedrich Kittler and the allegorical approach he takes to technology.  In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler observed that

What writers astonished by gramophones, films, and typewriters - the first technological media - committed to paper between 1880 and 1920 amounts, therefore, to a ghostly image of our present as future.  Those early and seemingly harmless machines capable of storying and therefore separating sounds, sights, and writing ushered in a technologizing of information that, in retrospect, paved the way for today's self-recursive stream of numbers (xl).

Just as literature allegorized technology into "a ghostly image of our present as future," animality in a wide range of cinematic representation demonstrates a similar potential as a "self-recursive stream" flowing to a ghostly image of the past as our present.  First up in the menagerie: the refugee Wolf Man.

"It's Our Fate": The Wolf Man (Universal, 1941) Revisited

Considering animal representations in cinema occasions a rethinking beyond the conventional parameters of a Holocaust film.  Universal's 1941 The Wolf Man presents an unlikely candidate for consideration.  Part of a cycle of B-movie monsters, the studio budgeted a modest $180,000 for the surprise box-office hit, becoming one of the most profitable titles in Universal's horror cycle.  Indeed, both the film's popularity as well as its lesser cultural status merit attention.  Unlike bigger budget A pictures, films like The Wolf Man often escaped the scrutiny of the film industry's self-regulation apparatus.  While A pictures faced obstacles in forthrightly challenging Nazi anti-Semitism, smaller budget B movies like Hitler - Beast of Berlin (PDC, 1939) or The Three Stooges' short "You Nazty Spy!" (Columbia, 1940) enjoyed greater latitude with more controversial subjects.  Meanwhile, with The Wolf Man part of its 1930s and 40s monster franchise, Universal anticipated some success for the film.  Yet as a biography of the film's star Lon Chaney, Jr. noted, the studio worried that the film "would pale in comparison to the horrors of the real world, or that the public would consider the film in bad taste" (Smith 37).  As Arthur Lenning observed, the success of the film stumped trade publications like Variety, which wondered why horror films did well amid wartime horrors, concluding that it was just "another of those cycles" (qtd. in Lenning 309).

Unlike other animals in the menagerie, the Wolf Man did not immediately inspire an allegorized reading of the Holocaust.  A 1943 New York Times article on movie villains noted a progression of the horror villain to sympathetic villain in film:

Lately the film fan has been seeking some escape from the war.  He finds it by watching a novel kind of bad man - the sympathetic villain.  More sinned against than sinning, this new menace is not cast in shades of black, but in the more human, indeterminate grays of a real-life character.  So a moviegoer looking at him might say, "There but for the grace of God go I" (orig. emphasis; Robinson).

While the Times classified the Wolf Man as horror villain, screenwriter Curt Siodmak later remembered the enduring character as sympathetic villain, a kind of monstrous cipher for European Jewry.  In interviews for Turner Classic Movies' 1998 documentary Universal Horror and a 1999 Writers Guild of America magazine article, Siodmak claimed that the film "was a metaphor for his own flight from the horrors of Nazi Germany":

"I am the Wolf Man...  I was forced into a fate I didn't want: to be a Jew in Germany.  I would not have chosen that as my fate.  The swastika represents the moon.  When the moon comes up, the man doesn't want to murder, but he knows he cannot escape it, the Wolf Man destiny" (qtd. in Martin).

The Wolf Man allegorizes a central dilemma of Holocaust representation that in Kittler's words flows to a ghostly image of the past as our present.  Some sixty years later, the film's screenwriter told audiences what The Wolf Man was really about.  Yet The Wolf Man sprung not from Siodmak's sole authorship, but from the corporate authorship of Universal Studios.  Absent the screenwriter's later reminiscences, the film just as easily could allegorize psychosexual horrors, the Great Depression, or Pearl Harbor; or, it could allegorize absolutely nothing as just "another of those cycles."  In Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk, Barbara Klinger showed how Sirk capitalized on a boom in auteurist criticism throughout the sixties to reassert his authorship of melodramas he directed in the fifties, even though audiences of the time read his films quite differently from the auteurist meanings Sirk later ascribed to those films.  Nonetheless, one cannot easily dismiss Siodmak's recollections out of hand.  LIke its eponymous monster, the film eludes easy classification, as either a one-to-one metaphor for being a German Jewish refugee, or as the product of just another monster cycle.  With Blood of the Beasts, the next film discussed, authorial intent becomes even murkier as the images of violence from that documentary invite stronger articulations to Holocaust imagery.

The Animality of Evil: Leading Sheep to the Slaughter in Blood of the Beasts / Le Sang des Bêtes (1949)

Like The Wolf Man, Blood of the Beasts resists an allegorical reading of easy, one-to-one correspondence.  Yet outright rejection of its possibilities for Holocaust allegory does not come so easily either. Its images of violent mass slaughter, banal and routinized butchery, and contradictory co-existence between a peaceful Paris neighborhood and the Auschwitz-like gates of the charnel house invite suppressed and oblique comparisons to the death camps.  One of the most striking parallels to the Holocaust occurs when the narrator describes a "traitor goat" leading lambs "like condemned men" to the slaughter.  As Jeannette Sloniowski observed, the sequence inspired critic Raymond Durgnat to interpret the film as an allegory for the Holocaust, which in turn influenced subsequent readings of the film.  At the same, though, Sloniowski correctly noted "the problem of a documentary like Blood of the Beasts":

It resists easy classification as a moral statement about cruelty to animals, or humankind's survival at the price of the deaths of its fellow creatures, or even as an allegory about the Holocaust; the film may be all of these things, but it is not obviously any of them.  Unlike Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955)... Franju's film resolutely resists easy categorization.  It would be far more comfortable for spectators to suffer the pain of Blood of the Beasts if moral reassurance or a lesson learned was a clear and comfortable position when the film had run its course (172).

The film offered none of these things, even resisting easy categorization as a documentary.  Unlike The Wolf Man, Blood of the Beasts had no authorial voice who later claimed an intentional meaning.  As Sloniowski noted, in interviews, Franju evaded tying his film to any particular political or moral agenda.

Just as Sloniowski argued that the film may mean some things, but not "obviously any of them," it also resists an interpretation that denies the film's relevance to the Holocaust.  For one thing, the conditions of production for French cinema during this period, including government censorship, militated against explicit representations of subjects like French collaboration with the Nazis.  For another, the conditions of reception for the film suggest that, at least for American audiences, Blood of the Beasts meant a new kind of film for a new postwar era in which Hollywood films appeared increasingly irrelevant.  In a review of a 1950 documentary program sponsored by the newly formed film society Cinema 16, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther deemed the film

a horrible, sick-making picture for anyone with a slightly delicate sense - and it certainly is a classic example of the sort of thing at which the Hollywood-happy salesmen scoff.  But the brilliantly realized intention of its candor is simply to show what goes on behind the carefully drawn curtain of our sensibilities at our very doors.

As if to echo the film's allegorical implications, Crowther's article ends with its own unsettling ambiguity, completely independent of Durgnat's more explicit interpretation, paralleling the film's concluding sequence with the use of trains to deliver victims to concentration camps:

It gives expression to the unmentionable ironies of everyday life, with a little train [sic] going out through the beautiful French farmlands to pick up the slaughterhouse "victims" of the next day (Crowther).

While Crowther never once mentioned Nazis or concentration camps in his review, the passage suggested that audiences would well have been aware of the possibilities of meanings of The Blood of the Beasts, 17 years before Durgnat published his book detailing his allegorical reading of the film.

Holo-clucks Remembrance: Chicken Run (Dreamworks, 2000) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' "Holocaust on Your Plate (2003) Campaign

The tour of the menagerie ends, not with the fantastical or monstrous, but with the chicken.  What could possibly explain how such an ordinary creature could take on such extraordinarily vituperative and divergent meanings?  While most Western audiences read the chickens in the 2000 animated film Chicken Run as surrogate characters from POW films like Stalag 17 (Paramount, 1953) and The Great Escape (United Artists, 1963), outside the U.S. the film just as easily could lend itself to other readings, which reasonably detected a Holocaust subtext.  Even if these readings unreasonably derived a Zionist plot in which the chickens were tools of a Jewish conspiracy meant to brainwash young children with guilt over the Holocaust.  Even more surprising, though, was how little attention the Holocaust subtext in Chicken Run could garner in the West, when only three years later, chickens became part of a larger struggle over the taste politics of Holocaust representation, industrial farming, and vegetarianism with PETA's "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign erupting suddenly into a cultural crisis.  Like the ghostly images of werewolves and slaughterhouses flowing from the past into our present, the unlikely chicken now bore the signifying load for the limits of Holocaust representation.

While easy to dismiss the 2008 segment on Iranian television as ridiculous, minus its hand-fisted anti-Zionism, its allegorical reading did not seem that different from reviews appearing in The New York Times in 2000.  In "Taking the Children; A Crisis for Chickens: How To Escape?," Peter M. Nichols advised parents on whether the film was kid-appropriate.  Mrs. Tweedy of Tweedy Farm "runs the barnyard like a concentration camp, with barbed wire along the fences and the number 17, as in Stalag 17, painted on one of the barrackslike hen houses."  Unlike later controversies aroused by the PETA campaign, the review noted that for audiences aged 3-6 years, Chicken Run was a good deal grittier than most animated movies" and its "mood is still a little darker than Disney," although "any lasting harm is carefully avoided" (Nichols).

There is certainly ample evidence to suggest radically different contexts for the reception of the PETA campaign to explain the ensuing crisis in Holocaust representation over its images.  Unlike a children's film, the campaign played its articulated images both straight and explicitly.  The campaign lacked the benefit of having another cultural form, the film set in a POW camp, serve as its cover.  And unlike the Dreamworks film, which like other Dreamworks films could only vaguely allude to a set of political and ideological concerns, the PETA campaign sought to leverage its highly visible and contested ideological agenda of vegetarianism and animal rights with explicit images of Holocaust atrocity.

Like The Wolf Man and The Blood of the Beasts, though, one cannot completely explain away how Chicken Run was able to evade charges of Holocaust trivialization when critics recognized in print the parallels to Holocaust imagery and when concerns over trivialization erupted at the center of the crisis over the PETA campaign.  Similarly, one cannot completely explain away how little the articulation between Holocaust memory and animal rights mattered throughout the PETA controversy, or even the identity politics involved in that campaign.  As PETA was quick to point out, a Jewish PETA member funded the display in the U.S., and the statements that "to animals, all people are Nazis" and "for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka" came from Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer's book The Letter Writer (PETA).

Animality and Allegory

The problems and controversies swirling around the animality of Holocaust representation ultimately point to just how ill-suited the beasts are to performing clear-cut allegorical meanings about the Holocaust, even though audiences keep asking them to carry an expansive signifying load for what are appropriate and inappropriate interpretations of allegorical and metaphorical meanings.  They are beasts of burgeon.  They carry burgeoning meanings of the Holocaust across multiple cultural contexts and time periods.  Rather than become bogged down in debates over whether these texts function allegorically or whether these allegories function appropriately, we might do well to consider animality and the Holocaust in light of Kittler's observations regarding literature and technology.  Furthermore, perhaps Holocaust allegories of animality function best, not for what they reveal, but for what they lack.  In this sense, the animal representations of these films allegorize the inability of their very representation to fully encompass either the magnitude of the Holocaust, or its resultant human suffering.  The very elusiveness of these allegories point to the ultimate uncertainty of what these representations mean, or even if these representations can function allegorically.  At the same time, these representations mean something, something different to different audiences, and for some of those audiences, mean something intertwined with culturally specific understandings of the Holocaust.  Rather than occur in isolation, the surrogates in the menagerie recur across burgeoning anxieties and fears amid the unresolved crises of taste and politics in Holocaust representation.

Thanks to Ken Feil for directing me to Chicken Run, and to Sarah Groeneveld for recalling the Burger King promotional tie-in to that film.  Thanks to Rebecca Saunders and the other members of the Humans Gone Wild: Catastrophe, Inhumanity, Animality for their helpful and supportive insights at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting.

Primary Works Cited

Anti-Defamation League (ADL).  "ADL Denounces Peta for its 'Holocaust on Your Plate' Campaign; Calls Appeal for Jewish Community Support 'The Height of Chutzpah.'"  Press Release.  24 Feb. 2003.  http://www.adl.org/PresRele/HolNa_52.  Accessed 28 Mar. 2012.

Crowther, Bosley.  "Nothing Daunted: New Documentary Pictures Show Power and Progress in That Field."  The New York Times.  5 Nov. 1950.  http://www.nytimes.com.  Accessed 29 Mar. 2012.

Martin, Douglas.  "Curt Siodmak Dies at 98; Created Modern 'Wolf Man.'"  The New York Times.  19 Nov. 2000.  http://www.nytimes.com.  Accessed 28 Mar. 2012.

Nichols, Peter M.  "Taking the Children; A Crisis for Chickens: How to Escape?"  The New York Times.  30 June 2000.  http://www.nytimes.com.  Accessed 28 Mar. 2012.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).  "PETA Germany's Holocaust Display Banned."  The PETA Files: PETA's Official Blog.  27 Mar. 2009.  http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/tags/holocaust+on+your+plate/.  Accessed 28 Mar. 2012.

Robinson, Florett.  "The Hiss-s-s-s-s Through the Years."  The New York Times.  15 Aug. 1943.  http://www.nytimes.com.  Accessed 28 Mar. 2012.

United States.  Dept. of the Interior. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).  "United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Demands That PETA Stop Exploiting the Holocaust."  Press Release.  3 Mar. 2003.  http://www.ushmm.org/museum/press/archives.  Accessed 28 Mar. 2012.

Secondary Works Cited

Kittler, Friedrich.  Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.  1986.  Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, trans.  Stanford CA: Stanford U P, 1999.

Klinger, Barbara.  Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk.  Bloomington IN: Indiana U P, 1994.

Lenning, Arthur.  The Immortal Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi.  Lexington KY: U P of Kentucky, 2003.

Metz, Walter.  "Here's to Ben!: Visual Sound in the Films of David Lynch."  Materialities of Film Sound.  Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2012 Conference.  Boston MA.  24 Mar. 2012.

Sloniowski, Jeannette.  "'It Was an Atrocious Film': Georges Franju's Blood of the Beasts."  Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video.  Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, eds.  Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television.  Detroit MI: Wayne State U P, 1998.  171-87.

Smith, Don G.  Lon Chaney, Jr.: Horror Film Star, 1906-1973.  Jefferson NC: McFarland, 1996.

Strzelczyk, Florentine.  "Fascism and Family Entertainment."  Quarterly Review of Film and Video 25.3 (2008): 196-211.  http://uwindsor.ca.  Accessed 27 Mar. 2012.

Wutz, Michael.  "Notes Toward a Media-Historical History of Sound in Film."  Materialities of Film Sound.  Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2012 Conference.  Boston MA.  24 Mar. 2012.