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Hollywood, Foreign Films, and the Birth of the Holocaust Film

This paper is a revision and expansion of "To Encompass the Unseeable": The Last Stage (Times Film, 1949) and Auschwitz in the Mind of Cold War America.  Reimagining Jewish History in the Cold War.  Cold War Cultures: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives.  U of Texas at Austin, Austin TX.  1 Oct. 2010.

Introduction

In the film The Diary of Anne Frank (20th Century-Fox, 1959), a rather mysterious dream sequence occurs.  Anne has a nightmarish premonition.  She imagines her best friend Sanne Devries in a concentration camp.  Significantly, the scene is the only time that the film explicitly references a camp, and it is one of the first times that a postwar Hollywood film depicts a camp within the context of the Holocaust.  Although uncredited, but at least as significant for the erasure of its cinematic provenance, the sequence comes from The Last Stop (1948; Times Film, 1949)^[1], a 1948 Polish film shot on location at Auschwitz and based on the personal experiences of director Wanda Jakubowska, screenwriter Gerda Schneider, and some 3,500 female extras, all of whom had survived the camp and returned to re-enact its history for the camera.  Even in the director's commentary featuring the film's associate producer George Stevens, Jr. and star Millie Perkins, neither one mentions the particular historical origins of the footage.

The dream sequence from The Diary of Anne Frank (20th Century-Fox, 1959)

While both Stevens and Perkins acknowledged how much had changed since the release of the film in terms of cultural understandings of the Holocaust, their commentary continued the mystification of The Last Stop, omitting its historical specificity as a film created and performed after World War II by survivors on location at Auschwitz, and implicitly treating the Polish film, as Anne Frank did, more as actuality than as a significant cultural phenomenon in its own right (Perkins and Stevens).  As Hanno Loewy has argued, The Last Stop ultimately created a highly influential "iconography of the camps" that reinterpreted certain details through "cinematic visual traditions."  As a result, the film has become something more: an authentic document in its own right that other films treat as evidence (Loewy).  Thus, subsequent appropriation of the film's iconography, plus the erasure of its provenance, only work to enhance the film's authenticity.  Like a dream sequence itself, iconography from The Last Stop slips in and out of other Holocaust films, leaving the audience to imagine its footage as actuality, and to wake up to subsequently less authentic and fictionalized representations of the Holocaust.

More recently, The Last Stop has received renewed attention in its own right with its recent release through PolArt on DVD.  Yet the film, along with others, has yet to achieve the full recognition both their style as well as their historical conditions of reception deserve.  This paper argues that these foreign films were for audiences through the 1960s, a primary interpretive mode through which Americans came to understand the Holocaust.  Certainly, there were other interpretive modes, including radio, novels, the stage, newsreels and the Hollywood social problem film.  The foreign film, however, established a particular set of audience expectations concerning fictionalized treatment of the Holocaust in Hollywood film.  Though largely forgotten today, two films in particular bookended the formation of this American understanding.  The Last Stop marked the tail end of this formation.  A 1938 Soviet film, Professor Mamlock (Amkino, 1938)^[2], marked a beginning for this framing of an American encounter with fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust.

To Encompass the Unseeable

Given the amount of criticism leveled against Hollywood to adequately "encompass the unseeable," as New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther noted in his 1949 review of The Last Stop, understanding how foreign film shaped American encounters with fictionalized representations of the Holocaust thus takes on added urgency.  Wulf Kansteiner, in considering the influence of Holocaust film on what he called "the recalibration of collective identities after the Cold War," concluded that the U.S. and Western European post-war cinema misrepresented the Final Solution by universalizing, democratizing and popularizing the Holocaust.  Drawing from Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life, Kansteiner especially singled out The Diary of Anne Frank as "the first international Holocaust-related media event" to offer a powerful global consensus: "no camps, no brutality, and no Jewishness, but a distinctly generic representation of innocence and tragedy in times of crisis" (Kansteiner 163-64).  While Kansteiner also noted that The Last Stop downplayed Jewishness, he found that as a Polish film, it offered a comparatively "honest filmic exploration of the Nazi legacy," at least until Soviet control tightened over its satellite countries (155-56).

While such accounts do not offer an erroneous version of this history, in and of themselves they offer an incomplete one.  This version of film history and the Holocaust has persisted at least since the release of Professor Mamlock.  The notion of an inherently superior European cinematic sensibility in addressing Nazism and Auschwitz certainly is not a recent development.  In the week following the 1949 opening of The Last Stop in New York, Times critic Crowther already had ranked the film alongside such neo-Realist classics as Open City, Paisan, and Shoe Shine.  The only Hollywood film among them was The Search (1948), which even then was an MGM-PraesensFilm international co-production with Austria.  Crowther observed that "the only films which have yet really shown some deep and mature comprehension of the great human tragedy of our times" have been the ones made in Europe, and that it wouldn't be fair to expect "the people working in our studios" to have "faculties sufficiently up" to making such films (Crowther).  Without disparaging anyone's faculties, then, the same basic critique of Hollywood and the Holocaust has not changed much in the intervening sixty plus years: when it came to depicting the Holocaust, foreign films did it better.

The legacy of European and Eastern European cinematic treatment of the Holocaust notwithstanding, one must not mistake national cinemas for national receptions.  An implicit assumption behind the alleged inferiority or even absence of the Holocaust in Hollywood film, arguable at best, was that American audiences remained sheltered from and ignorant of the record of Nazi atrocities.  "I was not as aware," remembered Millie Perkins for the DVD commentary, "of what happened during the war" (Perkins and Stevens).  At the very least, Stevens' assertion that The Diary of Anne Frank was the first mainstream Hollywood film to address the Holocaust requires qualification.  It was in fact one of the first Hollywood films to address the Holocaust, but it certainly was not the first to address either the Holocaust or anti-Semitism after World War II.  A full year earlier, The Young Lions (20th Century-Fox, 1958) had tackled both anti-Semitism in the U.S. military, as well as the liberation of Jews in concentration camps in Germany.  Even before that, films such as RKO's 1945 Cornered and 1946 The Stranger dealt however fleetingly or problematically with Nazi atrocities.

A more complete assessment of Hollywood's treatment of the Holocaust, then, would envision films such as Cornered, The Stranger, The Young Lions, and The Diary of Anne Frank all as operating in relation to foreign film.  If foreign film did indeed do a superior job of depicting the Holocaust, and if by 1949 Hollywood's inadequacy in dealing with the realities of postwar Europe was well-publicized in the pages of the The New York Times, then perhaps Hollywood films did not need to depict these realities, when foreign film could do it better.  Perhaps all Hollywood films had to do was to reference what foreign films could do.  Ultimately, perhaps the point of what Hollywood was doing during this period was to show deference to the foreign film, and that audiences would have seen anything more than this as horrifically insensitive and tasteless overreaching that was capitalizing on the suffering of others.

The foreign film framed the American popular encounter with Nazi anti-Semitism, and then the full extent of Holocaust atrocities.  That framing, beginning with films like the 1938 Professor Mamlock, and ending with the 1949 American premiere of The Last Stop, spawned a whole formation of rules, conventions, and expectations for subsequent depictions of the Holocaust that both governed American films dealing with this subject, and that inflected these films with a set of taste politics favoring a decidedly foreign sensibility.  The cultural taste consensus that emerged from this initial framing would suggest that the birth of the Holocaust film was indeed far more globalized and international than more conventional notions of national cinemas would suggest.  The recent release of The Last Stop on DVD offers the opportunity to reacquaint American audiences with that film.  However, films such as the 1938 Professor Mamlock are completely unavailable at this time.  Even with its newfound availability, The Last Stop targets a relatively narrow cultural niche when compared to The Diary of Anne Frank.  Thus, the current canon formation of historically significant anti-Nazi and Holocaust films from this period may have more to do with the necessities of current tastes, technologies, and economic necessities amid present-day flows of globalization and culture, than they have to do with how actual audiences encountered actual films during the period between 1938 and 1949.

Professor Mamlock and the Anti-Nazi Foreign Film

Two interpretive polarities marked the extent and breadth of how the foreign film shaped the initial American encounter with Nazism and the Holocaust.  The first, as exemplified by The Last Stop, involved a neo-Realist sensibility, marked by extensive and pivotal use of on-location cinematography featuring non-professional performances and slice-of-life narratives involving everyday people.  The second, and arguably less recognized polarity from this period, involved the forthright and thus politically-charged representation of Nazi anti-Semitism and its specificity in singling out Jews.  Thus, the unavailability of a film like Professor Mamlock today belies the film's importance then as a lightning rod for debates about film censorship and propaganda, debates that many at the time saw as stymying more forthright depictions of Nazi anti-Semitism in Hollywood film.

American audiences in 1938 would have been well-versed with Professor Mamlock, if not with its basic story, then certainly with the controversy the Soviet film engendered.  As early as 1933, the New York Times reported that a group called the Theatre Union would perform a version of the Friedrich Wolf play on which the later film was based, entitled simply Mamlock (NYT).  By 1937, the Jewish Unit of the Works Progress Administration Federal Theatre Project had produced another version of the play bearing the same name as the film (NYT).  The play's narrative and Wolf's biography were closely intertwined.  Mamlock, like Wolf, was a doctor and veteran of World War I.  After the Nazis came to power, both were persecuted, with the real-life Wolf emigrating to Moscow to write Mamlock.  Unlike Wolf, who was active in the Communist Party, the fictional Mamlock began the play largely assimilated, patriotic, anti-Communist, and unconcerned with the rise of Nazism.  Only once the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of 1935 removed Mamlock from his position as chief surgeon at a university hospital, stripped him of his German citizenship, and justified attacks targeting his own children did he realize the full extent of the Nazi threat, but by then, it was too late.

By 1938, audiences came to recognize the film version of Professor Mamlock as a specific indictment of anti-Semitism.  In the advertisement for the premiere for the film, an image of a man appeared in a white coat resembling a straightjacket with the word JUDE scrawled across his chest.  Two brownshirt officers flank him.  The tagline for the film read "a crushing indictment of Nazi terror" (NYT).

Advertisement for Professor Mamlock (Amkino, 1938) in The New York Times 7 Nov. 1938: 23.

In fact, reviews of both the film and the play suggested that audiences already would be familiar with the story.  The film's significance was that its subject was "a topic which Hollywood, with its fear of jeopardizing foreign markets, has not dared to touch" (Nugent).  In an interview with the Times, Edward G. Robinson claimed that he "would give my teeth to do an American version of Professor Mamlock" (Crowther).  At the same time, though, Brooks Atkinson's review of the Federal Theatre's production of the play observed that even by 1937 "in one way or another," the play's "fiendish story has been told... several times," and that "the whole subject of the Nazi persecution of the Jews needs something more penetrating" (Atkinson).  Similarly, film reviewer Frank S. Nugent observed that the Soviet production said "nothing new about Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany," and confessed to "a feeling of resentment" over the film's conflation of Jewish and Communist suffering, and "the simplification of a problem which is not limited to politics but is deeply rooted as well in religious, racial, and economic soil" (Nugent).  However much the actual film fell short in its lack of originality, and its conflation of Jewish with Communist suffering, the film engendered both controversy and status, becoming a cause celebre for those advocating First Amendment protections for the film industry.  By 1939, the Columbia Law Review noted how Mamlock had "received much publicity" for numerous instances where public and journalistic pressure had forced censorship boards in Ohio and Chicago to reverse initial exhibition bans that cited ostensible concerns for public safety and fears of rioting.

For many audiences, the potent politics of Professor Mamlock as a forthright indictment of Nazi anti-Semitism heralded the postwar wave of neo-Realist films coming from Italy.  A political hot potato amid the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, screenings at the Russian Pavilion during the 1939 World's Fair ceased almost immediately after the Soviets had signed this surprise agreement (NYT).  Within a month after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, however, the New York Times announced what would be one of numerous revivals of the film for the duration of the war (NYT).  What Professor Mamlock could do to indict Nazi anti-Semitism before the war became a bellwether for what film could do in the aftermath of World War II.  Author Friedrich Wolf, who by 1946 the Times identified as "the white hope of the current German cinema," began to articulate a new direction desperately needed for postwar film.  Quoted in an article on postwar German film and specifically credited with Professor Mamlock, Wolf argued that Germany should be making films about concentration camps and other "anti-fascistic themes":

the reality of yesterday and today is the most touching subject, and an artist could never have invented it in more tragic, grotesque or apocalyptic terms.  This inferno really did happen.  To get at the bottom of it and to shape the present truth of life - that is the theme (qtd. in Hill).

A month later, film reviewer Bosley Crowther had reiterated Wolf's statement to help make sense of what Roberto Rossellini's Open City (1945; Mayer, Burstyn, 1946) was doing.  Crowther noted that like what Rossellini did in setting a slice-of-life story against the backdrop of on-location shooting under still Nazi-occupied Rome, "the outlook of German film men... is toward a realistic interpretation of modern life.  All of their observation and experience in recent years has presumably fixed their attention upon this one obsessing theme: the reality of yesterday and the present truth of life" (Crowther).  That obsessing theme would become the dominant frame of reference for The Last Stop.

The New "World Film" 

As a film, The Last Stop confounds many assumptions scholars hold about American audiences' encounters with the Holocaust film.  While a casual interpretation might conclude that a banal universalism of Anne Frank utterly drove The Last Stop and its specificity of depicting camp life into obscurity, the latter film received extensive publicity well before it opened in New York.  The Times first began reporting on the film in October 1948.  By the end of the year, the United Nations Film Board had issued a special commendation for the film "in recognition of its moral and artistic values" (New York Times).  Throughout February and March, the film figured prominently in the Times' coverage of foreign films screened in the U.S.  By the end of May 1949, The Times noted that the film was about to begin its 10th week run.  Even if the film had achieved niche appeal with a New York audience, that appeal had longevity.

The film confounds many present-day assumptions regarding the American encounter with Holocaust film, not just because many of the Times' readers would have known of the film well before Hollywood produced a Holocaust film, but because those readers would have known so much about the unique conditions of production for the film.  The recitation of details of this production became a framework through which an audience could understand gruesome aspects of daily life in the camp.  In "Nazi Concentration Camp Reactivated for Film," William Friedberg focused on the details of the film's authenticity: 45 crew members using obsolete and inferior equipment; 27 performers; 3,500 extras who were actual prisoners of Auschwitz agreeing to relive their experiences.  As if anticipating the opening of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog six years before that film's release, Friedberg noted how "a field of beautiful green, billowing grass that was waist high" had grown around the camp, and "had to be cut down and the original filth" restored (Friedberg).

In addition to its emphasis upon scale and actual location, this article helped to establish the beguiling and compelling aspects of the film's authenticity.  So realistic and seductive, the authenticity of the production compelled the performers to actually become their parts outside of filming:

Polish actors, at first reluctant to portray the hated Nazi officials, took to playing their parts so wholeheartedly that the former prisoners began to fall into their former habits.  Everything about Auschwitz was restored with such frightening accuracy that during lunch hours the prisoners would go to eat five by five.  In groups of five was the way they were commanded to fall out by the Nazis.  The mass scenes were so realistic that the extras hesitated to break their lines until told to do so (Friedberg).

While this recitation of scale and overwhelming actuality was certainly not new to film advance publicity, with the Holocaust film, it took on added urgency.  Indeed, such details became part of a production history lore for later Holocaust films, such as Schindler's List (1993) and The Pianist (2002), where the "making-of" history for these films became history in its own right.  Even if the historical factors concerning the making of these films remained subordinate to actual Holocaust history, in its relation to the Holocaust, such details and use of location bestowed added credibility to what might otherwise serve as an ordinary fictional account of the Holocaust.

This emphasis on production history as a way for audiences to experience the Holocaust film before, after, and even without having seen The Last Stop helped activate an interpretive frame through which American audiences could understand not just images of the Holocaust, but images of postwar Europe.  That frame emphasized the importance of such details as on-location shooting and the use of non-professional extras.  Indeed, The Last Stop's advertising highlights not just the film's ties to such postwar classics as Open City and Paisan, actively encouraging audiences to categorize the film with those films.  That advertising also emphasized the role of New York's World Theatre as showcase for this new kind of "world film."  The experience of the Holocaust film thus became mediated, not just by other foreign films, but by the very theater where foreign films were shown.

Advertisement, New York Times, 25 Mar. 1949.

Just as neo-Realism and foreign film could guide viewer responses to understanding The Last Stop as a Holocaust film, subsequent Cold War ideology as easily could justify the film's obsolescence.  In reviewing a 1996 festival retrospective of Polish film, New York Times critic Stephen Holden noted that The Last Stop was "bleaker and more terrifying than Schindler's List," yet "one false note--and it is glaring--is the movie's portrayal of Soviet Communists as the world's shining saviors" (Holden).  If popular discourse could so effectively establish a neo-Realist frame of reference for the film in 1949, how could the film's political slant have eluded becoming a central concern for critics at the height of the Cold War?  Just as the conflation of Jewish with Communist suffering in Professor Mamlock no longer became an issue once critical reception had established that film as indictment of Nazi anti-Semitism, the propagandistic aspects of The Last Stop had become an issue in 1996, a full five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991, and nearly 50 years after the film's initial release.  

With both films, popular criticism helped to establish audience expectations for what a Holocaust film should be through a shifting discussion of aesthetic and political norms.  Given this context, the Holocaust film did not emerge fully formed by the late 1950s.  Rather, notions of what a Holocaust film should be resulted from how audiences negotiated meaning through a set of flexible aesthetic, cultural, and ideological practices. These practices helped to shape an American understanding of an entire film genre, long before Hollywood began making its Holocaust films, through a globalized distribution of European films that were widely screened and discussed among actual audiences in the United States.  

Works Cited

Filmography

The Diary of Anne Frank (20th Century-Fox, 1959).

Primary Works

Atkinson, Brooks.  "The Play."  The New York Times 23 Aug. 1933.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Internet.  Accessed 20 Mar. 2011.

---.  "The Play: Nazi Customs and Manners."  Review of Professor Mamlock.  The New York Times 14 Apr. 1937.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Internet.  Accessed 20 Mar. 2011. 

Crowther, Bosley.  "Little Caesar Waits His Chance."  The New York Times 22 Jan. 1939.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Internet.  Accessed 20 Mar. 2011. 

---.  "Open City."  The New York Times 3 Mar. 1946.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Internet.  Accessed 20 Mar. 2011.  

---. “The Brutal Truth: Polish Film Dramatizes Nazi Torture Camp.” The New York Times 27 Mar. 1949.

Friedberg, William.  "Nazi Concentration Camp Reactivated for Film."  The New York Times 20 Feb. 1949.

 Hill, Gladwin.  "Whither Go German Films."  The New York Times 3 Feb. 1946.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Internet.  Accessed 20 Mar. 2011. 

"Film Censorship: An Administrative Analysis."  Columbia Law Review 39.8 (1939): 1383-1405.  JSTOR.  Internet.  Accessed 20 Mar. 2011.

Last Stop, The.  Advertisement.  The New York Times 24 Mar. 1949.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Internet.  Accessed 20 Mar. 2011.

Perkins, Millie and George Stevens, Jr., commentary.  The Diary of Anne Frank.  1959.  DVD Videodisc.  20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment, 2000.

Nugent, Frank S.  "Professor Mamlock, a Russian Appraisal of Nazi Culture, Has Its Premiere at the Cameo."  Review of Professor Mamlock (Amkino, 1938).  

The New York Times 8 Nov. 1937.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Internet.  Accessed 20 Mar. 2011.

"Of Local Origin."  The New York Times 5 July 1941.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Internet.  Accessed 21 Mar. 2011.

Professor Mamlock.  Advertisement.  The New York Times 7 Nov. 1937.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Internet.  Accessed 20 Mar. 2011.

"Soviet Withdraws Anti-Nazi Movie."  The New York Times 30 Aug. 1939.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Internet.  Accessed 21 Mar. 2011.

Secondary Works

Kansteiner, Wulf.  "Sold Globally - Remembered Locally: Holocaust Cinema and the Construction of Collective Identities in Europe and the US."  Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media, and the Arts. Berger, Stefan, Linas Eriksonas, and Andrew Mycock, eds.  New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. 153-80.

Loewy, Hanno. “The mother of all holocaust films?: Wanda Jakubowska's Auschwitz trilogy.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 24.2 (2004): 179-204. Internet.