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Eichmann TV

In his chapter on contemporary responses to the Holocaust, German historian Dieter Pohl concludes that with the stabilizing influence of the European Union, the leveling of political and social disparities may ultimately “globalize memory” of the Holocaust and its aftermath.  This heightened awareness, Pohl argues, is part of a worldwide process transforming the way in which both Germany and Eastern Europe choose to remember the Shoah (Pohl).  This globalization of memory appears to come from outside Europe, driven in particular by the forces of American popular entertainment.  That the Americanization of the Holocaust has become the synechdoche for discussions concerning the globalization of the Holocaust should come as no surprise, then, particularly in light of a widespread understanding of globalization as a process of domination and influence, described by critics such as Herb Schiller involving one-way flow exporting American popular entertainment (Schiller).

While American entertainment enjoys a lopsided influence in shaping worldwide memory of the Holocaust, this influence is not the only dimension to globalization.  Rather than a recent imposition of progressive and linear influence, one can view the globalization of Holocaust memory as a process described by Ian Baucom that is “an eternal recurrence, a continual stopping and resetting of the clock of history” (Baucom).  The globalization of Holocaust memory thus exists not solely as an imperial memory newly thrust upon weaker cultures.  This globalized memory may in fact be an elongation, acceleration, and fragmentation of the same ongoing processes that have operated for decades if not centuries, and that the more recent globalization of the Holocaust simply sets into relief a set of fitful and spasmodic shifts away from a single authorial arbiter determining the meaning of the Holocaust for a mass audience.

If the globalization of Holocaust memory reveals a set of processes that have existed for much longer period of time than perhaps even the postwar era, the choice to look at television coverage of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann and its reception as an instance of globalization may seem a bit arbitrary.  Why not study the reception of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (Universal, 1993), or the 1978 NBC television mini-series Holocaust, particularly when it aired in Germany?  Why not consider the reception of atrocity footage?  Indeed, each of these would make excellent subjects for a deeper analysis of audience reception of Holocaust representations in an era of globalization[SC1] .

The televised trial of Adolf Eichmann lends itself particularly well to a study of the globalization of Holocaust memory.  Early on it establishes many of the same problems concerning the globalization of the Holocaust now receiving attention.  In addition to bearing seeds of problems noticed later, the 1961 broadcast and its subsequent controversy confounds many of the traditional arguments made with regard to globalization and the so-called Americanization of the Holocaust.  These problems include concerns over the authenticity of the mediated image, the role of technology in reaching a global audience, and the fragmentation of this global audience across temporal and geographic boundaries.  Finally, Eichmann TV is an intriguing historical interstice, where old and new characters and institutions intermingle at the threshold of modern Holocaust memory.  If Eichmann TV were a movie, it indeed would have a strange cast of characters, including a digitally-enhanced documentary; a blacklisted filmmaker, Leo Hurwitz, working for the future media conglomerate Capital Cities Broadcasting; and a young Masters candidate named Ted Koppel writing his thesis on what would become one of the earliest audience studies of the trial and press coverage of it.  More on these cast members later[SC2] .

Footage from the Eichmann trial serves as a pretext for larger concerns over globalization.  Over time, discussions of the trial have gone through a series of phases, from the positive - awareness of genocide as a global problem, the power of modern communication technology in disseminating the trial to a worldwide audience – to the dystopic.  The latter includes both the concern that the proliferation of mediated representations of the Holocaust has cheapened Holocaust memory.  Another strand of this negative view addresses the rise of media conglomerates and interlocking directorates.

Dennis Mazzocco typifies this view in his discussion of Capital Cities Broadcasting.  In the 1994 book Networks of Power, he details the rise of Capital Cities from a mom-and-pop business owning foundering UHF and AM stations in Albany, to a media conglomerate powerhouse that engineered the merger with the ABC television network in 1985.  Mazzocco interprets the exclusive contract Capital Cities received from the Israeli government to make footage available to other U.S. networks as a portent of how commercial broadcasting would serve “U.S. interests in the Middle East.”  He argues that Capital Cities rose “to prominence as a U.S. media power” by “serving as Israel’s public relations arm” and “spinning” the Eichmann trial “for profit.”  For Mazzocco, the profit was more than just economic, but a growing influence of interlocking directorates that included ultra-conversative political interests such as former CIA Director under President Reagan, William J. Casey, who was an investor and partner in the company (Mazzocco).

In terms of the globalization of Holocaust memory, however, authenticity long has been a focal concern in discussions of representation.  This concern, in turn, reflects deep-seated anxieties that the Holocaust no longer holds a special place in popular discourse.  In 2003, a New York Times headline asked “Holocaust Documentaries: Too Much of a Bad Thing?”  Annette Insdorf, chronicler of the Holocaust film in her book Indelible Shadows, noted that there had been 69 documentaries since 1990, which the Times calculated to be one every two months.  This proliferation raised a troubling question for the Times: “are too many Holocaust documentaries being made?  Has supply outstripped demand”(Gewen)?

While the article arguably skirted the edges of glibness, the questions repackaged similar objections that other critics and intellectuals, such as Elie Wiesel, already had raised with regard to mediated representations of the Holocaust.  Anxieties over how popular entertainment trivialized the Holocaust, over how mediated representations would eventually supplant survivor testimony, or over how atrocity footage had desensitized the popular response to the Holocaust all had received much public attention.  Concern over the rate of Holocaust documentaries being released was just another iteration of larger anxieties over a yawning gap between unmediated Holocaust actuality and mediated Holocaust representation[SC3] .

This crisis of authenticity in Holocaust representation came amid increasing popularization of the Holocaust.  The scarcity of Holocaust imagery once bestowed cultural capital upon middle- to high-brow texts.  That scarcity retained an emotional power that could trump rules and standards, such as when NBC aired Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in its entirety, despite Senator Tom Coburn’s protestations that the network airing was “an all-time low” for network television to allow “full-frontal nudity, violence, and profanity” that was “polluting the minds of our children” (Carmody).  Within a few years of the New York Times article, the Holocaust was being invoked to gain credence for everything from the war in Iraq to the campaign against animal slaughterhouses (Schorr; Snaza).

Coverage of the Eichmann trial indicates a number of larger paradoxes that current discussions of globalization and the Holocaust fail to address.  How does one discuss an influential broadcast that no one ever saw?  A global audience that encountered media coverage of the trial via very different media?  As Jeffrey Shandler persuasively has argued, a template for how popular media represents the Holocaust and shapes Holocaust memory resulted in large part from television coverage of the Eichmann trial in spring and summer of 1961.  As Shandler notes, the trial “provided the first opportunity for television networks to deal with the Holocaust in the context of reporting a major news story.  In fact, American television audiences are most likely to have first heard the word Holocaust [orig. emphasis] used to describe the Nazi persecution of European Jewry during broadcasts of the trial” (Shandler).  Yet from the start, this template was itself both highly mediated and selective.  Shandler notes the theatrical setting for the trial [SC4] in Beit Ha’am, a large public theater in Jerusalem.  The auditorium featured state-of-the-art technology, including closed-circuit television and videotape recording, and reserved 474 out of its 756 seats for journalists.  The trial became a bellwether for the relatively new Israeli state, where the proceedings effectively would perform the legitimacy of the new state’s rule of law (Shandler).  In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt derided the proceedings as pure theater.  “Whoever planned this auditorium in the newly built Beit Ha’am . . . had a theater in mind, complete with orchestra and gallery, with proscenium and stage, and with side doors for the actors’ entrance.  Clearly, this courtroom is not a bad place for the show trial . . .” (Arendt).

That the trial was highly mediated created a scarcity of accounts over which journalistic authority in turn could exert a great deal of control in explaining Holocaust and genocide to a general audience.  Thus, while reports of the trial proliferated, most audiences saw these reports in highly fragmented form.  Except for a closed-circuit television broadcast, no Israeli could watch the proceedings on television because Israel had no television broadcasting infrastructure in 1961.  Instead, the Israeli encounter with the Eichmann trial took place over transistor radios. The Israeli government allowed only one company, Capital Cities Broadcasting, an exclusive contract to cover the trial with four hidden cameras set up in the hall.  Rather than watch this coverage live, American audiences saw the Eichmann trial via breaking news bulletins, and videotape and 16mm footage Capital Cities shipped from Jerusalem in hour long segments.

This proliferation of controlled and fragmented imagery from the trial helped stir a kind of aura for this representation, which still required institutional authority to interpret a preferred and dominant explanation of the trial’s significance.  In the 30 minute compilation distributed by Capital Cities after the trial had ended and the judges deliberated their verdict, Verdict for Tomorrow offered what would become the standard narrative for how to understand the Holocaust.  The prologue to this program, as Shandler notes, offers what would become the archetypal “capsule summary” of Nazi anti-Semitism (Shandler).  Narrated by Lowell Thomas, who himself reported on Kristallnacht for American radio in November 1938, this prologue uses Thomas’ broadcast and archival footage to establish a historical trajectory toward atrocity footage taken at Liberation and the penultimate Final Solution.  “The last chapters of this unforgettable nightmare,” intones Thomas, “are being written . . . by newsmen in Beit Ha’am” (Verdict for Tomorrow)[SC5] .

Embedded within this “capsule summary” where journalism became the voice of authority is an unintended and arguably unnoticed crisis of authenticity for the mediated image.  To[SC6]  support its visual evidence for Kristallnacht, the documentary does not distinguish in this brief montage between actuality and staged footage.  One brief sequence from this montage shows a man dressed in a uniform painting a Jewish star on a shop window.  The shot originated with the controversial March of Time documentary Inside Nazi Germany (RKO, 1938).  When the producers deemed original footage smuggled out of Germany after Kristallnacht not dramatic enough, they hired anti-Nazi German-Americans living in Hoboken, New Jersey to re-enact various scenes, complete with multiple takes and camera set-ups (Fielding).  Documentary-like, the staged re-enactment of painting a Jewish shop window since has become part of the Holocaust lexicon for American audiences[SC7] .

Over 40 years later, this crisis of authenticity emerged again and more fiercely with Eyal Sivan’s 1998 documentary The Specialist, which edited some nine (9) months of trial footage down to a little over two (2) hours.  In 2005, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the head of the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive Hillel Tryster had conducted a close study of the film and concluded that the film “was almost entirely a perverse fraud, ranging from radical editing, to artificial dialogues that never took place.”  Sivan responded by noting that the six years the Archive took “to point out presumed defects in the film . . . indicates the extent of the archive’s efficiency.”  Noting that much of the footage used in the documentary was discovered in a law school faculty bathroom at Hebrew University and did not come from the Spielberg Archives, Sivan flatly insisted “we made a film.”  In addition to acknowledging editing and digitally inserting reflections of the spectators in the bullet-proof glass booth surrounding Eichmann during the trial, Sivan emphasized the cinematic nature of the work.  “All the materials we used underwent treatment.  We added lighting.  We touched up the picture” (Pinto).

Debates over authenticity over these images reveal deep schisms and already extant contradictions within an increasingly globalized memory of the Holocaust.  The proliferation of images in digital formats, plus the affordability of an increasing palette of digital effects almost guarantees that traditional Holocaust imagery will be wrenched free of traditional meanings.  As Frances Guerin notes, though the film uses Arendt’s book to guide the viewer through the performative aspect of the trial, the documentary exists in its own right.  “To understand The Specialist as a straightforward translation of Arendt's book into images,” Guerin argues, “irresponsibly overlooks the film's sophisticated analysis on the nature of visual, in particular, documentary representation of such significant historical events” (Guerin).

The opening of the film clearly sets out the demarcated boundaries between video footage, digitally manipulated to include such effects as reflections of the crowd, and the grainy, black and white newsreel footage of prosecutor Gideon Hausner delivering his opening statement[SC8] .  At the same time, it is hard to separate the film’s self-conscious and distancing strategies from an increasingly literate mass audience with growing facility and expertise in interpreting a variety of accounts, including Arendt’s.  As Gil Raz notes, the Hebrew translation of Arendt’s book did not appear until 2000, a year after the release of Sivan’s film.  Raz attributes this 40 year delay to controversial questions Arendt raised, including those that questioned whether Eichmann was indeed “a blood-thirsty antisemitic monster” who even should be tried in Jerusalem (Raz).

If The Specialist fractured the institutional account of the Eichmann trial in controversial ways, one might be tempted to view Leo Hurwitz’s 35-hour live-on-tape broadcast as the coherent and preferred version of events[SC9] .  To the contrary, the broadcast that was not a broadcast is full of globalized contradictions.  Few if any audiences have seen that version in its entirety.  Contemporary press accounts of the trial suggest that the reception of television coverage already showed an indifferent audience as curious about the debut of new television technology in Israel as they were about “the awful account” of Nazi anti-Semitism.  A New York Times story already had noted the elusive nature of capturing the trial live on tape via a multiple camera setup.  The notion of a blacklisted filmmaker concealed from view and engaged in surveillance of the trial is in itself rife with ironic overtones.  More interesting still is the absence from these accounts of any identification of Hurwitz as a blacklisted filmmaker.  Instead, the Times focused on Hurwitz’ technique in capturing the trial:

He continuously is directing his four camera men here, studying the pictures each one relays from his particular hidden niche in the courtroom, and selecting first one and then another of the pictures for the continuous record that goes onto the videotape.

"You can't follow mechanically," Mr. Hurwitz says. "You can't simply follow a witness all the time he speaks and then put the camera on Eichmann when his name is mentioned. You have to have a sense of the event, a sense of following the case as it is built up against Eichmann. It helps to know that someone is watching" (Fellows).

The article proceeds to note that this technique provokes different reactions from different audiences:

[Eichmann] has been a disappointment especially to the audiences in Germany, who are anxious· to see his reactions. They also want to see the look of Israeli faces in the crowd.  The Germans are understandably a bit more self-conscious than are, say, the British, who prefer a straight reporting job without complicated interrelations. The American audiences have been quiet, apparently pleased with the mix they have been getting from Mr. Hurwitz (Fellows).

While the the Eichmann trial clearly “provided the first opportunity for television networks to deal with the Holocaust,” the contested footage offers no clear indication of what, how, or by whom this nascent representation of the Holocaust was seen.  Influenced by the two-step flow model, Edward James Koppel’s Masters Thesis for Stanford University calls upon the work of Edward Klapper to conclude that press coverage of the trial “does not serve as a necessary and sufficient cause of audience effects,” instead “functioning among and through a nexus of mediating factors and influences” (Koppel).  Given the unique nature of the trial, a broadcast that was not a broadcast, consumed by different audiences in very different ways and with different responses, any consideration of the globalization of Holocaust memory would do well to return to the actual conditions of reception for this significant if fragmented moment in the public understanding of the Holocaust.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.

Baucom, Ian. "Globalit, Inc.; or, the Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies." PMLA 116.1 (2001): 158-72.

Carmody, John. "The Tv Column." The Washington Post 1997: D.04.

Fellows, Lawrence. "Tv Makes Its Israeli Debut with a Tragedy." The New York Times 2 July 1961. 1961: X9.

Fielding, Raymond. The March of Time, 1935-1951. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Gewen, Barry. "Holocaust Documentaries: Too Much of a Bad Thing?". New York Times (1857-Current file) 2003: AR1.

Guerin, Frances. "The Perpetrator in Focus: Turn of the Century Holocaust Remembrance in 'the Specialist'." Law/Text/Culture 10 (2006): 167-93.

Koppel, Ted Feb. "Attitudinal and Informational Changes Precipitated by Local Newspaper Coverage of the Eichmann Trial." iv, 161 l. tables. Dissertation: Thesis (M.A.)--Dept. of Speech and Drama, Stanford University.

Mazzocco, Dennis W. Networks of Power : Corporate Tv's Threat to Democracy. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994.

Pinto, Goel. "The Specialist Is Almost Entirely a Perverse Fraud." Haaretz 31 Jan. 2005. 2005.

Pohl, Dieter. "Contemporary Responses to the Shoah in Germany and Eastern Europe."  Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust. Eds. Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthäus. Praeger Series on Jewish and Israeli Studies. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. 19-36.

Raz, Gal. "Actuality of Banality." Shofar 24 (2005): 4.

Schiller, Herbert I. Information Inequality : The Deepening Social Crisis in America. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Schorr, Daniel. "Does 'Appeasement' Fit into the Iraq War Debate? ; Donald Rumsfeld Warned against Repeating the World War Ii Mistake of 'Appeasement.'." The Christian Science Monitor 2006: 09.

Shandler, Jeffrey. While America Watches : Televising the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Snaza, Nathan. "(Im)Possible Witness: Viewing Peta's "Holocaust on Your Plate"." Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal 2.1 (2004): 1-20.

Verdict for Tomorrow. Visual Material. New York : The League, 1981.

 [SC1]Framing Holocaust representation in terms of media and globalization marks a shift in my research and underscores the importance of being able to use such developments to gain further insight into long-standing issues – how can we develop mechanisms to do this regularly in our classes and across the curriculum?

 [SC2]The approach I’m taking here underscores the importance of bridging both studies and production.  In order to understand the importance of the Eichmann Trials, you have to understand aspects of technology, media history, and matters of representation.  Department can take a leadership role in integrating these areas.

 [SC3]These are the kind of issues that are helpful to raise with both production as well as studies students – we want them to be reflective not just about mediated texts, but also about the practices of putting together these texts

 [SC4]Slide; again, awareness of practices of production important to understanding key point that Shandler makes

 [SC5]Clip 2

 [SC6]Clip 3

 [SC7]Pointing out these aspects of representation can spark useful discussions among students to think critically about these kinds of issues

 [SC8]Clips 4 and 5

 [SC9]Here I shift away from Shandler’s conception of the impact the televised trial had on a worldwide audience; the broadcast is not so much a watershed event of mediated representation of the Holocaust as much as it is a harbinger of the globalized nature of Holocaust representation