ABSTRACT
If the primary purpose of visual media-drama, film, and photography-is tomake the viewer see an object or event, how is this purpose complicated by the Holocaust? Just what is it that the viewer ought to see? Should the viewer act as a witness, and if so, witness to what? In the case of those dramatists and artists who were themselves witnesses and who were there on the spot, how does the artist allow the viewer to see what happened without completely repulsing the viewer? In the case of the artist who wasn’t there, the problem is compounded because that firsthand experience must be recast from someone else’s memory-the historians’, the witnesses’, the criminals’—and by the fact that the artist must always face the problem of authenticity. How, in other words, does he provide a picture of what happened, or what might have happened, that is both true to the actual events but also imaginatively full and consistent with the artist’s medium? A medium that replicates atrocities-film and photography are meant to provide a picture of what lies before the lens, and the theater and the visual arts, though using different media, are meant to give the viewer a visual representation of something more or less real-risks making the viewer a passive receiver of the horror, or risks giving shape to the event that makes it palatable for that viewer.
