ABSTRACT
Although Shanghai was the last port to remain open to Jewish refugees during the Second World War, the experience of Jewish exiles in Shanghai remained largely uncharted until the 1990s. Since then, a number of memoirs, historical accounts, novels, and films have appeared which portray this segment of history. This paper explores questions of memory and representation of exile in two documentaries – Exil Shanghai (1997) by Ulrike Ottinger and Shanghai Ghetto (2002) by Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann. The two documentaries use interviews with survivors to record experiences of the Jewish community in Shanghai, including some of the 20,000 central European Jews who fled to Shanghai during the Second World War. In addition to being the site of multiple colonial administrations, the Shanghai of that period was also flooded with internal refugees fleeing military conflict and natural disasters in other parts of China. Following Michael Rothberg’s question “Does the remembrance of one history erase others from view?”, this paper analyzes how these two histories and their memories emerge and intersect in these two cinematic accounts. The theme is further explored by analyzing differences in how the two documentaries frame these recollections and representations of Shanghai, thus revealing two distinct approaches to history, identity, and memory.
