ABSTRACT
In selecting an appropriate passage from diaries, letters, or testimonies of the perpetrators, one faces a dilemma not unlike that confronted by filmmakers. Claude Lanzmann, for instance, chose not to use any original footage from the Holocaust in making his film Shoah, since that type of material would obviously be contaminated by the Nazi perception of their victims and their will to reduce them to the status of subhumans. Yet by avoiding such documentation altogether one also eschews any attempt to understand the psychology of the killers. This, in turn, leads to a dehumanization of the perpetrators which facilitates avoiding any sense of common human responsibility for their crimes; they become wholly alien and therefore relevant to us only in so far as they may pose a threat to our existence. If we do choose to use filmic or written material by the Nazis, however, the very familiarity with the manner in which they perceived the reality they created can lead viewers or readers to identify with the makers of these images and empathize with their viewpoint. Moreover, these distorted portrayals of the victims may contain the kind of sadistic, pornographic imagery that would turn their audience into voyeurs, thereby making them complicit in the obscenity of mass murder (which is of course their very purpose). We have been exposed to a multitude of dehumanizing, brutalizing images of the victims of Nazism, reprinted over and over again whenever the Holocaust is mentioned, until we think we know what it was like, we almost “remember” it, when in fact all we remember are photographs taken by the killers or scraps of Nazi speeches and propaganda leaflets. They teach us very little either about the killers or about their victims.
