ABSTRACT
This chapter reconsiders Maurice Halbwachs’ argument that individual memories have to come into alignment with the leading thoughts of the society in order to be incorporated into collective memory. This chapter focuses on the cross-cultural interrelationship between individual and public memory in three documentaries about German-speaking Jews in wartime Shanghai: (1) Shanghai Ghetto (2002), (2) Survival in Shanghai (2015), and (3) Above the Drowning Sea (2017). Each film addresses witness testimony, intersecting with aspects of German, Austrian, Chinese, Japanese, Shanghai, and Jewish experience, and reaching across continents, languages, and Eastern and Western cultural traditions. Focusing on the films’ respective narrative strategies and depictions of transcultural relationships between European Jews and East Asians, this chapter examines the construction of collective public memory across socio-political, national, and cultural borders. Although each film documents past experiences encompassing multiple cultures and continents, each ultimately reveals that cross-cultural or global collective discourse is still constrained by national discourse and imagination. Although remembrance of the suffering under the Nazis continues to inform collective cultural memory formation—as is evidenced by all three documentaries—the suffering of the Chinese in Shanghai does not fit neatly into the Western Holocaust narrative and is therefore only depicted tangentially.
