A.O. SCOTT ESSAY

This holiday season the movie theaters will be overrun with Nazis. A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscarseason tradition, but 2008 offers an unusually large cadre of prominent actors embodying the most profound and consequential evil of the recent past.
David Thewlis, playing a death camp commandant in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” will be joined by Willem Dafoe, who takes on a similar role in “Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader’s new film. In “The Reader,” directed by Stephen Daldry and based on Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling novel of the same name, Kate Winslet plays a former concentration camp guard tried for war crimes. Tom Cruise, the star of Bryan Singer’s “Valkyrie,” portrays a patriotic German military officer involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
Meanwhile the wave of European cinema dealing with Nazism and the Holocaust - including “The Counterfeiters,” which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film back in February - continued this fall with the American releases of “A Secret” and “One Day You’ll Understand,” two quiet, powerful French-language films exploring themes of memory and its suppression.
The near-simultaneous appearance of all these movies is to some degree a coincidence, but it throws into relief the curious fact that early 21st-century culture, in Europe and America, on screen and in books, is intensely, perhaps morbidly preoccupied with the great political trauma of the mid-20th century.
The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many- Why now- And more queasily, could there be too many- Shortly after the war the German critic T. W. Adorno declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
This observation has frequently been interpreted as a prohibition against the use of the ordinary tools of culture to address the extraordinary, inassimilable fact of genocide. But those tools, however crude, are what we have to work with.
The perception that this catastrophe overwhelms conventional aesthetic strategies and traditions has led to the creation of a remarkable range of formally innovative work, including the lyric poetry of Paul Celan, the early prose works of Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary “Shoah,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Peter Eisenmann’s Berlin memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazism.
If the Holocaust can inspire a great work of art, then it can also open itself up, like everything else, to exploitation, pretense and vulgarity.
Of course the line between kitsch and art is notoriously blurry, and in any case kitsch has its uses. The television miniseries “Holocaust” is nobody’s idea of a masterpiece, but its broadcast, in 1979, on West German state television was a decisive event in that nation’s reckoning with its culpability. It is estimated that more than half of the adult German population watched the series.
The French conscience may have been stirred by superior movies - “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “Shoah” - but France was much slower to acknowledge the full measure of its complicity.
And in the United States “Schindler’s List” in 1993 was a similar watershed. Though the Holocaust was not a central event in American history, “Schindler’s List” made it into one . Buying a ticket was treated as almost a moral duty, and its Oscar-night triumph was staged as a grand collective catharsis.
“Schindler’s List,” for all its unsparing and powerful re-creations of the horror of the Krakow ghetto, is a story of heroism, resilience and survival. And a great many of the mainstream Holocaust movies that have followed have emphasized hope and overcoming rather than despair and destruction. When death dominates these films - as it does in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” - it is rendered aesthetically palatable by an overlay of maudlin sentiment.
The Holocaust is more accessible than ever, and more entertaining. At the same time it is receding from living memory, which may by itself explain the recent burst of cinematic and literary interest. “A Secret” and “One Day You’ll Understand” are meditations on what it means to remember. In those films, full of unresolved feelings of grief, tenderness and bewilderment, French Jews born after World War II try to figure out what the annihilation of their parents’ world means to them.
In the United States the Holocaust is a mystery, a puzzle, and the obsessive interest in it testifies to its intrinsic strangeness. In France, in Germany and in Eastern Europe it remains an urgent problem that needs to be worked out - in art, in politics and in the society as a whole.