The article deals with philosopher Günther Stern Anders’s response to the airing of the NBC miniseries Holocaust in Austria and in Western Germany in 1979. While much has been written about the TV miniseries, the reaction of Anders (1902–1992) has not been the object of discussion. The present article first examines the debate on the witnessing, visualization and representation of the Shoah (Adorno, Agamben, Didi-Huberman, Lanzmann and Levi), focusing in particular on the American TV miniseries Holocaust, and then investigates Günther Anders’s reaction to this controversial fiction in the essay ‘Nach “Holocaust”’ (1979). Anders’s remarks about the miniseries are important in connection with his cultural-philosophical studies on Auschwitz and Hiroshima- Nagasaki as major turning points, as well as his theory of media. It is remarkable that Anders was one of the first intellectuals to develop an interest in television as a new medium.
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The Vision of the End: Anders on the TV Series Holocaust
Micaela Latini, Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio
Meridionale




Abstract

    The article deals with philosopher Günther Stern Anders’s response to the ai-
    ring of the NBC miniseries Holocaust in Austria and in Western Germany in
    1979. While much has been written about the TV miniseries, the reaction of
    Anders (1902–1992) has not been the object of discussion. The present article
    first examines the debate on the witnessing, visualization and representation of
    the Shoah (Adorno, Agamben, Didi-Huberman, Lanzmann and Levi), focusing
    in particular on the American TV miniseries Holocaust, and then investigates
    Günther Anders’s reaction to this controversial fiction in the essay ‘Nach “Ho-
    locaust”’ (1979). Anders’s remarks about the miniseries are important in con-
    nection with his cultural-philosophical studies on Auschwitz and Hiroshima-
    Nagasaki as major turning points, as well as his theory of media. It is remarkable
    that Anders was one of the first intellectuals to develop an interest in television
    as a new medium.


Visualizing the Holocaust

  Critics have often talked of Auschwitz as something that cannot be truly repre-
sented without risking reducing its unique horror to a tragic normality. Others
have insisted on the importance of bearing witness to the Shoah.1 The aesthetical
and ethical problem raised by the representation of Auschwitz and the Holo-
caust is described by Theodor W. Adorno in a well-known passage of Cultural
Criticism and Society (1949): ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that
corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to
write poetry today’.2 The arts cannot represent the Shoah, according to Adorno,


1
  Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. by Daniel Heller-
Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002).
2
  Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. by Shierry Weber Nichol-
sen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 17–34 (p. 34).

                                                         Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 25, Fall 2015
                                          Micaela Latini


because the Shoah has demonstrated the impossibility of an ‘artistic serenity’.
Auschwitz marks, for Adorno, the caesura or irredeemable break in the history
of civilization, the failure of Western humanism, insofar as its horror makes the
person helpless and dooms any attempt at explanation. On the other hand, re-
nouncing the possibility of bearing witness to the barbarity through arts would
be giving in to the barbarity itself. It is no coincidence if Adorno later resumed
and corrected his verdict in Negative Dialectics (1966), writing that the impos-
sibility of representing Auschwitz does not cancel the duty of representing that
impossibility.
   While the debate on the representation of the Shoah developed in the 1960s
among intellectuals (especially within the Jewish community), it took twenty ye-
ars to extend it to the larger community, where there was a strong resistance
towards dealing with the Holocaust. An important role in overcoming this resi-
stance and bringing the Holocaust into the collective imagination was played by
the more popular media, such as television and the cinema.3 Among the many
television and cinema productions on the Shoah, one of the most famous is the
1978 American TV miniseries Holocaust, directed by Marvin Chomsky. The mi-
niseries, which featured talented actors like James Woods and Meryl Streep, was
broadcasted in West Germany in 1979 — a year earlier, in September 1978, it
aired in England — and seen by millions of persons.4 The miniseries Holocaust
described, in a typical Hollywood style, the genesis of the extermination of the
Jews in the ill-fated decade 1935–1945 through the story of two German fami-
lies, one Jewish, the Weiss family, and the other Aryan, the Dorf, in which the


3
  See, for instance: Raul Calzoni, ‘Witnessing and Visualizing Trauma. Peter Weiss, Alexander
Kluge and Claude Lanzmann Representing the Shoah’, Eupsycho, 3.1 (2015), 4–12; Holocaust and
the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933, ed. by Toby Haggit and Jo-
anna Newman (London: Wallflower, 2005); Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time
in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995); Andrea Minuz, La Shoah e la cultura visuale.
Cinema, memoria, spazio pubblico (Rome: Bulzoni, 2010); Claudio Gaetani, Il cinema e la Shoah
(Genoa: Le Mani, 2006).
4
  It is important to underscore that the miniseries did not air in East Germany. See, for instance:
Mark A. Wolfgram, ‘The Holocaust through the Prism of East German Television: Collective
Memory and Audience Perceptions’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 20 (2006), 57–79; Fried-
rich Knilli and Siegfried Zielinski, Holocaust zur Unterhaltung. Anatomie eines internationalen
Bestsellers (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1982); Betrifft: Holocaust. Zuschauer schreiben an den WDR:
ein Projektbericht, ed. by Erwin Gundelsheimer and others (Berlin: Volker Spiess Verlag, 1983);
Siegfried Zielinski, ‘History as Entertainment and Provocation: The TV Series “Holocaust” in
West Germany’, New German Critique, 19 (winter 1980), 81–96 (repr. in Germans and Jews since
the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, ed. by Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes
(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), pp. 258–86); Im Kreuzfeuer: Der Fernsehfilm Holocaust.
Eine Nation ist betroffen, ed. by Peter Märthesheimer and Ivo Frenzel (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1979);
Andréa Lauterwein, Essai sur la mémoire de la Shoah en Allemagne fédérale (1945–1990) (Paris:
Kimé, 2005); Susanne Brandt, ‘Wenig Anschauung? Die Ausstrahlung des Film “Holocaust” im
westdeutschen Fernsehen (1978/79)’, in Erinnerungskulturen. Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit
1945, ed. by Christoph Cornelißen, Lutz Klinkhammer and Wolfgang Schwentker (Frankfurt:
Fischer, 2003). See also: Germans and Jews, the special issue of New German Critique, 19 (Winter
1980), dedicated to the response to Holocaust in West Germany.

116
                    The Vision of the End: Anders on the TV Series Holocaust


father, a lawyer out of a job, decides to enlist in the SS and eventually becomes
a war criminal.
   The impact of the series in Europe was enormous, and sparked a debate on
the question of representing the Holocaust, giving rise to two contrasting posi-
tions: the first rejected the representation of the Holocaust in images, while the
second argued that only images could evoke an horror which otherwise could
not be represented.5 In regards to the reception of the Holocaust TV series in
the US6 the Bulgarian-American writer Elie Wiesel wrote in 1978: ‘Auschwitz
cannot be explained nor can it be visualized […]. The Holocaust transcends
history’, because it is ‘the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be
transmitted’.7 Similarly, in 1979, the French director Claude Lanzmann (who
at that time was filming his documentary film Shoah, 1985) criticized the series
arguing that truly understanding the Holocaust is impossible and the Holo-
caust series could only be a fictive product of Hollywood’s cultural industry but
not a representation of the historical event. What, among other things, did not
convince Lanzmann was the choice of representing mass murder through the
life of a family, who experiences the various stages of persecution. There is a
high risk that this format will serve to move the audience (and then to remove
the memory), rather than helping understand what actually happened.8 Ano-
ther question is the extent to which the images should reflect the horror of the
Shoah or, rather, seek not to excessively shock the audience. Stephen Spielberg
faced a similar issue when he made Schindler’s List (1993), an iconic film of
the Holocaust, basing it on the testimonies of survivors instead of using the
approach of Claude Lanzmann. The latter responded with a negative analysis
of Schindler’s List, describing it as a performance.9 The German director Edgar

5
  See: Annette Insdorf, L’Holocauste à l’écran, special issue CinémAction, 32 (1985), 5–185 (pp.18–
21).
6
  For discussions concerning the reception of Holocaust in the United States, see: Jeffrey Schandler,
While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) —
which shows that the Holocaust was a recurring feature in many popular TV programmes — and
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
7
  Elie Wiesel, ‘Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction’, New York Times, 16 April
1978, section 1, p. 2.
8
  See: Claude Lanzmann, ‘De l'Holocauste à Holocauste ou comment s'en débarrasser’, Les Temps
Modernes, 395 (1979), 1897–1909. See also: Claude Lanzmann, ‘Seminar with Claude Lanzmann
11 April 1990’, Yale French Studies: Literature and the Ethical Questions, 79 (1991), 82–99.
9
  See: Mathias Weiß, ‘Sinnliche Erinnerung. Die Filme “Holocaust” und “Schindler’s List” in der
bundesrepublikanischen Vergegenwärtigung der NS-Zeit’, in Beschweigen und Bekennen. Die
deutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft und der Holocaust, ed. by Norbert Frei and Sybille Steinbacher
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), pp. 71–102. It is perhaps worth noting that the German writer
Winfried Georg (Max) Sebald in a passage, which also emphasizes the capability of the impact
produced by fiction film compared to the historical monograph, provides an adverse opinion of
Schindler’s List as a false form of fiction: ‘The question remains the same: can one go to market
using the misfortunes of others? Fiction is also a form of popularization — with the advantage
that the topics are conveyed to a much wider reading group than the one possible for a historical
monograph [...]. This is intentional, because I fear falling into the melodramatic, even when the
melodrama is based on historical events. When this happens the aesthetic authenticity gets lost,

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                                            Micaela Latini


Reitz — who has linked his name to the film Heimat — recognized in Holo-
caust a negative model, lacking any aesthetic and/or experiential authenticity.
In the light of the international success of this serial product, Reitz argues that
Germans must take again possession of their history, which Americans have
expropriated.10
   Regarding the notion of unrepresentability, a completely different position
was taken by Christian Zimmer, who defined Holocaust a weak fiction, but reco-
gnized its importance in the debate on Nazism.11
   Not so distant from Zimmer’s position was the one taken by the Italian nove-
list and survivor of Auschwitz, Primo Levi.12 While criticizing the commercial
aspect of the series, its inaccuracies, its naiveté, its failure to properly outline the
historical characteristics of Nazism, Levi stressed that the series provided a sense
of the Holocaust to people who had no other means to grasp it in concrete terms.
For many Germans, the television miniseries had the extraordinary effect of bru-
squely awakening them from the oblivious sleep they had indulged in for thirty
years. In a 1979 interview in the programme Dalla realtà alla TV, Levi explained
his thesis as follows:

   The fierceness and the disproportioned nature of the Holocaust carried out by the
   Nazis, which the fiction shows with shocking realism, harboured in itself a riddle that
   no historian has yet solved, and this explains the several phone calls that bombarded
   the networks of the countries where the movie has so far been broadcast. They were,
   for the most part, viewers asking ‘why?’, and this is a gigantic why, and as old as the
   human race. It is the query about the evil of the world, the question that Job addres-
   sed to God in vain, and to which people can respond with many partial answers.13



which is connected in subtle, intimate ways with the ethical one. It is paradoxical that the docu-
ments cannot become literature in their undisguised form. Of course there are also false forms of
fictionalization: an example for me is the movie Schindler’s List. I have always tried to present this
topic as already mediated: the readers are repeatedly reminded that the story has been told by
someone and that it has gone through the filter of the narrator’. Martin Von Doerry and Volker
Hage, ‘Ich fürchte das melodramatische’, Der Spiegel, 11 (2001), <http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/
print/d-18700596.html> (my translation) [accessed 20 January 2015].
10
   See, for instance: Matteo Galli, Edgar Reitz (Milan: il Castoro, 2006), pp. 117–119.
11
   Christian Zimmer, ‘Le vrai choc d’“Holocauste”’, Les Temps Modernes, 393 (1979), 1697–1704.
The study of Ivelise Perniola focuses on the dispute between Zimmer and Lanzmann with regard
to Holocaust. See: Ivelise Perniola, L’immagine spezzata. Il cinema di Claude Lanzmann (Turin:
Kaplan, 2007), pp. 27–31.
12
   Holocaust was broadcast in Italy in episodes airing from May to June 1979. See, for instance:
Emiliano Perra, ‘Politica, memoria, identità. La ricezione italiana di Holocaust e di Schindler’s List’,
Cinema e storia, 2 (special issue on La Shoah nel cinema italiano, ed. by Andrea Minuz and Guido
Vitiello, 2013), 49–67; Emiliano Perra, Conflicts of Memory: The Reception of Holocaust Films and
TV Programmes in Italy: 1945 to the Present (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), particularly pp. 132–138.
13
   Primo Levi, ‘Images from Holocaust’, in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, ed. by Ann Gold-
stein, 3 vols (New York–London: Liveright, 2015), ii, 1308–16 (p. 1311). Even more favorable was
the judgment of the Italian intellectual Luigi Pintor, who, while noting the pro-US rhetoric that
characterizes the series, credits Holocaust for having awakened a ‘sleeping left-wing’. Luigi Pintor,
‘Olocausto, nostra storia’, Il manifesto, 1 June 1979, pp. 1–2 (my translation).

118
                   The Vision of the End: Anders on the TV Series Holocaust


Anders and the Miniseries Holocaust

    Among the many spectators (more than twenty million Germans) who, on 22
January 1979, began watching the series, was the German Jewish philosopher
Günther Stern Anders (1902–1992). From the comfort of his drawing room in
Vienna — where he had settled in 1950, after his return from his exile in the Uni-
ted States, to follow his wife, the Austrian writer Elisabeth Freundlich — Anders
carefully studied the TV series Holocaust.
    At the time, Anders was one of the few philosophers who wrote about televi-
sion, and was particularly aware of its potential. Especially in Die Antiquiertheit
des Menschen, 1956 [The Outdatedness of Human Beings], in the chapter en-
titled ‘Die Welt als Phantom und Matrize. Philosophische Betrachtungen über
Rundfunk und Fernsehen’ [The World as Phantom and as Matrix: philosophical
considerations on radio and television],14 Anders remarks that television and ra-
dio provide us with world-wide home: families transform themselves into an au-
dience of ‘mass hermits’. This experience depletes the sphere of feelings, and the
sad conclusion is that we become ‘consumers of the world’.15 Anders’ preoccu-
pation with the new medium is important in connection with cultural-historical
studies as well as with the history of his own work.
    After watching the miniseries, Anders decided to write about it, joining the
debate on the relation between movies and the Holocaust. The notes he took
from 4 March to 20 April 1979 were published by Anders in the work Besuch
im Hades. Auschwitz und Breslau 1966. Nach “Holocaust” 1979 [Visit to Hades.
Auschwitz and Breslau, 1966. After “Holocaust”, 1979],16 and are not only in-
teresting for the original discussion on the television series, but also for Anders’
reflection on Jewishness and on the role of images and films.17 It is remarkable
that Anders was one of the first to critically examine the Austrian victim myth.
    Anders starts by asking the following question: why did the thrill of horror and
shame produced by the American TV-miniseries Holocaust not occur in 1945,
when people saw the documentaries and photographs testifying to the gruesome
reality of the Shoah? The answer is rooted in Anders’s philosophical anthropo-
logy. This lack of response, Anders says, is not a German shortcoming, a sign of


14
   Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten in-
dustriellen Revolution [The Outdatedness of Human Beings 1. On the Soul in the Era of the Second
Industrial Revolution] (Munich: Beck, 1956), pp. 97–110.
15
   See also: Stefano Velotti, ‘L’antropologia di Günther Anders e l’ambivalenza delle immagini’,
Discipline filosofiche, 2 (2008), 99–114. For this important dimension of Anders’s philosophy, see:
Werner Fuld, ‘Zwischen Film und Bombe. Die Kontinuität des Andersschen Denkens’, in Günther
Anders kontrovers, ed. by Konrad Paul Liessmann (Munich: Beck, 1992), pp. 114–23; and Klaus
Albrecht Schröder, ‘Die Genese von Günther Anders’ Medienkritik’, ivi, pp. 124–34.
16
   Günther Anders, Besuch im Hades. Auschwitz und Breslau 1966. Nach ‘Holocaust’ 1979 (Munich:
Beck, 1996).
17
   See also Anders’s reflections on these topics in his works: Mein Judentum [My Jewishness], ed. by
Hans Jürgen Schultz (Zürich-Düsseldorf: Benzinger, 1999 [1979]), pp. 69–87; and Kafka. Pro und
contra. Die Prozess-Unterlagen [Kafka, pro and contra. The Trial Records] (Munich: Beck, 1952).

                                                                                               119
                                          Micaela Latini


the inhumanity of the German people, but rather the hallmark of humanity tout
court at the time of the ‘outdatedness of human beings’.

     The surprising thing is that this fiction gives us the facts, and that only through this fic-
     tion we learn what happened a long time ago. And that’s not all. The fiction is essential
     not only because the truth that we need to know is no longer perceptible, but mainly
     because the monstrosity [Ungeheuerlichkeit] and the enormity [Enormität] of what
     happens today […] are no longer perceptible and knowable.18

   We are not able, Anders explains, to mourn for millions of people killed, we
are unable to bear such a disproportionate pain. There is a discrepancy between
what humans can produce (the bureaucratic extermination of an immense mass
of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals...) and what humans can see, feel, truly grasp. The
‘emotional illiteracy’, i.e. the inability to feel pain or remorse described by An-
ders in the first volume of his monumental The Outdatedness of Human Beings,19
applies also to the Holocaust and makes it unreadable. In his main philosophi-
cal work Anders advanced a ‘philosophy of discrepance’, an analysis of the gap
between what we are able to produce (herstellen) and what we are able to imagi-
ne (vorstellen).20 Faced with a new surplus of images, with their suffocating and
blinding sensationalism, the imagination stalls, collapses, in a kind of domino
effect, a defensive anaesthetizing reaction, leading to the inability to feel and
therefore to take responsibility in regard to the world, to act as subjects.
   Unlike many intellectuals, Anders’ book After ‘Holocaust’ offered a positive
assessment of the miniseries, not so much in terms of its aesthetic qualities, as
for its power to awaken the conscience of West German and Austrian people.21
   In light of the inevitable human tendency to avoid thinking of the horror that
had happened, says Anders, the Holocaust series has a positive role: it brings the
experience of Auschwitz into the homes of those who did not know what had
happened in the concentration camps, close to where they lived, or of those who
had been told but were unable to imagine it. The cinematic images rip the veil
of oblivion, break the taboo of the Holocaust, and induce a painful awareness of
the event: in this sense a conventional Hollywood series is able to achieve what
had not been achieved in 1945.
   The success of the television series was not a consequence of its historical
accuracy or its reliance on real witnesses, but of the force of fiction, of its focus
on the individuals rather than the mass, on the micro-history of a family. Throu-


18
   Anders, Besuch im Hades, pp. 202–03 (my translation).
19
   See: Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, pp. 260–70.
20
   See: The Life and Work of Günther Anders: Émigré, Iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of Letters, ed. by
Günther Bishof, Jason Dawsey and Bernhard Fetz (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2014).
21
   See: David Bidussa, ‘Prefazione. Holocaust e il discorso pubblico sulla Shoah’, in Günther An-
ders, Dopo Holocaust, 1979, ed. by David Bidussa and Sergio Fabian, trans. by Sergio Fabian
(Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2014), pp. 9–21 and Sergio Fabian, ‘Postfazione. Storie minuscole per
turbare una coscienza opaca’, in Dopo Holocaust, 1979, pp. 85–97.

120
                    The Vision of the End: Anders on the TV Series Holocaust


gh a fiction, a pretense, perhaps even a trivialization of the events, people were
able to finally begin grasping and remembering the unconceivable horror of the
Holocaust.
   In describing the effects of the Holocaust, Anders adopts and corrects the
well-known Paul Klee painting of Angelus Novus, as it was used by his cousin,
Walter Benjamin, in Theses on the Philosophy of History (Über den Begriff der
Geschichte, 1940).22 In Germany after Auschwitz, no angel of history is silhou-
etted against the sky, or, at the most, it is a broken, impotent angel: an angel of
oblivion.23 Post-war Germany, after its total defeat, had to renounce any prospect
of a millennial past or future, and all that is left is a passion for the present, per-
sonified by consumers with no sense of past or future.
   Like Adorno, Anders also denounces the denial of the past that dominates the
collective consciousness, preventing a healthy elaboration of the tragedy of the
Holocaust. In this context, the series Holocaust adopts an innovative strategy:
to reach out to the consciousness of millions of Germans, the director Marvin
Chomsky based his work on the individual portraits of people involved. Accor-
ding to Anders, the miniseries successfully shows, as it reels backwards through
a series of historical events, how what was treated as an insignificant lump of
flesh was once a person, and how, behind the abstract numbers (six million), the
abstract mass of victims, are real individuals who once loved, hoped, dreamed.
Captivated by the fast-paced events and dramatic, and sometimes sentimental,
moments, the viewer of Holocaust becomes involved in the story of the two fami-
lies and shares their tragic destiny:

     The imaginary character of a single tortured person of whom we know the fictitious
     life and whom we have learned to love, reveals about the millions of dead far more
     than could have been revealed, even about a single individual, by sum of the millions.24

   As for the habitual criticism leveled against the film, i.e. that it emphasizes per-
sonal events and disregards the historical dimension of the Holocaust, Anders’s
position is clear: the need to personalize the history is a result of the previous
depersonalization that the people of the Holocaust have undergone. Auschwitz,
as Primo Levi said, involved the ‘destruction of man’, a destruction in which not
only individual lives are destroyed but also the very idea of the humanity of the
victims and it is this humanity that must be restored. Shoah victims were treated
literally as animals who were processed and transformed into things — shoes,
spectacle frames, broken dentures, baggage without owners — or quasi-things,
the waste arising from the chimneys of the furnaces where the bodies were burnt.


22
   Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
ed. by Hannah Arendt and trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007 [1968]), pp.
253–63.
23
   I refer to the title of a novel by the Austrian writer Maja Haderlap.
24
   Anders, Besuch im Hades, p. 187 (my translation).

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                                          Micaela Latini


According to Anders, it is necessary to react against the perception of the victims
as an anonymous mass and the murderers as mere cogs in a machine. The sta-
tus of persons must be restored back to both victims and to their executioners,
people like Erik Dorf (actor Tom Bell) in Holocaust, the murderous bureaucrat,
whose fictitious character recalls that of Adolf Eichmann.25
   Anders’s notes emphasize the importance of narrowing the focus of our gaze,
of bringing the most horrible crime in history within the visual and conceptual
grasp of humankind: ‘photographs [which] showed too many corpses and the
horror for death, even when faced with the crime, decrease as the number of
dead bodies shown increases’.26 Hence the need follows to renegotiate what
Adorno called the ‘aesthetic distance’.


Narrowing the Focus

   This narrowing of the focus is a necessary step to coming to terms with the
Holocaust. The circulation of the miniseries Holocaust is therefore a crucial brid-
ge that allows people to span the gap of thirty-five years of silence and oblivion.
But what does this reflection on the past entail? And why was it not possible
for Germans to engage in it sooner? The answer lies partly in the uniqueness
and exceptionality of the event called Auschwitz, which constitutes an historical
watershed.27 The crimes occurred under the command of a higher authority, and
that made them impersonal, wrapping them in anonymity without responsibility,
in the automatic character of the routine, in the ‘banality of evil’ (using the well-
known wording by Hannah Arendt).28 Secondly, the colossal dimensions of the
crime made it very difficult to remember and reflect on it. Faced with such an
enormous deed, the mechanism of remorse becomes clogged and denial takes
its place. The greater the evil, says Anders, the less can consciousness grasp,
feel remorse, and eventually produce a new sense of moral integrity. The eyes of
humans become saturated, unable to absorb crimes whose boundaries extend


25
   It is worth remembering that Anders submitted the trial of Adolf Eichmann to careful scrutiny
in his work Wir Eichmannsöhne: Offener Brief an Klaus Eichmann [We Sons of Eichmann: Open
Letter to Klaus Eichmann] (Munich: Beck, 1964). The trial before the Jerusalem District Court
began on 11 April 1961 and ended on 15 December 1961, when Eichmann was sentenced to death.
The book includes Anders’s correspondence with Klaus Eichmann, the son of the notorious Nazi
bureaucrat and genocidaire. Anders’s remarks recall the thesis of his ex-wife, the political philoso-
pher Hannah Arendt, in her study Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New
York: Viking, 1963).
26
   Anders, Besuch im Hades, p. 187 (my translation).
27
   See: Steven T. Katz, ‘The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: the Historical Dimension’, in Is the
Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. by Alan S. Rosenbaum, 2nd edn
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), pp. 49–68.
28
   Yet, the last twenty years of research have demonstrated that a large number of the victims of
the Holocaust were killed in more traditional face-to-face killing operations. See, for instance: Dan
Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

122
                    The Vision of the End: Anders on the TV Series Holocaust


towards the infernal. Finally, says Anders, humans can remember or imagine,
or adequately perceive only what they are able to control linguistically. This last
aspect, copies and amplifies Adorno’s well-known position, according to which
it is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz: you cannot because ‘the words
are lacking’ to express Auschwitz. Yet ‘to be speechless’ means renouncing the
possibility of preserving the memory of the Holocaust, abdicating to the horror
and wrapping Auschwitz in a mist of denial. Instead it is necessary to main-
tain one’s bearings, to avoid being overcome by the dimensions of the events: to
achieve this, the gaps in the collective memory must be interrogated, snatching
from oblivion all that recalls the finiteness of the human being. As Theodor W.
Adorno noted in his Negative Dialectics (Negative Dialektik, 1966): ‘Perennial
suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence
it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write
poems’.29
    According to Georges Didi-Huberman, even for Anders, grasping Auschwitz
required resorting to the power of images, while remaining aware of the limi-
ted vision they provided: in order to know you should exert the imagination.30
For this reason, it is useful to film what was invisible, to imagine Auschwitz
notwithstanding the impossibility of representing it in its entirety. While repro-
ducing in full the reality of the Holocaust is impossible, says Anders, we must
be able to give a sense of what it was and to induce remorse for it. Thanks to the
filter of fiction, the series Holocaust can scale down the dimensions of the horror
to a graspable size and testify to a horror that would otherwise remain forgotten.
    Anders’s reflections in After Holocaust can be considered as an extraordinary
compendium of ‘negative aesthetics’. According to him, what the images in the
miniseries Holocaust transmit

     is the horrible appearance [grauenhafte Schein], or rather the semblance of horror [der
     Schein des Grauenhaften], which the reality we perceive cannot transmit like the ar-
     tistic medium manages to do. And what we perceive is not the ‘appearance’, but the
     reality of that time, which, in order to be perceived had to be first turned into fiction.31

   Anders here seems to have embraced the lesson of Friedrich Schiller in his
letters Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1795 [On the Aesthetic Edu-



29
   Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), p.
362.
30
   See: Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. by
Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 38–39; see also: Anders, Besuch
im Hades, pp. 202–03. For a discussion on this topic, see: Natascia Mattucci, ‘Shoah tra ripro-
ducibilità e immaginazione’, in Pop Shoah? Immaginari del genocidio ebraico, ed. by Francesca R.
Recchia Luciani and Claudio Vercelli (Genoa: Il melangolo, 2016), pp. 113–27, particularly pp.
125–27.
31
   Anders, Besuch im Hades, p. 200 (my translation).

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                                        Micaela Latini


cation of Man], for whom aesthetics (whether it be theatre or cinema) should be
the instrument of morality.
   If the reality of the horror of our condition cannot be directly perceived, our
imagination must serve as a kind of telescope’s lens:

      Our simple perception [nackte Wahrnehmung] is not enough to understand the pre-
      sent-day world, and it is too short-sighted for the enormous, or better, monstrous
      dimensions [monströse Ausmaße] of what we ourselves are capable of producing […].
      We must rather use fantasy as a corrective, because the truth of our monstrous condi-
      tions can in no way be perceived, at least by the naked eye […]. At the very least we
      should be able to imagine the immensity that we ourselves are able to produce and
      provoke.32

   The (apparent) deformation, the exaggeration that fancy and force of imagi-
nation perform must not be understood as a falsification of the truth. It is rather
an alternative method of observing, of allowing people to grasp the truth-content
behind the lie, to communicate it and expand our ability to feel. The ability to
teach how to despair: ‘And thank God, now they despair, finally they despair’.33
This, for Anders, is the role of culture after Auschwitz: that of expanding our
capacity to feel, to see, to break the invisible barrier that surrounds the events of
the past. This goal is paramount and anything that allows us to achieve this goal
is therefore laudable, whether it is the arguments of philosophy, the words of
literature, or the images of a Hollywood TV-miniseries.




32
     Ivi, p. 39 (my translation).
33
     Ivi, p. 202 (my translation).

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