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Some of you may react as I do to the prospect of watching another Holocaust film: “Depressing!” This fine book helps us understand why we are nonetheless drawn to watching this crucial genre of film, and why we often feel profoundly healed and enriched by the experience. It is far more than a matter of individual mourning and working through; it is a collective imperative, if we as a society are to come to terms with the Shoah, and push back against the loathsome re-emergence of bigotry, including anti-Semitism.
The book’s twelve contributors discuss eleven films in depth, with special emphasis on Son of Saul. In their final chapter, Nanette Auerhahn and Dori Laub comment that all but two of these films focus on the aftermath of the Holocaust for survivors and their families. The editors offer us profound insights into what one of them calls “the art and angst of viewing Holocaust films” (p. 34). Space limitations will not permit me to cover all these excellent chapters.
Co-editor Diana Diamond’s Introduction is a tour de force as she summarizes each chapter, and synthesizes several over-arching themes. She underlines the value of Holocaust films in helping us integrate the potentially fragmenting trauma of the Shoah. In fact, her Introduction shows us such integration in action. Diamond highlights the intersection of individual and group responses to the Holocaust. Like the centuries of oral literature before written language, film (as well as theater) restores the group experience of art, making it well suited to promoting our collective recovery from a catastrophe that still affects us all. As she puts it, “It is particularly in the arena of showing the intersection of cultural with individual defense that these films reveal their brilliance” (p. 15).
William James presciently observed that, “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”† John and Helen Watkins, and later Philip Bromberg, have helped elucidate these “social selves” as