Bringing the Holocaust Home: The Freudian Dynamics of Kubrick's The Shining*

World War II has relatively recently begun to take on a dark mythopoeic aspect for the artists of the postmodern age. Unlike World War I, whose horrors preoccupied European society and art right from the armistice of 1918, for a generation afterward the second “Great War” of the twentieth century was generally celebrated as a “good war” by the victorious Allied nations. The former Axis powers converted to the ideologies of their conquerors and, with them, concentrated on economic recovery, the rigors and responsibilities of the Cold War, and the repression of the horrors of the previous conflict. These preoccupations were challenged beginning in the sixties. The Holocaust was rediscovered as a subject for historians, artists, writers, and filmmakers who also integrated it into critical concerns about the nature of human society and its future on earth. Even Alain Resnais's classic 1955 short film on the Nazi concentration camps, Night and Fog, had ignored the centrality of Jewish victimage and shied away from depicting French collaboration in the Final Solution. Save for a few works like Albert Camus' The Plague ( confrontation with such issues would have to wait until a decade that opened with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and, for France, closed with Marcel Ophuls' 1971 television documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity (which was not shown on television there until 1981). In between, documentary and feature film-makers