Hitler Gets the Treatment
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: At this year's Academy Awards, a German film called Downfall, about Hitler's last days in the bunker, was up for an Oscar. It was the first German film ever depicting Hitler. It didn't win. We'll return to Downfall in a few minutes, but first we thought we'd consider America's complicated relationship with the Holocaust. [MUSIC INTRO - CLIP FROM THIS IS YOUR LIFE]
TV HOST: This is your life, Hannah Black Kohner.
HANNAH: Oh, no!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: America demands happy endings.
TV HOST: You look like a young American girl, just out of college - not at all like a survivor of Hitler's cruel purge of German Jews.
WOMAN: That's where I first met Hannah.
HANNAH: Oh, Eva!
WOMAN: We spent about eight months…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: On May 27th, 1953, the TV show This is Your Life tried to give a happy ending to Auschwitz survivor Hannah Blokova, uniting her with an old friend from Auschwitz.
TV HOST: You were each given a cake of soap and a towel, weren't you, Hannah?
HANNAH: I don't remember the soap.
TV HOST: [LAUGHS] Well, you were sent to the so-called "showers," and even this was a doubtful procedure, because some showers had regular water; others had liquid gas. And you never knew which one you were being…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Flying out a brother she hadn't seen since the war exterminated the rest of her family…
TV HOST: Now, here he is, from Israel, your brother Dr. Gottfried Bloch.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Show business has since refined its approach to the Holocaust. It started out, after all, by virtually ignoring it. In Hollywood, Jack Warner and a handful of other studio heads tried to deal with Fascism here and abroad, but met with fierce criticism. The movie, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, drawn from the headlines, was produced in secret. Half the cast withheld their names from the credits. No one was willing to play Hitler. Joseph Kennedy, fresh from his ambassadorship in London, flew in and told the studios to back off - and mostly, they did. Once America entered the war, there were big studio pictures about soldiers and patriotism and democracy - but not about the plight of the Jews. Daniel Anker is the producer of the documentary Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, which premieres on AMC April 5th. He told us that Hollywood filmmakers took heart and took pictures when the president told them to.
DANIEL ANKER: Just after the camps were liberated, in April, 1945, 60 years ago, Eisenhower invited Hollywood executives to come to Europe to see the devastation of the war, and in particular, to see the liberation of the camps, and the message was: tell the world. And there was some effort, after that, to try to do that. The newsreel footage that had been shot was shown in theaters. But by and large, after 1945, there was silence. The first major Hollywood response to the Holocaust - you could say that was Gentleman's Agreement and Crossfire, which were two films that came out in 1947 and were about anti-Semitism in this country, which was considered, again, very courageous for moviemakers to tackle, but they did not mention what had happened in Germany just two years before. [CLIP FROM GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT PLAYS]
MAN: Mr. Green is going to do a series on anti-Semitism for us.
MAN: Really? The worst, the most harmful thing you can possibly do now.
MAN: Not at all. Why is it a harmful idea?
MAN: Because it'll only stir it up more, that's why. Let it alone. We'll handle it in our own way.
MAN: The hush-hush way?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what was happening on television?
DANIEL ANKER: It's very interesting. Television always took a harsher look, a more realistic look. In the '50s, there were a number of teleplays, culminating in Judgment at Nuremberg, which was a phenomenal moment in American television.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That teleplay was based on war crimes trials of many leading Nazis in Nuremberg, and it was harsh, and yet, even that was marred somewhat by the exigencies of commercial television.
DANIEL ANKER: Let me just address the harshness for a second, because it is interesting that, you know, this was a teleplay about a courtroom trial, and so how they sort of opened it up was to incorporate a lot of newsreel footage. This is 1959, and this is the same newsreel footage that was shown in '45 but really had not been shown since. So, that was really something.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're talking about skeletons and ovens and piles of the dead.
DANIEL ANKER: And you know, the irony here is that we're still talking about network television, and the sponsor of this teleplay was the American Gas Company, and at the last minute the word came down that they could not say the word "gas," so, every time someone talked about the gas chambers, it was the "bleep" chambers, and that issue is what made the impact nationally - the fact that this had happened - rather than whatever the message of the film was.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And then, in 1959, Hollywood returned to the Holocaust with The Diary of Anne Frank, criticized because Millie Perkins, who played Anne, seemed to be stripped of all ethnicity. [CLIP FROM DIARY OF ANNE FRANK PLAYS]
MILLIE PERKINS/ANNE FRANK: I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.
DANIEL ANKER: Right. I mean, Diary of Anne Frank is an example of what we would see happen again and again, which is that, when Hollywood filmmakers were able to make a Holocaust story, it was only after the proven success of that story in another medium. So, Anne Frank had already been a best seller, the play had already been successful on Broadway, and then Hollywood's greatest director of the time, George Stevens, is able to make The Diary of Anne Frank as a motion picture, which is really a wonderful film. Yet, it's also a film that was, at the time, and continues to be much criticized. For example, the fact that this was, maybe, the first (quote/unquote) "Holocaust Story set to music." There was criticism that there had been a score. "How dare you set the Holocaust to music?" And there was, as you mentioned, the criticism in the casting of Anne.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that was in 1959.
DANIEL ANKER: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the 1960s, there seems to have been a change. You have The Pawnbroker, Ship of Fools - there are films about survivors.
DANIEL ANKER: We sort of chart this parallel story of the survivor in America, and survivors of the camps were silent about their experiences. And in the '60s, there is this sort of - beginnings of a growing awareness about the Holocaust. The Pawnbroker comes out in '65, and then in Harold & Maude there's this wonderful moment which is only a second or two in which you see Maude's tattoo - but that reflects back on the entire life of this character in just those two seconds. And that audience of the early '70s understood what that tattoo meant. And then, moving forward, in the late '70s, there is The Holocaust, the mini-series.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It ran for four consecutive nights. It starred Meryl Streep. One in two Americans, supposedly, tuned in. In the New York Times, Eli Weisel called it "a trivialization," and yet, as you note in your film, amazingly, in Germany the impact of the mini-series Holocaust was extraordinary. You say that it extended the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes, and, in fact, the joke was - Holocaust, the mini-series, seemed to have a greater impact on Germans than, than the original did.
DANIEL ANKER: Yeah. I mean that's a great irony, obviously. It had great impact here. Before Holocaust came out, there was the sense that just telling the story - bearing witness to the event, however you do that, is a very noble thing. Then, Eli Weisel comes out with an article that says, essentially, "No it's not just about bearing witness. It's about how you bear witness." And the mini-series, to some, was a sort of very watered-down soap opera attempt to portray these very larger-than-one-can-comprehend events, and trying to sort of package them in a mini-series was sacrilegious to some people.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And then finally, Schindler's List, which someone in your film called "a compendium of all the different approaches to the Holocaust." [CLIP FROM SCHINDLER'S LIST PLAYS]
MAN: It's Hebrew from the Talmud. It says whoever saves one life saves the world, entirely.
DANIEL ANKER: All of these films fit into these Hollywood conventions. They have happy endings. They have heroes. Often, they have non-Jewish heroes that the audience can identify with. And the question becomes: how can you portray the Holocaust - this event that has so many dimensions - and how can you fit that into a Hollywood mold?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet, the Hollywood mold, in the end, is all we'll have left. Soon, all the survivors will be dead, and for better or for worse, most people will come to terms with the Holocaust through Hollywood.
DANIEL ANKER: Absolutely.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Daniel Anker is the producer of the documentary, Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, which premieres on AMC April 5th.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Last month, "Downfall" opened - a film about Hitler's final days - from a German perspective. It pictures Hitler, portrayed by the acclaimed Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, as a madman, but not the cartoon kind. He's a complicated madman - kind to his secretary and his dog, and cruelly indifferent to the sufferings of his people. He rattles the walls of his bunker with rage, as the walls close in. [CLIP FROM DOWNFALL PLAYS] [MEN SPEAKING IN GERMAN, HITLER SHOUTING IN GERMAN]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As A.O. Scott noted in the New York Times, the conventions of film narrative demand that we identify with someone, and we do - even in Downfall. In some of Hitler's throng, a secretary, a general, a professor, we see an uneasy conscience, a change of heart. We see civilians brutalized. Downfall has drawn criticism not so much for humanizing Hitler but for humanizing the German people, who are the only victims we see in the film. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel and Bruno Ganz say the criticism is unfair. Hirschbiegel speaks first.
OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL: Of course, the Germans were guilty and were responsible what happened. A lot of them, we know today, knew about the concentration camps; they knew about the gas. And there is no excuse.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, you disagree with the notion that this film in some way appears to be an apologia.
OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL: I certainly did not set out to, to do anything in that direction. We are talking about the worst crime in the history of human - mankind. I think it's absurd and nonsense to assume something like that would be possible at all.
BRUNO GANZ: Now, I'm, I'm speaking as a Swiss citizen. I think it is allowed, after 60 years, even to the German people, that they have been victims. Part of them, they had really to suffer with the American-British bombing, and other things - because it was war. I'm not talking about now reversing priorities. It's out of the question who started this war and, and who killed the Jews. We don't have to discuss it. But we know it.
OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL: No German will ever doubt the responsibility we have.
BRUNO GANZ:But it's interesting that now, after 60 years, apparently Germany is ready to come to terms with their own history, or they dare to handle their own history in entertainment, because I think this is only possible because we have the European Union. This nationalism that caused a lot of wars and tensions between the European countries, that's fading away.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You think that the formation of the European Union creates a climate where these sorts of depictions and re-considerations are more possible?
BRUNO GANZ: No, I think it's more possible for the Germans to talk in the way we talk about their history, because they're part of the European family.
OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL: I mean there's 82,000 books been written about Adolph Hitler, and I don't understand why people expect answers from my movie. I cannot give explanations there. I can only raise certain questions, and I can try to stay as honest with my sources and with the historic events. [THEME MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Oliver Hirschbiegel is the director of Downfall. Bruno Ganz stars in the film.
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Mike Vuolo, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Susanna Dilliplane and Nick Gilewicz. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media, produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
TV HOST: This is your life, Hannah Black Kohner.
HANNAH: Oh, no!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: America demands happy endings.
TV HOST: You look like a young American girl, just out of college - not at all like a survivor of Hitler's cruel purge of German Jews.
WOMAN: That's where I first met Hannah.
HANNAH: Oh, Eva!
WOMAN: We spent about eight months…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: On May 27th, 1953, the TV show This is Your Life tried to give a happy ending to Auschwitz survivor Hannah Blokova, uniting her with an old friend from Auschwitz.
TV HOST: You were each given a cake of soap and a towel, weren't you, Hannah?
HANNAH: I don't remember the soap.
TV HOST: [LAUGHS] Well, you were sent to the so-called "showers," and even this was a doubtful procedure, because some showers had regular water; others had liquid gas. And you never knew which one you were being…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Flying out a brother she hadn't seen since the war exterminated the rest of her family…
TV HOST: Now, here he is, from Israel, your brother Dr. Gottfried Bloch.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Show business has since refined its approach to the Holocaust. It started out, after all, by virtually ignoring it. In Hollywood, Jack Warner and a handful of other studio heads tried to deal with Fascism here and abroad, but met with fierce criticism. The movie, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, drawn from the headlines, was produced in secret. Half the cast withheld their names from the credits. No one was willing to play Hitler. Joseph Kennedy, fresh from his ambassadorship in London, flew in and told the studios to back off - and mostly, they did. Once America entered the war, there were big studio pictures about soldiers and patriotism and democracy - but not about the plight of the Jews. Daniel Anker is the producer of the documentary Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, which premieres on AMC April 5th. He told us that Hollywood filmmakers took heart and took pictures when the president told them to.
DANIEL ANKER: Just after the camps were liberated, in April, 1945, 60 years ago, Eisenhower invited Hollywood executives to come to Europe to see the devastation of the war, and in particular, to see the liberation of the camps, and the message was: tell the world. And there was some effort, after that, to try to do that. The newsreel footage that had been shot was shown in theaters. But by and large, after 1945, there was silence. The first major Hollywood response to the Holocaust - you could say that was Gentleman's Agreement and Crossfire, which were two films that came out in 1947 and were about anti-Semitism in this country, which was considered, again, very courageous for moviemakers to tackle, but they did not mention what had happened in Germany just two years before. [CLIP FROM GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT PLAYS]
MAN: Mr. Green is going to do a series on anti-Semitism for us.
MAN: Really? The worst, the most harmful thing you can possibly do now.
MAN: Not at all. Why is it a harmful idea?
MAN: Because it'll only stir it up more, that's why. Let it alone. We'll handle it in our own way.
MAN: The hush-hush way?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what was happening on television?
DANIEL ANKER: It's very interesting. Television always took a harsher look, a more realistic look. In the '50s, there were a number of teleplays, culminating in Judgment at Nuremberg, which was a phenomenal moment in American television.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That teleplay was based on war crimes trials of many leading Nazis in Nuremberg, and it was harsh, and yet, even that was marred somewhat by the exigencies of commercial television.
DANIEL ANKER: Let me just address the harshness for a second, because it is interesting that, you know, this was a teleplay about a courtroom trial, and so how they sort of opened it up was to incorporate a lot of newsreel footage. This is 1959, and this is the same newsreel footage that was shown in '45 but really had not been shown since. So, that was really something.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're talking about skeletons and ovens and piles of the dead.
DANIEL ANKER: And you know, the irony here is that we're still talking about network television, and the sponsor of this teleplay was the American Gas Company, and at the last minute the word came down that they could not say the word "gas," so, every time someone talked about the gas chambers, it was the "bleep" chambers, and that issue is what made the impact nationally - the fact that this had happened - rather than whatever the message of the film was.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And then, in 1959, Hollywood returned to the Holocaust with The Diary of Anne Frank, criticized because Millie Perkins, who played Anne, seemed to be stripped of all ethnicity. [CLIP FROM DIARY OF ANNE FRANK PLAYS]
MILLIE PERKINS/ANNE FRANK: I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.
DANIEL ANKER: Right. I mean, Diary of Anne Frank is an example of what we would see happen again and again, which is that, when Hollywood filmmakers were able to make a Holocaust story, it was only after the proven success of that story in another medium. So, Anne Frank had already been a best seller, the play had already been successful on Broadway, and then Hollywood's greatest director of the time, George Stevens, is able to make The Diary of Anne Frank as a motion picture, which is really a wonderful film. Yet, it's also a film that was, at the time, and continues to be much criticized. For example, the fact that this was, maybe, the first (quote/unquote) "Holocaust Story set to music." There was criticism that there had been a score. "How dare you set the Holocaust to music?" And there was, as you mentioned, the criticism in the casting of Anne.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that was in 1959.
DANIEL ANKER: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the 1960s, there seems to have been a change. You have The Pawnbroker, Ship of Fools - there are films about survivors.
DANIEL ANKER: We sort of chart this parallel story of the survivor in America, and survivors of the camps were silent about their experiences. And in the '60s, there is this sort of - beginnings of a growing awareness about the Holocaust. The Pawnbroker comes out in '65, and then in Harold & Maude there's this wonderful moment which is only a second or two in which you see Maude's tattoo - but that reflects back on the entire life of this character in just those two seconds. And that audience of the early '70s understood what that tattoo meant. And then, moving forward, in the late '70s, there is The Holocaust, the mini-series.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It ran for four consecutive nights. It starred Meryl Streep. One in two Americans, supposedly, tuned in. In the New York Times, Eli Weisel called it "a trivialization," and yet, as you note in your film, amazingly, in Germany the impact of the mini-series Holocaust was extraordinary. You say that it extended the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes, and, in fact, the joke was - Holocaust, the mini-series, seemed to have a greater impact on Germans than, than the original did.
DANIEL ANKER: Yeah. I mean that's a great irony, obviously. It had great impact here. Before Holocaust came out, there was the sense that just telling the story - bearing witness to the event, however you do that, is a very noble thing. Then, Eli Weisel comes out with an article that says, essentially, "No it's not just about bearing witness. It's about how you bear witness." And the mini-series, to some, was a sort of very watered-down soap opera attempt to portray these very larger-than-one-can-comprehend events, and trying to sort of package them in a mini-series was sacrilegious to some people.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And then finally, Schindler's List, which someone in your film called "a compendium of all the different approaches to the Holocaust." [CLIP FROM SCHINDLER'S LIST PLAYS]
MAN: It's Hebrew from the Talmud. It says whoever saves one life saves the world, entirely.
DANIEL ANKER: All of these films fit into these Hollywood conventions. They have happy endings. They have heroes. Often, they have non-Jewish heroes that the audience can identify with. And the question becomes: how can you portray the Holocaust - this event that has so many dimensions - and how can you fit that into a Hollywood mold?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet, the Hollywood mold, in the end, is all we'll have left. Soon, all the survivors will be dead, and for better or for worse, most people will come to terms with the Holocaust through Hollywood.
DANIEL ANKER: Absolutely.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Daniel Anker is the producer of the documentary, Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, which premieres on AMC April 5th.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Last month, "Downfall" opened - a film about Hitler's final days - from a German perspective. It pictures Hitler, portrayed by the acclaimed Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, as a madman, but not the cartoon kind. He's a complicated madman - kind to his secretary and his dog, and cruelly indifferent to the sufferings of his people. He rattles the walls of his bunker with rage, as the walls close in. [CLIP FROM DOWNFALL PLAYS] [MEN SPEAKING IN GERMAN, HITLER SHOUTING IN GERMAN]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As A.O. Scott noted in the New York Times, the conventions of film narrative demand that we identify with someone, and we do - even in Downfall. In some of Hitler's throng, a secretary, a general, a professor, we see an uneasy conscience, a change of heart. We see civilians brutalized. Downfall has drawn criticism not so much for humanizing Hitler but for humanizing the German people, who are the only victims we see in the film. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel and Bruno Ganz say the criticism is unfair. Hirschbiegel speaks first.
OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL: Of course, the Germans were guilty and were responsible what happened. A lot of them, we know today, knew about the concentration camps; they knew about the gas. And there is no excuse.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, you disagree with the notion that this film in some way appears to be an apologia.
OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL: I certainly did not set out to, to do anything in that direction. We are talking about the worst crime in the history of human - mankind. I think it's absurd and nonsense to assume something like that would be possible at all.
BRUNO GANZ: Now, I'm, I'm speaking as a Swiss citizen. I think it is allowed, after 60 years, even to the German people, that they have been victims. Part of them, they had really to suffer with the American-British bombing, and other things - because it was war. I'm not talking about now reversing priorities. It's out of the question who started this war and, and who killed the Jews. We don't have to discuss it. But we know it.
OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL: No German will ever doubt the responsibility we have.
BRUNO GANZ:But it's interesting that now, after 60 years, apparently Germany is ready to come to terms with their own history, or they dare to handle their own history in entertainment, because I think this is only possible because we have the European Union. This nationalism that caused a lot of wars and tensions between the European countries, that's fading away.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You think that the formation of the European Union creates a climate where these sorts of depictions and re-considerations are more possible?
BRUNO GANZ: No, I think it's more possible for the Germans to talk in the way we talk about their history, because they're part of the European family.
OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL: I mean there's 82,000 books been written about Adolph Hitler, and I don't understand why people expect answers from my movie. I cannot give explanations there. I can only raise certain questions, and I can try to stay as honest with my sources and with the historic events. [THEME MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Oliver Hirschbiegel is the director of Downfall. Bruno Ganz stars in the film.
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Mike Vuolo, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Susanna Dilliplane and Nick Gilewicz. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media, produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
Produced by WNYC Studios