East German Film and the Holocaust

ISBN-13: 9781789207477 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 264 str.

Elizabeth Ward

Opis

Throughout its existence, East Germany's ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for crimes committed on its territory between 1933 and 1945, and to the extent that it addressed the Nazi era at all, it was to cast communist antifascists as both the victims of and victors over fascist oppression. Yet it was the internationally successful Jacob the Liar-which has a Jewish protagonist and no communist characters at all-that the GDR's Ministry of Culture submitted for the 1976 Academy Awards, becoming the only East German movie to ever be nominated. By combining close analyses of five key films with extensive archival research, this book unravels the complex status of cinema depicting antisemitism in a country whose official history emphasized political persecution over racial victimhood.