The Holocaust in Popular Culture

The Holocaust has been the subject of more popular-culture treatment than any other event of comparable historical weight. The body of work runs from the immediate post-war American radio plays through the 1959 Hollywood film of The Diary of Anne Frank, through novels, comics, video games, podcasts, museum visitor experiences, school plays, virtual-reality reconstructions and social-media reels. The cumulative effect has been to make the Holocaust the most popular-culturally present of all twentieth-century atrocities; it has also produced a sustained set of arguments about whether and how the events should be treated outside the documentary and historical disciplines that handle them most rigorously.

The kinds of work

The most established popular treatments are the major Hollywood films treated on their own pages: Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Life is Beautiful, The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Son of Saul, the 1959 film of The Diary of Anne Frank, and the 1978 NBC television series Holocaust. These have reached the widest non-specialist audiences and have done much of the work of popular Holocaust education.

The novels are a substantial second category. Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005), narrated by Death and following a German girl who shelters a Jewish refugee, has sold over sixteen million copies. Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014) won the Pulitzer Prize and has been adapted as a Netflix series. Sebastian Faulks’s Charlotte Gray (1998), Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Mark Sullivan’s Beneath a Scarlet Sky (2017) and Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) have each sold in the millions. The Morris novel was adapted as a Sky Atlantic television series in 2024.

The graphic novel and comics tradition runs from Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986 and 1991), the most-cited single work, through Joe Kubert’s Yossel: April 19, 1943 (2003), Pascal Croci’s Auschwitz (2003), Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (2012, a partial Holocaust treatment), and the children’s graphic adaptations of Anne Frank that have proliferated since the 1990s. The popularity of the graphic form for Holocaust subjects is in part the achievement of Maus, which made the form respectable for the subject.

Television

The television treatments have ranged from major dramas to documentary serials. The 1978 NBC series Holocaust, watched by 120 million Americans and around half the West German adult population when broadcast in Germany the following year, was the founding work of long-form television Holocaust drama. The 1985 BBC television production of Auschwitz: The Forgotten Evidence, the BBC’s The World at War episode “Genocide” (1973), the multi-part BBC and PBS treatments of the 1990s and 2000s, and the 2024 Sky adaptation of The Tattooist of Auschwitz are landmarks. Streaming-era productions including the 2020 Netflix series Hunters, which combined Holocaust subject matter with a comic-book Nazi-hunter framework and was widely criticised for its cavalier treatment of the historical material, mark the more contested end of the popular-cultural treatment.

The argument over popularisation

The argument runs back to the immediate post-war period and has not ended. The principal critical position is that popular-cultural treatment of the Holocaust risks trivialising the events, generating false images of camp life and survival, and producing in its audiences a sense of having understood the events through a fictional plot when they have only seen its rendering. The Adorno-Lanzmann tradition, in its strongest form, holds that the Holocaust should not be treated in fiction at all; in a softer form it argues that the popular treatments are unavoidable but should be treated as fictional treatments rather than as historical accounts.

The principal defending position is that popular culture is the form through which the wider non-specialist public encounters the subject at all, that the alternative to popular treatment is no treatment, and that the educational responsibility lies in distinguishing between the popular treatments and the historical record rather than in suppressing the popular treatments. Spielberg’s pragmatic argument (that Schindler’s List would do educational work that Shoah could not) is a version of this position.

The argument has been complicated in the 2020s by social media and short-form video. The TikTok platform’s algorithmic surfacing of Holocaust-themed content, including young users producing short videos in which they imagine themselves as victims of the gas chambers, has produced a new and unstable category of treatment. The Auschwitz Memorial has issued public statements criticising specific examples of TikTok content as trivialising; the platform’s response has been to remove some content and to leave most of it in place. The argument over what constitutes acceptable popular treatment of the Holocaust is now substantially being conducted on platforms whose content moderation policies are not designed for the subject.

The educational consequences

The cumulative educational consequence of the popular-cultural treatments has been double-edged. Holocaust knowledge in the general Western public has been broader than it would have been without the popular treatments; the recognition of names, of camps, of the central operational facts is wider in 2026 than in 1986 or 1996. At the same time, the specific factual content of that knowledge is structured by the works people have encountered, with the consequence that fictional plot elements are widely believed to be historical (the impossibility of a child of Shmuel’s age surviving in any camp; the false impression that camp commandants’ families did not know what their husbands did; the false sense that survival was a matter of luck and pluck rather than the structural rarity it actually was). The challenge for Holocaust education in 2026 is the management of a public whose subject knowledge is real but whose specific factual basis is in places fictional.

See also

Sources

  • Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust, Indiana University Press, 2011
  • Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler. How History Is Bought, Packaged and Sold, Routledge, 1999
  • Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Cambridge University Press, third edition 2003
  • Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005
  • Michael Gray, Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
  • Daniel H. Magilow and Lisa Silverman, Holocaust Representations in History: An Introduction, Bloomsbury, 2015
  • UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, research on Holocaust knowledge and understanding, https://www.holocausteducation.org.uk
  • Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, statements on social-media trivialisation, https://www.auschwitz.org