The Holocaust has produced a vast body of art and literature, more than any other event of the twentieth century. Some of it is great. Some of it is unwatchable kitsch. Some of it has done real damage to public understanding by simplifying or sentimentalising what should not be simplified. This page sets out the works that matter and explains why.
The literature begins with the testimony. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, published in 1947, is the foundational text. Elie Wiesel’s Night, published in French in 1958 and English in 1960, brought the religious dimension of the catastrophe into the language of a Christian-majority readership for the first time. Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, published in Polish in 1948 and English in 1967, is the coldest and most uncomfortable of the eyewitness books. The diary of Anne Frank, published by her father Otto in 1947, is the single most-read Holocaust text in the world. The work of Imre Kertész, especially Fatelessness, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002 and brought Hungarian camp experience into the canon. Jorge Semprun, a Spanish communist who survived Buchenwald, wrote in French. Ruth Klüger wrote weiter leben in German and translated and revised it into English as Still Alive. The work of these writers is not interchangeable. Each is the record of a specific experience.
Poetry has had a particular intensity in this field. Paul Celan’s Todesfuge, the Death Fugue, written in Romanian-German in 1944 or 1945, is the most reproduced poem of the catastrophe. Nelly Sachs and Dan Pagis, both German-language poets in exile, did major work. The Yiddish poetry of Itzhak Katzenelson and Avrom Sutzkever, written in the Warsaw and Vilnius ghettos, is less translated and deserves to be more read.
The fiction is less stable. Some of the most popular novels are also the most criticised. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne’s 2006 children’s book, has been condemned by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and by leading Holocaust educators for its historical impossibilities and for the impression it leaves with young readers that German children would not have known what was happening to their Jewish neighbours. The 2008 film made the problem worse. The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Heather Morris’s 2018 novel, has also drawn detailed criticism from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Research Centre for factual errors and for treating its subject as the basis of a romance. By contrast, the work of W. G. Sebald, especially Austerlitz, and the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman, are widely regarded as serious and durable.
The cinema is its own argument. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, released in 1985, is over nine hours long, contains no archive footage, and is widely regarded as the most important documentary on the catastrophe. Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, brought the Holocaust to a mainstream audience that had not engaged with the literature. The film has critics, including Lanzmann, who argued that any narrative film about the catastrophe risks turning it into spectacle. Whatever one thinks of that argument, the cultural reach of Schindler’s List has been enormous. The Pianist, Roman Polanski’s 2002 adaptation of Władysław Szpilman’s memoir, is generally regarded as the strongest fiction film to have come out of the subject. Son of Saul, the 2015 Hungarian film by László Nemes, set inside the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, was made under direct consultation with Sonderkommando survivor testimony and is the most technically rigorous attempt at putting the camp on screen.
Painting and visual art has been less mainstream but produced specific landmarks. Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre?, a sequence of nearly eight hundred gouaches made in southern France between 1940 and 1942 before her arrest and deportation to Auschwitz, where she was killed at twenty six, is the most extraordinary single body of art to come out of the catastrophe. Felix Nussbaum, painted in hiding in Belgium until his arrest in 1944, left a body of work now in the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück. Anselm Kiefer, born in Germany in 1945, has made the catastrophe and German memory of it the centre of his career.
The pages in this section take the most-read writers and the most-watched films and treat them seriously. They also flag the works that are popular but unreliable. The aim is to send a reader to the literature and the cinema that will repay the time. The aim is also to keep them away from the things that, however well meant, are doing more harm than good.
See also
- The Sonderkommando
- Oskar Schindler
- Elie Wiesel
- Jorge Semprun
- Schindler’s List
- Maus by Art Spiegelman
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Yisrael Gutman, ed, The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vols, Macmillan, 1995