The 1978 American television miniseries Holocaust was the single most-watched dramatic treatment of the Nazi murder of European Jewry in the twentieth century. The four-part series was broadcast on NBC in the United States on the four consecutive nights of 16, 17, 18 and 19 April 1978; it was watched by an estimated 120 million Americans. The German broadcast on the regional ARD third-channel network in January 1979 was watched by an estimated 20 million West Germans, around half the West German adult population. The substantial public conversation that followed both broadcasts is treated by the historians of post-war Holocaust memory as the moment at which the Holocaust entered the popular consciousness of both countries as a discrete historical subject in the form in which it has been understood since.
The production
The miniseries was developed at NBC by Robert Berger and the producer Herbert Brodkin in response to the substantial American audience figures for the 1977 ABC miniseries Roots, which had established that long-form historical drama could draw substantial network audiences. Brodkin had been a producer on the 1960 American television play of Judgment at Nuremberg and had a long-standing interest in Holocaust subjects. The screenplay was written by Gerald Green over 18 months in 1976 and 1977. The narrative followed two German families, the Jewish Weiss family of Berlin and the SS Dorf family, through the period 1935 to 1945, with the narrative arc designed to illustrate the substantial features of the persecution and killing through their experiences.
The cast was substantial. Meryl Streep played Inga Helms-Weiss in what was one of her early major television roles. James Woods played Karl Weiss. Michael Moriarty played Erik Dorf, the SS character through whom the audience encountered the perpetrator side. Joseph Bottoms played Rudi Weiss. Tovah Feldshuh played Helena Slomova. Ian Holm played Heydrich. The director was Marvin Chomsky, who had directed Roots.
The American reception
The American broadcast in April 1978 produced substantial public response. The estimated 120 million viewers across the four nights were the second-largest American television audience for any drama broadcast to that point. The substantial mail response to NBC was published in part in the post-broadcast period and showed substantial American audience surprise at the scale and detail of what was depicted. The Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz, whose 1975 book The War Against the Jews had been substantially the principal English-language history available at the time, criticised the series in Commentary on documentary grounds (the series compressed and simplified the historical record substantially) but acknowledged that it had substantially expanded American public awareness of the events. The American Jewish Committee published a substantial study guide that was distributed in the millions to American schools and colleges. Elie Wiesel published a substantial critical piece in The New York Times on 16 April 1978 (the day of the first broadcast) arguing that the series trivialised the events; Wiesel’s position was substantially the most-cited critical response and shaped a long subsequent argument about the legitimacy of dramatic Holocaust treatment.
The German reception
The German broadcast was substantially the more consequential of the two. ARD had been substantially reluctant to broadcast the series and had placed it on the regional third-channel network rather than on the main ARD channel; the third-channel placement was intended to limit the audience and to substantially insulate the main networks from any controversy. The audience figures defeated the placement strategy: the four nights produced substantial cumulative viewing of around 20 million West Germans. The post-broadcast public conversation in West Germany substantially reshaped the country’s relationship with its wartime past.
The substantial documented effects of the German broadcast included the immediate post-broadcast debate in the Bundestag on the substantial question of the statute of limitations on Nazi murder cases (which was set to expire in 1979 under the existing law); the subsequent vote on 3 July 1979 by which the Bundestag abolished the statute of limitations on Nazi murder, a vote substantially attributed by the historians of West German Holocaust memory to the public pressure that the broadcast had generated; the substantial subsequent expansion of Holocaust education in West German schools through the early 1980s; and the substantial increase in West German visits to Holocaust memorial sites including Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz from 1979 onwards. The miniseries had also introduced the German word “Holocaust” itself into general West German usage; the previous German term had been the more abstract “Judenvernichtung” (extermination of the Jews), and the substantial post-1979 German adoption of “Holocaust” as a loanword traces directly to the broadcast.
The historiographical position
The historiographical position on the 1978 series, as it has emerged in the work of Jeffrey Shandler, Annette Insdorf, Saul Friedländer and others, is that the series was substantially flawed as a historical reconstruction (the dramatic compressions and simplifications that the format required produced a substantially misleading picture of several aspects of the killing) and was substantially consequential as a public-cultural event (the substantial audiences and the substantial post-broadcast policy effects, particularly in West Germany, established the events of the killing in popular consciousness in a way that no previous treatment had managed). The two judgements are not in tension. The series is now treated as the principal example of how dramatic treatment can fail historiographically and succeed culturally at the same time.
The series is now substantially difficult to obtain in commercial release; it has been broadcast on PBS and on streaming services intermittently since the 1990s but does not have a continuous availability. The substantial archival materials are held at the NBC archives at the Library of Congress and at the Jewish Museum Berlin.
See also
- Elie Wiesel
- Reinhard Heydrich
- Jewish Museum Berlin
- Adolf Eichmann
- The Eichmann Trial 1961
- Schindler’s List
- The Holocaust in Popular Culture
Sources
- Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, Oxford University Press, 1999
- Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005
- Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Cambridge University Press, third edition 2003
- Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, Harper and Row, 1984
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Holocaust as Entertainment”, Commentary, October 1978
- Elie Wiesel, “Trivialising the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction”, The New York Times, 16 April 1978
- Andrei S. Markovits and Beth Simone Noveck, “West Germany”, in David S. Wyman (ed), The World Reacts to the Holocaust, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996
- Library of Congress, NBC Archives, “Holocaust” miniseries production records