This chapter follows “the long 1960s” in Western Europe. Although the decade began with a transnational “Swastika Epidemic,” it was a pivotal moment for philosemitism in the postwar period. The passing of the first hate-speech laws, the decline of antisemitism in public opinion polls, and the entry of the Holocaust into public culture, reflected this new climate. Students who in 1967–68 imagined themselves as “long-hair ersatz Jews” in West Germany, or chanted “We are all German Jews” in Paris, admittedly distorted the meaning of the Holocaust. In the Federal Republic, the New Left also rebelled against the official philosemitism of the “fascist” Bonn Republic. But “the year of the barricades” had long-lasting consequences for European philosemitism. Although one outcome of the student movement in West Germany was ultra-leftism, another one was memory activism. In France, critical interrogations of the Vichy past soon followed the May events: the path to erinnerungskultur [remembrance culture] and devoir de mémoire [duty of memory] began in 1968.

Few historical events have been more often depicted in film than the Holocaust. This started in the 1940s and continues to the present day. Many of the representational challenges and conundrums found in other arts are present in film as well, though if anything in more acute form. Film is arguably the most mimetic of all the arts, which makes the risk of prurience, voyeurism, or sadistic (or masochistic) pleasure in watching artificial depictions of the suffering of others all the graver. This chapter situates the history of Holocaust films between the poles of melodramatic realism embodied in the American television miniseries Holocaust and the epic documentary film Shoah. These represent conventional realism, on the one hand, and a rigorous and austere refusal to represent the past at except through images of the present, on the other. As the chapter shows, a myriad of other films situate themselves either at one pole or the other, or between the two.

In the 1990s, the challenges of representing the (perhaps, arguably) unrepresentable horror of the Holocaust were hotly debated. The issue still poses crucial theoretical questions that have animated a wide array of both scholarly and aesthetic responses. One might think, for instance, of the very different representational strategies adopted by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah and Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List as marking two ends of the spectrum on how to represent the Holocaust. This chapter articulates the theoretical terrain upon which Holocaust representation unfolds and, in this respect, serves as a theoretical companion to the topic-specific culture chapters that follow.

Claude Lanzmann began work on Shoah in 1973 and didn’t complete it until twelve years later. The film was shaped in part by events that happened as it was being shot: a spate of trials that placed in the dock perpetrators of the Final Solution in France, the emergence of a movement of Holocaust-deniers or negationists, and the airing on French TV in 1979 of the American “docudrama” Holocaust. Lanzmann shaped a movie that in form and substance defined itself in reaction to these developments, crystallizing in the process a particular, French understanding of the Final Solution as a unique and unprecedented event, not about survival and reconstruction, but about death in the gas chambers of the Aktion Reinhard Vernicthungslagers. Lanzmann wanted to create a film that denied viewers catharsis or consolation, and in the process, he gave the genocide a new name, Shoah, which has since gained currency in France and elsewhere.