Selling the Holocaust : From Auschwitz to Schindler; How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold

Rating:
Summary: How history is portrayed
Review: "Selling the Holocaust" is an excellent study of how history is presented. While Tim Cole uses the Holocaust as the subject for this particular study what he shows is how history generally develops at various times and in various places.

History-at any particular time and place--is a refining and processing of pertinent facts with the cultural values of the existing establishment that creates a 'myth' of the historic reality. Different times in the same place or different places at the same time result in varying 'myths'.

The subtitle of the book--"From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold"-is most appropriate in expressing this manipulation of historic events to conform to a particular country's existing policies.

Cole analyzes six subjects for illustration: the diary of Anne Frank; the trial of Adolf Eichmann; Steven Sondheim's film "Schindler's List"; the concentration camp at Auschwitz; the Israeli memorial of Yad Vashem; and the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.

By exploring each, he shows us that in different places (Israel, United States, Poland) and at different times (post World War II, post six-day war, '80s, '90s) the Holocaust has been interpreted and portrayed differently. The cultural values of each unique time and place determine how we perceive the Holocaust.

This is obviously a study of how all of history is revealed. Events looked at in distant places and times acquire different meanings-often at variance with what actually occurred. Writers who challenge conventional history by disclosing the truth are usually criticized as revisionists and are reviled and disregarded by the establishment.

This analysis is obviously in conflict with the author's message and with other readers' interpretations. Nevertheless, it relies on six excellent case studies for validation.

Rating:
Summary: Sincere,probing, Cole shows appropriate respect for subject.
Review: As Cole points out, any movie that deals with the holocaust is automatically rendered ten-fold more deep than typical fare.

I think Cole's book may benefit from this same depth by association, and I'd venture that Cole is aware of this himself.

While Cole deconstructs the myth of "the Holocaust" by investigating several instances of "the Holocaust" in latter 20th century culture, what is most impressive to me is his repeated insistance that no redemptive meaning can be derived from the holocaust.

Contrary to the out-of-context quote from the Diary of Anne Frank ...in spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart...(which closes the Broadway play and the movie), the Holocaust provides us only with an overwhelming awareness of our species capacity for evil.

Cole also objects to the sanitized "Holocaust" that we are fed. By a Holocaust museum that issues identity cards for Jewish victims (more than 50% of which "live through", in defiance of actual history), and not for average German, Polish, French, American bystanders. People are meant to identify with the victims, or with the American G.I. liberators, but not with the equally typical European bystander.

Cole exposes this unwillingness to face the truth, that we are all capable of allowing horrible mass murder to occur. Or allowing impoverished third world peasants to slave sixteen hours a day in sweat shops so we can have cheaper clothes, or allowing one ethnic group to massacre another ethnic group even as we erect monuments to past atrocities. Yet Cole does not argue that the Holocaust is "just another example of mankind's capacity for evil", for to do so would be its own trivialization.

Cole unlifts many veils in this book, and he does so with utmost respect for truth. As readers we can ask for no more.

Rating:
Summary: Provocative
Review: Cole has written a provocative book, one that examines the increasing divide between the Holocaust--the factual event--and the "Holocaust"--our received notion of the event. He points to (among other subjects) "Schindler's List," "The Diary of Anne Frank," and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as evidence that the "Holocaust" is arguably more real to us than the Holocaust itself.

Cole rightly criticizes the (peculiarly American?) need to find a redemptive message, a clear-cut universal lesson somewhere in the Holocaust, a need that ultimately trivializes it and strips it of moral complexity. For example, Anne Frank's diary was originally published stripped of her references to growing sexual awareness or any bitterness harbored against the Germans. The first play about her life downplayed her Jewishness and stressed her universal message that "in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

While Cole's arguments are insightful, his writing--repetitive at times--makes for labored reading. Annoying, for example, is his liberal use of quotation marks, needless in many cases, to assign some special meaning to a term, as in the following:

"While the process of 'Americanizing' the 'Holocaust' does involve ... stressing the role of the American 'bystander,' 'liberator' and 'survivor,' 'Americanization' also involves a certain distancing of 'self'....

I question the difference between "Americanizing" the "Holocaust" and Americanizing it.

Annoying too are the punctuation errors and subject-verb disagreements that pop up with dismaying regularity.

Despite this, Cole's ideas are well-formed, if a bit heavy-handed, and this book makes for important and interesting reading.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing.
Review: Having read and seen more than my fair share of Holocaust-related books and films, I was hoping for some provocative, or at least thought-provoking, analysis here. Instead, I was treated to a superficial and incomplete overview. From start to finish, Cole's contention is that in literary and cinematographic works the Holocaust has been packaged to supply consumers with a "happy ending", and that in endeavours such as museums the full horror is deliberately (although the reader is left in some doubt as to how consciously) blanked out or softened.

In fact, many survivors have pointed out that the full horror can never be known, as even their own experience could only be partial. Another fact is that all the first-hand accounts, however gruesome, have been given by survivors, which does tend to leave an impression of the Holocaust as something which could be (and in fact was) survived, if only by a minority. It is a pity that Cole did not take a closer look at the abundant literature describing the damage wreaked on survivors and their families, for instance Art Spiegelman's depiction of his parents, Lily Brett's of her mother, or Charlotte Delbo's wrenching account of the individual lives of her fellow deportees before, during and after their imprisonment in Auschwitz.

There are also occurrences of sloppy thinking. For instance, Cole has accomplished the tour de force of simultaneously criticising the early presentation of Anne Frank for "stripping her of her sexuality" and drawing a veil over her appalling death. Actually, that early presentation was almost exclusively based on the first published version of the Diary, which made no secret of Anne's romance with Peter (sexual enough to cause her parents serious concern), and surely it is not common for diarists to record their own demise, least of all in a death camp?

Finally, there are a number of careless errors not acceptable in a scholarly work. The recurrent misspelling of "Birkeneau" is especially irritating in view of Cole's credentials, "the girl in the red coat" of "Schindler's List", whom Cole dismisses as a "myth" incorporated by Spielberg into his film, does in fact appear in Keneally's book under the name "Red Genia", and the Jews in the "Train of Life" do not escape to freedom - the last scene shows the narrator in prisoner's garb, possibly German, possibly Soviet, behind barbed wire, leaving it unclear whether the train story was a fantasy or whether the Gulag ultimately caught up with the escaped Jews.

In a word, disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: Well presented, much needed book!
Review: Our "love affair" with the Holocaust has gone beyond comprehension, to the point of ignoring all other acts of genocide. Certainly, as Bosnians were being ethnically cleansed, I received an advertisement to donate money to build the American Holocaust Museum which now stands in Washington DC. How about doing something novel, like using the money to help victims of genocide which was happening here and now?

The Holocaust has also allowed Israel--besides giving it its reason for being--to operate outside of international law and conduct their own little holocaust on the Palestinians. But shielded by the memory of the Holocaust, they can steal, kill, torture, expell, conquer--do whatever they like because remember, they suffered terribly.

Thank you, Mr. Cole, for finally starting to put this into perspective.

Rating:
Summary: Food For Thought Rather Than A Fully Developed Theory
Review: The title "Selling The Holocaust" does not do the book credit -- Cole is not uncovering a "Holocaust marketing conspiracy", rather he is looking at and analysing several places and people that have become a mainstay of modern Holocaust discourse, such as Yad Vashem, Oskar Schindler and Anne Frank. The book does not come up with a succinct answer or bottom - line analysis, instead it plainly offers food for thought, which is good enough for me. If you are interested in the subject matter you should also read Peter Novick's "Holocaust In American Society" (title varies somewhat depending on the country of publication).

Rating:
Summary: interesting insights
Review: There are only six main sections in this book, addressing Anne Frank, Adolph Eichmann, Oskar Shindler and three Holocaust sites; Aushwitz and two museums. Of the museums, Cole points out the lack in the countries where the events occurred, and the proliferation of them where it didn't. Why is that? And why are museums built for the Holocaust? As is pointed out, how can we go to such a museum and be anything other than tourists? How can we begin to understand the enormity of what the Holocaust was? I think he's right on there.
In addition, I'm bothered by the mass killings of the Nazi era being monopolized by the Jews. Cole doesn't sufficiently address this issue. Were the lives of the millions of gypsies, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, religious leaders and prisoners of conscience and so on, any less important than the Jews'? Were they not also tortured, experimented upon, shot, hung, gassed and so forth too? I wish 'Selling the Holocaust' addressed this important omission as well. Still, an interesting study with provocative insights.

Rating:
Summary: interesting insights
Review: There are only six main sections in this book, addressing Anne Frank, Adolph Eichmann, Oskar Shindler and three Holocaust sites; Aushwitz and two museums. Of the museums, Cole points out the lack in the countries where the events occurred, and the proliferation of them where it didn't. Why is that? And why are museums built for the Holocaust? As is pointed out, how can we go to such a museum and be anything other than tourists? How can we begin to understand the enormity of what the Holocaust was? I think he's right on there.
In addition, I'm bothered by the mass killings of the Nazi era being monopolized by the Jews. Cole doesn't sufficiently address this issue. Were the lives of the millions of gypsies, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, religious leaders and prisoners of conscience and so on, any less important than the Jews'? Were they not also tortured, experimented upon, shot, hung, gassed and so forth too? I wish 'Selling the Holocaust' addressed this important omission as well. Still, an interesting study with provocative insights.