Narrating the Shoah: From Maus to "Life is Beautiful"

In contemporary societies public knowledge related to a certain past or the ways in which a trauma has been inscribed in public discourse are not only depending on the historical work written on that event, but also on different cultural artefacts produced in relation to that past . Cultural trauma theories have contributed to a better understanding of how societies try to remember and forget these events, which mark the collectivity in an indelible way (Alexander et all., 2004). They have underlined that trauma is always “a socially mediated attribution” (ibid., p. 8): there is a gap between the event that has occurred and its meaning and this gap corresponds to the cultural trauma process. In the European culture one of the most relevant trauma is the Holocaust. It is here argued that we are witnessing a new trend in which public knowledge of the Shoah depends as much on Primo Levi’s book If This is a Man, as on films like Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg (1993), Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni (1997), Train de Vie (1998) by Radu Mihaileanu, just to name a few, as on historical works written on this topic. Some historians have interpreted this trend as “public use of history”, revisiting Habermas’ definition (1988). However, this essay argues that this way of considering the phenomenon, it is to some extent misleading. This definition implies that there is a correct way to narrate the past (the works written by historians), followed by secondary adaptations of historical works, which take shape as movies, cartoons, exhibitions, etc. According to this definition, all these cultural artefacts, however, never achieve the quality standards - in terms of authenticity, reliability, and authority – of historical narration. They are narrating the past but remain a “second best” option. If one considers the relationship between film and history according to this definition, it seems very controversial. As matter of fact, for many decades historians have criticized the “misrepresentation” of the past in the cinema. In the last decades a new approach has prevailed especially within cultural sociology, but also within the film studies (Sorlin 1980; Ortoleva, 1995; Barta 1998). It is argued that the representation of the past cannot be relegated to the academic culture of historians. Instead of speaking about “the public use of history”, the focus here is on “the cultural consumption of the past” - for example, viewing a film, visiting a museum, etc. - as a growing phenomenon that needs to be further analysed. Since the beginning, cinema has narrated the past, but now this tendency has undergone a marked increase. Taking into account Shoah, we can refer to several examples of what is called a “film with historical content”. From this perspective the question to address is to what extent the representation of the past on the screen might be similar or dissimilar to that produced by historians, and whether or not similar criteria can be used to evaluate both forms of expression.