Un-American? Or Just ‘Inglourious’? Reflections on the ‘Americanization of the Holocaust’ from Langer to Tarantino

Abstract

ABSTRACT In his 1983 essay ‘The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen’, Lawrence Langer originated an argument subsequently expanded and amplified by numerous scholars, that the Holocaust’s establishment as a central ‘location’ in American culture, particularly as conducted by mainstream fictional and dramatic representations, is facilitated by its recuperation in the terms of a broadly affirmative cultural discourse that determinedly if not tendentiously discovers redemption, individual agency, and moral meaning in historical events to which such concepts are not only inapplicable but irrelevant. ‘Americanizing the Holocaust’ thus entails a ‘category error’ prompting American Holocaust representations to proffer meanings – civic lessons around tolerance and democratic politics, declarations of human sodality in the face of radical evil, etc. – relating primarily to American public and political culture’s ideological preferences, whose restorative propensity will always tend to collapse into kitsch. Langer identified the Goodrich-Hackett/Stevens adaptations of The Diary of Anne Frank and the 1978 mini-series Holocaust as key vectors of the Holocaust’s Americanization; Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) has generally taken center stage in more recent elaborations. This essay distinguishes Langer’s original proposition – grounded in a humanistic American literary-critical tradition – from the more far-reaching claims that have subsequently taken up the ‘Americanization thesis’, contrasting his position to recent scholarship arguing that Holocaust representations introduce dissentient and self-critical, rather than affirmative, strands into American life; or that the paradigms of American mass art such as Hollywood film are themselves in fact more complex and multi-valent than Langer believes. The essay considers Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) as a work that repurposes the canons of popular film with the specific aim of dismantling the firewalls between Nazi racial ideology, genocidal violence, tyranny and sadism on the one hand, and ‘American’ values on the other – ultimately ‘Americanizing’ the Holocaust in ways that radically revise Langer’s original formulation.