Planet Auschwitz

Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television

Brian E. Crim

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978801622
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Planet Auschwitz explores the diverse ways in which the Holocaust influences and shapes science fiction and horror film and television by focusing on notable contributions from the last fifty years. The supernatural and extraterrestrial are rich and complex spaces with which to examine important Holocaust themes - trauma, guilt, grief, ideological fervor and perversion, industrialized killing, and the dangerous afterlife of Nazism after World War II. Planet Auschwitz explores why the Holocaust continues to set the standard for horror in the modern era and asks if the Holocaust is imaginable here on Earth, at least by those who perpetrated it, why not in a galaxy far, far away? The pervasive use of Holocaust imagery and plotlines in horror and science fiction reflects both our preoccupation with its enduring trauma and our persistent need to "work through" its many legacies. Planet Auschwitz website (https://planetauschwitz.com)

1

From Muselmann to The Walking Dead

---

Holocaust Imagery in the Zombie Genre

Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselamänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

—Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

The zombie haunts history. Whether it is the enslaved peoples of the Caribbean and their descendants forced to endure the grueling sugar plantations, the golem who protects vulnerable Jews only to turn against them, or vengeful colonial subjects menacing their imperial overlords, the zombie is a victim, perpetrator, and witness to humanity’s worst crimes and instincts. Zombies reflect social anxieties and act as the ultimate “meaning machines,” Jeremy Strong writes, “as metaphorically cannibalistic as they are literal,” invading every genre and cultural milieu.¹ The zombie is a herald of the apocalypse, humanity’s demise, and a spectator to the physical and metaphysical destruction of civilization. Zombies bear witness to human survivors dismantling the moral and ethical infrastructure that brought order and meaning to life, reverting to the brutal survival of the fittest code of prehistory. Zombies torment, stalk, and consume humans, but they also unnerve humanity by transgressing the boundary between life and death. When a character in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) asks about the origins of the ghouls menacing them, another responds, “They’re us, that’s all.”² Zombie narratives reinforce Friedrich Nietzsche’s timeless epigram conceived on the eve of the horrific twentieth century: “Anyone who fights with monsters should make sure that he does not in the process become a monster himself.” The second part of the epigram applies more to those of us who voraciously consume zombie narratives: “And when you look for a long time into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”³

Reflecting on the state of Holocaust cinema after Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece Shoah, French film critic Jacques Mandelbaum wrote “of all the ghostly creatures depicted onscreen, the zombie … is the one that demonstrates with the most acuity the effect of the return of the genocide in the history of cinema.”⁴ This chapter first explores how zombie narratives integrate historical trauma and speak to great crimes and injustices. Second, it examines the relationship between the Muselmann, by which I mean the culturally constructed figure derived from literature, film, memoirs, and historiography, and the zombie of pop culture.⁵ Third, there is a close reading of arguably the most profound zombie narrative in recent years—AMC’s long-running series The Walking Dead (TWD). Partially inspired by iconic Holocaust representations, TWD uses Holocaust imagery and themes to depict its postapocalyptic universe and contextualize its characters’ search for meaning in an empty world.

News of the concentration camps and death camps trickled out of Europe in early 1945 accompanied by photographs and now infamous footage of traumatized and skeletal survivors. The camps’ liberators used terms like walking dead and zombies to describe what they saw. Years later Primo Levi introduced Muselmann to the lexicon, the prisoner whose humanity the camps systematically and deliberately eradicated. In recounting his years at Auschwitz, Levi revealed that the Muselmann was pitied at first, then reviled, and eventually forgotten. The “anonymous mass” of broken bodies and spirits was the more authentic witness, the “complete witness,” as philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues, to modernity’s assault on the citizen.⁶ Zombie narratives like TWD meditate on the meaning of survival and interrogate survivors’ moral choices in ways reminiscent of actual Holocaust survivors. Moreover, TWD encourages viewers to contemplate the humanity of the walkers hounding characters in unexpected ways. Are zombies corpses to be discarded on the ash heap of history, or are they too close in body and spirit to humans to be dispatched gleefully and without remorse?

Zombies and the “Deep, Dark Ocean of History”

The horror of the zombie stems from what Freud termed uncanny (unheimlich) and Julia Kristeva the abject, that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”⁷ Freud and later Jacques Lacan argued strangely familiar experiences can be deeply unsettling and provoke intense anxiety or disorientation about the world around us. Monsters that assume human form, such as vampires, humanoid aliens, and zombies, are especially disquieting precisely because they resemble us, and not just physically.⁸ For Kristeva, horror resides in impurities and pollution that threaten the dissolution of both the physical body and the body politic. Indeed, twentieth-century totalitarian regimes conflated social and racial hygiene with horrific results. “The abject has only one quality of the object,” Kristeva writes: “that of being opposed to I.”⁹ The corpse represents “the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.”¹⁰ The zombie is a walking corpse—unearthed, unclean, oblivious to social order and custom, and, most disturbing, a premonition of what awaits us all. The walking dead bear secrets the living would rather forget. Zombies force humanity to confront their own mortality, yes, but also its murderous crimes against the other. “Corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live,” writes Kristeva. “These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.”¹¹ Zombies truly are meaning machines, but they are equally voracious memory machines devouring those who forget and compelling the living to come to terms with the past.

One of the earliest manifestations of the zombie concerns the thirteenth-century tale of the Wandering Jew (sometimes identified as Ahasuerus), who taunted Jesus on the road to crucifixion and was condemned to walk the Earth until the Second Coming. The Wandering Jew was a powerful antisemitic myth in medieval Europe intended to inscribe eternal guilt on Jews for the death of Christ. However, the legend endured and served as a powerful rhetorical tool for ethnic nationalists seeking to repudiate arguments in favor of assimilation and emancipation in the modern nation-state. Portraying Jews as stateless specters and interlopers in an otherwise homogenous state resounded with proponents of ethnic nationalism. Karl Gutzkow, a leader of the Young Germany movement, resurrected and modernized the Wandering Jew myth in Plan of a New Ahasuerus (1838) to undermine Jewish participation in any future German state: “Ahasuerus is the tragic consequence of Jewish hopes … only Ahasuerus stays on, a living corpse, a dead man who has not yet died.”¹² From myth to metaphor, the Wandering Jew appealed to antisemites seeking to create an indelible image of Europe’s Jews as parasites incapable of true national belonging. The Wandering Jew featured prominently in The Golem and is referenced in the title of Nazi Germany’s notorious propaganda documentary (Der Ewige Jude). The notion that Jews walk among Europeans but do not belong to Europe predates the Wandering Jew myth, but conflating Jews with supernatural beings implied Jews posed an existential threat to the nation-state in the modern era.

World War I shattered European hegemony and plunged the continent further into cultural despair, but the rupture prompted a burst of feverish creativity and invigorated the cinematic arts. The obsession with visualizing war’s traumatic effects on the human body challenged filmmakers, many of whom endured the “storm of steel.”¹³ Filmmakers struggled to translate the incommensurability of the experience to Europeans anxious to recast the war in ideological terms, if not forget its terrible toll altogether. French director Abel Gance’s brilliant film J’accuse! (released in 1919 and remade with sound in 1938) is an unvarnished portrayal of wartime suffering from the perspective of the poilu (French conscript). Filmed in 1918 using French soldiers on the battlefield, Gance, himself in uniform at the time, envisions the millions of fallen countrymen as avenging ghosts, the walking dead bearing the message “Never again.” W. Scott Poole argues Gance “ventured to make the first and most explicit effort to connect the story of war to the emergence of horror” by linking the return of the dead to an expression of social criticism.¹⁴ Susan Sontag credits Gance’s disquieting climax with allowing viewers to empathize with pain far removed from their own experience. She describes the final scene vividly in Regarding the Pain of Others:

“Morts de Verdun, levez-vous!” (Rise, dead of Verdun), cries the deranged veteran who is the protagonist of the film, and he repeats his summons in German and in English: “Your sacrifices were in vain!” And the vast mortuary plain disgorges its multitudes, an army of shambling ghosts in rotted uniforms with multifaceted faces, who rise from their graves and set out in all directions, causing mass panic among the populace already mobilized for a new pan-European war. “Fill your eyes with this horror! It is the only thing that can stop you!” the madman cries to the fleeing multitudes of the living, impassive ghosts overrunning the cowering future combatants and victims of la guerre de domain. War beaten back by apocalypse.¹⁵

J’accuse!’s haunting conclusion is even more poignant when one considers most of the actors were actual French soldiers who died just months after filming.¹⁶ French media scholar Mari-Jose Mondzain claims J’accuse!’s walking dead are connected to filmic representations of the Holocaust because “the cinema has always been a ghost-making machine. How is what happened with Nazism, and in particular the Shoah, touched in detail by this art of ghosts?” Mondzain values both versions of J’accuse because Gance in 1918 enables the dead to “say something about history” and, in the case of the 1938 film, he summons the ghosts “to warn us of what may happen” if we fail to heed their warnings.¹⁷ J’accuse “became a paradigm of the need to produce horror,” W. Scott Poole suggests, “the need to scream a demand that the memory of the war’s horror not disappear.”¹⁸

The notion of dead soldiers haunting the battlefield and those who so cavalierly dispatched them to their deaths is an ancient trope, but no conflict had yet approximated World War I’s death and destruction.¹⁹ The war normalized industrialized slaughter in Europe, inspiring, and perhaps guaranteeing, its repetition a generation later by veterans drawn to ideologies claiming inheritance to the trenches.²⁰ The trauma inspired the shell shock cinema of the interwar period, particularly in nations suffering the worst casualties and political chaos. J’accuse’s antiwar message is replicated in Hans Clumber’s 1930 film Wunder am Verdun (Miracle at Verdun) in which German and French soldiers rise from the dead many years after the horrific battle, forcing families and politicians to acknowledge their sacrifice and prevent another slaughter. However, the living moved on and the sacrificial dead are deemed useful only in graves and memorials where they belong. How can a nation erect a comforting myth about the war dead if the dead can confront the living with the truth?²¹ Paul Bäumer, Erich Maria Remarque’s narrator in All Quiet on the Western Front, describes himself and his comrades as “dead men with no feelings, who are able by some trick, some dangerous magic, to keep running and keep on killing.”²² Postwar Europe did not fear the reconstituted armies of the dead bursting through fresh graves and marring the landscape, but shattered veterans besieging the capitals and bringing the war home, in some cases demanding the reins of power from those who were not there.

Early cinema kindled interest in the traditional zombie narrative and its roots in Haitian folklore. The plight of enslaved Africans toiling in the Caribbean inspired the first horror films featuring zombies, specifically White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Kyle Bishop notes these early portrayals reveal “imperialist anxieties associated with colonialism and slavery. By allowing native voodoo priests to enslave white heroines, these inherently racist movies terrified Western viewers with the thing they likely dreaded most at the time: slave uprisings and reverse colonization.”²³ The legend that zombies were slaves condemned to labor in the sugar cane fields for eternity—soulless, mindless, and tireless—intimates a symbiotic relationship between slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Zombies are “the ‘human face’ of capitalist monstrosity,” Gerry Canavan posits, and “all that remains of human nature … in the immense and unimaginably complex of network economy.”²⁴ Zombies help us understand how capitalism creates wealt...