Holocaust and Genres the Holocaust Is One

Holocaust and Genres The Holocaust is one of the most profound, disturbing, and defining events in modern history. As such, stories of the Holocaust have been told by a wide variety of storytellers, and in a wide variety of ways. The treatment of a specific theme such as the Holocaust can be profoundly different both between different and within different genres.

As such, this paper describes the treatment of the Holocaust in Elie Wiesel's Night, Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, Alain Resnais' Night and Fog. Each of these different works provides a unique and important look at the Holocaust, illustrating that different genres and approaches can be effective in conveying an event as important and profound as the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel's book, Night, tells the semi-autobiographical tale of fourteen-year-old Eliezer Wiesel who is sent to Holocaust concentration camps.

Throughout the novel, the author struggles to find meaning in the horror of the events that surround Eliezer. The death camps consume his family, and Eliezer is left with the horrific guilt of survival. He tries desperately to understand how God could have allowed these terrible events. In Night, the author ultimately fails to make sense of the horrors of the Holocaust.

He vividly recreates the terror of life in the camps, and shows countless examples of inhumanity both in the actions of the Germans, and in the actions of many of the prisoners themselves. Eliezer seeks constantly to find meaning and understanding, and ultimately resigns himself to the knowledge that the events of his experience seem to be beyond comprehension. Overall, Night is a disturbing look at how the horrors of the Holocaust, and man's ability to inflict pain and torture on each other can never be truly understood.

Art Spiegelman's book, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, tells the story of his parent's survival in concentration camps in the form of a cartoon narrative. The juxtaposition of the cartoon characters with the Holocaust provides a disturbing and surreal telling of the tale of Spiegelman's parents. In the cartoons, the Nazi's are cats, Jews are mice, Americans are dogs, and the French are drawn as frogs. The use of cartoon images has a number of effects on the reader.

First, cartoon images may potentially make the topic more accessible to readers (such as children). Second, the use of cartoons breaks the sense of familiarity of readers who are used to black and white images of the Holocaust, and disturbing narratives of the inhumanity of the death camps. The end result is to draw the reader in closer to the horror of the Holocaust. In Life is Beautiful, Director Roberto Benigni seeks to create a film that showcases the power of humanity and humor over terrible events and tragedy.

Life is Beautiful begins with a relatively benign introduction to the life of Guido, an Italian waiter in the 1930s. Guido arrives in town, and immediately falls in love with Dora, and seeks to win her away from the Fascist town clerk. Through a series of misadventures, Guido is mistaken for a school inspector, and the movie almost begins to seem like a homage to the silent films of actors like Charlie Chaplin.

The audience does not even learn that Guido is Jewish until well in the movie, underscoring Benigni's intention to first depict the humanity of his characters before delving into the Holocaust. Guido and Dora marry, and Benigni shows them doting on their five-year-old son, Joshua. Here, the movie begins to take a subtle and insidious turn.

The Nazis take over the town that happily married Dora and Guido live in, and Guido and Joshua are loaded on a train, accompanied by Dora, who is not Jewish, but refuses to leave her family. In the train, Benigni shows Guido's attempts to comfort his son through humor, and the creation of games. In the camp, Guido continues the games, trying to shelter Guido from the horrific realities of the camps.

In his depiction of Guido's unfailing desire to maintain his humanity, Benigni clearly shows the importance of the human spirit. Against the backdrop of the Holocaust, Benigni has crated a movie that dwells on the importance of maintaining what is good in the human spirit against what is evil and destructive. Benigni often uses humor to illustrate what is life-affirming and good in humanity.

While Benigni's intention in the movie seems to have been to illustrate the power of love, humor and the human spirit when faced with death, it does this at the expense of muting much of the horror of the Holocaust. In effect, many of the horrors of the concentration camps must be glossed over in order to tell Benigni's tale.

It is hard to imagine that a father would risk his son's life simply to say "Buon giorno, principessa!" To his wife over a public loudspeaker, and yet Benigni's Guido does this. In many other ways, the movie continually negates and plays down the horrific nature of the camps, largely because if the real horror of the camps were revealed, Guido's actions would seem even more out-of-place and improbable. In the real camps, Guido simply could not have existed, which is a fundamental flaw in the logic of Benigni's film.

In essence, in making this movie Benigni was forced to deny the fundamental reality of the Holocaust: that humanity, love, and humor were stripped from humankind, leaving only the baseness of hatred and destruction. It is in this denial that Life is Beautiful, for all its wonderful intentions and heartwarming message, delivers a fundamental lie about the reality of the Holocaust. The 1955 documentary Night and Fog, by director Alain Resnais, could hardly be a more different treatment of the holocaust than Benigni's Life is Beautiful.

Night and Fog is a 30-minute documentary, filmed in black and white, is an uncompromising and shocking look at the horrors of the holocaust. Like Benigni's Life is Beautiful, Night and fog begins with a gentle, pastoral look at the countryside that acted as a backdrop to the Holocaust. Here, however, the similarities end, as narrator Michel Bouquet asks "What horrors have these silent tracks witnessed?," and the movie moves to a collection of disturbing archived footage taken from German records.

The images in Night and Fog are deeply disturbing, and clearly show the horror of the Holocaust. Skeletal bodies, soap made from prisoner's fat, prisoners disfigured by medical experiments, and bodies being bulldozed into mass graves are some of the images seen in Resnais' documentary. Scenes from the Nehrenberg trials follow, as Nazi officials argue that.