With the youngest of people that were conscious of the horrors of World War 2 now in their late 70s, it's clear in the 20 years to come, we'll live in a time with no living survivors or witnesses from that era. With all literature of the Holocaust being relatively close to the actual event timewise, there's been a fresh immediacy to the work that makes it even more horrifying. I wonder if as time goes on, our approach will change? Will facts and narratives change to promote the dramatic? One only needs to look back at America's own revisionist history of events from 1620-1920 and wonder how things might change with how The Holocaust was depicted. How different would a film like Schindler's List be if it were made in the year 2050? How much will something like Anne Frank's diary hold up? Will there be some new unspeakable horror that will have occurred that will make The Holocaust some distant memory?
With films like Inglorious Basterds and series like The Man In The High Tower and the Amazon series Hunters , we see stories that are based on actual events, but highly fictionalized. Quentin Tarantino's "Basterds" ends with Hitler getting point blank shot in the face with automatic rifles. Of course it never happened, but it's sort of a retroactive propaganda akin to the first issue of Captain America in 1941, who's cover famously featured Captain America punching Hitler in the jaw! Works of fiction that portray Nazis often ignore The Holocaust completely. The Nazis in the TV SHow "Hogan's Heroes" were portrayed as laughable, and the living condition of Hogan and his jovial crew were better than many people living in poverty. It's clearly not the type of show that could exist anymore. Indiana Jones famously fought Nazis in some of his films. It's weird to think about how Dr. Jones had to get The Lost Ark to keep the Nazis from destroyi...
It's heavy to look back and think about how a tragedy like The Holocaust produced so much poignant writing, art, and film. I think for most of us, exposure to art representing The Holocaust was limited to reading Anne Frank's diary and watching Schindler's List. Consider how many millions of lives were erased, and how much music, paintings, stories, and more potential artwork were lost with them. Persecution of Jews is nothing new, nor has it stopped after World War 2. And we've learned that genocide is something that is still executed by many throughout the world. It's sad that in the grand scheme of things, so little lessons have been learned in the last 80 years. Greed and self-interest make it very easy to look the other way. At what point will we be on the side of the persecuted and culled, hoping someone else will help us? The sad thing is that Hitler alone could not have made The Holocaust happen. The entirety of Germany could have kept it from happening. Th...
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