PREVIEW: Feature Film and the Holocaust

Suite (212)

This is a preview of our Patreon-only episode about how feature films dealt with the Holocaust, following on from this month's Resonance 104.4fm programme. Here, Juliet talks to Dr Libby Saxton, Reader in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, about Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers are Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946) - one of the first feature films made in East Germany after the war. They discuss the politics of the film's ending, changed after pressure from its Soviet backers as the Nuremburg trials began; its glancing references to Auschwitz; its refusal to identify the specifics of Jewish (or Roma, LGBT or other) suffering in favour of a humanist approach; and how Adam Curtis used the film in his BBC TV series The Living Dead (1995). To hear the entire episode, please subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/suite212.