Can There Be a Jewish Holocaust in Official East German Antifascism?
5One of the least recognized national cinemas when it comes to the topic of the Shoah was that of the East German DEFA. This has been due in part to the manner in which those writing about the period have chosen to designate the object of their study. Indeed, discussions of films in the Soviet Zone and subsequently in the GDR that dealt with Jewish persecution were often subsumed under larger generic categories such as “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (coming to terms with the past), “the anti-fascist past in DEFA films” (Mückenberger 1999), “rubble films” (Schandley 2001) or “representations of Jews and antifascism in East German film.”[5] While such contextual assignations are helpful as a way of understanding the larger historical discursive frameworks in which individual cinematic texts have evolved and found meaning, they have often served as well to obfuscate if not repress the issue of Jewish annihilation lying buried beneath the surface of such programmatic formulations. And this is
