Elizabeth Ward
Berghahn Books, 2021
ISBN 978-1-78920-747-7
The GDR’s ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany’s name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lügner—a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how East German filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of National Socialist persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.
“Offering new historical information coupled with refined close readings and an impressive amount of archival work, East German Film and the Holocaust is an informative, insightful and fascinating book. It will be of interest to film scholars and historians alike.”
Brad Prager, University of Missouri“[This] exceptionally researched monograph…[with an] extensive filmography—also the first of its kind in English—and the archival materials including press and print reviews that Ward consulted make this book an important resource for scholars and teachers of East German cinema. Equally important to scholars of East German film and Holocaust studies is Ward’s ability to foreground subtle yet crucial details in her film analyses and weave them together with insights from interviews, private and company correspondence, political officials’ statements, and industrial papers.”
Europe Now“Ward … offers an interesting perspective on a socialist world where Jewish persecution would normally give way to communist heroism. Remarkably, the persecution of Jews in these films is given a tragic honesty often not found in the ideologically controlled world of the German Democratic Republic….Highly recommended.”
Choice“Elizabeth Ward’s careful and wide-ranging analysis of a set of nine DEFA films, in the specific socio-historical and discursive context of their production, proves to be an important contribution to research on the memory of the Holocaust in East Germany.”
The German Quarterly
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Elizabeth Ward 