There is a time before and after the American TV series “Holocaust – the story of The family Weiss”. The film narrative of the German-Jewish Weiss family and the German national socialist family, village liberated, in 1979, the young Federal Republic of Germany from a collective amnesia. And embossed in Germany, until then still an unknown term for the mass extermination of the Jews in the time of the NS regime: the Holocaust. At that time, the specially connected third programmes of the ARD broadcast the four episodes. From Monday on, you will do this again. And add to the series, a new documentary about the formation and history of the “Holocaust”.
Tobias Schrörs
volunteer.
F. A. Z.
In the documentation “How Holocaust’ on TV,” explains the Director, Alice Agnes Kirchner, the story of the controversial series, by sequences, and Interviews with Participants shows a single film, which will now be presented as witnesses. There’s, like, the actress Rosemary Harris, who starred in the movie the main role of Berta Weiss, and Blanche Baker fall – was the film daughter Anna – in the case of a reunion after forty years in the army. Both played on the side of James Woods and Meryl Streep, which “helped the Holocaust” to the international breakthrough.
The actor had their difficulties with the series. Michael Moriarty even needed a psychiatrist, to be able to the role of the lawyer, Erik Dorf endure. The village of rises in the series for the personal representatives of the head of the Reich security main office, Reinhard Heydrich, who co-organised the Holocaust is relevant. “To do it well, you have to open, and when the most terrible things there are in it, they continue to live forever in the soul,” says Moriarty, as he goes on the floor by the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Here also the scene was filmed in the gas chamber, the film’s Director, Marvin J. Chomsky “as soon as possible in the box,” wanted, as he reported. “The only way I was able to send people to the gas chamber.”
After the NBC had shown the series in 1978 in the United States for the first time, was to shape the judgment of Sabina lietzmann, the reported at the time for this newspaper from New York, public opinion in this country. You have wrote to you on 20. April 1978, a Drama invented, “the soap Opera recipe dangerously close”. They also cited the writer and Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel, who had previously expressed in the “New York Times” that he was “shocked by the transformation of an ontological event into a soap Opera”.
In the documentation of the previous WDR-TV-game-in-chief and producer Günter Rohrbach the article Lietz’s in the camera. To the, he says, he could still remember. Does not mention that Sabina Lietzmann revised in September 1978, their opinion and wrote: “Still at the time described discomfort fills us in view of the Trivialization of suffering, and still a native of the critical impulse to fight it, ,history’, to dilute the story’.” Meanwhile, you think it is possible to capture the “Enormous Private”. She is convinced that had been set by the series, many Americans with the Holocaust.
Günter Rohrbach, who took the series to Germany was also against internal resistance. So they agreed on the compromise, to show you are not in the first programme of the ARD, but at the same time in the third-party programs; to the detriment of many viewers in the GDR, which could usually only receive the First and the ZDF. The reactions after the airing in January of 1979, were overwhelming. In its review, the then editor of this newspaper, Joachim described, the broadcast of the series in Germany as a “major television event”. The historians and publicists, for years, lamented lack of interest of the Public in the past have turned out to be here than it is in reality: “the lack of interest by historians and publicists of the Public”.