Holocaust (miniseries)
Holocaust | |
---|---|
Genre | Miniseries Drama |
Created by | Gerald Green |
Written by | Gerald Green |
Directed by | Marvin J. Chomsky |
Starring | Joseph Bottoms Tovah Feldshuh Michael Moriarty Meryl Streep Rosemary Harris James Woods David Warner Fritz Weaver Sam Wanamaker George Rose |
Theme music composer | Morton Gould |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
No. of seasons | 1 |
No. of episodes | 4 |
Production | |
Executive producer | Herbert Brodkin |
Producers | Robert Berger Herbert Brodkin |
Cinematography | Brian West |
Editors | Craig McKay Stephen A. Rotter |
Camera setup | Jimmy Turrell |
Running time | 475 minutes |
Production company | Titus Productions |
Original release | |
Network | National Broadcasting Company (NBC) |
Release | April 16 April 19, 1978 | –
Holocaust (full title: Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss) (1978) is an American television miniseries which aired on NBC over four nights, from April 16 — April 19, 1978.
It dramatizes
Holocaust highlights numerous events which occurred both up to and during
The miniseries won several awards and received positive reviews, but was also criticized. In
The series has been widely credited with bringing the term "Holocaust" into popular usage to describe the extermination of the European Jews.[2][3][4]
Plot Summary
Part 1: The Gathering Darkness
1935 — Karl and Inga celebrate their wedding in Berlin. Erik Dorf gets a job in the SS as right-hand man to top-level Nazi Reinhard Heydrich (David Warner).
1938 — Dorf warns Dr. Weiss to leave Germany. Berta is adamant about staying. During
1939 — Dorf rises within Nazi society as he helps Heydrich plan the transport of Jews to occupied Poland. In Warsaw, Dr. Weiss serves as an Elder in the Judenrat (Jewish council) and works as a doctor serving the Jewish community.
1940 — On New Year's Eve, a distraught Anna runs away and is soon raped by
Part 2: The Road to Babi Yar
1941 — Berta is transported to the
1942 — Heydrich and Dorf convene the Wannsee Conference, at which the "Final Solution" is planned. Rudi and Helena join up with Jewish partisans.
Part 3: The Final Solution
1942 — Karl is transferred to the propaganda art studio at
Part 4: The Saving Remnant
1942 — Dorf asks for a transfer back to Berlin, which is denied. His wife reassures him that what he is doing is right. Dorf tours Auschwitz and observes the murder of Jews in the gas chambers. Dr. Weiss is caught saving Jews from the transport trains by falsely claiming they have contagious illnesses. He and Berta are sent to
1943 — Moses and the Zionists start the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Berta and the women of her barracks are gassed. After three weeks of resistance, the Uprising is suppressed. Moses and the survivors are shot to death. Dorf learns his uncle is protecting Jews on a road construction project. Dorf has them all, including Dr. Weiss, sent to the gas chamber. Most of the partisans, including Helena, are killed during a botched attack on German troops. Rudi is sent to Sobibór death camp. He escapes during the Sobibór uprising.
1945 — As Auschwitz is evacuated, Karl is found dead in his barracks, slumped over one final sketch. Dorf is captured by the
Cast
- Starring
- Tom Bell as Adolf Eichmann (eps. 1–4)
- Joseph Bottoms as Rudi Weiss
- Tovah Feldshuh as Helena Slomova
- Marius Goring as Heinrich Palitz (ep. 1)
- Rosemary Harris as Berta Palitz Weiss
- Anthony Haygarth as Heinz Muller
- Ian Holm as Heinrich Himmler (eps. 3–4)
- Lee Montague as Uncle Sasha (eps. 2–4)
- Michael Moriarty as Erik Dorf
- Deborah Norton as Marta Dorf
- George Rose as Franz Lowy
- Robert Stephens as Uncle Kurt Dorf (eps. 1–2, 4)
- Meryl Streep as Inga Helms Weiss
- Sam Wanamaker as Moses Weiss
- David Warner as Reinhard Heydrich (eps. 1–3)
- Fritz Weaver as Dr. Josef Weiss
- James Woods as Karl Weiss
- Also starring
- Blanche Baker as Anna Weiss
- Michael Beck as Hans Helms
- T. P. McKenna as SS Standartenführer Paul Blobel
- Cyril Shaps as KZ Inmate Weinberg
Production
Holocaust was produced by Robert Berger and filmed on location in Austria and West Berlin. It was broadcast in four parts, from April 16 to April 19, 1978. The series earned a 49% market share. It was also well received in Europe.[citation needed]
The 9½ hour program starred Fritz Weaver, Meryl Streep, James Woods, and Michael Moriarty, as well as a large supporting cast. It was directed by Marvin J. Chomsky, whose credits included ABC's miniseries Roots (1977). The teleplay was written by novelist-producer Gerald Green, who later adapted the script as a novel.[5]
Artworks seen during the series's closing credits were created by
The miniseries was rebroadcast on NBC from September 10 to September 13, 1979.
Home media
In the U.S., Holocaust was released as a
In the U.S. and Canada, a 452-minute version was released as a 2-disc Blu-ray set on September 24, 2019.[7]
Reception
Some critics accused the miniseries of trivializing the Holocaust. The television format was believed to limit how realistic the portrayal could be. In addition, the fact that NBC made a financial gain as a result of advertising resulted in charges that it had commercialized a vast tragedy.[citation needed] The producers of the series rebutted these charges by stating that it educated the public by raising its awareness of the Holocaust. With the exception of films such as The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and The Hiding Place (1975), this was the first time in which many Americans had seen a lengthy dramatization of the Holocaust.
The television critic
The German Jews were the most
Hitler's prose or Speer's architecture. Hitler's dream of the racially pure future was of an abstract landscape tended by chain-gangs of shadows and crisscrossed with highways bearing truckloads of Aryans endlessly speeding to somewhere undefined. Dorf sounded just like that: his dead mackerel eyes were dully alight with a limitless vision of banality.[8]
The historian Tony Judt described the series as "the purest product of American commercial television — its story simple, its characters mostly two-dimensional, its narrative structured for maximum emotional impact" and he also wrote that, when it is shown in Continental Europe, it was "execrated and abominated by European cinéastes from Edgar Reitz to Claude Lanzmann" and he responded to these negative reviews of the miniseries by noting that "these very limitations account for the show's impact", especially in West Germany, where it was aired over four consecutive nights in January 1979 and coincided with public interest in the Majdanek trials.[9] The viewership was estimated to consist of up to 15 million households or 20 million people, approximately 50% of West Germany's entire adult population. Judt describes the public interest as "enormous".[9]
After each part of Holocaust was aired, a companion show was aired in which a panel of historians answered viewers' questions by telephone. Thousands of shocked and outraged Germans called the panels. The German historian Alf Lüdtke wrote that the historians "could not cope" because thousands of angry viewers asked how such acts had happened.[10] Subsequently, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache ranked the term "Holocaust" as the German Word of the Year for the publicity associated with it.[11]
During an introductory documentary that preceded the first broadcast of the series in Germany, Peter Naumann, then a right-wing terrorist with two accomplices, tried to blow up the transmission towers of the ARD transmitters at Koblenz and near Münster (station Nottuln), to prevent the broadcast. At the Koblenz transmitter, the supply cables were damaged, and the transmitter failed for one hour. Several hundred thousand television viewers could not see the program during this time.[12] Naumann later became a politician with the NPD.
The
In 1982, during the rule of the
Commenting on what he saw as the sentimentality and low production values of the series, Dr Jonathan Miller said “I suppose it’s only fitting we should turn the Nazis into a soap.”
Awards
Holocaust won
Influence
Holocaust was watched by an estimated 120 million viewers in the United States when it was first broadcast in 1978.[15]
The series has been widely credited with bringing the term "Holocaust" into popular usage to describe the extermination of the European Jews.[2][3][4]
In 1979, Holocaust was broadcast in West Germany, where it was watched by an estimated 20 million people, then 36% of the nation's television-owning population. Later that same year, the West German parliament removed the statute of limitations on war crimes.[4] The series is credited with educating many Germans, particularly what was then the younger generation, about the scale of common people's participation in the Holocaust.[15] Der Spiegel stated that Holocaust "managed to do what hundreds of books, plays, films and TV broadcasts, thousands of documents and all concentration camp trials in three decades of postwar history had failed to do: to inform Germans about the crimes committed against the Jews in their name in such a way that millions were shaken."[4]
On its fortieth anniversary, in January 2019, the series was rebroadcast on German television, in connection with Alice Agneskirchner's documentary, How the Holocaust Came To TV, which described the impact of the broadcast on the original German audience.[16] A survey at the time showed that fewer than half of all German school children had any knowledge of the Auschwitz concentration camp.[15]
See also
References
- ^ Wiesel, Elie (April 16, 1978). "Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction". The New York Times. Retrieved May 6, 2019.
- ^ a b Friess, Steve (17 May 2015). "When "Holocaust" Became "The Holocaust": An etymological mystery". The New Republic. Retrieved 18 May 2023.
- ^ a b Gilad, Elon (1 May 2019). "Shoah: How a Biblical Term Became the Hebrew Word for Holocaust". Haaretz. Retrieved 18 May 2023.
- ^ a b c d Axelrod, Toby (2 February 2019). "TV series 'Holocaust,' which changed how Germans saw their history, airs again". The Times of Israel. Retrieved 18 May 2023.
- ^ Green, Gerald (1978). Holocaust. Transworld Publishers.
- ^ "Arbit Blatas - Babi Yar".
- ^ "Blu-ray Review: Holocaust". October 2019.
- ISBN 0-330-26745-0.
- ^ ISBN 9780143037750.
- S2CID 144281631.
- Spiegel Online(in German).
- ^ "Holocaust: Die Vergangenheit kommt zurück". Der Spiegel (in German). 28 January 1979.
- ^ Henry, Diane (23 September 1979). "Holocaust on TV Stirs Poles' Anger". The New York Times.
- ^ FOTECH. "Las 10 series que paralizaron a la televisión chilena".
- ^ a b c McGuinness, Damien (30 January 2019). "Holocaust: How a US TV series changed Germany". BBC News. Retrieved 30 January 2019.
- ^ Sheldon Kirshner (May 18, 2020). "How the Holocaust came to TV". Times of Israel. Retrieved January 30, 2022.
Further reading
- Bartov, Omer (2005). The "Jew" in Cinema: From The Golem to Don't Touch My Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
External links
- Holocaust at IMDb
- Holocaust at AllMovie
- Holocaust at the TCM Movie Database
- Hadmark, Stefan. "Holocaust analysis". The Movie Hamlet.
- "Holocaust listing". SimplyStreep.com. Meryl Streep informational website.
- Holocaust film trailer on YouTube