1978 | Directed by Marvin J. Chomsky |
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Holocaust" follows each member of the Jewish Family Weiss throughout Hitler's reign in Germany.
One by one, the family members suffer the horrible fate of extermination under Anti-Semetic
Nazi Law until only one son remains at the end of World War II. A sub-plot follows the story
of Eric Dorf, a young German lawyer with a good heart who is changed into a mass murderer by
membership in the SS. |
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| ADDITIONAL CAST & CHARACTERS |
James Woods
Meryl Streep
Fritz Weaver
Rosemary Harris
Michael Moriarty |
... Karl Weiss
... Inga Helms Weiss
... Dr. Josef Weiss
... Berta Weiss
... Erik Dorf |
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Meryl Streep, Horizon Magazine, August 1978
"I did it for the money. I need it very badly, and I make no bones about that. The fame of the show has brought me something surreal. The other day I was riding my bike through Chelsea when these four guys in a Volkswagen started yelling at me out of the window, 'Hey, Holocaust, hey, Holocaust!' Can you imagine? It's absurd that that episode in history can be reduced to people screaming out of car windows at an actress."
Holocaust first aired on NBC from 16 April through 19 April of 1978. Most obviously, this nine-and-a-half-hour, four-part series may be compared to Roots, which aired on ABC a year earlier and on which Holocaust's director, Marvin Chomsky, had worked. Like Roots's saga of American slavery, Holocaust's story of Jewish suffering before and during World War II apparently flew in the face of network programming wisdom, which advised against presenting tales of virtually unrelieved or inexplicable misery. While Holocaust was a smaller ratings success than was Roots (it drew a 49 audience share to Roots's 66), NBC estimated after the 1979 rebroadcast that as many as 220 million viewers in the United States and Europe had seen the series.
Holocaust, produced by Herbert Brodkin, contrasts the interlocking fates of two German families, the Jewish Weisses of the subtitle and the Nazi Dorfs. At the time of the series's first airing, critics sniped about the improbability of the proposition that so small a cast of characters would be witnesses to so great a number of the major milestones in the destruction of European Jewry, among them the confabulations of the architects of Hitler's Final Solution, the slaughter at Babi Yar, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and the liberation of Auschwitz. In another sense, however, this emphasis on blood ties conforms to this drama's major artistic strategy, the employment (over-employment, James Lardner complained in the New Republic) of symbol and archetype. Thus the Holocaust is, in this conception, the decimation of a family within Europe, just as the infamous smokestacks of the death camps may be emblematized by a moment when the small daughter of Nazi bureaucrat Erik Dorf stuffs a sheaf of Weiss family photographs into the parlor stove and shuts the door firmly upon them.
On its American debut, Holocaust met with a generally positive response but not with unanimous approbation. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel protested in the New York Times that it was "untrue, offensive, cheap". Reviewers generally applauded the cast and praised Gerald Green's script, an overnight best seller when published in novel form as a tie-in. Still, several critics described a curious "emptiness" at the drama's heart, emanating from what they identified as excessive melodrama and flat characters who seemed designed to represent particular classes and types more than individuals. Moreover, many viewers were particularly dismayed by the content of the commercial interruptions, which at best seemed to strike a cheerfully vulgar note inappropriate to the subject matter of the series and at other times appeared, horrifyingly, to parody it, as in the juxtaposition of a Lysol ad alerting viewers to the need to combat kitchen odors, with a scene in which Adolf Eichmann complains that the crematoria smells make dining at Auschwitz unpleasant.
When the series aired in West Germany on the Third (Regional) Network in January of 1979 (a forum apparently designed to lessen its impact), however, viewer response was little short of stunning. According to German polls intended to measure audience reaction before, immediately after, and several months after Holocaust appeared, this single television event had a significant effect on West Germans' understanding of this episode in the history of their country. Despite strong opposition to the broadcast before it aired, some 15 million West Germans (roughly half the adult population) tuned in to one or more episodes, breaking what Judith Doneson terms "a thirty-five-year taboo on discussing Nazi atrocities". Among those who saw the series, the number favoring the failed German-resistance plot of 20 July 1944 to assassinate Hitler rose dramatically, Variety reported "70% of those in the 14 to 19 age group declared that they had learned more from the shows about the horrors of the Nazi regime than they had learned in all their years of studying West German history". Such was the public response that West Germany promptly canceled the statute of limitations for Nazi war crimes, formerly scheduled to expire at the end of 1979.
The mixture of prime-time commercialism and emotional commitment that informed Holocaust goes far to explaining both its wide appeal (and, often, powerful effect) and the disappointment it represented for its detractors. Filmed, unlike Roots, on location--in Mauthausen concentration camp, among other places--and reportedly a shattering experience especially for the actors portraying Nazis, the series allowed its producers to take pride in the quality of the research involved; they were creating, they noted, a major television event designed to shape the historical perceptions of millions. But ultimately, it would seem, the critiques of the series arise from the fact that it is no more than the "major television event" that NBC assuredly achieved.
Some Holocaust survivors have criticized the portrayal of Dr. Weiss, after he becomes a prisoner of Auschwitz, because his character is portrayed as working on road gangs and paving crews. Jewish doctors in Auschwitz were almost always assigned to the Camp Infirmary and placed in the moral dilemma of serving under German Doctors. These Jewish doctors endured an "agony of conscience" as they were ordered to help prevent the spread of disease from Jewish inmates to German captors, and also participate in medical experiments and, in some cases, even selections for the gas chambers.
When this was aired on German television, police station switchboards were flooded with confessional calls during the "Krystallnacht" scene, where people were smashing the windows of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. People who had participated in the actual event were calling to confess their participation, but the Statute of Limitation had taken effect, and no actions could be taken, despite their confessions.
The term 'Holocaust' didn't exist in the German language until the '80s. Due to the great success of the mini series it became common knowledge.
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Full cast & credits, trivia and business information
| AWARDS / NOMINATIONS FOR MERYL STREEP |
1978 (
Winner) Emmy Award - Best Television Actress
