27. January is an official day of commemoration in memory of the victims of national socialism. In many countries, it is called Holocaust remembrance day. After Germany, the term came only in 1979 by a television series.
In 1979, the series, “Holocaust – the story of The family Weiss” came to German television
Excited millions of viewers tuned in West Germany on the evening of the 22. January 1979 on the TV. The streets in the cities were empty of people. What the television audience on this day and also on the following evenings at home, experienced in front of the screen, was a media historical event.
Never before has a Film or a TV programme had shown the previously rather abstract referred to “the genocide of the Jews” from the perspective of the victims. Deeply shocked thousands of viewers in the broadcasters called in the night. For weeks after the broadcast, full of spectators, the post piled up in the corridors of the WDR-movie house boxes.
Shown on the American television series “Holocaust – the story of The Weiss family had been”, with the later Hollywood star Meryl Streep playing the female lead role. In the German media has been heavily and controversially discussed over the series. The main question was whether such a Form of representation could lead to a trivialisation of history.
Criticism: family drama or Soap Opera?
In America, where “the Holocaust” was sent for the first Time in the spring of 1978, on NBC, achieved the multi-part TV drama, also US citizens, who were interested, otherwise, never for history and so far, nothing of the systematic extermination of Jews in Europe. The planned mass murder of the Nazis they had held for a propagandistic Exaggeration.
Scene from the series “Holocaust”: the Jews are deported to a concentration camp
Director Marvin J. Chomsky had treated the scenes of the miniseries for the first time with Original documentary footage from the Nazi era – in black-and-white. A whole new Form of “docu-drama”, as it was later in the German television is very popular. After the outstanding success of the slave epic “Roots”, which had provided the competition with fantastic ratings, wanted to NBC with this spectacular TV-Drama lost viewers back.
The writer and Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel, who had looked at the 428 minutes of the series in the American TV-channel NBC, was worried before the broadcast of the series in Germany, that the million-fold is reduced to the murder of the European Jews on the fate of a single Jewish family. In a guest post in the “New York Times” he wrote: “I am horrified at the thought that once the Holocaust is measured and evaluated could be based on this NBC-TV production that bears this name.”
Shooting in the concentration camp
The screenplay, written by the American writer Gerald Green, tells the fictional story of two families: the German-Jewish doctor-family, White, living as assimilated Jews in Berlin. And parallel to this, the family history of the German national socialist jurists, Erik village. At the beginning hesitantly, but driven by his ambitious wife, fits the village to the new circumstances and rises in a short time as a Deputy to Reinhard Heydrich – the brutal organizer of the extermination of the Jews.
For the first Time, the TV series shows the side of the Jewish victims on a very personal level. No abstract Numbers, not lump-sum. The spectators were able to witness each stage of the initial exclusion of the Jews, the deportations and finally the death of the victims in the gas chamber – close to the action.
Bearing wall with memorial plaques in the Mauthausen concentration camp
Was filmed the TV series, especially in Austria – there is a rotary was to get approval for exterior shots in SS-uniforms – and in Germany. Even at the original locations of the Holocaust: the Mauthausen concentration camp in Hadamar, where the Nazis had tens of thousands of mentally disabled people to the gas chamber.
The daughter of the Weiss family, Anna, is brought to a mass rape by SA-men in there and the nursing staff of the institution is murdered. The actors, for the most part, well-known British and American actors in the theatre, the proximity to the murder of Nazi sites and the authenticity of the historically-backed events hardly bear.
American actor Michael Moriarty, who plays the Nazi-promoted village needed during the filming of psychiatric help because he could not sleep at night. “To do it well, you have to open up,” he says in the current TV documentary “came out As ‘the Holocaust’ to be on TV” (WDR/2019), which was seen as a companion program to the Re-broadcast of the TV series in January 2019. “And if you let the most terrible things there are in it, they continue to live forever in the soul.”
Onerous role: actor Michael Moriarty (left) as Erik Dorf in the television series “Holocaust”
The “Holocaust” as a collective media event
For the broadcast of the American TV series the Directors and the Directors of the German television station (ARD) had agreed on a simultaneous broadcast of “the Holocaust”. Only the Bavarian radio in Munich, opened.
After each episode of the spring radiated from the leading West German radio in Cologne (WDR) every evening, the Live broadcast “please call us”, a star-studded round table discussion of experts and stakeholders. This was also a novelty. And, an absolute novelty in a German television programme, sat the Survivors of the Holocaust: the political scientist Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, as a political prisoner in Auschwitz and Neuengamme and Renate Lasker, who had survived with her sister Anita, the Deportation to the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the death March to Bergen-Belsen. In April 1945 they were liberated by the British troops.
What is Renate Lasker-Harpprecht, as you said, in the meantime, this evening in the TV Studio of the West German radio in the barren words of the real everyday life in a concentration camp, reported, shocked deeply the viewers. Never someone had reported to the public, which had to suffer the prisoners every day under the Terror of the SS.
Witness Anita Lasker-Wallfisch talks to 2018 in the hour of commemoration, the German Bundestag in Berlin
Lasker-Harpprecht turned at the end to the young viewers: “you can for your children and for all of us to protect, if you are always asking questions. And if your courage shows and not so cowardly of you, how your parents and grandparents were.” So you can see it in the book, “In the crossfire: The TV movie Holocaust: a Nation is involved” (Fischer 1979) reference.
Ratings as at sporting events
Neither the numerous historical TV documentaries about the Nazi era, movies such as “the diary of Anne Frank” had done this, Knows what this series “Holocaust – the story of The family” at the time, in the whole of Western Germany and also in Austria triggered: ratings of nearly 40 percent, tens of thousands of nightly phone Calls and a mountain of viewers to the post, the employees, later the science.
A destination for many visitors to Germany: The Holocaust memorial in Berlin
In Germany, there was in January, 1979, no newspaper, not dealt with the broadcast of the American television series and the emotional aftermath in Germany. Ivo Frenzl, responsible for Transmitting an editor at WDR, wrote in retrospect: “The Holocaust shows have managed that a whole people suddenly remembered, and most painful of his own history.” And at once questions: What did our grandfather in the Nazi time? Why didn’t you helped the Jewish neighbors? How much did you know?
Today, many school classes, and especially young tourists from the US, Canada, Japan or Israel because of the visit one of the memorials to Berlin. To deal also to the Chapter of the German and Jewish history, which only came in 1978/79 by American TV-series into a full awareness of the General Public. A series that burned at the same time, the term “Holocaust” (from the Greek Holókaustos = completely) brought them to Germany, now the German politicians in the Bundestag acquisitions. Previously was always from the “genocide of the European Jews”. The society for German language chose “Holocaust” word of the year in 1979.