4.15. What Remains After the Fire: Memory, Film, and Postwar Lives

Title: The Collective Trauma of the Holocaust in Sergei Loznitsa’s Play "The Erinyes" based on Jonathan Littell’s "The Kindly Ones". Research Question: How does Sergei Loznitsa’s theatrical adaptation "The Erinyes" reconfigure the representation of Holocaust trauma from Jonathan Littell’s novel "The Kindly Ones" into a collective, post-memorial, and performative discourse that interrogates the moral and political mechanisms of modern bureaucratic violence? Methodology: This research draws upon an interdisciplinary qualitative analysis combining literary criticism, performance studies, trauma theory, and memory studies. It performs a comparative textual-performative study of Littell’s novel and Loznitsa’s stage version (Vilnius Youth Theater, 2022), supported by critical reviews, theoretical frameworks from Caruth, LaCapra, Hirsch, Arendt, and Alexander, and discourse analysis of visual and ritual elements. Archival and reception materials are interpreted hermeneutically through the lenses of cultural trauma and postmemory. Keywords: Holocaust memory; cultural trauma; perpetrator narrative; postmemory; performance studies; democracy and remembrance; ritual and theater; collective guilt. Key Findings: Loznitsa abstracts Littell’s individual psycho-narrative of the perpetrator into a choral enactment of collective guilt, transforming psychological introspection into structural critique. By replacing narrative interiority with ritual repetition and bureaucratic speech, "The Erinyes" stages a mechanics of killing rather than its pathology. The integration of Paul Celan’s "Todesfuge" as prologue converts the performance into a postmemorial ritual of mourning and ethical cognition. The theatricalization of administrative evil situates Holocaust remembrance within contemporary democratic crises - including current wars and authoritarian resurgences - demonstrating how collective trauma resurfaces in new political configurations. Thus, "The Erinyes" exemplifies the role of the arts as a forum for democratic reflection and as an ethical medium of transgenerational memory.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, Soviet filmmakers began exploring the significance of WWII. Several scholars have noted an upsurge in the production of war-crime trial films (Malinauskaitė 2025) and Holocaust-themed films during this period (Gershenson 2013; Timoshkina 2014), although the Jewish nature of victimhood remained unacknowledged. This shift across the USSR can be attributed to the de-Stalinization of the Thaw era, which prompted the expansion of Soviet film production and facilitated the exploration of new themes. Also significant was the second wave of the war-crime trials and the gradual emergence of Holocaust memory from complete silence, one of the catalysts being the publication of Jevgeni Jevtušenko’s poem “Babi Yar” in 1961 (Gershenson 2013, 57–58). Similarly in Soviet Estonia, multiple documentary films and newsreels visualising the commemoration of Nazi-era victims and the prosecution of perpetrators were produced during the Thaw era. Although these audiovisual materials were created under tight ideological control and used to legitimise Soviet power in Estonia, they also played a role in producing knowledge about the Nazi crimes and shaping early Holocaust memory in Estonia. This presentation examines how the Nazi past is visualised in the late 1950s and 1960s Soviet Estonian documentaries and newsreels. While scholars have examined film production in Lithuania and Latvia (Tcherneva 2020; Davoliūtė 2021; Malinauskaitė 2025), particularly war-crime trial documentaries and feature films, Estonian materials remain unexplored. The presentation explores how Soviet memorial frames influenced the production of these audiovisual materials, while also analysing narrative strategies and visual aspects to explore how the memory of Nazi-era victims and collaborators was (mis)constructed. It also traces possible changes in representations of the Nazi occupation over the course of the decade.

Film noir, the post Second World War films in which corrupt characters slip out of the shadows, has been widely characterised as a collection of narratives about defeat. But for many film noir was a means to criticise the status quo, a source of solace after displacement caused by the war, and an articulated a deficit of democracy. Raymond Durgnat in his seminal essay on film noir (1970) notes that ‘Socially critical films noirs are mainly Democratic (reformist) or cynical nihilistic, Republican [conservative] moralists tend to avoid the genre.’ Told largely in flashback, featuring a male protagonist who can’t outrun his past, and taking place in a world where everyone is changeable and no one can be trusted, film noir was an outlier in Hollywood, a rebuttal to films where problems are solved in the end. The aesthetics of film noir were, as Paul Schrader noted (1972), shaped by the German and east European directors who had fled to America during the Nazi era. By acknowledging widespread injustice and questioning the American Dream, noir’s outsider protagonists in a corrupt and brutal world gave voice to post War audiences who believed that there were no easy answers. I will explore the ways that noir addressed audiences who felt they were on the fringes of society and look at how the conventions of noir are utilised in contemporary films to encourage resistance to authoritarianism. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025), telegraphs a noir perspective with its title as well as its depiction of unjust circumstances and the need for resilience. Guillermo del Toro (2022) also revisits noir perspectives in his films, explaining that ‘Noir isn't about Venetian blinds and a husky voiceover and a dimly lit street’ but is about ‘the tragedy that emerges between the haves

The confrontation with the Nazi past has been a mainstay of German literature, film, and political philosophy since 1945. In both East and West Germany, authors imagined the future as a renunciation of fascism, but what alternatives did they advocate? While both states made claims to democratic forms of government, prominent authors from either country tended to invest their hopes in an expressly socialistic future or a conservative return to the bourgeois values of the Wilhelmine-Weimar past. This paper will take up three works: Thomas Mann’s short story Mario and the Magician, Bruno Apitz’s novel Naked among Wolves, and Anja Kampmann’s novel Rage is a Bright Star. The first two works have achieved canonical status and offer distinct critiques of fascism that imagine vastly different alternatives to the preceding Third Reich. Reflecting a lukewarm attitude toward democracy, neither centers pluralism as a guarantee against Nazism; instead, they recapitulate the Cold War cultural politics in which both communist and capitalist regimes saw one another as the continuation of Nazi authoritarian rule. The paper then turns to Anja Kampmann’s acclaimed new novel, which offers an alternative that imagines democracy less as a form of statecraft than as an embracing of pluralism in the cultural realm. Drawing on theoretical reflections from Hannah Arendt, Viktor Klemperer, Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, and other prominent thinkers who explore the nexus between culture and politics, the paper works to highlight the politics implicitly endorsed in different critiques of fascism. This paper ultimately asks whether the German case, recently celebrated in Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans, can serve as an exemplary championing of democracy.

In the novel “Dora Bruder”, by Patrick Modiano, a writer becomes interested in the history of a young Jewish girl who disappears during the Nazi occupation of Paris during the Second World War, his quest takes on the airs of an investigation and, like in a detective novel, the narrator will move around the city searching for clues about Dora and what happened to her. During this journey, the narrator will come across events and places directly connected to the history of the Paris Jewish community as well as the Nazi occupation of the city and the deportations that happened during this time. Some of these places are marked, just as some events are registered, but many are not, or the commemorations are buried under layers of other historical events, urban transformation and ordinary city life. This presentation aims at mapping the ghosts of the past in Modiano’s “Dora Bruder” and exploring how a fraught memorialization process leaves its mark in a city. What does France want to remember about World War II? What it tries to forget? How people and histories are lost in these gaps and how do their ghosts keep coming back? Those are all central themes of the novel that this paper will highlight, as well as discussing how the literary work itself becomes part of the memory work on the Nazi occupation of Paris.