"The Americanisation of the Holocaust"

[jbor]

"Until prime-time television rammed home the story, most Americans cared 
little about the genocide of the Jews. Now, writes Detlef Junker, the
Holocaust belongs to Uncle Sam and his mission to save the world."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0103/03/spectrum/spectrum2.html

Excerpts from the article:

"During the past 30 years the Holocaust has moved from the periphery to the
centre of American culture. Foreign visitors encounter almost everywhere
Holocaust-related products of research and education, as institutionalised
in museums, memorials, research centres, universities and schools. In the
process, however, the Shoah has been politicised, trivialised and
commercialised."

[ ... ]

"Of course, the influence of the written word is far surpassed by that of
the visual media: cinema, television, comics and the Internet."

[ ... ]

"The Holocaust has become an integral part of American infotainment and
political soap operas. Survivors of the Holocaust tell their stories on the
trashy _Jerry Springer Show_. Members of the pro-life movement draw
parallels between aborted foetuses and those murdered in Auschwitz. Even a
cookbook of recipes from a concentration camp has found a public.

The present focus on the Holocaust in the United States presents a radical
contrast to the situation from World War II, when the genocide was actually
taking place, through to the 1960s, the peak of the Cold War. Although
Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke often to the American people about the menace
unfolding around the globe in the '30s and '40s, he never once publicly
referred to the threat confronting the Jews in Europe and in the Third
Reich. He was convinced he could not afford to do so, in part because of the
anti-Semitism then widespread in the United States. This was also one of the
reasons why immigration quotas were never raised to allow Jewish refugees
into the US.

Nowadays it is often overlooked that during World War II American attention
was drawn primarily to the global conflict being fought on five continents
and seven oceans, a conflict that cost 50 million to 60 million lives. The
concept of the Holocaust as a unique event had not yet entered the American
consciousness. In May 1945, a majority of Americans estimated that a total
of only 1million people, Jews and non-Jews, had been murdered in the Nazi
concentration camps."

[ ... ]

"The Americanisation of the Holocaust, the constant struggle against
absolute evil, gives the American nation the perpetual opportunity to
revalidate the necessity of its liberal democratic mission. The 2 million
visitors to the Holocaust museum in Washington experience this dialectic at
close range. After confronting overwhelming scenes of inhumanity in the
museum, they re-emerge in the commemorative centre of the nation's capital,
amid the monuments of the American mission."

[Detlef Junker is the Curt Engelhorn Foundation Professor of American
History at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. This article first
appeared in the _Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung_.]

best