The Problematic of the Holocaust

The Problematic of the Holocaust

The events of the Holocaust are, by rights, an awful example of the levels of evil doing capable by mankind. They show the extremes of depravity that we as humans are capable of and the stories that we hear of torture and violence could easily be mistaken for those of a fictional modern horror film. So why do people make light of the attempted extermination of the Jewish people between 1939 and 45? The answer to this question is difficult to pin point. It is human nature to look back and laugh at our failings but usually this occurs in a context where those failings are no longer important to us or have been overcome. As the aftermath of the Holocaust still rumbles on in the form of the conflict between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people, it is fair to say that the Holocaust has not been overcome. And it would be s terrifying reality if we, as 21st century citizens, were to accept that the events of less than one hundred years ago no longer bared importance to us.

But still, we see comedies based on the holocaust both in film and theatre. Even sport is not safe from this blasé approach to the atrocities with anti-Semitic chants and songs being sung proudly in top flight English soccer matches. Even the pairing of the words ‘comedy’ and ‘Holocaust’ seems odd to me. Surely these words should repel each other as magnets would and should be situated at opposite ends of the English language, never to merge or be seen together. Slavoj Žižek attempts to explain this phenomena of Holocaust comedies when he says: ‘The key to this trend is provided by the obvious failure of its opposite, the holocaust tragedy.’ Žižek’s theory is that because the Holocaust is so predictable in film, that another genre should be used to look at it and this is where we get the Holocaust comedies.

This however, creates a problem for the Holocaust. Is the importance of