Imaginary Witness

For over half a century Hollywood films have dealt with Nazism and the Holocaust in complex and
contradictory ways, marked by outrage and indifference, compassion and ignorance, the need to understand
and the desire to forget. And while these events have taken place far from American shores it has been
American films that have shaped so deeply how we and even the world -- remember these events.

The Holocaust has become ingrained in American culture. It has become the negative absolute in our
society: we do not know what is good, we do not know what is bad but the one thing we can agree upon is
that this is absolute evil. And thus it has become the standard by which we judge evil and the standard by
which we judge values.