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Holocaust never supplies enough surrounding political and economic context for its drama. The adolescent born in 1965, trying to comprehend what happened so long ago, cannot in the 9½ hours find Germany's post-World War I humiliation, its horrific inflation under Weimar, the strange, grasping hopes that so many Germans invested in Hitler. He or she will not understand why the German people allowed it all to happen, a mystery connected to the question of why the Jews did not comprehend everything earlier.
It is possible to approach the subject of the Holocaust with all kinds of metaphysical pretensions. The producers of Holocaust, knowing their medium, audience and tremendous potential for popular influence, avoided the deep mystifications that attend most theories about the aesthetics of atrocity. The philosopher T.W. Adorno once claimed that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. If those who made Holocaust had taken that warning seriously—it amounts to an injunction to silence—they would hardly have dared anything as vulgar as a TV show. But in telling the story as soap opera enlarged to historic proportions, the producers never truly penetrated the tragedy or even permitted themselves to observe its symptoms clearly. Yes: naked men, machine-gunned, topple into a ditch. But the sight, in Holocaust, is weirdly unpersuasive. The men seem so obviously to be extras jumping on cue.
Perhaps television cannot be expected to plumb horror any more thoroughly than it did. Could anyone have endured a closer inspection of it? The Holocaust is very nearly unbearable to contemplate. But one senses something wrong with the television effort when one realizes that two or three black-and-white concentration-camp still photographs displayed by Dorf—the stacked, starved bodies—are more powerful and heartbreaking than two or three hours of the dramatization. The last 15 minutes of Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, in which Italian Jews are rounded up to be taken to the camps, is more wrenching than all the hours of Holocaust.
Almost everyone who approved of the series confessed that the production was not perfect; it was, after all, only TV—and three times better than that medium, with all its bad habits and commercial limitations, usually manages to do. Therefore (or so this argument unfairly implies) it is purist and precious, an ostentation of suffering, to say that the series was flawed, that it did not anguish stylishly enough before the abyss, over the race that went up the chimneys in smoke. The importance of the series was that, however imperfectly, it instructed millions, imprinting upon their memories an evil almost beyond comprehension.
Much of that thesis is sensible enough. The critic George Steiner has argued that "the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason." But that elegant despair, which would not desecrate the victims by recording their tales, contradicts the imperative to repeat the facts frequently, from one generation to the next, precisely to keep the victims from the oblivion that the Nazis desired for the entire Jewish race. It pays to be impatient with anyone who says a story is too terrible to be told.