Soundtracks of the Holocaust in East and West German Cinema: Jakob der Lügner (1974) and Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (1977)

Abstract

Issues surrounding the reaction to, and reception of, the Holocaust in post-war Germany are complex, owing to the differing politics in East and West Germany, and more recently, the reunified Federal Republic of Germany. The ideological differences between the East and the West far outweighed their geographical proximity and provided two contrasting outlooks on the Holocaust. During the initial post-war decades, the Holocaust was not the focus of much scholarly inquiry worldwide, suggesting that there was not an immediate engagement with the past. 1 Later, debates emerged about how best to engage with the Holocaust in the Germanies, and more broadly in terms of the Germans' coming to terms with their past, or Vergangenheitsbewältigung. This culminated in West Germany in the late 1980s with the Historikerstreit: a major public debate between left-and right-wing intellectuals, resulting from years of Vergangenheitsbewältigung discourse. This chapter examines the music used in a filmic response to the Holocaust from East and West Germany. The significantly differing musical scores from the two case studies, Jakob der