Popular culture’s shameless Holocaust obsession feeds continuing hatred

“Is this all that will be remembered of the Event?” 

—Elie Wiesel 

Last spring my sister sent me a photograph of a novel called The Stable Boy of Auschwitz: A Heartbreaking True Story of Courage and Survival. I stared at the photograph, and I thought: who is this novel for? What does it serve?  

There is a glut of Shoah popular culture nowadays, and it is self-perpetuating. The Shoah can be a creation myth or a punchline. Marvel’s X-Men (2000) begins in Auschwitz; X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) ends there. Bridget Jones’s mother begs her not to walk around 1990s London “looking like someone from Auschwitz, darling”. As I write, Wendy Holden’s new novel, The Teacher of Auschwitz, has just been published, and The Boys from Brazil, the 1978 Jewsploitation film (Hitler lives, as multiple clones!) is being remade for fools. 

The Shoah is everywhere in popular culture but, as it really was, it is nowhere. There is too much of it, and too little. It is spoken of ceaselessly but it is almost never faced. 

Until 7 October 2023, I knew this, and I didn’t care. Let people watch X-Men’s Magneto raze Auschwitz; let them reanimate the Wannsee Conference as an English-style tea party in Conspiracy (2001). (In this film the genocidaire Reinhard Heydrich says of Schubert’s Quintet in C major: “The adagio will tear your heart out.” No doubt.)