Facing the Sonderkommando
Son of Saul and the dynamics of witnessing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12904168 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jeffrey Wallen (Hampshire College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 325-338 |
| Publication date | 2019-08-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Holocaust Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1750-4902 • E-ISSN: 2048-4887 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17504902.2019.1637502 |
| OpenAlex | W2968023025 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
The essay analyzes the movie Son of Saul, a Hungarian film that immerses its viewers in the life of a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is not an easy film to watch as it presents the view from inside the world of the men who were forced to shepherd the Jews into the gas chambers and to dispose of their corpses, after first gleaning what was valuable from them. The essay explores questions about the limits of representation of the Holocaust, and it engages the ethical quandary that is at the heart of the film: the intense confrontation with the horrors of the Sonderkommando comes about by embracing a quest that involves betraying those who would (and did) communicate these horrors to the world. The essay also addresses Georges Didi-Huberman’s argument that Son of Saul presents a heroic revolt against the death factory at Birkenau, and it suggests instead that the film leads its audience to feel that it has faced evil and had the courage to confront the horrors it reveals, while actually turning away from the central challenges of grappling with the Holocaust
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Art history · Courage · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Representation (politics · Sociology · The Holocaust · European history and politics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |