Holocaust Artistic responses to the HolocaustEuropean history Hebrew Shoʾah , Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban (“Destruction”)

Artists the world over and camp survivors themselves have responded to the Holocaust through art. The very existence of Holocaust art can, however, create a sense of unease. Critic Irving Howe has asked, “Can imaginative literature represent in any profound or illuminating way the meanings of the Holocaust? Is ‘the debris of our misery’ (as one survivor described it) a proper or manageable subject for stories and novels? Are there not perhaps extreme situations beyond the reach of art?” Similarly, philosopher Theodore Adorno has commented that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Yet poetry has been written—moving poetry that seeks to come to terms with the tragedy even in the German language—in works by Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, among others. Gripping work dealing with the horror, pain, and loss of the Holocaust has appeared in every literary genre and in music, film, painting, and sculpture.

Survivors of the Holocaust have produced powerful works that record or reflect on their experiences. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (originally in Dutch, 1947), Eli Wiesel’s Night (originally in Yiddish, 1956), and works by Primo Levi are some of the most memorable in the field of literature. Paintings and drawings by survivors Samuel Bak, Alice Lok Cahana, and David Olère document the horrors that they experienced in ghettos and death camps. Holocaust survivors have also composed a wide variety of music, including street songs, which gave voice to life in the ghetto; resistance songs, such as Hirsh Glik’s “Song of the Partisans” (composed and first performed 1943, published 1953); and classical compositions, such as Quartet for the End of Time (first performed 1941) by Olivier Messiaen and the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder der Tod dankt ab (first performed 1943; “The Emperor of Atlantis or Death Abdicates”) by Victor Ullman.

Artists of all kinds, regardless of any firsthand experience with the Holocaust, have sought to grapple with this tragedy. George Segal’s memorial sculpture, Holocaust, is but one notable example. Visual art in response to the Holocaust includes paintings by Holocaust refugees Marc Chagall and George Grosz and the illustrated story Maus (published in installments 1980–85) by Art Spiegelman, the son of a survivor. Notable musical responses to the Holocaust include Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (first performed 1947), Dmitri Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony (first performed 1962), which used the text of the poem “Baby Yar” (1961) by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and works by composers Charles Davidson, Michael Horvitz, and Oskar Morawetz.

Film, too, has been a prime medium for dealing with the Holocaust. Shortly after World War II, several eastern European filmmakers, including Aleksander Ford, Wanda Jakubowska, and Alfred Radok, attempted to capture the experience of Holocaust victims. Some of the most influential films since then include The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), directed by George Stevens; Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1970, The Garden of the Finzi Continis), directed by Vittorio De Sica; the nine-hour documentary Shoah (1985), directed by Claude Lanzmann; Au Revoir les Enfants (1987, Goodbye, Children), directed by Louis Malle; Schindler’s List (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg; La Vita è Bella (1997; Life Is Beautiful), directed by Roberto Benigni; and Bent (1997), directed by Sean Mathias and based on Martin Sherman’s 1979 play about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals.