‘Jojo Rabbit’ and the Cinema of Denial
Why is Hollywood so compelled to make feel-good movies about the Holocaust?
It’s the best remembered line in Anne Frank’s famous memoir — the statement of pure-hearted generosity that helped make the book an international bestseller and landed it on high school syllabi for decades to come; the line that Broadway audiences wept to hear as the final curtain fell on the Frank family story. Over the years, it’s become a sort of incantation:
“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, a camp survivor himself, didn’t buy it. “There is good reason why the so successful play ends with Anne stating her belief in the good in all men,” he wrote in 1960. “If all men are basically good… then indeed we can all go on with life as usual and forget about Auschwitz.” By that logic, he added, Frank’s diary “found wide acclaim because for us too it denies implicitly that Auschwitz ever existed.”
Of course, Holocaust denial is an actual thing. Though long viewed as a fringe movement of deluded conspiracy theorists, it’s really an organic continuation of the Third Reich’s project of genocidal erasure. The death camps were designed not merely to exterminate human beings efficiently and at scale but to eliminate any evidence that they’d ever lived, sowing doubts that have been successfully exploited for 75 years now. A 2014 study by the Anti-Defamation League found that nearly half of the global population hasn’t heard of the Holocaust at all. Of those who have, a third considers the accepted history to be a myth or “greatly exaggerated.”
Bettelheim’s hot take — accusing one of best-known victims of the Nazi genocide of denialism — was not well-received. But he had a point: As with the obfuscation of climate change, denial of the Holocaust takes various forms. There’s the conscious denial of the hard facts, and then there’s the emotional denial of their implications — a far more widespread and insidious category of nullification and one you can’t quite poll for.
It’s probably not hard to imagine what Bettelheim would have thought of Jojo Rabbit, the latest feel-good movie about the ultimate feel-bad crime against humanity — part of a…
