‘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…
