BesondersWeg

On Sunday I had the opportunity to see the documentary film Stalags, about a short-lived genre of Israeli erotica from the early 1960s. “Stalags” featured American or British pilots kept captive in German prisoner-of-war camps being raped and tortured by beautiful women of the SS before getting their own brutal revenge. The titles often claimed to be “true stories” and translations from English into Hebrew, but they were really inventions on the part of Israeli writers.

These booklets were ridiculously popular in early-1960s Israel, selling up to 80,000 copies per title. We missed the five minutes of the film where they talk about the end of the stalag craze because of technical difficulties with the film projector, but I gather that one stalag–I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch–crossed the line of acceptability by featuring a female victim instead of a male victim, and then there was an obscenity trial and the whole genre was condemned.

The first thing I wanted to do when I heard this information was ask a lot of questions about gender in Israeli society and the gender dimensions of revenge fantasies, but the movie avoided questions about gender-in-the-stalags entirely and decided to mount a critique on the Israeli memory culture instead.

For example, the last part of the film focused on one of the most famous Holocaust memoirs: Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls, which actually appeared in 1955 and was an inspiration for the stalag writers. I’ve actually never read the book, but it claims to be a truthful account of “Joy Divisions” of Jewish women kept for the sexual pleasure of German soldiers. The film claims that House of Dolls is a pack of pornographic and exploitative lies, but the Israeli high school curriculum teaches it as absolute truth.

The reality, is, of course, somewhere in the murky-in-between. There was forced prostitution in Nazi Germany, but it seems that women from Poland and the East were forced into prostitution rather than Jewish women.

Using this claim that House of Dolls is total bullshit, and arguing that the stalags were a direct result of the popularity of House of Dolls, the film-maker argues that the stalags were symptomatic of an Israeli memory culture that ignored and even demonized the experiences of actual Holocaust survivors in favor of juvenile and pornographic comic-book revenge fantasies.

It was a version of Holocaust memory appropriate for an up-and-coming nation of heroes. Young male Jews who felt insecure about their place in the world could read these books and imagine themselves raping and killing the beautiful SS guards, and that made them ready to go fight for Israel rather than waste time feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the tragedy.

(Like I said earlier, the topic is begging for a gender analysis that didn’t happen in the movie, which meant that I left the theater feeling incredibly self-righteous: what do young Jewish women who feel vulnerable do to reclaim their sense of security? Why did everyone laugh at that scene where the Israeli guy talked about having degrading sex with his German girlfriend? Isn’t there anything problematic about displacing revenge fantasies on the bodies of women, even if they are fantasies?)

In the meantime, actual survivors were themselves criticized and silenced, because there wasn’t time for the reflection their stories demanded. First they were blamed for not having been smart enough to get out in time–”We emigrated once Hitler came into power, why didn’t you?” Then the victim-blaming took another disgusting turn: it was assumed that anybody who had survived the camps had done something terrible: for men, perhaps they had been Kapos, and for women, especially attractive women, well, they must have been whores. 

That part of the movie was the most striking and emotionally painful for me. Why do humans always feel the need to be terrible to people who have just been through terrible things? Is it a way for you to feel superior and not have to acknowledge your own vulnerability? Why does the same dynamic keep appearing? 

One of the women interviewed said at the end of the film that she hoped the story of the next Holocaust would be told in simple words, without embellishments, and of course I thought of Adorno’s “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Did Adorno know about Holocaust pornography? Would it have blown his mind? It nearly blew mine, and I think poetry has its place. 

Representing the Holocaust in a morally acceptable manner is always going to be a difficult proposition, but this film stretched my ideas about how it could and couldn’t be done. I would recommend that anyone with an interest in these topics see it (it’s much less explicit than The Night Porter), but be prepared to be really angry at humanity, frustrated with incomplete critiques, and, okay, maybe completely overwhelmed with despair and pain afterwards.

I still liked it better than The Night Porter.