4.5.2023 by Joy McEntee
Abstract
Stanley Kubrick’s project on the Holocaust, Aryan Papers, was dear to his heart. He worked on it for a long time, but he could not, in the end, bring himself to complete the planned film. This article canvasses some of the reasons other scholars have supplied for this film remaining unmade, including the notion that the Holocaust is unrepresentable. However, it points to a novel explanation. I argue that Kubrick’s plot modifications, particularly to the conclusion, doomed the project. Specifically, Kubrick has a Jewish woman take revenge for war-time atrocities. Discussing revenge in relation to the Holocaust has until recently been as impious as representing the Holocaust itself. Jewish revenge was unfashionable in Holocaust films of all kinds when Kubrick was working on Aryan Papers in the early 1990s. Kubrick’s planned film was generically ahead of its times. The vengeful Jewish woman had to wait for Inglourious Basterds in 2009.
Introduction
Sue Vice and I are both asking why Aryan Papers, Stanley Kubrick’s long-gestated film about the Holocaust, remained unmade. Various reasons have been offered. Perhaps Kubrick, Jewish by descent, was too depressed by the material (Abrams Citation2023). Perhaps he anticipated overwhelming commercial competition from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (Citation1993, McEntee Citation2022, Abrams Citation2023: 362–363). After all, he abandoned his cherished Napoleon project when the market for Bonaparte films went cold after the failure of Waterloo (Citation1970). Perhaps it was because it was impossible to ‘scrub [Aryan Papers] clean of Jewishness’ or ‘dejudaize’ it in the same way he had done other productions (Weissman Citation2004: 12, Abrams Citation2018, Citation2023, O’Malley Citation2018). Perhaps the actress he selected to play his protagonist, Johanna Ter Steege, was not bankable in Hollywood like Meryl Streep of Sophie’s Choice (Citation1982) or Liam Neeson of Schindler’s List (McEntee Citation2022). Perhaps Kubrick’s failure to make Aryan Papers was the result of his own stultifying micromanagement towards the end of his career, and his growing indecision (Fenwick Citation2020, Citation2022). This variety in interpretation reveals that, because we are dealing with a film that remained unmade, and with its incomplete archival traces, all we can do is speculate.
But is it possible Kubrick could not bring himself to make Aryan Papers because the Holocaust resists cinematic representation? Kubrick’s widow Christiane has been interviewed as saying:
He was […] in a state of depression, because he realized it was an impossible film. It’s impossible to direct the Holocaust unless it’s a documentary. If you show the atrocities as they actually happened, it would entail the total destruction of the actors. Stanley said he could not instruct actors how to liquidate others and could not explain the motives for the killing. ‘I will die from this,’ he said, ‘and the actors will die, too, not to mention the audience.’ (Karpel Citation2005)
That the Holocaust is impossible to represent is the tenor of many critical discussions of art in its wake (Langford Citation1999, Trezise Citation2001). Clearly, this is less a matter of what cannot be represented than what should not. It is not that representing the Holocaust isn’t possible or attempted, but the effort to do so is somehow in the most abominable of taste; it is blasphemous, obscene, and taboo. However, this sentiment was rather shop-worn when Kubrick worked on Aryan Papers in the early 1990s. As Kent Jones says, even by 1985, ‘Theodor Adorno’s exhaustively quoted 1949 statement “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” had been thoroughly decontextualized and reduced to an edict that a parent might deliver to a child’ (Jones Citation2010: 33).
Nonetheless, the industrialized murder of millions of people is a catastrophe that beggars the imagination and the will to aestheticize. Certainly, there is a critical accord that the Holocaust exceeds the genericising tendencies of Hollywood. This is why Steven Spielberg’s melodramatic Schindler’s List is often compared unfavourably with Claude Lanzmann’s gruelling, genre-defying assemblage of testimonials in Shoah (Citation1985). As Miriam Bratu Hansen says, these two films are usually held to embody ‘two mutually exclusive paradigms of cinematically representing or not-representing the Holocaust’ (Hansen Citation1996: 294). Schindler’s List and Shoah have different foci: where Schindler’s List emphasizes survival, Lanzmann decided that his subject matter was death, the gas chambers from which no witnesses returned, and which were, therefore, unrepresentable (Jones Citation2010: 36). This is perverse, considering Lanzmann’s film contains witness statements from those who skirted the periphery of the gas chambers or even entered them. However, the horrors of the Holocaust, according to Lanzmann, absolutely should not be communicated (Citation2010: 49). Gillian Rose challenges such ‘Holocaust piety,’ including special pleading about its representation, in these terms:
To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the witness of ‘ineffability’, that is, non-representability, is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are—human, all too human. What is it that we do not want to understand? What is it that Holocaust piety in film and reviews once again protects us from understanding? (Citation1996: 43)
What do we fear may be ‘too understandable,’ ‘too human,’ ‘too continuous’ with our lived contemporary experience? Instead of taking the line that the Holocaust is unrepresentable, I will open this special issue by speculating about another inhibition that prevented Kubrick from realizing Aryan Papers. His proposed plot modifications included centralizing a Jewish woman and allowing her to take violent revenge for war time atrocities. I suggest the complexities of vindicating, condemning, or withholding judgment on a Jewish woman’s revenge presented Kubrick a conundrum he could not solve. Kubrick’s plot ideas include a rape scene and several alternative endings with various permutations. In some endings, she dies. In some, she survives. I will focus here on this dithering about the ending, as it seems to bespeak a particularly knotty set of problems.
I argue that Kubrick’s film remained unmade, not necessarily because Kubrick could not bring himself to represent the Holocaust, but because his film was ahead of its generic times. The generic moment for the Jewish woman’s revenge had to wait for Quentin Tarantino in 2009 and Inglourious Basterds (Citation2009). That film features the mass murder of Nazi perpetrators of atrocity by a vengeful Jewish woman. As Matthew Boswell points out, Tarantino even has the temerity to place the cinematic spectator in the position of a Nazi suffering at the hands of a brutally vengeful Jew (Boswell Citation2011: 175). Following Rose (Citation1996), Boswell (Citation2011) describes such works as Tarantino’s as representing ‘Holocaust impiety.’ This is the antithesis of ‘sentimental or sanctimonious approaches to the genocide’ (1). These pious attitudes are represented in different ways by Schindler’s List – with Spielberg tending to the sentimental – and Shoah – with Lanzmann tending to the sanctimonious in his paratextual remarks. Kubrick was not habitually either sentimental or sanctimonious. I doubt that fear of Holocaust impiety inhibited him, although its moment had not yet come when he was working on Aryan Papers in the early 1990s.
Materials and methods
The evidence that supports this paper comes from the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts, London, and the research was conducted in late 2021. Because I live in Australia, and because the Covid pandemic had closed international borders, I employed a proxy researcher, Dr. Cassie Brummitt, to go into the Archive on my behalf. We would meet via Zoom, go over the catalogue, and agree on a plan for each day’s exploration. Cassie would then consult the materials, take notes, transcribe passages, and report to me in writing and again via Zoom. I would interpret her notes and synthesize key insights. Cassie and I have described our methods more fully in James Fenwick and Kieran Foster’s forthcoming Studying the Unmade (McEntee and Brummitt CitationForthcoming). Briefly, Cassie adopted the role of a self-reflexive ‘archivist researcher,’ a concept she derives from Lynée Lewis Gaillet (Gaillet Citation2012: 50) in approaching the ‘skeletal, damaged, or […] non-existent’ archival traces that are left by an unfinished film (Fenwick Citation2021: 4).
As both Cassie and I have a background in Adaptation Studies, we focussed on a detailed comparison of the novel and the draft screenplays. Adaptation studies and archival research are not necessarily compatible. James Fenwick asserts the currency of archival research and the ‘New Film History,’ and particularly ‘Women’s Film History’ (Fenwick CitationForthcoming, N. Pag.). However, Fenwick also draws attention to the limitations of novel-to-screenplay and screenplay-to-screenplay comparisons, on which the current article relies, as they fetishize the auteur at the expense of other film workers whose labour becomes submerged when a film fails to make it into production. This would appear to place the current trend in archival studies, at least as advocated by Fenwick, at odds with adaptation studies. However, I would seek to reassert the relevance of the kind of study I have undertaken in terms of Robert Stam’s observation that ‘adaptations … can take an activist stance toward their source novels,’ recontextualizing them ideologically (Stam Citation2000: 64). Kubrick takes an activist stance to the novel he was adapting, Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies (Citation2007), repositioning the main characters to centralize Tania and explore her agency: he remodelled gender relations in the drama, so the woman became the focal point. The apparent incompatibility of archival studies and adaptation studies is not a barrier, nor is conducting novel-to-screenplay and screenplay-to-screenplay comparisons redundant. Rather, bringing together these two methodologies – one relatively new, one relatively old – produces new insights. And it can help excavate the work of unsung film workers, like Johanna Ter Steege.
Results
Wartime Lies: plot outline
Centring the woman, allowing her to take revenge and to die are all significant departures from the novel Kubrick was adapting, Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies. The focalizer is a young Jewish boy, Maciek. He begins the novel in the upper-middle-class household of his widower doctor father and unmarried Aunt Tania. Tania and Maciek are particularly close to Maciek’s grandfather (Tania’s father). As the war closes in, the family splits up and relocates. Tania and Maciek begin living under assumed names and flee to Warsaw. Their existence is one long series of lies and impostures as they seek to conceal their Jewish identity from informers. Tania and Maciek escape the train to Auschwitz thanks to Tania’s bravado and resourcefulness. Maciek and Tania make their way to a remote village named Piasowe where Tania gathers intelligence about other refugees in the hopes of finding Grandfather. She discovers that he has been betrayed and shot. She and Maciek flee. The novel’s end sees them settling into Cracow using Aryan papers. They continue to live under assumed names as Roman Catholics.
Aryan Papers: script revisions
Screenplay versions in the Archive reveal important things about how the film, and Tania’s role, were conceived and reworked during the drafting process. There are dramatic changes to the end of the story. In many documents, Kubrick suggests that the ending should be changed so that Tania kills Miska, the man who brags about Grandfather being killedFootnote1 as well as some village elders who are German sympathizers.Footnote2
The text of one of the screenplay treatments is explicit about framing these murders as Tania’s taking revenge.
Tania screamed when she saw her [father’s corpse], and she rushed to the wagon and threw her arms around him, sobbing.
…
Jozef [a partisan] handed Tania his pistol.
“Avenge yourself. Honour your father,” Jozef said.
Tania wild-eyed, her mouth open, looked at the pistol, then took it from Jozef.
“Have mercy … Oh please have mercy!”
“Shoot them! Shoot the swine!!” Jozef said.
Tania stared at the couple, filled with hate, seeming not to hear Jozef.
“Oh, please … Dear God, save us … ”
“Avenge your father. Shoot them!”
Tania raised the pistol, aimed at the man, and fired.
But she missed.
Even on his knees, he was bobbing around too much.
“I want to live. Oh, please, God help me. I want to live.”
“So did all the innocent victims you and traitors like you helped to send to their death,” Jozef shouted.
Tania started to tremble violently.Jozef walked over to her and said, “Come, Tania. Move closer … move closer.”
He took her by the arm and moved her forward slowly until she was only about a yard away from the man and woman who continued to beg piteously.
“Now, shoot them, in the head,” Jozef said, quietly.
Tania aimed the pistol and shot the man in the head.
His wife let out a horrible scream and Tania shot her, too.
Afterwards, Jozef pinned the death warrant to the man’s shirt.Footnote3
Kubrick also references a ‘Kaputt’ [sic] ending, which may refer to an ending that kills off all the major characters.Footnote4 Kubrick’s annotations indicate the potential problems with this finale: ‘If we use the Kaputt ending where Tania may be killed, you need the father to tidy up the ending.’Footnote5 Later draft treatments show another substantial change to the ending of the story.Footnote6 Some treatments entirely cut the Piasowe episode in favour of Tania and Maciek joining the partisans, which puts Tania in the thick of the fighting. According to Kubrick’s notes, ‘If T [Tania] joins the partisans, some partisan military action is called for.’Footnote7 An annotated draft treatment dated 12 June 1992 ends thus: ‘The Russian offensive has smashed German resistance, and Tania and Maciek are caught up in the cruel and vengeful fighting between the partisans and the retreating Germans. / Their long battle for survival ends when they are overrun by the advancing Russian army.’Footnote8 In other treatments, Nowak is recast as a German informant and tells Tania where to find Grandfather; Tania finds Grandfather alive, and Maciek survives a battle between the partisans and the Germans. The three survive at the end of the script.Footnote9
All the proposed changes to the script, even in the early drafts, make Tania a much more active figure: whether that’s going to kill Miska (in the earliest drafts), or joining the partisans and killing the village elders. She essentially propels the action at the end of the film. She is resilient, resourceful, and powerful. In some annotations and drafts, he arms Tania, suggesting she kills Miska ‘with a knife’ and that ‘Komar gives Tania a gun when she goes out with the Bimber [bootleg vodkal] / Teaches her how to shoot it / Perhaps we see her use it.’Footnote10 One synopsis even suggests she kills Miska with a Baby Browning semi-automatic Komar has given her, not only emptying it into him but reloading the magazine to finish killing him.Footnote11
Kubrick’s script revisions also do interesting things with the motivation for this revenge. In two early drafts, Nowak rapes Tania.Footnote12 But in later drafts, the rape scene is cut.Footnote13 In most drafts, Nowak does not rape Tania. In some, he merely flirts with her (as he does in the novel); in some, he does not. Rape revenge, then, is removed as a motivation as the script evolves.
Discussion
Revenge
Revenge is a thorny subject. To take an impious attitude towards it, revenge is an all-too-human impulse out of which people are only schooled by the most elaborate enculturation towards the piety of forgiveness. Revenge is the justice of the marginalized. It is what is left to victim/survivors when the law is absent or fails them. Forgiveness is not always appropriate, and expectations that victim/survivors should forgive an atrocity as enormous as the Holocaust, or any part of it, ‘so [to dilute] the principle of forgiveness as to make its transaction trivial or empty’ (Lang Citation2005: 26). But advocating revenge is unfashionable. As Rosenbaum (Citation2013) says, ‘It’s difficult if not impossible to have honest conversations about revenge’ (12). He interrogates nice, ‘artificial’ (Citation2013: 12) distinctions between revenge and justice in contemporary ‘revenge-averse’ society (Citation2013: 19). He says, ‘Revenge is the one human instinct that dares not speak its name. The mere mention of it is widely regarded as undignified – barbarism at its most naked, one of those nasty impediments to civilization itself.’ (Citation2013: 32) If art after the Holocaust is considered barbarous, so is revenge.
Focussing on the era he dubs the Post-Holocaust, Lang (Citation2005) writes in similar terms about the silence about revenge in relation to the Holocaust, which he says amounts to repression (19). Writing in 2005, Lang said that revenge and forgiveness should remain live issues in contemporary discussions of the Holocaust precisely because its enormity puts it beyond the pale of justice (17–18). This silence about revenge and the Holocaust has pertained until recently, even though retaliation for atrocities did occur, including by death camp inmates and partisans (Lang Citation2005, Rosenbaum Citation2013).
But the willingness to confront Jewish revenge has evolved with the times and gone in and out of fashion. Indeed, it seems only to have been possible to talk about Jewish revenge for wartime atrocities in certain eras, with reluctance creeping in at others. As Rosenbaum says, at the end of World War II,
Whether [death camp inmates’] lawless acts of retribution are examples of justice or revenge didn’t seem to matter much to anyone since no one—except Nazi guards […]—complained about it. Most people believed that these sporadic, improvised acts of vengeance were completely just and justified given the enormity of evil, and the scale of mass death, that the Nazis and their abettors had visited on Europe. (Citation2013: 17)
But despite this, survivors testifying at trials sixty-five years later would find it to be seemly to be seeking justice, not revenge (Rosenbaum Citation2013: 17). In the world off-screen, revenge was outmoded in the 2010s. Indeed, in 2010 the Jewish holy books were revised and re-edited to redact the vengeful God of the Israelites (Rosenbaum Citation2013: 6). Only in the movies, says Rosenbaum, was revenge aired (Citation2013: 28).
But not in all movies all the time. In 1985, Lanzmann finished Shoah, which in Sue Vice’s estimation, is about ‘destruction’ rather than ‘rescue or resistance’ (Citation2023: 1). This film allows the discussion of revenge only in an anti-Semitic outburst in front of the Chelmno church on Easter Sunday morning. A crowd member suggests a Rabbi attributed the genocide of Jews to Christ’s vengeance for the events surrounding the crucifixion. Shoah remains mute on Jewish revenge, however. That has to wait for a separate film made of Shoah outtakes, Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4pm. (Citation2001). There, Yehuda Lerner testifies to the joy of revenge. It is telling that this film was not released until Citation2001, 16 years after Shoah. In another outtake, never released but available as part of Lanzmann’s online archive, Lanzmann interviews Abba Kovner, who masterminded the elaborate conspiracy of survivors who planned the mass poisoning of 6 million Germans in an act of Nakam, or revenge (Lang Citation2005, Porat and Yuval Citation2020, Porat Citation2023). However, in Sue Vice’s account, the interview did not centre on that extraordinary undertaking (Citation2023).
However, while the revenge was being edited out of Jewish holy books, interest in Jewish revenge was growing Hollywood. Steven Spielberg’s Munich (adapted from George Jonas’ book Vengeance) came out in Citation2005, Defiance in Citation2008 and Inglourious Basterds in Citation2009. All feature Jewish revenge. Munich features a campaign of retaliatory assassinations carried out by former Mossad agents for the 1972 massacre of Olympic athletes by Black September terrorists. Defiance and Inglourious Basterds feature revenge for World War II atrocities associated with the Holocaust. A widespread interest in revenge in any era bespeaks perceived failings of the mechanisms of the law and justice of the State in that time or on that topic. Rosenbaum says
there has been an inverse relationship between injustice under the law and the abundance of revenge novels, plays, and films that spring from the imagination of artists. If the legal system didn’t treat emotion as contraband, if it better appreciated the human need to feel avenged, vengeance wouldn’t have become such a staple of our common culture. Our revenge cravings become ravenous whenever justice is left undone. (Rosenbaum Citation2013: 29)
As Lang says, Holocaust Justice has not yet been achieved and may never be achievable (Citation2005: 18). If revenge is ever understandable, it is in the circumstance where justice via the law is not available. It is a wonder there are not more movies about Jewish vengeance.
Yet even in Hollywood action movies like Munich and Defiance, revenge is carefully hedged about. In the case of Munich, vengeful action is carefully gendered. Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) gives a speech taking responsibility for the decision to go beyond civilized laws and seek revenge. Hers is the mens rea of the vengeful action. However, the actual assassinations are carried out by a team of men: Avner Kaufmann (Eric Bana) and his associates. Theirs is the actus reus. This is by contrast with Aryan Papers, where Tania takes vengeful action herself. In Defiance, the Jewish protagonist brothers, who lead an armed militia in the forests, have heated debates about revenge, which some say debases them to the level of animals. There is a squeamishness about owning revenge as a justifiable response, even in the absence of the law, the zone beyond the law, in wartime situations where people are making up all the laws for themselves. Piety surrounds not just the Holocaust but also revenge, at least as far as conventional Hollywood products are concerned. Defiance explores Jewish vengeance but repudiates it; Inglourious Basterds, by contrast, rejoices in a Jewish woman’s vengeance. These films may demonstrate a growing appetite for Jewish vengeance in the mid- to late-2000, but Kubrick was making Aryan Papers in 1992 and 1993. Only Genghis Cohn (Citation1993) dared to deal with revenge, and then through the ameliorating frame of comedy. There seems to have been a lack of appetite for the serious consideration of Holocaust revenge in the early 1990s, when Kubrick was making Aryan Papers.
The ‘Holocaust genre’
Regarding timing, something has to be said here about Kubrick’s relationship to ‘the Holocaust film’ as a genre. In 1999, Langford said the category was itself ‘scandalous’ and ‘problematic’ (23). However, Langford went on to acknowledge that Sophie’s Choice from Citation1982 and Schindler’s List from Citation1993 ‘[helped] trace out the parameters of a still nugatory new genre’ (Citation1999: 25). Kubrick’s relationship with generic filmmaking was unique. Elsaesser (Citation2020) characterizes him as making experimental ‘one-offs’ and ‘prototypes,’ films that anticipated future generic developments, as 2001: A Space Odyssey (Citation1968) set the agenda for science fiction films that came after it. Where his film could not be the defining film for an emergent genre, Kubrick lost interest. As Elsaesser says,
Kubrick, who usually nursed his projects for up to twenty years, abandoned or set aside certain films because he sensed that they would have arrived after another prototype had become the defining blockbuster. This was the case with Brian Aldiss’ story ‘Super-Toys Last All Summer Long’ a.k.a. ‘Pinocchio’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ which Kubrick put aside after the success of Star Wars, and the abandonment of ‘The Aryan Papers’ […], which would have been released after Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. […]. ‘Kubrick’s films,’ as one of his temporary collaborators put it, ‘seem to be out of time.’ (Elsaesser Citation2020: 34)
And as Rauch’s (Citation2021) audience survey study demonstrates, Schindler’s List has become the film that defines ‘the Holocaust genre’ for young British moviegoers (110). This is partly because of a subsidized educational campaign that saw the film placed in every school in the UK (Hansen Citation1996: 294, Pearce Citation2017: 242). What Rauch’s young informants ‘expected’ of ‘the Holocaust genre’ is revealing. Their preconceptions were that such films would represent concentration camps and focus on Jewish inmates (Rauch Citation2021: 102). Films that Rauch’s interviewees identified as ‘different’ included Defiance (Rauch Citation2021: 102–103). Defiance is set in the forests and focuses on the armed resistance of a Jewish militia rather than focusing on the camps and passive suffering. Aryan Papers would, likewise, have been ‘different.’ As Gary Weissman has observed, a hierarchy of suffering has been established in Holocaust representation, with the gas chambers at once central and unrepresentable (Weissman Citation2004: 196–197), and all other aspects of the Holocaust ‘peripheral’, so that ‘some aspects of the Holocaust,’ such as the partisan experience or simply the experience of slipping under the radar, as Tania and Maciek do, become less ‘authentic, noteworthy or significant’ (Weissman Citation2004: 211). Thus, Kubrick’s film, which would have dealt with ‘peripheral’ matters, might have suffered in generic comparison with Shoah or Schindler’s List had it been realized.
Because Kubrick worked proleptically, it is easier to compare Aryan Papers with films that would have come after it than with films that went before, but positioning it in relation to other films in the genre yields insights into how ground-breaking it would have been had it come out in 1993 or 1994. It would have been like Sophie’s Choice in that it was to have focused on a woman, but Aryan Papers would have been in advance of Sophie’s Choice in that it imagined her taking action, however morally equivocal, rather than passively suffering. It was to have been more like 2008’s Defiance than 1993’s Schindler’s List in that it was set in towns, farms and forests rather than labour – or death – camps, and the victim/survivors take up armed resistance. It anticipated 2009s Inglourious Basterds in figuring Jewish vengeance for wartime atrocities. Aryan Papers, then, would have been in advance of the generic times. Perhaps this is why it remained unmade.
Rauch’s informants expected Holocaust films ‘to create sympathy for the victims’ (Citation2021: 104). Aryan Papers would have featured the problem of creating sympathy for the avenger, who may, in some readings, become the monster. It is not that Kubrick was incapable of creating sympathy for monsters. After all, he had done it with Alex De Large in A Clockwork Orange (Citation1971). However, Tania’s revenge is not straightforward. As it is unlikely that the final script would have settled on rape revenge, Tania would not have been avenging herself. Rather, she would have been avenging another, a true victim. She would have been a proxy avenger. And then, too, it is revenge against collaborators rather than directly against Nazis. It is against criminals of a lesser order, if you like: mere traitors rather than monsters. Yet everything about the casting and costuming of Johanna Ter Steege that can be gleaned from the Archive indicates that Kubrick sought to generate sympathy for her (McEntee Citation2022). However, the dithering with the end of the script that becomes apparent in the Archival traces indicates some indecision, some excess that would not be contained about the figure of the vengeful Jewess.
Death or survival?
Death, of course, is one way to contain excess. In the ‘kaput’ ending, Kubrick kills Tania off. It is possible that Kubrick could imagine generating sympathy for Tania’s revenge but could not imagine her getting away with it. The ‘kaput’ ending has a certain symmetry to it. Tania, having taken revenge, would have to be duly punished and expelled from the scene. This is certainly the ending Tarantino imagined for Shoshana Dreyfuss (Mélanie Laurent) in Inglourious Basterds. Her revenge is richly earned, and Tarantino even revels in it, but she is still punished for it. Then, too, killing your protagonist is a sure way to shock an audience out of their complacency.
Like Schindler’s List, the alternative endings to Aryan Papers that see Tania survive – and in one case even escape to Israel (Abrams Citation2023: 354) – give the lie to the fact that vast numbers of Jews caught up in the chaos of occupied Europe died. This is why Shoah, while narrated by survivors, never tells their tales of how they survived. That is left to the later outtakes, including Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4pm. But as Gary Weissman points out, Lanzmann is dissatisfied with closing that film with Yehuda Lerner’s tale of escape. He immediately turns to an account of how the gas chambers were demolished, the convoys stopped, and the extermination ended (Weissman Citation2020: 181–182). Lanzmann moves the tale beyond ‘individual survival’ (Weissman Citation2020: 182), and draws back to bring the whole of the death camp into the frame. Lanzmann is interested in individual stories only insofar as they illustrate the general story of the destruction of European Jews.
Incommensurability and revenge: the problem of scale
By contrast with Lanzmann’s tendency to move the tale beyond individual survival, Tania and Maciek in Aryan Papers are individualized, and not necessarily representative. Tania’s revenge is similarly individualized. There is a big problem with individualized revenge: it is inadequate in the face of atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust. That takes a scheme on the scale of Abba Kovner’s Nakam. Revenge such as Tania’s cannot touch the larger problem of the industrialization of genocide. But how much can a 2-hour entertainment, as Aryan Papers was planned to be (Abrams Citation2023: 350), or a 3-hour entertainment, as Schindler’s List is, address mass suffering, let alone systematic redress? Lanzmann took 9.5 hours to address the suffering without considering redress. While he does everything possible to reveal the horrors of the Holocaust without actually showing the gas chambers in operation, Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah is silent on the subject of successful resistance, and Jewish vengeance is considered only in outtakes, deliberately left on the cutting room floor in Citation1985 (though revived later, when the times were right).
Authorizing Aryan papers
About Schindler’s List, Claude Lanzmann said, ‘There is no reflection, no thought, about what is the Holocaust and no thought about what is cinema, because if [Spielberg] would have thought, he would not have made it – or he would have made Shoah’ (Lanzmann in Sklar Citation1994: 1). This is a statement of breath-taking egotism, in which Lanzmann stakes his claim as the only authorized representative of the Holocaust and Shoah as the only possible representation. And subsequent critics have abetted this egocentric manoeuvre, elevating Shoah to the sine qua non of Holocaust films. I do not wish to argue with this manoeuvre except to point out that it suggests that it is not so much the case that the Holocaust is unrepresentable as that there are only certain licensed, authorized representations, preferably those that approach as nearly as possible the harrowing nature of the events Holocaust victims went through themselves. Gary Weissman points out that this is an impossibility precisely because, far from being unrepresentable, the Holocaust is
only representable. We can watch a Holocaust movie, visit a Holocaust museum or memorial site, or read a Holocaust book, but we cannot experience or witness the reality of the Holocaust itself; and the more conscious we are of differences between the past reality and its representation, the more elusive the Holocaust seems to be. (Weissman Citation2004: 209. Emphasis in the original)
Putting Shoah on a pedestal has consequences. Shoah is not for everyone. Specifically, it is not for mass audiences. Weissman asks a series of questions about what can make the Holocaust as a subject more approachable, particularly for a group he dubs the ‘nonwitnesses’ – those second and third-generation descendants of survivors and those sympathizers not related at all:
When representing the Holocaust, how much horror can be shown without repelling viewers? How much horror can be described without alienating readers? How horrific and bleak can the story be without turning audiences away? How Jewish can a depiction of the Holocaust be without losing the patronage of an overwhelmingly non-Jewish audience? These questions are not easily answered. (Weissman Citation2004: 10–11)
In doing so, he interrogates the kind of snobbery that underlies Lanzmann’s totalizing claim to the space of Holocaust representation: ‘Nonwitnesses can be drawn to whatever makes the Holocaust accessible for a mass audience, even if this means finding fulfilment in the “wrong” kind of Holocaust representation’ (Weissman Citation2004: 148). For all that Kubrick might not have shared Spielberg’s sentimentality, it seems clear that Aryan Papers would have resembled Schindler’s List as a Hollywood fiction film more than it resembled Shoah. It would have been a ‘wrong’ kind of Holocaust film relative to Shoah. But does this make it a ‘wrong’ film tout court? Or just a film out of its time? The evolution, or devolution, of Holocaust films towards Inglourious Basterds suggests that Aryan Papers was just a film out of its time.
Conclusion
James Fenwick cites Kubrick’s growing indecision, rather than Hollywood’s practice of reducing risk by avoiding fashionable genres, as being responsible for Aryan Papers remaining unmade (Fenwick Citation2020, Citation2022). There is, indeed, substantial evidence in the Archive that Kubrick dithered over the production location and production company for Aryan Papers (Fenwick Citation2020). However, while there is evidence in the script revisions that he dithered about the ending of the film, the treatments evolved consistently in ways that imagined a Jewish woman’s active revenge. Such revenge, as is the way of all revenge, was impossible either to vindicate or deny. Nor was there a mainstream market appetite, in the early 1990s, for the serious consideration of Jewish vengeance. This suggests that it was not Kubrick’s indecision alone that doomed the film, but the ‘industrial logic of Hollywood,’ including its ‘fear of [commercial] failure’ (Fenwick Citation2022). Jewish vengeance was to wait for 2001, Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4pm, and ultimately for 2009, with Inglourious Basterds, a work of ‘Holocaust impiety’ that imagined a Jewish woman’s revenge writ large. In the early 1990s, piety, shame or denial surrounded Jewish revenge, particularly enacted by a woman, making it unrepresentable.
Cinema’s reticence only imitates the tendencies of Holocaust historiography. As Lang attested in 2005, the subject of Jewish vengeance for the Holocaust was then only beginning to be discussed in historical scholarship. A full account of Abba Kovner’s Nakam was to wait for Dina Porat in the 2020s (Porat and Yuval Citation2020, Porat Citation2023). I can understand the reluctance to confront this aspect of the Holocaust experience. Revenge of any kind raises uncomfortable questions. To return to Gillian Rose’s question about the plea for silence about the Holocaust, ‘What is it that we do not want to understand? What is it that Holocaust piety […] protects us from understanding?’ (Citation1996: 43). I submit that the confrontation that is withheld by the failure to realize Aryan Papers is the confrontation with Jewish revenge as an ‘all too human’ response to the Holocaust. A less pious approach to all aspects of the Holocaust, including vengeful impulses, might yield a truer picture. It is time to have an honest conversation about revenge. The need has never been more urgent.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable contribution Dr. Cassie Brummitt made to this article in conducting research with the raw archival data, and Professor Sue Vice for her wise counsel.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Funding
This work was supported by School of Humanities Research Committee, University of Adelaide.
Notes on contributors
Joy McEntee
Dr. Joy McEntee SFHEA is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at the University of Adelaide. Her work focuses on American film, especially Stanley Kubrick, and adaptation. She is currently writing a monograph on women in Kubrick’s cinema and an edited collection on Kubrick and race, both for Liverpool University Press.
Notes
1 Notably SK/18/2/1/4 ‘WL Notes Book 1.
2 War T Lies SK Box 3; Three script treatments are identical and dated 11-14-92 (14th November 1992), pp. 119–129.
3 War T Lies SK Box 3; Three script treatments are identical and dated 11-14-92 (14th November 1992), pp. 127–129.
4 This is first mentioned in SK/18/2/1/5 Synopsis and then seen in SK/18/2/1/6 Annotated ‘Draft’ Treatment with Archive Newsreel use noted.
5 SK/18/2/1/5 (alt ref SK/18/2/1/3) Synopsis -16 May 1992.
6 See SK/18/2/1/7 Annotated Draft Treatment and all subsequent treatments.
7 SK/18/2/1/4 (alt ref SK/18/2/1/2) WL Notes Book 1 - PDF – 26 Jul – 12 Oct 1991.
8 SK/18/2/1/6 Annotated ‘Draft’ Treatment with Archive Newsreel use noted – 12 June 1992 p. 125.
9 SK/18/2/1/7 (alt ref SK/18/2/1/4) Annotated Draft Treatment -– May-Jun 1992.
10 SK/18/2/1/4 (alt ref SK/18/2/1/2) WL Notes Book 1 - PDF – 26 Jul – 12 October 1991.
11 SK/18/2/1/5 (alt ref SK/18/2/1/3) Synopsis – 16 May 1992, p. 12.
12 SK/18/2/1/7 Annotated Draft Treatment and SK/18/2/1/8 Partially Annotated Draft Treatment.
13 SK/18/2/1/10 onwards, Arian Papers’ treatment with scene list and shooting plan.
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