Figure 4. Auschwitz, Poland.
Figure 4. Auschwitz, Poland.
By avoiding the sense that the Holocaust was simply inexplicable,
‘Genocide’ also performs a valuable social function. Implicitly, it encourages viewers to reflect on the conditions that might still allow a similar atrocity to occur again.
The content of ‘Genocide’ is significant. But it is the context of the episode itself that is arguably of greatest importance. ‘Genocide’ represented a milestone in public consciousness of the Holocaust. The idea of post-war ‘silence’ regarding the Holocaust has since received challenge.[1] However, by 1973, the details of the Holocaust were still not well-known.[2]The war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 had raised the profile of the genocide, but The World at War was still amongst the first primetime television considerations of the Holocaust. The frankness with which the Holocaust is related is equally impressive, given the contemporary momentum of television censorship campaigns led by individuals such as Mary Whitehouse.
The World at War was watched by an average weekly audience of ten million UK viewers. The series therefore brought historical knowledge to a large portion of the population. Andy Pearce, a leading authority of British Holocaust memory, has identified ‘Genocide’ as ‘one of the major events in the history of British Holocaust consciousness’, and noted the ground-breaking way it focussed on ‘the Jewish experience’ and employed a new ‘representational approach’.[3] James Jordan’s analysis of BBC programming between 1955 and 1978 has suggested that the Holocaust, despite being a ‘regular presence on British television’, was previously only dealt with in tangential ways.[4]
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