The Demands of Holocaust Representation: Formal Considerations in Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstraße

German filmmakers who have made Holocaust films in the past two decades have faced a significant amount of criticism from scholars for "converting bad history into a good stoiy," as Lutz Koepnick puts it so succinctly in his article, "Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and the Holocaust in the 1990s," and for thus "denying the veiy trauma they want to assign to both Jews and non-Jews" (72) 4 The Holocaust and its representation confront us with both routine and distinctive epistemological questions that have long formed part of the critical discourse on the subject.2 In his efforts to open up a dialogue between scholars of the two disciplines, Michael Rothberg underscores the discrepancy between "the persistence of the question of realism" in Holocaust studies and "the privileging of discourse and representation at the expense of the real" in cultural studies in his book, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (8). Filmmakers who depict aspects of the Holocaust in their films must come to terms with these competing tendencies and often inhabit the contradictory position so well described by Rothberg: they are artists who produce "works about genocide for the smiling, two-dimensional space of the entertainment industry, but everywhere confront the detritus of the real" (2). The "detritus of the real" makes it impossible for films about the Holocaust to exist merely as films. They cannot be appropriately analyzed and read without taking into account the extra-diegetic, troubled, troubling, and incommensurable realities of the German past. Fragments of that past-its detritus or undissolved particles- persist and haunt every filmic project of remembering. Exploring the possibility of sensitive popular depictions of the Holocaust, Rothberg asks what might constitute an ethical representation and argues convincingly for "the absolutely central and unavoidable need for reflection on the means and modes of representation in all scholarly and lay approaches to the Holocaust" (2, my emphasis).Debates surrounding Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrase bring the difficulties of achieving a satisfying and discerning realism in Holocaust films into stark relief. Concerns (such as those of Wolfgang Benz and Beate Meyer) about realism and historical authenticity in Rosenstrase are important and necessary. They add significantly to our understanding of aspects of the film and keep us vigilant about the exigencies of Holocaust representation.3 A critical stance toward German heritage films and their creators' implicit aims is also important and necessary. According to Daniela Berghahn, Lutz Koepnick, and Stephan Schindler, among others, most recent popular German films about the Holocaust, including Rosenstrase, are examples of a new philosemitism whose proponents undermine the suffering of Holocaust victims by focusing on the acts of "good" Germans. Sabine von Mering summarizes this position on heritage films: "They [heritage films] create a non-existent continuity that erases the Nazi past and 'remember the harrowing events and divisions of German history in order to forget them'" (162). Readings of Rosenstrase that focus primarily on plot convey the impression that this film too is merely another example ofwhat so many scholars see as the normalization discourse of German cinema. I argue here, however, that Rosenstrase satisfies Rothberg's demands for an ethical representation of the Holocaust because von Trotta carefully and self-reflexively frames her investigation of generational differences in the reception of and responses to the Holocaust. By making formal elements of the film at least as important as the film's plot and by drawing the viewer's attention to these formal elements with her deliberate and slow pacing-which she establishes from the opening montage with a melancholy, heavy score-she manages to avoid the kind of naive normalization of the German past that, according to these critics, characterizes heritage films. …