Melodrama and Memory: Historicizing Pathos in Czech Holocaust Films A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Rachel Lindsay Schaff IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Paula Rabinowitz Alice Lovejoy December 2018 © Rachel Lindsay Schaff 2018 Acknowledgements I am grateful to the fellowships and grants that generously supported my research: the Margit Meissner Fellowship for the Study of the Holocaust in the Czech Lands at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Harold Leonard Fellowship in Film Study, the Fulbright IIE Student Research Fellowship to the Czech Republic, the Bernard and Fern Badzin Graduate Fellowship in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Voices of Vienna Scholarship, the Alexander Dubček Fund, the Foreign Language and Advanced Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, the Center for Austrian Studies Summer Research Fellowship, the Edward W. Said Memorial Summer Language Fellowship, and the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Summer Grant. I thank the staff at the and the Archives of the Barrandov Studios, the Czech Television Archive, the National Film Archive in Prague, the Archives at the National Museum in Prague, the National Archives in Prague, and the National Library in Prague. I am also grateful to the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for welcoming me into their community of archivists and scholars. I owe the deepest debt of gratitude to my advisers, Alice Lovejoy and Paula Rabinowitz, for their intellectual guidance, insightful readings and critiques, and especially for their patience. I am grateful for Alice’s guidance with all things Czech—I would have been lost without her expansive knowledge of Czech cinema and history as well as her expert translation assistance. Paula’s intellectual rigor pushed me to be a i better writer and critical thinker—her ability to anticipate and help me clarify my broader arguments and interventions ensured the cohesion of this dissertation’s narrative arc. Her ability to remind and motivate me to “get out of my head” also helped to ensure that this was completed in the nick of time. I also thank my doctoral committee, Gary B. Cohen, Jason McGrath, and Jani Scandura for their thoughtful readings, feedback, and for coming together at the last moment for my defense. This project was originally conceived while I was at Columbia University’s Film Studies Program. I am eternally grateful to Jane Gaines for showing me that film historiography and theory can be as creative (if not more) than filmmaking, and for her unwavering faith in my project. Thanks to Jane, I was introduced to a rigorous intellectual community of friends and scholars including Neta Alexander, Vincent Buriuan, Bethany Czerny, Marc Francis, Linnea Hussein, Katy Gray, Alessandra Luciano, Alece Oxendine, Dolores McElroy, Zack Oleson, Jose Miguel Palacios, and Vika Paranyuk. I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. I am particularly grateful to Michelle Baroody, Lyes Benerbane, Vanessa Cambier, Courtney Gildersleeve, Michael Gallope, Meredith Gill, Andrea Gyenge, Maggie Hennefield, Michelle Lekas, Sara Saljoughi, Aleksander Sedzielarz, Joseph Sannicandro, and Graeme Stout. I was extremely fortunate to enter graduate school the same year as Koel Banerjee, who quickly became my friend and fellow melodramatic. Our ongoing discussions about melodrama and nostalgia are always a source of inspiration. Thank you to the CSCL ii staff, especially Claire Anderson, Katie Goodin, and Jesika Peterson for their help cutting through all the bureaucratic red tape. Conversations with Chris Campo Bowan, Amy Hughes, Rosamund Johnston, Jacob Labendz, Elana Thurston-Milgrom, Eric Phillips, and Lisa Scott have clarified my understanding of Czech history and culture. Many thanks in particular to Elana for her incisive readings, historical insights, and fierce and unwavering friendship. I would not have been able to finish this dissertation without her encouragement and insistence that I turn my abstract ideas into words on the page. Thanks to Kateřina Lu, my Czech tutor and friend, for her assistance with translations. I am also grateful to Lauren Clifford, Cassandra Evanisko, Bethany Gould, Maureen Heydt, Kristina Májová, Petr Máj, Marissa Rann, Curt Singer, Carole Sgambati, Allison Terkowitz, and Ali Dostal Webster for their many years of friendship. My parents, Robin and Michael Schaff, and grandmother Joan Rose were always willing to listen to my ideas about melodrama and the Holocaust, even when they had no clue what I was talking about. Thanks, finally to Noah Fessler (and of course, Franny) for loving me in spite of my more melodramatic impulses. iii Dedication To my grandmother, Joan Rose, who always answers the phone. iv Abstract This dissertation explores melodrama’s engagement with the past in postwar Holocaust memorialization and examines its significance for the national projects of history and memory. Looking past the so-called “limits” of Holocaust representation, my research proposes that melodrama—much like memory—acts as a placeholder outside or beyond what can be experienced and mediates what lies between the event and its re- presentation. While most scholars and critics define Czech Holocaust films in terms of their “artistic approach” to the concentration camp universe (as opposed to the “Americanization” or “Hollywoodization” of the Holocaust), I argue that the historical circumstances of postwar Czechoslovakia provide a unique case for theorizing the melodramatic impulses of Holocaust memorialization. Starting from this point, I situate melodrama’s relationship to Czech cinema during the period of the interwar First Czechoslovak Republic and the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. First, I interrogate historiographic problems of canon formation and examine how, in 1998, the National Film Archive in Prague (Národní filmový archiv or NFA) retroactively classified 67 feature-length fiction films made between 1930 and 1944 as generic melodramas in their volumes of Czech Feature Films (Česky hraný film). Then, I examine how Holocaust films produced in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1961 (the year in which the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann thrust the Holocaust into the international spotlight)—fiction and non-fiction, feature-length and short—relied on the melodramatic modality to negotiate Holocaust memory in the shifting national imaginary. I argue that melodrama not only helps to narrate a nation’s memory of the past, or v institutionalize forms of national or communal remembrance, but it also enables us to recognize, anticipate, and remember how to feel toward the past and the collective meanings that have been passed down from one generation to the next. Tracing melodrama’s emotional trajectory from Nezapomeneme (Lest We Forget, Václav Švarc, 1946) to Distant Journey (Daleká Cesta, Alfréd Radok, 1949) to Romeo, Juliet and Darkness (Romeo, Julie a tma, Jiří Weiss, 1959), I develop a theory of historicized pathos that inextricably links melodrama to the memorializing impulse. vi Table of Contents List of Figures………………………………………………............................. vi – vii Introduction………………………………………………….............................. 1 – 34 Melodrama and Memory Chapter One…………………………………………………....................…… 35 – 80 Classifying Czech Melodrama Chapter Two…………………………………………………………………. 81 – 162 Mrs. Morality Sweeps Through the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia Chapter Three……………………………………………………………….. 163 – 198 Melodrama as Testimony: The Pathos of Never Again Chapter Four……………………………………………………………….. 199 – 276 Observations on the Czech Holocaust Melodrama Epilogue……………………………………………………………………. 277 – 285 Filmography………………………………………………………………… 286 – 299 Primary Sources……………………………………………………………. 300 – 302 Secondary Sources…………………………………………………………. 303 – 320 vii List of Figures Figure 1…………………………………………………………………….. 84 One-Sheet for Diagnosis X (Diagnosa X, Leo Marten, 1933) Promotional Materials, National Film Archive, Prague, Czech Republic Figure 2 ……………………………………………………………………. 90 Promotional Book for Port Arthur (Nicholas Farkas, 1936) Promotional Materials, National Film Archive, Prague, Czech Republic Figure 3 …………………………………………………………………… 107 Cinema program for Lark’s Song (Skřivánčí píseň, Svatopluk Innemann, 1933) Promotional Materials, National Film Archive, Prague, Czech Republic Figure 4 …………………………………………………………………… 120 Cinema program for Night Butterfly (Noční motýl, František Čáp, 1941) Promotional Materials, National Film Archive, Prague, Czech Republic Figure 5 …………………………………………………………………… 126 Cinema Program for The Masked Lover (Maskovaná milenka, Otakar Vávra, 1940) Promotional Materials, National Film Archive, Prague, Czech Republic Figures 6 – 7………………………………………………………………. 134 Promotional Posters for Saturday (Sobota, Václav Wasserman, 1945) Promotional Materials, National Film Archive, Prague, Czech Republic Figures 8 – 9 ……………………………………………………………… 137 Film Still, Kristián (Martin Frič, 1939) Figures 10 – 11……………………………………………………………. 145 Film Still, Saturday (Sobota, Václav Wasserman, 1945) Figures 12 – 29…………………………………. 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173 Film Still, Letter from Prague (Dopis z Prahy, František Šádek, 1945) National Film Archive, Prague, Czech Republic/