Later-generation Holocaust films are no longer driven to document the entirety of the atrocity, rather they seek the “devil in the details.” The 2007 Austrian film, Die Fälscher (2008 Oscar, Best Foreign-Language Film), did just this by taking the perspective of a rather limited population of camp inmates: a band of Jewish petty criminals and counterfeit artists in Mathausen (a camp in Austria). The story is based on the 1983 memoir of Adolf Burger, a forced participant in the Nazis’ currency counterfeiting “Operation Bernhard,” and the film continues the trend of fact-finding and testimony found throughout 20th and 21st century Holocaust films insofar as it sheds light on this heretofore unknown event. The film looks at the counterfeiters’ unusual, and relatively “privileged,” existence within the camp, as long as their criminal and artistic talents as counterfeiters served their Nazi supervisors and the regime itself by helping create counterfeit dollars and pounds to flood and thereby undermine the Allies’ economies. The story of these counterfeiters is not representative of the Holocaust experience as a whole: this film is no Shoah nor is it a Schindler’s List. But the film’s unique vision does present new answers to the aesthetic questions that surrounded filmic representation of the Holocaust for the generations that preceded it. What is compelling in Die Fälscher (and indeed what makes it a “later generation” Holocaust film) is its response to the enduring question about the “unrepresentability of the events of the Holocaust.” This ethical dilemma haunted much of 20th century Holocaust filmmaking and created a sense of taboo in Germany and Austria about any filmic representation of the Holocaust.
Instead of trying to make the extreme reality of the Holocaust somehow real, Die Fälscher recognizes the impossibility of retelling the story of the Holocaust without employing some element of fiction, and simultaneously recognizes its own ethical faults in doing so. The film asks: who is the counterfeiter: the Jewish con man trying to survive the torture of the camps, the genocidal terror regime that desperately held its death grip over Europe even as its real power had long ago been lost, or the aestheticizer of the Holocaust – the filmmaker whose artistic profit turns on a compelling Spielfilm on the tragic events that took place in his own country?
The theme of confabulation in Holocaust film is not entirely new: Take, for example, one of the very first Holocaust films (in East Germany) Jakob der Lügner (1975), based on Jurek Becker’s novel, in which a camp detainee lies to his fellow inmates about a coming end to the war for reasons unclear, perhaps to keep up morale in the camp. But in Die Fälscher, it is not merely the detainees of the Jewish ghetto who confabulate – it is really every player in the whole affair. And even as the film underscores this collective lie (an understanding that has arisen in response to forged autobiographies and the Hollywood-effect on Holocaust representation) the film’s real feat is that it avoids relativizing the suffering of those who, in reality, died, even as it avoids any real representation of violence. Although the film gives up on the search for authenticity, its plot takes care to never depart from the brutal reality that in the end, it is only the imprisoned Jews who are humiliated and threatened with real death. And so it is their counterfeit alone that seems understandable and necessary, even if the prisoners themselves no longer regard survival as the most moral option. That’s important to remember: the survivor is not the most moral character and his story isn’t either. In how many genocidal situations is this true? Probably all of them. And still we must continue to document them, with eyes wide open, and smash the deniers to pieces.