Scripting Genocide: The Wannsee Conference on Television, 1960–2022

Johnson, Nicholas K.

Abstract

Scripting Genocide traces the history of how and why the Wannsee Conference has repeatedly attracted the attention of American, British, and German artists, writers, and filmmakers since 1960. Almost all of their televisual depictions of the conference itself are sparse, minimalist, dialogue-driven productions. Their subtle, almost scholarly projection of the conference stands in stark contrast to the large-scale and often critically acclaimed attention devoted to other aspects of the Holocaust in both big- budget theatrical films and European art cinema. Focusing on the television docudramas The Wannsee Conference, Conspiracy, and The Conference, this book investigates how the dramatic, fictiona- lized depictions of the Wannsee Conference offered filmmakers, and especially screenwriters, opportunities to be public historians. This book also contains the final interviews with screenwriters Paul Mommertz and Loring Mandel. Following the methods of the New Film History, which is grounded in archival production material, oral history interviews, and screenplay analysis, this book asks why and how filmmakers have grappled with portraying Wannsee in dramatic form since the 1960s. Each of these docudramas contributed to a diffuse body of work the author conceptualizes as “antifascist television”. In the end, all of these productions argue that words prefigure deeds