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- Title
No "Innocent Victim"?: Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust as Trope in Zeugin aus der Hölle.
- Authors
STEITZ, KERSTIN
- Abstract
This essay addresses how in the film Zeugin aus der Hölle (1965, Witness out of hell), fictionalized sexual violence against a female Jewish Holocaust survivor functions as a trope that exposes and rejects patriarchal and misogynist discourses of victimhood, perpetration, survivor shame, and guilt, which reviewers and scholars rightly have critiqued for such discourses' re-victimizing and re-traumatizing effects upon victims. I argue that as a filmic trope sexual violence served specific functions for its contemporaneous audience- Germans in the postwar 1960s. By means of the trope of sexual violence, Zeugin aus der Hölle confronted contemporaneous West German audiences with gender- specific experiences of women during the Holocaust, the continuing trauma and re- victimization of Jewish Holocaust survivors in postwar Germany, and Nazi guilt.
- Subjects
WITNESS Out of Hell (Film); HOLOCAUST, 1939-1945
- Publication
Women in German Yearbook, 2017, Vol 33, p101
- ISSN
1058-7446
- Publication type
Film Review
- DOI
10.5250/womgeryearbook.33.2017.0101