Why we fought: Holocaust memory in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan

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Why we fought: Holocaust memory in Spielberg'sSaving Private RyanPeter Ehrenhaus aa Department of Communication and Theatre at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA98447-0003Published online: 09 Nov 2010.

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Why We Fought: Holocaust Memoryin Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan

Peter Ehrenhaus

�—Steven Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan has been criticized for its failure toframe narrative action in terms of national, moral purpose. This criticism can beunderstood in terms of the constraints that the ‘‘Vietnam syndrome’’ places uponcontemporary cinematic narratives of war; Vietnam memory subverts earnest declarationof high national principle. This essay examines how Saving Private Ryan ‘‘reillusions’’American national identity in the wake of Vietnam by giving presence to an even moredistant past. Supported by close textual analysis of key scenes centering upon the sole Jewishcharacter in the film, this reading argues that the specific moral justification for wagingwar and accepting its horrors and sacrifices is found in a moral crusade against the Naziprogram of Holocaust. By suturing the Holocaust into the film as its moral foundation, thefilm participates in the ‘‘Americanization’’ of Holocaust memory, circumvents Vietnam asa source of traumatic memory, manufactures a redemptive national identity, and constructsan ethically usable past in the present.

DESPITE its commercial success andartistic accolades, acclaim for Sav-

ing Private Ryan has not been universal.Criticisms note flaws of commissionand omission. Allegations on one handclaim that Saving Private Ryan romanti-cizes the inhumane conditions of war-fare, valorizes each soldier’s persis-tence in the face of uncertain survival,and commemorates the soldier’s sacri-fice. Others allege that the film sup-presses the indispensable element ofjustification—in other words, ‘‘Why wefight.’’ It is my contention that these

criticisms can be understood by read-ing Saving Private Ryan as a response tothis nation’s enduring traumaticmemory, frequently characterized bythe condensation signifier of ‘‘the Viet-nam syndrome.’’ Saving Private Ryanperforms two functions of culturalmemory simultaneously. It ‘‘reillu-sions’’ American national identity evenas it pays homage to the war sacrificesand accomplishments of ‘‘the GreatestGeneration.’’ Precisely because thefilm participates in shaping collectivememory, it is as much about contempo-rary matters as it is about commemorat-ing an historical past. Consequently,the manner in which the film con-structs memory requires our attendingto opportunities for, and constraintsupon, contemporary narratives thatspeak to national identity.

As Owen (1999) argues, the Viet-

Peter Ehrenhaus is Associate Professor in theDepartment of Communication and Theatre atPacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA98447-0003. An earlier version of this essaywas presented at the 1999 National Communi-cation Association convention. The author thanksA. Susan Owen for her critical insights.

Critical Studies in Media CommunicationVol. 18, No. 3, September 2001, pp. 321–337

Copyright 2001, National Communication Association

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nam syndrome has disabled the rhetori-cal function of jeremiad. To claim thatcontemporary conditions have arisenas a result of a lapse, a falling away ofthe individual from the principles ofthe collective, and to claim that re-demption can be achieved through arededication to those principles, re-quires a fundamental faith in those prin-ciples and in the bonds between indi-vidual and community. Here Vietnam’slegacy presents a challenge: How canone make such a call when the legiti-macy of that bond has been violated?How can one valorize past sacrifices,celebrate the virtues of those sacrifices,and lay the groundwork for future callsfor sacrifice, when memory of Viet-nam subverts earnest declaration ofnational purpose and identity with itsown cynical voice and ironic inflec-tion? In Saving Private Ryan, Owen con-tends, Spielberg meets this challengeby constructing the justification for thenational commitment to wage warthrough visual tropes rather thanthrough the established war film con-vention of ‘‘the speech,’’ a declarationof moral principles explaining why wefight. As the title of this essay suggests,Spielberg constructs the moral justifica-tion for waging war and accepting itshorrors and sacrifices in a moral cru-sade against the Nazi program of Holo-caust. Despite the fact that this crusadeis utterly implausible as an historicallyvalid premise for U. S. involvement inWorld War II (Novick, 1999), the Ho-locaust has gained definition in thefinal third of this century as the pre-mier moral failing of Western (read:Christian) culture, a transcendentbenchmark for personal and collectivemoral judgments and responsibilitiesand, perhaps, the sole unifying signi-fier of the American Jewish commu-nity. It is well worth noting that the

emergence of the Holocaust as a sym-bolic construction roughly parallels thetime frame of the Vietnam syndrome.

What might be the implications,then, as well as the entailments andaccomplishments, of re-imagining thewar as a national quest against theconsuming flames of the Holocaust?To explore these questions, I beginwith a closer examination of criticismsleveled at Saving Private Ryan. I thenturn to the film and discuss how Holo-caust memory is woven into the narra-tive. Next, I examine the ‘‘Americaniza-tion’’ of Holocaust memory and finally,I consider how reimagining nationalpurpose through the Holocaust con-structs a more ecumenical nationalidentity, one that is more consistentwith conditions of post-VietnamAmerica.

Criticisms, Left and RightOn the political and cultural left,

criticisms of Spielberg’s film have fo-cused upon the ideological legitima-tion that inevitably accompanies cin-ematic tellings of war stories. Forexample, historian Howard Zinn (1998)writes:

[K]nowing the horrors of war has neverbeen an obstacle to a quick build-up of warspirit by patriotic speeches and an obsequi-ous press. All that bloodshed, all that pain,all those torn limbs and exposed intestineswill not deter a brave people from going towar. They just need to believe that thecause is just. . . . Vietnam caused large num-bers of Americans to question the enter-prise of war itself. Now, Saving Private Ryan,aided by superb cinematographic technol-ogy, draws on our deep feeling for the GIsin order to rescue not just Private Ryan butthe good name of war. (p. 39)

Film critic Thomas Doherty (1998) ech-oes Zinn’s concerns about succumbingto the seductions of the film’s technol-

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ogy: ‘‘The guilty secret here is that farfrom being horrifying and repulsive,the stunning spectacle of sight andsound is a joy to behold and hearken tofrom a theater seat, pure cinema at itsmost hypnotic and intense. Godard isright: war on screen is always exhilarat-ing’’ (p. 69).

Beyond the claims of saving war’sgood name, Spielberg has also beenaccused of participating in a cross-generation fawning over ‘‘the GreatestGeneration,’’ an uncritical and mawk-ish swansong of adulation by a baby-boomer generation for its elders (Gold-stein, 1999). In a world in which moralcertainties and principled action havegiven way to murkiness of nationalpurpose, moral expedience in foreignpolicy, and personal self-indulgence,Saving Private Ryan is both homage tothose who sacrificed and an expressionof longing for a time when moral dis-tinctions were far less problematic. Ofcourse, the clarities of that former timeowe, in part, to distortive systems ofprivilege and power relations basedupon race, gender, ethnicity, and reli-gion.

Conservative voices have beenequally harsh towards Saving PrivateRyan for what it fails to accomplish.Bruce Edwards (1998) writes in HumanEvents, ‘‘I cannot remember a WWIImovie with so few stirring speeches,nor one so bereft of endearing allu-sions to one’s native soil. Neither haveI seen one whose dialogue features solittle reference to the propriety of de-fending freedom against oppression’’(p. 22). Rather, ‘‘the grand moral land-scape’’ of the war has been reduced toa ‘‘defiantly personal, quite private mo-rality’’ (p. 22). Christopher Caldwell(1998) writes in Commentary that thenarrative ‘‘undercuts any potentiallypatriotic message.’’ In a film ‘‘rich in

examples of cowardice and criminal-ity,’’ Caldwell is astonished by Spiel-berg’s admission of identification withCorporal Upham, an ‘‘unctuous fig-ure’’ (p. 49) and the most glaring ex-ample of what Caldwell reads as cow-ardice. Moreover, he, too, notes withdisappointment the lack of nationalis-tic discourse:

In any war there are two narratives: thenarrative of civilization . . . and the on-the-ground narrative. . . . There can be overlap. . . [although] frequently the two narra-tives exist in hermetic isolation from eachother. . . . What is new about [Saving Pri-vate Ryan] is that, as a battle film, it ispurged of the context of civilization. (p. 50)

Caldwell argues that audiences can con-tend with vivid depictions of the chaos,violence, and sheer terror of warfareprecisely because the narrative of civi-lization creates an interpretive contextfor these depictions. Saving Private Ryan‘‘hardly so much as acknowledges theexistence of this realm of public val-ues.’’ This is not to say that Spielberg’ssoldiers operate in a realm devoid ofhuman values; rather, their experi-ences are ‘‘exiled from the values thatput them there in the first place.’’ Thus,‘‘the film fatally ‘privatizes patriotism’by divorcing it from its proper, politicalcontext ’’ (p. 50, emphasis added).

Both strands of criticism are under-standable in terms of this nation’s trau-matizing Vietnam experience. Trau-matic memory reaches beyond the livesof those who have lived trauma intothe lives of those for whom it becomesinheritance. It imbues the past with anenduring emotional salience (Schud-son, 1995). Because the rhetoricalstructuring of the past is infused withtraumatic memory of Vietnam, theresonances of that traumatic memorymilitate against an integrative nationalcommunity bound by common inter-

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ests, agendas, commitments, and obli-gations.

This is the specter of ‘‘the Vietnamsyndrome.’’ It motivated Richard Nix-on’s Vietnam policies to stave off na-tional decline into a ‘‘pitiful giant’’ butto no avail. That image was made vividby photographs of helicopter wreck-age in the Iranian desert, evidence ofthe botched rescue mission of Ameri-can hostages in Teheran. It loomedlarge in Ronald Reagan’s campaign ofnational ‘‘reillusionment’’ (Wallace,1995), in his celebration of the warrioron his trip to the cemeteries at Nor-mandy and at Bitburg, and in his char-acterization of Vietnam as simply onebattle in the ultimately successful waragainst the Soviets’ ‘‘evil empire.’’George Bush’s inaugural addressnamed the need to ‘‘get Vietnam be-hind us,’’ and America’s Vietnam fail-ure was context for his address to thenation on the eve of the Persian GulfWar; this time, our military would notbe fighting with ‘‘one hand tied behindtheir backs.’’ Vietnam’s presence waspalpable in the crossfire of acrimoni-ous debates about guilt and responsi-bility precipitated by Robert Mc-Namara’s 1995 mea culpa, In Retrospect.Vietnam persists in contemporary pur-suits of multi-lateral military ventures,in public relations campaigns to craftpublic support for military action (andin parodic commentaries such as thefilm Wag the Dog), in the reliance uponstrategies of techno-war, and in thecontrol of news media by militaryspokespersons (Haines, 1995).

In the wake of ‘‘the Vietnam syn-drome,’’ reconstituting an integrativepast—imag(in)ing a national commu-nity unified by shared moral principlesin pursuit of transcendent promise—poses significant challenges. Spielberg(1998) acknowledges, ‘‘After Vietnam,

[realism] was all that mattered’’ in warfilms (p. 66). The patriotic fervor,simple moral clarities, and broad cul-tural stereotypes that defined the cin-ematic tropes of war films of decadesago are no longer viable, having beenreduced to ironic caricatures. The di-minished capacity of the American na-tional community to suspend disbeliefand to engage discourses of nationalcelebration owes to the disillusioningexperiences of the final third of thetwentieth century.1

It is understandable, then, that Spiel-berg’s homage to those who fought inthe greatest of wars offers, quite liter-ally, a pedestrian view of that war.‘‘The speech’’ is absent, no longer aviable narrative device, and its ab-sence creates the appearance of defi-ciency, what Caldwell bemoans as theabsent ‘‘narrative of civilization.’’ Allwe encounter is men contending withmaterial conditions—terrifying, hor-rific, exhausting, chaotic, life threaten-ing. Moral purpose is reduced to Capt.John Miller’s actuarial rationalizations—sacrifice some to save untold others—yet even that moral tenet is overturnedas many must be sacrificed to save one.

But embedded within the film’s nar-rative structure, scenic composition andcharacter development we find the Ho-locaust. We may be directed towardthe ‘‘quite private morality’’ of the film’scharacters, but the Holocaust is the‘‘grand moral landscape,’’ the groundupon which these characters search forPrivate Ryan. In the film, characters’understanding of this great, Americanmoral enterprise is so profound andfoundational that it emerges only inthe knowing glance of an eye onOmaha Beach. Its lesson is at the cen-ter of the film’s dramatic tension, whereit is tested and found true. Spielberg’searlier critical triumph, Schindler’s List,

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proclaims a secularized aphorism fromthe Mishnah, ‘‘Whoever saves one lifesaves the entire world.’’ The quest to savePrivate Ryan instantiates this moral tenet.

Holocaust Memory asVisual Trope

Central to Holocaust memory is thecharacter development of Private Mel-lish and the narrative functions thatthis character serves. As the unit’s Jew-ish member, Mellish is the vehiclethrough which viewers can engage theHolocaust and participate in construc-tion of its memory as an American phe-nomenon. Readings of Mellish rest, inpart, upon that character’s relationshipto others. Key in this regard is thecharacter of Corporal Upham. Uphamis a multi-lingual interpreter, fluent inFrench and German; he is young, welleducated, infused through his literaryexperiences with romantic ideals ofwarfare and the bonds of brotherhood,and thoroughly naı̈ve about war’s bruterealities. Upham’s surname suggestsEnglish origins; he is positioned as thesheltered, idealistic, and privilegedWASP.

Mellish serves three distinct func-tions. First, he is the basis for insertinginto the film an acknowledgment of thenation’s moral conscience and commit-ment—the reason that the nation is wag-ing war. Second, Mellish embodies asecularized Judaism and is constructedas a thoroughly assimilated and recog-nizable American character. Third, inMellish’s demise, we encounter one ofthe key dynamics that motivate con-temporary Holocaust memory: themortally endangered Jew, resisting; anAmerican Christian incapable of act-ing despite hearing the cries of the Jew;and the unmitigated horror of Nazipredation and extermination becauseno one was there to prevent it (Cole,

1999; Cornwell, 1999; Linenthal, 1995;Novick, 1999). A close reading of keyscenes, including description of theirtechnical composition, reveals how thesemiotic structure of these scenes sup-ports these contentions.

The Unspoken Moral Covenant

Following an opening that framesSaving Private Ryan as a memory projectlocated in the present moment, thefilm flashes back to 1944 with a 24minute reenactment of the landing onOmaha Beach. This scene is the basisof much of the film’s critical acclaim,moving Paul Fussell (1989) to suggestthat it be used as a documentaryentitled, ‘‘Omaha Beach: Aren’t YouGlad You Weren’t There?’’ (Cohen,1998/99). The landing scene carriesthe viewer along at such a frenetic pacethat any query into the reasons for thismassive and horrific enterprise is likelyto be deferred. The first moment ofrelative stasis is reached after the beachhas been secured and the German em-placements destroyed.

The moment is defined by a longshot with continuous fluid action. Itbegins with a 3/4 shot of two Americansoldiers squatting in a German trenchrifling the remains of a dead German.One of the soldiers stands up and callsout to Mellish, ‘‘Hey, Fish. Look atthis. A Hitler Youth knife.’’ He handsthe knife up to Mellish, who is fore-grounded in the shot. Mellish flips theknife and replies in a mocking tone,‘‘And now it’s a shabbat challah cutter,right?’’ In this off-handed reply is therecognition of something more omi-nous, and the camera tracks Mellish ina continuous close-up shot as he col-lapses to the ground and begins to sob.The camera cuts back to the soldiers inthe trench. They grimace, lower theireyes, and shake their heads. The cam-

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era returns to Mellish in a low angle,extreme close-up shot, signifying thecentrality of his trauma to this scene.At this point, the camera begins an-other long fluid shot. It cuts to Sgt.Horvath, who we see filling a small tinwith sand. The camera pans in close toenable us to see that the tin is labeled‘‘France.’’ Horvath places it in his ruck-sack along with two other tins labeled‘‘North Africa’’ and ‘‘Italy.’’ The cam-era pans up to a sustained low angleclose-up shot of Horvath’s face as hesighs inaudibly and looks away. Hor-vath’s demeanor suggests an inadver-tent intruder. The camera cross-cutsamong Horvath, Mellish, and unnamedothers. In these cross-cuts, we see eyesaverting and looking away all the whilethat Mellish sobs.

Here is the implied covenant: Nomatter how far they must travel, nomatter where they must fight, even tothe ends of the earth they will perse-vere in order to end this unspeakable,and unspoken, horror. The ritual ofshabbat, conducted in synagogues andin Jewish homes around the globe, sig-nifies and celebrates the covenant of apeople with their God. In this souvenirknife lies the profanity that would anni-hilate the sacred. Mellish is at the cen-ter of this horror.

Americanizing the Judaic Ethos

A covenant may be sacred, an ideol-ogy profane, but the ability to identifywith the potential victims is crucial forothers to act on their behalf and foraudiences to care about the character’sfate. In Mellish we find the thoroughlyassimilated American Jew. There isnothing alien about him; there is novestige of the signifiers that differenti-ated European Jewry from the Chris-tian societies in which they lived andfrom the national identities that they

were denied. In fact, Mellish embodiesthe ideals of American masculinity. Heis physically fit, self-assured, knowl-edgeable about the ways of war, quick-witted, adept at verbal sparring andheterosexual banter, and entirely com-fortable in the company of men.

As an assimilated American Jew,Mellish does not wear his faith openly,but he flaunts his identity as a Jew tothose who would destroy him. In ascene in which the patrol is under fire,he taunts the unseen German shooter,‘‘Your father was circumcised by myrabbi, you prick!’’ In another, he en-counters a column of German POWs,marching under guard with their handsclasped behind their heads. He ap-proaches the column and thrusts hisdog tags, entangled with a Star ofDavid, towards the passing prisoners,mocking them with ‘‘Juden . . . Ja,Juden, Juden!!’’ Mellish has moxie.

Abandonment and Extermination

This scene is set in a second floorroom and occurs during the final battlesegment of the film. It is comprised of39 shots, and lasts a total of 4 minutes.Action is continuous and frantic, offer-ing viewers little respite. In the narra-tive flow, Corporal Upham is chargedwith bringing belts of ammunition toMellish and another soldier who havetaken up position in a second storyroom. Beset by fear and surrounded bythe frantic movement of experiencedsoldiers in battle, Upham becomesoverwhelmed and freezes. German sol-diers move towards the building. Up-ham hides behind a pillar at the cornerof the building as the Germans pass byhim and ascend the stairway to thesecond floor. In the next shot, we arepositioned in the upstairs room, withthe camera situated behind the twoAmericans, looking towards the door-

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way. We hear footsteps on the stairs.There is a momentary silence. Mellishcalls out, ‘‘Upham?’’ Silence. TheAmericans spray their last rounds ofammunition in a burst of machine gunfire at the wall by the doorway. Wehear the sound of a body collapsing,and blood begins to pool in the door-way. All is silent. Suddenly, there is aburst of fire from the doorway, and theunnamed American soldier writhes onthe floor, shot through the throat. Mel-lish shoots the first German to enterthe room. Another German soldier en-ters the room. With Mellish’s ammuni-tion now exhausted, hand-to-handfighting ensues. It is at this point in thescene that Holocaust memory becomesvividly inscribed.

Cinematically, Mellish’s strugglewith the German is disorienting andclaustrophobic. The camera dollies infor extreme close-ups and pulls backrepeatedly—creating the sensation forviewers of ducking and dodging thelunging action. A rocking motion isadded to this visual frenzy.2 The cam-era then parallel-cuts to the battle rag-ing in the ruins of the village and toUpham on the stairs cowering, unableto fix his foot on a step. The followingshots demonstrate how viscerally theaudience is sutured into the action.From Upham on the stairs, the cameraparallel-cuts back to Mellish and theGerman. We begin with a low anglemedium close-up of the German, en-tirely obscuring Mellish. The camerapulls back to include Mellish, and thenit cants, signifying the intensity andurgency of the chaos. The camera dol-lies in again, cutting Mellish from thescene and focusing again on the Ger-man. Mellish and the German roll overthe mortally wounded American, astheir proximity to the camera’s lensunderpins the suffocating terror of the

moment. The entire shot transpires inseconds. A parallel-cut takes us back toUpham, with a high angle long shot,followed by another that returns us to along shot of the struggle. Mixed in withthe ambient sounds of grunts is thedistinctive sound of metal as Mellishpulls his bayonet from its sheath. Anextreme close-up follows. Mellish is ontop; as the two roll over each other,screaming, the German wrests controlof the bayonet. Another parallel cutreturns us to Upham, in an extremelow angle shot, focusing upon his gai-ters and boots, and the steps that hecannot master; the screams from theroom further debilitate Upham, as amedium close up of his face pans downto fingers fumbling the rifle’s safetyrelease, and then pans back to the ter-ror in Upham’s face. Another parallelcut returns us to the room with a lowangle, extreme close-up of Mellish’sface. The blade is pointed at his chest.The camera pans up to the German,with the blade prominent in the centerof the image. Mellish screams as hemusters the strength to push the knifeaway. A high angle, extreme close-upfollows; the German is on top and incontrol of the bayonet. He begins tospeak (in German), ‘‘Let’s put an endto this.’’ Then a close-up follows ofMellish and the German in which Mel-lish entreats in rapid fire, ‘‘Stop, stop,stop!’’ Drenched with sweat and pant-ing, the German slowly begins to pen-etrate Mellish’s chest with the bayonet;the sounds of its entry are unmistak-able. In a low angle, extreme close-upof the German’s hand on the bayonet’shandle, we see the blade penetratingfurther into Mellish’s chest. Mellish’sstruggling gives way to sounds of gur-gling and breaking bone. The Germanspeaks softly (again, in German), ‘‘Thiswill be easier for you. Much easier. It

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will soon be over.’’3 In a close-up ofMellish, mouth agape, the German’s faceenters the frame, dripping sweat, their lipsnearly close enough to kiss. The Germansoothes Mellish, softly uttering ‘‘Shhh . . .shhhhh. . . .’’ The camera pulls back. TheGerman is lying on Mellish, one hand onthe bayonet handle, the other restrainingthe now limp body. He pushes the bladeall the way in. The only sound is of theGerman’s heavy breathing.

Meanwhile, a parallel cut takes us tothe exterior action of the battle ragingin the streets, and another parallel cut,using a high angle shot looking downthe stairs, returns us to Upham, col-lapsed and in tears. The leg of theGerman enters the frame. From theunseen room, there is only silence. Up-ham tries to make a gesture of concilia-tion. An extreme low angle shot looksup over Upham’s body toward the headof the stairs where the German isbathed in light. He begins to descend.A reverse shot follows, from the top ofthe stairs, and as the German continuesdownward, he steps around the cower-ing Upham, a potential foe of no conse-quence. We, too, are positioned to lookdown upon the sobbing Upham. In thenext shot, a close-up, the Germanemerges into the exterior light. Helooks to his left, his right, behind, andthen exits. In this brief shot, we canglimpse in passing the military designa-tion on his collar; Mellish’s slayer is amember of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, theelite corps of the Nazi party that ranthe extermination camps and coordi-nated the Final Solution. In the lastshot of this four minute scene, the cam-era pans back up the stairs. It dollies inon Upham, who sinks behind the barsof the staircase railing, curls up into afetal position and heaves with sobs.

The intimacy of Mellish’s rape-likestruggle and his blood sacrifice are hor-

rific. Their impact is intensified by Up-ham’s inability to act. Theater audi-ences groan audibly as the cameraparallel-cuts again and again betweenthe life-and-death struggle in the up-stairs room, and Upham on the stair-way. We see Upham in anguish, inca-pacitated by fear, unable to commandhis body to act as he knows he should.He—and we—hear Mellish’s screamsand cries as he struggles for his life andultimately succumbs. Woven into thefabric of this scene, viewers encounterone of the most compelling reasons forthe Americanization of Holocaustmemory—guilt for not having acted, fornot having acted sooner, for not hav-ing done enough. Caldwell and Ed-wards long for a speech that celebratesa nation’s commitment to oppose tyr-anny and oppression as foundationalto its moral identity, an identity thathas fused the Christian principles ofcolonial America with the secular na-tionalism of the modern nation-state(Bercovitch, 1978). This scene instanti-ates the failure of America—as a pre-dominantly Christian nation4—to actupon that commitment, to oppose ac-tively and vigorously Nazi persecu-tion, and to help save European Jewry.

Americanizing HolocaustMemory

The cultural genealogy by which Ho-locaust memory grew into a distinctlyAmerican phenomenon reveals the en-tanglements of popular and politicalculture (Sturken, 1997), and of vernacu-lar and official discourses (Bodnar,1992). To begin, the Holocaust did notemerge from the ashes of the extermi-nation camps as a coherent symbolicconstruction. For a decade and a halffollowing the end of World War II, theprogram of genocide that consumedEuropean Jewry was cast within the

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larger horrors of the war in Europe(Cole, 1999). The traumas borne bysurvivors of the camps who emigratedto start new lives were generally bornein silence. Starting anew after traumarequires looking forward.5

Not until 1959 was the word ‘‘holo-caust’’ used in the New York Times (Cole,1999, p. 7). Not until the 1960s did‘‘the Holocaust’’ begin to crystallize inpopular imagination as specifically sig-nifying the systematic and bureaucrati-cally organized program of Nazi massextermination of European Jewry. The1960 capture of Adolph Eichmann andhis 1961 trial in Israel was the firstshowcase for international attention onthe annihilation of six million Jews.6As a result of Jewish survivors testify-ing at the trial, ‘‘the Holocaust’’ beganto take shape as a distinctly Jewishnightmare. At this juncture ‘‘the ‘Holo-caust’ became an ‘archetype’, ‘an inde-pendent icon’, ‘a figure for subsequentpain, suffering, and destruction’ and‘began to inform all writers’ literaryimagination as a prospective trope,’’(Young, cited in Cole, 1999, p. 8).

Most scholars are in agreement thatthe 1967 Arab-Israeli War is the cen-tral moment in the construction of Ho-locaust memory. It held the same fore-boding as did the destruction ofEuropean Jewry, but this time, it wasmotivated by annihilation of the stateof Israel, and this time, at the hands ofa unified Arab world. Six days after thefirst attacks, Israeli forces stood on theJordan River, on the banks of the Nile,and at the gates of Damascus. Jerusa-lem was retaken, and Israelis—Jews—stood again at the sacred wall of theSecond Temple. This was a definingmoment for the American Jewish com-munity, as well as for the state of Israel.

Judaic Studies scholar Jacob Neusner(1992) points to three inter-related phe-

nomena that underlie the Americaniza-tion of Holocaust memory: First is the1967 Arab-Israeli War. Second is theemergence in the mid- to late 1960s ofmultiple discourses within the Ameri-can community asserting ethnic minor-ity identity and victimization. Onemanifestation of this trend was the es-tablishment of various ethnic studiesprograms and departments in collegesand universities throughout the nation.It was in this institutional context thatcourses on the Holocaust began to beoffered, and these courses drew—andcontinue to draw—a broad populationof students, including the predomi-nantly Christian population. Holo-caust memory is also the beneficiary ofan unfortunate consequence of the ris-ing recognition of minority histories.Edward Linenthal (1995), chronicler ofU. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,writes that these discourses of identityhave degenerated into ‘‘a grotesquecompetition for status as ‘first and worst’victims among American ethnicgroups, vying for the ‘fruits’ of officiallyrecognized suffering’’ (p. 14). In thiscontest, the Holocaust is unassailable;no claims of oppression can competewith its enormity, its sweep, its utterbrutality, and its vast bureaucratic engi-neering.

The third factor contributing to thepotency of American Holocaustmemory is the mythic transformation‘‘from the mundane murder of mil-lions into a tale about cosmic evil,unique and beyond all comparing’’ (p.269). In the Holocaust we encounterthe archetypal myth of salvation, the‘‘myth of the darkness followed by thelight; of passage through the nether-world and past the gates of hell; then,purified by suffering and by blood, intothe new age’’ (p. 268). Following thethe Six-Day War, the American Jewish

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community began to think of itself interms of sacrifice and redemption. Eu-ropean Jewry was the offering of holo-caust, literally a sacrifice consumed byfire. Israel and America were the sitesand sources of a people’s redemption.A story of evil’s banality (Arendt,1964)—the bureaucratic administrationof a state policy of extermination—became transformed into the centralcultural narrative of survival and re-newal beyond consumption and incin-eration. Moreover, the allure and acces-sibility of Holocaust memory toChristian America is due at least inpart to its mythic construction throughconcepts central to Christian theology—innocence sacrificed, renewal, and re-demption.

The exhilaration of Israel’s 1967 vic-tory and this ‘‘new age’’ was sooncrushed by the Yom Kippur War of1973. Israel was imperiled. Victory didcome but only after dire setbacks atconsiderable human cost and after thedirect intervention of the U. S. by airlift-ing supplies in the midst of the war.This role was a key factor for bothIsraeli and American Holocaustmemory. Michael Berenbaum (1986)writes, ‘‘the fate of [Israel] was depen-dent upon gentile rulers . . . [Israel] washumbled to discover itself dependenton the good will of others in order tosurvive’’ (p. 450) once again, an ironiccounterpart to Yad Vashem’s Holo-caust lesson, ‘‘Never again.’’

In 1976 an Air France flight originat-ing in Tel Aviv was hijacked by Pales-tinian terrorists and flown to Entebbeairport in Uganda. Seventy Israeli pas-sengers were identified and marked ashostages to be murdered; a dramaticIsraeli commando raid foiled the hijack-ers and rescued the passengers. Thisevent was covered widely by the U. S.news media and was quickly made into

a television movie in 1977. Also in1977 Israelis endorsed the nationalisticLikud Party and chose Menachem Be-gin as their prime minister. Begin ar-ticulated an uncompromising Jewishnational identity built upon strength,resistance, and self-interest. In a worldwhere the place of Jews is never fullyaccepted, often debated, and repeat-edly the object of genocidal hatred,militancy is survival, compromise,death. In the United States, the grow-ing identification of the American Jew-ish community with Israel was centralto the myth of ‘‘Holocaust and Re-demption.’’ It meant that the survivalof Israel—the redemptive site of theextermination of six million—became asacred obligation. Holocaust memorybecame the basis of the covenant bind-ing the American Jewish communityand the state of Israel.

Threatening this covenant was Presi-dent Jimmy Carter. An evangelicalChristian, Carter expressed support fora Palestinian homeland. He endorsedthe Palestinian Liberation Organiza-tion as a party to the Geneva peacetalks on the Middle East. In the au-tumn of 1977, he proposed linking thesale of F-15 military aircraft to Israelwith sales to Egypt and Saudi Arabia,nations that four years earlier hadsought the annihilation of Israel. Thedebate on that proposal continued wellinto 1978.

Holocaust memory was not only be-ing shaped in the official discourses ofthe government. In March 1978,American Nazis applied for a paradepermit in Skokie, Illinois, home to30,000 Jews, among whom were nu-merous Holocaust survivors. Like theraid on Entebbe, this event, too, wastransformed into a critically acclaimedtelevision docudrama (O’Connor,1981). As columnist William Safire

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noted at the time, ‘‘America has novivid reminder of the Final Solution,but we have a reminder than not evenIsraelis can boast: our own home-grown handful of Nazis’’ (Safire, quotedin Linenthal, 1995, p. 18).

Through the genre of docudrama,television has played a crucial role inshaping American Holocaust memoryand in widening its identification be-yond the Jewish community. No televi-sion event had greater impact than didthe nine and a half hour televisionminiseries Holocaust. Beginning on Sun-day, April 16, 1978, and running forfour consecutive nights, Holocaust intro-duced American viewers to the Weissfamily, a family of thoroughly assimi-lated German Jews. Through them,American viewers could experience theconsuming encroachment of the FinalSolution. The series was viewed by asmany as 120 million Americans.Through the cooperation and lobby-ing of various interests, the series satu-rated public consciousness. Newspa-pers carried special inserts. Studyguides were prepared for viewers andschool children. Religious leaders hadadvance viewings, so from pulpitsacross the nation, the Sunday sermonsof priests, ministers, and preacherswould reinforce the designation of theseries premiere as ‘‘Holocaust Sun-day.’’ Yellow Stars of David distrib-uted by the National Conference ofChristians and Jews were to be wornproudly on that day (Novick, 1999).7

The national impact of this televi-sion event was substantial and drewfurther attention to the need for theCarter administration to repair itsbreech with the American Jewishcommunity. On May 1, 1978, less thantwo weeks following the conclusion ofthe mini-series, President Carter an-nounced his executive order forming

the President’s Commission on the Ho-locaust. The announcement was madein a Rose Garden ceremony celebrat-ing the 30th anniversary of the state ofIsrael. Prime Minister Begin was inattendance, as were 1000 rabbis (Linen-thal, 1995). The political expedienceand transparency of Carter’s announce-ment notwithstanding, this act ulti-mately institutionalized the centralplace of American Holocaust memoryin American national identity; it re-sulted in the United States HolocaustMemorial Museum, situated on theMall in Washington, D.C.

The appropriation of Holocaustmemory and its symbolic constructionas a distinctly American phenomenonhas resulted from the interplay of offi-cial public culture, the trends and dis-courses that pervade the society, andthe mass mediated texts of Americanpopular culture. In fact, the signifi-cance of the United States HolocaustMemorial Museum, dedicated in April1993, cannot be evaluated apart fromthe impact of Schindler’s List, releasedin December of the same year. Presi-dent Clinton and Oprah, alike, urgedAmericans to view the film as a moralobligation of citizenship (Cole, 1999).With endorsements such as these, wecan appreciate the import of the follow-ing commemorative sentiments:‘‘[D]edicated to the memory of the sixmillion Jews and millions of other non-Jews who were murdered by the Nazis

and their numerous helpers . . . [Its]main task . . . is to present the facts ofthe Holocaust, to tell the Americanpublic as clearly and comprehensivelyas possible what happened in that dark-est chapter. . . .’’ Its most relevant morallesson is understanding ‘‘the passive by-stander’s inadvertent guilt. . . .’’ (Wein-berg, cited in Berenbaum, 1993, pp.xiv–xv; emphasis added). These words,

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written about the Museum by its direc-tor, might equally have been written ofthe film.

Holocaust Memory,Saving Private Ryan,

and National ReillusionmentI conclude as I began, by noting

Owen’s (1999) argument about the dis-abling impact of America’s Vietnamexperience upon the secular jeremiad,a call to a people to redeem themselvesthrough a rededication to the prin-ciples that define them as ‘‘a people.’’Historian Sacvan Bercovitch (1978)writes, ‘‘Only in the United States hasnationalism carried with it the Chris-tian meaning of the sacred . . . onlyAmerica has united nationality and uni-versality, civic and spiritual selfhood,secular and redemptive history, thecountry’s past and paradise to be, in asingle synthetic ideal’’ (p. 176). Holo-caust memory has a crucial role inAmerican national identity that ex-tends beyond the American Jewishcommunity to the larger, predomi-nantly Christian population. Christiantheology, secularized through the cen-turies since colonial times, has pro-duced a national story and a nationalidentity that is grounded in principlesof innocence, guilt, sacrifice, suffering,and transcendent redemption (Engel-hardt, 1995; Steele, 1995). These arethe principles through which the indi-vidual tales of settlement, expansion,travail, and triumph have been inte-grated into the American mythology ofever expanding promise and inclusive-ness, of movement towards a transcen-dent state of political grace. This is thesecular covenant that is the source ofnational unification and common com-mitment as a people.

In Saving Private Ryan we need noexplanation to understand why Omaha

Beach is being stormed; it is in affirma-tion of this covenant. Cast against thebackdrop of the inferno that Elie Wie-sel calls the ‘‘Kingdom of Night,’’ webegin to understand the importance ofeight men searching for Private Ryan.In the context of Holocaust, no actionis more powerful than affirming the valueof a single human life. Here we encounterthe voice of Judaic law, Judaic principle,the Judaic meaning of the sacred.

Still, for a contemporary film set inevents more than a half-century ago,the subtle yet central role of Holocaustmemory requires explanation. I pro-pose three related answers: the continu-ing resonances of America’s Vietnamsyndrome and the need to acknowl-edge its presence; the problematic ofChristian foundations in the mythicstory of America; and the perpetualneed to construct an ethically usablepast.

Moral righteousness may have ledmany Americans—policy makers andordinary citizens, alike—to view wag-ing war in Vietnam as another chapterin a national story of mythic propor-tions. Vietnam may have begun formany as a story of righteousness oppos-ing tyranny, a quest against evil, but inthat quest that righteousness was re-vealed as distorted and bankrupt. Pub-lic accusations leveled against the na-tional government and those whoenacted its policies invoked Holocaustmemory directly. This time, Americawas accused of conducting a campaignof genocide against a ‘‘lesser’’ people, acharacterization supported by an unfor-tunate number of military and politicalfigures, alike. Moreover, these accusa-tions of ‘‘holocaust perpetrator’’ oc-curred during a period of rising Holo-caust awareness in the Americancommunity. As early as 1963, BertrandRussell wrote in the New York Times

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that the United States was conductinga war of annihilation in Vietnam, withthe goal of exterminating those who op-posed its political aims, and engagingin atrocities against innocent peoplethrough chemical spraying and na-palm (Russell, 1967). By 1971, philoso-pher Paul Menzel posed the questionin Moral Argument and the Vietnam Warwhether the term ‘‘genocide’’ shouldbe used to characterize U. S. policy inVietnam, noting its potent use by thattime (Menzel, 1971). It is no surprise,then, that the impact of Holocaust im-agery contributed to the symbolic dev-astation of national self-image. As aconsequence, the lingering hold of Viet-nam upon American memory hasmade the earnest declaration of na-tional purpose and identity fundamen-tally problematic.

How then, as Owen (1999) asks, canone tell an American war story that isin any way commemorative and cel-ebratory, especially when cinematic re-alism must acknowledge Vietnam? Af-ter all, in Saving Private Ryan, Spielbergacknowledges Vietnam’s influence byshowing Americans committing atroci-ties. One solution is to leapfrog overthe source of traumatic memory (Viet-nam) and manufacture redemption bygiving presence to an even more dis-tant past (World War II). The use ofHolocaust memory in Saving PrivateRyan re-enobles American nationalidentity. On first glance, Americanmoral righteousness in this narrative isplaced securely beyond reproach, andan Americanized Holocaust memoryis situated in the mainstream of na-tional identity. No matter what elseone might say of this nation’s shortcom-ings, one can say that it embraced thestruggle against the ‘‘Kingdom ofNight.’’ It recognized how dire andurgent the moment. It acted. From the

Hitler Youth knife to the shabbat chal-lah cutter, from the knowing glances tothe labeled tins of sand in Sgt. Hor-vath’s rucksack, this greatest of moralcovenants was fulfilled.

However, a closer examination re-veals the paradoxical voice of a nowsecularized Christianity as the sourceof the nation’s moral imagination. Thisparadox is instantiated in Corporal Up-ham’s crisis, and this crisis echoes inthe theological challenge of the Holo-caust for contemporary Christian theol-ogy. In the film’s narrative, Uphamarticulates a view of war that is roman-tic and Emersonian. War is the testingground of righteousness, revealing thetrue moral order of the world; it is thecontext in which men bond and canexpress their essential masculinity. Butthe crisis emerges when Upham discov-ers his betrayal; war is moral chaos.Incapacitated on the stairs as he hearsMellish’s screams, he knows he hasfailed, as the romantic myth of war hasfailed him. Earlier in the narrative, hiscommitment to rules of fair play in-duced Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller torelease a captured German. FollowingUpham’s failure to come to Mellish’said, he hides in a bomb crater, wherehe sees that same German shoot andmortally wound Miller. He is ag-grieved, responsible for two deaths.Now abandoning the moral imagina-tion that has failed him, Upham cap-tures the German at the battle’s end.The German attempts, once again, toappeal to Upham’s sense of fair play;Upham fires his rifle, murdering theGerman soldier. In this act is Upham’sfinal recognition of the paradox in themoral foundations of American na-tional identity. In this act is the warn-ing of Begin and the Israel of Holo-caust and Redemption: Fair play bythe rules of liberal pluralism can mean

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death in a world in which claims ofmoral righteousness obscure the ha-treds upon which those claims prosper.In this dialectical tension Upham mustnow live, seeking to reconcile his needfor a moral code with his memoriesand his culpability.

Similarly, Christianity grapples withits internal contradictions brought tolight vividly by the Holocaust. Chris-tianity’s claims of universal brother-hood and charity exist in tension withits exclusionary claims of the true pathto salvation. In this regard, theologianRosemary Reuther (1982) writes:

The anti-Semitic heritage of Christian civi-lization is neither an accidental nor a pe-ripheral element. . . . Anti-Semitism inWestern civilization springs, at its root,from Christian theological anti-Judaism. Itwas Christian theology that developed thethesis of the reprobate status of the Jew inhistory and laid the foundations for thedemonic view of the Jew that fanned theflames of popular hatred. . . . Anti-Judaismwas the negative side of the Christian affir-mation that Jesus was the Christ. (p. 25)

Echoing a widely stated position,Reuther argues further that Christianantipathy towards the Jews resulted infar less opposition to the Nazi programof Holocaust, and far less interventionon their behalf, than might otherwisehave happened. Christians ‘‘must takeresponsibility for the perpetuation ofthe demonic myth of the Jew that al-lowed the Nazis to make them thescapegoat of their project of racial pu-rity’’ (p. 27).

Moreover, and regardless of com-plicity, indifference, or resistance, themythic construction of the Holocaustis compelling to Christians as Chris-tians (Dietrich, 1995; Gushee, 1994).‘‘Christianity’s optimistic, transcen-dent claims’’ demand ‘‘a ‘meaning’ forsuffering and death,’’ and declare ‘‘aredemptive sacrifice having already

taken place’’ (Steele, 1995, p. 13). Inthis ‘‘triumphant . . . message of tran-scendence and consolation . . . [a]ll willbe made clear in due course, including,presumably, why the six million diedas they did’’ (p. 13). Here, in part, is theallure of Holocaust memory for theAmerican Christian community.

Finally, by suturing Holocaustmemory into Saving Private Ryan, thepast becomes a source of moral guid-ance for the future. Literary critic TimWood (1998) writes that ‘‘there is afunction for [narrative] in the construc-tion of an ethically usable past’’ (p.339). By constructing history throughthe narrative form, he argues, we con-front the ‘‘uncontrollable ‘other’ ’’ in atherapeutic practice of collectivememory. Saving Private Ryan is such anarrative. The other that we confront iscertainly the nightmare of the Naziinferno, but we also confront the ‘‘un-controllable otherness’’ of our own his-torical past. These are the disjuncturesbetween the moral foundations of anuplifting and unifying national iden-tity, and the indisputable recognitionthat those very foundations were foundwanting, and more distressingly, werepart of the ‘‘landscape of memory’’upon which the Holocaust was carriedout.

By suturing Holocaust memory intoSaving Private Ryan, Spielberg bestowsequal stature upon the vast historicalsweep of the D-Day invasion and theearthbound and pedestrian search forPrivate Ryan. In so doing, he re-imagines and reillusions a secularAmerican national identity. This newlyconstructed identity overcomes the de-fects of that which dominated duringthe years of Nazi fascism and whichfound its ruin in Southeast Asia. Spiel-berg’s newly constructed national iden-tity is ecumenical, fusing Christian andJudaic principle. As I have noted, Schin-

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dler’s List begins with a secularizedaphorism from the Mishnah: ‘‘Whoso-ever saves a single life saves the entireworld.’’ Its unabridged translation pro-claims: ‘‘Whosoever saves a single lifeof Israel saves the entire world.’’ In thisnewly constructed national identity,grounded in American Holocaustmemory and the commitments towhich it calls us, the distinction be-tween these two versions disappear.The two become one.8

Peter Novick writes in his provoca-tive book, The Holocaust in American Life(1999), ‘‘In recent years ‘Holocaust sur-vivor’ has become an honorific term,evoking not just sympathy but admira-tion, and even awe. Survivors arethought of and customarily described

as exemplars of courage, fortitude, andwisdom derived from their suffering’’(p. 68). Insofar as Spielberg appropri-ates the Holocaust and weaves it intoAmerican cultural memory, we are en-abled to bestow the same honor-ifics upon those who sacrificed in orderto end its horror. Here we see theconsequences of leapfrogging back overVietnam to the Second World War.Our inheritance in the present be-comes a reconstituted national identitygrounded in uncontested and incontest-able moral clarity and commitment, anidentity whose stature is measured bythe enormity of the horror it sought toend. We can only wonder whether areinvigorated national identity such asthis carries with it the germ of anotherVietnam.

Notes1Not coincidentally, the last cinematic appearance of a speech declaring national purpose in a

film narrative situated in a U. S. war was in John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968). The speech ofnational moral principle is still a widely used narrative device in fantasy-based films. Its use is bothearnest (e.g., Independence Day) and ironic (e.g., Starship Troopers).

2Visual representation offers the viewing audience the opportunity to be positioned as Holocaust‘‘witness.’’ But viewing can also be engaged in voyeuristically, in which one consumes thespectacle of Mellish’s consumption. Unlike the fixed photographic image, however, the construc-tion of this scene is designed to bring the viewer into the action, rather than distance the viewerfrom the images that the camera records. See Zelizer (1998) for a superb treatment of theappropriation of static visual images of the extermination camps.

3The grammatical form of ‘‘you’’ used by the German suggests intimacy and familiarity. It is notthe form that would ordinarily be employed between strangers.

4Bercovitch (1978) provides a detailed treatment of the Christian theocratic foundations of themoral principles for the national, secular credo. The Christian worldview that underlies nationalidentity is crucial to an appreciation of the allure that Holocaust memory holds for the nationalcommunity.

5Historians continue to grapple with questions about the past: What did the Allies know? Whendid they know it? What could they have done about it? Historian Raul Hilberg (1994) asserts thatthe U.S. and Great Britain knew of the impending eradication of European Jews as early as thesummer of 1942, and the catastrophe began to get press attention in the end of that year. Stories ofgenocide found their way to the West, but in an environment rich with strategic disinformation,and with limitations upon corroboration, how could one reconcile the uncertainties attributed tothese reports with the suspicions that they raised? Moreover, as historian Peter Novick suggests inhis provocative book, The Holocaust in American Life, in 1942–1943 U.S. attentions were focusedprimarily upon the war in the Pacific. In the slogan ‘‘Remember Pearl Harbor!’’ we see the nationalmotive of revenge. There is no comparable slogan, or motive, to energize public imagination andoutrage towards the mass dislocation, internment, and execution of civilian populations of Europe,generally, or the plight of European Jewry, specifically. True, press coverage of the war did include

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stories of atrocities, but these were reports of atrocities committed by the Germans and theJapanese against national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups. However, even this coverage wascomparatively minor to that of battles and the military progress of the war effort.

What could have been done remains a topic of heated dispute. Some claim a failure of will andcommitment, even among the American Jewish community (Medoff, 1987). The refusal to permitlegal entry to the liner, St. Louis (the ‘‘Ship of Fools’’), with its Jewish refugees, is prominent amongthe noted failures. So, too, is the failure to target Auschwitz and the railroad lines leading to it.Others claim that these accusations are naı̈ve, ignoring the complex web of political alliances,opportunities, constraints, resources, and capabilities. Discussions in and around the U.S. govern-ment specifically addressed the inadvisability of focusing upon the annihilation of European Jewry.Roosevelt was constrained, already accused of being too much in the debt of Jewish interests. Thedegree of anti-Semitism in the American community suggested the folly of framing the war inEurope as a crusade to save the Jews. Bombing only incapacitated railroad lines for a matter ofdays, and precision bombing was, and remains, a myth (See Novick, 1999).

6As Cole (1999, p. 7) notes, a primary audience for the Eichmann trial was the population ofIsraelis born subsequent to the war. The post-war Nuremburg trials were expressly concerned withthe more encompassing issue of ‘‘crimes against humanity,’’ and not what we now signify as ‘‘theHolocaust.’’

7This mini-series follows the success of Roots, broadcast in 1977. Holocaust has been called ‘‘theJewish Roots,’’ evidence, perhaps, of Neusner’s (1992) contention regarding the fragmentation ofAmerican national identity in favor of ethnic identities and claims of victimage as signifiers of status(See Novick, 1999, on this point). The sensitizing power of Holocaust for the broader American (i.e.,non-Jewish) community was considerable. It enabled the success of the 1981 television movie,Skokie, a dramatization of the threatened march by American Nazis in the Chicago suburb with alarge Jewish population, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. Coincidentally, the court battleover the Nazis’ right to march was contemporaneous with the airing of Holocaust. The culturalimpact and economic success of the mini-series led to numerous other portrayals of the Holocaust,although none achieved the audience or impact of the original.

8The key challenge, of course, is found in the tensions between recognizing the policyentailments of a national identity reconstituted through Americanized Holocaust memory andacting on those entailments as a matter of national moral commitment. For example, at thededication ceremony for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in April 1993, President BillClinton spoke of the fragility of ‘‘the safeguards of civilization.’’ Citing the ‘‘evil represented here inthis museum,’’ Clinton asserted that ‘‘as we are its witness, so must we remain its adversary. . . .’’Others, including Elie Wiesel, pointedly observed the lack of U. S. resolve in Bosnia againstSerbian ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’ (McDonald, 1993, p. A1).

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Wallace, M. (1996). Mickey Mouse history and other essays on American memory. Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press.

Wood, T. (1998). Mending the skin of memory: Ethics and history in contemporary narratives.Rethinking History, 2(3), 339–348.

Zelizer, B. (1999). Remembering to forget: Holocaust memory through the camera’s eye. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Zinn, H. (1998, Oct.). Private Ryan saves war. Progressive, 62(10), 38–39.

Received November 15, 1999Accepted May 22, 2000

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Documents

Why we fought: Holocaust memory in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan