When directors Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein began work on The U.S. and the Holocaust around 2015, some of the events the three-part historical documentary series would depict hadn’t even happened yet.
Initially, the series was inspired by questions viewers had for filmmakers including Burns after the release of The War (2007) and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014), as well as an invitation by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to work on a companion film to their exhibition, “Americans and the Holocaust.” The idea was to ask, what did the U.S. know about the Holocaust and when, and what should the U.S. have done about it? But as Burns, Novick and Botstein got down to work answering those questions over the course of the next seven years, their story began to resonate loudly with current events. Ultimately, before the series premiered on Sept. 18 on PBS, the filmmakers included some far more recent imagery — from the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA and the racist manifesto of Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof — at the end of the film to make a connection between past and present.
“We see authoritarianism, which is of course the main culprit back then, rearing its ugly head all around the world,” explains Burns of the addition of recent footage into the film. “And we see in the United States institutions that have held through great crises like the Civil War and the Depression and World War II being rocked.”
The film traces American sentiment and political action from the period that preceded the Holocaust through the aftermath of World War II, when it was clear how vast the genocide had been. Ultimately, the U.S. admitted just 225,000 refugees from the Nazi regime — more than any other sovereign nation, but far fewer than even the U.S.’ contemporaneous immigration quota system allowed. Before the third part of the series premiered on PBS, Burns and Novick sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss the series’ contemporary resonance, viewer reactions so far and why they incorporated the familiar tale of Anne Frank into the story.
You’ve said, Ken, that this series was initially scheduled for release in 2023 but you decided to expedite that release because it felt so timely…
Burns: Every film that we’ve worked on, we’ve always been aware of the echoes in the present. Human nature doesn’t change. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” We’re always feeling the rhymes. But our responsibility as storytellers and filmmakers struggling to get it right with scholars, with archives, to calibrate all that stuff, to learn how to tell a complex, interrelated narrative with lots of moving parts, is to ignore them. I mean, not ignore them, but just say we’re not going to call attention to them, we’re not going to point arrows and say, isn’t that so like today? That’s unnecessary. We have an intelligent audience and they will understand that.
As we told our story, particularly its setup, which is a little-told story of American dispossession of Native people’s lands and their murder and isolation into reservations, something Hitler admired; our own treatment of Black Americans beyond emancipation, [and] German jurists came and studied our Jim Crow laws to fashion their 1935 laws against the Jews; the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act that Hitler thought was just terrific, favoring white, Protestant, Northern European, Nordic, he would say “Aryan” peoples, it’s a kind of awful, toxic brew to which you add the Depression and its dislocations. So by table-setting that way, we felt as we were working on the project that we couldn’t just end, say, when a new immigration law was passed in 1965, which replaced the other one. We had to actually consider the fact that as we worked on this over the seven years, the rhymes — as Mark Twain might say — grew louder and louder and louder, and that we had to represent that very impressionistically in the last couple minutes of our film but more to the point, we wanted to accelerate the release of the film to this year and not next year, as we had originally planned, just to be part of a conversation.
We see authoritarianism, which is of course the main culprit back then, rearing its ugly head all around the world. And we see in the United States institutions that have held through great crises like the Civil War and the Depression and World War II being rocked: free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power, the independence of the judiciary, a free press unfettered by accusations by the state or actors of that level of disinformation at a high degree. So the authoritarian playbook has sort of been taken out. Racism is still prevalent in the United States and in the world. So we felt that we could take a story which represents I think to many people, as one of our survivors said, the nadir of civilization, and say, “Let’s have a conversation.” History often provides you with an opportunity to take a couple of steps back, to pull out a few of the fuel rods that animate our arguments today and make civil discourse impossible and permit us, perhaps, in storytelling, to continue a conversation about history and about what human beings are susceptible to. As Jefferson says in the Declaration, people are disposed to suffer tyranny. And so he’s implying that making a democratic government, whether it’s parliamentary or constitutional or whatever it is, requires energy and action. And I think what we see right now is a kind of atrophy and a willingness to say “well, you know, as long as the trains run on time, I’m okay to give this up.” But that’s a slippery slope as we see in the story that we’ve tried to tell in the three parts of The U.S. and the Holocaust.
Novick: As Ken was speaking about the story that we tell, I was trying to think, why are people responding the way they are? And I don’t want to generalize about the responses because it’s a pretty wide range. But one of the things that happens in many of the films we work on is people say “I didn’t know that.” And what’s really gratifying [is] that these are the [same] things that we didn’t know, that we learned in making the film. We live in this kind of oblivious present sometimes because we’re overwhelmed with so much information and it’s a very disturbing time and there’s all this stuff happening. I feel that way myself most of the time — I wake up and I open up the newspaper, I listen to the radio and I can’t make sense of what’s going on around me because it’s frightening, it feels different than what I’m used to. These forces are there, and somehow this film helped us understand the big-picture things Ken just described and I think that’s maybe why we’ve had the response we’ve had. Because it is nourishing to understand, to get some sense of what the hell is happening.
You both have been making films about American history for a long time. What in the making of this documentary caused you the greatest reexaminations not just of your preconceptions, but of your previous films?
Burns: I think as Lynn was suggesting, we don’t know going in, we’re not telling you what you should know — we’re sharing with you a process of discovery. We presume now, having been to a few rodeos, that all of our preconceptions, whatever they might be, are going to be exploded pretty early on. And they are, and by the time you finish it, you can’t really remember how completely ignorant you were of the situation. You know, we’ve got 20, 30, 40 times as much material to work with than what ends up in the final film, so we’re constantly trying to figure out what should be in and what should be out. Not just elements of story but also the visual calibration that takes place, so there’s not any kind of further dehumanization that takes place from showing ghastly imagery after ghastly imagery. If you think about the end of our film, the whole Auschwitz experience is told entirely with modern live cinematography narrated by a survivor. That was there, and it didn’t have to go into the worst images possible. So I think for us it’s always been a process and a learning curve. Sometimes it’s just working every single day on the last couple years of this with scholars. I don’t think there’s a day where we didn’t pick up the phone and talk to one of them or the other and say, “We’re saying this, you said it was okay but … is it okay?” And after we locked the film, we unlocked it 150 times to pull out an adjective we thought was maybe putting the thumb on the scale unnecessarily, unfairly, of adding a qualifying “perhaps” or “some said,” just to try to make it as fair as possible so that we have a presentation that permits people to have the kinds of changes or the kinds of range of feelings that Lynn was just suggesting. We certainly did.
Novick: Absolutely.
Burns: We cried like babies lots of times during it, and last night, watching episode two.
Novick: It was hard to watch. I mean, there’s so many ways in which this reframes our understanding of our history in such profound ways. We spent however many years, seven or eight years, working with Sarah Botstein and Geoff Ward on [The War], which dealt with the Holocaust at the end. We basically decided, we’re not going to do that [tackle the Holocaust] until the Americans find out about it, or until the camps are liberated. And so that was kind of an organizing principal for that project, that we’re telling the story of the American experience of the second World War. Now we’re telling the [story of the] American experience of the Holocaust, so it’s the same time period, it’s the same characters to some degree, but it’s a completely different story. I personally haven’t done that before. This has been profound, to think about flipping this around and focusing on what was happening in Europe and how did Americans respond to it, and not telling the story of the war per se, although we do do that as well.
I went into this thinking, and even having made the other film, that Americans didn’t know much about this [the Holocaust at the time]. Because that’s kind of what I had heard or thought, I don’t know where I got that, but I think many people feel that way. Here we’re showing that, actually, Americans did know a lot about what Hitler was doing, what he was saying, what he was promising, threatening. There were news reports, there was occasionally a photograph about something, there was a lot of information. So that just led us to deeply examine, well why did we respond the way we did and not want to let people in, keep our golden door shut, treat immigrants as a threat to our national security? It was really interesting, of many things that happened with this project, rethinking a period that we actually had spent a lot of time in because we’re asking different questions this time.
After having worked through all this material, are there any areas of the U.S.’ response to the Holocaust that you think could use more research or investigation, that you wish scholars could spend more time on?
Burns: Well, I think that the scholarship is pretty robust and continues to be robust and I think people are discovering new things; in fact, we open our film with the story of Anne Frank, which is kind of a familiar trope. You would expect us not to go there. Anne Frank is the introduction for most schoolkids in the United States to the story of the Holocaust and most people have heard or know about it but don’t think that there’s any relationship of the United States. But recent uncovering of letters and correspondence of Otto Frank, Anne’s father, reveals he spent a good deal of the ’30s trying to get to the United States and had everything going for him and he still couldn’t get through. And so we’re not interested in the counterfactual, but it makes you wonder, what happens if Anne Frank lives and she’s here? And so the arc of the Frank family story goes across all three episodes. Whatever time you do this, you’ve got a particular set of perspectives that you’re able to employ that are having to do with imagery availability, having to do with recent scholarship, but this is always changing. We see the past as fixed but it’s malleable. So we’ll discover a new area and the Holocaust scholars will go to work.
There’s some who have suggested that FDR is the villain on the American side of this piece and it’s just not borne out in the evidence, though as you see from our film, we hold his feet to the fire when there seems to be some insensitivity. Many people say “he could have done more by yelling louder” but we also see his political genius in understanding exigencies that others couldn’t see, and necessities that he had to ensure would happen. That simple kind of binary response — that’s a good guy, that’s a bad guy — just doesn’t apply. You can see clearly there are lots of bad guys in this thing and there are lots of good guys, too. But there are lots of places where it’s not so easy to divine what happened and I think we look forward to another film coming and new scholarship telling us new things. We don’t have the anxiety that the white Protestant majority had at the end of 19th century that we’re about to be replaced.
Novick: [Laughs] We look forward to that, right?
Burns: We look forward to [those] offering new scholarship or offering a new cinematic way of understanding it. And if you think about it, the Holocaust film shelf is pretty wide: from Judgment at Nuremburg to Night and Fog to The Sorrow and the Pity to Shoah to Schindler’s List to Sophie’s Choice, and recent ones as well. We’re just happy to get up on the shelf and be part of that conversation.
You had mentioned the decision to include some modern imagery and news items at the end of the film. Given your interest in not prescribing the viewer’s experience, how did you decide how much or how little of that to use?
Burns: It was a struggle, it was a real struggle for us. Talk about calibration. I don’t think there’s any place that got more massaged and more considered and more pulled out than that.
Novick: When the film was first conceived, obviously, the events that are described at the end had not happened. So we knew the film would go up to the end of World War II and then we were trying to figure out, okay, well, this story’s not over, so where do we go? So we went to the reform of the immigration law in 1965. That seemed like a very triumphant moment in some ways; it was problematic in other ways that we’ve made amends for the sins of the past, as President Johnson says at the time, but then the currents that are playing out are still with us, as [a subject] says in the film. And so we saw things happening around us that we felt compelled to help our viewers walk through recent history as well. And we traced anti-Semitism and the current of white supremacy and just mob violence and authoritarianism and how immigrants are spoken about as coming right up to the present, basically — the present as of a year or so ago. We had to finish the film. But if we hadn’t had to deliver it, there would be more events that we could have included because the story’s still not over, it’s still ongoing, and it speaks to what we were saying before: We’re living in a time where authoritarianism is a real threat. I think [of] what Daniel Mendelsohn says at the end of the film, which we added late in our editing process, about the fragility of democracy, the fragility of institutions. Things can change very quickly and that we shouldn’t feel safe and secure because these things happened in the past and we’re somehow protected. Because we aren’t. We’re living with that right now. We don’t say anything, we just let these events speak for themselves and let people figure out for themselves.
What has struck you about the reactions to the series so far compared to your previous films?
Burns: I don’t compare it to the past films because they’re all kind of different and have their things. This has a kind of [feel of], if there could be any more, where there’s not, appointment television, where people are streaming it at their own leisure. There’s a kind of conversation going on that we’ve seen periodically when we’ve had big, huge, tentpole series, usually longer ones than the three parts that this is, but having a kind of entering into the bloodstream and into the conversation, which is what we wanted to do. I think we’re debating how we teach our history and should we sanitize it and somehow make it all Madison Avenue perfect or, conversely, do you throw the baby out with the bathwater and just say American history is a litany of crimes? And we’ve never felt that that was the case — it was much more complicated and it was much more interesting in that complication. As Lynn said, and I do too, if you trust your audience and their intelligence, you don’t have to point arrows at this and say “See, isn’t this just like that or this?” but trust people to come to their own conclusions. And we don’t have anything that we want people to feel. We want them just to feel, that’s it. There’s no arguments to change people’s mind and to win the argument, which never happens, no one’s ever convinced. But stories work their way into people’s hearts, stories change things at the edges, stories sometimes change things in the middle, sometimes stories don’t do anything, sometimes stories are absorbed and the best of intentions are there and nothing happens, so it’s all a mixed bag. But the human impulse to tell stories, which is the editing of human experience into some form, is just basic to our DNA. And we’ve been dedicated for decades to trying to tell complicated stories about us — not just the U.S., but us.
Novick: We took this one on with a lot of humility because of the scope of the tragedy and the uncomfortable truths we were going to have to examine, and I think there’s the immediate reaction of people who are seeing it right now and that’s been incredible. And then I think as Ken’s saying, it will live on. People will hear about it a month from now and watch it. It’s streaming on PBS free for a month, but it’s going to be really interesting to see. It has the feeling of something that potentially could last because it hits people in a way that they want to tell their friends to watch it, and then they want to have a conversation, and then they want to take it to their kids. We’re seeing all of this on social media and with just anecdotal things at this point because it’s still on TV right now.
Frankly, when we were working on the film, sometimes people would ask what we’re working on, and some people would say, “Oh, I don’t know if I can really watch another movie about the Holocaust, it’s so difficult.” And I would say, “Well, just wait and see.” And I think we have found so far that people do want to watch it, they want to know this history and they’re willing to have the feelings Ken was just describing, which is hard. It’s not an easy story to tell, it’s not an easy film to watch and so it’s incredibly meaningful to us that people want to watch it, want to feel the things that it makes you feel and then see where it goes from there.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Source: Hollywood
