Reviewed by:

• Nazi and Holocaust Representations in Anglo-American Popular Culture, 1945-2020: Irreverent Remembrance by Jeffrey Demsky
• Phyllis Lassner (bio)

In 2003, toward the end of my course on Holocaust representation, a student eagerly reported that a new film transporting the story of Anne Frank to Spanish Harlem and titled Anne B. Real was a must-see and available on YouTube. I suggested that we all watch it and share our responses in class. Instead of a diary, the Afro-Latinx protagonist expresses her own plight by writing rap poems. My students loved it and would have enjoyed the support of Jeffrey Demsky, who finds that [End Page 207] instead of "supplant[ing] Anne Frank's factuality," the video "modernizes her story," making it relatable to today's students (87). In his critical survey of "tasteless jokes," cartoons, performances, and other irreverent forms of Anglo-American Holocaust discourses, Demsky develops a comprehensive argument that in order to reach today's students and those audiences uninitiated in Holocaust history or misled by social media distortions and denials, "absurdist portrayals can facilitate constructive remembrance" (vii, 129).

In this short but rigorously researched, succinct, and illuminating study, Demsky is particularly interested in the way Holocaust memorialization has evolved, from the widely reported confrontation with leading perpetrators at the Nuremberg Trials to its instantiation in the textual and visual turns of American and British popular culture. There is no doubt that Demsky wishes to be provocative. He argues that instead of ignoring problematic kitsch, scholars and teachers should instrumentalize it in the service of showing how Holocaust history and representation have developed in relation to contemporary life and attitudes in the US and Britain. Ideally, the result would be to "rejuvenate this past, helping to ensure that the history is remembered at all" (2).

Nazi and Holocaust Representations takes us back to earlier critiques of Holocaust memorialization that many survivors and scholars viewed as diminishing the suffering endured under the Third Reich but that reflect contemporaneous concerns among scholars and teachers. For example, following the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, some cultural critics argued that it expressed American triumphalism rather than the suffering of Nazism's "foreign" victims. For the British, Demsky posits, the Nuremberg Trials translated the embarrassments of prewar appeasement and diminishing global power into recognition of the nation's heroism and cultural diversity. Given the vastness of the Holocaust and the myriad forms of official and popular memorialization, debates persist about the impact of nationalist, ideological, commercial, and popular constructions of Holocaust memory.

Once Holocaust representation became a distinct field of study, scholars began to examine various narrative forms that represented survivors' fragmented memories, public memorialization, and fictional reinterpretations. Demsky reviews Philip Roth's imagined Anne Frank in The Ghost Writer as depicting the contradictions and limits of lessons wrought from the Holocaust. With an impact that has never diminished, Art Spiegelman's Maus defied the limits of acceptable narrative conventions by confronting readers with questions about the mediated authenticity and presumed gravity of Holocaust testimony and representation. That these questions continue to be addressed as controversial textual, [End Page 208] graphic, cinematic, and audio depictions proliferate sustains Demsky's study. For example, in rebellion against canonical modes of Holocaust representation, a cartoon image juxtaposing Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler and the lyrics of British rock stars parodies hallmarks of World War II heroism in order to declare "independence from this inherited past." In this vein Demsky invites us to understand the antisemitic lyrics performed by David Johansen and the Oi! rockers in the 1970s as recognition of how "HATEFUL" Nazi rhetoric was (59). Nonetheless, despite illuminating close readings of images and performances, prodigious historical and ideological contexts, and resourceful interpretations, the book strains in its efforts to transform abhorrent representations into pedagogical opportunities. Whether Holocaust mockery and disdain, as in the lyrics "Join the shower queue in your dancing shoes," will inspire learning "factual historical memory" about what Nazism meant for the Jews remains questionable (60).

In the case of American sitcoms, Demsky...

审核人：

• 纳粹和大屠杀在英美流行文化中的表现，1945-2020：杰弗里·德姆斯基 (Jeffrey Demsky ) 的不敬纪念
• 菲利斯·拉斯纳（生物）

2003 年，在我关于大屠杀再现的课程即将结束时，一名学生急切地报告说，一部将安妮·弗兰克的故事传到西班牙哈莱姆区并名为《安妮·B·雷亚尔》的新电影是必看的，并且可以在 YouTube 上观看。我建议我们都观看它并在课堂上分享我们的反应。这位非裔拉丁裔主角没有写日记，而是通过写说唱诗来表达自己的困境。我的学生喜欢它并且会得到 Jeffrey Demsky 的支持，他发现[End Page 207]视频没有“取代安妮·弗兰克的真实性”，而是“使她的故事现代化”，使其与今天的学生产生共鸣 (87)。在他对“无味的笑话”、卡通、表演和其他不敬形式的英美大屠杀话语的批判性调查中，德姆斯基提出了一个全面的论点，即为了让今天的学生和那些不了解大屠杀历史或被社交媒体歪曲误导的观众和否认，“荒诞的描绘可以促进建设性的纪念”（vii，129）。

在这项简短但经过严格研究、简明扼要且富有启发性的研究中，德姆斯基对大屠杀纪念活动的演变方式特别感兴趣，从广泛报道的与纽伦堡审判中的主要肇事者的对抗到其在美国和英国的文本和视觉转变中的实例化流行文化。毫无疑问，德姆斯基希望挑衅。他认为，学者和教师不应忽视有问题的媚俗，而应利用它来展示大屠杀历史和表现如何与美国和英国的当代生活和态度相关的发展。理想情况下，结果将是“重振过去，帮助确保完全记住历史”(2)。

纳粹和大屠杀的陈述让我们回到早期对大屠杀纪念活动的批评，许多幸存者和学者认为这些批评减少了第三帝国统治下的苦难，但反映了学者和教师同时期的担忧。例如，美国大屠杀纪念馆开馆后，一些文化评论家认为它表达的是美国人的必胜主义，而不是纳粹主义“外国”受害者的苦难。德姆斯基认为，对于英国人来说，纽伦堡审判将战前绥靖政策和全球实力减弱的尴尬转化为对国家英雄主义和文化多样性的认可。鉴于大屠杀的浩瀚以及无数官方和民间纪念形式，关于民族主义、意识形态、商业、

一旦大屠杀再现成为一个独特的研究领域，学者们就开始研究代表幸存者支离破碎的记忆、公共纪念和虚构的重新解释的各种叙事形式。德姆斯基评论菲利普罗斯在《幽灵作家》中想象的安妮弗兰克描绘了大屠杀教训的矛盾和局限性。阿特·斯皮格曼 (Art Spiegelman) 的《鼠》的影响从未减弱，它向读者提出有关大屠杀证词和陈述的中介真实性和假定严重性的问题，从而挑战了可接受的叙事惯例的局限性。这些问题继续作为有争议的文本来解决，[第 208 页结束]图形、电影和音频描述的激增支持了德姆斯基的研究。例如，为了反抗大屠杀的典型模式，将安妮·弗兰克和阿道夫·希特勒的卡通形象与英国摇滚明星的歌词并列，模仿二战英雄主义的标志，以宣布“从这个继承的过去中独立出来”。本着这种精神，德姆斯基邀请我们理解大卫约翰森和 Oi 演唱的反犹太主义歌词！1970 年代的摇滚歌手承认纳粹言论是多么“可恶”(59)。尽管如此，尽管对图像和表演的仔细阅读、惊人的历史和意识形态背景以及足智多谋的解释都得到了启发，但这本书还是努力将令人厌恶的表现形式转化为教学机会。

就美国情景喜剧而言，Demsky...