Antisemitism In The Eternal Jews

The history of antisemitism extends back many centuries and includes both the stereotyping of Jewish people and indoctrination of Jewish inferiority. Accordingly, Fritz Hippler’s Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew combines documentary footage and cinematic trickery to present a falsified version of Jewish life in Poland during World War II. While Jewish discrimination has always been prevalent, Jewish culture has its own ways of fighting back – most prominently demonstrated through the “soaring sonorous lines” of Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue” (Fetz 70). Throughout “Death Fugue,” Jewish prisoners open the reader’s eyes to the horrific reality of life in concentration camps and challenge the hateful propaganda voiced by the anti-Semitic narrator

Throughout the film, the narrator makes many comparisons between the Jews and rats, and in doing so, the Jews are dehumanized. Another important scene in the film is the slaughter of a cow, through which the footage highlights the cow’s suffering and the supposed amusement of the Jewish butchers – ultimately portraying koshering as “cruelty to animals” (Hartman 334). In this sense, the narrator suggests that “what the Jews do to animals can then be done to the Jews” (Hartman 335). Therefore, The Eternal Jew combines visual imagery with powerful statements to dehumanize the Jews, leading viewers to believe that Jewish people were corrupt pack animals.

Similar to the ways in which The Eternal Jew dehumanizes Jewish people, the first two stanzas of Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” convey the dehumanization of the Jewish prisoners and their implicit lack of agency. “Death Fugue” is a lyric poem in the form of a verbal fugue, which similar to a musical fugue, starts with a certain theme and then restates this theme multiple times with subtle modifications. Accordingly, the Jewish experience described in the first two stanzas establishes the central theme of the suffering.