Arthur Miller Research Paper

“Write what you know,” said the famous American author, Mark Twain. Vera Britain, World War I nurse, wrote about her experience in World War I. Elie Weisel, Holocaust survivor, wrote about his experience in the concentration camps. Time O’Brien, United States solider during the Vietnam War, wrote about his experience in Vietnam. But Arthur Miller, born and raised an American Jew, wrote about the Holocaust. Most famous for his four major American plays – All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge – Miller also wrote a number of minor plays, including After the Fall, Incident at Vichy and Broken Glass, that present the Holocaust as a theme or sub-theme. A trip to Germany in 1964 put the Holocaust into perspective

Even the response of the American Jews was characterized by inaction, rather than action. With anti-Semitism on the rise in America, Jews were hesitant to express their needs and unwilling to ask for assistance and rescue efforts (Bauer 3). They were afraid of “exacerbating the American people’s hostility…to Jews,” and wanted to avoid risking their reputation among Americans, a reputation they had worked hard to achieve since the mass Jewish migration in the 1880s (Miller, Timbends 63). They did, however, attempt one demonstration outside the White House, which was ultimately unsuccessful (Bauer 4). America was busy “leading a war to liberate humanity from Nazism and Japanese Imperialism, [and such] a demonsration against the government was…unacceptable…[and] showed how limited ‘Jewish power’ was at the time” (Bauer 4). Political concern was not the only deterrent to the vocalization of the Jewish problem. Other Jews did not respond to the Holocaust simply out of disbelief, “dismissing as rumor the tales of massive killing” they heard (Gleason 6). Even upon receiving conformation from European relatives of the atrocities being committed against Jews, American Jews never “mount[ed] an all-our, sustained, unified mobilization for rescue or even

On returning from his trip to Germany, he began to write about the Holocaust in a number of his plays. These works are also more personal; they were not limited to an objective look at moral short comings of humankind, but offered sentiments Miller himself felt as an American Jew. His journey had left a great impression on him, and being that he was “a natural existentialist, Miller did not believe that responsibility ended where social action began, and that conviction led him into a darkness he now felt the need to address” (Bigsby, Arthur Miller: 1962-2005 11). He felt a certain sense of “survivor’s guilt” after seeing the concentration camp. Although he was not an actual Holocaust survivor, he felt he was one, by virtue of the fact that he, an American Jew, lived, while the European Jews had died. He believed the Holocaust was something necessary to address not because of “its remoteness from ourselves, but...our complicity with it, murders from which we all profit[ed] if only by virtue of having survived” (Bigsby, Arthur Miller: 1962-2005 47). To that extent, from 1964 and onwards, the Holocaust became a recurring image in Miller’s