A train travels through the darkness. A barbed-wire fence divides the frame. A child looks out from behind a window. Such motifs have recurred so often in cinema that they can easily seem like shorthand for an entire history. Yet a recognisable cinematic image is, first and foremost, an image created for a narrative – not evidence that a particular event happened exactly that way.
On 5 November, Michal Kosakowski’s “Holofiction” opens in cinemas across Germany. The essay film brings together excerpts from thousands of feature films and television films depicting the Holocaust. Its question reaches beyond any individual work: how has cinema shaped our image of a historical crime – and what is lost when familiar scenes take the place of knowledge?
History Is More Than Images of Camps
The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators. It developed between 1933 and 1945: from the stripping of rights and social exclusion to genocide across Europe. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also emphasises that millions of other people were persecuted and murdered during this period. This history therefore cannot be reduced to camps, trains or individual rescue stories.
Cinematic storytelling has to select, condense and follow characters. This can make abstract historical processes comprehensible and bring individual experiences into view. At the same time, it favours clear narrative arcs: the persecuted, perpetrators, helpers, escape, rescue. Such forms of storytelling can create a sense of closeness; but they can also suggest that a complex process shaped by bureaucracy, ideology and complicity can be resolved within a manageable story.
Recurring images are not automatically inaccurate. But their familiarity can be deceptive. A staged train sequence or a reconstructed camp barrack tells us, first and foremost, something about how a film has been made. Historical claims need other foundations: documents, photographs, material traces, research and testimony – each with its own provenance and limitations.
What Testimony Can Do
An important counterpoint to dramatic reconstruction is Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour film “Shoah”, released in 1985. Lanzmann deliberately dispensed with historical archival footage and let survivors, eyewitnesses, perpetrators and experts speak, alongside footage of the locations. This method does not make the past itself visible. It shows how people remember and recount their experiences, and keeps the distinction between events at the time and their later representation open.
Testimonies, too, are not exhaustive records. They have a specific perspective, emerge in a particular situation and need to be placed in historical context. The difference between testimony and a re-enacted scene is not that one image “speaks” and the other does not. What matters is how the material came into being, what it can substantiate and where its evidential value ends.
Montage as a Question
Kosakowski arranges film fragments into recurring motifs and patterns. “Holofiction” is not a collection of historical evidence, but an examination of the images cinema has produced over decades. The title names this mixture of Holocaust and fiction – and draws attention to the fact that cultural memory is also formed through repetition.
The method can reveal how familiar shots reinforce one another. Yet a montage, too, remains a selection and therefore an interpretation: which excerpts appear, how are they grouped, which differences emerge? For precisely this reason, a film about images should not be regarded as the final authority. It can sharpen the question of which ideas we have absorbed; it cannot replace historical scrutiny.
To Look Is to Distinguish
This distinction is central to education. When looking at a film scene, we can ask: is it documentary footage, a re-enactment or a fictional invention? What source is it based on? Which perspective is missing? Comparing it with witness accounts, documents and historical research reveals what the dramatisation explains – and what it simplifies or leaves out.
Cinema can offer a way into history by bringing people, places and decisions to life. But a moving image is not necessarily a truthful one, nor is a compelling narrative necessarily a complete history. The productive question, then, is not whether the Holocaust may be depicted in cinema at all. It is how images make their provenance clear – and whether they invite further questions rather than bringing thought to a halt.
Original reviewed by the editors · 1 November 2026
