Abstract

ABSTRACTThe basis of my argument is that the cultural trauma now identified as the Holocaust occupied a latency period of around thirty years, or one generation, before surfacing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Alongside theorists such as Ron Eyerman and Jeffrey Alexander I argue that cultural trauma, the trauma experienced by a social group, functions in a similar way to individual trauma. In this article I examine a number of texts that exhibit expressions of the trauma of the Holocaust before that trauma was identified and narrativised. These texts include the television series Hogan’s Heroes, the film The Producers, and the musical Fiddler on the Roof. My approach to the texts has been through the idea of haunting as developed by Jacques Derrida. I argue that during the period of latency texts are haunted in various ways by the traumatic events that were later integrated as the Holocaust.