With The 'U.S. and the Holocaust', the filmmaker went beyond mere documentary and delivered storytelling that PBS viewers could relate to – individually.
I don’t know of a writer, historian, journalist or filmmaker who doesn’t aim for personal connections with audiences. After all, a well told story can resonate at a very personal level: Individual viewers come away from a good story feeling a unique connection, like they just learned something about themselves.
Not every story, even a superb allegory or narrative, provokes such a coveted reaction. So it’s worth noting when it clearly does happen.
Ken Burns is often called “America’s Storyteller.” And this leads me to a brief aside: I don’t like that title. America is actually the majority of a hemisphere, and as such is home to a Hall-of-Fame roster of storytellers that reaches beyond the borders of the United States. My aversion to the common Burns honorific mirrors a reluctance I’ve had for other titles bestowed on the likes of “The Boss” Bruce Springsteen, or “The King of Pop” Michael Jackson. They’re coined by mainstream media and ice out too many excellent scribes and artists for whom English is not the first language, who don’t fly in literary first class with critics, or who don’t have professional public relations teams behind them.
Still, I won’t hesitate to say that Ken Burns is a one-of-a-kind. He’s indeed one of the best storytellers in the Americas. His gold standard of the genre, “The Civil War,” engaged millions of viewers who could directly trace family histories to one side or the other in that national tragedy, or to the evil of slavery that was at its core. A filmmaker could retire after such a landmark production.
But then, last September, PBS aired Burns’ and Florentine Films’ six-hour, three-part, “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” It was not a blockbuster like the ambitious, nine-episode “The Civil War.” But the Holocaust exploration, for me – and others, as we will discuss – is deeper because it examines a well-chronicled genocide in a new and uncomfortable context of a U.S. history dotted with home-made atrocity.
Just days after Holocaust Remembrance Day, and as the series is re-broadcast on many U.S. public television stations and debuts globally on networks like the BBC, it’s a good time to revisit the impact the documentary left on many of our viewers.
Countless historical strands
When the documentary premiered, the Public Editor’s office noted a bump in email traffic from viewers. Taken generally, the traffic appeared supportive of the series that dived into the role the United States played in aiding (generally) or derailing (too often) the diaspora of European Jews who sought to flee persecution and death at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators before and during World War II. Viewer criticisms were limited to what seemed like one-off issues at first glance.
As time passed, however, we sensed that the nationwide buzz was unusual around this Burns project. The documentary at once scolded us for what we didn’t do during World War II, reminded us of how easy it is to slide down a path that leads to political authoritarianism and cultural bullying, and slapped our collective faces for having forgotten (or never really having learned about) atrocities committed in the name of our own country, by U.S. citizens, often with the backing of the U.S. government.
So we set out to review audience reactions in greater depth. We found that viewers more often than not offered positive feedback, fed through very broad comments, like this one:
“You recently aired a multi-part program on the U.S. and the Holocaust, which I watched and learned a lot from. It was important for the historical information that it offered, and also for the connections it made with current U.S. immigration policy.” – Elizabeth Burr, St. Paul, Minn. |
But most people who had strong enough feelings to write to us did so in order to press their personal perspectives on history. For these viewers, the documentary seemed to provoke further thought on racism, genocide and war. The film had provided the spark that led them to write to us, and these audience members often segued into their own particular concerns.
Even the comment reprinted above did not end with that simple, positive statement about the documentary.
The viewer added, “My request is that you would show a program of several hours … about the Palestinian Nakba (the Palestinians’ experience of the 1948 war) and the consequences of that event for Palestinians, both in Israel/Palestine and elsewhere, in the decades since.”
Another viewer complained that “we hear nothing in depth about the American ‘holocaust’ of Indigenous Americans.”
It was as if the Burns film plucked a number of historical strings, all at once and not limited to viewers whose specific family histories trace back to the Holocaust.
For this series, Burns set out to put the U.S. role in the Holocaust tragedy into an important context.
A personal story
The context proved controversial because it focused a harsh light on a dark corners of our nation’s foundation: U.S. history is replete with episodes of hateful, racist or misguided treatment of people not cut from the same demographic cloth that has traditionally dominated our culture and politics.
Viewers across social media – on Ken Burns’ Facebook page in particular – expressed shock in learning about episodes of violent hate in our own history.
The docuseries reminded us that no amount of anti-woke censorship or crimping of discussion of critical race theory can obscure our mistreatment of native people, of Blacks, Asians and Latinos, and of Irish and Italian immigrants as they first drifted past the Statue of Liberty.
Yet many startling specifics are mostly unknown, and Burns deftly schooled us on some of those.
One such is very personal:
The first episode of “The U.S. And The Holocaust,” described an episode in recent U.S. history that is important in my own family’s story. It was the first time I’d heard it told on a national stage.
PBS viewers learned that more than a million Latinos were forcibly deported during the Great Depression. Most were Mexican and were corralled onto box cars and trucks and sent to the southern border. Others, like my grandparents, were simply told to leave by local authorities. That their daughter, Ofelia, was a U.S.-born citizen was not enough to prevent the family’s deportation.
Ofelia was my mother: born in 1930 in what is now suburban Denver.
By then my grandfather, who as a teenager was orphaned in the Mexican Revolution and escaped to Texas, had worked as a field hand and leather craftsman in the U.S. Midwest for some 15 years. He’d settled in Denver with other members of his family, which originally hailed from the farm and silver mining state of Zacatecas in central Mexico. My grandmother’s family, also settled in Denver, was from the same town in Zacatecas.
In the late 1940s my deported mother decided she’d reclaim her birthright, embarking with my father on a winding migration that featured stops for work and pregnancies in most of the major cities in northern Mexico.
I’m seventh in a line of nine children. I was born in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego in California. My mother’s first work in the United States was harvesting tomatoes just north of the border. Then, she moved up, winning a job cleaning houses, including the home of a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service official. That all led to the discovery – backed by a Colorado birth certificate – that Ofelia Palos was indeed a citizen of the United States.
So, through “The U.S. And The Holocaust” Burns had, for me, hit the storytelling trifecta. I connected, literally, emotionally and intellectually with the underlying context of his sweeping documentary.
I was convinced I was not the only one, so we broadened our look at the impact of the series, beyond the Public Editor’s inbox, and found that the social media and critical reviews reinforced the success of the series.
Turns out, many, many more had also connected to the series.
This comment, from Burns’ Facebook page, reflected many viewers who found a personal connection to the film:
“I got chills watching the 3rd part. My mother was one of the Hungarian Jews who were saved by Raoul Wallenberg. He plucked her out of a group about to be deported, & placed in one of the ‘“safe houses’”.
– Barbara C. Lubell
The film also scored well with viewers who recognized Burns’ message, laced throughout the documentary, that sins in history can repeat themselves. He cited the Eugenics movement and local Jim Crow laws that had U.S. origins and were studied by Nazis in their rise to power.
“An excellent job examining the political climate of the world, the bigoted beliefs and intolerances that allowed Hitler to gain power. It was hard to watch the story over a few days, because of the brutality, but I learned so much. It is still hard to comprehend the scope of the killing. The world needs to hear this and we have not changed much.”
– Nancy McLaughlin
The critics say
Among professional reviewers, the docuseries has an unusual, near-perfect critic score on IMDb and Metacritic and a 100% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
Metacritic, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes all use different measures to avoid a practice known as “review bombing,” which happens when internet users spam review sites in order to lower an overall audience or score. Shows that deal with sensitive topics, such as the Holocaust, are often the target of this practice.
But the Burns series seemed immune from review bombing. For example, the site Letterboxd does not have anti-bombing measures in place, but the docuseries currently is rated at 4.3 out of 5 stars.
Here are a couple of slices from the critical pie:
“What sells the series is its emotional immediacy, forcing a historical and contemporary examination of America’s long-professed aspirations and the consequences when we fall short. You may not want this series, but it’s still and always distressingly necessary.”
- Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter
And:
“Many works of history are much less about the past than they are about the present.”
- Dara Horn for The Atlantic
Sure, the series didn’t score well with everyone, especially on social media.
Political or social titles always attract ire, and most critical audience reviews for “The U.S. and the Holocaust” came from users who seemed not to engage with the film in good faith. Many of these users admitted they hadn’t seen, or finished, the docuseries. Others said they went into it with a political bias against the series, especially because it paints the United States in an unfavorable light. Some said it was insulting and unpatriotic.
Other critics, sounding off on social media, took issue with discussions of the Holocaust altogether, due to stated historical revisionism or bigotry. And, of course, fellow documentarians and filmmakers chimed in on Letterboxd with minor hits at the series’ pacing or narrative structure.
Overall, the docuseries has been well received and, is even being recommended by historians as a comprehensive and topical look at this nation’s complex history of Nazism, antisemitism and racism.
The few negative reviews from professional media focused on specific grievances. For example, some business and economics publications expressed disappointment that the docuseries does not fully cover the unsteady economics in Europe during the Nazi’s rise to power, or for not delving into the U.S.’s economic situation in those same years. And in some Jewish publications, reviewers wished Burns would have used more primary Jewish voices or highlighted the American Jewish experience before and after WWII.
Among more specific audiences, one interesting comment stood out. Some members of the LGBT+ community wished the docuseries had also touched on the destruction of physician Magnus Hirschfeld’s work on German gender and sexology when the Nazi Party took power.
Generally, though, there were prominent thumbs up across the critical landscape.
Interestingly, oft-repeated criticism was the desire to know more about the complex topics featured in “The U.S. and The Holocaust.”
That’s a conversation I hope Ken Burns will continue to have with PBS viewers.
Daniel Macy, Senior Associate in the PBS Office of the Public Editor, contributed to this article.