Revised German Dept. JP published in Scholarly Film Journal

Ever wonder what becomes of JPs after they are written? While many are simply archived in the German Department, some of them do end up being the basis for scholarly publications. In this instance, it all began in 2018 when then-German major Danny Pinto decided that he would write his JP on the 1946 documentary “Todeslager Sachsenhausen” which was effectively the first film made after the end of the war about the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps.  Perhaps because the film was commissioned by the Russians, perhaps because the camp that is its ostensible subject was located in the DDR, perhaps because at least one of the many variants of the film served to bolster East German anti-fascist ideology, perhaps because one of the central figures in the film, the so-called Hangman of Sachsenhausen Paul Sakowski (who recounts in gruesome details the pragmatics of systematic murder in which he was complicit) was hardly the textbook Nazi perpetrator, having been incarcerated himself in the camp as a Communist activist  – indeed for a host of reasons – this remarkable media artifact had been largely ignored by the literature on the cinematic Aufarbeitung of the Shoah. So, in collaboration with his advisor Prof. Tom Levin, Danny set out to write the first sustained treatment of this complex cinematic work. The result was an impressive – and very long – piece of scholarship entitled ““Wie es wirklich gewesen ist:” ‘Todeslager Sachsenhausen’ and the rhetorical-hermeneutic multiplicity of film as medial Aufarbeitungszeug.” Seven years later, Danny is a graduate student in the Departments of Germanic Studies and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, where he is preparing a dissertation on marginal practices, corpuses, and theories of film in East Germany. And the revised JP just appeared as “’They Saw Their Guilt on Screen:’ The Archive Effects of Death Camp Sachsenhausen (1947)” in Film History: An International Journal (Volume 35, Number 4, Winter 2025) pp.101-128. Congratulations Danny!