Artistic images of the Holocaust are typically ghastly and shattering: the mounds of bones, masses of shorn hair and haunted ovens of Auschwitz in the classic documentary film "Night and Fog." Or they are as glib and deceptive as the bright, pretty, red-bannered Nazi parade in the current World War II thriller "Shining Through."
But in recent years some of the most moving and evocative renderings of the Holocaust have been both deeply respectful and filled with fancy. Artists too young to remember World War II are breaking the mold of documentary realism, infusing their work with fantasy and pop culture, and incorporating a sophisticated sense of how the mass media control images of the past.
So Hitler waltzes with Stalin while children scamper and candy falls from the ceiling in a fantasy sequence in Agnieszka Holland's film "Europa, Europa." In the autobiographical "Maus: A Survivor's Tale. II: And Here My Troubles Began," Art Spiegelman uses the comic-book form and animal characters to recreate Auschwitz and the frustrating father-and-son dialogue through which Vladek Spiegelman's memories of survival emerge.
"Time's Arrow," Martin Amis's recent novel, begins in the present with a Nazi doctor who has changed his identity and moved to the United States; the story regresses through time to the Holocaust, with the author using the conceit of a film running in reverse. And in the 1989 German film "The Nasty Girl," the director Michael Verhoeven uses the frame of a television documentary to tell the witty story of a young German woman's struggle to learn the truth about her town's Nazi past.
What is happening here cuts across nations and genres, but it is definitely generational. These representative artists are in their mid-40's (except for Mr. Verhoeven, who is 53), the generation that includes the German painter Anselm Kiefer, perhaps the most relentless artistic explorer of his country's Nazi history. How, these artists implicitly ask, can they approach a subject that is too important to ignore but that lies beyond their memories?
Their fantastic responses will never supplant firsthand evidence. As wartime survivors grow older, the memories preserved in documentaries like Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah" become more precious than ever. But for many artists, the passage of time has diminished the effectiveness of realism. Documentary accounts of the Holocaust have become more familiar, and realistic images have often been replaced by slick and dangerously dishonest ones -- from the comic Nazis of "Hogan's Heroes" to swastikas worn as a skinhead fashion statement.
The farther the war recedes into the past, the more imagination is needed to wrench it into the present. These artists cannot recall and reproduce the Holocaust, but they can reimagine it in ways that speak to their media-bred generation. On Film From 'Tin Drum' To 'Europa'
The odd fate of "Europa, Europa" and the Academy Awards offers vivid evidence of the new generational struggle. Each country can submit one work to be considered for a nomi nation as best foreign film. But the German board offered nothing at all rather than nominate Ms. Holland's film, a fact-based and elegantly made survivor's story that has received immense critical praise and much commercial success in the United States and Europe.
Many people read this snub as a wrongheaded political decision to leave the Holocaust behind. Thirty German directors, Mr. Verhoeven among them, wrote a public letter of support for Ms. Holland, saying, "As German film makers we are well aware of the special responsibility the past imposes on us." Ms. Holland, who is Polish and now lives in Paris, said Germans were put through "official guilt" after the war; now, she said, "This generation hates all those people who put them through the official guilt." Although "Europa, Europa" was eligible for Oscar nominations in other categories, it received ony one, for Ms. Holland's screenplay.
Appropriately, these tensions are swirling around a film that explores the mix of guilt, memory and redemption experienced by its hero, a young German Jew. "Europa" tells the improbable but true story of Solomon Perel, who survives by his wits and a series of accidents that lead him first to a Russian orphanage, then to heroism in the German Army and finally to an elite school for Hitler Youth. Solly constantly fears discovery and is tormented and confused by his Jewish identity.
The boy's story is so fantastic that Ms. Holland wisely treats it in a straightforward manner; there is no need to enhance this incredible plot. Her restraint makes the film's occasional flights into Solly's dreams that much more resonant. When Hitler and Stalin dance, it is not only a symbol of their destructive collusion, but it is also spurred by Solly's guilt about a death he has unwittingly caused. Later, when the Nazis have embraced him, Solly dreams that Hitler is hiding in his closet and that Hitler, too, is a Jew. It is an astonishing way to recreate the boy's sense of complicity and confused identity.
Such heightened, symbolic approaches to Nazism are not totally new, of course. Solly's picaresque survival story has been compared to Jerzy Kozinski's novel "The Painted Bird." And in "The Tin Drum," the 1979 film based on a novel by Gunter Grass, a 3-year-old who refuses to grow is simply the most conspicuous of many fantastic elements. In fact, Solly's nightmare of a dancing Hitler in "Europa" echoes a scene in which Oskar plays his tin drum and provokes a large Nazi rally to waltz.
In a contemporary climate in which political guilt gives way to convenient forgetfulness, though, the conflict that "Europa, Europa" highlights is urgent. And its artistic impulse toward fantasy goes beyond the Holocaust itself to include its legacy, fraught with forgetfulness and memory -- a second generation's problem.
The ironic edge to much of this generation's work speaks to the slipperiness of historical evidence. Mr. Kiefer's playful, ambiguous photographs of himself giving the Nazi salute are deliberately disturbing, suggesting that the artist is accepting and mocking the Third Reich at the same time. His later paintings of empty scorched landscapes, including one titled "Nuremberg," are easier for viewers to comprehend. But their lack of sentimentality depends partly on our knowledge of the body of Mr. Kiefer's work, with its cold-eyed examination of the past. Images of Horror Art Spiegelman's 'Maus' Books
Playing with images of the Holocaust is a serious creative endeavor for second-generation artists, and no one has captured their unflinching yet heartfelt attitude more comprehensively, or with greater artistic and popular success, than Art Spiegelman. "Maus II," a sequel to the 1986 "Maus: A Survivor's Tale," became both a best seller and the basis of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art this winter. The work's hybrid form brings together high art and mass culture and has as much in common with film and painting as with books.
The "Maus" books make the horror of the Holocaust fresh as well as real. Remarkably, Mr. Spiegelman endows his animals -- Jewish mice, German cats, Polish pigs and French frogs -- with such authentic human personalities that they become living characters rather than cartoon symbols. The artist offers an unsentimental portrait of his father, an obstinate old man in Rego Park, Queens. As the autobiographical character of Art listens to installments of his father's story, Mr. Spiegelman creates the equivalent of flashbacks to the war. In the present and past, he gives his mice greatly expressive faces.
At first, the gaunt, hollow-eyed mice wearing the striped uniforms of the concentration camps seem easier to look at than photographs from Auschwitz. Eventually they take on all the weight and authenticity of human victims; they are as capable of provoking nightmares as "Night and Fog." Mr. Spiegelman takes a huge artistic risk, and part of his success comes from his awareness of how arrogant yet necessary a risk it is.
In one of the most compressed and richest images in "Maus II," Art -- a cartoonist wearing a mouse mask -- sits at his desk overlooking a pile of mouse corpses, wondering how he can possibly create anything more. Since the success of "Maus I," Art has been hounded by the media and besieged with proposals for tie-in products ("Maus: You've read the book, now buy the vest").
An earlier version of this image was on display in the Modern exhibition, which traced the beginnings of "Maus." In that cartoon, Art is represented as a block resembling a television set (he is, in fact, a creative block), and a TV interviewer with more hair than brains pushes a microphone in his face.
"So what do you think about the Holocaust, Mr. Spiegelman?" she asks.
"Well, Carol, I -- uh -- think genocide is a bad thing," Art answers. "A very bad thing." Facing the danger of trivializing the Holocaust is a crucial element of the work's artistic success; to ignore the media would seem dishonest to a generation raised on its images. Television When the Media Shape History
It is no coincidence, of course, that television and mainstream Hollywood movies have rarely depicted the Holocaust in the brutal terms it demands. For every clearsighted television movie about Auschwitz like "Playing for Time," (1980), in which a female prisoner with a shaved head prostitutes herself for food and ravenously eats during the act, there are dozens of prettified images.
The 1989 mini-series "War and Remembrance" shows concentration-camp prisoners who look unbelievably healthy, almost rosy-cheeked, suggesting that they have just come from the makeup department. The wider the medium's reach, the more palatable its images of war and death are. So it has been largely left to literature, painting and smaller foreign films to find artistic ways of approaching the Holocaust.
Like "Maus," "The Nasty Girl" is constantly aware that history can lie, so the process of discovering the truth must become an openly displayed part of the artist's work. Mr. Verhoeven uses the frame of a fictional television documentary sparingly and to shrewd effect. Sonja, the young woman whose story is based on fact, occasionally stands in front of the camera, microphone in hand, narrating her story. Approaching her 30's, Sonya is part of the media generation, and as she tries to unearth the past, she encounters those who prefer to bury it. Her tale includes the whole town's denial of guilt, even though a Nazi work camp had been situated nearby. Eventually her house is bombed by people determined to stop her research.
At times "The Nasty Girl" is deliberately theatrical. Photographs of libraries are projected in the background while Sonya does her research, a technique that distances her in time and suggests the potential artifice of history. When she is sued for libel and taken to court, she fantasizes herself as a martyr being burned at the stake in a surreally comic scene set against a bright orange backdrop. As in "Europa, Europa," the occasional use of fantasy jolts viewers out of any illusion that documentary realism is sufficient to tell the whole truth. Innovation Odd Approaches, Artistic Success
Imaginative approaches to the Holocaust may sound gimmicky, but when their innovations work they produce startling artistic sucesses, including "Time's Arrow." Its backward-moving story is told by an eerie, ethereal narrative voice. It is the voice of the Nazi doctor's soul or conscience, an inner being who can see what the doctor does but who retains no memory of the horrible past toward which the novel inevitably pulls him.
This narrative voice knows only that the doctor has a mysterious nightmare about a man in white clothes. Mr. Amis's most astute artistic strategy is to play off the reader's knowledge of history. We know what the narrator does not, and as the novel moves closer to Auschwitz the weight of that knowledge becomes almost unbearable. Through his narrator, Mr. Amis captures the new generation's resistance to memory, while the novel itself relies on the years of documentary realism that have preceded it.
Mr. Amis does not avoid depicting the Holocaust. When the doctor arrives at Auschwitz, the film in his mind is still running backward, cruelly allowing live bodies to be removed from ovens and naked women to move out of the deadly showers and back to the room where they put on their clothes. Raising the dead instead of killing them is a dangerous artistic tactic, but Mr. Amis uses it effectively to make the Holocaust live in the minds of readers accustomed to slick Hollywood images. He turns those images against themselves. Film can lie, but in this case readers spot the painful lie that the Nazi doctor has told himself.
The issues of the media, memory, art and the Holocaust come together trenchantly in Donald Margulies's play "Sight Unseen," at Manhattan Theater Club Stage 2 until March 22. (It will move to the Orpheum Theater on March 26.) Its main character, Jonathan Waxman, a Jewish American painter in his 30's, visits an old girlfriend and, by extension, his own past. The work flits back and forth in time, playing with narrative structure and memory. But its most pertinent scenes are those between Waxman and a young German woman who interviews him.
The Holocaust is an issue they dance around, with Waxman assuming its central importance to our times and the German woman denying its relevance. Here, onstage, is the very problem that "Europa, Europa" provoked. It is the same problem Waxman depicts in his most notorious and ambiguous painting, in which an interracial couple make love -- or is she being raped? -- in a desecrated Jewish cemetery. "I thought I was really hitting people over the head, but I guess not," Waxman says of the work, which he claims refers to anti-Semitism but which many critics interpreted as racist and anti-feminist.
Waxman may or may not be disingenuous about his work. But he is astute about the way he must reimagine reality, and risk being called insensitive, if he is to shock viewers out of their complacency. "People see my stuff at a gallery, a museum, and the work competes for their attention," he says. "All I can hope is maybe -- maybe -- one night, one of my images will find its way into their unconscious and color their dreams."
Similarly, the real-life artists he represents are reconceiving the Holocaust to make its lessons live on in their work and in the memories of their contemporaries. The German interviewer fails to understand that Waxman is not being provocative in a shallow way. In his generation, the most important burden artists can assume is to reinvent the Holocaust and its legacy, stretching their imaginations to the breaking point, toward the unimaginable.
Photos: Stanislaw Zatloka, left, as Stalin waltzes with Ryszard Papruska as Hitler in Agnieszka Holland's film "Europa, Europa" -- How can artists deal with a subject that lies beyond their memories? (Orion Classics)(pg. 1); Lena Stolze as Sonja, the heroine of "The Nasty Girl" -- The director Michael Verhoeven uses the frame of a TV documentary to tell of a German woman's struggle to learn about her town's Nazi past. (Miramax); A page from Art Spiegelman's "Maus II" -- Playing with images of the Holocaust is a serious endeavor for second-generation artists. (Pantheon Books)(pg. 14); A scene from the 1979 film "The Tin Drum" -- Symbolic approaches to Nazism are not totally new. (pg. 15)