Americanizing the holocaust: The case of Jakob the Liar

This paper aims to investigate the cultural transformations that occurred in the process of converting Jurek Becker's 1969 novel Jakob der Lügner into the 1999 US film Jakob the Liar, directed by French director Peter Kassovitz. Drawing both on the 1974 DEFA film version and theories of Americanization of the Holocaust expounded by Peter Novick and others, the paper seeks to identify some of the elements that constitute Americanization, identifying in the process elements such as Jewish resistance, heroism, American intervention, and happy endings as the key factors in mainstream reception of the Holocaust in the US, where it has become not just a Jewish memory, but a mainstream American cultural memory.