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And They Lived Happily Ever After? The Fable as Search for Meaning in Holocaust Cinema

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War, Myths, and Fairy Tales
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Abstract

Story-telling about the Holocaust comes down to a search for an ineffable meaning that will let us make sense of the tragedy, elaborate the trauma, and master its legacy. In analysing European Holocaust films that are structured as a fairy tale, such as La Vita è Bella (1997) and Train de Vie (1998), or use fairy tales as a narrative key, such as Jakob der Lügner (1975) and A Nagy Füzet (2013), this chapter argues that fairy tales can have multiple and at times contradictory roles. They present a continued search for meaning and look for ways to represent the “unrepresentable.”

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Lichtner, G. (2017). And They Lived Happily Ever After? The Fable as Search for Meaning in Holocaust Cinema. In: Buttsworth, S., Abbenhuis, M. (eds) War, Myths, and Fairy Tales. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2684-3_2

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