Since The Civil War became a phenomenon, in 1990, Ken Burns has made an art form of sprawling TV documentaries about grand American subjects: from baseball to jazz, national parks to World War II, Mark Twain to Jackie Robinson. His cinematic style—solemn narration over black-and-white photos and vintage clips, broken up by interviews with historians and quotations read by well-known actors—has become the visual language of American history. This impersonality is deliberate: in a Burns film, the filmmakers are never seen or heard on-screen, giving the impression that the story is telling itself.
The U.S. and the Holocaust, the new documentary premiering September 18 on PBS, fits a little uneasily into Burns’s ever expanding canon. There was no need to title earlier films “The U.S. and Baseball” or “The U.S. and Jazz,” because those things are obviously part of the American story. But the murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators took place in Europe, mainly in Poland and Ukraine. While the Allied victory in World War II brought it to an end, it was the Red Army’s conquest of Eastern Europe that forced the Nazis to abandon Auschwitz and exposed the existence of other killing centers and mass graves.
