Spectres of the Holocaust in Contemporary European Refugee Cinema

This article examines contemporary European refugee cinema through the conceptual prisms of hauntology, multidirectional and cosmopolitan memory by bringing the suffering and trauma of the refugee experience into dialogue with the spectre of the Holocaust that continues to haunt Europe. While hauntology furnishes a useful critical framework for apprehending historical traumas that refuse closure, multidirectional and cosmopolitan memory advocate for a comparative approach to memory that brings multiple burdened pasts into dialogue with one another through cross-referencing, borrowing and negotiation. The transnationally comparative analysis of Transit (Christian Petzold, 2018), Green Border (Agnieszka Holland, 2023) and The Swimmers (Sally El Hosaini, 2022), made by German, Polish and British filmmakers in the wake of the so-called European ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, examines how spectral traces of the Holocaust manifest themselves in the films’ visual and narrative grammar. By establishing mnemonic connections across diverse forms of forced displacement and political violence, the films illuminate certain uncanny parallels between past crimes against humanity and the moral failures of the present. In this way, they represent an urgent call for a moral re-awakening, a call for empathy, global justice and solidarity with the plight of contemporary refugees.