Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on America’s role in the Holocaust is the year’s most important new work of art. Its historic sweep is detailed, searching, profound, intellectually solid and emotionally compelling. It also catches truths as applicable to America and the West today as it is about the Nazi period.
That is, Burns’s latest epic series succeeds on the three time-schemes that any ambitious historic art work involves. An artist’s approach to some long past event undertakes to represent a significant truth about the period it depicts. Given that open choice of subject, it is at least equally about the time the work was made as it is about the time in which its action is set. Why else make it? Finally, the best historic works also catch a truth about the time when the work is seen — even if it’s decades after the work was made and hundreds of years after the subject event.
Burns’s new series pointedly reflects upon the resurgence of white supremacy, xenophobia, fear of immigration and especially antisemitism, the appeasement or toleration of murderous dictators, that undermines Western democracies today. Especially the subject, America.
Don’t miss it. And don’t leave it smug that “we’re not like that anymore.” In politics, in the media, in our universities we once again — or still — are. That’s why Burns made this now.
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