George Steiner has argued persuasively that the context of the Holocaust goes beyond politics to metaphysics – that the deep anti-Semitic loathing built up in the social subconscious was rooted in Judaism's “claims of the ideal,” to use Ibsen's phrase. Given that “some political scientists put at roughly 80 percent the proportion of Jews in the ideological development of messianic socialism and communism,” “when it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation – albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware – of its own best hopes.… The secular, materialist, warlike community of modern Europe sought to extirpate from itself … the carriers of the ideal.” Steiner sees the Holocaust not as a political or socioeconomic phenomenon, but as the enactment of a suicidal impulse in Western civilization:

This suicidal impulse can be seen in films that focus on individual responsibility vis-á-vis Nazi domination – such as The Shop on Main Street, Mr. Klein, General della Rovere, and The Man in the Glass Booth.