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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2022
Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980) can be read as a central European imaginary retelling Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). The film constructs a dark meditation on the human condition not only through its formal and thematic focus on Mann's novel but also through the lens of works by numerous other central European artists and scholars. Consequently, The Shining presents historical comprehension as the product not only of knowledge, but of experience, memory, and artistic representation/reception. Just as The Magic Mountain addressed itself to the crisis of European civilization that had culminated in the First World War, a deep-laid historical subtext in The Shining concerns the more desperate crisis facing the West in the wake of the Second World War. At its dark center, Kubrick's horror film reflects its creator's and its era's struggle with the reality and representation of the Holocaust.
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6 Andrin Albrecht, “Playing in the Snow: The Racial Self-Critique in the Altered Ending of Kubrick's The Shining,” September 3, 2021, University of Adelaide Online Seminar.
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10 Samuel Wigley, “Producing the Shining: Jan Harlan on Kubrick,” June 1, 2015 (www2.bfi.org.uk/news).
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20 HR/B/23/1-2; McAvoy, “The Uncanny, the Gothic, and the Loner,” 354.
21 Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 200.
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25 Diane Johnson, personal communication, September 15, 2019.
26 Christine Pritzlaff, Zahlensymbolik bei Thomas Mann (Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1972), 27–42.
27 Mark J. Madigan, “‘Orders from the House’: Kubrick's The Shining and Kafka's ‘The Metamorphosis,’” in The Shining Reader, ed. Tony Magistrale (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont, 1991), 193–201.
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29 Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” 112.
30 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995), 463, 487; emphasis in original.
31 Mann, The Magic Mountain, 471, 475.
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37 Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, 147, 160.
38 Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 192–93.
39 Carola Sachse, ed., “Mitteleuropa” und ‘Sudosteuropa” als Planungsraum. Wirtschafts- und Kulturpolitische Expertisen im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010).
40 Frewin, “Stanley Kubrick,” 517.
41 Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).
42 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 201–5; Nelson, Kubrick, 218–19.
43 Eisenstein, “Color and Meaning,” 126, 131, 136, 152.
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45 Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart and David A. Frank, Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 3–4, 140–46.
46 Look magazine, May 25, 1948, 67; Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Fine, 1997), 445. At the Nazi camps using carbon monoxide gas chambers the operation took much longer and the bodies were “thrown out blue, wet with sweat and urine, the legs covered with excrement and menstrual blood”; see Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 627–28.
47 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 565.
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50 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 31.
51 Matthew Baigell, Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 17–18.
52 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 41.
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54 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 262–65. Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita (1955) employs 42 as a sign of malevolent fate as does Kubrick's Lolita. The Sears Catalog (Fall Winter 1977, 381) shows the style jersey Danny wears available with the number 22, 32, or 42.
55 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 118–41.
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64 Earl R. Beck, Under the Bombs: The German Home Front, 1942–1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 74.
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67 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer as Told by a Friend, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Random House, 1997), chap. 13; Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 203.
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70 Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 105; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963); Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960).
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73 Frewin, “Stanley Kubrick,” 514.
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81 Andy Battaglia, “The Passion of Krzysztof Penderecki,” August 11, 2010 (residentadvisor.net/features/1234).
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83 Bill Blakemore, “Kubrick's Shining Secret: Film's Hidden Horror Is the Murder of the Indian,” Washington Post, July 12, 1987; HR/B/23/1-2; McAvoy, “The Uncanny, the Gothic, and the Loner,” 353–54.
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87 De Toth's None Shall Escape (1944), whose Nazi villain is named Wilhelm Grimm and which Kubrick surely saw at Loew's Paradise Theater in April 1944, was—by showing Nazis machine-gunning a trainload of Jews—the first Hollywood film to depict the mass murder of Jews in Poland. Kubrick might also have been familiar with de Toth's horror film, House of Wax (1953), which contains dark allusions to Germany while recalling Schulz's uncanny waxwork figures—like their human spectators—as “tortured matter which does not know what it is and why it is” (Schultz, Street of Crocodiles, 64); see Andre de Toth, Fragments: Portraits from the Inside (London: Faber, 1994), 207–19, 250–64, 309–15, 355–56.
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89 Abrams (Stanley Kubrick, 209) points out that the colors of the Marlboro cigarette pack also flanking the typewriter are those of the Nazi flag. Advertising for the brand featured the Western cowboy “Marlboro Man.”
90 Gajewska, Holocaust and the Stars, 21–24, 41.
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