Hollywood Film as Therapy: Hugo Haas, Trauma, and Survivor Guilt

The article discusses the exile cinema of Czechoslovakia-born producer, director, and actor Hugo Haas (1901–1968). As a prominent Jewish artist with strong anti-Nazi convictions, Haas was forced to escape his homeland when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. Deeply traumatized by losing his close relatives in the Holocaust, Haas used his independent productions made in Hollywood after World War II to cope with his feelings of loss, pain, loneliness, and dispossession. The author reads selected films, disguised as run-of-the-mill genre pieces, against the filmmaker’s personal history and identifies patterns and motives suggesting that Haas’s body of work was strongly informed by his survivor guilt and trauma