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    Published: 2025-12-15
    No. 12 (2025)

    “World of Glory” or a World of Evil We Fail to See? Modernity and the Shoah in Roy Andersson’s Cinema

    Dagmara Jaszewska
    Cultural Studies Appendix
    Section: Artykuły
    https://doi.org/10.21697/zk.2025.12.17

    Abstract

    The article analyzes the representation of the Holocaust in Roy Andersson’s film World of Glory (1991). The film’s opening scene which shows gassing—one of the most shocking tableaux in the history of cinema—depicts the Shoah in an anachronistic setting of contemporary Sweden. The director does not reconstruct historical realities but, through symbolism and minimalism, conveys the essence of the Holocaust: the dehumanization of the victims, the indifference of the witnesses, and the bureaucratic order of death. In the following scenes, the Holocaust is inscribed into the banal everyday life of the protagonist, a civil servant, thus visualizing Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis about the connection between barbarism and modernity. Yet this apparent order breaks apart in the protagonist’s grotesque situations and gestures, revealing his fears and repressed sense of guilt. The article also addresses the problem of the unrepresentability of the Shoah. It raises the question of how far Andersson’s surrealist and symbolic cinematic form can convey the truth about this historical event. The second question concerns the risks inherent in artistic representations of the Holocaust: whether the director’s use of aesthetic devices might lead to the aestheticization of Nazism, to various forms of kitsch that distort the ethical message. The analysis demonstrated that the film offers neither catharsis nor aesthetic pleasure—it requires an interpretive effort from the viewer and instead provokes shock and disgust when it reveals the evil of modernity hidden beneath the surface of its beauty and order. The ethical dimension of the message remains intact, while the work restores the memory of the Holocaust and reminds contemporary Europeans of their shared responsibility for it.

     

    Keywords:

    Modernity, Shoah, Holocaust, artistic representations of the Holocaust, unrepresentability of the Shoah, World War II, gassing, trauma, memory, postmemory, Zygmunt Bauman, Roy Andersson, World of Glory, surrealism, symbolic cinema, aestheticization, Nazism

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    Jaszewska, D. (2025). “World of Glory” or a World of Evil We Fail to See? Modernity and the Shoah in Roy Andersson’s Cinema . Cultural Studies Appendix, (12), 309–340. https://doi.org/10.21697/zk.2025.12.17

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