The Old Man and the Glass Booth: Adolf Eichmann and the Migration of an Under- and Overdetermined Iconography

Abstract

This article discusses the image of Adolf Eichmann, which has haunted the screen ever since his spectacular kidnapping in Argentina. Characterized by a lack of archive images from the Nazi era and an abundance of images from the trial in Jerusalem in 1962, the man in the glass booth is an interesting example of the role of archive images in cultural memory and the mediality of history. Eichmann as a “media phenomenon” is analysed in his different dimensions: first a semiologic study of the two iconic images which became “super signs” of the Holocaust, generating contradictory narratives; then an exhaustive overview of the films produced about Adolf Eichmann with their thematic and narrative approaches; the analysis of three films made after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and their link to German national memory; and finally a discussion of the central motive of the glass booth and its migration toward other filmic contexts, giving Eichmann a wider presence in popular culture.