Students of the American Civil War know that conditions were harsh and severe in the prisoner-of-war camps on both sides; at the same time, however, the Confederacy’s Andersonville prison camp in southwest Georgia stands out as a place of particular grimness and horror. The sheer scale of the mass death and suffering at Andersonville – of the 41,000 prisoners interned there, about 15,000 died, making one’s odds of dying at Andersonville slightly higher than one in three – has drawn a great deal of popular attention to the camp; and when writers and filmmakers have worked to dramatize the Andersonville experience, they have tended to be influenced in that process by the historical experiences of their own era.
The two interpretations of Andersonville that are of central interest here are MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Andersonville (1955) and John Frankenheimer’s TV movie Andersonville (1996). Both works, while pursuing historical verisimilitude, also draw parallels with other, more recent conflicts. Kantor in his novel Andersonville draws links between the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville and the Nazi death camps of the Second World War that had ended just ten years before Kantor published his novel. Kantor populates his novel with, among other characters, a sympathetically depicted Union prisoner of Jewish heritage and a vicious rebel officer who boasts openly that his camp will kill more Unionists than any Confederate army might. Additionally, Kantor places strong focus on the German cultural heritage of the camp’s commandant, Henry Wirz. Similarly, director Frankenheimer, in crafting his 1994 TV film Andersonville, includes images that recall footage of Bosnian Serb concentration camps from the 1992-95 Bosnian War, such as the well-known “Must It Go On?” Time magazine cover photo of emaciated Bosnian Muslim prisoners at the Omarska concentration camp in August 1992.
About the presenterPaul Haspel
Paul Haspel received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. He is a term associate professor of English at George Mason University. His research interests center around literature and culture of the Chesapeake Bay region and the Middle Atlantic — particularly Virginia, the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Delaware. He is currently working on a book about literature of the Chesapeake.