Once again, as in the years following the European Holocaust, we are faced with the problem of imaginatively recreating an historical nightmare—Vietnam. Coppola's Apocalypse Now, through the technology of film, attempted to capture for us the latest technologically implemented slaughter of human beings, just as the TV series The Holocaust sought to render an earlier one. In each case a considerable amount of time passed between the historical event and its fictionalized portrayals on our theater and video screens: there are things we cannot forget but do not wish to remember. Nevertheless, the compulsion to remember is strong, and may perhaps account for Coppola's use of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a narrative scaffolding for the film; for what nearly everyone seems to have forgotten is that this century began with genocide on an immense scale—the murder of millions of black Africans by "civilized" Europeans. Hannah Arendt has made it clear that the colonial atrocities in Africa which Conrad saw and wrote about became the proving ground for the systematized destruction of Europe's Jews through the mechanism of bureaucracy and the ideology of race. According to Arendt, "African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite." In fact it may be a form of latent racism which allows us to forget—or perhaps never to have known—that insofar as mass murder is concerned the African Holocaust was at least as cataclysmic as the European one which has preoccupied us all for the last 35 years. It was by no means coincidental that Coppola should have chosen Heart of Darkness—"the most illuminating work on actual race experience in Africa"—in order to remind us of our own recent Asiatic adventure and our own infatuation with body counts; for Conrad's novel may in fact be that rarest of literary species, a truly prophetic work, one which belongs in every course entitled "Holocaust Literature." Conrad probably had no clear idea that he was divining the future, but he did it nevertheless; and Coppola sensed this in choosing the novel for his film about Vietnam. This essay will try to make explicit the ways in which Heart of Darkness can also serve as a primer for the history and literature of the European Holocaust.