Spielberg, Steven, dir. Schindler’s List

Based on the novel by Thomas Keneally, this film depicts the story of the so-called “Schindlerjuden”, Jews who were saved from the Holocaust by Oskar Schindler. As a member of Hitler’s Nazi Party, he initially intended to make a fortune out of the war, hiring Jewish workers for his enamel factory because they were cheaper. After witnessing the ‘clean-up’ (i.e. massacre) of the Krakow Ghetto, he joins forces with his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern, who protected the Jewish workers before then by making as many as possible ‘indispensable’ to the German war effort. Schindler and Stern actively start trying to save as many lives as they can, with Schindler bribing high-ranking SS officials and framing his actions as if they were either for his own personal gain, beneficial to the Nazis, or in support of the war effort. As the German defeat draws nearer, Amon Göth, the violent SS-Hauptsturmführer in charge of Płaszów concentration camp, is ordered to send all remaining Jews to Auschwitz, but Schindler bribes him so that he can take ‘his’ Jews to his new munitions factory. Schindler and Stern thus create ‘Schindler’s List,’ but one of the trains is accidentally redirected to Auschwitz. Schindler bribes Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, to get them back. Schindler keeps his group of Jews relatively safe in his munitions factory until the end of the war, but he never has them manufacture any functional weapons or shells, instead buying them from other manufacturers to keep up the façade, and thus indirectly hindering the German war effort. By the end of the war, Schindler has no money left and, as a known Nazi and war profiteer, he has to flee. The Schindlerjuden give him a signed document as proof of his role in saving Jewish lives; Schindler, however, is ashamed, saying that he did not do enough, that he should have saved more lives. The film ends with a summary of Schindler’s later life and a shot of his grave in Jerusalem, where the surviving Schindlerjuden and the actors who portrayed them in the film come to pay their respects.

A few memorable scenes have made film history on their own. Filmed entirely in black and white, a little girl in a bright red coat stands out painfully clear in the massacre of the Krakow Ghetto. In an interview Spielberg compares this little girl, who is seen walking prone and undisturbed through the ghetto amid running figures, to the Holocaust itself: “The Holocaust was known about … it was as obvious as a little girl wearing a red coat, walking down the street” (2:09-2:23). (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAM5q837enk). Another famous scene depicts a group of women who think they are about to be gassed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZBOuW3m8U4) – the soundtrack and the women’s palpable fear suggest the most unthinkable part of the Holocaust, before it turns into relief as the showers come on. As the women exit the shower house, however, they look back to see newcomers entering what appears to be the actual crematorium.

Steven Spielberg interviewed Holocaust survivors while he was working on the production of the film, and this experience incited him to found the Shoah foundation (http://sfi.usc.edu/), which up to this day stores and records audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, for the purpose of education.

Schindler’s List has had an enormous impact on later filmic representations of the Holocaust, but it was not without controversy. The objections made against Schindler’s List tend to fall into four categories: firstly, the film is a product of Hollywood, of the American culture industry, exploiting the Holocaust for money and entertainment. Secondly, the film is not realistic enough; it is inadequate in its attempt to represent the totality of the Holocaust experience through a fictionalised story. Thirdly, it narrates the tragedy of the Holocaust almost entirely from a perpetrator’s perspective, and stereotypical ones at that; the Gentile Nazi Schindler and the psychotic SS commandant Amon Göth, and simultaneously reduces the Jewish characters to a faceless multitude. This introduced the two most lasting representations of perpetrators: either the hero-in-disguise, like Schindler, or the monster who delights in killing and inflicting pain, like Göth. Lastly, it violates the commonly understood taboos on the representation (Bilderverbot) of the Holocaust by attempting to represent the unimaginable (most notably in the shower scene mentioned above). The film is considered to be not realistic enough, and yet at the same time too realistic. Despite these objections, the film has been awarded with seven Academy Awards (including Best Original Score), seven BAFTAs, and three Golden Globes, and is generally considered one of the greatest films ever made.

For a more detailed discussion of the controversies surrounding Schindler’s List, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory.” Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 292-312.

For a passionate defense of Spielberg’s film, see Eric Sterling, “All Rules Barred: A Defense of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 32.2 (2002): 62-71.

For a comparison and consideration of Holocaust ‘blockbusters’, see David Brenner, “Working Through the Holocaust Blockbuster: Schindler’s List and Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Globally and Locally. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 75.4 (2000): 296-316.

For a consideration of Schindler’s List from a historian’s perspective, see Michael Wildt and Pamela Selwyn, “The Invented and the Real: Historiographical Notes on Schindler’s List.” History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996): 240-249.

For a consideration of the (German) reception of Schindler’s List and a discussion of the film in the context of the Bilderverbot, see Karyn Ball, “For and Against the Bilderverbot: The Rhetoric of ‘Unrepresentability’ and Remediated ‘Authenticity’ in the German Reception of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.” Visualising the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. Ed. David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael David Richardson. Rochester, NY: Camden, 2008.

For a collection of various critical perspectives on Schindler’s List, see Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List. Ed. Yosefa Loshitzky. Bloomington, IN: UP, 1997.

Author of this entry: Eline Reinhoud

Spielberg, Steven, dir. Schindler’s List. United States: Universal Pictures, 1993.