Appearing just eight months after the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which gives visitors a three-dimensional immersion into the actual sights and sounds and artifacts of the Holocaust, Schindler’s List provided a remarkably similar emotional experience. Taken together, as complementary educational and memorial representations of this century’s most shattering historical event, the museum and the film have helped stimulate a much broader public awareness of the urgency of Holocaust study and its relevance to contemporary life.
Spielberg’s return to his roots in making Schindler’s List was also, paradoxically, an act of liberation from his culturally imposed and self-imposed limitations. In confronting the Holocaust, he radically redefined his public image, confounding most (though not all) of the skeptics who thought him merely a frivolous entertainer, a child-man incapable of dealing with serious themes. But there was a double edge to their abrupt reevaluation. Annette Insdorf, author of Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, commented in The Village Voice, “Many of us were expecting him to simply apply the techniques of Jurassic Park to the Holocaust, but were pleasantly surprised that he transcended his reputation for a glib, feel-good approach.” As Armond White wondered in a Film Comment essay on Spielberg’s career, “Can the man who directed the most splendid, heartfelt Hollywood entertainments of the past twenty years accept that praise, that dismissal of his life’s work, as reasonable?”
Nowhere was that dismissive attitude more evident than in the schizoid voting of three critics’ groups—the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), the New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Board of Review—all of which chose Schindler’s List as the Best Film of 1993 yet pointedly failed to honor Spielberg for directing it.§§ The implication was either that the film somehow directed itself, or that, as Scott Rosenberg put it in the San Francisco Examiner, the subject matter had caused Spielberg “to resist the urge to imprint his own sensibility on the film,” an act of self-abnegation more characteristic of a producer than a director.
After Spielberg won his second Directors Guild of America award, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him his Oscar as Best Director; the film received six other Academy Awards, including Best Picture.¶¶ Backstage at the Oscars, Spielberg could not resist a touch of sarcasm: “I could have dealt with never winning an Academy Award, because I had practiced dealing with it for the last twelve years.” But then he added, “So this was a wonderful honor tonight. If I hadn’t gotten it, I probably would have been shattered.”
While the question posed in one form or another by many critics was, “How is this film unlike any other Steven Spielberg film?,” it is more enlightening to ask, “How is this film profoundly characteristic of Steven Spielberg?”
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KENEALLY observed that by taking collective responsibility for the postwar financial support of Oskar Schindler, “Oskar’s children”—the Schindlerjuden—“had become his parents.” The image of Schindler as a deeply flawed father figure who ultimately assumes responsibility for his “family” of eleven hundred Jews is at the heart of Spielberg’s film. In the improbable but inspiring figure of this rescuer whose underlying humanity was brought out by the social cataclysm that threatened to engulf his “children,” Spielberg could see writ large the themes of parental responsibility that have obsessed him throughout his career. Schindler’s List extends his preoccupation with the breakdown of the nuclear family to encompass the breakdown of European society and the destruction of Jewish family life during the second World War.
Deprived of their freedom and placed in a helpless and dependent position by the Nazis, the Schindler Jews are in a situation resembling that of abused children. At any moment, they are subject to arbitrary punishment and death at the hands of Amon Goeth and his fellow SS men. Among the most chilling scenes is that of Goeth casually shooting Plaszów inmates at random from his balcony, as if for sport, before his morning urination (“Oh, God, Amon!” whines his mistress, covering her head with a pillow during the shooting. “Amon, you’re such a damn fucking child!”). When Schindler takes physical charge of “his” Jews, guarding them against the depredations of the Nazis, they still remain in an infantilized position, even though he tries to restore as much of their prewar social structure as he can under the circumstances, reuniting families and enabling a rabbi among them to conduct Shabbat services inside the factory. “There will be generations because of what you did,” Stern tells Schindler. This truth is demonstrated in the epilogue, with its reunion of Schindler’s real-life “family,” a long line of his workers and their families filing past his grave in the Latin Cemetery of Jerusalem. They lay memorial stones on the grave while the following words are superimposed: “There are fewer than four thousand Jews left alive in Poland today. There are more than six thousand descendants of the Schindler Jews.”
Some critics found fault with Spielberg for not spending more time rounding out the characters of individual Schindler Jews. One of the film’s most vociferous opponents, Philip Gourevitch, complained in Commentary that it “depicts the Nazi slaughter of Polish Jewry almost entirely through German eyes. Except for Itzhak Stern … few Jewish figures are individuated from the mob of victims. When Jews are seen on their own, the camera eyes them with the detachment of a National Geographic ethnographic documentary.” Incredibly, Gourevitch went on to accuse Spielberg of employing “Jewish caricatures” lifted “from the pages of Der Stuermer,” the notoriously anti-Semitic Nazi organ. Calling that charge “truly enraging,” reader Ruth King of New York City responded, “The movie shows Jews—ugly, plain, beautiful. This is how we look.”
In fact, not only are Stern and Helen Hirsch (Goeth’s maid) among the film’s central characters, Spielberg also follows the fates of many other Schindler Jews carefully throughout the story. But they are seen mostly in brief vignettes or as faces in the crowd, for the director deliberately chose not to deal expansively with the personal stories of most of the Jewish characters. While the TV miniseries Holocaust concentrated the viewer’s attention on one Jewish family—a device that encouraged audience identification with the characters but gave the series the emotionally indulgent tone of a soap opera—Spielberg wanted to avoid that kind of narrow, melodramatic focus. Instead he set out to demonstrate in brutally direct dramatic terms how the Nazis systematically stripped Jews of their individuality, robbing them of their property and freedom, chopping off their hair, dressing them in striped uniforms, and reducing their names to numbers. The first graphic indication of what is in store for the characters in Schindler’s List comes when a trainload of Jews leaves the Kraków station and Spielberg’s camera moves into an adjacent storehouse filled with piles of suitcases, valuables, family photographs, and bloodstained teeth with gold fillings. This, said Spielberg, “wasn’t the story of eight Jews from Kraków who survived—it was a conscious decision to represent the six million who died and the several hundred thousand who did survive with just sort of a scent of characters and faces we follow all through the story.”
It is when Schindler unexpectedly begins seeing his Jewish workers as individuals that he begins to change his thinking about the war. The first such incident is that of the elderly one-armed machinist, Lowenstein (Henryk Bista), who interrupts Schindler at lunch to thank him for having classified him as “essential to the war effort”—a designation that has saved his life, which the Nazis regard as useless. “God bless you, sir,” Lowenstein earnestly tells him. “You are a good man.” Realizing that he is not such a good man, Schindler reacts with shame, losing his appetite and angrily demanding of Stern, “Don’t ever do that to me again!” Stern, who throughout the film acts as Schindler’s conscience, has arranged the meeting as one of his many careful and subtle appeals to the better angels of Schindler’s nature. As Spielberg has pointed out, Stern is the “unsung hero” of the story, a man who manipulates Schindler masterfully while keeping his own emotions under almost superhuman
control. Ben Kingsley’s finely shaded performance, rich with understated compassion and the gallows humor of a born survivor, captures what Keneally called the “limitless calm” of a character who can never afford to utter a wrong word, because hundreds of people’s lives depend on him. The unspoken message Stern hopes to convey to Schindler is the same one Spielberg repeatedly gave to Kingsley when they discussed his character. The director said simply, “Be a mensch.”
The one-armed man’s intrusion into Schindler’s comfortable existence, soon followed by his shockingly brutal public execution, crystallizes the moral issues Schindler until then has been able to ignore. Some critics complained that Spielberg fails to make clear why Schindler undergoes his change of heart. Although the evidence on screen of Schindler’s growing empathy and compassion is abundantly clear to anyone who has eyes to see, this profound transformation is all the more powerful for not being spelled out in words. The climactic moment of Schindler witnessing the liquidation of the ghetto with silent horror achieves its emotional impact partly because he (and the audience) have been prepared for it by his earlier protection of Lowenstein and other victims of escalating Nazi cruelty, including the symbolically unkillable Rabbi Levartov (Ezra Dagan), who miraculously survives Goeth’s repeated attempts to shoot him.
While Schindler’s goodness is hardly “incomprehensible,” there is a mystery in it that resists facile explanation. Spielberg credited screenwriter Steven Zaillian with making this the film’s thematic focus: “Steve had a very strong point of view. He approached it as the Rosebud theory—the mystery as to why Schindler did what he did…. Even having made the movie about his life, I still don’t know him very well. I ended my experience, I guess, a bit like [the newsreel reporter] in Citizen Kane, where I was not able to go back to my editor with the story that he wanted. Every day it was frustrating.”
Honoring the memory of a rescuer stresses the importance of individual responsibility while giving the lie to the myth that Germans were powerless to resist the Nazi tyranny. “I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism,” was the straightforward explanation Schindler gave after the war for his heroic actions. “I just couldn’t stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That’s all there is to it. Really, nothing more.” But ultimately the question of why one person chooses good over evil must always remain, to some extent, a spiritual riddle. When Poldek Pfefferberg was asked in 1993 why he thought Schindler saved him, he replied, “Who cares! I don’t give a hoot for the reasons he did it. He saved eleven hundred people.” Spielberg wisely resists allowing Liam Neeson’s Schindler to make any explicit declaration about his motives.
“The studio, of course, wanted me to spell everything out,” Spielberg said. “I got into a lot of arguments with people saying we need that big Hollywood catharsis where Schindler falls to his knees and says, ‘Yes, I know what I’m doing—now I must do it!’ and goes full steam ahead. That was the last thing I wanted…. I’m not sure he really felt that during the war. It was a lot easier for him to define his own actions after he had taken them. I also felt that it would have been too melodramatic of me to have invented a reason for him. It would have been too easy for the sort of couch-potato tastes of American audiences, who demand easy answers to complicated questions. I felt it would have been a disservice to Schindler’s deeds to have manufactured something just because I couldn’t find it in real life.”
Even some who admire the film object to the scene of Schindler’s breakdown as he bids farewell to his workers, considering it an unfortunate lapse into the kind of sentimentality the film otherwise avoids. But Spielberg’s instincts as a popular artist made him recognize that both the characters and the audience need an emotional catharsis, releasing the mingled feelings of communal solidarity and loss that have been forcibly pent up throughout the three-hour film. Presented with a gold ring in which his workers have inscribed the Talmud’s words, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire,” Schindler is stricken with guilt. He confesses to Stern, “I could have got more out. I could have got more.” Looking over his remaining valuables, Schindler haltingly admits his car would have been worth ten people and his gold swastika pin “would have given me two more—at least one. It would have given me one. One more. One more person. A person is dead—for this. I could have got one more person and I didn’t.”
Schindler’s mournful litany reminds the audience that, however many persons he and others managed to save, there were millions more who perished. Any celebration of survival in the context of the Holocaust, Spielberg acknowledges, must be seen in the shadow of overwhelming loss. At key points throughout the film, he stresses this complexity in visual terms, such as showing a long line of people entering the gas chamber as Schindler’s women leave the shower room alive. David Thomson claimed in Film Comment that “when those saved hurry to trains, the camera (or their eyes) does not pan away to note those less fortunate.” But that is exactly what Spielberg does with his camera, showing another group of victims arriving in Auschwitz as the Schindler Jews hurry to their trains. While Schindler and Stern are drawing up their list of people to save from extermination, the viewer is painfully aware that in bringing the selection to an end, Schindler inevitably is condemning others to die. When Schindler ransoms his women from Auschwitz, the camp commandant tries to interest him instead in “three hundred units” of Hungarian Jews from another train; in rejecting those Jews in favor of his Jews, Schindler is playing God and condemning the others to death. Such are the terrible moral paradoxes of this story, insoluble dilemmas Spielberg does not shrink from acknowledging. This is the opposite of sentimentality. When Schindler humbly confesses, “I didn’t do enough,” he is speaking not only as a wealthy man whose virtues are inextricably mixed with human weaknesses, he is also speaking for the entire world that abandoned the Jews.
For all its emphasis on rescue and survival, the film does not provide audiences the simple and consolatory “happy ending” some of its detractors accused it of offering. “This is a movie about World War II in which all the Jews live,” J. Hoberman claimed in The Village Voice. “The selection is ‘life,’ the Nazi turns out to be a good guy, and human nature is revealed to be sunny and bright. It’s a total reversal.” Such a grotesque caricature of Schindler’s List illustrates not only the difficulty of communicating the complexities of the Holocaust in a popular entertainment medium, but also the stubbornly enduring resistance to Spielberg’s artistry among some segments of the self-styled American intellectual elite.
One of the readers of Commentary who took exception to Philip Gourevitch’s intemperate assault on the film was Rabbi Uri D. Herscher of Los Angeles’s Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, who wrote: “I lost so many relatives in the Holocaust; maybe that is why I found the film so appealing and, finally, so uplifting. Is it a perfect film? What would a perfect film be about the Holocaust? For me it is enough that it is an extraordinarily—even though painfully—absorbing film which demonstrates the splendor of human sympathies and humanitarian passion.” A Holocaust survivor, Norbert Friedman of West Hempstead, New York, wrote in his letter to Commentary, “No matter what the critics say, no matter what the public’s reactions, for us, the survivors, there is only one response, a response usually reserved for another survivor when he concludes giving public testimony. That is appreciatively and warmly to embrace Steven Spielberg in the silent act of bonding.”
Rabbi Albert Lewis, Spielberg’s Hebrew school teacher during his childhood in New Jersey, sees Schindler’s List as “Steven’s gift to his mother, to his people, and in a sense to himself. Now he is a full human being, and for a long while he was alienated from his people. He wrestled with himself, in a sense; it was a little like the story in the Bible of Jacob wrestling with the angel. He suddenly realized what it’s all about.”
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AS he approached the milestone of his fiftieth birthday—which he
passed on December 18, 1996—Spielberg showed no signs of being crushed under the enormous weight of his success. Many a lesser career has collapsed from the burden of escalating expectations, and Spielberg, who still bites his fingernails and throws up before coming to the set in the morning, cannot help feeling the “horrendous” pressure of having to top himself, of simply having to be Steven Spielberg. But throughout his twenty-eight years as a professional filmmaker, he has maintained a sense of inner balance that so far has enabled him to avoid losing his nerve. He seems comfortable (even if others are not) with his own complexities and contradictions.
To some observers, it may have appeared that the choice facing Spielberg about where to take his directing career was plain and clearcut: He either could make more “message” movies like Schindler’s List or regress to making more Indiana Jones movies and movies about dinosaurs. But though Spielberg evolved as a result of Schindler’s List, he did not suddenly change into someone else. On the last day of principal photography on Jurassic Park, he said, “I feel I have a responsibility. And I want to go back and forth from entertainment to socially conscious movies.” When he returned to directing after a long break to recover from the emotional and physical exhaustion of filming those two movies, he proved he meant what he said. The feature film project he chose to follow Schindler’s List was The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park.||||
Going back to sheer entertainment was a way of keeping his creative equilibrium. The traditional American dichotomy between art and entertainment is a stubbornly enduring part of the nation’s puritan heritage, but for Spielberg, pleasing himself and pleasing his audience have almost always gone hand-in-hand. When high school friend Chuck Case visited him at the Long Beach Airport during the filming of 1941, Spielberg surveyed his army of uniformed actors and World War II airplanes and said with a childlike smile, “You know, they pay me to do this.” Schindler’s List demonstrated that, at least in the case of a great popular artist such as Steven Spielberg, artistry and popularity need not be mutually exclusive.
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