The transformation of a rapacious Nazi businessman into the saviour of 1200 Jews —that is the theme of Schindler’s List. It has provoked huge public debate in Germany and Austria, with millions attending the film in the first few weeks of release. This article is a translated excerpt of a longer review, by Eric Wegner, originally appearing in ArbeiterInnen Standpunkt, paper of the Austrian section of the LRCI.
Steven Spielberg’s latest film shows the horror of fascism in power. It will reach greater numbers of viewers than documentaries like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, including a new generation confronted with the growth of fascism. Schindler’s List drags the Holocaust out of the realm of anonymous statistics, helping to make the scale of the terror concrete and, at least partially, imaginable. As such the film is a useful weapon in today’s anti-fascist struggle.
Nevertheless Schindler’s List is a product of the capitalist film industry. It is an expression of the spirit of the times. It reflects today’s economic and social crisis, and a change in the cultural atmosphere which has swept away uncritical celebrations of capitalist society and its values.
Despite this the “anti-fascist” establishment has nothing to fear from this film. It presses on few of society’s raw nerves—so that neither the public nor the liberal bourgeoisie will take offence.
The film shows that, alongside small employers like Oskar Schindler, German industrial giants like IG Farben also used Jewish slave labour. German capitalism was the main beneficiary of the rule of the fascist murder gangs.
Capitalists
But what is never shown is the role of the German capitalists in the Nazis’ rise to power. The capitalists relied on Hitler to smash the organised working class, to boost profits at the expense of the working class—in particular through the super-exploitation of Jewish and East European slave labour.
Because the film cannot explain the origins of fascism, it presents a picture of something akin to a natural catastrophe, something which just suddenly happened. This is typical of bourgeois historical accounts .
It presents an idealist image of history; the Nazis and their backers are portrayed as men who, for unknown reasons, suddenly become fanatical, inhuman and “evil”.
Fascism appears not as the capitalists’ ultimate regime of crisis management, but as a ready-made reign of terror which simply fell from the skies. Thus the message of the film is that under such a regime it is only possible to save some of the victims through personal courage, and then wait until the “natural catastrophe” is over, until liberation from above by the Allies.
Foolish
In Austrian debates about Spielberg’s film a foolish idea has been doing the rounds: “What would have happened if there had been many Schindlers?”
This absurd arithmetic—“with 6,000 Schindlers there would have been no extermination of the Jews”—just does not add up. Schindler’s plan worked simply because he found a gap in the system that he could use without attracting attention. Had he taken on a greater volume of Jewish workers, they could no longer have been concealed. The liberal answer to fascism—generalised individual courage and a sense of civic duty—is a laughably inadequate means of struggle. The only serious alternative is the organised political struggle to undermine and smash fascist rule.
It is no accident that Spielberg has chosen the story of an employer, a man from the Nazi establishment, who “sees the light”—a popular theme in religious America. Why not one of the thousands of resistance fighters from the working class movement, who at the risk of their lives fought the fascists in the towns, industry and the army, or who hid Jews in their homes?
The ruling class do not want to hear tales of working class self-organisation, of class struggle, of industrial sabotage, of subversion in the army. That is why German histories of the period parade the military chiefs around Stauffenberg—who decided to overthrow Hitler when it became clear that the Nazis faced defeat—as the real “heroes of anti-fascism”.
Schindler’s later history is covered in a documentary epilogue. This is highly selective, which is also no accident. We are told that he had no further business success and received eventual recognition of his deeds. What is not mentioned is that Schindler was arrested and fined by a Frankfurt court at the end of the 1950s. His crime was to punch a Nazi who, like countless others before him, harassed Schindler in the street, and called him a Jew-lover for his role in saving people from the Holocaust.
Spielberg obviously did not want to start a debate about the role of former Nazis in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany. In particular he did not want to draw attention to the fact that its justice system showed a definite continuity with the institutions of the Nazi state, using many of the same people as judges and officials.
This would have upset the West German ruling class and lessened the glory attached to the Allied armies for their role in the “liberation”.
These armies disarmed the Antifascist Committees that had taken over many towns and workplaces in the immediate aftermath of liberation, and re-established the old state apparatus under the protection of the Allied military administration, making only a few cosmetic changes. In their project of ensuring capitalist stability and building an anti-Soviet bloc, the Western “democrats” regarded the old Nazis as far more reliable than the resistance fighters, most of whom came from the working class movement.
In Schindler’s List the anti-fascist hero is a German. Spielberg thus seems to break with the banal schema of most American anti-fascist films that present “the Germans” as being all little more than fanatical Nazis. But once we leave Schindler himself out of account, Spielberg’s film stands four-square in this tradition. All the German characters come across at best as cowardly fellow travellers of vicious camp bosses. This is exacerbated by images of children filled with anti-semitic hatred, cheering on the incarceration and annihilation of the Jews. There is no doubt that these examples are entirely authentic. The point is that they are not representative of the majority of Germans under the Nazis.
For Spielberg, Schindler is the exception that proves the rule. The notion that the supposed “national character” of the Germans is particularly authoritarian, disciplined and thus prone to fascism is not only widespread in the West, but also among Austrian anti-fascists.
In Austria this myth is bound up with the central lie of the Second Republic, the notion that Austria was the “first victim” of Nazism. Thus Austrian nationalists are able to blame “the Germans” for fascism and to exonerate the Austrians. In reality Austria, like most capitalist countries, had its own home-grown fascist movement, the Heimwehr, which came to power.
After the German annexation, Austria not only had a higher percentage of Nazi Party members than the “Old Reich” (Germany), but our kindly fellow citizens were also over-represented in the repressive state apparatus and in the running of the concentration camps. Above all, it cannot be said that the Germans as a whole became fascist, or even that a majority of them did. Nor were the exceptions few and far between.
At the last free democratic elections, the Nazis got fewer than the combined votes of the two working class parties—the Social Democrats and the Communists. After their seizure of power, the tendency for the Nazi Party to be integrated into the system stood in contradiction to growing disillusionment at the Nazis’ broken promises.
The certain outbreak of civil war in Germany was forestalled by the allied invasion. The reactionary ideological consequences of the fact that the liberation of Germany came not from within but from without have profoundly influenced post-war politics.
As well as reinforcing stereotypes of the Germans, Spielberg reinforces stereotypes of the Jews. Spielberg’s film reproduces an image of the Jews as passive victims, who accepted their fate resignedly, who ran their businesses even under Nazi repression, who relied on “instinctive cleverness” to overcome the worst, but were incapable of collective resistance and relied on well-meaning saviours.
1943 saw the heroic uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, which brought with it a class and political polarisation among the Jews (see Ben Carling’s account in WP 173 and Marek Edelman’s The Ghetto Fights).
In view of the uprising’s revolutionary character it is no accident that the US film industry hasn’t latched on to that particular “story”. In Spielberg’s film there is not a single reference to this, the most significant instance of Jewish resistance to the fascist murderers.
The weakest part of the film is definitely the end. Incredibly, Hollywood has succeeded in giving even a film about the Holocaust a happy ending. The epilogue, which reminds us that today only 4,000 Jews are still living in Poland gives the impression of having been tacked on as an after-thought. The real ending is a lengthy and emotional parting scene between Schindler and “his” Jewish workers, followed by the march of the Schindler-Jews, amidst optimistic music, over the hills and into the distance.
A Red Army soldier who comes into the camp to announce the liberation is depicted as a laughable and overbearing figure. The symbolism is cynical to say the least.
The Soviet people and Soviet troops defended themselves against the fascist assault, sustaining a monstrous level of victims and casualties—20 million dead, the scorching and wasting of endless stretches of land, and racist genocide against the so-called “Slav sub-humans”.
Struggle
Through their struggle they made the decisive contribution to the liberation of Europe. The fact that the USSR was ruled by vicious Stalinists in no way robs the struggle of the Soviet people of its meaning. The Brunnlitz concentration camp in East Sudetenland, depicted in the film, was liberated because its SS guards fled before the advancing Soviet troops.
What a sickening reminder of Hollywood’s ingrained anti-communism: confronted with the Holocaust, the whole of liberal society is consumed with pious hypocrisy, but the film can still end with a tasteless joke at the expense of Nazism’s Soviet victims.
Finally, Spielberg hints at the pro-Zionist conclusions that the establishment wants us to draw from the Holocaust. After the Red Army soldier makes it clear that the Jews are not welcome in the East and that things scarcely look better in the West, he leaves the freed captives to march off into the sun. Together with the positive image of Israel in the documentary epilogue, the message is clear: a Jewish state in Palestine is the salvation and the future for the Jewish people.
Reactionary
This message is reactionary not only because it has meant the oppression of the Palestinians, but also because it reinforces the reactionary myth of the “unity of the Jewish people”, of their supposedly common interest—transcending class distinctions—against a universally and eternally hostile environment.
It is reactionary because it leads the Jewish people towards another catastrophe: Israel is not their salvation, but a prison house, forcing them into permanent confrontation with the Arab masses in the Middle East. It is not nationalist self-isolation in an armed reactionary state but the international struggle of the working class that can free all Jewish people from centuries of persecution.
Barbaric
Despite these weaknesses, Schindler’s List has its strengths. It is a tremendous indictment of fascism’s reign of terror. By showing us the barbaric reality that gripped Europe fifty years ago, the film can be a powerful spur for the struggles of the future. Liberal “anti-fascism” will use this film’s undoubted emotional charge to divert and smother any effective class action against the fascists. We have to focus that emotional charge into support for a fighting alternative.n