The transformation of a rapacious Nazi businessman into the saviour of 1200 Jews \u2014that is the theme of Schindler\u2019s List. It has provoked huge public debate in Germany and Austria, with millions attending the \ufb01lm in the \ufb01rst 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.<\/p>\n
Steven Spielberg\u2019s latest \ufb01lm shows the horror of fascism in power. It will reach greater numbers of viewers than documentaries like Claude Lanzmann\u2019s Shoah, including a new generation confronted with the growth of fascism. Schindler\u2019s 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 \ufb01lm is a useful weapon in today\u2019s anti-fascist struggle.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless Schindler\u2019s List is a product of the capitalist \ufb01lm industry. It is an expression of the spirit of the times. It re\ufb02ects today\u2019s economic and social crisis, and a change in the cultural atmosphere which has swept away uncritical celebrations of capitalist society and its values.<\/p>\n
Despite this the \u201canti-fascist\u201d establishment has nothing to fear from this \ufb01lm. It presses on few of society\u2019s raw nerves\u2014so that neither the public nor the liberal bourgeoisie will take offence.<\/p>\n
The \ufb01lm shows that, alongside small employers like Oskar Schindler, German industrial giants like IG Farben also used Jewish slave labour. German capitalism was the main bene\ufb01ciary of the rule of the fascist murder gangs.<\/p>\n
Capitalists<\/p>\n
But what is never shown is the role of the German capitalists in the Nazis\u2019 rise to power. The capitalists relied on Hitler to smash the organised working class, to boost pro\ufb01ts at the expense of the working class\u2014in particular through the super-exploitation of Jewish and East European slave labour.<\/p>\n
Because the \ufb01lm 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 .<\/p>\n
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 \u201cevil\u201d.<\/p>\n
Fascism appears not as the capitalists\u2019 ultimate regime of crisis management, but as a ready-made reign of terror which simply fell from the skies. Thus the message of the \ufb01lm is that under such a regime it is only possible to save some of the victims through personal courage, and then wait until the \u201cnatural catastrophe\u201d is over, until liberation from above by the Allies.<\/p>\n
Foolish<\/p>\n
In Austrian debates about Spielberg\u2019s \ufb01lm a foolish idea has been doing the rounds: \u201cWhat would have happened if there had been many Schindlers?\u201d<\/p>\n
This absurd arithmetic\u2014\u201cwith 6,000 Schindlers there would have been no extermination of the Jews\u201d\u2014just does not add up. Schindler\u2019s 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\u2014generalised individual courage and a sense of civic duty\u2014is a laughably inadequate means of struggle. The only serious alternative is the organised political struggle to undermine and smash fascist rule.<\/p>\n
It is no accident that Spielberg has chosen the story of an employer, a man from the Nazi establishment, who \u201csees the light\u201d\u2014a popular theme in religious America. Why not one of the thousands of resistance \ufb01ghters 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?<\/p>\n
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\u2014who decided to overthrow Hitler when it became clear that the Nazis faced defeat\u2014as the real \u201cheroes of anti-fascism\u201d.<\/p>\n
Schindler\u2019s 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 \ufb01ned 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.<\/p>\n
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 de\ufb01nite continuity with the institutions of the Nazi state, using many of the same people as judges and of\ufb01cials.<\/p>\n
This would have upset the West German ruling class and lessened the glory attached to the Allied armies for their role in the \u201cliberation\u201d.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cdemocrats\u201d regarded the old Nazis as far more reliable than the resistance \ufb01ghters, most of whom came from the working class movement.<\/p>\n
In Schindler\u2019s List the anti-fascist hero is a German. Spielberg thus seems to break with the banal schema of most American anti-fascist \ufb01lms that present \u201cthe Germans\u201d as being all little more than fanatical Nazis. But once we leave Schindler himself out of account, Spielberg\u2019s \ufb01lm 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 \ufb01lled 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.<\/p>\n
For Spielberg, Schindler is the exception that proves the rule. The notion that the supposed \u201cnational character\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In Austria this myth is bound up with the central lie of the Second Republic, the notion that Austria was the \u201c\ufb01rst victim\u201d of Nazism. Thus Austrian nationalists are able to blame \u201cthe Germans\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
After the German annexation, Austria not only had a higher percentage of Nazi Party members than the \u201cOld Reich\u201d (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.<\/p>\n
At the last free democratic elections, the Nazis got fewer than the combined votes of the two working class parties\u2014the 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\u2019 broken promises.<\/p>\n
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 in\ufb02uenced post-war politics.<\/p>\n
As well as reinforcing stereotypes of the Germans, Spielberg reinforces stereotypes of the Jews. Spielberg\u2019s \ufb01lm 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 \u201cinstinctive cleverness\u201d to overcome the worst, but were incapable of collective resistance and relied on well-meaning saviours.<\/p>\n
1943 saw the heroic uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, which brought with it a class and political polarisation among the Jews (see Ben Carling\u2019s account in WP 173 and Marek Edelman\u2019s The Ghetto Fights).<\/p>\n
In view of the uprising\u2019s revolutionary character it is no accident that the US \ufb01lm industry hasn\u2019t latched on to that particular \u201cstory\u201d. In Spielberg\u2019s \ufb01lm there is not a single reference to this, the most signi\ufb01cant instance of Jewish resistance to the fascist murderers.<\/p>\n
The weakest part of the \ufb01lm is de\ufb01nitely the end. Incredibly, Hollywood has succeeded in giving even a \ufb01lm 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 \u201chis\u201d Jewish workers, followed by the march of the Schindler-Jews, amidst optimistic music, over the hills and into the distance.<\/p>\n
A Red Army soldier who comes into the camp to announce the liberation is depicted as a laughable and overbearing \ufb01gure. The symbolism is cynical to say the least.<\/p>\n
The Soviet people and Soviet troops defended themselves against the fascist assault, sustaining a monstrous level of victims and casualties\u201420 million dead, the scorching and wasting of endless stretches of land, and racist genocide against the so-called \u201cSlav sub-humans\u201d.<\/p>\n
Struggle<\/p>\n
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 \ufb01lm, was liberated because its SS guards \ufb02ed before the advancing Soviet troops.<\/p>\n
What a sickening reminder of Hollywood\u2019s ingrained anti-communism: confronted with the Holocaust, the whole of liberal society is consumed with pious hypocrisy, but the \ufb01lm can still end with a tasteless joke at the expense of Nazism\u2019s Soviet victims.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Reactionary<\/p>\n
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 \u201cunity of the Jewish people\u201d, of their supposedly common interest\u2014transcending class distinctions\u2014against a universally and eternally hostile environment.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Barbaric<\/p>\n
Despite these weaknesses, Schindler\u2019s List has its strengths. It is a tremendous indictment of fascism\u2019s reign of terror. By showing us the barbaric reality that gripped Europe \ufb01fty years ago, the \ufb01lm can be a powerful spur for the struggles of the future. Liberal \u201canti-fascism\u201d will use this \ufb01lm\u2019s 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 \ufb01ghting alternative.n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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