schindlers list is not shoah. miriam hansen

8/12/2019 Schindlers List is Not Shoah. Miriam Hansen

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"Schindler's List" Is Not "Shoah": The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and PublicMemoryAuthor(s): Miriam Bratu HansenSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Winter, 1996), pp. 292-312Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343973.

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Schindler's List Is Not Shoah: The SecondCommandment, Popular Modernism,and Public Memory

Miriam Bratu Hansen

If there were a Richter scale to measure the extent to which commercialfilms cause reverberations in the traditional public sphere, the effect ofSchindler'sList might equal or come close to that of D. W. Griffith's racistblockbuster of 1915, TheBirthof a Nation.1 If we bracket obvious differ-ences between the films (which are perhaps not quite as obvious as theymay seem) and bracket eight decades of media history, we are temptedto make the comparison because a similar seismic intensity characterizesboth Spielberg's ambition and the film's public reception Each film de-monstratively takes on a trauma of collective historical dimensions; andeach reworks this trauma in the name of memory and national identity,inscribed with particular notions of race, sexuality, and family. Each filmparticipates in the contested discourse of fiftieth-year commemorations,marking the eventual surrender of survivor- (or veteran-) based memoryto the vicissitudes of public history. While TheBirthof a Nation was not the

For astute readings and suggestions on this essay, I wish to thank Homi Bhabha, BillBrown, Michael Geyer, Alison Landsberg, and audiences at the University of Chicago, Har-vard University, and the annual conference of the Society for Cinema Studies, March 1994.1. The comparison was first suggested, in a somewhat different spirit, in Terrence Raf-ferty, "A Man of Transactions," review of Schindler'sList, New Yorker,0 Dec. 1993, p. 132.Rafferty praises the epic significance and "visionary clarity" of Schindler'sList by invokingJames Agee's reverie about The Birth of a Nation as "'a perfect realization of a collectivedream of what the Civil War was like, as veterans might remember it fifty years later, or aschildren, fifty years later, might imagine it"' (p. 132). Obviously, such a comparison asks tobe turned against itself; see Philip Gourevitch, "ADissent on Schindler'sList,"Commentary7(Feb. 1994): 52.Critical nquiry22 (Winter 1996)(D 1996 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/96/2202-0006$01.00. All rights reserved.

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Critical nquiry Winter1996 293first film to deal with the Civil War and its aftermath (there were in factdozens of Civil War films between 1911 and 1915), the film did lay un-precedented claim to the construction of national history and thus dem-onstrated the stakes of national memory for the history of the present.And while Schindler'sList is certainly not the first film to deal with theGerman Judeocide, Spielberg's story about a Sudenten German Catholicentrepreneur who saved the lives of 1,100 Polish Jews asserts a similarplace of centrality in contemporary U.S. culture and politics.On the level of reception, both TheBirthofa Nation and Schindler'sListprovoked responses from far beyond the pale of industrial-commercialculture, getting attention from writers, activists, and politicians who usu-ally don't take films seriously; it thus temporarily linked the respectivemedia publics (emergent in the case of The Birthof a Nation, all-inclusivein the case of Schindler'sList) with the publics of traditional politics andcritical intellectuals.2 What is extraordinary about these two films is notjust how they managed to catalyze contesting points of view but also howthey make visible the contestation among various and unequal discursivearenas in their effort to lay claim to what and how a nation remembers-not an identical nation, to be sure, but distinctly different formations ofa national public. As is well known, The Birthof a Nation was the first filmto be given a screening at the White House (after which President Wood-row Wilson's comment "it is like writing history in lightning" became partof the legend), but it was also the first film to galvanize intellectual andpolitical opposition in an alliance of Progressive reformers and the newlyformed NAACP.As is likewise known, not all intellectuals protested: TheBirthof a Nation became the founding text for an apologetic discourse on"film art" that for decades tried to relativize the film's racist infraction.3

2. Another example of such boundary-crossing publicity in the recent past is OliverStone's JFK (1992). My use of the term public, like the distinction among various types ofpublicness, is indebted to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphereand Experience:Toward n Analysis of the Bourgeoisand ProletarianPublic Sphere,trans. Peter Labanyi, JamieOwen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (1972; Minneapolis, 1993); see also my foreword to thisedition, pp. ix-xli.3. Woodrow Wilson, quoted in Michael Rogin, "'The Sword Became a Flashing Vision':D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation," in "TheBirth of a Nation":D. W Griffith,Director, d.Robert Lang (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994), p. 251, an excellent essay on the film's interven-tion in the contemporary political and ideological context. See also Janet Staiger, "TheBirthof a Nation: Reconsidering Its Reception," in "TheBirth of a Nation," pp. 195-213. For anearlier account, see Thomas Cripps, SlowFade o Black: TheNegro nAmericanFilm,1900-1942

Miriam Bratu Hansen is Andrew W. Mellon and Ferdinand ScherillDistinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University ofChicago where she also directs the Film Studies Center. She is completinga study of the Frankfurt school's debates on film and mass culture.


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294 MiriamBratuHansen Schindler's List and ShoahHere my comparison turns into disanalogy. For can we compare theviolent and persistent damage done to African Americans by The Birthof

a Nation to the damage done, as some critics claim, by Schindler'sList tothe victims in whose name it pretends to speak? And can we comparethe engagement for a disenfranchised community by whites and blacks,liberals and radicals, to the contemporary intellectual stance that holdsall representations of the Shoah accountable to the task of an anamnesticsolidarity with the dead? To what extent is the disjunction of the two filmsa matter of the different histories they engage and to what extent does itillustrate the profound transformation of public memory in contempo-rary media culture? What do we make, in each case, of the ambivalenteffects of popular success? And how, finally, does popularity as such shapethe critical accounts we get of the films?In the following, I will try to trace some of the dynamics at work inthe reception of Schindler'sList. I regard the controversies over the filmas symptomatic of larger issues, in particular the ongoing problematic ofHolocaust remembrance and the so-called Americanization of the Holo-caust, but also the more general issue of the relationship of intellectualsto mass culture, specifically to the media publics of cinema and television.I see both these issues encapsulated in the pervasive polarization of criti-cal argument into the opposition between Schindler'sList and ClaudeLanzmann's documentary Shoah (1985) as two mutually exclusive para-digms of cinematically representing or not-representing the Holocaust.This opposition, I will argue, does not yield a productive way of dealingwith either the films or the larger issues involved.4I distinguish, roughly, among three major strands or levels in thereception of Schindler'sList. First, there is the level of official publicity.Under this term I lump together a whole variety of channels and dis-courses, ranging from Spielberg's self-promotion and the usual Holly-wood hype (culminating in the Oscars award ceremony) to presidentialendorsements at home and abroad as well as government bannings of thefilm in some Near Eastern and Asian countries; from subsidized and man-datory screenings for high school students and youth groups to the largelyadulatory coverage in the trades, the daily press, and TV talk shows.The second, though by no means secondary, level of reception is themercurial factor of popular reception. While this reception is no doubtproduced and shaped by official publicity, it cannot be totally reduced tointended response. The distinct dynamics of popular reception comes to

(New York, 1977), chap. 2. On the film's devastating and lasting effects on African Ameri-cans' cinematic representation and relation to film practice, see Black AmericanCinema,ed.Manthia Diawara (New York, 1993).4. For a comment on the relationship between the two films, see Yosefa Loshitzky, "Ho-locaust Others: Spielberg's Schindler'sList versus Lanzmann's Shoah," n Spielberg'sHolocaust:CriticalPerspectives n "Schindler's ist,"ed. Loshitzky (Bloomington, Ind., 1996).


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Winter1996 295the fore in precisely those moments when an audience diverges or goesaway from the film, when reception takes on a momentum of its own,that is, becomes public in the emphatic sense of the word. This includesmoments of failure, like the much-publicized irreverent reaction of blackstudents at Castlemont High School in Oakland.5 It also includes thefilm's enormous success in Germany, which prompted endless discus-sions, letters to the editor, and the discovery of local Schindlers every-where-a development one cannot but view with amazement andambivalence. Methodologically, this aspect of reception is the most diffi-cult to represent, for it eludes both ethnographic audience research andtextually based constructions of possible spectatorial effects; and yet itrequires an approach that is capable of mediating empirical and theoreti-cal levels of argument.The third level of reception, on which I will focus here, is the vehe-ment rejection of the film on the part of critical intellectuals. Thisincludes both academics and journalists, avant-garde artists and film-makers (among others, Art Spiegelman and Ken Jacobs in a symposiumprinted in the Village Voice),but also a fair number of liberal publicists(for example, Frank Rich, Leon Wieseltier, Philip Gourevitch, IleneRosenzweig) who voiced their dissent in middlebrow publications such asthe New YorkTimes,The New Republic,and the New YorkReviewof Booksaswell as Jewish publications such as Forward,Tikkun,and Commentary.Mostof these critical comments position themselves as minority opinionagainst the film's allegedly overwhelming endorsement in the media, ifnot as martyrs in the "resistance" against popular taste ("there is littlepleasure in being troubled by what so many have found deeply mov-ing").6Accordingly, critical dissent is directed as much against the largerimpact of the film-which Michael Andre Bernstein has dubbed "theSchindler'sListeffect"7- as against the film itself.

This response is no doubt legitimate and, in print at least, highlypersuasive. For all I know, I might well have joined in, that is, had I seenthe film in this country rather than in Germany. The kind of work thefilm did there, in light of a hopelessly overdetermined and yet rapidlychanging "politics of memory," may arguably present a special case.85. See Kluge, "On Film and the Public Sphere," trans. Thomas Y. Levin and MiriamHansen, New GermanCritique,nos. 24-25 (Fall/Winter 1981-82): 206-20. For the CastlemontHigh School incident, see Frank Rich, "Schindler's Dissed," New YorkTimes,6 Feb. 1994, p.D17, city ed. and "Laughter at Film Brings Spielberg Visit," New YorkTimes,13 Apr. 1994,p. Bll.6. Michael Andre Bernstein, "The Schindler'sList Effect,"AmericanScholar 63 (Summer1994): 429.7. Ibid.8. See Michael Geyer, "On the Uses of Shame: The German Politics of Memory," inRadicalEvil, ed. Joan Copjec (London, 1995). See also Geyer and Hansen, "German-JewishMemory and National Consciousness," in HolocaustRemembrance: he Shapesof Memory,ed.Geoffrey Hartman (Oxford, 1994), pp. 175-90.

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296 MiriamBratu HansenSeeing the film outside the context of American publicity, however, mademe consider the film's textual work, if not independently of its intentionsand public effects, yet still from a slightly displaced location in relation toboth Hollywood global effects and its intellectual critics. Let me say at theoutset that it is not my intention to vindicate Schindler'sList as a master-piece (which would mean reverting to the Birthofa Nation debate). I thinkthere are serious problems with the film's conception, and I could havedone without much of the last third, when Oskar Schindler (Liam Nee-son) the opportunist, gambler, and philanderer turns into Schindler theheroic rescuer. But seen from a perspective of displacement, and consid-ered from an interstitial space between distinct critical discourses andbetween disjunctive political legacies, the film did seem to have an im-portant function, not only for empirically diverse audiences, but also forthinking through key issues involved in the representation of the Shoahand the problem of "public memory."9Moreover, in the way the film po-larized, or was assumed to have polarized, critical and popular responses,the reception of Schindler'sList threw into relief a particular pattern inintellectuals' positioning that rehearsed familiar tropes of the old debateon modernism versus mass culture.Before I elaborate on this pattern, and on what it occludes in thepublic as well as textual workings of the film, I will first outline the intel-lectual critique in its key points. The following summary distinguishes,roughly, among arguments pertaining to (a) the culture ndustry in Hork-heimer and Adorno's sense); (b) the problem of narrative; c) the questionof cinematic ubjectivity; nd (d) the question of representation.a) The first and obvious argument is that Schindler'sList is and re-mains a Hollywood product. As such it is circumscribed by the economicand ideological tenets of the culture industry, with its unquestioned andsupreme values of entertainment and spectacle; its fetishism of style andglamour; its penchant for superlatives and historicist grasp at any and allexperience (the "ultimate statement on" or "the greatest Holocaust filmever made"); and its reifying, levelling, and trivializing effect on every-thing it touches. In this argument, Schindler'sList is usually aligned withSpielberg's previous megaspectacles, especiallyJurassic Park,and accusedof having turned the Holocaust into a theme park. Since the business ofHollywood is entertainment, preferably in the key of sentimental opti-mism, there is something intrinsically and profoundly incommensurableabout the "re-creation"of the traumatic events of the Shoah "for the sake

9. See Hartman, "Public Memory and Its Discontents," Raritan 13 (Spring 1994): 24-40. Hartman defines "contemporary publicmemory" in contradistinction to "traditional col-lective memory" (p. 33). I am using the term in a more general and less pessimistic senseindebted to Negt and Kluge's theory of the public sphere (see n. 2). See also Hartman,"The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg's Schindler'sList,"Salmagundi,nos. 106-7 (Spring/Sum-mer 1995): 127-45.

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Winter1996 297of an audience's recreation."10Or, as J. Hoberman puts it so eloquently:"Is it possible to make a feel-good entertainment about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the 20th century?""This critique of Schindler'sList links the film to the larger problem ofthe Holocaust's dubious mass-media currency, recalling the ugly pun of"Shoah-business." The interesting question here is whether Spielberg'sfilm is merely the latest culmination of what Saul Friedlander discerned,in films and novels of the 1970s, as a "new discourse about Nazism onthe right as well as on the left," a discourse that thrived on the spectacularfusion of kitsch and death.12 Or does Schindler'sList,along with the successof the Washington D.C. Holocaust museum, mark the emergence of yetanother new discourse? If the latter is the case, this new discourse, whosedifferent dynamics the film might help us understand, will have to besituated in relation to other struggles over public memorializing, con-cerning more specifically U.S. traumata such as slavery, the genocide ofNative Americans, and Vietnam.b) The second and more local argument made about the film's inade-quacy to the topic it engages is that it does so in the form of a fictionalnarrative. One emphasis in this argument is on the choice of fiction (not-withstanding the film's pretensions to historical "authenticity") over non-fiction or documentary, a form of film practice that would have allowedfor a different organization of space and temporality, different sound/image relations, and therefore different possibilities of approaching theevents portrayed. Attendant upon the film's fictional form-with its(nineteenth-century) novelistic and historicist underpinnings-is theclaim, supported by the publicity and Spielberg's complicity with it, thatSchindler'sList does not just represent one story from the Shoah but thatit does so in a representativemanner-that it encapsulates the totality ofthe Holocaust experience.'3 If that were the case, the film's focus on theheroic exception, the Gentile rescuer and the miracle of survival, wouldindeed distort the proportions and thus end up falsifying the record.Related to this charge is the condemnation of the film's choice of a

10. Art Spiegelman, in J. Hoberman et al., "Schindler's ist:Myth, Movie, and Memory,"VillageVoice,29 Mar. 1994, p. 27; hereafter abbreviated "MMM." See also Sean Mitchell'sprofile of Spiegelman, "Now, for a Little Hedonism," LosAngelesTimes,18 Dec. 1994, pp. 7,97-98, esp. p. 98.11. Hoberman, "Spielberg's Oskar," Village Voice,21 Dec. 1993, p. 63. See also Rich,"Extras in the Shadows," New YorkTimes,2 Jan. 1994, p. 4, and Leon Wieseltier, "CloseEncounters of the Nazi Kind," The New Republic,24 Jan. 1994, p. 42.12. Saul Friedlander, Reflections f Nazism:An Essayon Kitschand Death, trans. ThomasWeyr (New York, 1984), p. 13. Friedlander himself discusses this question in an essay sched-uled to appear in Spielberg'sHolocaust. See also Friedlander's introduction to the volumeof essays, edited by him, Probingthe Limitsof Representation:Nazism and the "Final Solution"(Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 1-21.13. See Ora Gelley, "Narration and the Embodiment of Power in Schindler'sList,"paperdelivered at the Society for Cinema Studies annual conference, New York, March 1995.

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298 MiriamBratu Hansenparticular type of narrative, specifically, the classicalmode that governedHollywood products until about 1960 and beyond.14 In a technical sense,this term refers to a type of narrative that requires thorough causal moti-vation centering on the actions and goals of individual characters (as op-posed to the "anonymous" Jewish masses who were the object ofextermination); a type of narrative in which character psychology andrelations among characters tend to be predicated on masculinist hierar-chies of gender and sexuality (in the case of Schindler'sList,the reassertionof certain "styles of manhood"'5 and the sadistic-voyeuristic fascinationwith the female body, in particular the staging of Amon Goeth's [RalphFiennes] desire and his violence toward Helen Hirsch [Embeth Davidtz],the Jewish housemaid); a type of narrative in which the resolution oflarger-order problems tends to hinge upon the formation of a couple orfamily and on the restoration of familial forms of subjectivity (Schindleras a super father-figure who has to renounce his promiscuity and returnto marriage in order to accomplish his historic mission, the rescue of Jew-ish families).16A fundamental limitation of classical narrative in relation to history,and to the historical event of the Shoah in particular, is that it relies onneoclassicist principles of compositional unity, motivation, linearity, equi-librium, and closure-principles singularly inadequate in the face of anevent that by its very nature defies our narrative urge to make sense of, toimpose order on the discontinuity and otherness of historical experience.Likewise, the deadly teleology of the Shoah represents a temporal trajec-tory that gives the lie to any classical dramaturgy of deadlines, suspense,and rescues in the nick of time, to moments of melodramatic intensityand relief. There are at least three last-minute rescues in Schindler'sList,leading up to the compulsory Hollywood happy ending. This radicallyexacerbates the general problem of narrative film, which AlexanderKluge has succinctly described as the problem of "how to get to a happyending without lying."'7 The rescue of the Schindler Jews is a matter ofluck and gamble rather than melodramatic coincidence; and althoughthe story is historically "authentic," it cannot but remain a fairy tale in the

14. See David Bordwell, Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The ClassicalHollywoodCinema:Film Styleand Mode of Production o 1960 (New York, 1985), and Bordwell, Narrationin theFiction Film (Madison, Wis., 1985), chap. 9. The concept of classical cinema owes much topsychoanalytic-semiotic and feminist film theory of the 1970s; see Narrative,Apparatus, deol-ogy:A FilmTheoryReader,ed. Philip Rosen (New York, 1986).15. Ken Jacobs, in "MMM,"p. 27. See also Gertrud Koch, in "MMM,"p. 28.16. See Bernstein, "The Schindler'sListEffect," p. 430, and Geoff Eley and Atina Gross-mann, "Watching Schindler'sList:Not the Last Word" (forthcoming in New GermanCritique).17. Kluge, Die Macht der Gefihle (1983); see the script of this film and other materialspublished under the same title (Frankfurt am Main, 1984). See also Hansen, "The StubbornDiscourse: History and Story-Telling in the Films of Alexander Kluge," Persistence f Vision,no. 2 (Fall 1985): 26. On the Hollywood convention of the always-happy ending, see Bord-well, "Happily Ever After, Part Two," The VelvetLight Trap19 (1982-83): 2-7.

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Winter1996 299face of the overwhelming facticity of "man-made mass death."'8 Criticsof the film, notably Lanzmann and Gertrud Koch, have observed thatSchindler'sList (like Agnieszka Holland's 1991 Europa, Europa) marks ashift in the public commemoration of the Shoah: the film is concernedwith survival, the survival of individuals, rather than the fact of death, thedeath of an entire people or peoples.19 If the possibility of passing throughAuschwitz s the film's central historical trope, the implications are indeedexorbitant-though not necessarily, in my opinion, that self-evident andunequivocal.Finally, as a classical narrative, Schindler'sList inscribes itself in a par-ticular tradition of "realist" film. This is not just a matter of Spielberg'sdeclared efforts to ensure "authenticity" (by using authentic locations, byfollowing Thomas Keneally's novel, which is based on survivor testi-mony); nor is it simply a matter of the film's use of black-and-white foot-age and imitation of a particular 1940s style. The film's "reality effect,"to use Roland Barthes's phrase, has as much to do with the way it recyclesimages and tropes from other Holocaust films, especially European ones;but, as a classical narrative, it does so without quotation marks, pre-tending to be telling the story for the first time.20 As Koch argues, thereis "something authoritarian" in the way Schindler'sList subsumes all theseearlier films, using them to assert its own "truth claims for history"("MMM,"pp. 26, 25). The question that poses itself is whether the film'scitational practice merely follows the well-worn path of nineteenth-century realist fiction, or whether it does so in the context of a postmod-ern aesthetics that has rehabilitated such syncretistic procedures in thename of popular resonance and success. The more interesting question,though, may be to what extent this distinction actually matters, or inwhich ways the event of the Shoah could be said to trouble, if not chal-lenge, postmodernist assumptions about representation, temporality,and history.c) The third objection raised against Schindler'sList pertains to theway it allocates subjectivity among its characters and engages the viewer'ssubjectivity in that process. The charge here is that the film narrates thehistory of 1,100 rescued Jews from the perspective of the perpetrators,the German Gentile Nazi turned resister and his alter ego, Goeth, thepsychotic SS commandant. As Philip Gourevitch asserts, "Schindler'sListdepicts the Nazis' slaughter of Polish Jewry almost entirely through Ger-

18. See Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes:Hegel, Heidegger,and Man-Made Mass Death(New Haven, Conn., 1985).19. See Claude Lanzmann, "Holocauste, la representation impossible," Le Monde, 3Mar. 1994, pp. 1, 7, trans. under the title "Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth," Guard-ian Weekly, Apr. 1994, p. 14; and Koch, in "MMM,"p. 26.20. See Roland Barthes, "LEffet de reel," Communications 1 (1968): 84-89; trans. Ger-ald Mead, under the title "The Realistic Effect," Film Reader 3 (1978): 131-35. See alsoBarthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974).

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300 MiriamBratu Hansenman eyes."21 By contrast, the argument goes, the Jewish characters arereduced to pasteboard figures, to generic types incapable of elicitingidentification and empathy. Or worse, some critics contend, they cometo life only to embody anti-Semitic stereotypes (money-grubbing Jews,Jew-as-eternal-victim, the association of Jewish women with dangeroussexuality, the characterization of Itzhak Stern [Ben Kingsley], Schindler'saccountant, as "king of the Jewish wimps").22This argument not onlyrefers to the degree to which characters are fleshed out, individualizedby means of casting, acting, cinematography, and narrative action; theargument also pertains to the level of filmic narration or enunciation, thelevel at which characters function to mediate the film's sights and sounds,events and meanings to the spectator, as for instance through flashbacks,voice-over, or optical point of view. As psychoanalytic film theorists haveargued in the 1970s and early 1980s, it is on this level that cinematicsubjectivity is formed most effectively because unconsciously.23 If that isso (and let's for the moment, for the sake of argument, assume it is),what does it mean that point-of-view shots are clustered not only aroundSchindler but also around Goeth, making us participate in one of hiskilling sprees in shots showing the victim through the telescope of hisgun? Does this mean that, even though he is marked as evil on the levelof the diegesis or fictional world of the film, the viewer is nonethelessurged to identify with Goeth's murderous desire on the unconscious levelof cinematic discourse?

d) The fourth, and most difficult, objection to Schindler'sList is that itviolates the taboo on representation (Bilderverbot),hat it tries to give an"image of the unimaginable."24 If the criticisms summarized up to thispoint imply by and large that the film is not "realistic"enough, this cri-tique involves the exact opposite charge, that the film is too "realistic."So, by offering us an "authentic" reconstruction of events of the Shoah,the film enhances the fallacy of an immediate and unmediated access to

21. Gourevitch, "A Dissent on Schindler'sList,"p. 51. See also Jonathan Rosenbaum,"Gentile Persuasion," ChicagoReader,17 Dec. 1993, pp. 10, 26-27, and Gelley, "Narrationand the Embodiment of Power in Schindler'sList."22. Ilene Rosenzweig, quoted in Rich, "Extras in the Shadows," p. 4. See Donald Kus-pit, "Director's Guilt,"Artforum32 (Feb. 1994): 11-12. See also "MMM,"p. 26.23. See, for instance, Christian Metz, "Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film"(pp. 35-65) and "The Imaginary Signifier" (pp. 244-78); Raymond Bellour, "Segmenting/Analyzing" (pp. 66-92) and "The Obvious and the Code" (pp. 93-101); Kaja Silverman,"Suture" (pp. 219-35); Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space" (pp. 379-420); and Laura Mul-vey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (pp. 198-209), in Narrative,Apparatus, deology.For a critique of the cine-semiotic concept of "enunciation," see Bordwell, Narrationand theFictionFilm,pp. 21-26.24. See Koch, "The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable: Noteson Claude Lanzmann's Shoah,"trans. Daniel and Hansen, October,no. 48 (Spring 1989):15-24. See also Koch, Die Einstellungist die Einstellung:VisuelleKonstruktionenesJudentums(Frankfurt am Main, 1992), esp. pt. 2, "Film und Faktizitat: Zur filmischen ReprasentationderJudenvernichtung," pp. 127-84.



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Winter1996 301the past (the fallacy of historical films from TheBirthof a Nation toJFK)-by posing as the "real thing" the film usurps the place of the actual event.What is worse, it does so with an event that defies depiction, whose hor-ror renders any attempt at direct representation obscene. Spielbergtransgresses the boundaries of representability most notoriously, criticsagree, when he takes the camera across the threshold of what we, andthe women in the film "mistakenly" deported to Auschwitz, believe to bea gas chamber. Thus Schindler'sList,like the TV miniseries Holocaust,endsup both trivializing and sensationalizing the Shoah.Lanzmann, the most radical proponent of this critique, accusesSchindler'sListof not respecting the unique and absolute status of the Ho-locaust: "unique in that it erects a ring of fire around itself, a borderlinethat cannot be crossed because there is a certain ultimate degree of hor-ror that cannot be transmitted. To claim it is possible to do so is to beguilty of the most serious transgression."25The counterexample of a filmthat respects that boundary and succeeds in an aesthetic figuration of thevery impossibility of representation is, for both Lanzmann and other crit-ics of Spielberg, his own film Shoah (1985). Lanzmann's film strictly re-fuses any direct representation of the past, whether by means of fictionalreenactment or archival footage. Instead, the film combines interviewsfeaturing various types of witnesses (survivors, perpetrators, bystanders,historians) to give testimony at once to the physical, sense-defying detailsof mass extermination and to the "historical risisof witnessing"presentedby the Shoah.26This crisis threatens not merely the project of a retrospec-tive, anamnestic account but the very possibility and concept of eyewit-nessing and, by extension, the recording capacity of the photographicmedia. (This is why Lanzmann so radically distrusts Spielberg's untrou-bled accessing-or, as Lanzmann calls it, "fabrication"-of a visual ar-chive: "If I had stumbled on a real SS film-a secret film, because filmingwas strictly forbidden-that showed how 3,000 Jewish men, women andchildren were gassed in Auschwitz's crematorium 2, not only would I nothave shown it but I would have destroyed it.")27Lanzmann's argument, like the critique of Schindler'sList in the nameof Shoah, is bound up with a complex philosophical debate surroundingthe Holocaust, which I cannot do justice to here. Suffice it to say that themoral argument about the impossibility of representation-of mimeticdoubling-is linked, via a quasi-theological invocation of the SecondCommandment, to the issue of the singularity of the Shoah, its status as

25. Lanzmann, "Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth," p. 14. Lanzmann makes thesame argument in his critique of the TV miniseries Holocaust,"From the Holocaust to theHolocaust," rans. Simon Srebrny, Telos42 (Winter 1979-80): 137-43.26. Shoshana Felman, "The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah," n Felmanand Dori Laub, Testimony:Crisesof Witnessing n Literature,Psychoanalysis, nd History (NewYork, 1992), p. 206.27. Lanzmann, "Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth," p. 14.

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302 MiriamBratu Hansenan event that is totally and irrecuperably Other, an event that rupturesand is ultimately outside history. What matters in this context is the fur-ther linkage, often made concurrently, between the claim to singularityand the type of aesthetic practice that alone is thought to be capable ofengaging the problematic of representation without disfiguring thememory of the dead. For the breach inflicted by the Shoah has not onlyput into question, irrevocably, the status of culture as an autonomous andsuperior domain (to invoke an often misquoted statement by Adorno);28it has also radicalized the case for a type of aesthetic expression that isaware of its problematic status-the nonrepresentational, singular, andhermetic ecriture to be found in works of high modernism. Shoah hasrightly been praised for its uniqueness, its rigorous and uncompromisinginvention of a filmic language capable of rendering "imageless images"of annihilation (Koch paraphrasing Adorno's AestheticTheory).29chindler'sList, by contrast, does not seek to negate the representational, iconicpower of filmic images, but rather banks on this power. Nor does it de-velop a unique filmic idiom to capture the unprecedented and unassimi-lable fact of mass extermination; rather, it relies on familiar tropes andcommon techniques to narrate the extraordinary rescue of a large groupof individuals.

The critique of Schindler'sList in high-modernist terms, however, es-pecially in Lanzmann's version, reduces the dialectics of the problem ofrepresenting the unrepresentable to a binary opposition of showing ornot showing-rather than casting it, as one might, as an issue of compet-ing representations and competing modes of representation. This binaryargument also reinscribes, paradoxically, a modernist fixation on visionand the visual, whether simply assumed as the epistemological mastersense or critically negated as illusory and affirmative. What gets left outis the dimension of the other senses and of sensory experience, that is,aesthetic in the more comprehensive, Greek sense of the word, and itsfate in a history of modernity that encompasses both mass productionand mass extermination.30 What gets left out in particular is the dimen-sion of the acoustic, the role of sound in the production of visuality, espe-

28. Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," Prisms,trans. Samuel andShierry Weber (1967; Cambridge, Mass., 1988), writes: "Cultural criticism finds itself facedwith the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write poetry after Auschwitzis barbaric, and this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to writepoetry today" (p. 34; trans. mod.). See also Adorno's own revision of this statement in hisNegativeDialectics, rans. E. B. Ashton (1966; New York, 1973), pp. 362-63.29. Koch, "Mimesis and Bilderverbot," creen34 (Autumn 1993): 211-22. See also Koch,Die Einstellung st die Einstellung, pp. 16ff., 123ff. and "The Aesthetic Transformation of theImage of the Unimaginable."30. It is this sense of the aesthetic that Benjamin tries to recover against and in view ofthe decline and perversion of the institution of art. See Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics andAnaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October, o. 62 (Fall 1992):3-41.



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Winter1996 303cially in the technical media where sound has come to compensate forthe historical marginalization of the more bodily senses. Yet, if we under-stand the Shoah's challenge to representation to be as much one of affectas one of epistemology, the specific sensory means of engaging this chal-lenge cannot be ignored. The soundtrack, for example, is neither the seatof a superior truth (as Lanzmann seems to claim for Shoah)nor merely amasked accomplice for the untruths of the image track (as assumed insummary critiques of the classical Hollywood film), but rather the mate-rial site of particular and competing aesthetic practices.31It is no coincidence that none of the critics of Schindler'sList havecommented on the film's use of sound (except for complaints about thesentimental and melodramatic music)-not to mention how few have ac-tually granted the film a closer look. Although I share some of the reser-vations paraphrased above, I still would argue that Schindler'sList is amore sophisticated, elliptical, and self-conscious film than its critics ac-knowledge (and the self-consciousness is not limited to the epilogue inwhich we see the actors together with the survivors they play file pastSchindler's Jerusalem grave). Let me cite a few, brief examples that sug-gest that we might imagine this film differently, examples pertaining toboth the film's complex use of sound and its structuring of narration andcinematic subjectivity.To begin with the latter point, the complaint that the film is narratedfrom the point of view of the perpetrators ignores the crucial function ofStern in the enunciative structure of the film. Throughout the film, Sternis the focus of point-of-view edits and reaction shots, just as he repeatedlymotivates camera movements and shot changes. Stern is the only charac-ter who gets to authorize a flashback, in the sequence in which he re-sponds to Schindler's attempt to defend Goeth ("a wonderful crook") byevoking a scene of Goeth's close-range shooting of twenty-five men in awork detail in retribution for one man's escape; closer framing within theflashback in turn foregrounds, as mute witness, the prisoner to whomStern attributes the account. The sequence is remarkable also in that itcontains the film's only flashforward, prompted by Schindler's exasper-ated question, "what do you want me to do about it?" NotwithstandingStern's disavowing gesture ("nothing, nothing-it's just talking"), hisflashback narration translates into action on Schindler's part, resulting inthe requisitioning of the Pearlmans as workers, which is shown prolepti-cally even before Schindler hands Stern his watch to be used as a bribe.This moment not only marks, on the diegetic level of the film, Schindler'sfirst conscious engagement in bartering for Jewish lives; it also inscribesthe absolute difference in power between Gentiles and Jews on the level

31. See James E Lastra, Technology nd theAmericanCinema:Perception,Representation,Modernity forthcoming). See also Sound Theory/Sound ractice,ed. Rick Altman (New York,1992).

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304 MiriamBratuHansenof cinematic discourse, as a disjunction of filmic temporality. Stern is de-prived of his ability, his right to act, that is, to produce a future, but hecan narrate the past and pass on testimony, hoping to produce action inthe listener/viewer.More often, temporal displacement is a function of the soundtrack,in particular an abundance of sound bridges and other forms of non-matching (such as a character's speech or reading turning into documen-tary-style voice-over); and there are numerous moments when the formaldisjunction of sound and image tracks subtends rhetorical relations ofirony and even counterpoint. This disjunctive style occurs primarily onthe level of diegetic sound, in particular, speech. (The use of nondiegeticmusic in Schindler'sList is indeed another matter, inasmuch as it functionsmore like the "glue" that traditionally covers over any discontinuity andsutures the viewer into the film.)32But the persistent splitting of the im-age track by means of displaced diegetic sound still undercuts the effectof an immediate and totalitarian grasp on reality-such as is producedby perfect sound/image matching in numerous World War II films or, touse a more recent example, Oliver Stone'sJFK.In the sequence that initiates the liquidation of the Kracow Ghetto,disjunctive sound/image relations combine with camera narration thatforegrounds Stern's point of view. The sequence is defined by the dura-tion of an acoustic event, Goeth's speech, that begins and ends with thephrase "today is history." The speech starts in the middle of a series offour shots alternating between Schindler and Goeth shaving, whichbriefly makes it an acoustic flashforward. Only in the fifth shot is the voicegrounded in the speaking character, Goeth, now dressed in a uniform,addressing his men who stand around him in a wide circle. In the shotsthat follow, the speech appears to function as a kind of voice-over, speak-ing the history of the Ghetto's inhabitants and the imminent erasure ofthis history and its subjects. But the images of the living people we see-arabbi praying, a family having breakfast, a man and a woman exchangingloving looks-also resist this predication. So does the voice of the rabbithat competes with Goeth's voice even before we see him pray, and itcontinues, as an undertone to Goeth's voice, into the subsequent shots ofGhetto inhabitants (so that in one shot, in which we hear the subduedsynchronic voices of the family at breakfast, there are actually three dif-ferent layers of sound); the praying voice fades out just before the lastsentence of Goeth's speech. Not coincidentally, all the Jewish charactersshown in this sequence will survive; that is, they will, as individuals, givethe lie to Goeth's project. What is more, nested into this sequence is apronounced point-of-view pattern that centers on Stern and makes himthe first to witness the ominous preparations. The act of looking is em-

32. Compare Claudia Gorbman, UnheardMelodies:NarrativeFilmMusic (Bloomington,Ind., 1987), and Hanns Eisler and Adorno, Composingor the Films(1947; London, 1994).



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Winter1996 305phasized by a close-up of him putting on his glasses and turning to thewindow, and by the answering extreme high-angle shot that frames win-dow and curtain from his vantage point. This shot is repeated, after twoobjective, almost emblematic shots (closely framed and violating screendirection) of rows of chairs and tables being set up by uniformed armsand hands, and then bookended by a medium shot of Stern watchingand turning away from the window. The whole sequence is symmetricallyclosed by reattaching Goeth's voice to his body, thus sealing the fate ofthe majority of the Ghetto population, the people not shown on the im-age track.To be sure, the film's hierarchy of physicality and masculinity wouldnever allow Stern to be seen shaving (as Schindler and Goeth are inthe beginning of the sequence). But the structuring of vision on thelevel of enunciation establishes Stern as a witness or the narration, for theviewer, for posterity. By contrast, moments of subjective vision ascribedto Schindler, most notably the point-of-view shots that stage his twosightings of the little girl in the red coat, serve a quite different function,stressing character psychology rather than narrational authority. Stern'srole as enunciative witness is particularly interesting in a sequence thatdoes not involve optical point of view-the sequence in which Goeth killsLisiek (Wojciech Klata), the boy whom he has made his personal servant.What is remarkable about this sequence is the oblique, elliptical render-ing of the killing: we neither see Goeth shooting nor do we see the boybeing hit; we only see his body lying in the background as Stern walksacross the yard, and it is Stern's movement that motivates that of thecamera. Even Stern's registering of the killing is rendered only obliquely,stressing the split between seeing and meaning, seeing and feelingcharacteristic of the concentration camp universe. Compared to thesystematic way Shoah (in Shoshana Felman's reading) foregrounds theproblematic of witnessing, such moments are perhaps marginal in Schind-ler'sList, but they nonetheless deserve to be discussed in similar terms-as an aesthetic attempt to engage the extreme difficulty (though notabsolute impossibility) of giving sensory expression to an experience thatradically defies sense.33Important as the close attention to the film's textual work is, it canonly provide a weak answer to the fundamental objections raised by thefilm's intellectual opponents. Let me repeat that I am not interested indefending Schindler'sList on aesthetic grounds (the aesthetic narrowly un-derstood as relating to the institution of art and its mass-mediatedafterlives). Nor am I suggesting that the film's use of sound and overallnarrational strategies are radical, unique, or original; on the contrary,most of these textual devices belong to the inventory of classical Holly-wood cinema, from the midteens through the 1950s. Seen in light of the

33. See Felman, "Return of the Voice."

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306 MiriamBratuHansen Schindler's List and Shoahhistory of that institution up to and including commercial film produc-tion of the present, however, Schindler'sList makes use of these devices ina relatively more intelligent, responsible, and interesting manner thanone might have expected, for instance, on the basis of Spielberg's earlierwork. The wholesale attack on the film not only erases these distinctions;it also misses the film's diagnostic significance in relation to other dis-courses, junctures, and disjunctures in contemporary American culture.The point I'm trying to make is that the lack of attention to the film'smaterial and textual specificity is itself a symptom of the impasse pro-duced by the intellectual critique, an impasse that I find epitomized inthe binary opposition of Schindler'sList and Shoah. (Lanzmann's positionin this regard is only the most extreme version of this opposition: "In[Spielberg's] film there is no reflection, no thought, about what is theHolocaust and no thought about what is cinema. Because if he wouldhave thought, he would not have made it-or he would have madeShoah.")34It is one thing to use Shoah for the purpose of spelling out thephilosophical and ethical issues of cinematic representation in relation tothe Shoah; it is another to accuse Schindler'sList of not being the samekind of film. For while Shoah has indeed changed the parameters of Holo-caust representation, it is not without problems, aesthetic as well as politi-cal, nor is it sacrosanct.More important, the attack on Schindler'sList in the name of Shoahreinscribes the debate on filmic representation with the old debate ofmodernism versus mass culture, and thus with binary oppositions of"high" versus "low," "art" versus "kitsch," "esoteric" versus "popular."However, Adorno's insight that, to use Andreas Huyssen's paraphrase,ever since the mid-nineteenth century "modernism and mass culturehave been engaged in a compulsive pas-de-deux"has become exponen-tially more pertinent in postmodern media culture.35 "High" and "low"are inextricably part of the same culture, part of the same public sphere,part of the ongoing negotiation of how forms of social difference are bothrepresented and produced in late capitalism. This is not to say that Shoahdid not have to compete for funding in an unequal struggle with com-mercial cinema; nor that it did not have to fight for distribution and ac-cess. But once the film was released, especially in the United States, itentered the commercial circuit of the art film market and was praised bythe same critics and in the same hyperbolic terms that celebrated Schind-ler'sList.

Ironically, it could be argued, Schindler'sList itself participates in themodernism/mass culture dichotomy even as it tries to overcome it. Hereis where I would like to insert the concept of popular modernism (which34. Quoted in Robert Sklar, "Lanzmann's Latest: After Shoah,Jewish Power," Forward,30 Sept. 1994, p. 10.35. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism,Mass Culture,Postmodernism(Bloomington, Ind., 1986), p. 24.


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FI( 4.-t is dlay. Il,day is history andlyout iFi(;. 1.- 1day is hist,ory;

FI ;.2--to(ldy ill b)eremel) rd. F'i(;. r.-whel elsewhlere tlhey werielpUt iI tlheiIi'u1i i

F(;' 3. -Ye ars i)111m no) the young( will ask with wonder labout

4Si.

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yan (1i a'le paXii 01 it. Kix I 1111(11c' yeatl-s a;go,Rabbli Vou (' |v))ilg

Ire )ut iin the b,lame foi thle black (leath, (asimir

Wfi I-Fi;. 7.-Kra kow. 'lhey c( lle, they trutll(lle(dheir b)elongings into the city; theyMrs. Dres.ner's voice: a bit less

F(i;. 8.-settled, they took hold(, thiey

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FI(;. 10 (a).-science, education, the arts.

FIG. 10 (b). ; ?4': i.*

Fl(;. 11.-They came here with nothing,

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FIG;. 4.-For six centuries, t


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u;.12.-nothing,randhey flourished.

Fl(;. 15.-Jewish Krak6w; think about that. By this evening, those six centuriesare a rumor; Rabbi's oice ades

FIG. 16.-they never happened. Today is history.


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Winter1996 307I elaborate in greater detail elsewhere).36 If we want to grasp the pluralityand complexity of twentieth-century modernity, it is important to notethe extent to which modernism was not just the creation of individualartists and intellectuals or, for that matter, avant-garde coteries, but also,especially during the interwar period, a popular and mass movement. Iam thinking in particular of formations usually subsumed under labelssuch as Americanism and Fordism, but more specifically referring to anew culture of leisure, distraction, and consumption that absorbed anumber of artistic innovations into a modern vernacular of its own (espe-cially by way of design) and vice versa. It seems to me that Spielbergwould like to go back to that moment-that he is trying to make a case fora capitalist aesthetics and culture which is at once modernist and popular,which would be capable of reflecting upon the shocks and scars inflictedby modernity on people's lives in a generally accessible, public horizon.The reason I believe that something of that order is at stake has todo with the way Schindler'sList refers itself to that great monument ofcinematic modernism, Citizen Kane.37This argument is primarily basedon striking affinities of film style-the self-conscious use of sound, low-key lighting, particular angles and compositions in frame, montage se-quences, as well as the comic use of still photography early on in the film.If Spielberg tries to inscribe himself into an American film history pivot-ing around CitizenKane, he also tries to revise the message-if one canspeak of a message-of Welles's film. CitizenKane traces the disintegrationof its protagonist from a young man of lofty ideals to a monstrous figureof the specular, two-dimensional, and fragmented media culture hehelped create. Schindler'sList reverses the direction of this development.It presents us with an enigmatic character who starts out in the world ofdazzling surfaces and glamour and who is repeatedly identified with theaesthetics of fashion, advertising, and consumption. (In the scene inwhich Schindler proposes to Stern what is basically a highly exploitativescheme, Stern asks: "They [the Jewish "investors"] put up all the money;I do all the work. What, if you don't mind my asking, would you do?"

36. Hansen, "America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Mo-dernity," in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R.Schwartz (Berkeley, 1995).37. Spielberg himself claims that he was neither inspired nor influenced by any fictionfilm when he was working on Schindler'sListbut only watched innumerable documentariesand sifted through piles of photographs. See Hellmuth Karasek, "Die ganze Wahrheitschwarz auf weiB: Regisseur Steven Spielberg uber seinen Film SchindlersListe,"Der Spiegel,2 Feb. 1994, p. 185. In the same interview, however, he acknowledges having thought of"Rosebud" to capture the enigmatic distance, the lack of clear, intelligible motivation, withwhich he conceived of the Schindler character. See also Annette Insdorf, in "MMM,"p. 28.Whether or not inspired by Welles, the relative restraint and withholding of interiority inSpielberg's construction of the Schindler character, at least during the film's first half, is inmy opinion much preferable to the omniscient, unrestricted access we get to Schindler'sfeelings and thoughts in Thomas Keneally's novel on which the film is based.

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Fi(;. 17.-Lisiek: I have to report, sir: I've been unable to remove the stainsfrom the bathtub. Goeth:Go ahead, go on, leave. I pardon you.

..',

Fie;. 18

FI(;. 19.-I pardon you.


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310 MiriamBratuHansen Schindler's List and ShoahAnd Schindler replies: "I'd make sure it's known the company's in busi-ness. I'd see that it had a certain panache. That's what I'm good at. Notthe work, not the work: the presentation ") But out of that cipher of acon man/grifter/gambler develops an "authentic" person, an integratedand intelligible character, a morally responsible agent. No doubt Spiel-berg himself has an investment in this redemptive trajectory; and if, as anumber of critics have pointed out, the director strongly identifies withhis protagonist, he does so in defense of a capitalist culture, of an aesthet-ics that fuses modernist style, popular storytelling, and an ethos of indi-vidual responsibility. Whether he succeeds in reversing CitizenKane'spessimistic trajectory, that is, in disentangling Schindler-and the storyof the Schindler Jews-from the reifying effects of mass-mediated, spec-tacular consumer culture, is an open question, depending as much onthe film's long-term public effects as on textual critique.But perhaps this question is beside the point, as is treating the oppo-sition of Shoah versus Schindler'sList as if it were a practical alternative, areal option. For whether we like it or not, the predominant vehicles ofpublic memory are the media of technical re/production and mass con-sumption. This is especially exacerbated for the remembrance of theShoah considering the specific crisis posed by the Nazis' destruction ofthe very basis and structures of collective remembering. (Unlike most ofthe "ordinary massacres" committed in the course of the German geno-cidal war all over Europe, the Shoah left no communities f survivors, wid-ows and children, not even burial sites that would have provided a linkwith a more "organic" tradition of oral and collective memory.)38 In asignificant way, even before the passing of the last survivors, the remem-brance of the Shoah, to the extent that it was public and collective, hasalways been more dependent on mass-mediated forms of memory-onwhat Alison Landsberg calls "prosthetic memory."39

Much has been written about the changing fabric of memory in post-modern media society, in particular the emergence of new cultural prac-tices (new types of exhibits, the museum boom) that allow the beholdersto experience he past-any past, not necessarily their own-with greaterintensity and sensuous immediacy (compare the Washington Holocaustmuseum).40We need to understand the place of Schindler'sList in the con-38. See the papers presented at "Per una memoria Europea dei crimi Nazisti," an inter-national conference to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1944 massacres aroundArezzo, 22-24 June 1994.39. See Alison Landsberg, "Prosthetic Memory: The Logics and Politics of Memory inModern American Culture" (Ph.D. diss. in progress, University of Chicago), esp. chap. 4.40. See Huyssen, TwilightMemories:Marking Time in a Cultureof Amnesia (New York,1995), esp. chaps. 1 and 12. See also Landsberg, "The 'Waning of Our Historicity'?A CloserLook at the Media of Experience" (paper delivered at the Society for Cinema Studies an-nual conference, New York, Mar. 1995). For a brief survey of issues involved in Americanmemorial culture, see Michael Kammen, MysticChords f Memory:TheTransformationf Tradi-tion in AmericanCulture(New York, 1991), pp. 3-14.


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Winter1996 311temporary culture of memory and memorializing; and the film in turnmay help us understand that culture. This might also shed light on howthe popular American fascination with the Holocaust may function as ascreen memory (Deckerinnerung) n the Freudian sense, covering up atraumatic event-another traumatic event-that cannot be approacheddirectly. More than just an ideological displacement (which it is no doubtas well), the fascination with the Holocaust could be read as a kind ofscreen allegory behind/through which the nation is struggling to find aproper mode of memorializing traumata closer to home. The displacedreferents of such memorializing may extend to events as distant as thegenocide of Native Americans or as recent as the Vietnam War. It is nocoincidence that African American historians have begun using conceptsdeveloped in the attempt to theorize the Shoah, such as the notion of a"breach" or "rupture," to talk about the Middle Passage.41Likewise, the screen memories of the Holocaust could be read aspart of an American discourse on modernity, in which Weimar and NaziGermany figure as an allegory of a modernity gone wrong.42 The contin-ued currency of these mythical topoi in the popular media may indicatea need for Americans to externalize and project modernity's catastrophicfeatures onto another nation's failure and defeat-so as to salvagemodernity the American way.This would give the American public's pen-chant for allegories of heroic rescue (elaborated in cinematic form byD. W. Griffith) a particular historical and political twist in that it couplesthe memory/fantasy of having won the war with the failure to save theJews. In any case, if Schindler'sList functions as a screen memory in thisor other ways, the pasts that it may at once cover and traverse cannot bereduced to the singular,just as the Americanization of the Holocaust can-not be explained by fixating exclusively on its ideological functions.43That the film touches on more than one nerve, appeals to more constitu-encies than a narrowly defined identity politics would have it, could bedismissed as an effect of Hollywood's marketing strategies in the block-

41. For a recent example, see Saidiya Hartman, "Redressing the Pained Body" (paperdelivered at the Chicago Humanities Institute, 17 Feb. 1995). The terms breachand rupturerefer to Zivilisationsbruch: enkennachAuschwitz,ed. Dan Diner (Frankfurt am Maim, 1988).The first, quite controversial attempt to conceptualize the trauma of slavery in terms of theShoah is Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery:A Problem n AmericanInstitutionaland IntellectualLife(1959; Chicago, 1968). More recently, see Paul Gilroy, TheBlackAtlantic:Modernity nd DoubleConsciousnessCambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 213. Laurence Mordekhai Thomas, Vessels fEvil:AmericanSlaveryand theHolocaust(Philadelphia, 1993), is a useful starting point, but he doesnot really engage with issues of representation and memory.42. See Geyer and Konrad H. Jarausch, "The Future of the German Past:TransatlanticReflections for the 1990s," CentralEuropeanHistory22 (Sept.-Dec. 1989): 229-59. See alsoZygmunt Bauman, Modernity nd theHolocaust(Ithaca, N.Y., 1989).43. In the manner of, for instance, Peter Novick, "Holocaust Memory in America,"in TheArt of Memory:HolocaustMemorials n History,ed. James E. Young (New York, 1995),pp. 159-65.

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312 Miriam BratuHansenbuster era. But it could also be taken as a measure of the film's ability toengender a public space, a horizon of at once sensory experience anddiscursive contestation.No doubt Schindler'sList could have been a different film, or manydifferent films, even based on Keneally's novel. And different stories re-lating to the most traumatic and central event of the twentieth centurywill be and will have to be told, in a variety of media and genres, withinan irrevocably multiple and hybrid public sphere. If TheBirthof a Nationremains important to American history, it is not only for its racist inscrip-tion of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods; it is just as importantfor what it tells us about 1915, about the new medium's role in creatinga national public, about the dynamics of cultural memory and public me-morializing in a volatile immigrant society. Schindler'sListcomes at a radi-cally different moment-in national and global history, in film history, inthe history of the public sphere. To dismiss the film because of the a prioriestablished unrepresentability of what it purports to represent may bejustified on ethical and epistemological grounds, but it means missing achance to understand the significance of the Shoah in the present, in theongoing and undecided struggles over which past gets remembered andhow. Unless we take all aspects-omissions and distortions, displacementsand possibilities-of public, mass-mediated memory culture seriously,we'll remain caught in the "compulsive pas-de-deux"of (not just) intellec-tual history.


schindlers list is not shoah. miriam hansen

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