Goldhagen & Spielberg's Zwolfkinder

[Steelhead]

The list has awakened. But in defense of Spielberg? Shameless...

Davemarc asks

"Who exactly considers the film the definitive statement on the
Holocaust??? I don't think anybody does.  But anyone on this list who does
should feel free to let everyone else know."

Well, I, for one, believe that Spielberg "thinks" that he has created the
"definitive flimic treatment" of the Holocaust. He has intimated this in
numerous interviews. He has also underwritten the showing of the film to
high
schools across the country, endocrinating students with his "mythic"
melodrama. The sophisticated marketing campaign behind Schindler's List
_was_ worthy of
Goebbles.


davemarc continues:
>As for *Schindler's List* and the links between capitalism and genocide,
>Spielberg (and Keneally) were concerned with critiquing the link between
>fascism and genocide.  Capitalism (of a very marginal sort) does come across
>favorably in the context of this particular movie, is all.  If you look at
>other Spielberg films--say, Jaws--you might find that it does criticize
>capitalism (though I would never argue that Spielberg is anti-capitalist).

Keneally sure was concerned with exploring the link between capitalism and
genocide. It was evident in his wonderful book. Indeed, that's what gave
his book depth. I don't see any of this in SS. The stuff in Jaws comes from
Benchley not SS. Hell, what are the Indiana Jones movies about: gleeful
cultural looting on a level that makes the Elgin Marbles case look like
petty larceny.

davemarc again:
>Was it that much fun for you, Steelhead?  Everyone I know who's been there
>(including survivors) found the entire experience very moving and
>educational, certainly not worthy of the utter derision you're doling out.

Fun? Spielberg's playroom upstairs was pathetic, melodramatic, and
de-meaning-a real virtual Zwolfkinder experience, if you know what I mean.
I went there with a former professor, Holocaust survivor of Sobibor and
writer, who as a child of 11 had to be fucked up the ass by SS guards
nearly every night. The cost of staying alive in a death camp. He
threatened to throw the damn Spielbergian computers out the window. I wish
he had. That whole wing is a grotesque cheapening of the otherwise
overwhelming experience of the Holocaust museum itself.

davemarc once more:
>Oh, so the short, well-made film Night and Fog has been seen all over the
>classrooms of America?  No way.  Neither have the other well-made Holocaust
>documentaries that meet with Steelhead's stamp of approval.  The single
>Holocaust work that *has* entered the syllabus (and the one which likely to
>remain there) is *The Diary of Anne Frank*, which has also received some of
>the same kind of unfair criticism (i.e., that it's not the definitive work
>on the Holocaust, that because it's not the whole truth it's completely
>invalid) that has been levelled at the movie *Schindler's List*.

I saw Night and Fog in a public high school 25 years ago (Indiana). My
pre-Schindler daughter saw it in middle school (Oregon). Now, my son gets a
week of Spielberg instead of Resnais. Talk about cultural decline.

I didn't criticize SS's SL because it wasn't the
definitive work on the Holocaust--that would require more inanity than even
I am capable of on a bad day. I criticized it--in part--for the opposite
reason--it set itself up as the principle interpretation of these events,
when, in fact, it doesn't even honestly tell Schindler's story. It's a big
lie. The only scenes worth a damn take place in the Warsaw ghetto--even
there he goes way over the top.

>The fact is that no single work of non-fiction or fiction (and certainly not
>Night and Fog--how often are Jews mentioned in it?) can even come close to
>being a definitive work on the entire Holocaust.  Not even Goldhagen's
>purportedly factual book, which is hardly above the kind of harsh criticism
>Steelhead seems to reserve for an admittedly fictional work like Schindler's
>List.  Incidentally, that book received a fair share of intelligent scrutiny
>at a recent event hosted by the Holocaust Museum and broadcast over C-SPAN.
>Goldhagen didn't seem to mind being there.

davemarc, I was an invited guest at the Goldhagen session in DC, which,
admittedly, shows you where my prejudices are. But why would Jonas mind
being at the Holocaust museum? I'm not criticizing the museum itself
(although the gypsies,commies, and slavs don't get much mention), but the
whiz-bang Spielberg wing with its interactive game room, got it?

Goldhagen's taken some shots from all sorts of Holocaust scholars, the same way
RJ Lifton did for the Nazi Doctors, and Christopher Simpson has for The
Splendid Blonde Beast. But Goldhagen's facts haven't been assailed, rather
his controversial conclusion that the seeds of the Holocaust were deeply
embedded in the German culture,in its myths, music, films, economics and
philosophy. Even if you don't accept this thesis, the book is worth it for
its detailed history of the little known but horrifically villainous
Einsatzgruppen and the sadistic and eliminationist death marches (mainly
involving women and children) at the close of the war.

Kenneally's book wasn't fiction. Did Spielberg admit that Schindler's list
was fictional? I never heard that. Spielberg ends his film with the
"Schindlerfolk" in Isreal doesn't he? That's a stab at reality, isn't it?
No. SS played this film as a scrupulously faithful docu-drama. That it
wasn't, is a big part of the problem.  Take Ralph Fiennes's incredible
portrayal of the SS officer in charge of the Auschwitz death camp. The
impression given by the film is that the sadism of one bad German
(Fiennes's) is balanced and compensated for by the altruism of a good
German (Liam Neeson's Schindler). This is ludicrous. The operations of
Auschwitz were not the result of a few crazed men, but of an entire
regime--if not society--bent on the extirmination of the European Jews, the
slavs, and communists. The operations of Auschwitz and the other camps were
enthusiastically supported by most Germans, including, I'd wager, Schindler
himself. In an interview in LOOT a few years ago, Christopher Simpson
suggested there is documentary evidence of this and that the man was merely
trying to save his own ass as he forsaw how the war was going to end. The
slave labor generated by the camps was welcomed by small businessmen like
Schindler and large corporations such as Daimler-Benz and Kontinental Oil.
Speilberg makes Fiennes's character a kind of Hannibal Lechter, a
personification of evil, when he should have been a grim bureaucrat who,
after a day of slaughter, goes home at night to strudle and schnapps with
the wife and schnauzer and Tannehauser playing on the Victrola.

>And, thankfully, we already have countless books and articles (as well as
>Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove) to remind us of the kindness ladled out by the US
>government to folks like Mr. von Braun.

Actually, I think the full story (although Kubrick, as always, was well
ahead of the curve) is hardly known at all--since most of the damning
evidence was destroyed by the Nazi's or remains sealed by the US State
Department. Some facts continue to emerge. For instance, there is the
strange case of George Bush's grandfather, the investment banker Herbert
Walker, among whose clients during the war were GAF and its parent
company...drumroll...IG Farben. George's father,
Prescott Bush continued this tradition at the Nazi-linked firm Dillon,
Read. Somehow it doesn't surprise me that George Bush thought Schindler's
List was
"one of the best films I've ever seen."

Steely