Goldhagen & Spielberg's Zwolfkinder

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

Steely confesses:

> 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

I've always wondered, maybe even innocently, why the other millions 
of Holocaust victims seem to have disappeared, a second time.

> 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

And at the risk of sounding like an apologist, the entire Western 
culture, too. As I understand it, US public opinion was not exactly 
virulently anti-Nazi, and neither was the rest of Europe - trust us 
Germans to fuck up all that universal public goodwill with our crude 
and arrogant antics....

> 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.

I can personally testify to the 'right or wrong, my country' attitude 
of Germans everywhere - my mother's two older brothers, who happened 
to be away from home (Suedwest) and in school in Germany in 1939, 
both joined up as expected (15 and 16 years old) and died heroes' 
deaths in Italy and Stalingrad respectively. My mother, who's the 
kind of person so perfectly nice all the time you just want to kick 
her in the teeth, still talks about her favourite big brother Onkel 
Hubert, who seems to have been a bit of a comedian.... Prost.

> 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?

Actually, I got the impression that the last scene was added 
belatedly, following the realisation that as it stood, Schindler's List 
was just too nauseating, maybe even for the US public, and possibly 
even for the Oscar commission.

> 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

Next to the shower scene, the final absolution crowd scene is just about 
the most nauseating one I've ever scene - give me a good old porn 
movie any day.

> 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.

Tannhauser sounds about right - on the other hand, I have little 
doubt that as time progressed, the ultraparadoxical phase took its 
own prisoners, and things got a little weird; a la Nightporter.
 
> >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."

Well, as I'm typing this, my right eye is watching Tommy Lee Jones in 
dark glasses in Under Siege, delighting me in yet another TV rerun, 
while I'm about halfway through a thick batch of English I "Much Ado 
About Nothing" exam scripts, marking at a rate of about 1 every 4 
minutes, having some beer (well ok, lots) to make it all easier, and 
although I know it shouldn't, it all makes perfect sense to me, right now. 
Go figure.

hg
hag at iafrica.com