Goldhagen & Spielberg's Zwolfkinder

[davemarc]

At 04:46 PM 6/11/96 -0700, Steelhead wrote:
>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.

Here we go again.  Making a point about Schindler's List and Spielberg by
referring to...Nazis!  Talk about cliched (and hyperbolic).  Anyway, Steely,
go ahead and believe you can read Spielberg's mind.  It's amazing, though,
that Spielberg would go ahead with the SHOAH project if he felt that he had
already made the definitive statement on the Holocaust.  
>
>
>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. 

So if something in a book source is missing, it's Spielberg's
responsibility.  But if something in a book source is present, it's the
author's.  Tell me, what is it like to have your cake and eat it too?  It
must be heaven.  Or perhaps, it's...

>Hell, what are the Indiana Jones movies about: gleeful
>cultural looting on a level that makes the Elgin Marbles case look like
>petty larceny.

Good thing the Indiana Jones films aren't documentaries!
>
>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.

Strong words.  I won't argue with your personal assessment or the one of
your companion; I'll just point out that many others don't share it.
Incidentally, what's your opinion of the SHOAH project, anyway.
>
>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.

I don't think it sets itself up as a principle interpretation of the events.
It's obviously a movie...and a work of fiction--a dramatization at that.
>
>>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?

Got it.  Just one thing:  Is his name really Jonas?
>
>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.

Goldhagen's manipulation of facts in the service of his conclusion has been
rightfully criticized.  (In fact, it can be argued that his case employs the
same techniques used by Goebbels' and other evil propagandists.  But I won't.)
>
>Kenneally's book wasn't fiction. 

Yes it was.  I've got a copy in front of me.  Just below the title it's
identified as "A Novel."  On the back it's classified as "Fiction/Judaica"
and "A stunning novel based on the true story...."  Can't tell a book by its
cover?  From the intro:  "To use the texture and devices of a novel to tell
a true story is a course that has frequently been followed in modern
writing.  It is the one I chose to follow here...."

>Did Spielberg admit that Schindler's list
>was fictional?  I never heard that.  

Well, he did say it was based on Keneally's book.

>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.  

We disagree.  But maybe you'll modify your opinion upon realizing that the
original source is a work of fiction.

>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.

Well, you can go ahead and make that version.  There were definitely
"personification of evil" officials at death camps.  Your own
former-professor pal was butt-fucked at 11 by guards.  Maybe they did go
home at night for a stereotypically German version of a relaxing evening.
There were others who should have.
>
>>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."

Hey, I'm all for *more* documentation.  SL counts for me as an example of
that, a flawed work of fiction that has paved the way for continued
examination of the Holocaust.  Spielberg's Shoah project is one such
continuation.

davemarc