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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2018
This essay takes issue with the established view regarding the deficiencies of Schindler's List, arguing that many of the subtler complexities in Spielberg's representation of the Holocaust have been overlooked. This applies especially to the ways in which Spielberg represents what Primo Levi terms the “gray zone” of coerced Jewish collaboration within the Nazi regime, exemplified in the morally compromised character of Marcel Goldberg (in real life Oscar Schindler's plant manager). His importance for the overall conception of Spielberg's film has not received the attention it deserves. Neither has Spielberg's focus on lists received much attention: the list functions throughout the film as a leitmotif for the bureaucratic nature of the genocide as a whole. A close reading of the film shows not only how well Levi's “gray zone” is represented in Spielberg's film, but also how it overlaps with Hannah Arendt's notion of the “banality of evil.”
It is a gray zone […] where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. —Primo Levi, “The Gray Zone”IN HIS MUCH-DISCUSSED CHAPTER “The Gray Zone” from The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi recounts the disturbing story of the morally corrupt Judenrat leader of the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, whose willing collaboration with the Nazis nonetheless failed to save him from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Levi tells us that a certain Hans Biebow, the German chief administrator of the ghetto, whom Levi describes as a “shady German industrialist” (GZ 65), wrote a letter on Rumkowski's behalf that secured him “special treatment” upon his deportation to Auschwitz. The bitter irony is that the Judenrat leader was clearly unaware of the Nazis’ euphemistic use of the term. The anecdote has a remarkable parallel to Schindler's List. When Oskar Schindler's savvy accountant Itzhak Stern faces deportation to Auschwitz, Schindler—himself “a shady German industrialist” who, much like Biebow, “was interested in profiting from his contracts” (GZ 66)—likewise offers to write a letter on Stern's behalf that would secure him “special treatment.”
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