Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
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2. See the remarks of Israeli Historian Tom Segev cited in “Schindler Shock,” Time (14 March 1994), 66.
3. See Kaes, Anton, “Holocaust and the End of History: Postmodern Historiography in Cinema,” in Friedlander, Saul, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation. Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 206–22.Google Scholar
4. Friedlander, Saul, Reflections of Nazism. An Essay on Kitch and Death (New York, 1984), 25.Google Scholar
5. Sontag, Susan, cited in Friedlander, Reflections on Nazism, 96.Google Scholar
6. See, for example, Angry Harvest or the filmed version of Hochhuth, Rolf, Eine Liebe in Deutschland (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1980).Google Scholar
7. On the rejection of narrativity, see Kaes, “Holocaust and the End of History,” 209–11
8. For an account of these and other films see Welch, David, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945. (Oxford, 1983), 284–304.Google Scholar
9. The book has been reissued by Touchstone, 1993. After its 1982 publication it won the Booker Prize and L. A. Times Book Award for fiction.
10. White, Hayden, “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” in his Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, 1978), 121–34Google Scholar, esp. 126 notes that “every discipline … is … constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do. Every discipline is made up of a set of restrictions on thought and imagination, and none is more hedged about with taboos than professional historiography.” See also LaCapra, Dominick, “History and the Novel,” in his Histroy and Criticism (Ithaca, 1985), 115–34.Google Scholar
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12. Art Spiegelman complains not only about the general absence of Jews in the film, but that those like Stern are presented as “slightly gentrified versions of Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer caricatures”. See his and other critics' at times scathing condemnations of the film in “Schindler's List: Myth, Movie and Memory”, The Village Voice, (29 March 1994), 24–31, here 26.
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17. Browning, The Path to Genocide, 169.
18. “Vom grossen Morden”, Der Spiegel 8 (21 02 1994), 168–86Google Scholar, here 174. For remarks on problems arising from the concept, the “banality of evil”, see Friedlander, Saul, “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation”, in Hayes, Peter, ed., Lessons and Legacies. The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, Ill., 1991), 23–35.Google Scholar
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20. For testimony that people in addition to Schindler's own workers were helped by his efforts see the brief remarks in Ferencz, Benjamin B., Less than Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 191Google Scholar and for help to the Poles Tycner, Janusz, “Bei Schindlers Polen”, Die Zeit (18 03 1994), 24.Google Scholar
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26. One critic was upset at “the mindless critical hyperbole which has greeted” the movie and found it “disheartening” that this would be all that millions would see of Jewish culture. See Gourevitch, Philip, cited in “Schindler's List: Myth, Movie and Momory”, The Village Voice, (29 03 1994), 30.Google Scholar
27. For an introduction see Young, James E., Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Bloomington, 1988), 1–80.Google Scholar
28. Cited in “Schindler's Shock”, Time (14 March 1994), 65.
29. The silences in filmed eyewitness testimonies can be gathered from the printed texts of T.V. and movie productions such as in Rosh, Lea and Jäckel, Eberhard, “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland”. Deportation und Ermordung der Juden, Kollaboration und Verweigerung in Europa (Hamburg, 1990)Google Scholar. Claude Lanzmann's review of Schindler's List reached me after my review was written. His main objection to the film is that he “deeply believe[s] that there are some things [like the Holocaust] that cannot and should not be represented.” However, he does not avoid the problems of representation with his alternative: letting survivors or other contemporaries speak on film, or by revisiting the actual sites of the pogroms. He believes his approach is more “real” or “authentic,” but, while there are important considerations in what Lanzmann says, his approach does not avoid the problem of representation, in that it constitutes a “re-presentation” of survivors' recalled experiences of what happened. See Lanzmann, Claude, “Why Spielberg has Distorted the Truth”, Guardian Weekly (9 04 1994): 14, a reprint from Le Monde (3 03 1994).Google Scholar
30. Kaes, “Holocaust and the End of History”, 206–22.
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32. Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism, 120.