Content area
Full Text
" I aspire to be Oskar Schindler."
-Steven Spielberg (McBride 429)
Schindler's List (1993), Steven Spielberg's first attempt to narrate a topic as historically unwieldy as the Holocaust, tells the now famous story of a German entrepreneur, Oskar Schindler, who through a series of events transforms himself from a practical capitalist into a savior. In the film, Schindler trades in his wealth to protect his Jewish workers from the gas chambers at Auschwitz, in the end bankrupting himself and his business. Often construed as the most significant cinematic statement on the Holocaust,' Schindler's List has already made the leap from popular culture to historical and educational material. A major television network has broadcast the film with little or no commercial interruption, and it is often shown in high schools to teach students about the Holocaust. Receiving an Oscar for the Best Film of 1993, Schindler's List was a remarkable commercial and aesthetic success. Most mainstream critics lauded Spielberg's storytelling abilities, and his Hollywood brethren held up the film as an unparalleled achievement.z Though a few writers, journals, and newspapers checked in with some critical commentary,3 none of it has relegated the film to anything less than its epic rank in American culture.
But why a German hero, and a Nazi one at that? This essay explores the role of biography and autobiography in Schindler's List. By autobiography, we mean how the film not only tells the story of Oskar Schindler, but in a metaphoric way tells the story of Steven Spielberg as well.4 Though the level of Spielberg's accomplishment is significant in terms of bringing the issue of the Holocaust to public attention, the movie-particularly in its biographical elements-says quite a bit about how the director envisions his role and contributions to art and culture. In our discussion, we mean to distinguish history from biography (and autobiography). History attempts to tell the objective story of past times. Biography tells the story of a person's life in relation to the times in which he or she lives. And autobiography of course tells the same story through the subject's eyes. In our view, Spielberg unconsciously invokes autobiography to write biography and history. This invocation is the palimpsest over which Schindler's List was produced.
First we offer...