Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
"I'm really sad that you are attacking a film that you haven't seen. It is not a German hate fest. Actually it's quite interesting and well made. Regardless of your Holocaust beliefs, I cannot fathom how someone as intelligent as you would attack something that you have not seen for yourself. That's a basic prerequisite."
Who was it that said you don't have to eat a whole lamb to know what mutton
tastes like - it is enough to eat a cutlet? That was on my mind writing
this two-part ZGram - a bit defensively, admittedly - and I will tell you
why.
Yesterday I asked for grassroots protest action because Ernst wanted me
to ask, but Ernst and I have some disagreement on the merits of fiction
as a legitimate tool conveying some aspect of historical truth - I being
a novelist myself and, hence, having a built-in artistic investment.
I am not fussy when it comes to "facts" in fiction as long as
fiction remains loyal to the overarching truth of characters, or periods
in history, or consistence of voices, or even dialog syntax. I believe,
for instance, that "Gone with the Wind" has done more for awareness
of the complex problems of the South during and after the Civil War than
all the factual scholarly books put together. There never existed a Scarlett
O'Hara. The character is totally made up. I think, however, that Scarlett,
Rhet Butler, Mamie, Melanie and Ashley Wilkes, to name a few, are splendid,
magnificently crafted EXPLANATORY TOOLS for complex, manufactured social
altercation that came to the South in the wake of plutocratic civil war.
I believe in the skillful technique of making such points via fiction.
Ernst, on the other hand, is a very literal person who qualifies and overqualifies
everything he says to make SURE that there is no possible misinterpretation
of a point that he wishes to make. He takes offense to fiction. Specifically,
he is outraged with some fictitious liberties that have been taken in "Schindler's
"List" - various highly charged emotional vignettes that simply
don't square with the "facts".
I will enumerate a few to give you a feel for his objections by summarizing
from a previous Power letter:
· Up front, Keneally, the author, is not a historian. He is a novelist,
playwright, and producer and is the author of numerous novels, some of which,
Ernst readily admits, have been published to critical acclaim. The book
on which the film "Schindler's List" is based has won the Booker
Prize and the LA Times Book Award for fiction, so he must have known how
to spin a good yarn to boost the Holocaust Promotion Lobby.
· The picture that emerges from both book and film is that the Schindlers
"spoke German" and lived in a German-speaking area of former Czechoslovakia.
Ernst reads this as a telling clue that they were, in fact, NOT German but
found it necessary to STRESS that they SPOKE German - as many Jews did then,
and still do in our days. As a "genuine" German, argues Ernst,
why would you stress that you spoke German? Of course you spoke German;
there would have been no need to make that obvious point.
· The Schindlers "fled" to Krakow, Poland, as soon as the
Germans took control of the Sudetenland, an event cheered by 99% of the
Sudeten-Germans - except for Marxists and Jews who merely "spoke"
German. In other words, they saw it necessary to flee IN THE DIRECTION of
the Soviets, not away from the Soviets, as Germans would have done. For
Ernst, this is a political giveaway. Poland, at that time, was virulently
anti-German, and no German would have "chosen" that country as
a place of refuge. Poland, of course, welcomed Jews and other refugees from
Nazism. Therefore, the Schindlers were most likely NOT German.
· Both book and movie stress that Schindler brought enough money
to Poland to set up a factory - highly unlikely in wartime Germany, since
there were stringent controls on currency and export restrictions of valuables.
· Schindler traded "diamonds for food" - an almost ludicrous
giveaway of "Jewishness" for any German having lived through those
tight, dire, ration-counting times. He also "traded in vodka and coffee".
Says Ernst: "Ask any Poles you know: "Who would be likely to do
that in the 1940s in Poland? Germans or Jews?"
· Ernst also likes to point out that the almost insurmountable logistics
of feeding 1200 Jews on the sly is a sure sign that the story is untrue
at the core.
At a time in Hitler Germany when every chicken, every piglet was registered
and had to be accounted for by municipal livestock enumerators - and at
a time when even pets were put on ration cards - would such an operation
have been possible?
Ernst writes: "In Nazi Germany, there was a regular animal and livestock
census. If an emergency butchering had to take place or an animal was accidentally
killed or diseased, each incident had to be reported to local authorities
- down to the very last chicken! My mother had to do that, and I remembers
these incidents from personal experience."
Concludes Ernst in his blunt ways: "So the Schindlers must have been
swindlers."
There are many more objections Ernst has raised, all of them valid and illustrative
of how the "facts" around this story have been fabricated from
thin air. But I am not so much upset about those (in my view) small literary
liberties as I am about the CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT that seems to have been
done in this Holocaust Promotion Lobby flick.
By way of illustration: In "Gone with the Wind", Margaret Mitchell
took some liberties with Melly Wilkes' pregnancy - which, if you read the
history book, lasted some 14 months in order to accommodate an extra battle
between the North and South. Now this is clearly ludicrous. Of course that
could not be.
Does that invalidate the novel? To me, that fine point slides right by because
the CHARACTERS are true. They are so true that they are palpable. The ATMOSPHERE
is true. Whatever the characters do, whatever the ambiance of the different
chapters might be, the characters within this novel ACT WITHIN THEIR NATURE
AND IN THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES.
This is not true of "Schindler's List, from all I have been told. Schindler
is portrayed as an opportunistic, corrupt, devious, greedy, utterly contemptible
German, who keeps triple sets of doctored business records, boozing it up,
exploiting the war, betraying his country, cutting shady deals right in
a beautiful church and right within earshot of other worshippers.
The question then comes up: Who was this Schindler? Really? He lived. He
is not just a character.
We get some real-life glimpses from some interviews with his ex-wife whose
name is Emilie, whom he left stranded in post-war Argentina with a big pile
of debts, and who, according to press reports, to this day is supported
by Jewish charity:
Reporter: "What do you think of your husband?"
Emilie: "Look, I don't think of him."
And in another interview: "Schindler was a fool. He was a strange man."
"He was a hero to the Jews," she has said also. "Not to me.
He was stupid. Useless. Half crazy. To hell with him."
Said Emily, as she stood by her ex-husband's grave a few years later: "I
felt nothing. Nothing. Nothing."
Schindler died in the 1970s and was buried in Jerusalem. This certainly
makes Ernst's contention that this strange "German" - otherwise
corrupt down to his toes - was really just another member of the Tribe,
fact which is withheld in this politically expedient, highly touted venture
of socking it yet one more time to the bedeviled Germans.
I have had many people write to me and tell me that the film is odd in that
it is internally flawed, although a cinematic masterpiece. When I ask why,
they tell me that ". . . it cannot be explained". They sense it
as a discord.
I think I have the answer. It's black-and-white, literally and figuratively.
What's wrong with it is that this Oskar Schindler shows all the attributes
that are simplistically attributed by red-neck anti-Semites to the Jews
- often to our embarrassment, for things are not that simple, and should
not be in an artistic piece meriting approbation and respect.
The "German-Nazi Party" golden-pin-wearing Schindler is lazy,
crooked, cheats on his wife, doctors his books, wheels and deals in a church
- a scene which comes right out of the "Eternal Jew" where Nazis
showed the Jews in an unflattering light carrying on business deals in the
synagogue while the cantor sings up front - a piece of work that has been
criticized as being too simplistic.
So it is true of "Schindler's List." The discord comes from the
broad brush portrayal that the only people in the film who are kind, just,
noble, dedicated, benign and soulful are the Jews. Schindler the Villain
has none of these McGuffey Readers qualities. Schindler the profligate "redeems"
himself by saving Jews - that is his only saving grace. The character lacks
depth. If it is claimed that anti-Semites always caricature Jews, then let
us claim that anti-German Spielberg in "Schindler's List" has
merely reversed the stereotypes.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"The root of all bad writing is to compose what you have not worked out for yourself."
(Alfred Kazin)