have to work cheaply, submissively, and in the least desirable jobs. The process of weeding out weaker inmates at the Plaszow camp could suggest the increasingly common use of selective layoffs to get rid of older and less robust employees who are more likely to draw costly health and retirement benefits. It also epitomizes Nazi dreams of eugenics as a pseudo-scientific means of breeding a perfect human type. Eugenics itself is a mutation of crude nineteenth-century Darwinism, where slogans like "survival of the fittest" link it to the "natural law" of capitalism that justifies unrestrained competition, whatever the individual human cost. In American business culture, executives justify the "termination" of "redundant" employees by appeals to "the bottom line," supposedly the measure of corporate "survival." And downsizing transfers survival terror to employees such as one quoted by The New York Times referring to a "'Schindler's List' of employees who've got jobs with our new parent corporation." However realistic or self-justifying it may be in any particular instance, this survival angst pervades the corporate world today as it did during the Great Depression, when it helped shape the war machine of the corporate fascist state. Even the Nuremburg race laws of 1935 construed the German people as a fragile community engulfed by a Zionist conspiracy of vast international might. In all-out competitive capitalism, survival dread justifies a paradoxical drive to expand while zealously streamlining production. As corporations expand they relentlessly force down the cost and status of labor, so that a widening gulf between rich and poor may seem inescapable. The deep systemic irrationality of this behavior surfaced in the middle of the Great Depression when, as the editors of Consumer Reports warned, "Nazi pile-drivers [are] pounding the German workers into serfdom," while "in some of the large corporations of this country the techniques of Der Fuehrer and his cohorts are followed with avidity and approval and a feeling of 'why can't we get away with that too.'" Henry Ford's paternalism, for example, had evolved toward a corporate police state of spies and enforcers, which became clear in 1932 when company and city police fired at laid-off workers demonstrating outside Ford's Rouge plant, killing four. But even in the late 1920s Ford was already facing economic setbacks that baffled his naive theories and and contributed to the fulminations about an international Jewish financial conspiracy which earned Ford's photo a place on the wall of Hitler's office in Munich and his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, a space on Hitler's coffee table. Ford reacted to the shock of the early 1930s by intensifying his prejudices, flogging the "lazy" workforce to produce more for less pay. Drive down the cost of labor far enough, he and other leaders insisted, and prosperity would return. It goes without saying that not this deflationary elixir but Keynesian stimulation--justified by a world war--is what finally revived economies. Not increased executive control but wider participation in the creation and rewards of economic life. Seen from this angle, the crisis in the Plaszow labor camp models a grotesque form of the "downsizing" which has become a commonplace survival strategy for business in the 1990s. Management slogans such as "lean and mean" project the values of an elite military force toughened by punishing training and selection in order to insure the triumph of top brass and stockholders. We focus on the Nazis' malice, but the Plaszow sequence also dramatizes the inability of Depression-era capitalist cultures to imagine means of comprehensively enlarging spheres of economic participation. Industrial economies needed either more customers for more workers or reduced costs--such as slave wages--for fewer customers. In a contracting economy fantasies of "getting more for less" make some people nothing so that others can be exalted. When some of Schindler's workers are mistakenly routed to Auschwitz, Schindler rescues them by bribing an SS officer who cannot understand Schindler's refusal to substitute other workers for his group. The SS man expresses the industrial principle that workers are merely interchangeable parts in a machine that serves an all-important executive will. They are supposed to be absorbed into their task to the exclusion of all other awareness and feeling--German slang calls this Fachidiotie. When the woman engineer at Plaszow interrupts construction to point out a serious flaw in the design of the barracks, she is summarily put to death. The woman acts as if her professional training gives her autonomy and responsibility, whereas the command system finds her insubordinate. Such problems of self-effacement and subordination are painfully vivid now when new workers living in highly individualistic American culture need to submit to the authority in the workplace. In the words of the supposedly fresh philosophy of "total quality management," "The unwritten standard . . . is that if all personnel were suddenly replaced[,] the new people could continue making the product or providing the service as before." As various studies have shown, the total number of new jobs in the U.S. may roughly match the number of people entering the workforce, but the quality of jobs--the amount of autonomy and freedom offered--is declining. As in other areas of conflict between labor and management, when processes of negotiation and renewal break down, extremes of individualistic and authoritarian behavior are likely to follow, with a likely resort to force. From the perspective of management, it may be desirable to export jobs abroad not simply because labor is cheap, but because authoritarian political culture and economic deprivation may make some foreign workers more tractable than their American counterparts. Instead of difficult negotiations with labor, corporations can pay a foreign manager who will contract to deliver labor in a cheap and trouble-free package, sometimes in the form of company dormitories, as in Taiwan, in which the level of control, by American standards, may evoke a labor camp. Logically enough, in this country labor camps usually house the most vulnerable, punishingly driven members of the labor force, migrant workers. The industrial mentality also surfaces in the film's parody of time-motion studies when the extra foreign prisoners are about to arrive. The SS boss Amon Goeth clocks one of Schindler's workers as he makes a hinge, and the penalty for inefficiency is death. The scene dramatizes the mania of competition and the fantasy that efficiency can be endlessly increased. At the same time Goeth is also unconsciously playing out his own predicament, inasmuch as he labors under tyrannical commands in the SS hierarchy--for him no less than his victims, disobedience would mean death. Like an angry adult once abused as a child, he abuses others, compulsively reenacting his own domination. In the culture of corporate downsizing, says the New York Times (March 4, 1996), managers who must layoff workers are colloquially termed "executioners" and become prone to post-traumatic symptoms (A14). Schindler's Jews challenge the Nazis' industrial ethos through their solidarity and adaptability. In the enamelware factory, for example, experienced workers quickly teach newcomers the necessary skills to qualify as essential to the war effort. This is the classic liberal democratic credo: that education and cooperation create a wholesome community. While the screenplay shows some Jews trying to survive in the ghetto through black-market connivance and collaboration, once Schindler's factory provides a means of escape, we see that the Jews have organized a system of self-government which helps them to make wise and compassionate executive decisions about who among them will survive. As dramatized, Stern's recruitment for the factory creates no conflict over favoritism or corruption. Stern himself is impeccably selfless, and the Jews seem instinctively to cooperate in a life-saving network. Fifty years later, just such networks turn out to be crucial to political refugees seeking asylum in the U. S., but also in a less drastic way to people seeking employment. According to labor economist Paul Osterman, "an overwhelmingly large fraction of people find their jobs through contacts," and employers rely a great deal on this informal network, especially if the contact is a relative. The lack of such contacts helps to explain the shocking unemployment rate among young blacks in America's inner city ghettoes. As for Oskar Schindler: in the context of American fears about employment, it is as if the callous Roger Smith in Roger and Me has wrestled with the angel of death on behalf of GM's auto workers and emerged a redeemer. In its symbolic logic the film celebrates a reconciliation of labor, management, and ownership. In this scenario Jewish victims bring about through their sacrifices a rehabilitation of labor and a mystical union with the once-predatory boss. The union is consecrated by the gold band--very like a wedding ring-- which Schindler's workers cast from gold teeth they have personally sacrificed for the purpose. It is easy to forget that neither Schindler nor the film makers ever challenge the assumption that lives are exchangeable for gold and money. Equally easy to overlook is Schindler's extortion from rich Jews of the money necessary to open the factory in the first place. At gunpoint, as it were, the self-appointed boss rescues Jews from their stereotypical tight-fistedness. In the actual postwar industrial world the marriage between labor and the boss has been a troubled one. After the bitterness of the Depression, American workers underwent a purgative initiation rite, as it were, in World War Two, after which a grateful nation rewarded them with a steadily enlarging share of postwar prosperity. Now those decades of job security and optimism are gone. As in Roger Smith's Detroit, automation and hostile management have routed organized labor, and once again business culture is shockingly dividing society into the poor and the very rich. During the same postwar period management progressively usurped stockholders' control over companies, and a new myth of executive genius flourished, aggrandizing power at the top and bringing with it grossly bloated compensation. This fantasy of the entrepreneurial executive resonates in strongly in Hollywood and especially in Hollywood's Schindler. John Kenneth Galbraith sees this fantasy figure disguising "the bureaucratic tendency in the modern private corporation"--a term which might recall the supremely bureaucratic Nazis. The entrepreneurial executive is imagined to be "Original, self-motivated, innovative, welcoming risk, [and] a creature of the market," the market he himself is often assumed to have discovered. "His counterpart, in fact, is the army general operating with a large and compliant staff behind the lines, who pictures himself as leading the tanks in fierce and unrelenting combat." In this atmosphere of fantasy, Galbraith concludes, "an entrepreneur can, indeed, fail, but he can do no wrong." At the same time, with the end of the Cold War, the master myth of the postwar period has disintegrated. In this context Schindler's List has powerful ideological resonance. It celebrates a humane and all-too-human capitalist who teams up with willing workers to help defeat a totalitarian enemy that could be the Soviet "evil empire" of Stalinist atrocities and Siberian labor camps. In this scenario democratic, American-style business overcomes a rival economy paralyzed by dictatorial planning and contempt for labor. And yet this triumph pays off like a military conquest inasmuch as the demise of the enemy magnifies the virtue and vitality of the survivor. In reality living standards for ordinary Americans appear to be slipping, and slipping far more drastically in the old Soviet world, where entrenched governmental corruption, wearing new masks, now routinely participates in "free market" business, and has earned the label "mafia" from a cowed citizenry. In reaction to economic trauma the newly independent states have begun reenacting versions of the Nazi selection process, driving out minorities and seizing their jobs. The Bosnian Serbs have committed forthright atrocities in the service of "ethnic cleansing," fueling their self-righteousness with memories of the Croats' cooperation with the Nazis. At the same time, as Jason Epstein protests, capitalist trade representatives eagerly shake hands with the despotic rulers of the new quasi-capitalist China. In this light Schindler's image of workers wedding the boss amplifies propaganda emanating from corporate headquarters and governmental agencies throughout the industrial world. Toil selflessly and trust the boss and someday all will be well. Yet as usual, Hollywood is equivocal about established power, offering the working poor a sympathetic wink too. Schindler finally owes his success to his canny and responsible Jewish employees. When he is cavalier about profits, they chide him. A vision of partnership begins to emerge. Yet no sooner do slaves and master ritualize their bond at war's end than the master vanishes, leaving behind a fleeting scene of brotherhood and moot questions about ownership and economic justice in the future. What could be a populist or quasi-socialist partnership ends up characterized not by assertive solidarity but by escapism. The capitalist Schindler finally redeems himself by choosing harmless failure over profits. In the last months of the war he creates a subversive anti-factory image of workers wedding the boss amplifies propaganda emanating from corporate headquarters and governmental agencies throughout the industrial world.  Toil selflessly and trust the boss and someday all will be well.

    Yet as usual, Hollywood is equivocal about established power, offering the working poor a sympathetic wink too.  Schindler finally owes his success to his canny and responsible Jewish employees.  When he is cavalier about profits, they chide him.  A vision of partnership begins to emerge.  Yet no sooner do slaves and master ritualize their bond at war's end than the master vanishes, leaving behind a fleeting scene of brotherhood and moot questions about ownership and economic justice in the future.  What could be a populist or quasi-socialist partnership ends up characterized not by assertive solidarity but by escapism.  The capitalist Schindler finally redeems himself by choosing harmless failure over profits.  In the last months of the war he creates a subversive anti-factory, deliberately manufacturing dud artillery shells.  The epilogue tells us that after the war Schindler failed twice more in business.  His inability to exploit working people tacitly vindicates the critique of acquisitive business that is implicit throughout the story.   The victims eventually thrive, presumably through some sort of business, but that of course takes place offscreen. 


| 5 |


    Schindler's List celebrates evil's defeat and the vitality of the survivors.  But the film's affirmation depends on a rich network of subliminal supports, and like the unarticulated emotions that suffuse and motivate the Nazis' behavior, some of those supports can be teased out.  Foremost among them is the screenplay's use of magical undoing to coax its storm of meanings and emotions toward closure.  When the camera follows some of Schindler's workers into the gas chamber, under the shower nozzles, for example, the screenplay has fate deliver not death but water: not industrial poison but the biblical symbol of life.   On most audiences the effect is probably more complex than simple escapism, but the reversal does tame or contain the vision the camera sets out to discover.

    And so in an inversion of the death camps' selection process, the epilogue marches victims past the grave of the dead Schindler in solemn tribute.  Instead of ordaining doom the now-empowered survivors give memorial life to the dead.  Although Schindler remains personally as unknowable as ever, this ceremonial hero-worship undoes the threat of Nazi annihilation by testifying to the importance of the individual.  The story argues that a single resourceful imagination can prevail against the cold hatred of an entire nation.  A lone voice can withstand the fury of the horde.  As in lowly adventure tales, such a scenario can enable a moviegoer to convert a source of terror into a celebration of heroic vitality.  Where Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker (1961) takes for granted that survivors are likely to be suffering classic trauma symptoms long after the war, some recent studies report a high rate of healthy adaptation among the aging survivors. 

    In its cultural context the epilogue mourns the lost leader it praises.  In an era when American business executives make more grossly disproportionate salaries than executives elsewhere in the world--40% more than their Japanese counterparts, for example--the business leader is an ambivalent figure.  In Michael Moore's documentary corporate brutality toward "GM families" leaves Flint Michigan looking ransacked, so that business culture more readily evokes Schindler's Nazis than its rescuers.  Hence the need for a flawed but generous Oskar Schindler, enigmatic and comic messiah, who can restore some faith in leaders without raising serious questions about any established power structure. 

    Schindler's workers, the film reports, have not only survived but multiplied, producing some thousands of offspring.  Ancient and seemingly natural as this reverence for increase is, it also directly undoes the traumatic loss of life, making it possible for audiences to forget that the dead cannot really be replaced.  On another level, this numerical prosperity onscreen could be taken as an eerie echo of the drive to produce and quantify that appears everywhere in industrial culture.  In this respect it amplifies Schindler's last-minute lament that if he had only made more money, he could have saved even more lives, as if money or numbers are the key.   Like other economic fantasies, the posterity-count assumes that more means better--and more--life.   

    If magical undoing promises wishful prosperity, it also promises to satisfy righteous wrath.  And so Amon Goeth tries to execute a victim at Plaszow, only to find that not one but two pistols will not fire.  Lest the moviegoer miss the hint of uncanny providence at work, the epilogue invokes a magical, talionic inversion when it reports that Goeth was executed as a war criminal--and then shows us the hanging, a botched affair in which the hangmen have to kick a chair out from under him not once but several times, each kick comically splintering the chair.  The theatrical ironies contrive a cosmically sanctioned punishment leavened with comic vindictiveness.  In economic slang, Goeth is paying his debt and being paid back.

    Finally magical undoing attempts to reunite the cultural meanings that disintegrated under Nazi assaults.  Through the sacramental ring, the screenplay tries to stabilize the meaning of Schindler's union with "his" people.  After all, Schindler himself is both criminal and hero, predator and guardian angel, monstrously selfish and altruistic.  "His" people had reason to hate as well love him.  In freely giving gold teeth for the ring, the survivors undo the coercion of slavery.   Slaves and gold teeth are both prosthetic entities: one substitutes for another.  Through the ring the laborers undo the hideous death camp slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei"--work will make you free--gladly giving from their own bodies to marry their wills to the redemptive leader.   At the same time the ring is meant to protect Schindler from punishment as a war criminal, so it rescues him as he rescued "his" people.  The transformation of body parts into a symbolic ring also undoes the Nazis' murder for body parts--hair, gold teeth, glasses--that can be scavenged for reuse.  The ring is a pledge of mutual faith in a tragic and chaotic moment, yet it also exists within a larger cultural economy of obligations, rewards, and wishes.  The screenplay makes it a final, magical product of Schindler's factory, a device meant to bring closure to the horrors, and faith in the future--and not only for those who suffered and were there.  


|6|


    Jason Epstein wants Schindler's List to educate us about "the real lesson of the Holocaust."  He deplores the way some "educated and humane" people cried out against Hitler's crimes and yet tolerated Stalin's crimes for ideological reasons.  But Epstein goes on to lambaste American culture, with special ire for "the literary theory of deconstruction" in the universities, because "the plain fact is that we have taught ourselves and our children to regard the conventional discourse of our civilization with the utmost skepticism, so that from high culture to low--from Plato and Shakespeare all the way down to the White House .  .  . we now, as a matter of habit, dismantle everything, leaving only the most fragile spiritual and cultural ground beneath us" (65). 

    This indignation is as eloquent and moving as it is self-contradictory.   Goethe and Beethoven are among the noblest of voices in "our civilization," and yet as Spielberg insists by having a stormtrooper play a famous scrap of Beethoven on the piano as his squad is liquidating an apartment in the ghetto, it is a commonplace to lament that not even the highest cultural values stopped the Nazis' predatory frenzy.   Goebbels' image-managers were able to warp all sorts of cultural discourse to Nazi ends, from the arts to philosophy. 

    But then, even the most venerated Great Books of western civilization can be dangerous guides to conduct.  In his study of combat trauma Jonathan Shay comments "that the modern cultural habit of dehumanizing the enemy originates in biblical religion."  The text is forthright.  God promises to reward Israel's conquests with plunder and slave labor.  Pharoah's erstwhile victims become righteous predators reflexively validated by their god.  "As he announces his plans for the ethnic cleansing of Canaan," says Jack Miles, "the Lord does not, to repeat, seem angry with the Canaanites, but the effect is genocidal all the same, and there is no escaping it."  Here is the Deuteronomic prescription:

            When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of

            peace.  If it responds peaceably and lets you in, all the people present

            there shall serve you at forced labor.  If it does not surrender to

            you, but would join battle with you, you shall lay siege to it; and

            when the Lord your God delivers it into your hands, you shall put

            all its males to the sword.  You may, however, take as your booty

            the women, the children, the livestock, and everything in the

            town--all its spoil--and enjoy the use of the spoil of your enemy,

            which the Lord your God gives you.

                        Thus you shall deal with all the towns that lie very far from

            you, towns that do not belong to nations hereabout.  In the towns

            of the latter peoples, however, which the Lord your God is giving

            you as a heritage, you shall not let a soul remain alive.  No, you

            must proscribe them--the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites

            and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites--as the Lord your

            God has commanded you, lest they lead you into doing all the

            abhorrent things that they have done for their gods and you

            stand guilty before the Lord your God.  (Deut. 20:10-18)

The disturbing truth is that there is no neutral "conventional discourse of our civilization" guaranteed to be benign.  Christianity was used both to condemn and to justify the Vietnam War, even as the courts have been used to oppose and to foster slavery and racial equality.  Nobody can trust any particular package of values to make a reliable First-Aid kit for all moral emergencies. 

    But Epstein’s complaint about skepticism also masks a false solution.  Do people tolerate a Stalin because they are uncritically committed to the wrong principles?  or because "utmost skepticism" prevents them from acting?  The painful truth is that evil thrives as readily on misguided noble commitment as on skepticism.  It is possible to sympathize with exhortations to cherish particular heroic values--the unspecified "real lesson of the Holocaust"--and simultaneously to recognize that radical existential motives such as death-anxiety and compensatory cultural chauvinism also greatly determine our ability to hear and to be taught.  In this spirit it seems important not just to regret that Schindler's List blinks at evil and death, but also to try to understand that reflex so we may be a little less compulsive.  Granted, the film is a particular structure of denial and consolation: what can that structure tell us about our behavior?

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