Schindler’s List: Horror Re-Creation for Audience Recreation

Schindler’s List released in 1993 to near universal acclaim from popular movie critics. Without question, the film piques the empathy of viewers for the victims, survivors, and heroes of the Holocaust depicted in its frames. It is also the only major Hollywood production to ever portray the Nazi death camps with such startling realism. That makes Schindler’s List a supremely important cultural artifact; movies leave far more lasting impressions than history books, and historical dramas therefore shape our collective understanding of history in powerful ways. It may, therefore, come as a surprise to learn that intellectual critics have almost universally rejected Schindler’s List as exploitative, shallow, and misleading. If those critics are correct, if Schindler’s List relies on distortions to forge understanding, then our evaluation of the film hinges on whether we prefer empathy or truth.

Fact Checking Spielberg

The film begins with a scene that shows Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), an ambitious Nazi entrepreneur, entertaining SS officers at a nightclub. He’s in the market for government contracts, and he’s using such occasions to network with influential men in the Nazi party. Spielberg therefore begins with distortion; in truth, Schindler was a Nazi spy prior to the invasion of Poland, and was therefore already…