ABSTRACT

Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993) attracted large audiences around the world in cities made up mostly of people who had never before seen a Holocaust film. Dialogue was opened as newspaper articles appeared and as the film gained popularity and acclaim. In Frankfurt, Germany, where Oskar Schindler had lived for the last 16 years of his life, the film opened on March 3, 1993, with Steven Spielberg in the audience. The Washington Post reported this with the statement: “The Holocaust returned to Germany today with the opening of the movie Schindler’s List and the reopening of a national debate about guilt, courage and the unresolved mysteries of mass murder” (Atkinson, 1993). In the United States, Schindler’s List won seven academy awards, including Best Director. The degree of attention from the public, media, film critics, and scholars indicates that Spielberg’s film invited witnessing in a way that had not occurred previously. Space for an audience was constructed, enabling people to sit in the theater and tolerate the anxiety, fear, anomie, depersonalization, and grief that inevitably accompany acknowledgment of the overwhelming terrible truths of the Holocaust. 1 Through his producing skills, Spielberg was able to bring knowledge of dehumanization and death to cinematic screens without repelling the audience. The way the film was constructed forged a path to realities of the Holocaust, allowing members of the audience to find and keep some movement in their minds. This type of movement is vitalizing and able to create and maintain what I have called “the living surround” (see Chapter 1) that can develop around trauma through witnessing. There was something to try to understand about the way Spielberg made Schindler’s List. I wanted to find what it was and proceeded to look closely at elements of the film fostering witnessing.