Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema

The Good German?: Oskar Schindler and the Movies, 1951–1993

125 Peter Krämer The Good German? Oskar Schindler and the Movies, 1951–1993 The worldwide success of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in 1993 and 1994 turned its protagonist, Oskar Schindler, into a curious kind of household name. The name “Schindler” not only came to represent this one individual , a Nazi party member and war profiteer who had rescued over a thousand Polish Jews during the Holocaust, but could be applied to other rescuers of Jews as well, especially if they were, like Schindler, highly unlikely and largely forgotten heroes. For example, when the Los Angeles Times reported in March 1994 that Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Lithuania in 1940, had defied his government’s orders and issued transit visas that saved the lives of several thousand Jews, the article was entitled “Japan’s Schindler” (Watanabe 243). More recently, headlines of articles in the British press about Sir Nicholas Winton, a former stockbroker who in 1939 moved 700 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia to Britain, proudly announced: “Czechs nominate ‘Britain’s Schindler’ for Nobel Prize” (De Quetteville 21; see also Craig 24). In addition to making Oskar Schindler the archetype of the unlikely and forgotten rescuer of Jews, Schindler’s List also left its imprint on how the actual person is remembered. An intriguing example can be found at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. When I visited the adjacent museum in April 2007, I noticed that Schindler’s first name was here spelled with a “c” rather than a “k” (as it should be), thus making him the exact namesake of the statuettes given out at the Academy Awards, of which Schindler’s List won seven (Fensch 262). In addition to winning those Academy Awards and numerous other prizes, Schindler’s List was a surprise hit at the box office. With a gross 126 Peter Krämer of $96 million it was the ninth biggest hit of 1993 in the United States (boxofficemojo.com). Yet what is even more astonishing is that, outside the United States, of all the films released in 1993 only one had a bigger gross than the $225 million of Schindler’s List, and that was another Steven Spielberg film—Jurassic Park (IMDb.com). A disproportionate share of Schindler’s List’s foreign revenues came from Germany. Here, not only did the film become the third biggest hit of 1994 but, with over six million cinema tickets sold, it was also one of the fifteen most successful films in the first decade of the reunified country (Krämer, “Hollywood” 180–81). In many ways, the success of Schindler’s List, in the United States, Germany , and the rest of the world, was unprecedented for the kind of story that it tells—a story of personal transformation set against the epic backdrop of the Nazis’ destruction of European Jewry; and a story of just over a thousand Jews being saved set against the backdrop of millions being murdered . If one looks for earlier, similarly successful, Holocaust stories, only two come to mind. The first is the 1978 American television miniseries Holocaust—The Story of the Family Weiss, which told the contrasting stories of two fictional German families—one Jewish, the other Christian—by placing them in many of the most important actual places and embedding them in events associated with the Holocaust (Baron 51–55). Indeed, reviews of Schindler’s List, both in the United States and in Germany, often Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) presents himself, in Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, Universal , 1993). Digital frame enlargement. 127 Oskar Schindler and the Movies referenced the extraordinary impact that Holocaust had previously made (see, for example, Hoberman; Kilb). The second, more distant precursor is The Diary of Anne Frank, first published as a book in Dutch in 1947, subsequently translated into many languages, and then adapted into a Broadway play in 1955 and a Hollywood movie in 1959, which in turn helped with the international success of this story of the maturation of a German-born Jewish girl in Amsterdam, set against the backdrop of the persecution of Jews in which she eventually perished (see Sagan; Kushner). It is well known that, in publishing and publicizing Anne Frank’s story from the late 1940s onward, her father, Otto Frank, edited her diary and also worked closely—and controversially—with American playwrights and screenwriters, debating the meaning and impact that he wanted The Diary of...