As Weissman shows, many critics of Schindler's List claim that Spielberg uses the Holocaust as a "backdrop" for telling the story of his protagonist, thereby reducing Nazism as an incidental setting (148). There is also the element of incidentalism. Discourses on the Holocaust, such as those presented in artistic renditions like Maus and Schindler's List allow for a reencountering and a multifaceted perspective. The Other is, however, the essence of representative documentation of the Holocaust. Genocide is a strange response to the sense of threat that derives from encounters with the Other. The Nazi social organization depends on cohesion and collective identity under the rubric of German nationalism. There are bystanders that watched while their neighbors were being forcibly removed and displaced these bystanders are crucial for understanding the narrative of Nazism. The Nazi social organization must be understood on all these dimensions. There were victims (Jews and survivors), perpetrators (Nazis), and perhaps most importantly, the bystanders (Poles, in the case of Auschwitz and documentaries related to the Warsaw ghetto Germans in the case of the Nazi endeavors in German-speaking lands). Using this line of thinking, it is important to understand the different modes of witnessing: the "heterogeneous points-of-view" that comprise the Nazi social organization (Felman 207). Whereas documentary evidence presents photographic testimonies, the artistic renditions allow for the impressions of how the reality of Nazism impacted the primary stakeholders. After all, the displacement of Africans from their homeland to a position of servitude and political oppression can be compared with the Holocaust in terms of both issues having a collective as well as personal dimension and each reflecting racism and its link to political and social power.Ĭreative or non-documentary representations of the Holocaust, as with Eli Wiesel's Maus and Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List allow for a thorough recreation of the Nazi ethos. Although Hansen acknowledges that the comparison is not much more than a "disanalogy," there do still remain some points of continuity that bear mentioning (128). Both films bear witness to the "vicissitudes of public history," (127). Griffith's "racist blockbuster of 1915, Birth of a Nation. Hansen, in fact, points out the peculiar continuities between Schindler's List and D.W. ![]() Genocide is a strange response to the sense of threat that derives… ![]()
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