Germany’s Screen Date With Its Past : Movies: Pre-release comment on ‘Schindler’s List’ has been positive. Some hope the film will be an ‘eye-opener’ for German youth.

Germany’s President Richard von Weizsaecker has an important date at the movies.

Tonight in Frankfurt, he will meet Steven Spielberg at the invitation-only premiere of the director’s Oscar-nominated Holocaust drama, “Schindler’s List.” The movie, opening in Germany on Thursday, already has generated tremendous pre-release buzz with an outpouring of media attention and overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Against a real-life backdrop of resurgent neo-Nazism throughout Germany, Von Weizsaecker’s presence at the benefit screening--which will raise money for the preservation of Auschwitz as a memorial--is meant to send a resounding message to the German people to take a hard look at their dark history.

A Von Weizsaecker aide said the president “wants his presence to signal to others that this (movie) is really more than just a product. . . . It engages the public to work on our own past. This is another opportunity for Germans to be confronted with our own history and the history of Europe, and, starting from that point, to try to face the present task, which you can only do if you really know the past.”

Von Weizsaecker has been forthright in condemning the rising neo-Nazi activities while, conversely, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl has been criticized at times both in Germany and abroad for not taking a harder line against neo-Nazi attacks.

“Schindler’s List’s” overseas distributor, the London-based United International Pictures, says that initial market research indicates a high percentage of the German public is ready to see a film that confronts the horrors of their country’s past. Hy Smith, UIP’s senior vice president of international marketing, says research shows 41% of the moviegoing population in Germany is aware of “Schindler’s List” and 34% have a “definite interest” in seeing the picture. Smith claims the results are “impressive,” relative to the German movie market, especially since they predated any television or print advertising, which only began late last week.

Given the film’s success in the United States, UIP has decided to release the movie on more screens in Germany than originally planned. It will open in key cities with approximately 35 prints; within a week it will expand to around 200 theaters, a major release for an “up market” film of this kind in Germany.

Famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal told The Times from Vienna that he is optimistic about the potential impact that “Schindler’s List” will have on German viewers. The film’s opening in Germany, he said, “is very, very important in this time of so many neo-Nazi events, with so many rightist extremists, and in a year of elections.”

He said he expects the movie to raise the public consciousness--especially among young people--and translate into fewer votes for extreme right-wing parties. Wiesenthal called “Schindler’s List” the “best film about our tragedy that I have seen, and I’ve seen 99% of them.”

Irene Runge, a sociologist and leader of the Jewish Cultural Assn. in Berlin, said she hopes the movie will be “an eye-opener for a generation of youths” who may be unexposed to the subject. But she also fears many intellectuals accustomed to repressing the issue might focus on discussions of “aesthetic values--talk about how well the movie was done or not done, according to their standards,” and not on Nazism and its victims.

The presence of “Schindler’s List” has been making itself felt even before the film’s opening. Last week, the German magazine Der Spiegel ran a cover story on the film titled “The Good German,” which said Spielberg “tells his story as precisely and brilliantly as never before, vividly in every detail, so full of life and, therefore, so intensely, so densely, that it takes the viewer’s breath away.”

“There has been an astonishing outpouring of attention on this film,” says Gerry Lewis, international marketing consultant for Spielberg’s Los Angeles-based production company, Amblin Entertainment, from UIP’s London headquarters. He said the momentum of media coverage “has grown immensely over the last four or five weeks.”

Lewis and Smith, who work closely on all of UIP’s releases of Amblin films overseas, characterized the marketing campaign for the movie as very straightforward, mirroring the look and strategy Universal Pictures enlisted to sell the picture domestically. The campaign was low-key and no frills, positioning it as an important “experience” rather than just a movie.

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Based on the true story of German industrialist and Nazi Party member Oskar Schindler who secretly saved more than 1,100 Jews from the death camps, “Schindler’s List” is the first major movie specifically confronting the subject in Germany since the 1979 U.S. television miniseries “Holocaust,” which drew 20 million viewers despite being aired on WDR network’s third-rated channel. That brought the word Holocaust into the German vocabulary, replacing “The Final Solution” or the still-preferred term “persecution of Jews.”

As Der Spiegel points out, even though the president is attending tonight’s premiere, the German government hasn’t always been so willing to address the subject of the Holocaust. In 1956, the government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer exercised considerable pressure to block the showing of Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” at the Cannes Film Festival because it saw the film as an offense against Germany.

One of the people behind tonight’s premiere is 37-year-old lawyer Michael Friedman, whose Holocaust survivor parents, Paul and Eugenia, were saved by Schindler. Friedman, who said Schindler attended his bar mitzvah in Tel Aviv, said the president’s presence at the movie’s premiere is a “sign of recognition of what Spielberg did in this film.”

Like other countries where the movie has begun to open, Germany is rolling out the red carpet for Spielberg. He arrives in Frankfurt just before lunchtime today after a meeting this morning in Paris with French President Francois Mitterrand. Later today, Spielberg will be honored at a lunch at Frankfurt’s City Hall.

On Wednesday, he will fly to the film’s premiere in Krakow, Poland, where Oskar Schindler established his work camp that saved Jewish workers from the Auschwitz death camp. Poland’s President Lech Walesa is expected to attend.

Tonight’s premiere benefit in Frankfurt was arranged by a committee of an organization known as Wider Das Vergessen, which roughly translates as “against forgetting.” The organization is made up of leading German industrialists who raise money for the preservation of Auschwitz as a memorial.

“The museum at Auschwitz is in bad shape and needs approximately $30 million (of restoration). The German government is giving 10 million marks ($7 million) toward it, and the rest has to be worked out worldwide,” said Amblin’s Lewis.

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Eller, the Times’ movie editor, wrote from Los Angeles; Miller reported from Germany.