The Power of an American Film : ‘Schindler’s List’ serves as both art and a teaching tool for Germans

There could be no more problematic audience for Steven Spielberg’s powerful Holocaust movie, “Schindler’s List,” than the Germans. The film has now opened in Germany, to mostly solemn and respectful reviews--and tight security. A special invited audience on Tuesday night in Frankfurt included President Richard von Weizsaecker and many other dignitaries. Chancellor Helmut Kohl, sometimes accused of not taking a hard line against neo-Nazis, did not attend.

Postwar German leaders have confronted their country’s Nazi past and its guilt in the attempted extermination of Europe’s Jews with considerable honesty and courage. But the topic remains a difficult one for modern Germany. Certainly its youths should not be held accountable for the sins of their parents and grandparents--but they are ignorant in many ways of the evils of Nazism, and a neo-Nazi movement has gained thousands of violent followers among young people born long after the death camps were shut down.

It’s striking that it has fallen to foreigners like Spielberg, an American Jew, to use the popular media to help teach the German public about the nation’s painful history. The German government had refused to back proposals to film the story of Oskar Schindler--a Nazi credited with saving the lives of 1,100 Jews working at his wartime ceramics factory in Poland--because, it said, financial success for such a motion picture was unlikely.

Perhaps an outsider had to do this project; a German-made film on the noble Schindler, a “good” Nazi, might have been dismissed as self-serving or self-justifying. And it is improbable that “Schindler’s List” will convert many neo-fascists.

But no one who has seen this moving film can mistake its message about the evils of fascism and the capacity of humans to rise above such barbarism. Let us hope it gains a wide audience in Germany and that it helps encourage the great majority of Germans who want to put their past to rest and to root out the remnants of the evil that once sprouted in their soil.