Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The University of Chicago Press
The University of Chicago Press
Memory
Author(s): Miriam Bratu Hansen
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Winter, 1996), pp. 292-312
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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For astute readings and suggestions on this essay, I wish to thank Homi Bhabha, Bill
Brown, Michael Geyer, Alison Landsberg, and audiences at the University of Chicago, Har-
vard University, and the annual conference of the Society for Cinema Studies, March 1994.
1. The comparison was first suggested, in a somewhat different spirit, in Terrence Raf-
ferty, "A Man of Transactions," review of Schindler'sList, New Yorker,20 Dec. 1993, p. 132.
Rafferty praises the epic significance and "visionary clarity" of Schindler'sList by invoking
James Agee's reverie about The Birth of a Nation as "'a perfect realization of a collective
dream of what the Civil War was like, as veterans might remember it fifty years later, or as
children, fifty years later, might imagine it"' (p. 132). Obviously, such a comparison asks to
be turned against itself; see Philip Gourevitch, "ADissent on Schindler'sList,"Commentary97
(Feb. 1994): 52.
292
first film to deal with the Civil War and its aftermath (there were in fact
dozens of Civil War films between 1911 and 1915), the film did lay un-
precedented claim to the construction of national history and thus dem-
onstrated the stakes of national memory for the history of the present.
And while Schindler'sList is certainly not the first film to deal with the
German Judeocide, Spielberg's story about a Sudenten German Catholic
entrepreneur who saved the lives of 1,100 Polish Jews asserts a similar
place of centrality in contemporary U.S. culture and politics.
On the level of reception, both TheBirthof a Nation and Schindler'sList
provoked responses from far beyond the pale of industrial-commercial
culture, getting attention from writers, activists, and politicians who usu-
ally don't take films seriously; it thus temporarily linked the respective
media publics (emergent in the case of The Birth of a Nation, all-inclusive
in the case of Schindler'sList) with the publics of traditional politics and
critical intellectuals.2 What is extraordinary about these two films is not
just how they managed to catalyze contesting points of view but also how
they make visible the contestation among various and unequal discursive
arenas in their effort to lay claim to what and how a nation remembers-
not an identical nation, to be sure, but distinctly different formations of
a national public. As is well known, TheBirth of a Nation was the first film
to be given a screening at the White House (after which President Wood-
row Wilson's comment "it is like writing history in lightning" became part
of the legend), but it was also the first film to galvanize intellectual and
political opposition in an alliance of Progressive reformers and the newly
formed NAACP.As is likewise known, not all intellectuals protested: The
Birth of a Nation became the founding text for an apologetic discourse on
"film art" that for decades tried to relativize the film's racist infraction.3
(New York, 1977), chap. 2. On the film's devastating and lasting effects on African Ameri-
cans' cinematic representation and relation to film practice, see Black AmericanCinema,ed.
Manthia Diawara (New York, 1993).
4. For a comment on the relationship between the two films, see Yosefa Loshitzky, "Ho-
locaust Others: Spielberg's Schindler'sList versus Lanzmann's Shoah,"in Spielberg'sHolocaust:
CriticalPerspectiveson "Schindler's
List,"ed. Loshitzky (Bloomington, Ind., 1996).
5. See Kluge, "On Film and the Public Sphere," trans. Thomas Y. Levin and Miriam
Hansen, New GermanCritique,nos. 24-25 (Fall/Winter 1981-82): 206-20. For the Castlemont
High School incident, see Frank Rich, "Schindler's Dissed," New YorkTimes,6 Feb. 1994, p.
D17, city ed. and "Laughter at Film Brings Spielberg Visit," New YorkTimes, 13 Apr. 1994,
p. Bll.
6. Michael Andre Bernstein, "The Schindler'sList Effect," AmericanScholar63 (Summer
1994): 429.
7. Ibid.
8. See Michael Geyer, "On the Uses of Shame: The German Politics of Memory," in
Radical Evil, ed. Joan Copjec (London, 1995). See also Geyer and Hansen, "German-Jewish
Memory and National Consciousness," in HolocaustRemembrance:The Shapesof Memory,ed.
Geoffrey Hartman (Oxford, 1994), pp. 175-90.
Seeing the film outside the context of American publicity, however, made
me consider the film's textual work, if not independently of its intentions
and public effects, yet still from a slightly displaced location in relation to
both Hollywood global effects and its intellectual critics. Let me say at the
outset that it is not my intention to vindicate Schindler'sList as a master-
piece (which would mean reverting to the Birthof a Nation debate). I think
there are serious problems with the film's conception, and I could have
done without much of the last third, when Oskar Schindler (Liam Nee-
son) the opportunist, gambler, and philanderer turns into Schindler the
heroic rescuer. But seen from a perspective of displacement, and consid-
ered from an interstitial space between distinct critical discourses and
between disjunctive political legacies, the film did seem to have an im-
portant function, not only for empirically diverse audiences, but also for
thinking through key issues involved in the representation of the Shoah
and the problem of "public memory."9 Moreover, in the way the film po-
larized, or was assumed to have polarized, critical and popular responses,
the reception of Schindler'sList threw into relief a particular pattern in
intellectuals' positioning that rehearsed familiar tropes of the old debate
on modernism versus mass culture.
Before I elaborate on this pattern, and on what it occludes in the
public as well as textual workings of the film, I will first outline the intel-
lectual critique in its key points. The following summary distinguishes,
roughly, among arguments pertaining to (a) the cultureindustry(in Hork-
heimer and Adorno's sense); (b) the problem of narrative;(c) the question
of cinematicsubjectivity;and (d) the question of representation.
a) The first and obvious argument is that Schindler'sList is and re-
mains a Hollywood product. As such it is circumscribed by the economic
and ideological tenets of the culture industry, with its unquestioned and
supreme values of entertainment and spectacle; its fetishism of style and
glamour; its penchant for superlatives and historicist grasp at any and all
experience (the "ultimate statement on" or "the greatest Holocaust film
ever made"); and its reifying, levelling, and trivializing effect on every-
thing it touches. In this argument, Schindler'sList is usually aligned with
Spielberg's previous megaspectacles, especiallyJurassic Park, and accused
of having turned the Holocaust into a theme park. Since the business of
Hollywood is entertainment, preferably in the key of sentimental opti-
mism, there is something intrinsically and profoundly incommensurable
about the "re-creation" of the traumatic events of the Shoah "for the sake
9. See Hartman, "Public Memory and Its Discontents," Raritan 13 (Spring 1994): 24-
40. Hartman defines "contemporary public memory" in contradistinction to "traditional col-
lective memory" (p. 33). I am using the term in a more general and less pessimistic sense
indebted to Negt and Kluge's theory of the public sphere (see n. 2). See also Hartman,
"The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg's Schindler'sList,"Salmagundi,nos. 106-7 (Spring/Sum-
mer 1995): 127-45.
10. Art Spiegelman, in J. Hoberman et al., "Schindler'sList: Myth, Movie, and Memory,"
Village Voice,29 Mar. 1994, p. 27; hereafter abbreviated "MMM." See also Sean Mitchell's
profile of Spiegelman, "Now, for a Little Hedonism," LosAngeles Times, 18 Dec. 1994, pp. 7,
97-98, esp. p. 98.
11. Hoberman, "Spielberg's Oskar," Village Voice,21 Dec. 1993, p. 63. See also Rich,
"Extras in the Shadows," New YorkTimes, 2 Jan. 1994, p. 4, and Leon Wieseltier, "Close
Encounters of the Nazi Kind," TheNew Republic,24 Jan. 1994, p. 42.
12. Saul Friedlander, Reflectionsof Nazism:An Essay on Kitschand Death, trans. Thomas
Weyr (New York, 1984), p. 13. Friedlander himself discusses this question in an essay sched-
uled to appear in Spielberg'sHolocaust. See also Friedlander's introduction to the volume
of essays, edited by him, Probing the Limitsof Representation:Nazism and the "Final Solution"
(Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 1-21.
13. See Ora Gelley, "Narration and the Embodiment of Power in Schindler'sList,"paper
delivered at the Society for Cinema Studies annual conference, New York, March 1995.
14. See David Bordwell, Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The ClassicalHollywoodCinema:
Film Styleand Mode of Productionto 1960 (New York, 1985), and Bordwell, Narration in the
FictionFilm (Madison, Wis., 1985), chap. 9. The concept of classical cinema owes much to
psychoanalytic-semiotic and feminist film theory of the 1970s; see Narrative,Apparatus,Ideol-
ogy:A Film TheoryReader,ed. Philip Rosen (New York, 1986).
15. Ken Jacobs, in "MMM,"p. 27. See also Gertrud Koch, in "MMM,"p. 28.
16. See Bernstein, "The Schindler'sList Effect," p. 430, and Geoff Eley and Atina Gross-
mann, "Watching Schindler'sList: Not the Last Word" (forthcoming in New GermanCritique).
17. Kluge, Die Macht der Gefihle (1983); see the script of this film and other materials
published under the same title (Frankfurt am Main, 1984). See also Hansen, "The Stubborn
Discourse: History and Story-Telling in the Films of Alexander Kluge," Persistenceof Vision,
no. 2 (Fall 1985): 26. On the Hollywood convention of the always-happy ending, see Bord-
well, "Happily Ever After, Part Two," The VelvetLight Trap 19 (1982-83): 2-7.
18. See Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger,and Man-Made Mass Death
(New Haven, Conn., 1985).
19. See Claude Lanzmann, "Holocauste, la representation impossible," Le Monde, 3
Mar. 1994, pp. 1, 7, trans. under the title "Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth," Guard-
ian Weekly,3 Apr. 1994, p. 14; and Koch, in "MMM,"p. 26.
20. See Roland Barthes, "LEffet de reel," Communications11 (1968): 84-89; trans. Ger-
ald Mead, under the title "The Realistic Effect," Film Reader 3 (1978): 131-35. See also
Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974).
man eyes."21By contrast, the argument goes, the Jewish characters are
reduced to pasteboard figures, to generic types incapable of eliciting
identification and empathy. Or worse, some critics contend, they come
to life only to embody anti-Semitic stereotypes (money-grubbing Jews,
Jew-as-eternal-victim, the association of Jewish women with dangerous
sexuality, the characterization of Itzhak Stern [Ben Kingsley], Schindler's
accountant, as "king of the Jewish wimps").22This argument not only
refers to the degree to which characters are fleshed out, individualized
by means of casting, acting, cinematography, and narrative action; the
argument also pertains to the level of filmic narration or enunciation, the
level at which characters function to mediate the film's sights and sounds,
events and meanings to the spectator, as for instance through flashbacks,
voice-over, or optical point of view. As psychoanalytic film theorists have
argued in the 1970s and early 1980s, it is on this level that cinematic
subjectivity is formed most effectively because unconsciously.23 If that is
so (and let's for the moment, for the sake of argument, assume it is),
what does it mean that point-of-view shots are clustered not only around
Schindler but also around Goeth, making us participate in one of his
killing sprees in shots showing the victim through the telescope of his
gun? Does this mean that, even though he is marked as evil on the level
of the diegesis or fictional world of the film, the viewer is nonetheless
urged to identify with Goeth's murderous desire on the unconscious level
of cinematic discourse?
d) The fourth, and most difficult, objection to Schindler'sList is that it
violates the taboo on representation (Bilderverbot),that it tries to give an
"image of the unimaginable."24 If the criticisms summarized up to this
point imply by and large that the film is not "realistic" enough, this cri-
tique involves the exact opposite charge, that the film is too "realistic."
So, by offering us an "authentic" reconstruction of events of the Shoah,
the film enhances the fallacy of an immediate and unmediated access to
21. Gourevitch, "A Dissent on Schindler'sList," p. 51. See also Jonathan Rosenbaum,
"Gentile Persuasion," ChicagoReader, 17 Dec. 1993, pp. 10, 26-27, and Gelley, "Narration
and the Embodiment of Power in Schindler'sList."
22. Ilene Rosenzweig, quoted in Rich, "Extras in the Shadows," p. 4. See Donald Kus-
pit, "Director's Guilt," Artforum32 (Feb. 1994): 11-12. See also "MMM,"p. 26.
23. See, for instance, Christian Metz, "Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film"
(pp. 35-65) and "The Imaginary Signifier" (pp. 244-78); Raymond Bellour, "Segmenting/
Analyzing" (pp. 66-92) and "The Obvious and the Code" (pp. 93-101); Kaja Silverman,
"Suture" (pp. 219-35); Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space" (pp. 379-420); and Laura Mul-
vey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (pp. 198-209), in Narrative,Apparatus,Ideology.
For a critique of the cine-semiotic concept of "enunciation," see Bordwell, Narrationand the
FictionFilm, pp. 21-26.
24. See Koch, "The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable: Notes
on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah," trans. Daniel and Hansen, October,no. 48 (Spring 1989):
15-24. See also Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: VisuelleKonstruktionendesJudentums
(Frankfurt am Main, 1992), esp. pt. 2, "Film und Faktizitat: Zur filmischen Reprasentation
derJudenvernichtung," pp. 127-84.
the past (the fallacy of historical films from TheBirth of a Nation toJFK)-
by posing as the "real thing" the film usurps the place of the actual event.
What is worse, it does so with an event that defies depiction, whose hor-
ror renders any attempt at direct representation obscene. Spielberg
transgresses the boundaries of representability most notoriously, critics
agree, when he takes the camera across the threshold of what we, and
the women in the film "mistakenly" deported to Auschwitz, believe to be
a gas chamber. Thus Schindler'sList, like the TV miniseries Holocaust,ends
up both trivializing and sensationalizing the Shoah.
Lanzmann, the most radical proponent of this critique, accuses
Schindler'sList of not respecting the unique and absolute status of the Ho-
locaust: "unique in that it erects a ring of fire around itself, a borderline
that cannot be crossed because there is a certain ultimate degree of hor-
ror that cannot be transmitted. To claim it is possible to do so is to be
guilty of the most serious transgression."25The counterexample of a film
that respects that boundary and succeeds in an aesthetic figuration of the
very impossibility of representation is, for both Lanzmann and other crit-
ics of Spielberg, his own film Shoah (1985). Lanzmann's film strictly re-
fuses any direct representation of the past, whether by means of fictional
reenactment or archival footage. Instead, the film combines interviews
featuring various types of witnesses (survivors, perpetrators, bystanders,
historians) to give testimony at once to the physical, sense-defying details
of mass extermination and to the "historicalcrisisof witnessing"presented
by the Shoah.26This crisis threatens not merely the project of a retrospec-
tive, anamnestic account but the very possibility and concept of eyewit-
nessing and, by extension, the recording capacity of the photographic
media. (This is why Lanzmann so radically distrusts Spielberg's untrou-
bled accessing-or, as Lanzmann calls it, "fabrication"-of a visual ar-
chive: "If I had stumbled on a real SS film-a secret film, because filming
was strictly forbidden-that showed how 3,000 Jewish men, women and
children were gassed in Auschwitz's crematorium 2, not only would I not
have shown it but I would have destroyed it.")27
Lanzmann's argument, like the critique of Schindler'sList in the name
of Shoah, is bound up with a complex philosophical debate surrounding
the Holocaust, which I cannot do justice to here. Suffice it to say that the
moral argument about the impossibility of representation-of mimetic
doubling-is linked, via a quasi-theological invocation of the Second
Commandment, to the issue of the singularity of the Shoah, its status as
25. Lanzmann, "Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth," p. 14. Lanzmann makes the
same argument in his critique of the TV miniseries Holocaust, "From the Holocaust to the
Holocaust,"trans. Simon Srebrny, Telos42 (Winter 1979-80): 137-43.
26. Shoshana Felman, "The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah,"in Felman
and Dori Laub, Testimony:Crisesof Witnessingin Literature,Psychoanalysis,and History (New
York, 1992), p. 206.
27. Lanzmann, "Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth," p. 14.
28. Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," Prisms, trans. Samuel and
Shierry Weber (1967; Cambridge, Mass., 1988), writes: "Cultural criticism finds itself faced
with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric, and this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write
poetry today" (p. 34; trans. mod.). See also Adorno's own revision of this statement in his
Negative Dialectics,trans. E. B. Ashton (1966; New York, 1973), pp. 362-63.
29. Koch, "Mimesis and Bilderverbot,"Screen34 (Autumn 1993): 211-22. See also Koch,
Die Einstellungist die Einstellung, pp. 16ff., 123ff. and "The Aesthetic Transformation of the
Image of the Unimaginable."
30. It is this sense of the aesthetic that Benjamin tries to recover against and in view of
the decline and perversion of the institution of art. See Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and
Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October,no. 62 (Fall 1992):
3-41.
cially in the technical media where sound has come to compensate for
the historical marginalization of the more bodily senses. Yet, if we under-
stand the Shoah's challenge to representation to be as much one of affect
as one of epistemology, the specific sensory means of engaging this chal-
lenge cannot be ignored. The soundtrack, for example, is neither the seat
of a superior truth (as Lanzmann seems to claim for Shoah) nor merely a
masked accomplice for the untruths of the image track (as assumed in
summary critiques of the classical Hollywood film), but rather the mate-
rial site of particular and competing aesthetic practices.31
It is no coincidence that none of the critics of Schindler'sList have
commented on the film's use of sound (except for complaints about the
sentimental and melodramatic music)-not to mention how few have ac-
tually granted the film a closer look. Although I share some of the reser-
vations paraphrased above, I still would argue that Schindler'sList is a
more sophisticated, elliptical, and self-conscious film than its critics ac-
knowledge (and the self-consciousness is not limited to the epilogue in
which we see the actors together with the survivors they play file past
Schindler's Jerusalem grave). Let me cite a few, brief examples that sug-
gest that we might imagine this film differently, examples pertaining to
both the film's complex use of sound and its structuring of narration and
cinematic subjectivity.
To begin with the latter point, the complaint that the film is narrated
from the point of view of the perpetrators ignores the crucial function of
Stern in the enunciative structure of the film. Throughout the film, Stern
is the focus of point-of-view edits and reaction shots, just as he repeatedly
motivates camera movements and shot changes. Stern is the only charac-
ter who gets to authorize a flashback, in the sequence in which he re-
sponds to Schindler's attempt to defend Goeth ("a wonderful crook") by
evoking a scene of Goeth's close-range shooting of twenty-five men in a
work detail in retribution for one man's escape; closer framing within the
flashback in turn foregrounds, as mute witness, the prisoner to whom
Stern attributes the account. The sequence is remarkable also in that it
contains the film's only flashforward, prompted by Schindler's exasper-
ated question, "what do you want me to do about it?" Notwithstanding
Stern's disavowing gesture ("nothing, nothing-it's just talking"), his
flashback narration translates into action on Schindler's part, resulting in
the requisitioning of the Pearlmans as workers, which is shown prolepti-
cally even before Schindler hands Stern his watch to be used as a bribe.
This moment not only marks, on the diegetic level of the film, Schindler's
first conscious engagement in bartering for Jewish lives; it also inscribes
the absolute difference in power between Gentiles and Jews on the level
FI ;. 2--to(ldy ill b)eremel) rd. F'i(;. r.-whel elsewhlere tlhey werielpUt iI tlhe
iIi'(u1i i
.a;7
4Si.
F(;' 3. -Ye ars i)111m no) the young( will ask with wonder labout Fl(;. (.-so-cajllc(l, t,ol(l tl,e Jtew
yan (
y1i a'le paXii 01 it. Kix I 1111(11c' yeatl-s a;go, Fi;. 7. -Kra kow. 'lhey c( lle, they trutll(lle(dtheir b)elongings into the city; they
you (' |v))ilg
Rabbli V Mrs. Dres.ner's voice: a bit less
Ire )ut iin the b,lame foi thle black (leath, (asimir F(i;. 8.-settled, they took hold(, thiey
FIG. 10 (b)
. ;
?4
': i.*
and
they flourished.
Fl(;. 15.-Jewish Krak6w; think about that. By this evening, those six centuries
are a rumor;
Rabbi'svoicefades
36. Hansen, "America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Mo-
dernity," in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R.
Schwartz (Berkeley, 1995).
37. Spielberg himself claims that he was neither inspired nor influenced by any fiction
film when he was working on Schindler'sList but only watched innumerable documentaries
and sifted through piles of photographs. See Hellmuth Karasek, "Die ganze Wahrheit
schwarz auf weiB: Regisseur Steven Spielberg uber seinen Film SchindlersListe,"Der Spiegel,
2 Feb. 1994, p. 185. In the same interview, however, he acknowledges having thought of
"Rosebud" to capture the enigmatic distance, the lack of clear, intelligible motivation, with
which he conceived of the Schindler character. See also Annette Insdorf, in "MMM,"p. 28.
Whether or not inspired by Welles, the relative restraint and withholding of interiority in
Spielberg's construction of the Schindler character, at least during the film's first half, is in
my opinion much preferable to the omniscient, unrestricted access we get to Schindler's
feelings and thoughts in Thomas Keneally's novel on which the film is based.
..',
Fie;. 18
FIG.20
Fic;. 21
c cww~ ,t
Flc;. 22
And Schindler replies: "I'd make sure it's known the company's in busi-
ness. I'd see that it had a certain panache. That's what I'm good at. Not
the work, not the work: the presentation!") But out of that cipher of a
con man/grifter/gambler develops an "authentic" person, an integrated
and intelligible character, a morally responsible agent. No doubt Spiel-
berg himself has an investment in this redemptive trajectory; and if, as a
number of critics have pointed out, the director strongly identifies with
his protagonist, he does so in defense of a capitalist culture, of an aesthet-
ics that fuses modernist style, popular storytelling, and an ethos of indi-
vidual responsibility. Whether he succeeds in reversing Citizen Kane's
pessimistic trajectory, that is, in disentangling Schindler-and the story
of the Schindler Jews-from the reifying effects of mass-mediated, spec-
tacular consumer culture, is an open question, depending as much on
the film's long-term public effects as on textual critique.
But perhaps this question is beside the point, as is treating the oppo-
sition of Shoah versus Schindler'sList as if it were a practical alternative, a
real option. For whether we like it or not, the predominant vehicles of
public memory are the media of technical re/production and mass con-
sumption. This is especially exacerbated for the remembrance of the
Shoah considering the specific crisis posed by the Nazis' destruction of
the very basis and structures of collective remembering. (Unlike most of
the "ordinary massacres" committed in the course of the German geno-
cidal war all over Europe, the Shoah left no communitiesof survivors, wid-
ows and children, not even burial sites that would have provided a link
with a more "organic" tradition of oral and collective memory.)38 In a
significant way, even before the passing of the last survivors, the remem-
brance of the Shoah, to the extent that it was public and collective, has
always been more dependent on mass-mediated forms of memory-on
what Alison Landsberg calls "prosthetic memory."39
Much has been written about the changing fabric of memory in post-
modern media society, in particular the emergence of new cultural prac-
tices (new types of exhibits, the museum boom) that allow the beholders
to experiencethe past-any past, not necessarily their own-with greater
intensity and sensuous immediacy (compare the Washington Holocaust
museum).40 We need to understand the place of Schindler'sList in the con-
38. See the papers presented at "Per una memoria Europea dei crimi Nazisti," an inter-
national conference to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1944 massacres around
Arezzo, 22-24 June 1994.
39. See Alison Landsberg, "Prosthetic Memory: The Logics and Politics of Memory in
Modern American Culture" (Ph.D. diss. in progress, University of Chicago), esp. chap. 4.
40. See Huyssen, TwilightMemories:Marking Time in a Cultureof Amnesia (New York,
1995), esp. chaps. 1 and 12. See also Landsberg, "The 'Waning of Our Historicity'? A Closer
Look at the Media of Experience" (paper delivered at the Society for Cinema Studies an-
nual conference, New York, Mar. 1995). For a brief survey of issues involved in American
memorial culture, see Michael Kammen, MysticChordsof Memory:The Transformation of Tradi-
tion in AmericanCulture(New York, 1991), pp. 3-14.
41. For a recent example, see Saidiya Hartman, "Redressing the Pained Body" (paper
delivered at the Chicago Humanities Institute, 17 Feb. 1995). The terms breachand rupture
refer to Zivilisationsbruch:
DenkennachAuschwitz,ed. Dan Diner (Frankfurt am Maim, 1988).
The first, quite controversial attempt to conceptualize the trauma of slavery in terms of the
Shoah is Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery:A Problemin AmericanInstitutionaland IntellectualLife
(1959; Chicago, 1968). More recently, see Paul Gilroy, TheBlackAtlantic:Modernityand Double
Consciousness(Cambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 213. Laurence Mordekhai Thomas, Vesselsof Evil:
AmericanSlaveryand the Holocaust(Philadelphia, 1993), is a useful starting point, but he does
not really engage with issues of representation and memory.
42. See Geyer and Konrad H. Jarausch, "The Future of the German Past: Transatlantic
Reflections for the 1990s," CentralEuropeanHistory 22 (Sept.-Dec. 1989): 229-59. See also
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernityand the Holocaust(Ithaca, N.Y., 1989).
43. In the manner of, for instance, Peter Novick, "Holocaust Memory in America,"
in The Art of Memory:HolocaustMemorialsin History,ed. James E. Young (New York, 1995),
pp. 159-65.
buster era. But it could also be taken as a measure of the film's ability to
engender a public space, a horizon of at once sensory experience and
discursive contestation.
No doubt Schindler'sList could have been a different film, or many
different films, even based on Keneally's novel. And different stories re-
lating to the most traumatic and central event of the twentieth century
will be and will have to be told, in a variety of media and genres, within
an irrevocably multiple and hybrid public sphere. If The Birth of a Nation
remains important to American history, it is not only for its racist inscrip-
tion of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods; it is just as important
for what it tells us about 1915, about the new medium's role in creating
a national public, about the dynamics of cultural memory and public me-
morializing in a volatile immigrant society. Schindler'sList comes at a radi-
cally different moment-in national and global history, in film history, in
the history of the public sphere. To dismiss the film because of the a priori
established unrepresentability of what it purports to represent may be
justified on ethical and epistemological grounds, but it means missing a
chance to understand the significance of the Shoah in the present, in the
ongoing and undecided struggles over which past gets remembered and
how. Unless we take all aspects-omissions and distortions, displacements
and possibilities-of public, mass-mediated memory culture seriously,
we'll remain caught in the "compulsive pas-de-deux"of (not just) intellec-
tual history.