Geographers Watching Movies: Schindler’s List.

The Good Nazi or The Good Capitalist?

I have decided to finally watch Schindler’s List. I watch lots of movies so my list of “absolute classics I haven’t seen yet” is quite limited. This was in fact one of those movies, always high on my bucket list.

Not that I was not interested in movies describing the horrors of the Holocaust. In fact, some time ago I had quite of an obsessive relationship to the topic, having watched everything that I could find, including the 9-hour long classic documentary called Shoah, created in the 1970s by Claude Lanzmann or the very first documentary about the death camps called Night and Fog.

Also, being born and raised in Poland, I feel a deep sense of an uneasy connection to the atrocities committed on the occupied territories of where my ancestors lived. After all, in every documentary about Holocaust, you will hear people talking in Polish, in every Hollywood movie about it you will people screaming in Polish. Sometimes these are the voices of victims, sometimes accomplices.

Now, the time came to watch Schindler’s List, a movie about a good Nazi entrepreneur who, at first, discovers the opportunity to exploit Jewish business and labor (doesn’t hide it, really) and then decides to actually help save the people. Juxtaposed with him we see a chief of the Płaszów labor camp — the bad Nazi, Amon Goeth. The first one is trying to save as many Jews as he can using his money and influence, the second one finds relief in randomly killing them.

Randomness is an important topic of the movie — the suspension of laws that, if followed, would enable one to survive is the striking feature of the Holocaust nightmare often explored in the movies as much as in literature — Hannah Arendt focuses on that suspension as a sole mechanism of inflicting terror, the perversity and the opaqueness of the reality produced by totalitarian regimes in order to exercise power. In other words, there is nothing to really hold on to, at least not for the Jewish nation, no sort of obedience or complacency that would assure survival. Death would come randomly because Jews were not considered people so “justice” was beyond their recourse.

The crucial scene touching upon the topic of laws is the one when Schindler tells Goeth about what real power is. He claims that indeed, the real power is not simply justice. It is the capability of acting beyond justice and to “pardon” the criminal, to decide, based on one's individual will, not to kill.

What a remarkable insight — it would be, I thought, if only the Spielbergian vision wasn’t limited to describing power as the one to “pardon”. You see, the ability to suspend the laws, human laws, is the true nature of sovereign power in the epoch we live in, the one which philosophers call “modernity”. Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian scholar called it “necropolitics”: “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die”. Mbembe uses that to describe the sovereignty of nation-states, one of the territorial features of modernity itself.

The idea of power, seen as a relationship between the larger structure and a person, allows us to apply the concept not only to the Holocaust but also to colonialism (as Mbembe skillfully does), to contemporary apartheid or to the idea of a nation-state itself.

“To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power”.

In order to dig deeper into that, Mbembe uses the framework of Michel Foucault called biopower:

“the form of power that regulates social life, from its interior, following it, interpreting it” (Hardt & Negri, 2000).

It might all sound vague but biopower is exactly the force allowing one nation, backed up with science, with technology, with philosophy, and only in the very end — with guns, to decide that the Jews wouldn't be considered not “people”. Hence, human laws would be not applicable to them. What is more, the Jews would in fact be considered an obstacle for humans to thrive which would make killing them not only a plausible option but an admirable act.

All of this, which Foucault described to us changing political science forever, is because power is not only guns but also knowledge, what we think is science, what we deem legitimate, and what we don’t. It is produced in the everyday experience, it is fluid and it permeates society in small gestures. Power is exercised not only in what we think of war or conflict but also in what we think about prisons, welfare, and the curricula in our children's schools.

Lots of quotes and writers, I know, but the best description of power and how it shapes society in both, its peaceful everyday life and its most extreme “states of exception” is the metaphor of the opening lines of the aforementioned Night and Fog, the first documentary ever made about death camps, by Alain Resnais:

“Even a road where cars and peasants and couples pass, even a resort village with a steeple and a country fair, can lead to a concentration camp”.

Just as every road in the world can technically lead to the gates of Auschwitz, our ideas of who has the right to live in a given territory, who can and who cannot cross the borders, who “have too many children” and who “deserves our aid”, finally — who is a protester and who is a looter, all of those opinions, thoughts and our decisions informed by them can also lead to a concentration camp — with us ending up inside or outside of it.

That is why Schindler disappoints with his argument about power being “the ability to pardon” — power is the sheer position of deciding with full authority if someone lives or dies, the power that we like to think we delegate to our governments, but in fact, we delegate it to immigration officers, to prison wardens, to police, and to twenty-year-old kids we give weapons to and send to do as they please in faraway lands where black and brown people live.

Spielberg seems to confuse “power” with “greatness” and the whole movie about a rich, spoiled entrepreneur who doesn’t understand what “no” means seems to be one big confusion of those two. Schindler’s power lies not in his decision to help the Jewish people but in the very fact that he could even make this decision. In other words, his power was the fact that he was both, a prominent Nazi and also an entrepreneur. The rest was his greatness.

That coinciding role of being an accomplice of far-right politics and of being a businessman leads us right into the sinister discovery about the nature of capital and fascism. I wrote “capital”, not “capitalism” only to keep the spark of outrage for later.

In fact, financial capital and private entrepreneurship go hand in hand with fascism and with right-wing politics. They need and fuel each other and their common ground is — again — often science, particularly the idea of race. In other words, capitalism needs exploitation and racism delivers the justification for it. Fascism needs a political reason to exclude the unworthy and again, racism delivers. There is a saying: “money likes predictability” and the fascist power provides that to the great industrial powers of modernity. After all, Schindler himself admits that the only thing that could end his thriving business would be the end of the war. But power needs private businesses oriented towards supporting the wartime economy, businesses happy to thrive on cheap or free labor. Here, probably accidentally, the Hollywood pean for a good, rich person becomes a quite insightful inquiry into the perfect relationship between fascism and big business.

Just to quote a Guyanese scholar, Walter Rodney: “white racism […] was an integral part of the capitalist mode of production.” Rodney didn’t write about the Holocaust. He wrote about colonialism and Africa. I hope you see the relationship already.

“It is mistakenly held that Europeans enslaved Africans for racist reasons. European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons.” (Rodney)

Hannah Arendt said that the Holocaust was the colonial violence directed inwards, imploding into Europe. Whether it is true or not, it

“ended up comparing the working classes and “stateless people” of the industrial world to the “savages” of the colonial world.” (Mbembe).

I am sure Spielberg has seen the masterpiece of Luchino Visconti, the 1969 movie “The Damned” about a family of German industrialists getting intertwined with Nazi politics. In this remarkable portrait of gradual suspension of laws and rights, of the tables of power and “logic” turning too fast, both the billionaire family members and the prominent members of the NSDAP party think they outsmart the other in a race to the bottom — of power:

“a complete conflation of war and politics (and racism, homicide, and suicide), until they are indistinguishable from one another” (Mbembe).

The young and ambitious hair of the family, Martin Von Essenbeck, sexually assaults a Jewish child who then commits suicide. At first, Martin becomes terrified of the consequences of his actions but in the quickly shifting logic of the business-politics conflation, contributing to the death of a Jewess seems to work in his favor. I couldn’t stop thinking about Martin Von Essenbeck while watching Oscar Schindler. No, the real power lies not in being Oscar Schindler, but in being a Nazi industrialist. To kill or not to kill is a personal choice.

Still, the ultimate argument showing the marriage of private business and the fascist power is the way in which Schindler buys off the Jews who have worked for him. He pays the Nazi officials great sums of money, but still, he pretends to save them for the benefit of his business, not for the sake of the Jews themselves. Even the astronomical bribes given to greedy officials and clerks are not enough to break the spell of the “obvious”, “scientific fact” that Jews were not humans and did not deserve to die. If Schindler wanted to “save” the Jews, he would become a traitor of the Third Reich. No, he had to pretend that he wanted to keep them alive to exploit them further. What that shows is that the only thing which could render saving lives plausible was the need for further exploitation and money-making. That is the higher law, the higher logic. Morality can be suspended, killing might become a hobby, but the laws of capitalism ought to stay intact.

I am sure that I was not the only one who hoped to see a great movie about humanity and has discovered that it was not racism, not “hate”, but profit that was strong enough to stop the killing machine. To quote yet another movie about Nazis: the money makes the world go round!

I am also not trying to argue that Holocaust was an endeavor of capitalism. It was not. Nazism was suicidal as both Arendt and Mbembe would agree. Nazis would spend ludicrous amounts of money to prove their point and the entire hellish machinery of Shoah was a horribly expensive plan. What I am saying is that in the logic of extermination and inflicting terrible suffering, capitalism has a safe spot, right in the eye of the tornado. After all, remember that the abolition of slavery in Great Britain and its colonies lead to unprecedented reparations — towards the slave owners.

Germans have this saying: if there are 10 people sitting at the table with a Nazi, it is a table of 11 Nazis.

In Nazi Germany, it was Siemens, Bayer, Kodak, Hugo Boss, and others sitting at that table. Under French and British colonialism, it was Unilever, Crédit Lyonnais, Cadbury, Barclays. Exploiting natural resources, altering the lives of indigenous communities, and annihilating ecosystems — British Petrol, Shell, Exxon. Looking at the year of 2022 — we could have vaccinated most of the world by now. Yes, I could point out at Moderna, Pfizer — and I do. But the ones ferociously defending their patents and their right to let the non-white world die are political structures, the nation-states, such as the US, Canada, or Great Britain.

As Foucault explains, power is omnipresent, flowing from one point to the other within the social tissue, and “every road can lead to a concentration camp”. That is why, almost always, the atrocities of the “everyday” are less striking than the ones that took place behind the gates of Auschwitz. The chance to rise to greatness doesn’t seem that evident or maybe even not that necessary, so we often get disoriented in where to look for the next Oscar Schindler. But his greatness as a person who went against the tide of the “scientific” logic of German supremacy and normalized violence is not so praiseworthy because he did what Amon Goeth and other Nazi officials were incapable of doing. His greatness stems from the fact that he did what Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, the Koch brothers, and others are incapable of doing.

REFERENCES:

Foucault, M. (2012). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.

Mbembe, A (2003) Necropolitics in Public Culture 15(1): 11–40.

Negri, A., & Hardt, M. (2000). Empire. Harvard University Press.

Rodney, W. (2018). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Verso Trade.

Night and Fog https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048434/

The Damned https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064118/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_5

Shoah https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090015/

Schindler’s List https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108052/