The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in this century. Sir Edward Grey, 3 August 1914 (Trenches) Cur, Phoebe, tuos rapis aspectus? Why, O Phoebus, do you tear away your aspect? (Seneca, Thyestes 793)
Cur, Phoebe, tuos rapis aspectus? Why, O Phoebus, do you tear away your aspect? (Seneca, Thyestes 793)
ita per innumerabilia retro saecula multum quidem prolixis intervallis, sed tamen certis, et idem Plato et eadem civitas et eadem schola idemque discipuli repetiti et per innumerabilia deinde saecula repetendi sint. Absit, inquam, ut nos ista credamus. Semel enim Christus mortuus est pro peccatis nostris; surgens autem a mortuis iam non moritur, et mors ei ultra non dominabitur; et nos post resurrectionem semper cum Domino erimus. (Augustine, Civitate Dei 12. 14) So back through innumerable ages, at very long but fixed intervals, the same Plato, the same city, the same school, and the same students have returned, and through innumerable ages hence they will return. Far be it from us, I say, to think such things. For Christ died once for our sins; but "rising from the dead, he will die no more, and death will have no more dominion over him"; and after the resurrection, we shall always be with the Lord.
So back through innumerable ages, at very long but fixed intervals, the same Plato, the same city, the same school, and the same students have returned, and through innumerable ages hence they will return. Far be it from us, I say, to think such things. For Christ died once for our sins; but "rising from the dead, he will die no more, and death will have no more dominion over him"; and after the resurrection, we shall always be with the Lord.
The traditional Judeo-Christian view not only maintains the continued existence of God following the apocalypse, but also of his followers. The mode of escape varies from one story to another. In the Genesis flood, the humans and animals who survived escaped on an ark (Genesis 6:1-9:17). In Revelation, those who escape the judgment and receive eternal life will be those whose names are on the list written in the Lamb's Book of Life (Revelation 21:22). Schindler's accomplishment has attracted comparisons to both the ark and the list: as mentioned previously, Keneally's novel has gone by the titles Schindler's Ark and Schindler's List. Keneally was not the first to make such comparisons; he records that after Schindler's death, three Schindlerjuden ("Schindler Jews," the name given to those Jews who survived by being on his list) made a donation in Schindler's honor dedicating a floor to him at Hebrew University. Among other things, the exhibit contains a Book of Life with the list and an account of Schindler's efforts (Keneally 397). Schindler's List thus joins Noah's ark and the Lamb's Book of Life as modes of salvation, but modes of salvation are not all these terms imply. When we examine these terms, we see that each one also indicates an agent of salvation--a savior.
The foregoing elements of the Judeo-Christian apocalypse are not just important to certain religious communities; they also influence popular entertainment. In an article on Schindler's List, Daniel Fogel relates that in a seminar he conducted on Holocaust literature, he and the students conducted a redactional analysis of the movie. As they studied changes the movie made to the book, "We began to discern some curious patterns" (Fogel). For example, Spielberg omitted Schindler's early activities against the Nazis, but also omitted some of Schindler's foibles that occur later in the book. Fogel concludes that Spielberg makes Schindler into "a cinematic everyman" and "transforms Schindler's List from historical novel to historical fable, a fable about choosing goodness and heroism with which the audience is invited to identify" (Fogel). Spielberg's changes fit the Schindler story into a plot structure that has long been established in Hollywood cinematography. According to Robert Jewett, this plot structure is derived from the apocalyptic, millenarian theology of parts of colonial America (Jewett 9). Jewett and John Lawrence argue that the plot structure is so common in American cinema and popular culture that it should be called the American monomyth. A monomyth is "the archetypal plot of heroic action" (xix). They take the term from Joseph Campbell and adapt their definition of the American monomyth from Campbell's work. They define the American monomyth in the following manner:
A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil: normal institutions fail to contend with this threat: a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task: aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisal condition: the superhero then recedes into obscurity. (Jewett and Lawrence xx)
Seneca too considers the punishments that the guilty suffer as a result of their crimes (Agamemnon 1-11). He goes into extensive detail regarding the punishment of Tantalus, who killed his son and tried to trick the gods into eating him at a banquet. Tantalus was the grandfather of and model for Atreus. Tantalus was punished by being surrounded by food and water that fled when he tried to eat and drink (Thyestes 145-175) The apocalyptic crime, however, would go beyond the gods' capacity to punish, since the apocalypse would destroy the gods along with the rest of the cosmos. The apocalypse would then be the consequence of the crime rather than the punishment per se. The basis for the apocalypse is the sympathy (sympatheia) that exists among the individual (the microcosm), the society (the mesocosm), and the universe as a whole (the macrocosm). According to Hahm, "the cosmic pneuma makes the cosmos a living, organic whole, with each single part grown together . . . in living sympathy . . . with all the rest" (163). Thus the actions of an individual can have consequences for the society and even the whole universe. In Seneca's Hercules Furens, for example, Hercules and Juno "see macrocosm in personal terms, so to speak, as if it were a microcosm. . . . [Their] personal passions expand outward to affect the whole universe" (Fitch 33). Atreus' crime has cosmic as well as social effects. By killing his nephews at the family altar and feeding them to his brother Thyestes, he is able to drive the sun from the sky and the gods from the heavens (Seneca, Thyestes 813-884).
Solitae mundi periere vices; nihil occasus, nihil ortus erit. (Seneca, Thyestes 813-814) The accustomed alterations of the cosmos have perished; Nothing will set, nothing rise.
The accustomed alterations of the cosmos have perished; Nothing will set, nothing rise.
Quod non vetat lex, hoc vetat fieri pudor. (Seneca, Troades 334) What the law does not veto, shame forbids to be done.
What the law does not veto, shame forbids to be done.
One of the strongest parallels between Senecan drama and Schindler's List is in the similarities of social setting that make Imperial Rome and Nazi Germany fitting backdrops for apocalyptic crime. According to Braden, many Romans believed that Augustus chained the furor that had raged in Rome's external and civil wars. Now the emperor was to be the stabilizing force that would bring order from the chaos that had afflicted the empire, just as Hitler promised to solve the severe social and economic problems Germany suffered as a result of World War I and the Great Depression. Braden's description of Rome under the several of the first century emperors could apply equally well to Hitler's Germany.
For the very force that was to restrain the world's violence has become, as Blake would say, what it beheld: the emperor is mad. Imperial pathology is the recurrent, compulsive theme for historians of the time. . . . The story is not simply one of political ruthlessness and personal rapacity, though there is plenty of both, but also one of a paranoid logic and arbitrary cruelty that seem to precede and go beyond rational political calculation. (Braden 8)
Imperial pathology is the recurrent, compulsive theme for historians of the time. . . . The story is not simply one of political ruthlessness and personal rapacity, though there is plenty of both, but also one of a paranoid logic and arbitrary cruelty that seem to precede and go beyond rational political calculation. (Braden 8)
The desire to scale the heavens is the desire to become a god oneself, to undergo an apotheosis. Hercules finally achieves this goal in Hercules Oetaeus.
Iam virtus mihi in astra et ipsos fecit ad superos iter. (Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus 813-814) Now has my valor made a path to the stars and to the gods themselves.
Now has my valor made a path to the stars and to the gods themselves.
Aequalis astris gradior et cunctos super altum superbo vertice attingens polum. (Seneca, Thyestes 885-886) I walk equal to the stars, and mount above everything, Touching the high stars with my head. O me caelitum excelsissimum, regum atque regem! (Seneca, Thyestes 911-912) Oh me, most exalted of the gods, and king of kings!
I walk equal to the stars, and mount above everything, Touching the high stars with my head.
O me caelitum excelsissimum, regum atque regem! (Seneca, Thyestes 911-912)
Oh me, most exalted of the gods, and king of kings!
"Name?!" This is the first English word spoken in Schindler's List, a scene not in the book. Considering the length of the movie (three hours and fifteen minutes) and the number of scenes from the book that had to be cut even then, the addition is significant. While Spielberg pushes Amon Goeth to the foreground as the movie's villain, he does recognize the bureaucracy of evil that made the Goeths, and the Holocaust, possible. For the Holocaust was an apocalypse of bureaucracy, of lists, of lines. Germany in the nineteenth century were in the forefront of the technology of population control (Pennings).
By the turn of the century the Germans had transformed British "political arithmetic" into "statistics" (state-istics), numerical techniques in the service of state and population administration. These techniques were taken up by the SS in their management of the Final Solution. From its first spoken word, "Name?!," Schindler's List investigates the political technology used in the Holocaust. The use of the census was an integral part of the process, as it allowed the Nazis to round up the Jews and start the continual process of selecting who would be eligible for work, who would be transported to a concentration camp, and who would be killed. Every name needed to be accounted for, registered and given a position. The list is an ancient political technology which Spielberg chose as his major motif. (Pennings)
From its first spoken word, "Name?!," Schindler's List investigates the political technology used in the Holocaust. The use of the census was an integral part of the process, as it allowed the Nazis to round up the Jews and start the continual process of selecting who would be eligible for work, who would be transported to a concentration camp, and who would be killed. Every name needed to be accounted for, registered and given a position.
The list is an ancient political technology which Spielberg chose as his major motif. (Pennings)
Spielberg needed a way to represent this new type of apocalypse. In Seneca, the apocalyptic effects of Atreus' crime produce an eerie netherworld of neither day nor night, where the sun reverses course and stars fall from the sky (Thyestes 789-874). But how could Spielberg represent the effects of the Holocaust on the cosmos in a manner that modern audiences would find credible? Spielberg chose a technique both simple and profound. The movie opens with a "harmonious paradise," a small group of Jews gathered around a kitchen table observing the Sabbath. As the song ends and the candle burns out, the color slowly fades. Because so many of the images recording the Holocaust are themselves in black and white, Spielberg's choice of filming the bulk of the movie in black and white gives it a documentary feel, a "newsreel 'reality'" that increases the film's apparent realism (White). Yet at the same time, the selection of black and white, along with the interplay of the few color scenes, has apocalyptic implications. Inverting one of the most famous effects in cinematic history, Spielberg's fade to black and white lets us know that we are not in Oz anymore. The color has gone out of the world. A note on the screen tells us why: the Nazis have conquered Poland, and what came before now seems a lost paradise.
The other color scenes in the movie are also significant for the relationship between paradise and apocalypse. The second scene with color is the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto; in it stygian Germans categorize the Jews and send them off to a lower levels of hell. The lucky ones go to the nearby Plaszów work camp, where there was a chance for survival. While most of the scene is in black and white, one girl dressed in red seems protected from the maelstrom around her, seemingly invisible to the black and white Nazis. She successfully walks away from the lines, returns to her home, and hides under the bed. Spielberg lets us know her fate later in the movie. One day Schindler goes outside to find the air full of smoke and raining ash. He goes to the camp to find Goeth unhappily overseeing the exhumation and cremation of the bodies of his victims (figure 1). The war was going badly, and the Nazis were trying to cover up their crimes. Among the heaps of bodies being carted up the hill to be cremated (figure 2), there is one spot of red. As the cart draws near, the audience can see that the girl did not escape after all. The Nazi apocalypse has successfully snuffed out another spot of color as it seems to answer Thyestes' ancient prayer, "Wrap the whole world in terrible clouds" (nubibus totum horridis / convolve mundum. Seneca, Thyestes 1078-1079).
Late in the movie, the color returns again briefly. Schindler has moved his Schindlerjuden to the new camp near his hometown of Brinnlitz, Czechoslovakia. He has rescued the women of the group from Auchwitz, where they had mistakenly been sent (figure 3). He has told the SS guards not to enter the factory or living quarters and not to shoot the prisoners. Chatting with Rabbi Levartov one Friday afternoon (Figure 4), he hints and finally insists that the Jews should observe the Sabbath.
Schindler: "Sun's going down." Rabbi: "Yes, it is." Schindler: "What day is this? Friday? It is Friday, isn't it?" Rabbi: "Is it?" Schindler: "What's the matter with you? You should be preparing for the Sabbath, shouldn't you?" (Spielberg)
At the end of the movie, full color returns. Following the end of the war, a lone officer from the Soviet army comes to Schindler's work camp and formally liberates the Jews, sending them to nearby Brinnlitz for food. In the book, the Jews' reintegration was slow and difficult, with individuals and small groups slowly drifting into town: "liberty and the day of plenty had to be approached gradually" (Keneally 383). In the movie, Spielberg needs to show that the community has returned "to its paradisal condition" (Jewett and Lawrence xx). The group sets out together, spreading out in a line across the hill. Reinforcing the imagery of paradise, a chorus in the background sings "Yeroushalaim Chel Zahau" (Jerusalem of Gold). As the line crosses the crest of the hill and comes down the other side, the scene shifts; the color returns. The apocalypse has passed. The color scene is present-day Jerusalem. This line of people is composed of the surviving Schindlerjuden, their descendants, and the actors who played the Schindlerjuden in the movie. Widely acclaimed as perhaps the most moving part of the movie (Thomson), the group forms a line passing by the grave of Oskar Schindler, who was buried in Jerusalem, and place rocks on his grave as they pass by. A note at the bottom of the screen attests to the grim applicability of the ark metaphor: while only 4,000 Jews live in Poland today (where 3,000,000 lived before the war), over 6,000 Schindlerjuden and their descendants survive today. It is to these Schindlerjuden that we now turn.