Bruce R. Magee
July 1997

SCHINDLER'S LIST AND THE SENECAN HERITAGE

Amon Goeth

Goeth is marked in the film, as well as in history, as one who finds causes for anger everywhere he looks. When he first arrives in the Plasz─ work camp, it is under construction. A Jewish woman is the engineer, and she advises Goeth that he needs to re-pour a foundation. For this act, Goeth has her summarily executed (figure 5). When Goeth is displeased with the number of hinges that Rabbi Levartov has made in a morning, he tries to shoot the Rabbi, only to have two guns jam, increasing his anger even more (figure 6). He shoots a woman for stopping to tie her shoe, a man for refusing to report who had tried to smuggle a chicken into camp. Ralph Fiennes plays a chilling Amon Goeth in the movie, and plays him to the point that some people have had trouble distinguishing him from the real thing.

Figure 5. Execution of the
woman engineer (Schickel).

Figure 6. Trying to shoot the Rabbi (Schickel).

During last winter's grueling shoot in Poland, Fiennes vacuumed up nuggets of Goethiana from every source: newsreels, Thomas Keneally's Schindler novel, testimony by the Schindler Jews. But he needed no research to feel the chill of hatred in his bones; simply by appearing in his Nazi uniform he enlisted volunteers of bigotry. "The Germans were charming people," a sweet-faced woman told him. "They didn't kill anybody who didn't deserve it."
When Fiennes, in full Hauptsturmführer regalia, was introduced by Spielberg to Mila Pfefferberg, a Schindler survivor depicted in the film, the old lady trembled. "Her knees began to give out from under her," Spielberg recalls. "I held her while Ralph enthused about how important it was for him to meet her -- and she vibrated with terror. She didn't see an actor. She saw Amon Goeth." (Corliss)

As evil as Fiennes makes Goeth in his portrait, the real Goeth was more evil still. "The real Amon Goeth . . . was an artist of evil grandly deranged, creatively sadistic. He would set his dogs on children and watch them be devoured" (Corliss). In the words of Poldek Pfefferberg, "When you saw Goeth, you saw death" (Keneally 360; figures 7 and 8).

Fiennes' Goeth running with soldiers & dogs.

Figure 7. "When you saw Goeth, you saw death."--Poldek Pfferberg (Internet Movie Database).

Figure 8. Amon Goeth on horseback. (Holocaust Museum).

THAT Goeth is as "grandly deranged" and "creatively sadistic" as any character from Seneca seems indisputable. But WHY he is so needs clarification. Goeth has not received the harm from Jews that would seem to be necessary for an understanding of his anger in Senecan terms. However, the traditional explanation of the causes of anger leaves room for the harm to be perceived or intended as well as real (Seneca, Ira 1. 3. 1). Nazi propaganda used mass media effectively to enhance traditional European anti-Semitism and to define the Jews in terms of evil, treachery, disease, and vermin. Propagandists used radio, posters, pamphlets, and even movies such as Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew; figure 9) in this process.

Figure 9. Poster for
Der ewige Jude.
(Holocaust Museum).

Keneally describes the posters and banners that the Germans posted in Poland and elsewhere.

"JEWS--LICE--TYPHUS," the billboard depicting a virginal Polish girl handing food to a hook-nosed Jew whose shadow was the shadow of the Devil. "Whoever helps a Jew helps Satan." Outside groceries hung pictures of Jews mincing rats into pies, watering milk, pouring lice into pastry, kneading dough with filthy feet. (Keneally 97)

One common thread of these images is the fear of pollution. Jews pollute the food supply, they pollute others through disease, rats, and lice, and most of all, they pollute the race through miscegenation. Seduction of the Aryan leads to racial impurity, preventing the hoped for apotheosis of the German race. This pollution, along with the Jewish Marxist plot, would deny "the aristocratic principle of nature" (aristokratische Prinzip der Natur; Hitler 69) to the German people, preventing them from taking their rightful place in the pantheon. So like Hercules, they rage at those who thwart their apotheosis.

en ultro vocat
omnis deorum coetus et laxat fores,
una vetante. recipis et reseras polum?
an contumacis ianuam mundi traho? (Seneca, Hercules Furens 962-964)
Beyond this, the whole
assemblage of the gods calls me and opens the doors,
with one forbidding. Will you unbolt the heavens and receive me?
Or shall I drag down the gate of that obstinate world?

Goeth himself sees the Jews as a danger. Spielberg's Goeth explains their seductive power to an official who is holding Schindler in prison because he kissed a Jewish woman. In the scene, he is subconsciously talking about himself and the feelings he has toward Helen Hirsch, his Jewish maid. Jews are dangerous because they seem so much like people, as he recognizes when he talks to Helen about his attraction toward her.

I would like so much to reach out and touch you in your loneliness. What would that be like, I wonder? What would be wrong with that? I realize that you're not a person in the strictest sense of the word, but, um, maybe you're right about that too. Maybe what's wrong, it's not us, it's this. I mean, when they compare you to vermin, to rodents, and to lice. I just, uh, you make a good point. You make a very good point. Is this the face of a rat? Are these the eyes of a rat? "Hath not a Jew eyes?" I feel for you, Helen. [leaning to kiss her] No, I don't think so. You Jewish bitch, you nearly talked me into it, didn't you? (Spielberg)

Unable to touch Helen in love, Goeth's only acceptable outlet is to beat her violently. In his monologue, Goeth quotes Shakespeare's Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. Shylock's speech is Senecan in Braden's sense that it marks the convergence of rhetoric and selfhood. Shylock reveals a Thyestian sense of injury and lust for blood as he explains what he will do with his pound of flesh and why he wants it.

To bait fish withal if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgrac'd me, and hind'red me half a million, laugh'd at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorn'd my nation, thwarted my bargains, cool'd my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice III. i. 53-67, 71-73)

Shylock's is thus "the voice of affronted selfhood staking its claim" (Braden 136). Spielberg's Goeth momentarily pauses in his rampage and listens to the voice of his victims.

For a crucial moment, on the face of actor Ralph Fiennes, evil pauses to consider itself. Could I have a decent feeling? Could I love this base creature, this beautiful thing, this Jewess? Just as quickly, and subtly, Fiennes' face tells us no. Goeth's fists flail out, not so much at Hirsch as at the recognition that he is doomed to solitude by his wickedness. (Corliss)

We, like Corliss, agree that Fiennes' Goeth is evil. Like many Hollywood villains, he seems to relish evil for its own sake. But within the world he inhabits, he is narrowly avoiding Hirsch's plot to tempt and pollute him. He returns to being the scourge of God exacting revenge against Jewish crimes. Hitler saw himself and his movement in these terms.

So glaube ich heute im Sinne des allmächtigen Schöpfers zu handeln: Indem ich mich des Juden erwehre, kämpfe ich für das Werk des herrn. (Hitler 70)

So I believe today that I act in the sense of the Almighty Creator: in that I myself guard against the Jews, I fight for the work of the Lord.

The desire to "better the instruction" (Shakespeare, Merchant III. i. 73) is part of the Senecan heritage. Senecan characters compete to outdo one another's crimes in seeking to avenge them. "You do not avenge crimes unless you surpass them" (Scelera non ulcisceris, / nisi vincis; Seneca, Thyestes 195-196). Later dramatists would compete with Seneca to outdo the crimes of his Thyestes (Braden 117), just as the Germans compete to outdo their predecessors. Thus in the party at the beginning of the film, one of the German officers boasts, "This storm is different. This storm is not the Romans. This storm is the SS." As Goeth prepares to liquidate the ghetto on March 13, 1943, he gives a chilling speech to his troops that shows the apocalyptic dimensions of his plans. In a speech that resonates as much with Orwell as with Seneca, he boasts that they will change not only the present and the future; but also the past.

Today is history. Today will be remembered. Years from now, the young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history, and you are part of it. Six hundred years ago, when elsewhere they were footing the blame for the Black Plague, Kasmierz the Great, so called, told the Jews they could come to Krakow. They came. They trundled their belongings into the city. They settled; they took hold; they prospered in business, science, education, the arts. They came here with nothing. Nothing. And they flourished. For six centuries, there has been a Jewish Krakow. Think about that. By this evening, those six centuries are a rumor. They never happened. Today is history. (Spielberg)

Hitler's scourge has come to Krakow.

The scourge is part of the English dramatic tradition, going back to the Herod's ranting on the medieval stage. This tradition merged with the Senecan tradition on the Renaissance stage with characters like Marlowe's Tamburlaine (Braden 195). Such figures developed on the stages of other European countries, such as Spain and France, with one important distinction. In France or Spain, these characters might or might not die in the pursuit of their revenge. On the English stage, however, the scourge almost always must die (Braden 201-202). The work of inflicting God's wrath on others also draws it to oneself.

The office of scourge, of course, entails in most accounts a further burden; even for a good cause, what the scourge does is still sinful, and he will himself be destroyed when his work is done. (Braden 194)

American cinema, especially when following the monomythic plot structure, has generally followed the tradition that the villains must fail in the end, usually either going to jail or dying. The historical Goeth could conceivably have died quietly in Argentina or one of the other refuges Nazis sought out. Instead, he met an end fitting for cinematic conventions when he was executed in Krakow after the war, giving an unrepentant "Heil Hitler" before being hanged (Keneally 389-391).

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