In January and February postings, I pointed to cinematic accounts of failed narcissism, first in Up in the Air, in which George Cluny’s character tragically gets a taste of object love only to lose it and then in About Schmidt, in which Jack Nicholson’s character experiences the disintegration of his narcissistic supports. In Schindler’s List, a film that deals with a much broader issue, we are swept along with the film’s depiction of a transformation from narcissism to altruism.
Like many others, I was riveted by Schindler’s List. What was particularly fascinating was the seemingly enigmatic transformation of a greedy, self-centered womanizer and war profiteer into one of the greatest heroes of the Holocaust tragedy. Although it is not explained in any obvious way, I nevertheless found the transformation very believable. Watching the film, we naturally wonder what allows a man to commit such feats of altruistic heroism. I don’t believe the film can adequately answer that question, but it gives us one possible pathway.
Before examining the film, there are two areas of possible misunderstanding that must be addressed. The first is that in analyzing altruistic acts of courage, we run the risk of appearing to trivialize them. Analyzing the dynamics behind acts of courage and altruism does not deprive them of their courageousness or kindness. The second potential misunderstanding is that we may confuse analysis of the film, which is a creative work, with analysis of the historical figures and events on which it is based. When we view a historical scene on a screen, we are swayed by the illusion that we are seeing the event as it happened. We make judgments of facial expression and vocal tone that we could not make if we were reading about the event. Schindler’s List is based on Thomas Keneally’s book of the same name, which was based on interviews with first hand witnesses. What follows is my interpretation of Spielberg’s interpretation of Keneally’s interpretation of the eye witnesses’ interpretations. The historical Oskar Schindler may well have had different motivations and psychic structure than the Oskar Schindler of Spielberg’s film.
Spielberg opens the film showing a Jewish Polish family reciting blessings around Sabbath candles. This is shown in color. The people disappear, the candles burn out, and we turn to black and white scenes of the beginning of Nazi terror. These scenes of Jews lining up to register with the Nazis bring automatic associations of the coming terror to a modern audience. Suddenly, there is something very different on the screen. A man is dressing, carefully and with elegance, in a quiet room to the sound of music on a radio. We do not hear his voice or see his face. We next see him from behind, approaching the maitre d’ of a nightclub. He leans forward, whispers something, and we see the maitre d’ take some bills from the pocket of his jacket. He is assured, in control, and anonymous. The waiters don’t know his name; we have not seen his face. Through his eyes, we sweep across the room to the sight of Nazi officers with attractive young women. Finally, the camera swings around in dramatic fashion, and we see his face, but we still have not heard his name or his voice
The scene creates an air of mystery and awe. If only on a preconscious level, our curiosity is aroused. We know the title of the film, so we suspect who this is, but it is difficult not to be drawn in by the sense of mystery and the desire to see and to know. This is evocative of the primal scene, the helpless infant’s view of parental sex already alluded to earlier, and more specifically puts the viewer into the mind set of an excited observer, outside trying to get in. This is paralleled in the protagonist’s viewpoint, as he himself views the powerful Nazi officers. The viewer is made to empathize with Schindler’s position of outsider, witness to the primal scene, wanting to get a closer look, and wanting to be a participant.
Schindler’s anonymity gives him the position of the anonymous fly on the wall observer of the primal scene as he views the Nazis, and yet also makes him into a larger than life mysterious figure who is clearly the center of our attention. It conveys both sides of the dynamic, the frustration of being an outsider, and the fantasy of being the center of attention. Schindler orders champagne for the most important Nazi official in his view, an older officer with an attractive young woman and a younger male aide. When asked, “Whom shall I tell them it is from?” Schindler confidently and mysteriously says, “Tell them it is from me,” maintaining his anonymity and further gaining control.
In a carefully orchestrated scene, Schindler deftly seduces the entire party into joining him. When a higher-ranking officer enters the nightclub, Schindler is at the center of attention, leading all the Nazis in song. The scene culminates with Schindler taking pictures with the top officers and their paramours, and when someone asks the maitre d’ who that man is, he answers happily, “Why that’s Oskar Schindler,” as if everyone should know such an important person. This is our introduction to his name. The fantasy is realized; the outsider is now the center of attention.
The filmmakers have given us a clear sense of the most powerful motivating forces in the film at this point. We can see the fantasy acted out directly, and we are made to empathize. In the opening scenes of the Nazi roundup of Jews, we are forced to watch helplessly, knowing that we have no power now, and would not have had then, to stop the mass murder and torture that was to come. Fear and helplessness can be relieved through fantasies of being powerful and in control. We are drawn into Schindler’s fantasy through a desire to be empowered and relieved of our sense of helplessness and fear as well as through our curiosity and envy created by way of the mystery surrounding Schindler in the opening scene.
As the plot develops, Schindler’s character is consistent with the dynamics of these opening scenes. Using the expertise of a Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern, and the help of a Jewish black marketeer, he sets himself up in business in Cracow, Poland. He extorts Jewish businessmen to give him the money to support his business, promising to repay them in pots and pans, since Jews are no longer permitted to save money. He buys an old enamelware factory, bribes his new Nazi friends for support and war contracts, and hires the cheapest local labor, Jews.
He is a great success, gratifying his narcissistic fantasies. He occupies the mansion of a Jewish family evicted to the ghetto. He has wealth, expensive clothing, fancy cars, the best food and alcohol available on the black market, and a coterie of servants. He also has beautiful women, whom he clearly enjoys. When his wife comes to see him, he inquires if people ask about him at home in Moravia and tells her, “They won’t soon forget the name, Schindler, here.” He has achieved the outsider’s dream of being powerful, sexually active, and at the center of attention. In the only direct hint at dynamics from the past, and particularly Oedipal dynamics, he brags to his wife that his father never had more than fifty workers, but that he now has three hundred fifty people working for him.
We learn in this interchange that he has not been successful in the past. This is unexplained, and is based on the historical facts, but it also is consonant with the Oedipal, primal scene dynamics by which Schindler’s character is identified as the child observer who is now living the fantasy of victory. He attributes his success, with no ambivalence, to the war and his use of it.
When his wife arrives unexpectedly, we have an enactment of the primal scene and the reversed Oedipal triangle. She finds him with a young woman. He tries to treat it casually, but this is the only scene in which we see him belittled. Schindler is taller than anyone else in the film, a device that gratifies the narcissistic fantasy. (The historical Schindler was tall.) After the girl leaves his apartment, we see him sitting on a chair being scolded by his wife, who stands above him. He looks somewhat sheepish, to my eye like a boy who has been caught by his mother doing something wrong. It undermines the fantasy. In that moment, we see that despite the successes, Schindler is still a boy, and not the Oedipal victor that he imagines himself to be.
As they are leaving his home, his servant at the door mistakes his wife for one of his mistresses. She later says that she will stay with him only if he can promise her that she will never again be mistaken for a mistress. We discover his answer as we see her leaving on the train. This brief episode indicates some conflict, a dynamic tension in the film and in Schindler involving his conscience and ideals. The conflict appears to be sent off to Moravia with Emilie Schindler. However, it returns for other reasons in a form which cannot be dealt with so easily.
One of these circumstances is the introduction of another important character, Amon Goeth. He was a Nazi officer sent to close down the ghetto and establish a concentration camp. Goeth is sadistic in psychotic proportions. He takes pleasure in killing, at times standing on the balcony of his house in the camp shooting people indiscriminately.
The filmmakers make a deliberate point of linking Goeth with Schindler. This is done with editing techniques, fadeouts from one to the other, sometimes with obvious parallels, as when each is shown shaving. They make comments indicating that they see each other as similar. Each expects to understand what the other is thinking, and each is perplexed when he cannot understand the other. We are led to see Goeth and Schindler as alter egos.
In this respect, Goeth enacts the sadism that Schindler eschews. It is Goeth’s overt sadism that begins to throw Schindler into conflict. Until Goeth’s arrival, the film is relatively insulated from the depth of Nazi sadism. Schindler can enjoy his gains and his narcissistic victory without conflict. As the violence escalates, we begin to see signs of tension, as a series of incidents unfolds which forces Schindler and the viewer to face the sadism that undermines his narcissistic fantasy.
Stern tells Schindler that one of the workers has been asking to speak with him. The man is an elderly one-armed machinist. He is effusive in thanking Schindler for saving his life by taking him on as an essential worker. In fact, Stern has been doing the rescuing in Schindler’s name. Schindler accepts the gratitude, but is then embarrassed and angry at Stern. He questions the usefulness of a one-armed machinist, but allows Stern to assure him that the man is a good worker. Shortly after that, the man is shot to death by Nazi soldiers. Schindler makes an angry protest to the authorities about the loss of an essential worker.
Next, Schindler is interrupted while having sex, reprising the primal scene. He is told that Stern has been picked up without his papers, and is at the train station about to be deported to the camps. Schindler uses his persuasiveness to have Stern released. As they are leaving the station, he says to Stern, in the language of a pure narcissist, “What if I got here five minutes later? Then, where would I be?” This is Schindler’s first personal act of rescue in the film.
Schindler comes face to face with Nazi brutality while out horseback riding with his girlfriend. From a hilltop, he witnesses the very bloody evacuation of the Jewish ghetto. He is confronted both with the sadism he has seen (with its primal scene reverberations) and with his empty factory. He solves the latter problem by reopening the factory on the grounds of Goeth’s camp. He and Goeth become partners.
The transformation is realized in a scene in which a young woman asks Schindler to save her parents. She comes to the factory and asks to speak with Schindler. The guard makes a call, and we see Schindler looking at her from the top of the stairs. She is turned away. She comes back dressed up more affluently and seductively. This time Schindler invites her up. When she tells him that she has heard he saves Jews and asks him to save her parents, he becomes angry, saying that he is running a business and needs qualified workers only. He sends her out. Schindler goes to Stern, angrily complaining that people think he is a savior, but that he is not. He tells Stern that he knows what Stern is doing (saving Jews), but then gives him the names of the woman’s parents for assignment to the factory. The scene with Stern is the first in the film in which Schindler clearly saves Jews as an act of altruism.
There is some ambiguity as to whether Schindler’s anger is real, or whether he is simply feigning it so as not to be caught in a dangerous act of altruism. (This is more ambiguous in Keneally’s book which does not include the scene with Stern.) The fact that he expresses his anger with Stern, with whom he needs no subterfuge, suggests that it is real. This expression of anger is also consistent with his character. Schindler wishes to see himself as a powerful businessman and man of the world, his father’s replacement in the primal scene. He is offended that this attractive woman would approach him as a rescuer of Jews and not as a powerful object of sexual desire. It is a humiliation to be seen as someone who hires one-armed machinists and other incompetents as an act of charity.
However, there is a change. With reluctance and even petulance, Schindler instructs Stern to save the young woman’s parents. The change occurs as a result of a push from increasing internal conflict and a pull from the offering of a new source of narcissistic gratification. Early in the film, he is able to rationalize and avoid any conflict between his idealized self-image as a powerful businessman and his conscience and empathic sense. He brushes away the problem of his wife’s indignation and hurt, and ignores the fate of the Jews he is using. But Goeth’s escalating brutality forces its way into his consciousness.
Goeth and Stern, representing the Nazis and the Jews, can be looked at as externalizations of competing aspects of Schindler’s personality. Stern is a more controlled, conscience driven reflection of a father. Schindler is drawn to Stern. He continually attempts to befriend him and seduce him by asking Stern to drink with him, a request that Stern steadfastly refuses until near the end of the film, when Schindler has proven the transformation of his character. Faced with escalating Nazi brutality and the young woman’s request, Schindler decides to actively cast his lot with Stern. Until this point, he has known what Stern is doing. Now, he emulates him and joins him.
Schindler’s helplessness in the face of Nazi sadism not only brings him into conflict with his conscience; it also undermines the success of his narcissistic resolution of the primal scene conflict. Although he is looking down at the scene, on a hilltop, astride a horse, accompanied by a beautiful woman, Schindler is thrown back into the position of a helpless, horrified observer as he watches the Nazis brutally evacuate the Jewish ghetto. The idealized self-image he has adopted can no longer protect him.
But another idealized self-image is readily available. By accepting the role of rescuer, identifying with Stern rather than with the Nazis, Schindler can achieve his narcissistic goals by winning the admiration and gratitude of the people that he saves while also gratifying the dictates of his own conscience. He can overcome the horror and humiliation of being a passive observer by outwitting the Nazis and preventing their brutality. From that point on, he achieves the narcissistic gratification of his primal scene fantasies not as a great businessman, admired by the Nazis, but as a great rescuer, admired by Stern and the Jews and by his own conscience. This merging of conscience and wishful self-image results in a real change in Schindler’s conscience and ideals.
This transformation is made explicit in a scene in which Schindler tries to tame Goeth’s sadism. He tells Goeth that the greatest power is not the power to kill, but the power to pardon, to spare a life. Goeth experiments with this new power in a way that would be comical in another context, but eventually finds the power to pardon lacking in pleasure. He changes his mind, shooting a young boy he has “pardoned.” Goeth is presented as an alternative to Schindler, a mirror image in his love of power and admiration, but lacking conscience and empathy to temper his sadism.
Schindler, on the other hand, takes on his new role with energy, now gratifying his need to achieve mastery with acts of courage and mercy that also satisfy his ethical sense and his compassion. Eventually he spends all his wealth saving Jews and runs his factory for that sole purpose. The “list” of the title is a list of Jews who are to accompany him to a new factory in Moravia instead of being sent to the camps. He pays for each name on the list. When the women on the list accidentally end up in Auschwitz, Schindler spends precious gems to secure their release. He sets up a munitions factory in Moravia, but makes sure that no useful ammunition is produced for the Nazis, spending his money buying other munitions to replace the faulty ones produced there so that the factory will not be closed. The successful business and the money are no longer an end, but a means to an altruistic end. His superego—his conscience and ideals—has changed.
Interestingly, this change is not just limited to his attitude towards the Jews and Nazis. It affects other aspects of his behavior as well. In the first part of the film, Schindler uses women for his pleasure and his sense of power. He is a womanizer. When his wife asks him to promise that she will not be mistaken for someone other than Mrs. Schindler by doormen and maitre d’s, he cannot make that promise. Consistent with his character, he is gentle with the women he uses, but he clearly uses them for his gratification. After the transformation of his superego, there is a scene in which he speaks with the Jewish girl who works as Goeth’s servant. Goeth is clearly aroused by the girl, and makes her the object of his distorted sexual appetite and his sadism. Schindler treats her with kindness, and gives her support. (It is after speaking with her that he attempts to convince Goeth of the greater value of pardoning over killing.) Before he leaves, Schindler bends over to kiss her. She hesitates, and he tells her that “it’s not that kind of kiss.” He kisses her on the forehead. Now, he can forego direct gratification of the fantasy of sexual conquest.
Having successfully moved the Jews of his factory to Czechoslovakia, saving the women from the jaws of the death camp, Schindler approaches his wife in a church and tells her that no doorman or maitre d’ will ever again mistake her for anyone other than Mrs. Schindler. His wife joins him in his altruistic endeavor, and we see him happy with her and monogamous. In fact, the factory takes on the qualities of a family. As we begin to see renewed signs of Jewish family life in the factory, there is a suggestion that Schindler has borrowed some aspects of the collective ideals of the Jews he has rescued. He is in a state of equilibrium, with an ideal for himself that is consonant with his conscience. We see all aspects of his personality in harmony, but it does not last.
As the war is ending, Schindler gathers the Jews of the factory and the Nazi guards to discuss what is coming. Courageously, he faces the guards whom he knows have been given instructions to kill all the inmates, and through persuasion and personality convinces them to leave peacefully. He is still in control. At midnight, the war is officially at an end. Schindler has said that at that point, the Jews will be free and he will be hunted as a Nazi. The Jews, led by Stern, present him with a letter, signed by all of them, testifying to his role as a rescuer. They also give him a ring they have forged from the gold in their teeth with the words inscribed, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Schindler and his wife are each given a set of prisoner’s clothes to help them escape capture and summary justice.
At this point, Schindler breaks down, turning the implication of the ring’s inscription against himself. He drops the ring, and begins to grab for it in the dirt. He finds it, but begins to shake. He starts to cry that he could have saved more. He looks at the few possessions he has left and berates himself for not saving a few more people from extermination. Stern tries to reassure him by saying that he has saved over one thousand people, but he cannot be calmed.
Schindler’s reaction seems natural. It follows with precise logic his lecture to Goeth in which he equates the God-like power to pardon and to kill. The guilt is the price he pays for supporting his narcissism with the gratification that comes from this power. If he has the power to save people and does not save everyone he can, then he is guilty of killing those he does not save. His reliance on that God-like power to keep an exalted self-image backfires.
Schindler’s reaction also expresses the horror and helplessness we all feel in the face of brutality and tragedy. The structures that have protected Schindler from this helplessness have broken down. As long as the war was ongoing, Schindler could sustain himself with his work, the support of his community in the factory, and the belief that he was defeating the Nazis. Now, in a moment, he has gone from a leader and benefactor, a Moses, to a poor man who owns nothing, who must travel incognito in the clothes of a prisoner. With his task completed, he no longer has any purpose to pursue in the interests of his new self-image, and he is left to face the many deaths and tortures that neither he nor anyone could prevent. He will also lose Stern. Stern has served as a model for his ego ideal (that part of conscience that represents what we feel we should be) and has provided tacit reinforcement. Without Stern as a model for control of aggression and a source of narcissistic reinforcement from a respected figure, Schindler loses control of his sadism as he directs it at himself.
One of the functions of the ego ideal is to stabilize our self-esteem by providing an internally controllable standard for self worth. If we use inner standards of morality and character to judge our worth, we are less dependent on external success and the appreciation of other people. In the film, Schindler’s new found ego ideal is not so independent or stable. Moore and Fine’s Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (1990) describes the “ideal self” as a component of the ego-ideal which is “a wishful concept; the ‘self I want to be,’ one which will elicit the most object approval, provide the greatest narcissistic gratification, and minimize aggressive discharge against the self”. In other words, if we live up to our ideals, we will not attack ourselves with self-recrimination. With the end of the war, Schindler can no longer live up to his “ideal self” by saving people. He is also about to lose Stern, a man of character whom he admires and who can give him the tacit approval that he needs. Without these supports, Schindler turns on himself. His self-doubt and self criticism can no longer be contained. We learn in an epilogue that Schindler failed in subsequent business ventures, and that his marriage also ended in failure. Perhaps his earlier failures are based on hidden conflicts of conscience. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, power and success were equated with the sadistic crushing of rivals. The Schindler that Spielberg has given us can ultimately achieve success only by basing it on conscience and selflessness. (However, I must reiterate that the real Oskar Schindler may well have been different from the Schindler depicted in this film.)
However, the film ends on a positive note. We are told that the Jews he saved and their progeny outnumber the Jews remaining in Poland. At the film’s conclusion, we see some of the people that he saved placing stones at his grave. One of the functions of films like this one is to support conscience and give the viewer a good feeling by reinforcing the notion that adherence to moral standards brings narcissistic rewards. If you do good works, you will be appreciated. This serves as an external boost to the internal structures. In fact, many people do leave the theater with a positive feeling. This is, of course, reinforced with the knowledge that there were, in fact, people like Oskar Schindler who risked their lives to save others, demonstrating man’s capacity for nobility and the victory of conscience.
Originally published in the PANY Bulletin Summer/Fall issue of 1994 and in Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film (2002: EREADS)