The Narrative Strategies Keneally Uses in his Novel
When Schindler's List (under the title Schindler's Ark) won the Booker Prize in 1982, more than one critic objected to the fact that this work of nonfiction could win a major literary prize that had traditionally been awarded to the year's best book of fiction. Other critics complained that not only was the work not fiction, it was not good literature, mainly because of its documentary style. Schindler's List is an unusual novel, to be sure, because it moves back and forth between telling a story and reporting the facts of history—and people's very personal accounts of that history. It perhaps does not read like a literary novel because, in some sense, things are told too plainly. There are dozens of characters in the novel, but with the exception of Schindler and a few of his close associates, those characters are not "developed"; their complexities do not unfold in such a way that the reader begins to know them from their actions. Rather, the author explicitly tells their stories, narrates the events of their lives, reports what they are like, notes their characteristics, and offers a few key details about what they went through during the war and afterward. Also, because it is a true story, there is a certain lack of tension in the plot; from the beginning, the author makes clear exactly what will happen—that Schindler will rescue over a thousand Jews from the death camps through his own brand of ingenuity and charm. There are, then, few surprises in the sense that one usually expects from a novel; even in the thick of the main action of the story, Keneally offers information about who survives the war, how a particular character ultimately meets his or her end, and so on. However, while the narrative style of Schindler's List is different from traditional novels, it is far more than mere reportage and has characteristics not merely of a "good read" but of good literature. This is because of the techniques Keneally uses to suggest questions, present ambiguities, and offer layers of meaning even as he tells a straightforward, true story. Keneally uses devices found in more traditional works of fiction that make his documentary novel rise to the level of "literature," but at the same time his particular narrative technique has its own strengths for recounting the type of story he tells in Schindler's List.
In his author's note, Keneally says explicitly that his book is not fiction, because fiction would "debase the record" of the Holocaust. The stories he tells of the victims, survivors, and oppressors in Schindler's List are all based on eyewitness accounts, historical documents, and visits to the sites described in the novel. Thus, it can be assumed that Keneally does not embellish stories or infuse characters with his own authorial imagination, making them "stand for" or represent certain ideas he is trying to communicate to his reader. What Keneally does do is offer certain ideas and images throughout the novel that make the reader think about the significance of events or characters in a deeper way than might be suggested from only a strict reporting of the facts. Keneally offers surprisingly little in the way of commentary about the events that take place during the Holocaust but he invites readers in other ways to think deeply about the meaning of what occurs.
One of the techniques Keneally uses is to repeat certain ideas and images over and over again. The most obvious one, of course, is that of the list. Nowhere does the author point out explicitly that the German war...
(This entire section contains 1737 words.)
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machine seems to run according to systematic directives and official lists, reducing its Jewish victims to subhuman status by cataloguing them—and their belongings—in order to dominate them. But as he describes repeatedly the German obsession with lists of various kinds, Keneally suggests that it is this type of impersonal, petty bureaucracy that enables the German military, from NCOs to SS authorities, to visit their terror upon the Jews, all the while retaining some notion of German "civilization." The members of the Jewish police, the OD, also use lists to pass information on to the SS, and they too seem to hide behind them in order to be able to betray their fellow ghetto dwellers. That Schindler finally rescues "his Jews" by drawing up a list of names of people to take to the relocated factory camp at Brinnlitz shows that he works within the confines of and by the rules of the German system, all the while undermining it. Throughout the novel, there is some sense that people can be judged by the way they use lists. Marcel Goldberg, the personnel clerk, keeps the Jews "in the dark" about the list of those to be sent to Schindler's factory; Raimund Tisch strains to remember names (he thinks of people as individuals) to add to the list and curses himself for not remembering more. The attitude toward the list thus also reflects characters' attitudes towards people as human beings. The list functions on various levels, including making readers think of these attitudes and of how people can hide behind bureaucracy and order to avoid recognizing the evil they may be engaged in.
Other ideas and images that recur in the novel are those of gods and kings. At the beginning of the novel, Keneally says that his book is about "virtue" and its unconventional representation in Oskar Schindler. In the rest of the book, the author offers no easy solutions about how to understand goodness—or, for that matter, evil. But he does explore the ideas in his descriptions of Schindler, his "dark brother" Amon Goeth, and others. Schindler, it is made clear, is far from virtuous in the traditional sense: he has mistresses, drinks heavily, and his ambition is to become a tycoon. Yet Schindler is repeatedly likened to a god. He is a "minor god of deliverance," a god like Bacchus, and he offers the "godlike promise" that his workers will survive the war if they stay at his factory. The image of Schindler as god suggests to the reader the complexity of this man who holds so much power and is, ultimately, a symbol of good despite the mystery that often shrouds his legend. Schindler's godlike qualities are often presented in contrast to Goeth's, who is often portrayed as a power-hungry king or emperor. Symche Spira, the Jewish policeman, is also referred to as a "Napoleon" and a "tsar." Both these men, with their king-complexes, do not understand the concept of mercy or goodness, but are corrupted by a misguided sense of power. Again, these ideas and images—and they recur in the novel—explore the complexity and ambiguity of good, evil, and power, not by explicitly discussing them but by making readers think about them in their own terms.
Keneally thus uses these—and other— recurring images in Schindler's List to explore difficult ground, not to offer overt explanations but to allow readers to come to their own conclusions about people and events. Exploring ideas in this manner is a technique that is generally associated with works of fiction and imaginative literature, not of reportage. The author, by using these devices, adds a layer of complexity to his story, taking it out of the realm merely of history telling to the realm of story telling. He engages the reader in such a way that the reader must "fill in the blanks" and try to understand what certain types of behavior mean, why a character might be motivated in a certain way, and so on. The author takes readers to the heart of characters and events but then offers images as clues that the reader must interpret for him or herself in trying to "understand" the story in a deeper way.
But while Keneally uses these "novelistic" methods and devices in Schindler's List, he also uses some devices that are not found in traditional novels. For example, as mentioned, many of the characters described in the book are undeveloped or "flat"; their characteristics are told to the reader by the author, but the reader does not get to "know" them from what they do or from an understanding of their psychologies or even their behavior. Rather, their characters emerge purely from a recounting of their stories, their histories. Also, throughout, Keneally "gives away" the ending of the story by flashing forward and explaining what happens after the war to certain characters, Schindler included. Keneally seems to do these things for a reason, however. It could be argued that what he is doing is presenting in the foreground the story of Oskar Schindler, a mysterious figure whose motivations and virtue are ambiguous. In contrast to Schindler is Goeth, a clear embodiment of evil and the worst of human nature. Schindler and Goeth thus represent good and evil, although not in altogether clear-cut terms. Schindler's story is the main thread of the novel, and Goeth's is told alongside it, his figure serving sometimes as a foil and sometimes as a mirror to that of Schindler. The rest of the novel is made up of the stories of the dozens of other characters, most of them Holocaust victims and survivors. Their stories and discussions of their personalities are told plainly, perhaps to emphasize the fact that it is ultimately history that is being recounted. By emphasizing the details of their lives and the facts of their personalities, Keneally stresses the fact that in this complex struggle between good and evil what was at stake were dozens of individuals, each with distinct histories that were changed forever.
Keneally, then, uses two different sets of techniques in Schindler's List. He uses novelistic techniques of "story telling" that involve using layers of meaning that his readers must uncover. He also uses techniques of "history telling" to hit home to the reader in no uncertain terms that the events described in his book took place and that the people described are flesh and blood. The two techniques complement each other and also leave readers with a sense that it is only through the use of the imagination, through trying to understand the deeper significances of events and people's behavior that history comes alive, and the horrors that people experienced become real.
Source: Uma Kukathas, Critical Essay on Schindler's
List, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Kukathas is a freelance writer.
The Power of Images
In Schindler's List, Thomas Keneally treats the subject of the Holocaust with sensitivity and grace in describing the account of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman whose "bottom line" in business was the successful rescue of Jews from the gas chamber. His account of the events surrounding such rescues is skillfully rendered by the employment of a series of images. As a good poet might, Keneally's use of imagery suggests ideas by "its vividness, emotional depth, psychological overtones, strangeness or familiarity, and connections to other images" in the work (excerpt taken from John Drury's "Creating Poetry"). The use of imagery is where Keneally's "poetic" genius lies— his presentation of images is powerful because the author has no need to draw conclusions that perhaps may discredit the sensitive subject to which he speaks. Instead, he lets these images speak for him, giving his novel voice as a powerful and historically-charged account of unthinkable horror.
The image of the scarlet child is a memorable image in Keneally's work and is a testimony to the power of the imagery inherent within the work. Little Genia, as she is initially referred to, is first introduced as a small child that has been smuggled back into the Kraków area, into the ghetto, by a Polish couple. She appears in the image of the young child indulged by peasants in her red cap, red coat, and small red boots. She is a darling vision who, in reality, is indulged by those who would just as soon hunt her parents down as they would spoil her. Although Mrs. Dresner noticed "how strangely guarded the child was in all her answers" she, "had her vanities," and not unlike "most three year olds a passionately preferred color." The reader learns that this propensity or preference for red is the defining characteristic in terms of Genia's person. Her desire for the color is the one piece of childhood she is able to hold on to, the single indication that she is three years old outside of physical considerations. Insistent talk of the child's parents only leads to the rehearsed recitation of a string of lies little Genia has been fed as to any intimate and potentially discriminatory details surrounding her parents' identity or location. The reaction to such an image, these deceptions of a small child, do not go unnoticed within the text, the narrator stating "the family frowned at each other, brought to a standstill by the unusual cunning of the child, finding it obscene." It is the idea of a child mastering the art of deception at a mere three years of age that is problematic; it goes against what seem to be fairly universal sentiments toward the very young. Any appreciation of honesty, innocence, and the freely expressive qualities children normally harbor has already been violated by cruel circumstances. Genia, in a very cruel and fundamental way, is the image of childhood and, by extension, life that has been debased by circumstance.
The image of red serves is a bright and compelling contrast to the dark activities of the ghetto for Oskar Schindler. Perched atop his horse and from some distance, he is able to make out a line of women and children being led by guards towards Piwna Street. Schindler particularly notes "at the rear, dawdling ... a toddler, boy or girl, dressed in a small scarlet coat and cap. The reason it compelled Schindler's interest was that it made a statement. ... The statement had to do, of course, with a passion for red." The scene presenting itself to Schindler is laden with meaning. As a guard gently guides the scarlet child as she drifts away from the line, in a manner much like a concerned sibling, in the background looms the brutal image of SS teams working the streets with their dogs. A moment of tenderness against the backdrop of brutality presents a highly-charged emotive moment for Oskar. He aptly notes the ridiculousness of the situation, the presence of some sort of "moral anxiety" inherent in the proceedings, in the "meandering" of the "scarlet toddler." The images are irreconcilable for the reader—how can a small moment of kindness emerge from such a whirlwind of violent confusion?
The violence of the scene is defined by suitcases hurled out of windows, their contents strewn on the street, or by people hiding, flushed out of their dwellings, and shot brutally on the street where they stood. These images resonate or take on a much deeper, darker meaning in light of the vision of Genia. As an observer, Oskar Schindler notes "they were doing it within a half block of her." Schindler is taken aback with the proceedings of the SS in front of such a young audience. Genia's presence is somehow compounding the killings on the sidewalk, somehow proving the seriousness of the murderous intent of the SS. Specifically, in a particularly jarring moment, "the scarlet child" as she is often referred to, is seen turning to watch a woman be shot in the neck by one member of the SS. The child then witnesses another SS man jam a young boy's head down to the ground before shooting him in the back of the head. A fellow guard's response to the child is again absurd amidst all of the bloodshed. After witnessing a moment of sheer horror, Genia is simply nudged back into the line gently. The absurdity of circumstance dominates the scene, wild variations of emotion expressed in the randomness of the brutality, the displays of affection, and the like. Similarly absurd images will be repeated within the text of the novel.
The insanity driving these actions gives a surreal quality to the proceedings. The nature of such crimes goes beyond admonition or mild reproof. These men have no limit to the horror they will inflict. These atrocities, which seem to defy human nature, become all the more scary or real to Schindler. In the world of this scarlet toddler, random acts of violence abound, and nothing is predictable. There is seemingly no refuge anywhere, nor is there any sympathy to be found. Observing the scene, Oskar can now define "the proposition" presenting itself—witnesses are permitted because such witnesses, like the red toddler, will all eventually perish. Clearly, then, killing had become an official act, allowing these men to act without a trace of shame and without even a thought to shielding a toddler from such violence. This realization also signifies a major turning point for Schindler. The tiny image of Genia in the ghetto ultimately leads him to conclude that "no thinking person could fail to see what would happen. I was now resolved in my power to defeat the system."
In a similarly poignant moment, Genia's uncle sees the scarlet child sitting among the shining boots of the SS. His eyes are met by hers, eyes clouding over, mute in the knowledge that reaching out to an uncle is not the sort of attention that will comfort or save her at this particular moment. As her uncle diverts the attention of the SS with a speech, he notices his niece move with a "dazzling speculator's coolness" as she steps out from between two guards nearest to her. Unlike their encounter at the Dresners', Genia is unable to respond to her uncle with the same childish enthusiasm demonstrated earlier in the text. Her escape is also described in a heart-pounding series of images:
She moved with an aching slowness which, of course, galvanized her uncle's vision, so that afterward he would often see behind his closed eyes the image of her among the forest of gleaming SS knee boots.
Genia's performance again is strangely instinctual, that of a little toddler stumbling at a partly ceremonial "bluffer's pace" as she cautiously meanders or wanders by winding down the "blind side of the street." The image of the child also galvanizes or stimulates shock in the reader, precisely because of the conditions that give rise to it and define it.
Her story, however, proves to be a triumph in the colorless world of the ghetto. Unbeknownst to Schindler, Genia returns to the apartment safely. She then chooses to hide, and when her uncle discovers her, the scene is recorded with this image:
It was just that he knew where to look, in the gap between the curtain and the window sash, and saw, shining in the drabness of the room, her red shoe beneath the hem of the bedspread.
There is a desire represented in the spirit of little Genia, who has an instinct for survival and a passion for life. In contrast to the drabness of the room, she is that one bright shiny moment, that one chance for the future, that one hope. The narrator is quick to point out Genia's victory, that she is able to return to the place where she was first discovered. What could have meant an end for her signifies the "triumph of red Genia's return." In a world of murderous, bloody red images, the one colorful image dominating the text is that of the scarlet child. Genia's survival is now dependent on "her precocious gift for maintaining silence and for being imperceptible in red." Considering her tiny stature, she is literally a small miracle.
The miracle of such an accomplishment, the image of a three-year-old infant triumphant in her escape, is one of many incomprehensible images characteristic of Keneally's text. It also mirrors a theme supported by similar images again and again throughout the course of the work. In the world defined by Schindler's List, seemingly so much depends on a scarlet child.
Source: Laura Kryhoski, Critical Essay on Schindler's
List, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Kryhoski is currently working as a freelance writer. She has also taught
English Literature in addition to English as a Second Language overseas.
The Writing Techniques Keneally Uses to Underscore the Profound Sense of Ambiguity in Schindler's List
Schindler's List, published in England as Schindler's Ark, is perhaps Thomas Keneally's most famous novel, in part because it was awarded England's prestigious Booker McConnell Prize for fiction in 1982. However, the book is even more famous because of the controversy surrounding its eligibility for the award. Michael Hollington, in his 1983 Meanjin article, summarizes the controversy: "Crudely put the question is, is it a novel or a true story?" Keneally based his story on a mountain of factual research and recollections from survivors, and yet used fictional techniques to embellish many parts of the story, so both positions can technically be supported. In reality, Keneally relies on both techniques, in an effort to create a sense of ambiguity or confusion in the reader, which manifests itself mainly in the moral ambiguity of Schindler and the physical ambiguity of the prisoners' survival chances.
Many critics have chosen to focus on the basic issue of whether the book is fiction or nonfic-tion. In a 1983 article for Encounter, A. N. Wilson says with conviction that "Schindler's Ark is not a novel. It is a highly competent, workaday piece of reportage." At the same time, Wilson is disappointed that Keneally "shrunk from the task of turning it into a novel." From the other camp, Marion Glastonbury, in her scathing 1982 review of the book in the New Statesman, implies that the book is fiction, since Schindler is elevated "to a dignity unsustained by evidence." And in her 1989 essay for Australian Literary Studies, Irmtraud Petersson refers to the work as "a documentary novel."
Regardless of what category the book ultimately falls into, Keneally deliberately uses both of these contradictory writing styles to induce a sense of confusion and ambiguity in his readers. The book is filled with ambiguities. Graphic depictions of human depravity, told in a dispassionate, journalistic style that induces despair, are juxtaposed next to novelistic depictions of Schindler, who offers hope to both prisoners and readers that redemption can be found in the most unlikely of situations. But Schindler himself is an ambiguous hero.
In the first chapter, Keneally gives his initial description of Schindler as viewed from the outside. He notes Schindler's distinguished, aristocratic appearance, then warns that "it will not be possible to see the whole story under such easy character headings." Keneally proceeds to make a case that, under normal circumstances, Schindler would not be considered a moral man, for many reasons, the first of which is adultery. Although he is married, Schindler lives in Poland "with his German mistress and maintained a long affair with his Polish secretary," while his wife, a nun-like woman, lives in Oscar's hometown in Czechoslovakia. Although Keneally notes that Schindler "was a well-mannered and generous lover," he still says "that's no excuse," when considering the traditional idea of virtue. This point-counterpoint method of illuminating characters and situations continues throughout the novel.
Others note Schindler's adulterous tendencies. For example, when Poldek Pfefferberg goes to make a delivery of black-market goods to Schindler's apartment one day, Schindler's wife unexpectedly answers. Pfefferberg does not recognize her—being used to Schindler's German mistress answering the door—and so asks, "'Is Frau Schindler in?'" using the name that Pfefferberg reserves for Schindler's mistress. Oskar's wife corrects Pfefferberg, informing him that she is Schindler's wife, and invites Pfefferberg in for a drink. However, as the wife notes, "the young man was just a little shocked by Oskar's personal life and thought it indecent to sit and drink with the victim." It is telling that Keneally uses the word, "victim," at this point, since Schindler is later considered by many of the Jewish prison victims to be their savior. It is also a curious commentary that, while Pfefferberg does not approve of Schindler's promiscuity, he has no problem making black-market deliveries. In this story, there is an ambiguous morality among many characters, not just Schindler, although his morality—or lack thereof—is given the most detail.
Adultery is not Schindler's only vice; he is also a heavy drinker. In the beginning, Keneally notes that "some of the time he drank for the pure glow of it, at other times with associates, bureaucrats, SS men for more palpable results." These results include, as the novel progresses, increasing attempts to use alcohol in bribery and trickery, two of Schindler's other vices that Keneally explores during the story. Even though these traits are not technically virtuous, Schindler uses them to achieve great good. Once again, through Keneally's narrative, he never lets the reader get a solid foothold on whether they believe Schindler is inherently good or bad. Says Keneally, "And although Herr Schindler's merit is well documented, it is a feature of his ambiguity that he worked within or, at least, on the strength of a corrupt and savage scheme."
In the beginning of the story, Schindler uses bribery and trickery to maintain and increase his business, a very self-serving activity. When speaking of Schindler's unscrupulous bribes, Keneally lumps Schindler in with other power magnates like the demonic Amon Goeth, whom he often bribes in order to get his way: "Among men like Goeth and Oskar, the word 'gratitude' did not have an abstract meaning. Gratitude was a payoff. Gratitude was liquor and diamonds." Schindler lies to Goeth, pretending to like him, and bribes him continuously. However, ultimately, bribes are the method by which Schindler is able to achieve his greatest acts of redemption—saving his chosen Jewish prisoners. In fact, by the end, Schindler has given up all plans for making money, and has instead spent most of his fortune on an unprofitable business that is merely a front for saving Jewish prisoners from concentration camps.
As Keneally notes, Schindler himself contrasts the respective outputs of his moneymaking factory in Cracow—in which "enamelware was manufactured to the value of 16,000,000 RM," and "produced shells worth 500,000 RM"—to Brinnlitz, in which "the factory produced nothing." Schindler is happy about his second factory's lack of output, however. On his birthday, he receives a telegram saying that the Brinnlitz shells have all failed their inspection tests, a message that he receives joyously. As Schindler notes, "'It's the best birthday present I could have got. Because I know now that no poor bastard has been killed by my product.'" But even here there are ambiguities. Schindler's earlier shells from the Cracow factory did pass their inspections, and were presumably used to kill people in battle. And the countless mess kits and other enamel cook-ware items that Schindler's Cracow factory produced were used to feed the German army, so while he has been helping Jewish prisoners, he has also been helping the Germans fight the war.
In the lives of the Jewish prisoners, the ambiguity goes beyond moral issues, extending to whether they will live the next day. When the prisoners are first rounded up and taken to Plaszów, many believe that this persecution will be no different than others in the past. They feel that all they have to do is wait it out until the war is over, and that in the meantime their services will be needed: "In the end the civil authorities needed Jews, especially in a nation where they were one in every eleven." However, this hope is soon crushed, when the prisoners see Goeth begin his killing spree at Plaszów, starting with a Jewish woman, Diana Re-iter, who has professional training—in theory, a valuable asset to Goeth. When Goeth instructs his subordinate to kill Reiter instantly, in cold blood, for pointing out a mistake that the German subordinate has made, all of the prisoners start to question their own safety. After all, "if Miss Diana Reiter could not save herself with all her professional skill, the only chance of the others was prompt and anonymous labor."
As a result, the anxiety and ambiguity increases at the camp, and neither the prisoners nor the reader know when a certain person will live or die. Keneally underscores this feeling when calmly discussing Goeth's daily routine of random killing: "No one knew Amon's precise reason for settling on that prisoner—Amon certainly did not have to document his motives." In addition to the individual executions that are performed at Goeth's whim, the prisoners are also aware that he performs mass executions, when he need to make room for incoming inmates: "the Commandant's quick method was to enter one of the camp offices or workshops, form up two lines, and march one of them away." These cold, impartial descriptions of death are journalistic in style, merely reporting on the events and not commenting on them.
Then, in the midst of this cold despair, Schindler's Emalia factory in Kraków gives the prisoners, and readers, reason to hope. At Emalia, "no one collapsed and died of overwork, beatings or hunger." Schindler's factory becomes a goal for many in Plaszów, and "among prisoners who knew, there was already competition to get into Emalia." Later, this competition spreads to Schindler's famous list of prisoners that he is trying to save for work in his new Brinnlitz factory. However, even here, ambiguities are introduced. Just being on the list is not enough, since the SS officers do not bring the prisoners immediately to Schindler's factory. Instead, the men are shipped off to Gröss-Rosen, while the women are sent initially to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Both receive brutal treatment that saps their health and threatens to invalidate them for work in Schindler's factory.
Keneally plays on this fact, using his suspense-building ability as a novelist to offer several examples of how the men and women might not survive their respective stays in the concentration camps. For example, at Auschwitz, "the Schindler women went through frequent mass medical inspections." Some of the ultimate survivors are initially marked for death: "Mrs. Clara Sternberg found herself put aside in a hut for older women." The same anxious ambiguity is present in the Schindler men, who find out that the SS men lost Schindler's list. Goldberg, who originally typed up the list, is asked by the SS men "to type out the list from memory." Even at this late point, when the prisoners have fought and bought their way onto the list, there is some ambiguity as to whether they will remain on it, and it comes down largely to Goldberg's memory. Once again, nothing is stable, nothing is guaranteed, and Keneally draws out the tension as long as possible to increase the sense of ambiguity.
Finally, the majority of the prisoners, both male and female, make it to Schindler's new factory in Brinnlitz, but, as noted earlier, their chances of survival are constantly threatened by the many factory inspections. Even after the war is over, many inside the Schindler factory worry that they will be attacked by retreating German military units, and there is tension and ambiguity until the camp is finally liberated, anticlimactically, "by a single Russian officer."
Even the ending is ambiguous. It is not a happy ending, in the traditional sense, because the overwhelming majority of Jewish prisoners die, including some of the Schindler Jews who could not be saved. Even Schindler himself dies relatively penniless and miserable. When all is said and done, Keneally's book does not give any pat answers. Throughout the novel, Keneally alternately leads readers one way and then the other in their thought patterns. His combination of straightforward journalistic techniques with more literary embellishments serves to shake up readers, as the prisoners are shaken up. Readers are not given a solid foothold either in their assessment of Schindler or in their expectations about the ultimate destiny of the Schindler prisoners. The two contradictory styles of writing force the reader to choose what aspects to focus on from the book and, ultimately, what message to take away from it. However, by unnerving the reader with ambiguities, Keneally, in the end, gives his readers a more heightened reading experience. Next to this fact, the question of whether the book is fiction takes on secondary importance.
Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on Schindler's
List, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about
literature.
The Ned Kelly of Cracow: Keneally's Schindler's Ark
The title of Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize winning text, with its overt Old Testament reference, may indicate that this book offers itself, as a consenting adult, to the kind of critical reading in which Christianity gets a large and sympathetic hearing. Keneally's Schindler, the Sudetan German who saved the lives of thousands of Jews in Poland between 1939 and 1945 is, like Noah, the 'one just man' of the dark and evil times of Nazi Germany—a type of Christ harrowing hell (Auschwitz, Gröss-Rosen, Plasów) to redeem the souls of the otherwise damned. Such a reading might construe him as a kind of Graham Greene hero, paradoxically bringing forth good out of the all-too-manifest corruption of his own flesh, so that in the end (in the words of the quotation that will obviously serve as a major exhibit for Christian interpretations of Schindler's Ark) it can be said of his urge to save Jews, 'that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaring heart of the Jesus that hung on Emiliés wall'.
Yet without dismissing such readings one notices a rather more secular paradox. For all its detailed, documentary striving after an accurate realist portrayal of wartime Poland—running to maps of Cracow, and plans of the concentration camp—Schindler's Ark is a peculiarly Australian book, owing more to the mythology of the bush than to that of central Europe. Although Australia figures overtly only once or twice in the text, the book seems to carry a subtext in which Australia functions as a discursive code to unlock the mysteries of the moral abyss of wartime Europe, explaining what it is that is lacking and why and how Schindler possesses it.
In a simple and general way, Keneally seems to imagine the issues at stake to be primarily personal and individual rather than social. He appears still to believe very much in the hero. There are other plausible 'just men' amongst the German inhabitants of the mad man's land of wartime Cracow. They have rather absurd names, like Bosko, Madritch, and Titsch, and no attempt is made to interest us in their stories, or their interaction, either with each other or with Schindler. And it is not for purely technical reasons (because Keneally wanted to write a particular kind of novel, perhaps) that only one can be allowed to fly over the cuckoo's nest; it is rather that a particular kind of individual space is imagined for this hero to operate in, space which is more strictly Australian than European. Keneally's Schindler is a hero on the run, a kind of Scarlet Pimpernel charging about central Europe on a train, fixing deals and saving souls, even moving his ersatz concentration camp from Poland to Czechoslovakia at a stage of the war when this has become almost impossible. Like the Australian bush hero he's essentially an outlaw who doesn't belong to the society of the respectable and orderly: 'Oskar liked under-the-counter, liked the sport of it, the disrepute'; 'Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system'.
It is repeatedly emphasised that Oskar is a kind of child of nature, with a residue of unfallen innocence. This doesn't imply that he's a simpleton: a kind of peasant cunning in his nature is invoked by the application to him of the Good Soldier Schweik stereotype. It is very much suggested, however, that Schindler is profoundly anti-intellectual, opposed in particular, to theories of individual heroism emanating from Paris. ('An existentialist might have been defeated by the numbers at Prokocim, stunned by the equal appeal of all the names and voices. But Herr Schindler was a philosophic innocent.') The anti-intellectualism is linked, both with a radical amorality, especially as far as sex is concerned—'To him sexual shame was a concept, something like existentialism, very worthy but hard to grasp'—and, just about simultaneously, with a fundamental morality of human kindness, stemming not from calculation but from spontaneous instinct: 'Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good.' Again, we are reminded of the babes and outlaws of the Australian bush.
I shall pass lightly over such relatively trivial aspects of Oskar's subterranean connection with Australia as his fondness, if not for the genuine amber nectar itself, then at least for such ersatz European counterparts as cognac, and his capacity to drink with various mates until they (but never he) disappear beneath the table. It is during these essentially male occasions (the mistress of the camp commandant always absents herself, for they are 'offensive to her sensibilities') that Schindler's real business is transacted, climaxing as it does in the drunken poker game when he wins the right to bear off to the fake concentration camp the favourite Jewish female domestic slave of the commandant of the real one. Although such scenes are reminiscent of quintessentially European paradigms, like that in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail where Osmin the Turk is stupefied and duped with wine, so that the abduction can take place, they also evoke antipodean male mores and fantasies.
A final point about Oskar Schindler's Australian parallels is that he's represented throughout as the 'most apolitical of Capitalists'. A pragmatic entrepreneur, his achievements reflect an anti-ideological work upon the givens that are to hand, rather than any abstract or theoretical form of protest against his world. In this respect he is pointedly contrasted with Wachmeister Bosko. This former theological student wafted by an afflatus of enthusiasm into the SS, later attempted to expiate his mistake by joining the Polish partisans, and 'had contempt for partial rescues . . . wanted to save everyone, and would soon try to, and would perish for it'. It is apparent that Bosko cannot be the hero of this narrative; there are kinds of theoretical innocence that it discriminates against just as vigorously as it favours 'intuitive naturalness'. This could be put another way by observing that Bosko, unlike Schindler, appears incapable of negotiating that distinctive antipodean contradiction whereby outlaws and rebels may at the same time be highly successful 'captains of industry', despite, or perhaps because of, their inherently anti-social behaviour.
What kind of truth claims are put forward by Schindler's Ark? Crudely put the question is, is it a novel or a true story? Keneally is suitably disingenuous on this point:
I have attempted to avoid all fiction ... since fiction would debase the record, and to distinguish between the reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar's stature.
The invitation, for any vaguely precise reader, is to see that whilst some kind of semi-plausible discrimination between reality and myth may be operative in the book, this in no sense implies that myth is disdained or eschewed. As the book will later tell us, 'the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer than truth itself’. According to such a measure of truth, it is possible, by the end of the book to say:
Oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double-faced—in the Greek manner ... subtly powerful, capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation.
The notion of the author with which Keneally is working in this book is by no means dissimilar to this conception of its hero. The homology is proffered in the prologue, which comments that 'it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue'—phrasing that clearly borrows its terms from Oskar's salto mortale to describe a purely aesthetic adventurousness. The book itself 'constructs' a fake concentration camp out of the testimony of those whose memories, working intensely upon the most nightmarishly vivid experiences of their lives, inevitably construct myths. It too attempts a 'redemption' of those 'just men' whom memory immortalises and weaves into heroes or gods, and a damnation of those whose crimes it once more exposes. And in doing this the author himself appears, like Schindler, to play the role of a minor god who is Janus and Bacchus.
If we remember Sartre's existentialist dictum (in his critique of Mauriac's Théràse), that the author must not play god with his own creation, an essential series of problems in Schindler's Ark are uncovered. In a supposedly documentary work, what validates the highly emotional, moralistic ironies that dispense grace and damnation? How can we be sure that these moralisings aren't some form of gloss upon yet another attempt to cash in on the holocaust, Janus-facedly pointing up these unspeakable horrors once again in order to catch that fat film contract? (There are frequent reminders that Oskar looks like Curt Jurgens and has 'the outrageous Charles Boyer charm'.) And—to return to the Australian subtext once more—why should we believe that the values of 'natural spontaneous goodness', derived from the bush or anywhere else, can offer any antidote to, or even a means of understanding, what happened in Poland between 1939 and 1945?
I'm not proposing here to try to answer any of these questions: they are intended to serve, instead, as gestures towards the kind of terms in which critical debate about Schindler's Ark might be conducted. Yet—to make a tentative start on the specifically Australian question—there are probably quite a number of occasions in the text where the voting is likely to run fairly heavily in Keneally's favour, where indeed (the Leavisite terminology seems unavoidable, for more than one reason) those values associated with Schindler, the bush outlaw, seem firmly and convincingly 'realised'. I shall select two.
Mieczyslaw Pemper, a Schindler protégé in the Janus-faced position of secretary to the commandant of the real concentration camp, is accused late one night of plotting an escape. The commandant Goeth is invariably trigger-happy: what is Pemper, literally at gun-point, going to do? Both he and the text rise to the occasion quite brilliantly:
looking around him for some sort of inspiration, he saw the seam of his trouser leg, which had come unsewn. How could I pass on the outside in this sort of clothing? he asked.
Here we have an example or 'work on the given' that justifies both Schindler's realism and the author's pragmatic handling of the writing's testimony.
The other example is more extended and central; it is indeed earmarked on a number of occasions as the paradigmatic correct instinctual response to an impossible situation. It's the day of the SS Aktion to clear the Cracow ghetto. Men, women and children are slaughtered indiscriminately, while Schindler watches like a film camera with a panoramic lens. One child stands out because she wears bright scarlet: the most conspicuous and vulnerable colour, one might have thought. As it is, the colour saves her, for there is no such thing as camouflage in this world. The SS men seem to use her as a kind of audience for their killings, paying no attention to her brightness, for they don't believe that any witness will eventually survive. The unlivable situation is mastered through a flamboyant gesture. This too is a 'realisation' of Schindler's mode of operation, a kind of gaudy, vulgar 'Australian' strategy of coping, in which instinctive flair counts far more than calculation. It gets translated into Christian terms as a kind of credo quia impossibile est in the story of the man who escapes gassing at Belzec camp by hiding for three days in the pit of the latrines and walking out at night time, covered in shit; 'everyone understood that he got out precisely because he was beyond reason'.
All of this is in part a way of establishing, pace the Oxonian lobby, that Schindler's Ark is indeed a worthy Booker Prize winner, even if, for the second year running, the eminence of Günter Grass looms large. It's an ambitious book which cocks a snook at the metaphysical religiosity of Patrick White. Here we have Voss in the 80s, on the rebound from the Australian desert, back in his home patch, shorn of idealism. Ach du lieber, rette mich nur! is here rendered in a more prosaic and down-to-earth dialect.
But it's a pity that we still seem to have to be tossed into the great lap of God somewhere along the way. That flaming heart of Jesus on Emilia's wall, under certain lights in the book, looks a bit puce in colour, rather like a little something Dame Edna brought back from Cracow for the mantelpiece. 'Australia', read as the natural impulse of the heart, isn't ultimately an effective counterweight to 'Europe'. Whatever system it is that requires undermining underpins them both, and must be com-batted, at least in part, with the weapons of intellect, intelligence and reason. Brecht's 'red statements' about Nazi Germany remain superior: his Schweiks are not heroes, but they do at least grasp that you get somewhere only when the office of 'just man' is abolished.
Source: Michael Hollington, "The Ned Kelly of Cracow: Keneally's Schindler's Ark," in Meanjin, Vol. 42, No. 1, March 1983, pp. 42-6.