a high praise of the spirit of capitalism

Rating: 10/10 (23 October 2005)

I had avoided to see the movie for a decade. The Holocaust is so absolute an act of cruelty that it does not give good food for originality. I underestimated Herr Schindler, just as I naively underestimated Herr Spielberg. No other movie has so boldly approached a fundamental ethical controversy of this size. Was Herr Schindler a prudent man or a remorseless exploiter? Did he help or use his workers? Didn't he decide to save them only when realizing he would be hunted down by the Soviets? Schindler is depicted as the most human of humans - his conversation with Amon Goeth over the real meaning of power and control can easily be included in college syllabi. And yet being so human, he is neither good nor bad: there are forces beyond him - his greed and his love of life, that allow him neither to refrain from war-time profiteering nor to subscribe to the absurd legal degradation of the Jews into lesser beings (are they less kiss-able just because they carry the Yellow Star, would ask Schindler?).
But still, Schindler plays only the supporting role in his own story. The central figure is Itzhak Stern - the bookkeeper who turned himself into a voluntary slave to the arrogant Schindler in order to be able to protect his kin. The scene in which Stern was brought out of the train taking him to the concentration camp, and apologized to his boss for his absent-mindedness - he got arrested because he had left his work permit - is of true biblical proportions. What is the message contained in Stern? That salvation does not come by itself. Schindler's Jews did not beg for mercy, they negotiated with him on their own terms, they made themselves useful to him, they invested in their own physical preservation. So the movie is not about Schindler being a hero or not, it is here to prove that good has a price and we cannot expect salvation for free - a moral philosophy inherent to Capitalism and incomprehensible for both the feudal or the social welfare states in which benefaction from above, be it from the feudal lord or from the all-powerful bureaucratic state is conceived as the necessary condition for man's survival.