Oskar Schindler's List Research Paper

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Schindler’s List: A Convincing History in Fictional Form Schindler’s List is supposed to be one of the most outstanding movies of the 1990s. It won many awards, and listed in the best 100 movies of all time (Schickel). The movie is about a corrupt German businessman who saved about 1000 Jews during the holocaust. The movie is about the heartlessness of the holocaust and how people could make a difference if they wanted to. As art, the film succeeds in achieving the director’s intentions of evoking the feelings of the Jews that were saved by Oskar Schindler in a convincing, news-like form. The film accomplishes this despite its weaknesses. The movie portrays Oskar Schindler as one such person—a man who would do anything to make money—but at the same time try to help those under his care; in this case the Jews during the war and holocaust (United States Holocaust …show more content…
Yet, the movie’s depiction of him tends to also be a bit one-sided. His weaknesses sometimes look like caricatures. For instance, his interest in beautiful women—as when he was choosing a personal secretary—was a humorous take on that episode in his life, but obviously exaggerated. Understandably, this may have stemmed from the original sources of the stories. The sources were the victims themselves, and they would have relayed their stories from an angry vantage point (Keneally, Schindler's List). Curiously, the Germans seem to have been portrayed in a similar way in other literature. They behave in that way because they have become blind to the truth and operate like robots following orders from their leaders (Arendt). The film also loses grasp of its period context. At the end, when the end of the war was announced, it became obvious that the script was written way after the war. It had a fore-knowledge of the holocaust that people in such an isolated location would not have
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Oskar Schindler's List Research Paper

Unlike many other literatures, for example, The Diary of a Young Girl, which reflect resistance to Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitism, Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally was not set to be in the context of Konzentrationslager. Instead, Keneally used a third-person omniscient narrator’s voice to demonstrate how Oskar Schindler, a war-time industrialist and Nazi Party member, saved more than a thousand Jews’ life by employing and keeping them in the humane labor camp in his factory, which he had established…

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