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Schindler’s List: Analyzing the underlying Sociological elements
- 1. Schindler’s List: Analyzing the underlying Sociological elements A Film review with special focus on Social Change in the context of popular culture By Yash Saxena (1530755) Aryaman Banerjee (1530705) 2EPS
- 2. Thesis Statement This presentation aims to explore the various underlying Sociological elements in the film Schindler’s List (1993).
- 3. Film Information • Based on a true story • Protagonist: Oskar Schindler • Saves over 1,100 Jews by allowing them to work • Diercted by Steven Spielberg • Released 1993 Plot: Oskar Schindler is a vainglorious and greedy German businessman who becomes an unlikely humanitarian amid the barbaric Nazi reign when he feels compelled to turn his factory into a refuge for Jews. Rising Action Climax Falling Action
- 4. Background Setting • 1939-1945 • World War II • Krakow, Poland • German and Soviet Red Army’s invasion of Poland • Marked the beginning of WWII in Europe • In 1933, Adolf Hitler along with the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party came into power in Germany. • They began plans for war. The party’s aim was to rid Germany, and eventually the world, of all its ‘impure’ groups: Jews, homosexuals, and also Gypsies, among others. • This started a period of widespread genocide.
- 5. Central Themes Themes Death Oppression Triumph of the human spirit Conflict Difference one individual can make Denial of the Jews
- 6. Social Change • Definition: Social change refers to an alteration in the social order of a society. Social change may include changes in social institutions, social behaviours, or social relations. • The word ‘change’ indicates any variations in human society. Social change is said to take place when changes take place in the modes of living of individuals, and when social relation gets influenced. Relevance to Schindler’s List • In this film’s context, the source of social change that we will be focusing on in this review is Social Conflict. This includes wars (WWII), ethnic conflicts (Nazi’s versus Jews) and protests. The immediate effect of war on society is quite evident through the endless deaths of the soldiers and civilians.
- 7. Genocide • Genocide is described as the systematic destruction of one group of people by another • Nazi’s vs Jews • Visible at multiple instances in the film • In 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin wanted to come up with a new terminology to describe the systematic murder of Jewish people by the Nazis. • Lemkin put together the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin word cide (killing) to coin the new word, “genocide.” • Before an serious sociological engagement in genocide studies, the Holocaust was seen as a one of the only real examples of genocide.
- 8. A still from Schindler’s List depicting Genocide with a dramatic touch
- 9. • Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn advanced a now frequently used definition of genocide that aimed to overcome some of the problems related with defining groups by arguing that it is the perpetrator in fact that defines the victim group during genocide. • According to Chalk and Jonassohn genocide is: “. . . a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.”
- 10. Lemkin’s contextualization of Genocide • Raphael Lemkin • At the International Conference for Unification of Criminal Law • Madrid (1933) • According to Lemkin, Genocide is of two types: By killing a group’s or community’s individual members Physical Genocide By undermining a group or community’s way of life Cultural Genocide
- 11. Genocide in Schindler’s List (Major events) • Germany invasion of Poland (1939) • The policies that were already in place in Germany were taken up in all the new German-occupied territories. • Jewish people were no longer allowed to own businesses in Poland or other German-occupied territories. • Jewis were forcibly made to wear armbands or patches with the Star of David on them so in order to easily identify them as Jews. • They were forced to leave their houses in the city and countryside, and made to live in ghettos, where they were and separated from rest of the population. • Jewish families that were formerly well-off now found themselves living as the lowest of the low. • The Krakow ghetto, featured in the movie, encompassed sixteen square blocks and was filled with about 20,000 Jews. • As time passed, Jews were made to work in labour camps, and many were killed by mobile killing units.
- 12. • Around 1941, the “Final Solution” plan was brought forward and implemented in order to exterminate all the remaining Jews, Gypsies, and other “impure” groups in Europe. • The Jews were violently removed from the ghettos, and were then sent to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death camps to be placed in the gas chambers. • Oskar Schindler saved the lives of about 1,100 Jews who were under his employment. • These people began to refer to themselves as the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews).
- 13. Factors contributing to Social change with respect to Schindler’s List Social Change Ideology War Ethical Standards OppressionForce Perception Conflict War, Conflict, Force, Oppression Ideology Perceptions Ethical standards
- 14. Sociological Theories as tools of analysis • Structural Functionalism Society is a complex system whose organs contribute to its functioning. These ‘organs’ include norms, customs, traditions and institutions. The Jews in Poland and the German Nazi’s functioned with different ideologies and perception stemmed from those social organs. Hitler used the German Army as an institution to generate and spread the Nazi ideology in Germany and German occupied territories. • Conflict Theory Conflict is a major theme in the film and was during the Holocaust. The Jews were oppressed by the Germans. Genocide is a form of this conflict
- 15. • Symbolic Interactionism Herbert Blumer put forward an influential summary of the perspective: people act toward things based on the meaning those things have for them, and these meanings are derived from social interaction and modified through interpretation. According to this perspective, there was heavy interaction between the Jews and Nazi’s (though violent in nature). The Nazi’s derived a superior-subordinate perspective from this interaction and thus the Holocaust was a product of this interaction. All three theories help explain one another. Furthermore, the conflict of the situation is contextualized according to these sociological perspectives.
- 16. Conclusion • In the face of an evil like the Holocaust, making a true connection with the victims can be overwhelming. Separating the victims from the numbers in order to comprehend the scope and horror of the Holocaust is nearly impossible. Museums, books, and pictures help to educate people, but more than six million Jews alone were slaughtered, which is a tremendously difficult reality to grasp emotionally and intellectually. The enormous number of victims and the many ways in which they were tortured and murdered are so vast that one could get lost in these statistical masses without ever really understanding the plight of individual victims. Only the victims themselves were truly able to feel the horror of the Holocaust. Steven Spielberg hoped to address this difficulty with Schindler’s List. Since it is easier for people to make connections on a personal rather than an abstract level, Spielberg tried to replace the vast numbers with specific faces and names. He tried to ensure that viewers would make personal connections with the characters in the film and thus begin to digest the events on a smaller scale.
Editor's Notes
- Schindler’s List was a film released in the year 1993 and was directed by reputed director Steven Spielberg. The Film tells the true story of German businessman Oskar Schindler, who saved the lives of many Jews during the Holocaust. Being a wealthy man who is associated with the Nazi Party, he comes to Krakow with the dream of making a large sum of money by starting a factory that makes items for the military. Upon opening the factory, Schindler decides to employ Jewish poles instead of Catholics, as their wages are cheaper. Later, Schindler observes an absolute massacre of Jewish Poles, as they are arbitrarily murdered due to no cooperation, poor health, or old age. Schindler later pushes for a sub-camp in order to retain his workers, so he could keep them safe and run the factory. He continues to bribe people in the Nazi party, so as to obtain more workers, and thus save more lives. Eventually, his money is drained from the continued payment of bribes and is forced to flee from the Red Army due to his reputation as a Nazi Party supporter. Oskar Schindler saved the lives of over 1,100 Jews in this manner. RISING ACTION · Schindler, a Nazi war profiteer and womanizer, upon witnessing increasing violence and killing of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland, undergoes a slow transformation, becoming a compassionate man obsessed with saving the lives of the Jewish workers in his factory. CLIMAX · As Schindler witnesses the evacuation of the Kraków ghetto, he sees a little girl in a red coat. The image and the violence he witnesses so move him that his humanity is awakened, and he realizes he must do something to help. FALLING ACTION · He continues to bribe people in the Nazi party, so as to obtain more workers, and thus save more lives. Eventually, his money is drained from the continued payment of bribes and is forced to flee from the Red Army due to his reputation as a Nazi Party supporter.
- Schindler’s List is a film set in Krakow, Poland, during World War 2. In 1933, Adolf Hitler along with the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party came into power in Germany and began plans for war. The party’s aim was to rid Germany, and eventually the world, of all its ‘impure’ groups: Jews, homosexuals, and also Gypsies, among others. The German invasion of Poland was a joint invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, the Free City of Danzig, the Soviet Union, and a small Slovak contingent, that marked the beginning of World War II in Europe.This started a period of widespread genocide.
- The Triumph of the Human Spirit In the face of overwhelming evil, the Jews in Schindler’s List exhibit an unbroken spirit and will to survive. Mrs. Nussbaum, trying to make the best of the situation just like all the other Jews forced into the ghetto, tells her husband their ghetto apartment could be worse. Schindler’s factory workers believe they may be safe in his factory and continue to hope for survival. The event that perhaps best illustrates this triumph of spirit is the wedding in the Plaszów labor camp. Even though the Jews in Plaszów live in constant fear of death, including random shootings from a hilltop villa by camp overseer Amon Goeth, two people manage to fall in love. With possibly no future to look forward to, they marry in the hope that they will survive. The Difference One Individual Can Make The more than six thousand descendants of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler’s Jews) might never have been born had one man not chosen to take a stand against evil. The Third Reich sanctioned and encouraged violence against the Jews and sought the ultimate destruction of the Jewish race, and millions of citizens of the Third Reich either stood idly by or actively supported this persecution. In Schindler’s List, as the Jews in Kraków are forced into the ghetto, a little girl on the street cries out, “Good-bye, Jews,” over and over again. Oskar Schindler risked his life and stood alone against the overwhelming evil of the Nazi Party. The powerful idea that one man can save the life of another underlies the entire film. The Dangerous Ease of Denial The Jews in Schindler’s List, even as they are forced into the ghetto and later into the labor camp, suffer from a denial of their true situation. This denial afflicted many European Jews who fell victim to the Holocaust. They leave their homes in the countryside and move to Kraków and later to the ghetto because the Nazis force them to. Once in the ghetto, however, they believe the bad times will pass. Their denial of their situation continues in the labor camp, even as killing surrounds them. The actors manage to convey the fact that the Jews have suffered enough horror already to know mass extermination is possible. Death, Conflict and Oppression Death and fear of death govern the lives of the Jews in Schindler’s List. Images of death pervade the film, usually in the form of executions, as people are shot in the head, often indiscriminately. This method of execution is used again and again.
- Social change is defined as an alteration in the social order of a society. Social change may include changes in social institutions, social behaviours, or social relations. The word ‘change’ indicates any variations in human society. Social change is said to take place when changes take place in the modes of living of individuals, and when social relation gets influenced. We use the word change to denote a difference in anything seen over a period of time. Thus, social change implies visible differences in any given social phenomena over time. There are a number of sources of social change, including Population Growth, Technological Changes etc. However, the source of social change that we will be focusing on in this review is Social Conflict. This includes wars, ethnic conflicts and protests. The immediate effect of war on society is quite evident, through the endless deaths of the soldiers and civilians. The depiction of World War II is evident in the film along with conflict amongst different ethnic groups with Hitler’s Nazi Army carrying out a genocide against Jews.
- Genocide is defined as the systematic destruction of one group of people by another. This deadly form of racism and ethnocentrism violates nearly all recognized moral standards, yet it has occurred several times over in human history. In 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin wanted to come up with a new terminology to describe the systematic murder of Jewish people by the Nazis. Lemkin put together the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin word cide (killing) to coin the new word, “genocide.” Before any serious sociological engagement in genocide studies, the Holocaust was seen as a one of the only real examples of genocide.
- Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn advanced a now frequently used definition of genocide that aimed to overcome some of the problems related with defining groups by arguing that it is the perpetrator in fact that defines the victim group during genocide. According to Chalk and Jonassohn genocide is: “. . . a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.” Today, most sociologists define genocide to include any group, whether it be a political, economic or cultural collection, with these groups being defined, as above, by the perpetrators selection. For example, during the Holocaust it was the Nazis themselves who decided who qualified as a Jew, or a mentally or physically handicapped person. The victims’ self-perception was not taking into account during this classification. Defining genocide in this way means that it is possible for certain groups to be chosen for destruction even if prior to this selection, no such group was in existence. If Donald Trump came into power one day and decided that he wanted all long-nosed people to be killed, it would still be termed as genocide as it is the perpetrator himself who decides upon the classification.
- Raphael Lemkin spoke at the ‘International Conference for Unification of Criminal Law’ in Madrid in 1993, and pushed for the international community to come together on the necessity to outlaw the destruction, both cultural and physical, of human groups. Lemkin envisaged genocide consisting of the purposeful destroying of a nation or group in two ways: (1) By killing its individual members – physical genocide (2) By undermining its way of life – cultural genocide He was more involved with culture loss rather than the loss of life, as culture is seen to be the social fabric of a genus. For Lemkin, culture is as, if not more vital to group life as physical well-being is to an individual person. He defined genocide in terms of the violation of a nation’s right to its collective being, i.e. – the destruction of a nation. Destruction such as this may be achieved through the mass murdering of all the people of a nation; or using an organised plan of different actions aiming to eradicate the important foundations of the life of national groups. The latter point had often been looked over by other sociologists.
- When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the policies that were already in place in Germany were taken up in all the new German-occupied territories. Jewish people were no longer allowed to own businesses in Poland or other German-occupied territories. Eventually, all the Jewish were forcibly made to wear armbands or patches with the Star of David on them so in order to easily identify them as Jews. They were forced to leave their houses in the city and countryside, and made to live in ghettos, where they were and separated from rest of the population. Jewish families that were formerly well-off now found themselves living as the lowest of the low. The Krakow ghetto, featured in the movie, encompassed sixteen square blocks and was filled with about 20,000 Jews. As time passed, Jews were made to work in labour camps, and many were killed by mobile killing units. Thus, major social change had been brought on by war and social conflict.
- Around 1941, the “Final Solution” plan was brought forward and implemented in order to exterminate all the remaining Jews, Gypsies, and other “impure” groups in Europe. Today, it still stands as one of the darkest periods in the history of mankind. The Jews were violently evacuated from the ghettos, and were then sent to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death camps to be placed in the gas chambers. Bodies of the murdered were incinerated in massive ovens, often making the sky above the death camps and surrounding towns a dark grey with smoke, and human ash raining down like snow. At the time of this bleak and horrifying period in Krakow, Oskar Schindler, a war profiteer and womanizer, saved the lives of about 1,100 Jews who were under his employment. These people began to refer to themselves as the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews). 1,100 may seem an insignificant number, when compared to the millions of Jewish lives taken by the Nazis. However, this number represents 1,100 unique human lives, lived which would have ceased to exist had it not been for Schindler, and those 1,100 now have around six thousand descendants. Regardless of the devastating scale of the Holocaust as a whole, the powerful tale of the Schindlerjuden and the man who risked everything he had to save their lives has endured.
- The contributing factors to social change are rather self explanatory. A change in any of the factors shift the equilibrium of society, causing Social Change. Inclusion and exclusion of factors in a society by another party influences this equilibrium. Some factors such as perception are psychological whereas others such as ethical standards are stemmed from society itself. Factors such as force, oppression, conflict and war originate from the basic psychological and societal ideas. The pyramid depiction of the factors contributing to Social Change shows that Ideology, Perceptions and ethical Standards of a group or community are the basis of their thought process. War, Conflict, Force and Oppression are outcomes of the thought process. In the film’s context the war and oppression of Jews were outcomes of the Socialist German ideology, the elitist perception that German’s had of themselves and Hitler’s highly questionable and criticized ethical standards.
- Structural Functionalism Society is a complex system whose organs contribute to its functioning. These ‘organs’ include norms, customs, traditions and institutions. The Jews in Poland and the German Nazi’s functioned with different ideologies and perception stemmed from those social organs. Hitler used the German Army as an institution to generate and spread the Nazi ideology in Germany and German occupied territories. Conflict Theory Conflict is a major theme in the film and was during the Holocaust. The Jews were oppressed by the Germans. Genocide is a form of this conflict
- Symbolic Interactionism Herbert Blumer put forward an influential summary of the perspective: people act toward things based on the meaning those things have for them, and these meanings are derived from social interaction and modified through interpretation. According to this perspective, there was heavy interaction between the Jews and Nazi’s (though violent in nature). The Nazi’s derived a superior-subordinate perspective from this interaction and thus the Holocaust was a product of this interaction. All three theories help explain one another. Furthermore, the conflict of the situation is contextualized according to these sociological perspectives.
- In the face of an evil like the Holocaust, making a true connection with the victims can be overwhelming. Separating the victims from the numbers in order to comprehend the scope and horror of the Holocaust is nearly impossible. Museums, books, and pictures help to educate people, but more than six million Jews alone were slaughtered, which is a tremendously difficult reality to grasp emotionally and intellectually. The enormous number of victims and the many ways in which they were tortured and murdered are so vast that one could get lost in these statistical masses without ever really understanding the plight of individual victims. Only the victims themselves were truly able to feel the horror of the Holocaust. Steven Spielberg hoped to address this difficulty with Schindler’s List. Since it is easier for people to make connections on a personal rather than an abstract level, Spielberg tried to replace the vast numbers with specific faces and names. He tried to ensure that viewers would make personal connections with the characters in the film and thus begin to digest the events on a smaller scale.