I wish this fekkin’ night was over
Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t
If he said it at all, he almost certainly didn’t say it in English, let alone some euphemistic form of the language. He’ll have much more probably said, “Ich wünsche mir, diese Scheißnacht wäre vorbei.” “He” is the character Amon Göth, based on a real man and played by Ralph Fiennes, in the movie Schindler’s List. The occasion is the clearance of the Cracow ghetto.
Schindler’s List was made by Steven Spielberg, who is Jewish, and it’s trite to relate what the film is about: it’s about a man called Schindler who arranges for a list to be made.
It’s a list of people whose lives are to be preserved. The lives in question are the lives of Jewish workers who are employed as slaves in his factory in Poland during World War II.
If he had not made that list, Oskar Schindler would have been cast as a demon. He was a slave exploiter, after all. But, the list saved his reputation and, to put things bluntly, he is viewed as a hero, especially in the light of this movie and especially in light of his acts of mercy. Schindler’s enslaving his Jewish workers saved their lives, and that’s not the only irony in this film.
So, why did Steven Spielberg make this movie?
Was it to tell us who Schindler was?
Or to tell us who Göth was?
Or to relate the story of the Cracow ghetto?
To say Germans are bad?
Jews good?
Or to challenge our personal preconceptions: of the events that are depicted? Of our own morality?
Image: in the film Schindler’s List, German stormtroopers shoot hospital patients who—a further irony—have already been poisoned by their carers in a Cracow clinic in anticipation of the murder.
The film depicts actual events, into which are woven very few entirely fictitious elements (unlike, say, the 1997 film Titanic): some of the characters are not based on real persons, but are based on real characters, people who did the things depicted or who said the sorts of things that are said or who represent characters who acted in a manner such as that which is displayed. The soldiers do not depict actual, named troops (aside from a few of the roles). And the workers also, the townsfolk also, the children also, the train drivers likewise. The character named as Amon Göth was a real person, however, as was Oskar Schindler.
Oskar Schindler, the slaver, employed his slaves to make enamel pots and he procured his slaves by showering German military personnel with favours. The German SS had taken the Jewish population into its custody, interning them in labour and concentration camps, or triaging those out whom they wanted to murder.
Amon Göth was an Austrian SS officer who ran the concentration camp from which Schindler would obtain some of his slaves. Göth had the Jewish inmates under his control (he was their self-proclaimed god, likely a macabre word-play on his name—Göth without an Umlaut would be pronounced the same as Gott, or god) and Schindler plied him with favours to procure factory workers: the two of them were in cahoots. Some might view Schindler as a hero, perhaps recalling the absolution he attains in the film’s final reel. This might, however, seem like jumping the gun, way back during the film’s initial sequences. Hence, Schindler is the one character that passes through a transformation in the course of the movie, going from bad guy to good guy.
It’s a trajectory that the Jews in the film don’t on the whole pass through. They start as good guys and they remain good guys right to the end. There are early scenes with Jews who ingratiate themselves with the German occupiers and even inflict punishment on their own kind, but they can either be seen as acting under duress (from the bad guys), as acting to preserve their own lives (they have no choice, are doing what anyone would do in similar circumstances), or as constituting an aberration (on the principle that every barrel has its rotten apple). However, the viewer is not told explicitly why this Jewish Ordnungsdienst collaborates with their occupiers, but there were historically some who, under the authority of the Judenrat, did so, not always willingly, and not always unwillingly.
Finally, we have Amon Göth, who, like the Jews who are his inmates, also goes through no transition. He starts out as a bad character (he summarily executes the Polish architect of his new concentration camp, only then to follow her professional advice) and also ends up as a bad character (with a noose around his neck). Even his moments of tenderness and friendship are overshadowed by a sense of foreboding and—that word—evil. He confers absolution on others, with the words, “I pardon you,” albeit they seem to pose a difficulty for him to utter. Absolution, from the very devil himself. The real devil is an angel, in actual fact, but, well, if Amon’s a god, he has to do godlike things.
He’s convinced to do this absolution thing by Oskar, who, in the quiet moment depicted above, tells Amon, “Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t.”
It’s an interesting line, and it never truly lay comfortably with me, for all these 30 years since it was spoken on the silver screen. Why does Schindler say this? In order to, himself, exercise power, over god? To plead with god to be merciful? Or is it not nonsense? Doesn’t it only apply once you’ve attained a position to be able to kill, even with justification? And most such positions are, in fact, attained by killing. Is that it—you kill to attain a position of power, which is in turn defined as refraining from the act that got you there in the first place? What is that, anyway—every justification to kill?
It’s a scene that is easily glossed over, and whose portent gets clouded out by Göth’s later implementation of Schindler’s advice. But it’s one of the most profound challenges in the movie for the passive audience, who are otherwise little more than a vessel into which the film pours its copious horror and pathos. It’s about the only scene in which the viewer is challenged to question their own morality, and not simply to castigate or condone the morality of the film’s characters.
The Jews, the victims of this film, are encouraged by Schindler at one point to perform a Jewish act of worship. It is a religious ritual, predicated on the purity of God’s word in accordance with biblical scripture. God’s word, which includes the injunction thou shalt not kill.
The unholy Schindler impresses upon his buddy Göth that temporal power comprises abstaining from killing in a situation in which there is every justification for killing. What Schindler argues, therefore, is not that one should not kill. What he argues is this: that the question of whether killing is or is not the result of an exercise of power depends on whether there was justification for it. If we kill with justification, we exercise no power. And, if we kill with no justification?
We humans do naught but complicate and convolute, with our nebulous ideas of justification, and retaliation, and retribution, and following orders, and doing our duty. Quite simply, if we refrain from killing, do we submit to God’s power over us, to our own power over us, or to both?
The Jews in Schindler’s List are the victims of an exercise, not of justification, but of authority. Killing is killing, whether doing it with or without justification is predicated on possessing power; and abstaining from killing is not to grant a pardon. Power is when we have every authority to kill, and we don’t. And it isn’t power over them whom we refrain from killing. It’s over ourselves.
Amon Göth was no god.
And nor are these.