"Schindler's List" Is Not "Shoah": The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory

If there were a Richter scale to measure the extent to which commercial films cause reverberations in the traditional public sphere, the effect of Schindler's List might equal or come close to that of D. W. Griffith's racist blockbuster of 1915, The Birth of a Nation.1 If we bracket obvious differences between the films (which are perhaps not quite as obvious as they may seem) and bracket eight decades of media history, we are tempted to make the comparison because a similar seismic intensity characterizes both Spielberg's ambition and the film's public reception Each film demonstratively takes on a trauma of collective historical dimensions; and each reworks this trauma in the name of memory and national identity, inscribed with particular notions of race, sexuality, and family. Each film participates in the contested discourse of fiftieth-year commemorations, marking the eventual surrender of survivor(or veteran-) based memory to the vicissitudes of public history. While The Birth of a Nation was not the