Schindler’s List: Analyzing the underlying Sociological elementsA Film review with special focus on Social Change in the context of popular culture By

Yash Saxena (1530755)Aryaman Banerjee (1530705)2EPS

Thesis Statement This presentation aims to explore the various underlying

Sociological elements in the film Schindler’s List (1993).

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

businessmanwho becomes an unlikely humanitarian amid the barbaric Nazi

reignwhen he feels compelled to turn his factory into a refuge for Jews.

Rising Action Climax Falling

Action

BackgroundSetting• 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.

Central Themes

Themes

Death

Oppression

Triumph of the human spirit

Conflict

Difference one

individual can make

Denial of the Jews

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.

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.

A still from Schindler’s List depicting Genocide with a dramatic touch

• 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.”

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 Genocid

eBy undermining a group or community’s way of life

Cultural Genocid

e

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.

• 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).

Factors contributing to Social change with respect to Schindler’s List

Social Chang

e

Ideology

War

Ethical Standard

s

OppressionForce

Perception

Conflict War, Conflict, Force,

Oppression

Ideology

Perceptions

Ethical standards

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

• 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.

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.