America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy

In the final scene of Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), a marching line of actors leaving a liberated concentration camp dissolves into a marching line of the real-life Schindler Jews approaching Schindler's grave in Israel. In this dissolve, the black-and-white film changes to color, signaling both a generic and a temporal shift from the classical Hollywood mode and the past to real-life and the present.2 The real Schindler Jews walk with the actors and actresses who portrayed them to Schindler's grave, upon which they together place a memorial rock. This scene both ruptures the diegetic world of the film and acts as a guarantee of the movie's authenticity. The movement that I would like to emphasize here is not the one from past to present, but rather the one between the survivor and the actor. This moment stages what I take to be the agenda of the film the transferring of living memory from the body of a survivor to an individual who has no authentic link