Nazi ‘Essential work’: No Blauschein for literature and history
In a scene in Thomas Keneally’s ‘Schindler’s Ark’, a professor, while waiting for a Blauschein — a blue card that declares what you do is ‘essential work’ for war effort — is informed that his qualification as a ‘high school professor’ cannot invite the grant of a Blauschein, and he’s rudely shunted aside to join the line of non-essential workers. “His yellow card identified him as a High School Professor, and in a rational world as yet only partly turned upside down, it was an honorable label”, goes the writing in the book about the thoughts of the professor, but it reads that the clerks at the end of the line disagree.
This scene, or the character, find no direct place in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film ‘Schindler’s List’. Instead, there are multiple quick scenes capturing disbelief in the eyes of well-dressed, and academic looking, Jews while waiting in those lines and who are subsequently denied the Blauschein. But where the word ‘literature’ does not appear at all in Thomas Keneally’s text, Steven Spielberg’s script expands the story to include writers, and professors of history and literature. In one such scene, a man is heard saying, “Me? Not essential? I am teaching History and Literature, since when it not [sic] essential?”, before he’s carried off to another line by the faithful Itzhak Stern, the right hand man of the main character Oskar Schindler, and represented there as a skilled metalworker to ‘save’ him. It’s a short scene. They are all short scenes. But the impact is greater if you are one of them, those affiliated with history or literature. You immediately wonder if you’d have received a Blauschein, and whether you’d lie about what your skills were. It’s a different thing that, as a woman, your chances of proving what you do is ‘essential’ is bleak automatically, but let’s say it weren’t: would you lie about who you are? Or would you allow yourself to be pushed into the line that guarantees a quicker death?
More importantly, would you argue that an expertise in arts, or even humanities, counts as ‘essential work’?
Do you think what writers and professors do is essential work? Forget about 20th century war-time which demanded a specific definition of ‘essential’ or ‘useful’ and set about dismissing or discarding those that didn’t fit under that bracket, do you think what writers and professors do is essential work today? Do you think they are essential for your life? Do you think they are essential for how you want to live your life? ‘Rational world that is only partly turned upside down’ writes Thomas Keneally, to describe a world that thought of writers, and people in literature and arts as ‘honorable’. Would you say that we are in a rational world now? And that what artists do is still… ‘honorable’?
