In the last decades there has been new importance to the question of "whether or not cinema and television modify our vision of History. " It has generated extensive debates among historians and media scholars regarding the right of cinema and television to constitute a new form of expression for history, as well as controversies concerning the contribution of this new form of historical "writing" to the transformation of our understanding of history.

This question applies even more radically to cinematic and televisual representations of the Holocaust. Will these representations, and particularly the more popular ones like Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, not only preserve the Holocaust in the world's historical memory but also define the shape and dominant imagery of this memory? Although most historians still hold the view that history books are "our designated preservers of memory", many of the official custodians of memory will admit that it is no longer necessary to justify an interest in films as "important pieces of evidence for any study of the twentieth century." Myths and symbols constructed and perpetuated by Hollywood have become permanent features of the world's historical consciousness.

Challenging "the limits of representation" (the Holocaust has, traditionally, been conceived of as defying representation) Spielberg's 1993 film has become a media event, generating extensive discourse on the Holocaust and its mediation by popular culture in a way not seen in the United States since the NBC 1978 television series Holocaust. By now no one can deny the impact of Spielberg's film on an ever-growing viewing audience. Publicly celebrated with multiple Academy Awards and screened as an antidote to racism in New Jersey, the film has been widely acclaimed as a moving, powerful, and truthful depiction of historical atrocity, affirming the veracity of survivor testimony and historical documentation for a public in need of initiation or convincing.

Schindler's List provides fertile ground for general reflections about the limits and problems associated with the representation of the Holocaust precisely because it challenges those limits by making the unimaginable imaginable, the unrepresentable representable. The film throws into crisis the ideational foundations of post-Holocaust aesthetics with its rigorous, Bible-inspired purist demand: do not make the Holocaust into an image. Schindler's List (along with the Holocaust Museum in Washington) can be viewed as part of a symbolic rite of passage introducing the Holocaust into mainstream American culture. The irony is that of all the films made on the Holocaust, Schindler's List, which is a prototype mainstream Hollywood film [unlike the highly experimental film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann) crystallizes a moment of rupture with past representational forms. Even the films (mostly German and Italian) which constitute part of what Saul Friedlander calls "the new discourse" have not achieved this degree of rupture. Distributed mostly in art cinemas, and consumed by an intellectual elite, films like The Damned, The Night Porter, Seven Beauties, and Hitler - A Film from Germany have failed to reach the masses. Their effect on global historical consciousness has therefore been limited. In contrast, Schindler's List has penetrated historical consciousness on a global scale and transformed the image of the Holocaust as perceived by millions of people all over the world.

Contemporary fascination with the Holocaust mediated through film, television and museums may be seen as part of a larger cultural phenomenon: a postmodern obsession with the past characterized by a cultivation of "memorial, or museal, sensibility." Yet the emerging interest in the Holocaust transcends postmodern fads and fashions. What might seem an obsession is anything but trivial. Rather, it is grounded in real needs, fears, and concerns. Today, the desire to represent the Holocaust is motivated by a deep anxiety nurtured by the gradual disappearance of Holocaust survivors - the last eyewitnesses to a catastrophe - from the land of the living. Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List may thus be seen as the great locus of this angst. The film, which was released almost two years before the 50-year anniversary memorializings of the end of WWII, appeared precisely at the moment in which the generation for whom the Holocaust remains a personal memory is disappearing. Hence the film reifies the fragile moment of transition in historical consciousness from lived, personal memories to collective manufactured memory. Furthermore, this moment signifies the victory of collective memory as transmitted by popular culture, over a memory contested and debated by professional historians. We all well know that most people derive their historical knowledge from popular culture and not from scholarly sources. Time, history and memory become qualitatively different concepts in a media-saturated world where "instead of relating to the past through a shared sense of place or ancestry" film and television consumers "can experience a common heritage with people they have never seen; they can acquire memories of a past to which they have no geographic or biological connection."

As an anxiety-induced film motivated by fears of disappearance and consequent oblivion and denial, Schindler's List also marks a shift in Holocaust narrative tropes and in generational sensibilities. Schindler's List can be viewed as a break in Holocaust cinematography through its introduction of the Holocaust into mainstream cinema. This process is, perhaps, not different from what Michael Marrus calls the current "entry of the Holocaust into the mainstream of historical writing." For Marrus this is a positive turn - a result of "a natural process as the event marks its anniversary of a half-century and a generation of writers appears for whom the Holocaust is discovered, instead of being contemplated as a lived experience."

Like Agnieszka Holland's Europa, Europa, Schindler's List, as well as Roberto Benigni’s recent film Life is Beautiful, is a film about survival rather than death, redemption instead of annihilation. After all, Schindler's List presents a palatable version of the Holocaust in which individual talent allegedly could have helped victims survive. Schindler’s List and other Holocaust films create, according to some critics and historians, a disturbing illusion which suggests that everything which Auschwitz destroyed actually lives on, at least on the screen. Schindler's List is a film generated by an American post-Cold War generational sensibility distanced from the Holocaust both temporally and spatially. The taboo on explicitly imagining the Holocaust was both advocated and practised by artists of the generation of the survivors like Elie Wiesel. This taboo begins to lose its moral grip as second generation artists appear on the Holocaust scene. For a director like Spielberg (as for the American Jewish community at large) what matters is survival. The mourning over the six million Jews who perished in Europe is symbolically transformed into a celebration of the approximately 5 millions Jews living in America today. It is as though American Jews are the imaginary survivors of the Holocaust, the reincarnation of the six million dead European Jews. Thus Schindler's List can be seen as a turning point in the politics of Holocaust representation.

Desacralizing the taboo on imagining the Holocaust Schindler's List symbolically passes the torch from one generation to the next, reaffirming the role of generational identity in the symbolic memory culture of the Holocaust. Furthermore, Schindler's List epitomizes the process of what some call the "colonization" of the Holocaust by American culture. Prior to Spielberg's film, the most important films on the Holocaust (Night and Fog, Shoah, Kitty: A Return to Auschwitz and The Memory of Justice were made in Europe by European filmmakers and artists who had had first hand experience of World War II. Though some of these films won artistic, critical, and popular success, none of them ever enjoyed the visibility and exposure granted to Schindler's List. Hence, Spielberg's film displaces not only a generational but also a continental sensibility. It shifts, symbolically, Holocaust consciousness from the "old world" (Europe), the "stage" on which the drama of the Holocaust was enacted, to the "new world" (America) the distant participant in or spectator of this drama. After all, first-hand American experience of the Holocaust (not of World War II at large) was limited to those United States soldiers who took part in the liberation of the camps.

Schindler's List can be seen as the ultimate popular representation of the Holocaust, confirming once again the power of popular cinema to shape collective memory and to generate topics for public conversation. Many Holocaust-related events and especially the phenomenal success of Schindler's List have had a cross-fertilizing effect on one another. The success of the Holocaust Museum attracted audiences to Spielberg's film and vice-versa, while both in turn helped provoke a flood of television programs on the Holocaust.
Perhaps what is most fascinating about the current "Schindlermania" is the film's engagement with public controversies about group hate. Despite some historians' objections, history on film and television is as much about the present as about the past; often it intervenes in ongoing debates. The Holocaust as memorialized by Spielberg's film has been mobilized as an educational tool in the fight against contemporary racism, reinforcing the thesis of French historian Pierre Sorlin that the historical film always interprets the past from the perspective of the present. This is most evident in the way the film has been used as a "weapon" in the multicultural wars dividing the contemporary ethnic landscape of American society, but also European society (as is evident from the use of the film in connection to the ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia). Spielberg's testimony in the summer of 1994 before a congressional committee on the issue of "hate crimes", itself testifies to the fact that the most successful commercial filmmaker in Hollywood's history has suddenly achieved "expert" status on a controversial and complex social phenomenon - purely by virtue of having directed a film whose subject is the rescue of a handful of Jews from the Nazis.

The invocation of Schindler's List in different political contexts, as well as Spielberg's testifying before the American Congress, attest to the status that Schindler's List has already achieved in American and European historical consciousness. It has attained the status of historical document about the horrors of racism and genocide.

Paradoxically, the worldwide success of the film and the consequent infiltration of the Holocaust into the historical consciousness of a global audience, creates a new situation. The limits of representation seem somehow no longer to be appreciated in the fullest sense of the word. As Spielberg has forcefully gone beyond these limits --has in fact transgressed, violated and desacralized them (according to critical intellectuals such as Claude Lanzmann)-- he has somehow made the whole debate concerning them obsolete. Schindler's List not only violates the taboo on graven images which has been at the core of the debate on post-Holocaust aesthetics, but it goes one step further: it opens a (post?) "new discourse" on the Holocaust.

The question, then, is what space does Spielberg's film occupy in relation to the Holocaust? Is Schindler's List the beginning of a post-"new discourse" which signifies a rupture with mass-produced fantasies about the Nazi past and a call for a more stable "truth" of the Holocaust? With Schindler's List, one may argue, the Holocaust has entered mainstream culture and the success of Benigni’s film, as well as the frequent connection made between the impact of Schindler's List with contemporary political events such as the war in the former Yugoslavia testify to it. It remains to be seen whether Spielberg's film will heighten fascination with Nazism or will open popular avenues in the quest for new, disenchanting images of the Holocaust. It also remains to be seen whether the filmmaker turned "historian" can give back to society a history of which it has been deprived by institutionalized history, which despite its impressively productive and crucially important work seldom finds its way back to the mainstream of cultural life in general.