During the gunfire-swept purge of the Kraków ghetto in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, a German soldier settles at a piano in a Jewish hideaway house while two comrades quarrel over whether his melody is Bach or Mozart. The scene is clumsily meant to remind us that barbarism wears a human face, as George Steiner once wrote: ‘a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.’ As in this scene, Spielberg renders horror through a divided German soul, split between the redemptive figure of Catholic industrialist Oskar Schindler and the sadism of SS Commander Amon Goeth.
The trope returns, more iconically, in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. In a bombed warehouse, Władysław Szpilman – a skeletal Adrien Brody – sits before an unscathed piano and performs Chopin’s Ballade in G minor for the uniformed German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld. Ignorant of the Hosenfeld described in Szpilman’s accompanying memoir – a devout Catholic in his late forties who abhorred Nazism and repeatedly risked his life to rescue both Poles and Jews – viewers are led, far too neatly, to see him as a plain Nazi redeemed by music, played on film implausibly by frostbitten, half-dead Szpilman. In a parting gesture, Polanski’s Hosenfeld hands Szpilman his Nazi overcoat with the words: ‘You must survive. God wills it.’
Friedrich Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that ‘only where there are tombs are there resurrections.’ Hosenfeld’s quiet benediction is hardly accidental. There is a distinctly religious inflexion given to the (Catholic) German characters in both Spielberg’s and Polanski’s films: an invocation of grace in the final hour, a pure, almost childlike act of humanity antithetical to the total corruption of Western civilisation. Why do we cling to these stories of redemption? The question echoes a deeper theological anxiety central to the Christian tradition: ‘What must we do to be saved?’ What do our narratives mean when they seek redemption, given that redemption begins when we are already enmeshed in ruin, when salvation must be wrested from failure? As Hannah Arendt reminds us, in ‘global times’, processes of universalisation are also processes of secularised Christianity. The rituals of purification, once permissible under the pre-secular gods, have vanished; there are no more laying on of hands, no cleansing flames. And still, we search – through film, through fiction – for a method that might gather the shards of violence into something meaningful. Perhaps we long for redemption not because we believe in it, but because we cannot bear a world without the possibility.
To get closer to such questions, I turn again to Arendt: ‘For many years now we have met Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human.’ We would not ache for redemption if we did not already feel, however inchoately, implicated. Not as time travellers, nor as perpetrators displaced across history, but as inheritors and maintainers. We were born into conditions we did not choose, yet we find ourselves still searching for what Arendt calls ‘possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility.’ The past is not settled; it reaches for us, nags us, dares us to forget it, and invites us to repaint or destroy it.
In a sense, trauma is nothing but a past that refuses to end. The existentialists would claim that every failure generates guilt with no clear exit, a condition Max Weber describes as ‘the secret anguish that modern man bears’, powering a compensatory mania—a feverish drive to appear virtuous despite what cannot be undone. If Albert Camus reveals anything in The Fall, it is that modern man lives in a state of panic, consumed by the question of his own innocence and, in turn, by the ways in which men may fend off guilt: ‘We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all costs, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.’ Here, man is so in love with innocence that he will do anything to protect it, even commit murder. Decades or hundreds of years in distance, we inherit and reinterpret the memory of events that no longer stand trial, whose victims cannot testify, whose perpetrators are often long dead.
We are left, to use Karl Jaspers’ words, ‘face to face with nothingness.’ In times impatient of distinctions, his The Question of German Guilt formulates a theological conception of (metaphysical) guilt: ‘Before God it is not a case of some, or the majority, or many, or most, but all who are guilty.’ Jaspers’ aim is not to accuse, nor to impose culpability upon victims of Nazism or other atrocities. Rather, he insists each person must confront their place within the drama of evil, gesturing towards a reconciliation that may renew human existence from its origins. Yet to place such guilt beyond the realm of judgment (or politics) is to risk abstraction; metaphysical guilt, untethered from law or politics, can drift too easily into universality, where it floats above the very structures it might have demanded be dismantled. This is, in Jaspers’ questions, as in those of most existentialists, the struggle to confront the ‘triviality of indifferent, mere living.’
‘Mere living’ recounts the uncertainty of our finitude. In response to the existentialist’s dread, David Scott would argue that the way we conceive of the temporal connection between past ‘social and political ills and injury’, on the one hand, and the horizon of possible futures of social and political repair, on the other, is no longer what it was because ‘the past is no longer imagined as a time that can be overcome.’ In the West’s post-authoritarian transition, new idioms arise. Scott, citing Neil Kritz’s volumes on transitional justice, identifies strategies not only to punish, honour, or consign truth but to preserve globalised (neo)liberalism by reintegrating victims and perpetrators into a ‘shared post-conflict’ order—what we might call liberalism armed: capable of naming without interrogating, reconciling without confronting the historical conditions that produced the violence. It liberalises the ‘illiberal’, defends transnational justice with drones and champions itself as the only imaginable horizon of legitimacy. Liberalism is euphoric in its self-image, untroubled by its failures and shielded by its own moral vocabulary that defines how transformation, if possible, appears. In our time, Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, liberalism grants itself a moral theatre that wields universal human rights while rationalising guilt, if felt, through their weaponised deployment. Thus, the future becomes a ‘mirror of the present’, foreclosing the imagination of radical transformation.
The inherent link between memory, history and political point-scoring, and our cultural love of redemption risks being swallowed by the “secular” spectacle of the world stage. History is nearly as fluid as memory, and though memory cannot be cast in stone, monuments nonetheless shape its character. Theology, at its core, is a work of memory—above all, the memory of victims—yet it also draws us, unrelentingly, toward a finale. One among many imagined endings, the rapture that precedes Christ’s return in the Bible’s Book of Revelation (or Book of Apocalypse) is storied to lie just beyond the horizon, ushering in a purified world cleansed of barbarity. Literary critic Frank Kermode sees our fixation on apocalypse – through tropes of ‘empire’, ‘decadence’ and ‘the perpetual crisis in morals and politics’ – as a recurring archetype: a ‘radical instance’ realised in a final catastrophe. Stories, then, perform a sense-making function: they lend shape to the shapelessness of unfolding time and render life legible amid both triviality and monstrosity. The allure of endings – our desire to reconcile beginning with end – allows us to stitch coherence into life’s fleeting middle, lending it rhythm, purpose and the illusion of resolution to our present. Fictional narratives, historical or otherwise, offer coherence even when that coherence is false; their endings satisfy our hunger for knowing. As David Bordwell puts it in Narration in the Fiction Film, ‘To understand a film’s story is to grasp what happens and where, why, and when it happens.’
Our love of redemption finds its tension here. Certainly, there is ‘the risk of understanding’—the ethical precariousness of explanation itself, the danger that to understand is to resolve, to impose closure where openness, ambiguity and discomfort ought to remain. The idea that the whole Earth might one day be healed, restored and transfigured can feel faintly absurd to someone just trying to survive, glancing at the day’s headlines filled with disaster. Yet the redemptive qualities we assign to certain moments often legitimate the very conditions of oppression they pretend to disrupt. Our interaction with the past tends to mirror our belief in history’s forward march – its presumed moral arc – tethered to a Christian-secularised liberal imaginary that soothes itself through the very violence of its naturalised continuity: progress. Redemption becomes a gesture that dignifies “progress”, even as it quietly reinforces the asymmetries that made that progress possible; reckoning becomes renewal. Perhaps Nietzsche better exposes its political afterlife: ‘As long as your morality hung over me, I breathed like one asphyxiated.’
And yet, in the films Schindler’s List and The Pianist, redemption becomes the vehicle through which we try to link our dissatisfaction with the past to a vision of an altered future. Schindler’s character personifies ‘hope’, as one viewer recalled after its 1993 German premiere. That is, redemption is not found in divine intervention, nor in the contemplation of radical alternatives, but in the fragile belief that the bounds of our present might be crossed and that the past can be salvaged by a future that insists it be progressive; morality becomes performance fixed onto a singular moment; a saviour figure arrives at a coherent end; our (neo)liberal present vindicated.
This does not mean that we cannot march onward, nor does it mean that our films cannot inspire us. Philosopher Laurence Mordekhai Thomas – writing on chattel slavery and the Holocaust – would agree with Arendt that ‘without being released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would […] be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover.’ What will save us? Following Scott, I turn to Arendt’s work on Christian forgiveness and promise, once again grounded in the recognition that theology has terraformed our world.The strength of Arendt’s account of forgiveness lies in its attention to tragic action – action marked by irreversibility – where forgiveness becomes the condition for preserving the possibility of beginning anew. In our (neo)liberal moment, forgiveness appears equally foreclosed, much like under the doctrine of predestination, where human action is cast beneath the shadow of an inscrutable divine design. For Arendt, however, it is forgiveness and promise that forge a response to human finitude, a political answer to the tragic nature of action that gestures toward freedom in the new: ‘The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises.’ Promising becomes an act of temporal repair, anchoring hope that something might endure despite the fragility of beginnings or the present’s own ‘destiny.’ It is a wager that, even in the wake of failure, the future need not be inherited passively – it can be made.