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Oskar Schindler was an impressive man and a fascinating contradiction who is highly worthy of a good biography. This is, unfortunately, not that book since it’s very poorly written, both from the context of readability and historical analysis.

In terms of readability, the main issue is that the book is horribly unfocused and prone to tangents.

There is little editorial control of the material. Rather than provide a clear and selective narrative based on the primary sources, Crowe summarizes the sources themselves. And not in brief statements but long digressions. Thus we get, for example, page after page of an interrogation conducted by Czech officials.

An important source, yes, but it’s easy to get bewildered by the mass of details, most of which are unimportant and will never be mentioned again. This distracts from the topic at hand. The book consistently fails to distinguish between what’s important and what’s merely background information.

David bridal Jump to ratings and reviews. Want to read. Rate this book. David M. Crowe , Steve Catalano Editor.

And the constant shifting of chronology and digressions makes it very hard to follow even simple accounts.

Names are dropped constantly, with no indication of whether they will be important later. I often found myself looking in the index for one name or another since I had not realized it wasn’t just one of the endless string of random people populating the narrative.

This is still better than when the book does actually go out of the way to introduce important people. Then we get a potted multi-page summary of their whole lives, including actions that occur later in the narrative. I don’t know why the book does this, but it disorients an already disoriented reader who’s already trying to keep up with a timeline filled with potted summaries of institutions, countries, and random events.

With regards to historical analysis, the book has a frustrating tendency to criticize Schindler’s List (the movie) as it would a historical source.

So we are told, for example, that Schindler’s apartment in the film was inaccurate since he probably didn’t move into it until a few months after he arrived in Kraków. To which my reaction was more wow, they actually filmed it in the real location than oh what a serious anachronism. Most of the other criticisms seem similarly petty.

Oskar schindler biography david m crowe jr Account Options Connexion. Version papier du livre. David Crowe. Basic Books , 26 oct. The first true biography of Oskar Schindler that explores the myths and realities of one of the Holocaust's most controversial figures.

Is it a huge mistake that Spielberg shows the Schindlerjuden getting off the train at Zwittau-Brinnlitz rather than just Brinnlitz (he actually spends a whole page arguing that this was too far to walk)? Or that Schindler probably didn’t watch the liquidation of the ghetto from Lasota Hill (two pages of argument)? Or that the Girl in Red is probably fictitious (seven pages)?

I understand that that any biography describing a subject made famous through an important movie needs to confront areas where the film has taken licenses, but I didn’t expect long digressions on the making of the film or descriptions of film scenes.

The analysis of Schindler’s List (the novel) is even more confusing to me.

For reasons I can’t explain, this book is treated as a genuine historical document. I get that the book was composed after careful consultation with several Schindlerjuden (some of whom died before he could interview them), but it’s still a work of fiction and, as he repeatedly points out, it gets many facts wrong. The second most cited biography is an unpublished MA dissertation, which also unsurprisingly gets many facts wrong.

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Meanwhile the more shocking Czech biographies calling Schindler an evil war criminal receive hardly any discussion at all. I thus found the historiography of this book highly incomplete.

I found these problems very frustrating because Schindler’s life, even in this highly flawed work, is utterly fascinating.

As the first part of the book makes clear, Schindler was even more of a scoundrel than he appears in the film. He was a drunken lout who mistreated his wife and had no real goal beyond getting fantastically rich, by any means. His ties with the Nazis began even before he was a German citizen (he was born in Sudetenland Czechoslovakia) and the Czech claim that he was a war criminal is essentially correct.

He played an important role in the Abwehr efforts to get detailed information on Czech and Polish railroads in preparation for the invasion, and he may even have provided the Polish army uniforms used by the SA to stage the “Polish invasion” used to justify the war.

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Yet his role in helping the Jews was more extreme as well. By he had contact with the Jewish Agency for Palestine and helped smuggle information out of Płaszów and money in. That’s an insane risk to take at the height of the Holocaust!

To Crowe’s credit he does lay out these contradictions in Schindler’s personality in a way that makes them sound less bizarre.

For example, Schindler’s close connections to the Abwehr are plausibly treated as a partial explanation for his turn. Abwehr leaders also fell out of love with Hitler (they were dissolved in for anti-Nazi activities) and Schindler’s trajectory can be seen as a more extreme version of their disillusionment. But those looking for a more complicated depiction of his shifting allegiances may find themselves disappointed.

While his major actions are documented when they appear you have to wait until the epilogue to get a psychological take of his character.

Dav donation pick up: David Crowe examines every phase of Schindler's life in this landmark biography, presenting a savior of mythic proportions who was also an opportunist and spy who helped Nazi Germany conquer Poland.

And that’s just to say that he was always essentially a decent, if self-serving, man who grew disillusioned with the Nazis. While the author clearly has his own views as to how Schindler thought and behaved he’s not very good at explaining them.

The book is about a very interesting individual who is not documented anywhere in such detail in English.

It is also the result of much research, including now irreplaceable interviews with surviving Schindlerjuden. But unfortunately none of this can alter the fact that the book is disorganized and unfocused.

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The confusion engendered by this lack of planning and editing makes the book less useful than it should be. Honestly, it could probably be reduced to about half this length without losing anything of value. The central question remains why a man as greedy and self-serving as Oskar Schindler should give up his fortune to help a group of Jews at great risk to his life.

And I don’t think the book ever answers that. I would recommend this book solely because of the inherent interest of its subject.