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Hansen, in fact, points out the peculiar continuities between Schindler's List and D.W. Griffith's "racist blockbuster of 1915, Birth of a Nation. Both films bear witness to the "vicissitudes of public history," (127). Although Hansen acknowledges that the comparison is not much more than a "disanalogy," there do still remain some points of continuity that bear mentioning (128). After all, the displacement of Africans from their homeland to a position of servitude and political oppression can be compared with the Holocaust in terms of both issues having a collective as well as personal dimension; and each reflecting racism and its link to political and social power.

Creative or non-documentary representations of the Holocaust, as with Eli Wiesel's Maus and Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List allow for a thorough recreation of the Nazi ethos. Whereas documentary evidence presents photographic testimonies, the artistic renditions allow for the impressions of how the reality of Nazism impacted the primary stakeholders. Using this line of thinking, it is important to understand the different modes of witnessing: the "heterogeneous points-of-view" that comprise the Nazi social organization (Felman 207). There were victims (Jews and survivors), perpetrators (Nazis), and perhaps most importantly, the bystanders (Poles, in the case of Auschwitz and documentaries related to the Warsaw ghetto; Germans in the case of the Nazi endeavors in German-speaking lands). The Nazi social organization must be understood on all these dimensions. There are bystanders that watched while their neighbors were being forcibly removed and displaced; these bystanders are crucial for understanding the narrative of Nazism. The Nazi social organization depends on cohesion and collective identity under the rubric of German nationalism.

Genocide is a strange response to the sense of threat that derives from encounters with the Other. The Self vs. The Other is, however, the essence of representative documentation of the Holocaust. Discourses on the Holocaust, such as those presented in artistic renditions like Maus and Schindler's List allow for a reencountering and a multifaceted perspective. There is also the element of incidentalism. As Weissman shows, many critics of Schindler's List claim that Spielberg uses the Holocaust as a "backdrop" for telling the story of his protagonist, thereby reducing Nazism as an incidental setting (148). Friedlander also elucidates the framework that suggests Nazism "or fascism generally thus appears as a particularly barbaric outgrowth of the Western capitalist system," and a disturbing reflection on the effects of modernity (13). The structure of Nazi consciousness and German identity cannot be reduced to such puerile conjectures, though. Elements of colonialism, imperialism, and displacement do come into play but in a complex and multifaceted manner.