Room 237 Page #3

And since

I'm trained as an historian

and my special expertise

is in the history of Germany

and Nazi Germany in particular,

I became

more and more convinced

that there is,

in this film,

a deeply laid subtext

that takes on The Holocaust.

I think

it probably was the typewriter,

which was a German brand,

which might seem arbitrary,

but by that time,

I knew enough about Kubrick

that most anything in his films

can't be regarded as arbitrary,

that anything...

especially objects and colors

and music and anything else,

probably have some intentional

as well as

unintentional meaning to them.

And so that struck me.

Why a German typewriter?

And in connection with that,

I began to see the number 42

appear in the film.

And for a German historian,

if you put the number 42

and a German typewriter

together,

you get the Holocaust,

because it was in 1942

that the Nazis made the decision

to go ahead and exterminate

all the Jews they could.

And they did so in

a highly mechanical, industrial,

and bureaucratic way.

And so the juxtaposition

of the number 42

and the typewriter was really

where it started for me

in terms of the historical

content of the film.

Of course "adler"

in German means "eagle."

And eagle, of course,

is a symbol of Nazi Germany.

It's also a symbol

of the United States.

And Kubrick

generally has recourse to eagles

to symbolize state power.

Kubrick read Raul Hilberg's

The Destruction

of the European Jews.

And Hilberg's

major theme in there

is that he focuses

on the apparatus of killing.

And he emphasizes

how bureaucratic it was

and how it was a matter

of lists and typewriters.

Spielberg picked that up in

Schindler's List, of course.

I mean, the film begins

with typewriters and lists

and ends with a list,

of course.

And so that informs...

and I had a chance

to talk to Raul Hilberg.

He visited Albion College.

And he said that he and Kubrick

corresponded about this.

And the fact that he read it

then, in the 1970s,

when there was a big wave

of interest in Hitler

and the Holocaust and the Nazis,

I think...

I think just tells us

that that typewriter,

that German typewriter...

which by the way, changes color

in the course of the film,

which typewriters

don't generally do...

is terribly,

terribly important

as a referent to that

particular historical event.

- I worked in a film archive

for a decade,

kind of like

fast-forwarding

through World War II

ten times a day.

But, you know, like,

when you see things

over and over and again,

their meanings change for you.

Like, when you see these... see,

like, World War ll newsreels,

like, after a while,

you come to realize

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