Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                               ON SEEING THREE FILMS ABOUT NAZIS    

As much by chance as by choice, over the last year we have gone to see three movies about Nazis and the Holocaust. None of the three was the standard Hollywood “war film” about battles and eventual retribution for the Nazis. All three were more subtle than that, though of very different quality from one another.

First we saw the filmed transcription of the British National Theatre’s production of Good the play written by Cecil Philip Taylor and first staged back in 1981. Now revived, the play has a very bleak and very simple stage-set and a total cast of four (with one fifth actor appearing in the last moments of the play). David Tennant plays the central character of Professor Halder and we quickly accept a Scottish actor with a Scottish voice as a German. It’s the 1930s. Professor Halder is an esteemed academic at a prestigious German university. He regards himself as a liberal. His best friend is Jewish, and Hitler has only recently come to power. Halder tells his friend not to worry – Hitler is just making stupid speeches he doesn’t really believe in. He’s just playing up to the rabble. He won’t do any harm. Then Halder’s friend disappears, but Halder rationalises that it was probably for the best. Halder believes that he can live in the Nazi state by simply separating from society and living a private life. When books are publicly burned he is able to keep some and read them in private – just like a Nazi woman he knows who is able to enjoy in private forbidden non-Aryan Jazz music. He is flattered into joining the S.S. He’s actually comforted by wearing a uniform and sharing the comradeship. But don’t worry. He doesn’t intend to do anything wrong. He still regards himself as “good”… and so it goes on - the story of a man who step by step rationalises what he does and never really accepts that he is complicit in great evil. After all, he is “good”.  Thus can a self-centred liberal’s morality collapse.

The second film we saw was One Life, the true story of the British bureaucrat Nicholas Winton who, in 1938 and 1939, managed to save many Jewish children in occupied Czechoslovakia from being sent to death camps. (Winton was of German-Jewish descent, but he had become an Anglican.) Winton arranged for trains to carry the children away from Nazi-occupied territory but, life-long, he regretted that he was not able to save the last group he had arranged. The film cuts between the old Winton reminiscing (played by Anthony Hopkins) and the young Winton carrying out his deeds of mercy (played by Johnny Flynn). This film closes with the elderly Winton being applauded in a television studio by some of the many people who were saved by him.

The third film was The Zone of Interest. The first five minutes of the film are a blank, reddish screen and a soundtrack of unsettling, ominous noise, grinding, shaking, rumbling. Then it cuts to a picnic near a river. These are ordinary people. They are enjoying themselves. They have a nice spacious house. Dad is good to his kids. He reads them bedtime stories. Mum makes nice meals. They have a large hot-house for exotic plants. Mum is very proud of her expansive garden, which is right next to a very high wall. How very nice. Oh, and by the way, Dad is Rudolf Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz. And over that high garden wall is where there are gas chambers, crematoria, forced slave labour, genocide. That is where all those rumblings and shaking come from, like the work of a huge factory, mixed occasionally with distant gunshots and screams, not to mention all the smoke that can be seen coming from tall chimneys. Where do the clothes and fur-coat Mum tries on come from? We don’t have to be told. Do the family ever get upset about where they are living? Well Mum does. She gets upset when Dad is posted elsewhere, and she fears that she will be moved from her beautiful garden and house. Filmed in Poland with a German cast The Zone of Interest is based in a novel by Martin Amis, but very much changed from Amis’s version. Among other things, Amis had given fictious names to the commandant and others, whereas the screenwriter and director Jonathan Glazer gave the characters their real names… such as Rudolf Hoss. Be it noted that the film’s camera never takes us over the wall into Auschwitz. In our minds, this makes what is behind the wall even more ominous.

How do I rate these films? The weakest of them is One Life . I do not belittle Nicholas Winton’s bravery and humaneness. He deserves to be remembered as a hero. But, like Schindler’s List, the film gives the audience a happy ending. The kids are saved. The hero is applauded. So, as in many formulaic films, we are allowed to think that there are more good people in the world to counter-balance bad people. But this simply wasn’t the truth about the Holocaust – or any other Genocide for that matter. The great majority of those targeted for extermination were actually murdered, often after torture and starvation. In focussing on the humane heroes, we are ignoring the horrible truth of history. Salute the compassionate heroes by all means, but always remember that they are the minority.

Far better, and equally more searching, are Good and The Zone of Interest. They are films for adults. Good makes it clear that a highly intelligent man can rationalise participating in what he would otherwise understand to be heinous. By deluding himself that he can stand aloof and live a private live, he is in effect allowing the worst to happen without resistance. The process that turns him into a Nazi is gradual, with him all the time assuming that he is “good”. The Zone of Influence concerns a man who knows exactly what he is doing and glories in it [Rudolf Hoss had been a committed Nazi as soon as the movement was created]. Yet he shadows the younger members of his family from it and in domestic matters he acts as if their life is perfectly normal. Again there is a cognitive dissonance here – a refusal to see that what he is doing is neither normal nor in the least moral. Creating mass murder does not go easily with ordinary domestic life. One major merit of these two films is that they do not try to persuade us of the genocidal horror by showing us gore and atrocities. Good stays in one set embracing three or four characters talking. The Zone of Interest never moves outside the house and garden, although there are nightmarish sequences where a young girl is seen searching through the grounds that prisoners have to work in. We, as adult viewers, understand that when Hoss looks at an imprisoned girl and then, in the next sequence, we see him washing his genitals, we know that he has committed rape. We understand the horror by knowing what we are not seeing

 

 Below is a photo of Rudolf Hoss's children enjoying their garden next to Auschwitz

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