Labyrinth of Lies

The original German title of Labyrinth of Lies is Labyrinth of Silence (Schweigens). It’s an important distinction. A discrete (aka cowardly) silence may prove more evil and more conducive to evil than lies are. And lies are bad enough. 

Oddly, this German film marks the directorial debut of an Italian actor, Giulio Ricciarelli. Germany so embraced the film as to nominate it for the Oscars. As Italy was an Axis partner of the Nazis, the Italian director has his own national point to make. Indeed Germany stands in for any nation with a shame in its past it can either bury or confront.  

Set in 1958, the film records the difficulties that an artist, a journalist, a young prosecutor and a courageous district attorney overcame to bring 19 former Auschwitz SS officers to justice.  Of the 19, 17 were convicted but none expressed remorse. The trial made a complacent and ignorant public aware of what “Auschwitz” meant, the horrors committed there and its guilty perpetrators, now free and thriving in the new Germany. 

Of course, unlike Austria, Germany since then undertook an intensive, painful examination of its Nazi past. The film reminds us that the nation’s current sense of responsibility was a hard-fought campaign. The social and political establishment was determined to bury its horrid secrets, to leave its criminals unpunished, in the name of moving forward. But as the DA insists, democracy is poisoned not by exposing its secrets but by burying them. Expediency rarely proves moral.

Here the historic film reflects upon the present Germany. Angela Merkel is undertaking a tightrope act, admitting hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees yet trying to preserve Germany’s modern culture. Offering the refuge is generous, but the attendant problems should not be buried in silence. The refugees bring along a new antisemitism, a new sapping of social and economic resources, a new threat to the nation’s culture and identity. Dealing with this challenge requires the openness and courage that confronting the nation’s old Nazis did. 

The heroic young prosecutor Johann Radmann begins as a young traffic case handler with a firm sense of justice and a willingness to invest himself in justice. That’s why he insists the young woman pay the mandated fine but gives her the money to make it.  The handsome young Aryan is a proper image of modern Germany confronting its past.

As he pursues the investigation into the Nazis’ buried past, his external obstacles are joined by some personal ones. His boss scolds him for single-mindedly pursuing Mengeles instead of prosecuting the lesser villains he can. For justice Radmann still has some ego to rein in. 

The files so overwhelm him they leave barely enough room on his single bed to admit his new girlfriend, Marlene. That she’s the girl he initially bailed out at court proves that virtue is sometimes not its only reward. That she becomes a dressmaker for the rich ex-Nazis’ wives represents the country’s restyling of itself, with willful denial of its past. The women like the economy flaunt a pretty front to hide its ugly source.

Radmann destroys this relationship when he confronts Marlene with her father’s Nazi past. She suspects enough when she recoils in disgust from his monthly drunken songfests with his old army buddies. But the full cruel truth drives her away. When she later brings Radmann his patched but irreparable jacket, she’s suggesting the possibility of redemption not just in their relationship but in Germany. The German drinking song contrasts to the young peoples’ German versions of US rock’n’roll (e.g., “Tweedle Dee Dee”) and the haunting strains of a ghostly Hebrew prayer.

Radmann also alienates himself from his journalist friend for having been a passive 17-year-old at Auschwitz. At their artist friend’s insistence they reunite to say Kaddish on the artist’s behalf at that site. As with Marlene’s father, Radmann must learn that people are imperfect, that circumstances can contaminate them. 

Radmann briefly leaves the trial project when he learns his own father was a Nazi party member. “All the lawyers were,” he’s told, but he can’t bear his disillusionment with the man he’d revered. 

Redemption means that even the flawed can seek justice. We can’t expect purity. “The lesson of Auschwitz is that we have to do the right thing.”

The campaign begins when an artist recognizes a schoolteacher as an Auschwitz guard. The police and school officials decline to punish him, with various excuses. Radmann’s insistence that the SS guard should not be teaching children is borne out in the arrest scene. There he’s separating his charges into two lines, right and left, as he separated the Jews at Auschwitz into lines either for work or to be gassed. He hits a student in the head for confusing his direction. Unchecked evil only repeats itself.

Radmann is briefly tempted to abandon his quest for justice for a rewarding career in corporate law. Behind his new boss’s desk is an abstract painting, like a horizontal Rothko, where a vast black dominates a gray side, an emblem of the company’s morality. He recoils at having to work with the scumbag who tried to free the teacher. 

Before Radmann can return to his idealistic mission he has to rediscover humility and the moral compass he had briefly lost. To err is human, to pursue even an imperfect justice the best we mortals can do.