109.3Abstract (summary)
In his screenplay, co-written with Jean-Claude Grumberg, [Costa-Gavras] carves a taut dialectic out of [Rolf Hochhuth]'s epic text (which was usually trimmed heavily even for the stage). In effect the film presents two parallel Representatives. Hochhuth's central hero is the highborn Jesuit Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz), who battles the church's hierarchy in his futile attempt to get Pope Pius XII to speak out against the slaughter of the Jews. Hochhuth based this figure upon the Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg of the Cathedral in Berlin, who openly prayed for the Jews and was granted his request to share their fate. Extending its target beyond just the church, the film gives equal emphasis to its second Representative, the historical SS officer Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur). He was the chemist whose initial assignment to fight typhus shifted to providing the Zyklon B gas used to eradicate the Jews. From his work on water purification he is reassigned to the Nazis' project of "racial cleansing" of the Jewish "vermin." Disgusted at the slaughter of the Jews - even when only "four hundred units are to be treated" - Gerstein tries to spur church and government officials to publicize this information, in the hope that the German people would - if they knew - rise against it. But his pastor tells him the majority of Germans and of church officials approve of Hitler's initiative. So Gerstein works to sabotage the machinery of genocide, falsifying problems of leakage and contamination, and ordering huge quantities of the gas buried.
Costa-Gavras doesn't pull any punches. Amen is framed by significant suicides. It opens with a Jew shooting himself at the League of Nations meeting in the hope of alerting the world to the plight of the Jews in Germany. The film ends with its two Representatives dying in forms of suicide. The priest Riccardo puts a Jewish star on his cassock after the Pope refuses to act on his direct information. Riccardo accompanies Rome's Jews to the concentration camp. He rejects both the doctor's and Gerstein's offers to save him, and dies there. Gerstein also declines opportunities to save himself, preferring to "be the eyes of God in that Hell." He is found dead in his cell, after he has turned himself in to the French occupation forces and written a detailed record of Hitler's Final Solution. But virtue can be as unrecognizable as evil. The De-Nazification Council still charges that a true Christian would have done more to prevent the slaughter. Whether Gerstein hanged himself or was hanged - by a fearful Nazi colleague or a vengeful Allied soldier - is as unclear in the film as in real life. These martyrs make the human costs of the Church's survival all the more shameful.
Costa-Gavras shares Hochhuth's confidence that the Nazis' activities were known well and early in the higher reaches of religious and political authority. As lower-level clerks stay blinkered by their resolve to help their country win the war, even after defeat appears inevitable, the higher administrators turn away from the Jews. The Church and its followers showed their power when they successfully opposed the Nazis' extermination of the "unproductive" - the crippled, the retarded - but they abandoned the Jews. In his frequent diplomatic chats, the Vatican spokesman only raises the treatment of the Jews when the Nazis arrest Jews who have converted to Christianity. Even then the Pope calibrates his emphasis - "our sorrow and our anger" - and avoids even the threat of criticizing the Nazis' treatment of the Jews. By then the Nazis have lost their fear that Pius XII might rouse his 400 million Catholics against them. And when the Church does provide limited refuge, it is scrupulous to "keep the two sensibilities apart" - Jews and converts - revealing its centuries-old prejudice. The Church treats no Jews as warmly as it treats their mass killer, the doctor.
MAURICE YACOWAR teaches film in the English Department at the University of Calgary. His most recent book is The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television's Greatest Series (Continuum).
The Holocaust represents so many human stories - and such an ocean of anguish and moral failure - that it has always presented the filmmaker with an artistic minefield. Of course there have been spectacular cinematic triumphs addressing this most human of stories - those that somehow convey so much factual history, profound emotion, and the complex issues of morality without falling into the traps of exploitation, distortion, or just bad filmmaking. Many other cinematic efforts have tumbled into exactly these pitfalls. But two recent films are among the most ambitious, and successful, treatments of the Holocaust ever - and this, of course, is because they do their best to do the impossible.
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IT'S about time. However persuasively a film may recreate the past, it cannot relive it. So it may become an historical document of its own time, but not of the time it depicts. Both in its choice of subject and in its presentation, a period film inevitably expresses the later perspective of its author. Indeed, if an author chooses to revisit an historical incident or fiction it is because that has a compelling contemporary reference.
Thus, in 1963 Rolf Hochhuth presented his play, Der Stellvertreter (The Representative or The Deputy), perhaps the most controversial play of the last century, to explore the civilized world's - especially the Catholic Church's - complicity with the Nazis in the extermination of the Jews. In 1995 Ronald Harwood revisited the same situation and issues in his play Taking Sides, where he challenged a new generation with the question of moral choice. Now two fine film adaptations of these plays confront us anew with the hard lessons the Holocaust holds on the subject of individual responsibility. Our time is ripe for them. As the films remind us, a successful historical drama is more pressingly about the time it is made - and the time it is viewed - than just about the time in which it is set.
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THE 70-year-old Greek director Costa-Gavras titles his Hochhuth adaptation Amen. This change allows him freer use of the original material than the promise of representivity that keeping the famous title would have implied. He does not purport to portray Hochhuth's work, but acknowledges it as his source. The new title suggests he offers his film as a prayer, a mea culpa - at once a religious request and a pledge - that perhaps mankind might finally rid itself of its historic anti-Semitism, without exterminating the Jews. As a sign-off, perhaps the term suggests that this film may be the last for the director who made his first feature, The Sleeping Car Murders, way back in 1965, and who established himself as one of cinema's major consciences in such work as Z (1969), The Confession (1970), State of Siege (1973), Special Section (1975), Missing (1982), and The Music Box (1989).
In his screenplay, co-written with Jean-Claude Grumberg, Costa-Gavras carves a taut dialectic out of Hochhuth's epic text (which was usually trimmed heavily even for the stage). In effect the film presents two parallel Representatives. Hochhuth's central hero is the highborn Jesuit Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz), who battles the church's hierarchy in his futile attempt to get Pope Pius XII to speak out against the slaughter of the Jews. Hochhuth based this figure upon the Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg of the Cathedral in Berlin, who openly prayed for the Jews and was granted his request to share their fate. Extending its target beyond just the church, the film gives equal emphasis to its second Representative, the historical SS officer Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur). He was the chemist whose initial assignment to fight typhus shifted to providing the Zyklon B gas used to eradicate the Jews. From his work on water purification he is reassigned to the Nazis' project of "racial cleansing" of the Jewish "vermin." Disgusted at the slaughter of the Jews - even when only "four hundred units are to be treated" - Gerstein tries to spur church and government officials to publicize this information, in the hope that the German people would - if they knew - rise against it. But his pastor tells him the majority of Germans and of church officials approve of Hitler's initiative. So Gerstein works to sabotage the machinery of genocide, falsifying problems of leakage and contamination, and ordering huge quantities of the gas buried.
Both Representatives are religious and are idealists, to the embarrassment of their respective wealthy fathers, who are well connected to the cynical Nazi establishment. Both are unrepresentative Representatives because unlike their institutional homes and colleagues, the church and the army/government, they feel compelled to try to save the Jews. Both men are shattered to discover not just the extent of the Nazis' atrocities but the world's indifference. When the rural pastor asks Gerstein what he knows about the "awful rumours," he is not concerned about the mass murder of the Jews but the news of the German army's disastrous defeat at Stalingrad. The priest is constantly turned away by his superiors with homilies of sympathy and sorrow, but the Church will confront the Nazis only on the issue of taxes. Church officials feel they meet their moral responsibility simply by expressing their low esteem for Hitler. Each hero literally bursts out of his uniform as his humanity exceeds his office. In his first appearance, Gerstein's Nazi salute tears the sleeve on the new uniform for which he's being fitted. Our last sign of Riccardo is his cassock discovered in the pile of Jewish victims' clothing.
The film gives Gerstein a "fine German family." The stages of his nightmare discovery are marked by his wife's pregnancy, his second son's birth and development, and the older son's increasingly aggressive Nazism, despite his father's efforts at correction. The family bond intensifies Gerstein's conflict of interest, as he must balance his principles against his responsibility to his wife and children. As his wife counsels him in the bomb shelter, "You take everything too seriously. Don't forget you have a family. That's what counts. More than anything in the world." This Homeland principle is in effect countered when his father instructs him: "Don't work for the salvation of your soul, Kurt. Work for the salvation of your people." Of course, it is Germany's soul that concerns Gerstein. In contrast, the portrait of Riccardo's dead mother seems to embody the warmth, values and encouragement that his father, a high lay adviser to the church, denies.
Both heroes contrast to coldly intelligent monster superiors. Riccardo's are the Church officials like the Nuncio (Michel Duchaussoy), who refuses to hear Gerstein's evidence. They all scold him for his efforts and counsel "faith and patience" instead of action, decorum over the truth. Gerstein's immediate superior is "the doctor" (Ulrich Muhe) whose blithe cynicism and candid self-awareness are undercut by one late scene, where he rises from a tormented sleeplessness. Costa-Gavras respects Hochhuth's dehumanizing of the doctor by denying him a name. In his first scene the doctor smiles warmly as he sends a retarded girl - who turns out to be Gerstein's beloved niece - to the gas chambers. He is proud to be one of the "men who have learned to subdue their consciences." The doctor teases Gerstein about his conscience: "Don't forget your Christian mission of public utility." The doctor often jokes about "that legendary human warmth" - as if it were a mysterious aberration - and habitually admits to being "a bit of a Catholic" (the same could be said of the Pope and his officials as presented here). But neither his religion nor his knowledge of his own venality inhibit his activity. At film's end a monsignor helps the doctor escape to a medical career in Argentina, unscathed.
The doctor parts with both heroes in religious terms. He thanks the Geneva Convention ban against bombing prisoner of war camps for the security of the genocide project: "German cities are bombed, but here the heavens are empty." "The heavens are never empty," Riccardo replies, his faith unshaken even as he explains why he came to the camp: "God let his children be devoured. I want to understand why." Ultimately the docotr dispatches him: "Up the chimney with him. He'll get faster to heaven." Having first threatened Gerstein with a court martial (for forging Himmler's signature on a letter to save Riccardo), the doctor sends the traitor home to his family: "Your God will have a really hard time with you, Gerstein." For while the doctor betrayed his conscience to serve his country, Gerstein betrayed his country by acting on his principles, and his principles by acting only covertly.
Costa-Gavras doesn't pull any punches. Amen is framed by significant suicides. It opens with a Jew shooting himself at the League of Nations meeting in the hope of alerting the world to the plight of the Jews in Germany. The film ends with its two Representatives dying in forms of suicide. The priest Riccardo puts a Jewish star on his cassock after the Pope refuses to act on his direct information. Riccardo accompanies Rome's Jews to the concentration camp. He rejects both the doctor's and Gerstein's offers to save him, and dies there. Gerstein also declines opportunities to save himself, preferring to "be the eyes of God in that Hell." He is found dead in his cell, after he has turned himself in to the French occupation forces and written a detailed record of Hitler's Final Solution. But virtue can be as unrecognizable as evil. The De-Nazification Council still charges that a true Christian would have done more to prevent the slaughter. Whether Gerstein hanged himself or was hanged - by a fearful Nazi colleague or a vengeful Allied soldier - is as unclear in the film as in real life. These martyrs make the human costs of the Church's survival all the more shameful.
One intensely moving, macabre image serves as Costa-Gavras' chorus: railway freight cars churning through the night. With the doors closed the shot reads as carloads of Jews being sped to their deaths. With the doors open, admitting the dusk light under the thick black smoke, the image is more poignant still. The space stands for the people already killed - and the ones about to be carted off. As the trains shuttle back and forth, inexorably collecting ten thousand Jews a day, the world fails them. The Vatican and the US government ask each other to verify the rumours of genocide. After six months of coaxing by the Swedish government, the US decides not to admit 2,000 Jewish children from Hungary. The American ambassador explains that taking in Jewish refugees would only serve the Nazis' interests by causing a huge anti-Semitic backlash and ruining his country's economy and war effort. Nobody wants to hear or to believe Gerstein's first-hand evidence and Riccardo's Christian pleas. "We've grown accustomed to the Jews' endless moaning," a cardinal remarks.
Costa-Gavras shares Hochhuth's confidence that the Nazis' activities were known well and early in the higher reaches of religious and political authority. As lower-level clerks stay blinkered by their resolve to help their country win the war, even after defeat appears inevitable, the higher administrators turn away from the Jews. The Church and its followers showed their power when they successfully opposed the Nazis' extermination of the "unproductive" - the crippled, the retarded - but they abandoned the Jews. In his frequent diplomatic chats, the Vatican spokesman only raises the treatment of the Jews when the Nazis arrest Jews who have converted to Christianity. Even then the Pope calibrates his emphasis - "our sorrow and our anger" - and avoids even the threat of criticizing the Nazis' treatment of the Jews. By then the Nazis have lost their fear that Pius XII might rouse his 400 million Catholics against them. And when the Church does provide limited refuge, it is scrupulous to "keep the two sensibilities apart" - Jews and converts - revealing its centuries-old prejudice. The Church treats no Jews as warmly as it treats their mass killer, the doctor.
Ultimately the Nazis' guilt is inescapably bound to those whose fear or calculated self-interest enabled their success. The shared responsibility parallels the familial bond that the weeping Gerstein recalls, after he has been forced to peep into a gas chamber: "Even in death you can recognize a family. They die clinging to each other.... After death they can't be pried apart, even with hooks." The collective guilt is as unbreakable as the victims' familial love.
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The characters' greed and ineluctable responsibility are parodied in the treasure hunt Gerstein arranges for his Christmas dinner guests: "Whatever you're holding is yours." His conviviality towards the Nazis conceals his true commitment. From the party he ducks out to the kitchen to listen with Riccardo to the Pope's Christmas address, where the promised "fiery words" to support the Jews do not materialize.
When the Pope tries to assuage Riccardo's father's embarrassment, he is undercut by the pretentious image he conjures of his own suffering: from his own role the Pope knows that being a father "is a crown of thorns." He refuses to condemn the Nazis' genocide because "only moderation can honour us." For Costa-Gavras, as for Hochhuth, Pius XII's dominant fears were first that the Communist Russians might defeat Hitler and secondly that Hitler might attack the Vatican. He failed to appreciate Hitler's respect for and fear of the international force of the Catholic Church and so did not assert his authority. The Pope preserved the Church at the cost of the Jewish millions - not to mention the profound compromise of its values. When a cardinal - over a sunny lobster lunch - brushes aside Riccardo's evidence of the genocide, he assumes infallibility: "In the end, time always proves the Church right. Always." To the contemporary viewer that line rings bleakly risible.
IF the moral principle and its widespread violation are quite clear in Amen, in Taking Sides the subject is rather the radical ambivalence in making such a profound choice. Based on playwright Ronald Harwood's own screenplay, the film is directed by the Hungarian master Istvan Szabo. Szabo previously explored the theme of personal responsibility during the Nazi period in Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1984), and Sunshine (1999). Taking Sides does not clearly take a side but respects the complexity of each position.
In the Berlin of 1946, the famous German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler (Stellan Skarsgard) is interrogated by an American army major, Steven Arnold (Harvey Keitel), about his relationship with the Nazi government. Furtwangler had been Hitler's favourite conductor and enjoyed many benefits and honours, although he never joined the Nazi Party. Arnold's investigation is preliminary to the Artists Tribunal of the De-Nazification Commission considering the conductor's case to be allowed to work again.
This work's complexity lies in its refusal to give either side in the argument a clear win. If Furtwangler exploited the opportunities of being Hitler's favourite - enjoying a prestigious appointment, an opulent residence, and more beautiful women than he could shake his baton at - he has the saving grace of a lofty principle. His artistry transcends mundane citizenship:
I know that a single performance of a great masterpiece was a stronger and more vital negation of the spirit of Buchenwald and Auschwitz than words. Human beings are free wherever Wagner and Beethoven are played. Music transported them to regions where the torturers and murderers could do them no harm.
Though equating Wagner and Beethoven may raise an eyebrow - neither Germans nor Jews could feel free under Wagner - his position is confirmed by the respect paid him both by Arnold's secretary, Emmi Straube (Brigit Minichmayr), and the American Jewish soldier, Lieutenant David Wills (Moritz Bleibtreu). Wills claims his first experience of Furtwangler's Beethoven was a "... waking to a new world... where there was - an absence of misery. Ever since I first heard you, music has been central to my life. My chief comfort."
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But though the arts are a balm, they don't erase misery. The orchestras in the concentration camps were scant comfort to the gassed. This is the basis of Major Arnold's powerful rebuttal: "Have you ever smelled burning flesh? I smelt it four miles away.... You setting culture and art and music against the millions put to death by your pals?... Yes, I blame you for not getting hanged, I blame you for your cowardice. You strutted and swaggered, king-pin in a shithouse."
When the Nazis used Furtwangler and his music to gloss over the monstrous misery they promulgated, Furtwangler let himself be so used. Like the second violinist who was promoted only because the superior Jewish musicians disappeared, the maestro owed his status to the Nazis. As the second violinist (and party spy) Helmut Rode (Ulrich Tukur again) reminds us, "A conductor is also a dictator... a terrifying power who gives hope and certainty and guarantees order. I wanted to be in the Maestro's power." In both the micro and macro societies, the music served the dictatorship.
Furtwangler defends all - his self-service, his anti-Semitic utterances, his machinations, his refusal both to leave Germany and to decline to be the Nazis' glamour conductor - by citing his devotion to his art. But where Gerstein refused to leave Germany in order to fight the evil from within, Furtwangler stayed out of personal vanity and ambition - to remain Germany's premier conductor, and to thwart the upstart von Karajan.
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Nonetheless, for all the film's loathing of the Nazi government and its collaborators, Harwood and Szabo give Furtwangler the last word:
What kind of world are you going to make?... Don't you believe that music transcends language and national barriers and speaks directly to the human spirit? If you honestly believe the only reality is the physical world, you will have nothing left but feculence more foulsmelling than that which pervades your nights.
That argument survives Major Arnold's final dismissal of David's defence of the conductor: "You're a liberal piece of shit. You don't know right from wrong." In the play, Major Arnold's last words are drowned out by a recording of Furtwangler conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which Emmi and David have left at high volume to spite the major. That's another form of "the last word." But the film gives Arnold a closing postscript. He reports that he failed in his attempt to deny Furtwangler's clearance, but he takes satisfaction from the fact that Furtwangler never again performed in the United States. That consolation seems as petty as Furtwangler's pride that he did not perform for the party congress or Hitler's birthday but on the eves before.
Perhaps the conclusion of Taking Sides is that there can be no allpurpose absolute. Context is all. Furtwangler's rationalization can seem noble and persuasive, but it dwindles in the scales when Major Arnold balances it against the atrocities that the music abetted and hid. The valorizing of the arts does not extend to the self-servers who hid behind these arts, nor the monsters who adored the music of civilization - and then walked out of the concert hall to continue their work of monstrous barbarism. Conversely, the coarse and often boorish Major Arnold may have the right principles in his heart but - as he is often reminded - he diminishes both himself and his principles when he bullies others and assaults their sensibility.
Unlike Amen, Taking Sides offers us no saints. Each of the German interviewees - save the magisterial Furtwangler - takes pains to pay homage to Emmi Straube's father, who died in a heroic attempt to overthrow Hitler. When even Major Arnold joins in that illusion, Emmi erupts: "My father only joined the plot when he realized we could not win the war!"
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David Wills is an example of someone transcending his own narrow experience to embrance a wider humanity, first in his introduction to music, then in the Jew's forgiveness of the Nazis' conductor. As Wills finally defines Furtwangler, he is "like a fallen priest.... They can be inadequate human beings. They can lie, they can fornicate, they can drink, they can deceive. But they can still put God into the mouths of the faithful." Unwittingly, Wills here may also absolve Major Arnold. Despite his coarseness, he still espouses and advances the higher principle - individual responsibility. In the end, Taking Sides veers toward the brutish major's insistence on moral accountability - but not without respecting the artistic idealism of which Furtwangler is such an articulate, inappropriate, and self-serving spokesman. There is no clear and simple choice here; the film challenges us to draw our own line.
The saints in Amen, I might add, are the two men who betrayed their institutions to serve their higher purpose. How bizarre it is that Pope Pius XII, who valued his institution over so many human lives, may soon be canonized. Raising Pius XII to sainthood would blackly confirm the principle "only moderation can honour us." If Amen is a most welcome addition to that debate, Taking Sides reminds us that making art is not enough to meet one's responsibilities as a citizen or as a human being.
AS Amen reminds us of the profound roots of anti-Semitism and the dreadful toll it takes on the world's values, Taking Sides reminds us of our transcendent responsibilities as humans. Let the world learn to doubt its own re-assuring rationalizations - rationalizations that excuse inaction when cultures and lives are at risk. To such a taking of sides, let us all say, amen.
Word count: 3636
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Fall 2002
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