- Is Nazi Germany a fit subject for sympathy?
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- In the case of individuals caught up in the conflagration
of World War II's final days, three recently made films suggest that the
answer may be a careful yes.
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- Paul Verhoeven's Black Book has its Jewish-Dutch resistance
heroine falling for the humane SS chief she's sent to spy on.
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- Steven Soderbergh's The Good German is set in Allied-occupied
Berlin in 1945, exploring its morally and physically devastated population,
and corrupt US motives as the Cold War looms.
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- Reg Traviss's Joy Division, most remarkably, ignores
the Holocaust, instead following a German boy soldier in 1944 through to
his life as a Soviet spy in 1960s London, showing the experience of German
civilians as they're bombed by the British and raped by the Russians, and
the savagery an uncomprehending 14-year-old Nazi is subjected to.
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- This shift in perspective has arrived with the 21st century,
with the war's reality six decades gone. Anthony Beevor's best-selling
2002 history book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 was one catalyst. It used newly
uncovered Soviet documents to detail the Red Army's systematic rape of
almost every woman in its path, as it bludgeoned its way through East Prussia
towards Hitler's capital. The sheer horror of German civilian suffering,
and the despairing heroism of its shattered armies, was impossible to avoid,
even as Beevor fought to keep the Nazis' culpability for everything visited
on them in view.
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- British bookshelves have since groaned with similar bestsellers,
including Max Hastings's Berlin narrative, Armageddon, and Frederick Taylor's
Dresden: February 13, 1945.
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- Cinema's newly humane view of Nazi Germany's last days
began in parallel with this literature. The Austrian documentary Blind
Spot: Hitler's Secretary (2002) was the beginning, holding its camera on
Traudl Junge as she recalled happy teenage days working for kind and funny
Adolf Hitler, a man too squeamish to mention the Holocaust or see his country's
bombed ruins through his train's blacked-out windows, until the deadly
horror of the last days in the bunker, and Junge's subsequent, palpable
life-long guilt at not seeing and resisting the nightmare unfolding in
front of her.
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- Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (2004), in some ways an
adaptation of both Blind Spot and Berlin, then dwarfed both in impact.
This German film took us into the heart of the Berlin inferno, setting
us alongside ragtag German platoons as the Red Army battered them back
foot by foot toward's Hitler's lair, and the city became a hellish husk.
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- It also followed Junge in leading us inside the bunker
and making the chief Nazis' evil clammily close, by at last making them
human. Magda Goebbels's poisoning of her own children, and Hitler's hurling
of Berlin's population into a knowingly futile last stand, gave a fresh
angle on Nazi atrocities. In the final scenes of numbed Germans shuffling
through the Third Reich's ruins, this international hit also forced audiences
in Germany and elsewhere into something like sympathy for the generation
that fought for Hitler, even as it renewed our sense of its disgrace.
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- Hollywood did not follow this lead. Aside from the caricature-Nazis
of films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), its own revived interest
in World War II has come from Steven Spielberg (also the director of Raiders),
with Schindler's List (1993), then Saving Private Ryan (1998) and its television
offspring, Band of Brothers. Though the first film's only slightly sentimental
version of the Holocaust was valuable for a new generation, subsequent
tales of GIs marching through a Europe shorn of political context stimulated
only patriotic books and movies, which basked in America's part in what
Studs Terkel's 1985 book called The Good War.
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- Despite the visceral violence of its D-Day scenes, Ryan's
values and assumptions were the same as in Hollywood films made during
the war. The fact that most anti-Nazi fighting was done by Stalin's Russia,
a more efficiently cruel and brutal regime, can't find a place in this
commonly held world view, which Hollywood did so much to construct. Of
course, there have been previous British and American attempts to see humanity
in their beaten enemies, notably Sam Fuller's anti-Nazi B-movie Verboten!
(1958) and Carol Reed's The Man Between (1953), both set in Germany immediately
after the war, when the suffering of millions of the country's refugees
and its place in Cold War power plays with Russia were well understood.
Reed's footage of the icy, burnt-out Berlin that Downfall recreates, and
its orphan children, is especially unforgettable.
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- It is this morally grey world that Steven Soderbergh's
The Good German returns to, becoming the first mainstream US film to attempt
a new, radical perspective.
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- Based on Joseph Kanon's bestselling novel and starring
George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire, it is very much in Third
Man territory, with black marketeers, a missing German being hunted by
both sides of the just-starting Cold War, and the Holocaust hanging over
it all. Opening here in March, its title alone promises the ambiguity and
nuance now entering perspectives on the war.
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- Black Book, Verhoeven's grand return to the Netherlands
after time in Hollywood making films such as Basic Instinct, is in some
ways a more traditional World War II movie, a rip-roaring adventure tale
of the Dutch resistance in the final months of Nazi occupation. But Verhoeven,
who was a child at the time and has worked on the script for 20 years,
is not content just to show Dutch heroism: he vividly remembers seeing
corpses of Nazi victims left lying in the street.
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- Black Book shows Nazi atrocities, especially against
Dutch Jews, in unswerving detail. But its Jewish heroine and an SS chief
with human foibles also fall in love, and the Dutch treatment of both at
war's end is vicious. Influenced by a Dutch revisionist history book, Chris
van der Heyden's Grijs Verleden (2001), it is Verhoeven's corrective to
his own popular tale of Dutch resistance heroics, Soldier of Orange (1977).
"I wanted to show what reality was like then," he has said. "Not
black and white, but in shades of grey. That is what makes our film so
provocative. Nobody has yet shown how we treated our prisoners in 1945."
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- But it is Traviss's low-budget British film, Joy Division
that is perhaps the most daring of all. Heavily influenced by Beevor's
Berlin, it interweaves narrative strands from the 1940s, '50s and '60s,
to show the eventual moral awakening of a Hitler Youth boy turned Soviet
spy. Early scenes, of its hero as a 14-year-old brownshirt in puppy love
with his blonde neighbour, give way to his immersion in desperate streetfighting
as the Red Army enters East Prussia, where its planes strafe refugees and
his girlfriend is gang-raped. Captured by Russians, the Cold War continues
his moral numbing. But it is the scenes of German suffering, with no alleviating
context of Nazi aggression or atrocity, that are challenging and powerful.
"It was a big script originally, with Polish Jews and a concentration
camp survivor in early drafts," Traviss tells me. "In the final
version, you don't see the Wehrmacht rushing east, you don't see the Holocaust,
which I regret. But that knowledge is assumed. We're focusing on something
that hasn't been seen before: from our perspective, the darker side of
the war, where troops of our allies were not heroic. Of course there is
truth in the idea the Russians committed atrocities in revenge. But there's
also a dark side to human nature.
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- "And if you're mobilising an army over someone's
border, and there's no defence, just women and kids, then that army's dark
side may come too. I don't think all those civilians could be held accountable
for the Third Reich's crimes. The teenage characters especially had just
been born when Hitler came to power. They're innocent."
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- Traviss has a simple answer to why this new perspective
is gaining ground. "Anthony Beevor talked about how enough time had
passed to write books like his, and predicted that films would be next.
And apart from the humanist aspect of wanting to understand such suffering,
the war has been a huge part of popular culture as well, with films like
The Dirty Dozen."
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- As a genre, after Spielberg's late-'90s realist approach,
what could be next? "Well, the end of the war hadn't really been done.
The search for stories is endless. And now filmmakers have found 1945,
and found it's much richer than that Dirty Dozen stuff."
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- All these films are on delicate ground, trodden carefully
for 60 years because no one wants to let Nazi horrors become just another
bit of history, to be debated or forgotten. But in showing a fuller picture,
of humanity and atrocity on both sides, they may teach truer lessons than
the simple story of the Good War that Hollywood has told until now.
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- The Good German opened nationally on March 8. The Black
Book will be released later this year.
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