Kate Williams says that Tarantino’s reduction of Nazi atrocities to entertainment is part of a dangerous trend in which the great evils of history become show business
One of this summer’s big screen openings is Quentin Tarantino’s hyperbolic battle movie, Inglourious Basterds. Featuring Brad Pitt demanding his men search for ‘100 Nazi scalps’, this ironic shootfest is bloody, explosive, rowdily entertaining — and a fantasy. ‘You haven’t seen war,’ screams the trailer, ‘until you have seen it through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino.’ As the pound falls and Germany under Merkel is resurgent, 2009 is the year in which our representations of the Third Reich and the second world war have turned towards areas that we would have seen as excessive only a few years back.
At a time when we are seemingly more obsessed with Hitler than ever, Tarantino has released an historical film in which history is irrelevant. Now, when most of those who fought in the 1940s are dead, the war is becoming not so much a memory, but a series of images, as fit for creative revision and ridicule as the Boleyn sisters and Henry VIII.
‘We are going to laugh at Hitler,’ declared Max Falk, the manager of the Admiral Theatre in Berlin, on the first staging of Mel Brooks’s musical The Producers in May. German audiences had never been exposed to a goose-stepping Hitler singing ‘Heil Myself’ and dancing stormtroopers. For Falk, the production was a ‘great step forward for Germany’.
Brooks’s tale of two New Yorkers creating the most tasteless musical possible in order to fleece their backers is a piquant comment on modern culture. The weighty seriousness of films focusing on the victims of the Holocaust such as Schindler’s List and Sophie’s Choice seems a thing of the past.
Now, if seriousness is present at all, it is confined to examining the roots of evil — and even excusing those who committed the atrocities. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (2004), evoking the intimate life of Hitler’s bunker, made audiences weep across Europe, and this year we have watched Kate Winslet as a former Auschwitz officer in The Reader, Tom Cruise as a would-be assassin of Hitler in Valkyrie, and Viggo Mortensen as a liberal professor seduced by the Third Reich in Good. Arguably the most important American literary novel of 2009 so far is Jonathan Littell’s attempt to write as a SS officer in The Kindly Ones, winner of the Prix Goncourt in France.
Less successful was Fugitive Pieces, the film of Anne Michaels’s sensitive portrayal of living in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The novel won the 1997 Orange Prize but society and culture have altered much in the past ten years. Now we have Tarantino showing Hitler shrieking — and that wins profit and prizes.
All this comes when Germany is changing. Recent surveys suggest that the country’s youth are putting guilt behind them. The old prohibitions against its troops are over, there are thousands of German soldiers in Afghanistan, and Germany is lobbying for a seat on the UN Security Council.
Germans themselves make films about other aspects of their long and fascinating history, such as The Lives of Others, and the forthcoming biopic of Goethe. But the English-speaking world is more obsessed with the Third Reich than ever. Whether we show SS officers as decent men caught up in an inhuman system, or evil and deserving of death as in Inglourious Basterds, Nazis win column inches and awards.
Theodor Adorno argued that artists should not represent the Holocaust because the very act of turning such horrors into art would confer upon them elegance — and mask the true terror. If art enables moral relativism, this is particularly true for films, which require likeable protagonists with which the audience can sympathise. Good, the title of C.P. Taylor’s 1981 play, was ironic: Professor Halder believed himself a decent man when he was a self-obsessed coward. The film was less ambivalent. Mortensen plays, as the publicity declared, a ‘devoted father’, a decent man convincing himself that the Third Reich is harmless.
Ricky Gervais might have told Kate Winslet that the way to win an Oscar was by playing a part in a Holocaust film, but it is as a sympathetic SS officer that ‘seriousness’ really awaits. The Reader works to attract compassion to Hanna Schmitz by showing her as illiterate. But does this imply that if she could read, she would not have committed such atrocities? It has been argued that Schmitz was based on Hermine Braunsteiner — a brutal officer accused of murder and rape — and more than able to read. Littell’s eagerness to show the horrors of war means that the soldiers are increasingly glorified — and he attributes perverse scatological sexual fantasies to his protagonist, Max Aue, to establish his depravity. This reveals a distinctly American preoccupation with sexual probity: dubious sex acts are more indicative of evil than policies of death.
No human can be entirely unlikeable or perpetually cruel. George Steiner struggled with the paradox that lovers of Beethoven could be brutal killers, and Gitta Sereny, biographer of Speer, admitted to finding him appealing. Art needs heroes and villains, and Littell castigates Eichmann as a crazed obsessive, determined to gas the Jewish population, whereas honest Speer wanted them only to work. This is to elide the death rates and the cruelty of the camps, and indeed their very illegality.
Directors and authors suggest that if we understand why ‘ordinary’, home-loving men and women participated in an evil regime, then we will guard ourselves against doing the same. They wish us to engage with the question, as in The Reader, of ‘what would you do?’ But this ignores those Germans who refused to participate — and teeters towards pandering to Holocaust deniers and the rise of neo-Nazi movements. Rather than understanding the nature of evil, we may come to excuse those who commit it.
And now we have Inglourious Basterds, vehemently promoted and polarising the critics. To the accompaniment of pumping rock music, Pitt shouts the importance of ‘murder, torture, intimidation and terror’ as he encourages his Jewish-American troops to scour occupied France for ‘the German’ and leave him ‘disembowelled, dismembered, disfigured’. ‘The German has no humanity,’ he declares, in a film that has much in common with a violent computer game. War is a joke, thrilling but ultimately empty entertainment.
When The Producers opened in Berlin, the complaints about the Nazi insignia on the marketing were dismissed as the last oversensitive gasp of an older generation. Those who find the Holocaust more painful than entertaining are seen as the old guard.
If no one is affected and worrying about guilt is passé, then everything is up for revision. What can be next — a film acclaiming Nazi doctors for their work on genetics? Or Brad Pitt as Speer, sensitive family man battling a brutal system? Now that SS officers are highly profitable Hollywood ‘booty’ — as Pitt’s character shouts in Inglourious Basterds — you can bet it’s only a matter of time.
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