Berlin Dispatch. 7.

The Berlinale is usually a place where you can get current on screen and television treatment of the Nazi era. So far I haven't seen the period as a subject for a dramatic features even though the market (EFM)  headquarters this year, the Martin Gropius Bau, is next door to the old Gestapo headquarters, which has been converted into a makeshift museum of Nazi atrocities. A real museum devoted to the same subject will be built there eventually.

Germany's uneasiness with the past was the subject of a feature documentary destined for television, The Unknown Soldier: What Did You Do in the War, Dad? and a British doc, KZ. The first documentary, by Michael Verhoeven, examines the role of the German army (Wehrmacht) in the atrocities and extermination campaigns of the Nazis.

Since the war, the prevailing story has been that the army was filled with ordinary citizens doing their duty, like any other soldiers, fighting when they were required to, mostly just trying to survive. Yet volumes of scholarship now show that the Wehrmacht was an integral part the Nazi campaign against "Jewish Bolshevism," and that Wehrmacht soldiers were crucial to roundups of Jews, executions of Jews and prisoners, mass killings and other war crimes, especially on the Eastern Front. These are what we now call uncomfortable truths for German veterans and their millions of descendants, and for the politicians who make careers on telling these constituencies what they want to hear. The Unknown Soldier looks at how these truths have divided German society since the debate over the army's role in the war (and its presumed innocence) began some 25 years ago.

For some context, a movie like Das Boot represents the prevailing opinions, with non-ideological German sailors just trying to survive and return home with their friends. The assumption is that all soldiers are alike, all armies are alike. The Unknown Soldier tells the other story.

At the market screening which I attended last Saturday, since the film was not part of any of the festival's official programs, fewer than five people were in the large screening room. Had they just tired of seeing Nazis murdering Jews again and again? Last year at the Berlinale, when a marathon-length documentary of the Goebbels diaries was shown, and the German directors explained the absence of any reference to the Shoah by saying that they would just have had to use the same stock footage again, we saw an unfortunate example of Holocaust fatigue resulting in the omission of some crucial information. They also admitted that Goebbels had visited Auschwitz. One of the aims of The Unknown Soldier was to ensure that these truths are at the core of the story.

As always, the soldiers themselves give some of the best testimony. As happened in the US in the late 19th and early 20th century, when bystanders who formed the huge crowds at public lynchings took photographs of those killings as souvenirs, Wehrmacht soldiers photographed themselves and their friends rounding up Jews and humiliating them. They also took pictures of piles of bodies and of firing squads shooting groups of Jews who were standing in the mass graves that they had just dug. The Wehrmacht photographs which were distributed so widely among family and friends were documenting a practice and a policy that the Nazis wanted to keep secret in the West. Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, ordered that no more pictures be taken, but enough of the evidence was already out there so it could not keep from surfacing. Film was taken of children being separated from their parents by Wehrmacht soldiers.

Veterans and their children say that no such atrocities happened at the hands of ordinary grunts, but that the SS did the ideological killing, as was assumed. Other soldiers who witnessed Wehrmacht massacres say otherwise. As we have come to expect, mountains of documentation won't do much to persuade people who chose to believe otherwise. Believing, after all, is seeing. The shrine of the Unknown Soldier, wherever it may be, whether in Washington or in Paris or in Berlin, is a monument that reaffirms the belief in the citizen-soldier just serving his country, the belief that we, as citizens, would not commit atrocities. (It dates from the early 20th century, especially from the grim fact of modern war fought by huge armies; the remains of many thousands soldiers in the killing fields of World War I could not be identified.)

Ronald Reagan laid a wreath in 1985 on the grave of the unknown soldier in Bitburg Cemetery, where thousands of SS were buried. He was told by historians, Auschwitz survivors and all sorts of reasonable people that these soldiers were not worthy of honor, but Reagan went to Bitburg and laid his wreath nonetheless, making a pro forma nod to Holocaust victims when word got out that the cemetery contained the graves of Waffen SS veterans, some of whom were responsible for the massacre of US prisoners during the Battle of the Bulge.

As the years ago by, war criminals who are not held accountable, like Henry Kissinger, become venerable old men. Films like The Unknown Soldier make sure that the crimes and those who committed them are not forgotten, even if those who committed them are our grandparents. The audience who watches these films can decide whom they'll honor.

In another film that played in the Berlinale market, KZ, Rex Bloomstein looks at Mautthausen, a Nazi concentration camp in Austria that has become a tourist site - not a Disney-fied family entertainment destination on the American model, but a tourist site just the same with a bar (the Inn at the KZ, or concentration camp) that has a band and dancing. The landscape is stunning, mute as a guide tells you that thousands of prisoners were marched here from death camps in the East, and thousands died from exposure to the winter cold.

Mautthausen was a horrific place, like all the camps were, but it has some special characteristics. Prisoners were forced to work in a quarry there, which involved carrying stone up a long steep staircase. Many died from that work. Prisoners at the large camp in the countryside were also outsourced to local farms and homes, where they worked as slaves. Townspeople who watched those prisoners walk to and from the camp couldn't say they didn't know what was going on. There is plenty of photographic documentation, yet Bloomstein chooses to focus on today, so we don't see archival images or the staircase of death.

KZ, which also played at Sundance, has a different expositional approach than The Unknown Soldier, a different perspective on the burden of accountability for future generations in Austria, where the official view of the country that welcomed Hitler is that it was a victim of the Nazis. We begin to see things differently when the young Austrian tour guide who looks like a concentration camp survivor turns out to be the grandson of an SS officer. The young man volunteered to work at the camp. Atonement, finally?

Posted by dwhudson at February 14, 2006 12:00 PM