ECHOES OF THE HOLOCAUST
Bromwich, David
Albert Speer has an absorbed and patient look as he answers questions about his complicity in Hitler's war crimes, through hour after hour of Marcel Ophuls's documentary, The Memory of Justice.*...
...a more general consideration of the problem of war crimes...
...In proportion as we exalt in our imagination all who refuse the temptation to do evil, we will condemn in actual life all who submit to it...
...But no question follows...
...you have a life of your own...
...This is a useful distinction to bear in mind...
...or that the officials responsible for American conduct in Vietnam should have been, and still ought to be, tried by the precedent set at Nuremberg...
...Speer no longer sees himself as a good man, either: he knows what *1 would advise anyone interested in the film to consult Michael Walzer's New Republic essay of October 9, 1976, to which mine is an extended footnote...
...To recognize this, however, is not to argue that what happened at Nuremberg was contemptible...
...The element of human interest or anecdotage really comes to dominate his film now and then...
...Here, it seems to me, Ophuls's emphasis on character is fatal...
...The American government committed some of the worst crimes in the history of modern war, for which no one has been or is likely to be punished...
...for example, judge Speer as a character...
...Without this, it would have been a monstrous crime of passion, like other crimes of war, but still within the compass of humanity...
...he has done and the knowledge has changed him...
...It was watching a film about ARBEIT MACHT FREI inscribed on the gates of hell...
...It can't be pleasant for you to give these interviews...
...Well, you know, that's neither here • nor there...
...We are sorry for Ophuls, and regret this moment, for all it implies of his own weakness...
...Yet there are worse fates for a director: one which, perhaps, is to assemble a film four-and-a-half hours long, making a sizable claim on anyone's week, which brings confusion to minds where none existed before...
...From this we may draw one of two conclusions: that Nuremberg now looks like a piece of hypocrisy, and the Nazis should never have been punished...
...There they had known Telford Taylor, the American prosecutor at Nuremberg and a main character in the film, as one of many boring professors...
...The Nazis committed crimes that have no equal in history, for which they were punished...
...Without this, it could hardly have been on the same scale...
...The easy demonstration of Taylor's personal limits is preferred to a clear-headed examination of the justness of what he believes...
...We feel that we are being driven slightly beyond the limits of our own experience: we do not know quite what to make of what we find on the other side...
...Nuremberg, he would then be saying, was, like other human strivings to represent the ideal justice in this world, an imperfect effort...
...But, myself, I think there is something inhuman in its scale...
...A review such as this ought not to give the impression that Ophuls has made a silly or unworthy film...
...They did, for the American medic in Vietnam, Eddie Sowder, when he saw another medic shut off the blood-transfusion valve for a wounded Vietnamese, and, rather than stay in order and let the man die, knocked down the other medic and turned the valve back on...
...This is a splendid illustration of what is meant by cant...
...We are asked to accept the director's honesty with his material as a perfect substitute for sound reasoning about his subject...
...As he contrasts Vietnam with Nuremberg he is apt to sound hair-splitting...
...To do so doubtless would have offended the more cautious or genteel among those interviewed, and denied us much of value that they do say...
...Yet he lived happily under Hitler's regime, did as he was told, played his part, and profited by it...
...Yet Ophuls's film, while observing it clearly in the case of Speer, allows it to blur when faced with less obviously repentant characters...
...And then Ophuls encourages him to play a sample of the military music he composes in his spare time...
...Long before the Jews were murdered, it had all been said in my buildings...
...Had they engaged in a war against Europe, in which the Jews, numbered with other enemies and fighting for life, were slaughtered as a matter of sport, so that even unarmed Jews found themselves the victims of unaccountable reprisals—had they done this, the Nazis would have secured their place among the villains of the ages, but they would not have been what they were, or have been tried at Nuremberg...
...Justice in this sense resides not only in the punishment of those who do evil but also in the sympathetic identification with those who do good...
...The cause of this may lie in some measure in that history of the emotions which is a part of history itself...
...When it does, the spectator's sense of the absurd naturally gets the better of him...
...Speer's reply to this brings us to a dead stop...
...While such feelings remain human there will be nothing essentially arbitrary about the idea of justice...
...and ari autobiography, offered as a defense of the film-maker's vocation...
...In making a film at all about the Holocaust, and revealing to us the depths of our own feelings, Ophuls has done a service...
...And yet there was giggling: at accounts of the jokes told by Goering during the trials, at the halfsenile ignorance of an unregenerate Nazi peasant and the shamelessness of the thriving ex-Nazi higher-ups, at Telford Taylor with his reasons and scruples and military music...
...I can't stop being a witness...
...It is merely to see Nuremberg as one necessary effort among others to achieve an ideal justice that must remain beyond us...
...Why do people giggle at horrors depicted on film...
...But the audience at The Memory of Justice was intellectual and predominantly Jewish...
...In his way he was a hero, as much as any lawyer in modern history...
...I WENT to The Memory of Justice with three lawyers who had been to Columbia Law School...
...His selfknowledge is too far removed from ours...
...that between madness and method...
...He errs by trying to do too much: yet much of what he records at any rate is fascinating...
...We cannot...
...But it needs to be said that Daniel Ellsberg, who in some quarters has been rated the holy idiot of the film, is admirably steady in his adherence to the second view...
...But my own experience at the film, which I shall relate, leads me to think that it will not reach those who were meant to receive it...
...Why do you go on...
...I believe that this is, in fact, an accurate summary of Ophuls's intended moral, and the only possible explanation of the film's structure: why it closes as it opened with Plato-Menuhin, why the personal element is stressed almost as a confession of bias, why, above all, the tone is so insistently 97 and resolutely gentle...
...The planning and precision with which the final solution was conceived, the directed skill with which it ground through its 96 days, alone made it a premeditated crime of the most awful magnitude, and was sufficient to condemn to death those who enforced it...
...Such moments—there are many of them in Ophuls's film—affect us in an unfamiliar way...
...This is the moral, and it is a fine one...
...Yet Taylor was an actor in history, who answered the demands of a most difficult time, and carried moral weight when it had to be carried...
...Here then is a troubling situation...
...Ophuls, with Menuhin, may have wanted to suggest our fall from a state in which justice, like the other pure ideas, had nothing to do with approximation or compromise or dissenting opinion...
...And Speer replies: "It's in this sense, I suppose, that I'm still Hitler's prisoner...
...He is offering to trace out the very root of his convictions on Vietnam and Nuremberg...
...Having lived through the most fearful of events we are less than ever inclined to be grave...
...q 98...
...They must for all of us, when we contemplate a possible act of courage "lived up to," or a risk taken for a principle other than selfinterest...
...And we note with interest that most of those who resort to this particular sentiment in this context are exNazis...
...To begin with, Taylor is a man of rather dry temperament...
...We laugh at the disparity between our will and our reach, between what we would be and what we are...
...that between charity and justice...
...We are angry with Speer because he does not satisfy our need to see a bad man, and because we have to believe him: someone so conscientious cannot be without a conscience...
...Nevertheless, some of the blame must be laid at Ophuls's feet...
...Ophuls finally asks...
...But there was every chance to perform the second and more illuminating task...
...Why was the tendency so strong to go on seeing in him only the boring professor...
...These different films crowd each other out, and disappoint each other's aims...
...The Memory of Justice carries an epigraph from Plato, and its final statement, again by Menuhin, has Platonic overtones: "I believe that ideally judgment should come from within the individual...
...Albert Speer has an absorbed and patient look as he answers questions about his complicity in Hitler's war crimes, through hour after hour of Marcel Ophuls's documentary, The Memory of Justice.* "What makes you do this...
...And, now that gravity is regarded as a token of the inflexible or unresponsive character, we have a theory to license our antinomianism, and may the more safely laugh on occasions which seem to require anything but laughter...
...These two views are among those that Ophuls allows to blur together...
...What do you think, now," Ophuls asks, "of the architecture you designed for the Third Reich...
...In college I used to hear without shock the cheers of right-wing students, when—in To Die in Madrid, for example— the faces of Franco and Mussolini appeared on screen...
...Andy Warhol told me he admired my work tremendously...
...After all, I was there...
...At this we stand back, and wonder a little...
...Some other distinctions are lost along the way, as: that between atrocity and genocide...
...Ophuls has taken it on himself to compile several films at once: an account of Nuremberg with the added evidence of the past 30 years...
...In his role as interviewer, Ophuls does at times contradict them, but never roundly or quickly enough...
...We hear a great deal, in the second half of The Memory of Justice, about the war America fought against Vietnam—as compared with the war Nazi Germany fought against Europe, in which the extermination of the Jews made an episode...
...It is a Jewish musician, Yehudi Menuhin, who says—his soul straining heavenwards as he utters a sigh and gives a noble shrug of his shoulders—"I proceed on the assumption that every human being is guilty...
...They did, for the exiled German actor Kortner, when he found himself able to say that the destruction of the German cities hurt him as much as Hitler's victories...
...But it happens in life that the two are seen to coincide, and The Memory of Justice shows us some of the times when they do...
...We are in the end convinced of what we thought at the start...
...Taylor at one point says that his estimate of the American people has changed more since 1945 than his estimate of the German people...
...We can, however, judge him as a moral agent: we know what he did...
Vol. 24 • January 1977 • No. 1
