Clean & Dirty Germans & Politics

...This single American critic surely represents many more, to whom the consequences of Von Braun's contributions to science and technology—in Germany and the United States—are matters of responsibility not quite made academic by any fanatic devotion to the cause of scientific progress...

...set that by 1958 Variety headlined as FILMS' NEW NICE-NASTY NAZIS...

...To make this one, there had to be some reliance on the familiarity of the figure of the non-political German, working with mixed, but finally faithful feelings for Nazi purposes and victories...

...The Hollywood studios seem to have been unusually responsive to State Department hints about the political importance of the feelings of an overseas audience—perhaps because the commercial importance of this particular audience has increased in the changing economics of the industry...

...I n Fraulein (1958), the dilemma and travail of the German civilian during and after the war is represented in terms of romantic sex, using some remarkable symbolism—the more significant, without doubt, if it is not deliberate...

...Similarly, the German U-Boat cap-* tain (Curt Jurgens) of The Enemy Below (1958) nostalgically recalls the "other" 1914-18 war as the "good" war, when it was possible to be patriotic without politics—again personified by the single Nazi fanatic (Kurt Krueger) apparently carried by all German ships as standard equipment...

...In the process, issues of why we fought at all tend to be ignored, minimized, or deliberately despised as unworthy of military concern...

...A kindly Negro corporal (James Edwards) erases the classification of common prostitute—unquestionably unjust—from her records...

...One film, produced by an Italian company with an international cast, significantly places .an American (Van Heflin) in the principal role of a latter-day Von Luckner...

...One hastily made dramatization, the American Operation Eichmann (1961), was banned by the West German Film Censorship Board as "oversimplified...

...The whole point is that he can pass for an American—first among G.I.s in a prison stockade, then in a party .of Germans infiltrating American lines during the Battle of the Bulge...

...The non-villainous or non-political German is a curious, recurrent figure of recent American films...

...For a complex of political, economic, and psychological reasons that are as effective as any official directives for propaganda strategy, a pattern came to be...

...The young Wehrmacht soldier (John Gavin), struggling for a few shares of happiness with his bride (Lilo Pulver) amid the wreckage of Berlin, does make choices...

...The tone makes all the difference, of course, between this scene from The Desert Fox (1951) and so many similar scenes in the antienemy films of the war years, in which patently villainous officers boasted of victories we in the audience knew would never be won...

...Once defeated, they could be looked upon with affection—magnifying the victory, to be sure, in praising the vanquished...

...Any doubts about his activities for the Nazis are finally confronted with the overriding need, in the cold war over missile technology and space exploration, to match the Russians' captured German scientists with some of our own...

...Not a small part of the background against which the trial must be viewed—and its justice or expediency measured— is made up of the "Nice-Nasty" pattern of presenting Germans in movie fiction, that became so striking a design of the decade...

...The gradually brutalized German of the novel, however, becomes a curiously clean romantic, committed to bloodletting as Accessary to progress—until he is confronted by the debris of defeat...

...Such esteem would be commendable, and at its worst only wistfully boyish over manly games, if it were not for the unanswered, and largely unasked questions of morality in practice...

...The British, to begin with, enthusiastically specialize in movies about triumphant ingenuity, stifflipped gallantry under fire, and nervy prison-camp escapes...

...The immense effort was surely intended to make propaganda: to tell the story of the Nazi horror to so many who had forgotten, and to so many more who had never known...

...This may be tactically expedient, continuing that part of the publicity campaign for military rocketry and space exploration that has pushed Von Braun to newspaper, magazine, and television celebrity...

...Wir Wunderkinder— 1958), and The Bridge (1960...

...or they exist only rhetorically —and all the individuals and millions of our dead were struck down by abstractions...

...The search for benign Sea Devils seems to beset the triumphant Allies a few years after each Gotterdammerung...

...American movies about the Germans have been even more romantically generous—and ideologically confusing—than the British, under pressures that have been somewhat more obvious and direct...

...And on screen, making allies of the Germans is no easier than elsewhere...

...Following the general plan of Irwin Shaw's novel, the story of the German soldier (Marlon Brando) is played against that of two different Americans (Montgomery Clift and Dean Martin...

...They fight because they must, and other reasons, involving votes and choices and notions of right and wrong, are carefully made academic...

...But the film provides what inevitably is no more than a minor gloss upon what is principally a massive production of documentary realism...

...For, to admire the Germans' military prowess—or their peacetime regenerative power—is no more difficult than to admire ourselves, for having been superior in battle and strategically magnanimous in victory...

...These operations are carried out with a minimum of bloodshed and with some deliberately unpolitical humanity—including consideration for a pregnant Jewish woman and her agonized husband...

...Politics by MARTIN S. DWORKIN Six YEARS after victory in Europe and the trials at Nuremberg, there was a scene in a movie, made from a British book by an American company, in which Field Marshal Rundstedt (Leo G. Carroll) complained to Field Marshal Rommel (James Mason) about the Allied landings in Normandy...

...Of even greater delicacy in the game of reconstructing enemies by recreating them is the problem of the German girl...

...The soldiers, the ordinary decent Germans, are not to blame...

...Within the pattern there is some variation, as, for example, between British and American films—reflecting, among other things, hallowed differences in national style or temperament...

...But they are simply and comfortably redrawn, to distinguish between the black imperatives of those who care about a cause—be it Nazi or not—and the white triumphs or noble defeats of those who do their unquestioned duty for the unquestionable right...

...The good and true German doing his patriotic duty in World War II sometimes shows that his true loyalties lie with the old Imperial Germany—not, notably, with any attempt at democracy that may have intervened before Hitler...

...Doing one's duty, the supreme military virtue, reinforces politics precisely because it insists that politics are irrelevant...

...A host of movie heroes has made propaganda for the civilized, deadly amorality of his career, first in developing the most indiscriminately destructive of Nazi weapons, and later in serving his relentless ambitions well enough in serving his captors well...

...But he is out to sink it only because he is doing what he has to do, " . . . like that German captain down there...

...They are either real people—hence, the very ones we try to heroicize...

...But turning old enemies into friends is something other than boasting of old battles...

...T h e enemy submarine might be the very one that torpedoed the freighter carrying his own wife...

...The recurring separations of the regular military acting under orders and the believers-in-uniform fighting for this truth or that carry certain ironies involving the attitudes of civilians on questions of responsibility...

...However, the contrasts and parallels suggested in the book are blurred and erased because the character of the German in the film has been sentimentalized...

...Of course, there were more immediate fruits of victory in fraternizing with the women of the vanquished than in perpetuating grudges...

...The inevitable Nazi political officer (Lyle Bettger) who is aboard as first mate is clearly more villainous than the somewhat unsavory British pursuers...

...This film, an eloquently detailed, if compressed and selective survey of the Nazi epoch, was produced originally (by Erwin Leiser) to inform German youth about a history evaded or distorted by most of their elders...

...We might accept the film itself as providing the missing platform, if it did not move so pointedly to exculpate Von Braun...

...But to turn wartime Germans into movie heroes, with whom we can associate our sympathies, requires either an unthinkable repudiation of ourselves, for having been their adversaries, or some alteration of the past, to make it all seem right...

...again...

...His appearance is the more puzzling when seen simultaneously with those more numerous, familiar images of evil and enmity of the old war films endlessly unreeling on television...

...They despise all ideological considerations, which soil the military purities of warfare with civilian concerns...

...There also could be a confident assimilation of elements of traditional movie liturgies, celebrating the dedicated quest after this grail or that: the fastest racing car, the secret of the sound barrier, the unique danceband sound—all sacred, all offering success and salvation and immortality, with a marriageable White Goddess usually nearby to provide earthly emoluments...

...But the character and situation are imagined on a plane of childish fantasy, culminating in a scene of magic sentimentalism...

...The Von Braun of this film (Curt Jurgens), for all the futurism of his monomania for space travel, is a familiar figure on screen...

...The U.S...

...The hero finally shoots his compatriots, and delivers a dying exhortation to the effect that the good Germans have been misled by evil men, and that they must never shout "Heil Hitler...

...But in continuing the imagery of the good German of the past as outside politics, and the good scientist of the present as outside responsibility, the film argues for a future of little meaning...

...The hero (Van Johnson) mercifully does not speak with an accent...

...The surge of documentary and dramatized rehearsals of the Nazi era —including the Eichmann trial— may be in rebuttal to what was said and left unsaid about the past for the last decade and longer...

...One way of defining his lack of sympathy for or contact with the contemporary Nazi politics of Germany is of particular interest...

...But the true spirit of the film overflows in vast CinemaScope-Color shots that frame the heroine's wholesome charms against the story-book Rhineland landscape...

...The German as Americanized good-guy may be carried even further, as in The Last Blitzkrieg...

...As in so many films of the 1950s, audiences are presented with an archly ambiguous German, whose wartime enmity is shown to have been no more than accidental...

...A little commercial psychology may be involved, too, in raising the ghosts of the gallant Count Von Luckners and Baron Von Richthofens of the books, movies, and radio programs of another era of romanticized enemies after victory...

...The figure of the critic, however he may comprise symbolically a multitude of actual and potential objectors, is given prominence and access to the most powerful instruments of public persuasion in a way that has been denied to dissenters...

...The girl (Dana Wynter) is plainly a piece of pure, pretty flotsam in a sea of vicissitudes...

...They may wear Nazi insignia, being Germans in uniform...

...In subtle or obvious ways, careful distinctions are made among the enemies— not so clearly between the "Germans" and the "Nazis" as between the "soldiers" and the "politicians...

...Politics, dirty civilian politics, brought on the defeat— if not the war itself...

...Two of the most powerfully realized sequences in the film are those of the battle of the Jewish boy (Clift) against the vicious anti-Semites in his own company, and of the discovery of a German concentration camp, crowded with decaying wrecks of humanity, during the last days of the war...

...Throughout, it is the Americans who see her for her true inner virtue, and in the end it is they who wave the wands to work her rehabilitation...

...And German women, representing only another nationality of universally sacred, innately decent femininity and motherhood, had rarely been depicted in images of villainy—even in the most partisan propaganda productions during the war...

...But they are not involved in "politics...

...To make one at all is not an act of impartiality, on issues so perfectly connecting responsibilities for the past, loyalties in the present, and anxieties over the future...

...It would seem that the most accessible villains would be the Nazis—as they were in, our own hortatory films during the war...

...In most of these films, it isn't the humanity or dignity of the erstwhile enemy that is being stressed, in order to decry the total hatreds of the years of conflict, or to depict the futilities or stupidities of war—as in The Bridge on the River Kwai...

...In some vague way, this reluctant enemy turned even more reluctant spycommando may be supposed to personify the doubts and conflicting loyalties of those Germans who were not involved in the politics of the Nazis, and not party to their perfidies and inhumanities...

...And because these films have to sell their images of Germans to Americans first of all, and will always be American productions to the Germans, it is no surprise to see the Germans on screen bearing careful resemblances to Americans...

...This is the point of the scene, and of the whole film...

...and the West German The Devil's General (1955), The Last Ten Days (Der Letzte Akt—1955), Aren't We Wonderful...

...plainly, he ought to have been on our side all along—as he is now...

...But the telling also had to be counter-propaganda— less against resurgent Nazism than against recurrent inclinations of the victors themselves to separate the Germans from their politics...

...Here and there, some sharp commentary on aspects of German character is interpolated 1hy director Henry Koster...

...Field Marshal Rommel of the African desert and Normandy, Admiral Canaris of naval intelligence, Captain Langsdorff of the raiding Admiral Graf Spee, General Kreipe of the garrison on Crete, and scores of others, real and fictional, are presented with chivalrous admiration and generous sympathy...

...For another complex of reasons, the reaction, including what by early 1961 Variety was noting as a N EW 'NAZI BEAST' FILM CYCLE, at first emphasized documentary realism, rather than dramatized rebuttal, using rediscovered newsreel and official footage, in addition to photographs and documents—as in the television presentation of the Winston Churchill memoirs, The Valiant Years, the numerous presentations of background of the Eichmann trial, and the Swedishmade Mein Kampf (1960...

...His true loyalty, and his destiny, lie with his comrades in combat, who are celebrated in a manner barely reminiscent of All Quiet on the Western Front...

...The Eichmann trial was managed to be publicized via all possible means of, mass information—including films, for theater and television showing...

...Carroll and Mason appear as Germans, wearing Nazi eagles...

...The black enemies and white heroes of wartime certainties are still opposed...

...The two generals in The Desert Fox are not Nazi...

...That the dreadful images of the film have been seen by great numbers of stunned, perplexed Germans surely justifies its making...

...The device of introducing one American (James Daly) who is bitterly critical, first as an army officer and then as a television commentator, actually compounds the ambiguity, adding a falsity the more ominous as it is obviously not intended...

...An even kinder American major (Mel Ferrer), whom she had saved from capture during the war, is just in time to waft her towards America and an American happy ending...

...and political soldiers, of course, are no soldiers at all...

...It may require an imaginative wrench, and a renovation of memory, that the movie makers are less able to manage gracefully than can professional adepts at realpolitik...

...The presentation of wartime Germans in postwar movies surely reaches an apogee in / Aim at the Stars (1960), dramatizing the career of Wehrner Von Braun...

...The heroes of The Young Lions (1958) and The Last Blitzkrieg (1958) are more complex, because they do ask questions...

...But / Aim at the Stars, in many ways a culmination of its kind, makes plain that more than even the most dreadful past is still at stake...

...It is surely pukka British to rehearse, in The One That Got Away (1958), the damned good show put on by one conspicuously unpolitical German, Luftwaffe Lieutenant Von Werra, in escaping from such connoisseurs of escape—in one exploit all the way back to Germany from Canada...

...Based on the memoirs of Captain (now Admiral) Bernhardt Rogge, Under Ten Flags (I960) recourits the remarkably successful operations of a German surface raider masquerading as a merchant ship of many nationalities, against the concerted might of the British Navy, directed from the Admiralty in London by the shaggiest sea dog of them all (Charles Laughton...

...If it were not for interference from political generals in Berlin, he said, he would show the invaders of Festung Europa " . . . what a German general can do...

...Since the mid-1950s, a sizable production of American films has been devoted largely or even primarily to favorable depiction of Germans during and after the war...

...As David ages, Goliath grows...

...While rejecting the opportunity to join the corrupt, pathological Nazi elite, he is hardly more than a spectator of the desperate life of the anti-Nazis in hiding, represented by his old schoolteacher (played by Remarque himself...

...The Young Lions may be the most elaborate attempt to represent the ordinary German at war in terms of direct comparison with his counterparts on the Allied side...

...Having had some old-time decency instilled in her by her father, a professor of Greek, she is able to survive being orphaned and bombed-out, mauled by lascivious Russians, embroiled by profiteers and white slavers, and rejected by her fiance, an embittered, crippled, totally defeated Nazi...

...An essential ingredient of this continued celebration, he might add, is the glorified German antagonist...

...What distinguishes the good Germans from the bad Nazis is not simply politics, unbecoming to patriots and soldiers, but degrees of American appearance and mannerism—ranging from John Wayne and Van Johnson to John Gavin and Marlon Brando...

...It is not inappropriate that Brando's characterization amounts to a vulgarized American version of a Teutonic hero, tricked out in a blinding blond coiffure and an impossibly fictitious accent...

...The contrast, in Sink' the Bismarck (1959), between the gallant, resourceful regular naval captain and the fanatic favorite of the Fuehrer who happens to be an admiral, is by now so multiplied a cliche of war movies that any truth or point in the matter is fatally exaggerated...

...That so many Germans, and so many others everywhere, see them unprepared can only condemn its timing...

...Any questions about his aiming at the stars from our side are overwhelmed by the success of the Sputniks from the other side...

...In ways often refined and elaborated, it is the point of almost all American and British films —but, significantly, of only a few French and even fewer Russian films —since the old shooting war ended and the new political war began...

...The fundamental issues of the Nuremberg trials—and the Eichmann case— would seem to be most often judged irrelevant, at the least, before the romantic tribunals of popular melodrama...

...After admitting so much as unforgivable, the film presents an exigent present and a hopeful future to make it all forgettable...

...But the film intended them to be believed in their dutiful optimism and to be accorded a subtle sympathy because they would not win, after all...

...The captain (John Wayne) of the German freighter in The Sea Chase (1955) sustains his resolution to outr u n the British fleet, from Australia to the North Sea, by adverting to the code of honor of the old Fatherland and the Imperial Navy—while an admiring not-so-Nazi spy (Lana Turner) offers unique encouragement...

...Any film about Von Braun would have to take sides...

...A new enemy must be found in the old war, against whom we can imagine the ordinary, good, lawabiding Germans united with us— however fiercely and bloodily we may have fought...

...Soldiers or sailors are the heroes, and politicians the villains...

...But "the Nazis" can turn out to be embarrassingly specific, or vacantly general...

...The response may also point up the indeterminate impact of the Germans' own bitterly self-critical films—including the East German The Murderers Are Among Us (1947), Marriage in the Shadows (1947), and The Blum Affair (1949...

...destroyer captain (Robert Mitchum) who is pitted against the noble German goes even further in eschewing not only politics but all personal feelings about the war...

...As he looks on, the nobly sentimental American major sees what many Americans want to see, so long and long enough after the war: a fraulein now so purified of politics as to make nostalgia uncomplicated, against a background of a tourist-poster Germany...

...In a way, the film of Erich Maria Remarque's novel, A Time to Love and A Time to Die (1958), tries to hold up the paradox as a light upon the German character...

...But the logic of loyalty to the Junker code obviously demands that there be no treason against any evil, so long as it wears a German uniform...

...There is no equivocation about Nazis here—whether in the American army or among the Germans...

...The decent Germans with whom we are supposed to associate vicariously are made to have as little use for politics as our own G.I.s or Tommies...

...An Australian critic, Allen Boase, remarking that " . . . the war film of Britain has its Hollywood counterpart in the Western," goes on to complain that "World War II has been converted into a grand adventure story with the British serviceman always shown in a heroic light...

...As melodrama, some form of exaggeration would be inevitable— even in this case...

...But the unfilmed fact is that there has been no such open, vociferous debate about Von Braun's character and policies, as is pictured in the film...

...More, the sympathy would not be misdirected, as these Germans obviously were enemies only in the old chivalric sense...

...It is the politicians who are—and they happen to be Nazis...