Having failed to recognize one of Hitler’s most specifically diabolical features – his way of localizing all the evil beyond his own borders, so as to make himself appear innocent – we have fallen into the same error as himself: we have made of Hitler an image of the Demon wholly external to our own reality. And while we were watching it with fascination, the Demon approached us again from behind to torment us beneath disguises which could not arouse our suspicions.– Denis de Rougemont, The Devil’s Share
“I HATE NAZIS,” SAYS INDIANA JONES. But do we really? I mean – don’t we love movie Nazis? That is, don’t we love to hate them? What I’m trying to say is, are there any more satisfying villains in all of cinema, such pure embodiments of the ultimate evil, of our darkest fears, of the depths of human depravity? Perhaps even (though who’s going admit to this?) certain dark and secret longings? The perennial appeal of movie Nazis probably has something do with Milton’s old problem, wherein the old Puritan was abashed to find Satan as he emerged under his pen so damned enthralling. This phenomenon may well have to do with that freedom in which the worst blasphemers seem to operate, even in hell. Whatever the attraction, it makes for an unbeatable packaging for another seductive quality, the localizing of all evil beyond our borders which Denis de Rougemont speaks about in the quote above.
It is this one-two punch — this having and eating of cake, this simultaneous moral outrage and vicarious experience of evil or at least power — which makes for that love-hate relationship audiences seem to maintain with Movie Nazis. For, indeed, Satan seems to have been replaced in popular imagination by various stand-ins, not least Nazis. Aside from the fact that nobody much believes in Satan these days, the trump card the Nazis hold is that they bring radical evil into history in a way that disembodied spirits can’t possibly compete with: they snatch the Archetype down to earth. Indeed, Nazis are often described as evil incarnate: myth-become-fact (as Screwtape might put it). In some ways, the Nazi narrative may represent, if I will be forgiven for advocating for the devil here, the Second Greatest Story Ever Told.
Certainly Hollywood heroism would lose some luster without having Nazis to fight. It’s almost a law of physics, or metaphysics: opposing Absolute Evil necessarily makes almost anybody look better in contrast – perhaps even push them down the scale in the direction of Absolute Good. And how satisfying when such bad, bad guys get theirs! Such poetic justice numbers among the most famous moments of screen history. Major Strasser on the phone at the airport. Indiana Jones’ black-booted nemeses, faces melting before (talk about poetic justice!) the Jewish Ark. In their triumph over these Bad Guys, such Good Guys aren’t merely morally superior, but superior in all ways, because anything more powerful than Absolute Evil must surely be the ultimate power. What deep moral closure such vicarious victories offer the viewer: the happiest of endings, Evil vanquished, right before the end credits – but not too close. That is to say, it doesn’t pay to dispatch the Nazis too much before that final climactic scene. For there are other pleasures in having movie Nazis around, even if we try not to let ourselves think too much about them.
Or is it just me? Am I out on a limb here? If so, I think I’d better carefully climb down, because I suspect it’s about to collapse under the weight of some stowaways. At least, it has been my observation and/or extrapolation that many moviegoers and even moviemakers can’t seem to get enough of Nazis. That it is immediately a point in favor of a film for some people if there is a Nazi villian — or at least some peripheral garnishments including the familiar skull and broken cross bones. Indeed, few are the romantic dabblers of popcorn cinema who have been able to resist a few dabs on this dark palette. The Nazi-riffing in Star Wars, for but one example, extends from the Imperial uniforms to the Storm Troopers to Lord Vader’s helmet lines to an entire series of shots lifted from that most notorious Nazi movie of all. In Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl captured the 1943 Nuremberg Rallies in the most infamous masterpiece in cinema, and directors have been swiping shots from her ever since. The gravitational tug which those images have exerted, and continue to exert, on both moviegoers and moviemakers is remarkable and very, very creepy.
Even Stephen Spielberg seems to have occasionally fallen under the spell. The director’s various depictions of Nazis have more than once been criticized for being too stylishly-photographed for his (or our) own good. Indiana Jones aside, even Spielberg’s “serious” film about the Holocaust (some critics complain) puts a certain Hollywood sheen and manufactured finality on a fathomless evil that many have said is best left unfathomed. Most viewers are unaware of the huge and ongoing controversy over any representation of the Holocaust in any art form; the discussion fills library shelves. As for film, French director Jacques Rivette once memorably lambasted a relatively obscure Holocaust movie on the basis of something as seemingly harmless as a tracking shot – which Rivette claimed betrayed an intent to reduce incomprehensible evil to a melodramatic effect. “There are some things,” said Rivette, “that should not be addressed except in the throes of fear and trembling…” That phrase – “fear and trembling” – comes from Kierkegaard, who argued that the domestication of fearful things renders us numb — into (my own paraprhase) moral zombies.
So, on the one hand, we have this potentially zombifying attraction of certain images – not unlike pornography, with which “Nazi-porn” has been sometimes compared. And on the other hand we have Eichmann in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann was the accountant of the Final Solution, who made a terrible first impression on his Israeli interrogator. “I no longer know what I had expected,” the agent wrote years later, “probably the sort of Nazi you see in the movies: tall, blond, with piercing blue eyes and brutal features expressive of domineering arrogance. Whereas this rather thin, balding man not much taller than myself looked utterly ordinary.” Even the Mossad was expecting somebody out of Central Nazi Casting.
Here’s a thought experiment. Try picturing the buttoned-down, dweeby, boring-as-paint-peeling Eichmann up there on the Silver Screen, in an effects-laden Hollywood action-movie fight scene – with, say, Indiana Jones. I can see Indie, reaching for his whip, then hesitating. Reaching for his gun, hesitating again. Finally, he shrugs, annoyed, and decides to knock over this evil Nazi with a feather. Or else just a well-aimed breath. For, far from embodying pure evil, Adolf Eichmann famously embodied pure mediocrity. Hannah Arendt, when she finally got a look at Eichmann at his trial, was inspired by her own disappointing first impression to muse famously on “the banality of evil.” This concept is pictured by C. S. Lewis (as Screwtape) as “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to even raise their voice,” committing crimes in “clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices.” Perhaps another example might be that nice, quiet, white-collar MBA, Robert McNamara, who planned (in his clean, carpeted Pentagon office) devastating firebombings of German and Japanese cities. McNamara freely admitted that if the Allies had lost the war, he’d have been tried as a war criminal, too. In any case, he’d have made another crummy opponent for Indiana Jones. (And that one is too painful to imagine.)
Not to stray too far from Nazis and their magnetism, but another buttoned-down figure mentioned as a war-crimes suspect is former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. When I was a kid, Kissinger was part of Evangelical “End Times” mythology, a prime candidate for Antichrist. Not for his secret bombing of Cambodia, or support of murderous regimes. No, it was because he won the Nobel Peace Prize and seemed too good to be true. In that perverse case, a whopper may have been accidentally caught in the net of popular myth-making. But he was ultimately thrown back, for the 70s Antichrist craze was followed in the 80s’ by another localization of evil: “the Satanists,” who were believed by many in those years to have been part of a world-wide conspiracy that seems in hindsight a kind of sublimated anti-Semitism. (And, in hindsight, the fact Kissinger was Jewish probably had something to do with his own popular mythification.)
All the above to say that the insatiable human thirst for both scapegoating and secretly envying evil finds its most characteristic satisfaction in cartoonish Evil Others — for which, one must add, the wolves’ clothing may now and then actually cover a wolf. This curious interplay of genuine evil, in its usual banality, of the undeniable truth-telling capacity of myth, and the localized evils of popular myth, make for the disturbing dynamic at the center of a film which throws a wrench into the myth-fact spectrum, connecting the poles, and short-circuiting our attempts to engage with Movie Nazis in the usual way. The 1999 German feature After the Truth, after a decade, has finally been released on DVD, and so I’m eager to see the discussion about the film I’ve been having with audiences I’ve screened my rare VHS copy for now finally expanded.
IT WAS AT THE 1998 CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL film festival that I first saw After the Truth.The film is an imaginary tale, which launches from the question, “What if the notorious Dr. Mengele didn’t die in South American exile, but come home to Germany to stand trial?” In history, Josef Mengele was a Nazi doctor who escaped after the war to Argentina, where he dodged capture and responsibility until drowning in 1979 at the age of 68. By then, he’d become an archetype for evil, the “Angel of Death of Auschwitz” – the most notorious symbol of the Nazi betrayal of the medical profession and the Western ethical tradition. The astonishing numbers of Jews personally selected by Mengele to die in the gas chambers, his horrific medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, have ever after represented the lowest a human being, humanity itself, can sink. Mengele died without answering a human judge, and he remains one of the last compelling arguments for a Final Judgment after death, and an Eternal Punishment.
After the Truth brings the Angel of Death of Auschwitz before the bar of humanity by drafting on the story of Mengele’s fellow South American exile, Adolf Eichmann (they actually lived for a time in the same town.) Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli agents in 1960, brought to trial in Israel and hanged. At his trial, Eichmann was kept in a bullet-proof glass box like Mengele in the film. Only in this imaginary tale, Mengele comes home willingly – to the New Berlin, the Post Cold War Berlin, to a newly-united Germany that only wants to put the past, especially this past, behind them and look only ahead.
But Dr. Mengele is determined to resolve things, to tell – as he says – the truth. That is to say, to tell his truth. Of course, there are other truths in play here. The nation’s truth, for example, more than ever at pains to prove itself different from that other Germany – not just in years, but qualitatively. Then there’s the truth of Mengele’s attorney, public defender Peter Rohm, who comes from Mengele’s town and is working on (but curiously unable to complete) a biography of the doctor. Debates over the historical truth of Auschwitz – which remains controversial in some circles – are dispensed with quickly here, as Mengele freely admits “what really happened,” to the outrage of neo- and veteran Nazi deniers alike. Nor is the film particularly interested in legal truth, that is, in the legitimacy of war crimes trials – which critics dismiss as “victor’s justice.” To engage this controversy would have been an obvious entrée into philosophical discussion about “truth”– a concept as quaint as certain provisions of the Geneva Convention. Auschwitz has a way of silencing deconstruction, and common-sense notions of truth prevail here.
Indeed, Mengele’s truth – that that he’s been unfairly made to take the rap for an entire nation, if not an entire species – offers a formidable enough challenge for one film.
The viewer is pulled into all those old thorny questions about collective guilt versus individual guilt – that horrible zero-sum game wherein sliding to one end of the scale somehow seems to lessen responsibility to anyone left at the other. That is to say, if everybody’s guilty for Auschwitz, then nobody’s guilty. And if somebody’s guilty, then everybody else seems to get off the hook. Up and down that scale, the film’s Dr. Mengele expertly conducts the traditional Nazi defense: he was just an unimportant cog in a machine, just following orders, just a product of his circumstances. The jury, onscreen and off, must decide whether Mengele (and his attorney) represent the voice of Satan, laying the axe to the foundations of morality – or the voice of Reason, asking hard questions that all of us (on screen and off) would rather not have answered.
This association of Mengele with the Devil is far from rhetorical: the film often feels like a magical realist fantasy wherein an angel (or angel of death) has fallen from the sky and poses less a question about the miraculous than a monumental inconvenience. Therefore, two more great truths in contest here are those of which we were considering earlier: the truth of history versus the truth of myth. If Mengele is a Monster, then he seems to particularly bear the whole sins of the German nation. If he’s a man, with all the ordinary historical context and extenuating circumstances, he seems to escape culpability for crimes that seem to demand an infinite justice. The film tries to have it both ways – producing a certain disturbing moral confusion and hair-raising metaphysical vertigo. We have the “banality of evil” – Mengele the fat old man in the shower, but we also have a performance by veteran German actor Götz George in which he plays Mengele much less banal than magnetic, diabolically cunning – a bald, brooding brilliance between Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector and Marlin Brando’s Colonel Kurtz.
Thus, against the generally demythologizing thrust of the film, myth comes down to earth, but doesn’t quite become fact. This cinematic Mengele is still larger-than-life, towering over history – even abstracted a bit from it. Despite the scandal of the doctor’s homecoming, for example, we never hear about the historical Mengele’s real-life family, still living Günzberg, Bavaria, still running the family business in farm machinery. The most notable historical absence is Mengele’s son Rolf, who spent his childhood believing his Argentinean relative was “Uncle Fritz.” Mortified (like Luke Skywalker) to learn who his real father was, Rolf visited Mengele and confronted him with all the hard questions Peter Rohm confronts him with in the film – and got many of the same answers. No doubt there’s room in poetry for license, a certain metaphorical heightening – and certainly the film would have been less effective without so compelling a central figure. In any case, a completely demythologized Mengele would still remain more than flesh and blood – just as surely as “Auschwitz” signifies more than a small town in Poland.
The film’s German title is Nichts als die Wahrheit, literally The Truth and Nothing But. I can’t say if the German title is as provocatively layered as this English one seems to me: After the Truth might refer to the pursuit of some truth, but it can also mean a life lived in the wake of some truth. And so the deepest, most disturbing truth in play in this film is, of course, as in any Holocaust discussion, is what human beings can do, and what God can allow. “After Auschwitz” remains the primary suffix of our age, still surpassing even “post 9/11.” Scholars have spent the last half century re-mapping every quadrant of human endeavor after the gas chambers. Ethics, philosophy, art, theology, psychology, sociology struggling to rise above the status of mere footnote to Auschwitz. And so the label “Auschwitz” is infinitely greater than the sum of what some Germans did there to some Jews: it is the black hole that opened in the Western – in the human – soul. It can’t be papered over by symbolic closure, certainly not in the show trial conviction of the most recognizable symbol for itself. That being the case, we must ask the terrible question of this would-be historical Mengele: has he been made, unfairly, a scapegoat?
Therein lies the paradox of After the Truth, and the viewer’s experience of this film will depend on how he or she navigates between the rocks and the whirlpool. A too-literal reading might rightly conclude that the prosecution’s case is airtight; a more poetic reading will find this Mengele impossible to litigate away, an effort as blasphemously absurd as presuming that any one nation of human beings on this planet could actually “rid the world of Evil” with an army.
ORIGINALLY WRITTEN BY AMERICANS for Hollywood, the script for After the Truth found its way to across the ocean where a German producer seized upon it with an intensely personal interest, one shared by the entire German team he assembled to make the film. When funds ran low during production, lead actor Götz George – whose actor father made propaganda films for the Nazis – pitched in one-million marks of his own money; other actors and producers made similar sacrifices to finish a film that seemed to many to be a sacred duty. The film was in various ways controversial on release – there was a mixed critical reaction and it broke certain cultural taboos, namely as (astonishingly) the first German film which forthrightly admitted the facts of Auschwitz. George went on to be nominated for a European Oscar, and the film has done well at festivals – including Jewish festivals – worldwide.
Still, the film was out of circulation in the US for ten years before the recent Ignatius Press DVD release. The reasons may be speculated upon. Americans have their own taboos. Speaking forthrightly about connections between German medical practice in the early 20th century and contemporary arguments in favor of abortion, euthanasia and other bio-ethical issues like stem cell research is too painful for many. Certainly the short-circuiting of the usual movie Nazi pleasures — the calling into question the “monster” theory of radical evil — can be disquieting for most of us who prefer to think monsters are made of different stuff that we are. At the same time, it must be forthrightly admitted that the film is in many ways a rather conventional thriller. I’ve nosed around the rest of director Roland Suso Richter’s work and decided he’s hitting above his average here, yet the film is still occasionally heavy-handed or structurally a bit too pat. And yet – somehow After the Truth has infected me with the very obsession of Peter Rohm, to ask questions and keep asking them, and provoke others to have to ask them in screenings of the film – even if the questions have no answers or only unbearable ones.
One memorable screening I led was for a group of Evangelical college students. In the post-film discussion, the students struggled poignantly to situate Unfathomable Evil into pre-existing theologies and clearly ill-tested theodicies. One or two resisted what they seemed to take as an assault on their basic moral categories, even ready to take it out on the messenger, i.e. the guest speaker. I looked to their regular instructor for assistance in delivering the painful message that radical evil is closer to each of us than we may wish to believe. Instead, the instructor jumped into the breach and helped them sandbag the threatened narratives – bolstering the wall between Decent People Like Us and That Monster Mengele. It was almost as if we were reenacting the film’s courtroom scene, where Rohm the defender was troubled by the evils that can be perpetrated by decent people, and the government prosecutor pushed the Monster theory of evil. I found this professor’s efforts to be threatening a teachable moment — but it’s hard not to find some sympathy for anyone who can’t imagine the perpetrators of Auschwitz as anything but non-human. “He is like an alien to me,” Rolf Mengele said of his father. “Auschwitz seems like another planet.”
Imagine – if it was difficult for these American students to process this film, what was it like to be Joseph Mengele’s son? Psychological studies of the children of Nazis fill their own library shelves. Rolf Mengele become a lawyer, and answered the obvious question by declaring that, if it had come down to it, he’d have defended his father in court – even if he was an alien. And how much easier it would have been for “Hitler’s children” and the rest of us if Auschwitz had been on another planet. Back in 1961, the North Pole seemed far enough away, in the film Judgment at Nuremberg. The American prosecutor (played by Richard Widmark) became so frustrated by evasions of responsibility he finally exploded, “There ARE no Nazis in Germany! Didn’t you know that, Judge? The Eskimos invaded Germany and took over. That’s how all those terrible things happened. It wasn’t the fault of the Germans. It was the fault of those damned Eskimos.”
This painful quest to ascertain responsibility for Auschwitz is the matrix for all the various truths in contention in this film. After the Truth goes after all these truths, and challenges the viewer to somehow hold onto all of them simultaneously – and still do justice in the case of one Joseph Mengele.
That a Catholic distributor has brought this film out seems likely connected primarily to the bio-ethical angle. No doubt, it can be hard not to let this powerful element overwhelm every other channel the film might be trying to broadcast on. Mengele characterizes his actions in terms of “compassionate euthanasia,” with grimly pragmatic apologetics that ring all-too-familiar in a culture still wrestling with the full spectrum of human life issues. Questions raised about contemporary debates are entirely pertinent and appropriate. Yet such questions can be huge enough to obscure other questions the film raises. It would be ironic if a viewer used bioethics as a stick to beat Evil Others, rather than following the film into the heart of darkness to implications less about Them, than Us.
For what is really on trial here is the title of Peter Rohm’s unfinished book about Mengele: One of Us – in other words, the defendant is not only the Angel of Death of Auschwitz. Rohm’s closing argument may seem to win the day, but I wouldn’t want to face an appeal. If the film teases with a reassuring moral closure, it whips it away to reveal the gaping Abyss, waiting to suck us all in. Auschwitz remains the great debunker of Grand Narratives, and little ones, too. And this is where the film has always haunted me the most: watching Mengele scribbling incessantly on his memoirs, his side of the story, his truth –like so many other Nazis did, Eichmann, Albert Speer –like all of us do. One way or another, we’re all perfecting our narrative, our version of history – exonerating, explaining, excusing, blaming, polishing: even as we watch this film. We may be stunned to find that the onscreen narrative-making falls into precise sync with our own. Perhaps it will be the moment we’re telling ourselves that, no matter what we’ve done, we’re not as bad as Nazis (one of the chief pleasures of Nazi movies!) If we catch our reflection in Josef Mengele, God grant our response will be the most honest one: there but for the Grace of God, go I.
Of course, those of us who still believe in God, after Auschwitz, carry the additional burden of reconciling another pair of competing narratives: this weighty historical record, and the story of a loving, just and powerful God. Whether or not any of us want to go there depends on how far we’re willing to let this film take us into the – into “the truth.” Can any of us really handle The Truth? Certainly the dogged quest for the truth was the undoing of Oedipus.
Most people, even in the face of cracks in any of their well-crafted narratives, would probably rather live in one sort of denial or another. But whatever lies beneath the surface generally always finds a way to get out and wreak havoc — characteristically, in projections of them onto the nearest available Evil Other. The Jews. The Witches. The Satanists. The Terrorists. The Evangelicals. The Guest Speaker. Even the Nazis, ironically – not to let the Nazis off the hook. Just to suggest there may be room for more of us on that hook than we might prefer to think.
Says Denis de Rougemont, “One of the lessons which the events in Europe make clear to us appears to me to be this: the purely sentimental hatred of evil which is in others may blind one as to the evil which one bears in oneself, and as to the seriousness of evil in general. The too easy condemnation of the evil-doer next door may cover over and encourage a good deal of intimate compliance in this very evil-doing.”
Editor’s note: an abbreviated version of this piece was published at Christianity Today Movies. Those portions are reprinted here with permission.