Contemporary Arts
Germany Then and Now
It is unfashionable to remember Germany's politically criminal past today; a tinge of unsport- ingness is supposed to colour any reminders of it to a nation that has since adopted other ways. But the new German season at the National Film Theatre raises, with its first film The Devil's General, so many prickly political problems, past and present, that one must poke about the remains and memories of Nazism to come to any under- standing of it at all. Besides, Germany's state of mind has always been reproduced with uncanny fidelity in her films. Probably no national cinema has been, in the past, as accurately autobio- graphical, as exuberantly detailed in its diagnosis And exposure of the national spirit of the moment. In its great film period that followed the First World War, from Caligari through the Twenties of Pabst, Lang, Leni, Murnau, the German moral climate was revealed with merciless and salutary exactness. With the coming of the Nazis the cinema, with its directors (those who had not already gone to Hollywood), was taken over lock, stock and barrel by Goebbels as a• powerful part of the propaganda machine. And with the end of the . war, with the first taste of freedom after twelve years, with the example of Germany's own previous postwar greatness behind her and the contemporary film resurgence of the other repen- tant Fascist, Italy, before her, one might have expected some expression, which the rest of the world could grasp, of the contemporary German spirit. (When we talk of the contemporary German spirit, or anything else German for that matter today, we tend to mean West German : in the case of films the East, except for Staudte's The.Marderers Are Amongst Us, which we saw nearly ten years ago, remains, at least till this sea- son, when this and four other East German films are being shown, a matter of hearsay and con- jecture.) And if the rest of the world has remained ignorant, even from the few films that have come out of Germany these last years, of any particular and recognisable spirit, it is partly the fault, one must suppose, of this arbitrary division of what- ever spirit there might be clean down the middle with a rigid political line, as well as the obvious lack of directors of the quality of those who appeared after the First World War in Germany and even after the Second in Italy. But perhaps the basic reason, in West Germany at least, is a lack of any definite postwar attitude, any gener- ally acceptable and unifying outlook, towards the immediate past : an embarrassed mid-air position between the alternatives of self-righteousness and self-flagellation.
Postwar Italy, with its remarkable film spirit, makes an obvious point of comparison. There the film-makers at least faced their immediate past and out of chaos came the semi-documentary war and immediately postwar, films fresh and solid from the disintegration of the moment. A rejection of the past was then diffused enough for them to put about a political—if only a negatively political—message without seeming cranks, moral oddities, or bootlickers of the Allies; they could presume on a sympathetic enough climate of public opinion. Of course they went too far : so persuaded were the film-makers by their own anti-Fascism that you would have thought, by their tone, they had defeated the enemy single- handed (it was not easy, given the time and cir- cumstances, to smile at Rossellini's two decadent British officers mooning over monuments while the Italian partisans died for them in the swelter- ing town). But this truculence was simply an exag- geration of a healthier state of mind, at once more united and more independent, than the one which has emerged from the postwar films of West Germany at least—where events of the Thirties and Forties are either ignored or treated as some- thing remote, regrettable, and faintly unmention- able, like halitosis or prostitution in Paraguay.
The first film of the season is an excellent ex- ample of all this, because although Helmut Kautner has directed an intelligent and adult film with dash and confidence, and one that attempts what few others have done—to assess the German guilt—he ends up with inadequate a final estimate of it that one is left feeling mildly de- flated. It also panders to the natural public taste for a hero with every quality to admire except the basic one that would have made him incapable of working with the Nazis in the first place. (The success of our own Battle of the River Plate in Germany, with Peter Finch's gentlemanly, non- political Captain. Langsdorff, shows the same sort of thing.) Harras in The Devil's General is Goering's immediate underling in the air force and as played by Curd Jiirgens is not, I imagine, unlike what Goering himself would have liked to appear. Indeed at moments the handsome heavy face and energetic paunchy figure recalled Goering's quite remarkably, and the mixture of bravery, jollity, a way with women and a general air of physical well-being must inevitably remind one of the Goering legend though not, of course, of the facts behind the legend. Indiscreet, popular, a non-party-member, too valuable to be silenced and, in a mild way, critical of things up to the level bf Hitler himself, loyal to Goering but tailed by Himmler, when the film opens Harras is foxed by an unreasonably large number of unaccount- able air force accidents. Carelessness or sabotage? Harras is badgered in two directions—by his genuine alarm and puzzlement at the accidents, and by an equally genuine alarm and puzzlement at the state of his own conscience, which is rous- ing itself after an overlong doze to wonder what he is doing in the Nazi machinery at all. When he discovers that the saboteur is in fact his good friend Karl ('Who are you working for?' he asks. 'For Russia? For England ?"For Germany,' says Karl—a lesson Harras might have learnt long ago), Harras takes up an aeroplane and dives it on to at least a handful of culprits in a spectacular suicide. One might argue that suicide is at least a sign of conviction, yet Harras's behaviour seems nothing more than the climax of his alarm and puzzlement; a way out, not an admission, not a facing of anything very serious. We have no sense of the terrible fact of starting the war, the Nazi movement, at all; only a vague and embarrassed feeling that the Nazis were not such nice people to work with. We get some illuminating glimpses of Berlin wartime life near the top—still 'quite smart, charming, luxurious; and of that sort of cosiness that even the worst Germans so sinisterly never quite lose. The acting is excellent, the direc- tion accomplished, the moral, inadequate.
The complete German season extends from the end of the silent period until the present day and is divided into five sections : the early sound years and the war; Max Ophuls—a tribute; the modern West German scene; German directors in Holly- wood; the East German scene. And for those who want to go further back to the great silent period the Hampstead Everyman is showing Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) for the two weeks before June 3, and for a week from June 3, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926).
ISABEL QUIGLY
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