Movie-A-Day: Das Boot – Or, should the Nazis ever be the good guys?

Starring: Jurgen Prochnow, Herbert Gronemeyer, Klaus Wennemann, Hubertus Bensch Director: Wolfgang Petersen Year Of Release: 1981 Plot: It is 1942 and the German submarine fleet is heavily engaged in the Battle of the Atlantic to harass and destroy English shipping. However, German U-Boats have begun to take heavy losses. Das Boot is the story of one such U-Boat crew, with the film examining how these submariners maintained their professionalism as soldiers, attempted to accomplish impossible missions, while all the time attempting to understand and obey the ideology of the government under which they served.

I think I’d better start out with a disclaimer. When I ask whether the Nazis should ever be the good guys, I’m talking about films and certainly not suggesting that Hollywood starts making apologia for the Holocaust, or that they begin hinting that the Sudetenland would be a nice place to annex. I’m more getting at the difficulty of making movies from the German perspective of World War II.

When it was first made, Das Boot was a pretty controversial film. Not only did it follow the crew of a German U-boat, but they were the heroes. If that weren’t enough, it was a German production. In fact it was the most expensive German made movie since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and remained so until a couple of years ago when Perfume took its place. There were many who bridled at the very idea of a movie showing the heroism of a U-boat crew, and wondered whether this was Germany trying to rehabilitate itself in its own eyes and try to make out that the Third Reich was courageous.

This was, remember, 1981, only 36 years after the liberation of the concentration camps, and there were still millions around the world who had fought against or suffered under the Nazis, and unsurprisingly they weren’t impressed with anything that suggested the German side of World War II was anything but evil.

Even the author of the book Das Boot is based on, Lothar-Günter Buchheim, came out against the film. A former U-boat correspondent himself, Buchheim criticised the accuracy of the film, saying the crew would never have acted in the undisciplined way they do in the movie. He felt the whole thing was unrealistic, overdone and clichéd, accusing director Wolfgang Petersen of sacrificing both realism and suspense in dialogue, narration, and photography for the sake of cheap dramatic thrills and action effects.

However while these criticisms could have come from the fact the filmmakers hadn’t used the ideas he’d provided for the adaptation, Buchheim reserved his greatest condemnation for the philosophy of the movie, saying it has pretty much destroyed the sentiment of his anti-war novel. Instead he said it was “another re-glorification and re-mystification” of the German U-boat, and German heroism, finally condemning it as a “contemporary German propaganda newsreel from World War II”. (Although it should be added most people didn’t feel this way, and thought the film did a good job of separating the actions of individual soldiers from the overall Nazi machinery and philosophy).

However this is the problem that any attempt to tell any story of World War II from a non-Allied perspective always faces. How do you make a film with Nazis as the protagonists, without the film in any way seeming to endorse or glorify the Axis powers?

Despite this difficulty, it’s always worthwhile looking at why people fighting on the ‘wrong’ side of a war would do so. What was their motivation? Did they not realise they were fighting and killing under an evil despot? Did they even think about it? Did they care? Or did their country just tell them to do something and they did? How many genuinely believed in Nazism and why did they do so? How far is an individual responsible if they do ‘evil’ acts at the behest of a system that tells them they’re doing the right thing, especially under the penalty of death for insubordination?

While they make some people nervous, these really are questions worth exploring, so we can understand how something like the Third Reich could happen, and hopefully avoid it in the future. Cartoon Nazis might have been fine for Indiana Jones flick, but they don’t really reveal how things could have gone so terribly wrong.

You’ve always got a problem with this though, because as soon as you start look at things through German eyes, many will wonder whether you’re basically trying to whitewash and apologise for the Nazis. This is particularly true with war movies, where the actions shown aren’t normally seen as specific to those individuals, but as a microcosm representing the whole (for example, while The Dam Busters is about a specific operation, it’s also meant to represent the bravery, ingenuity and heroism of the entire Allied side of the war).

So how do you separate the reasoning from the actions, the individual from the state? Some will say you shouldn’t, and that anything that shows a German from 1933-1945 in a good light is wrong. There were even some who argued against Schindler’s List when that was made into a movie, because despite the fact he became the first former Nazi to be honoured by Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, some felt the mere fact it was a story of a Nazi saving Jews was a corruption of the overall truth and presented a false picture of reality – what was one Nazi saving 1,200 when others killed six million? Of course this wasn’t the general view, but it just goes to how difficult this subject is.

In fact it’s only been in recent years that there’s been a groundswell of serious attempts to make movies from the German perspective of WWII (ignoring Nazi propaganda flicks), although obviously none has been even vaguely supportive of the Third Reich’s ideas or policies. There was, of course, the Tom Cruise starring Valkyrie, which got around the fact it was all about Nazis by following the true story of a plot to kill Hitler from within the ranks. There’s also the rather fascinating and terrifying Conspiracy, made in 2001 by the BBC and HBO, which was a dramatisation of the 1942 conference where the Nazis made plans for the Final Solution, based on the minutes of the meeting (no record was meant to survive, but one officer kept them and they were found after the war).

Even with something like Downfall, it’s difficult to imagine Germany making a major movie 15 or 20 years ago that was set in Hitler’s bunker, even though the film is decidedly not on Adolph’s side.

One film I find particularly interesting in trying to show Nazism through German eyes is Good, which was released in 2008 and stars Viggo Mortensen. Although it wasn’t a big success, it is a beautifully conceived look at how something as evil as Hitler’s regime could take hold, exploring whether Edmund Burke’s quote that ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’ is actually true, and whether if you only take incremental steps, you can get millions involved in evil without them even really thinking about what they’re actually doing, especially if you can convince them the acts they might not agree with have nothing directly to do with them.

There’s also the Oscar winning The Reader, which tried (only half successfully), to tackle some of the complex issues of why someone would have been a guard at a concentration camp when they knew what was going on, as well as the sort of moral choices we all have to make, which are often easier to ignore.

The reason for this interest in the other side of World War II, is partly because many of those who were involved in the conflict have died, and therefore it’s not as controversial as it once would have been. It’s also because it seems utterly baffling to many born after the war that something like the rise of Hitler could have happened, and they therefore want to know why and how something like the Holocaust could possibly have taken place (and whether it could happen again). However perhaps most important is the current world situation, which has brought into focus questions  about how millions could have been taken in by ideas of the Third Reich, as well the relationship between the individual and the system they live in.

For example, the idea of becoming an Al Qaeda suicide bomber is so alien to most people in the west, that it’s little wonder we’re looking back to the past, and something closer to our own western culture, to try and understand how people can be taken in by an ideology that seems so alien and evil. What is it that not only leads people to commit acts that most people consider utterly heinous, but to do it happily because they feel they are absolutely and totally right and justified?

Also important to film’s growing interest in life under the Third Reich are worries about our own culpabilities in the War On Terror. With massive arguments and anger over the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has brought to the fore questions about the difference between soldiers and their mission (can you support the troops and see them as heroes while condemning what they’ve being asked to do?), and whether anyone who stands idly by is culpable for the actions of their government.

I feel it is probably this that’s brought a rush of films trying to understand the Nazi perspective, not because I think we’re in a new Third Reich, but because it highlights questions over the individual’s responsibility if they think their government is doing something wrong. Is it their patriotic duty to stand behind a policy they don’t agree with, especially in time of war, or should they fight against it?  For several decades, we haven’t had to think too much about the social contract, but now the issues have become prevalent, and looking back to Nazism helps us explore where our responsibilities in society should begin and end.

I suspect we might see quite a few more films about Nazis in the next few years, trying to explore why they did what they did. We’ll hopefully never get to the point where they are genuinely the good guys, but we do seem to have moved to a place where we can separate the individual from the state in Germany in the 30s and 40s, and explore how such a thing could have happened, and whether there’s anything we can learn from it that applies today.

TIM ISAAC

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