Better Late Then Never

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Some years ago I saw "Conspiracy", an HBO-BBC TV movie about the Wannsee Conference, the secret conference in January 1942 where Hitler henchman Reinhard Heydrich laid out to a bunch of top German bureaucrats the Nazi genocidal plans toward the Jews in Europe. That film, which I liked quite a lot, has Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich, as well as other fine actors (Stanley Tucci was Adolf Eichmann, and Colin Firth has also a role there as a top Nazi lawyer, among others). It turns out Conspiracy was a remake of a previous German TV movie from 1984, called Die Wanseekonferenz. Both films are very similar, the conceit of the movie being the same (stagey setting with all the movie shot indoors, the conference is played in real time of about 85 minutes). Both movies shock the audience by having the characters talk dispassionately and matter of factly of killing the Jews in various manners. Whereas Conspiracy has a lineup of relatively famous thespians, the German movie is served by a little known but fine cast of German actors. Conspiracy has obviously a larger budget and is a bit more showy, yet I think Wannseekonferenz is probably more true to life. For instance, Branagh plays Heydrich as a master manipulator, a larger than life character, while Dietrich Mattausch, the German actor who played him in the earlier film in a more subdued form probably has him right. This is punctuated by small talk and several banal episodes, so as to point the banality of evil (for instance, Heydrich repeatedly joking about the barking dog of an officer, or some soldiers flirting with the secretaries).

I haven't seen this is twenty years or so, and I can't remember it in detail, but I'm compelled to comment on it anyway because I found it to be so gripping -- amazing, really. And a German production at that.The reason that this film has haunted me for so long, is the almost complete disjunction between the substance of the Wannsee Conference and the gemütlich ethos of the meeting itself. Here they are, a dozen or so guys, most of them in smart uniforms, sporting eight PhDs among them, talking about how to get rid of Europe's Jews without being too obvious or too messy or too inefficient about the "getting rid of" business.At the same time, this meeting of minds takes place in an atmosphere of politesse and camaraderie. Everyone is polite and chuckles over witticisms. They take breaks to help themselves at the buffet table groaning with strudel and canapés and loaves of bread and hams. They drink cognac. Heydrich stumbles over a table leg and makes a joke about it. Heydrich, a handsome fellow, laces his business with a dry wit, and of course everyone at the table laughs appreciatively. He flirts with the pretty secretary. It's almost a party in which the participants just happen to be talking about classifying Jews and half-Jews and killing them. And it's a knotty problem. What do you do with mixed children, one of whose parents is Aryan and the other Jewish. Will the Aryan blood enrich the offspring or will the Jewish blood pollute the purity of the race? What about the children who are only one quarter Jewish? How about the Jews who are in the Army? It's a striking movie in which the character we root for the most argues only for involuntary sterilization. I can't remember the characters any longer, but I recall Adolph Eichmann as a minor character. He oozes pleasantries, smiles generously, and has the figures worked out. Heydrich is the genial leader who represents the Führer. Only in the last few minutes, when most of the participants have left, do two guests remain behind and balk openly, angrily.Hannah Arendt made famous the phrase, "the banality of evil." But what we see here isn't banal. It's an effective combination of pleasure and of business efficiency. These aren't small minds dealing with small issues. And they aren't repulsive-looking bald monsters, as they're so often depicted in fiction. They're mostly ordinary, efficient, good-natured, intelligent men who just happen to have embraced some of the worst ideas that Western civilization has ever produced. How nice it would be if we could judge people by their appearance. There was at one time a popular school of psychology called "physiognomy," which proposed just that. Alas, the worst of us can be as handsome and charming and the best of us.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)What I want to do here is to note that The Wannsee Conference is a German language film with white English subtitles. Sometimes the subtitles are superimposed over a white background and the words disappear. That is why state of the art subtitles are yellow so that they don't get lost in the background. Otherwise the subtitles are very good, translating what needs to be translated and ignoring the extraneous.I also want to note that the somewhat miraculous script by Paul Mommertz is very much like a stage play with most of the action essentially confined to one set with the various players delivering their lines as the camera focuses on them, much as a spotlight might. I say "miraculous" because Mommertz forged his screenplay from the banal, bureaucratic and often euphemistic language used by the historical Nazis as they formulated the so-called "Final Solution." How to make such material dramatic was the problem Mommertz and Director Heinz Schirk faced. They achieved the nearly impossible through the subtle use of what I might call everyday "reality intrusions": the dog barking, the vainglorious Reinhard Heydrich tripping over a briefcase as he is posturing as the grand architect and fuhrer of the Holocaust, the stenographer flirting (and Heydrich's calculated, chilling affirmative response), the greedy drinking, the "Nazi rally" thumping of the table, the turf wars, the boorish jokes, etc. These served to highlight by contrast the horror that these men were so bureaucratically entertaining. Note too that when the stenographer asks if a verbatim report is desired, she is told that a detailed report will suffice. Thus the dumb brute reality could be edited later in a George Orwellian manner to further bureaucratize and euphemize what they were doing.What a truly verbatim report might have revealed is the point of this film. This is a work of art, and I want to say that real art, to the extent that it is didactic, fails. If the artist tries to teach a lesson or show us the way and the light through a human story, to that extent he or she loses control and becomes an advertiser, a propagandist, a preacher. We as audience or readers become not participants anymore but objects. A work of art is always a two-way street of participation between the artist and those viewing the art. We might agree with the message or we might not, but we are no longer equal participants in the experience.Yet what a work of art does is demonstrate a human truth through form. It is almost always an emotional truth. The Greeks emphasized tragedy because they understood the cathartic emotional experience that tragedy brings. What Mommertz and Schirk have done is present the truth as best they could discover it, and then they ran the closing credits. What we as audience experience depends on how well we participated, and what we brought as human beings to the experience. How well we concentrate, how aware we are of what is going on, how alert--these too are important. The Swannsee Conference is a demanding film, but it is surprising how quickly it moves, how engaged we become. The tension is not in what will happen at the end, of course. Instead the tension is in how it happens. We are held in thrall of discovering the essential nature of this most horrific and incredible evil done by the Nazis. And what we find out is that it was above all else banal and bureaucratic.This is its essence: the dehumanization of the objects upon which the evil is worked. It can be done no other way. It has been said that for good men to do evil it takes religious commitment. For ordinary men it is necessary to dehumanize. When Stuckart complains that women and children are being killed, he is told, "Women and children are Jews too."

Far above the bathetic histrionics of Kenneth Branagh in the recent "Conspiracy", this crisply chilling, almost real-time reenactment is among the most convincing works of historical evocation on celluloid.Not so much because its overall interpretation is historically valid: as I noted in my review of "Conspiracy", there are grave doubts whether the Wannsee meeting can bear anything like the watershed significance historians imputed to it between c. 1960 and 1980. More recent research has pointed to the Conference being more or less what the one remaining "Protokoll" (summary minutes) stated: a second-level pow-wow of bureaucrats to arrange for the deportation of Jews to the German-occupied East, not a master plan for their destruction cooked up by leading Nazis.But that is by the way. "Wannseekonferenz" ably conveys the peculiar ethos of German (by no means all Nazi) officials and soldiers in the pivotal years of World War Two, when the nation seemed to be on top of Europe but was already getting jitters about its staying power. As the Interior Ministry's moderate Dr Stuckart, between wipes of his nose, points out: neither the British Empire nor the Soviet Union has yet been defeated, America is about to join in (the date is a month after Pearl Harbor) and there is danger in sweeping assimilated Jews and mixed-race people out of the Reich. Some will escape to become mortal enemies of it when they might be co-opted. Other participants crudely call for total banishment of Jewry from the Altreich and the Polish "Generalgouvernement", grumbling about disease; but there are war-production and morale arguments on the other side, and the uniforms who start by seeming to spring wholesale evacuation on the suits as a fait accompli- Heydrich and "my Jewish consultant, Eichmann"- are willing to ponder exemptions.All this is a far cry from the Goldhagenesque "eliminationist antisemitism" uncritically portrayed in "Conspiracy". The German film is a more plausible picture of the clashes and compromises, the tired banter and one-upmanship, the relief of dirty jokes and the solemn courtesies one would expect of a gaggle of Teutonic bureaucrats who don't feel as assured of victory as they have to pretend. The film is little more than facial expressions and dialogue, batted to and fro across the table; but every actor is right inside his part. The sense of a warped community is potent, and the prowling encirclement by Heinz Schirk's camera reinforces this solidarity instead of just trying to fluff up the monotony of a bunch of men (and one shockable stenographer) talking.Dietrich Mattausch looks far more like the real Reinhard Heydrich- tall, elegant fencer and violinist with a streak of treachery- than stocky little Branagh. His unfailing politeness, with a hint of cold steel underneath, is more convincing than Branagh's Demon King. This man knows what he wants, but his chairmanship is skilfully emollient.Gerd Bockmann's Eichmann is assiduous and dispassionate like the real Adolf E, who had no great personal animus towards Jews but was determined to get ahead in his sordid profession of "dispatcher". Peter Fitz as Stuckart, the Jonah of the gathering, hints at distaste for the whole business while manfully arguing a pragmatic case for letting sleeping dogs lie. Among the smaller parts, Martin Luttge as Major Dr Rudolf Lange- intellectual turned persecutor in an SS Special Action Group- stands out for his affectation of rough, half-reluctant practicality, telling civilian papershufflers the score.Inevitably a few embroideries have crept in: Heydrich's pursuit of the secretary, Lange's dog, the contemptuous anecdote about the Papal Nuncio. As if tacitly admitting the lack of hard evidence for orchestrated genocide from the minutes, the screenplay chucks in a throwaway line: Heydrich speaks of finding a new way of killing Jews fast by "learning to take the Fuhrer literally". Stuckart tells Dr Kritzinger that this refers to a "Mein Kampf" passage about how the Great War could have been won if subversive, high-ranking German Jews back home had been held under poison gas. We are supposed to infer a whiff of Zyklon B from this; but as is clear in context, Hitler meant that those Jews should have had to inhale British poison gas as front-line soldiers, like himself.Such gaseous garnishings were probably required to make the film an accepted part of the curriculum in the guilt-ridden German system of historical re-education. But they do not seriously detract from this superbly atmospheric chamber piece.