Introduction: Screening German Perpetration BRAD PRAGER, COLUMBIA, MO MICHAEL D. RICHARDSON, ITHACA, NY In an attempt to piece together the mindset of a Holocaust perpetrator, the Austrian-born journalist Gitta Sereny interviewed Franz Stangl, who had been a death camp commandant at Sobibor and Treblinka. She writes that she aimed to approach Stangl «with an open mind,» and to assess matters «not from our point of view, but from his» (13). The document she produced, a book entitled Into that Darkness, was based on extended conversations with Stangl while he was incarcerated. It is undoubtedly invaluable. No one had talked with a man like Stangl for as long as Sereny did, and aspects of his selfpresentation come across as diabolical, in that he enjoyed aspects of his work and asserts that his conscience is clear; yet they were also quite ordinary, given that he was an accomplished mass murderer. He had a typical family life and ambitions; he neither breathed fire nor did he smell like sulfur. Sereny ’ s effort to understand the perpetrator thus yields a «both/ and» conclusion. She summarizes her interviews in contradictory terms: they are «a demonstration of the fatal independence of all human actions, and an affirmation of man ’ s responsibility for his own acts and their consequences» (15). Before setting out to film Shoah (1985) the French director Claude Lanzmann read Sereny ’ s account. He distinguishes his approach from hers. According to Lanzmann, Sereny wanted to think about evil, «to understand how a husband and father can calmly take part in mass murder» (420), but he, by contrast, took a position that was predicated on a refusal to comprehend; for Lanzmann, the crimes committed were not something with which one could, through any amount of reasoning, come to terms. He writes accusatorily that Sereny later fell for the charms of Albert Speer, and that this was, to his mind, a foreseeable extension of an approach that surrenders moral authority and rectitude in the name of understanding. «Carried along by the niceties proper to psychology,» he explains, she wrote another massive book «as a tribute» to Speer and his family. He complains, «She understood everything. She understood too much» (420). Lanzmann ’ s position is, in certain respects, unsurprising for a filmmaker. Unlike a psychologist, Lanzmann is willing to work from a position of righteousness and with a presupposition of guilt. For him, cinema need not play by the rules of psychological science. Film is not always suited to explore the dark corners of the mind: it depicts surfaces - especially faces and voices - and, as a rule, it leaves viewers to speculate about its subjects ’ inner lives. Given this limitation, each one of the perpetrator-related problematics explored in the films that are analyzed in the following pages is compounded and made more intricate by ambiguities that stem from their status as film. The filmed image is capable of bringing us closer to a speaking subject, but also of alienating us as it objectifies that same subject; cinematic images can seem static - especially when they linger on photographs - thereby opening the past to protracted and quasi-scientific scrutiny, yet they also trade on their fleeting, ephemeral character; the sounds of cinema can correspond to a given scene or sequence, heightening an emotional response, but they can simultaneously undermine those same feelings. Thus while cinema is capable of stripping away the surface of its subject in an attempt to find a core, in doing so it also tends to present additional layers of ambivalence. It is not simply the problems of the past - that is, the German responsibility for genocide and its history of working through the past - but also the paradoxes that attend cinema as a medium, which enrich the analyses in this special issue. The authors included in this issue have concerned themselves with cinematic engagements with perpetration, and the constellation of problems described in the following pages would be knotty and daunting enough on its own, even without the added dimension of cinema ’ s intrinsic ambivalence. This additional element of complexity is, in this case, neither a reference to the unrepresentability or ineffability of the Holocaust (that is, the widely recognized Bilderverbot connected with the depiction of Holocaust atrocities), nor does it refer to the conspicuous problem of Nazi representation per se. 1 Films such as Der Untergang (2004) merit attention for their ostensibly taboo-breaking nature, their willingness to engage directly with the Nazi past and represent Hitler directly, but they have become objects of academic study in large part because of their claims to authenticity (i. e., their meticulous recreation, based on historians ’ accounts, of their wartime milieu) and because of how they position the contemporary viewer with respect to the direct and indirect complicity of the German populace of the Nazi era. Although that film treads on hazardous ground, it was less concerned with the question of what cultural influences create a perpetrator, whether there is such a thing as an innocent Nazi bureaucrat, and whether families ever outlive a Nazi legacy, and more concerned with reclaiming emotional engagement as a potentially productive, if not entirely unproblematic aspect of historical understanding. 2 Those former questions and their answers are less well defined than the contrasting red and black in 148 Brad Prager, Michael D. Richardson banners bearing the swastika; they are nebulous and are best approached indirectly. Indirect approaches of this sort are analyzed in the essays that follow. These seek to answer a range of questions: Whether it is worthwhile to isolate social causes of perpetration (that is, whether violent perpetration can be rooted in repressive cultures of childcare), as critics felt Michael Haneke tried to do in Das weiße Band (2009); whether one can judge the inner lives of Nazi leaders on the basis of what they say about themselves in their diaries, as taken up by, for example, Das Goebbels-Experiment (2005); how justice was sought by Fritz Bauer in Germany prior to the 1960s and to the student movement, when Germans refused to avow guilt for war crimes or to even look at the evidence, as depicted in Fritz Bauer: Tod auf Raten (2010); whether guilt, shame or both are invariably handed down from one generation to the next, as was the concern of filmmaker Malte Ludin while working on his film about his father, 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2004); and, finally, where an interviewer can position himself - honestly or dishonestly, objectively or from a position of anger and resentment - vis-à-vis the appalling perpetrators interviewed in Lanzmann ’ s monumental Shoah. The essays in this special issue are not necessarily concerned with pursuing the truth about the causes of perpetration. That task is an overreach for even the most seasoned historians. These essays are concerned specifically with cinematic representations, and they return to certain tendencies throughout. Where cinematic technique is concerned, the key issue rarely concerns identification. It is less about whether, in a Brechtian vein, one sympathizes with the perpetrator and would be inclined to assess matters from his or her perspective. Rather, the tendencies that come to the foreground here, one after the next, have much more to do with how cinema as a medium establishes temporal and spatial distance from its subjects. In his filmmaking - and in his remarks about his filmmaking - Lanzmann was always concerned with whether viewers would mistake the crimes of the Holocaust for crimes committed in another (distant) time and in another (distant) place. The films examined here manipulate our proximity to that past, moving between distance and nostalgia, on the one hand, and immediacy and contemporaneousness on the other. In the interpretations that follow, there is a consistent engagement with a number of themes: 1. The employment of sound. Erin McGlothlin, citing Shoshana Felman, points out in her essay that for Lanzmann the «echo» is an essential heuristic. In Shoah, it denotes the reverberations of the past in the present, but also rerepresents the language - the individual, decontextualized words - associated with perpetration both to the perpetrators and the film ’ s audience. In Malte 149 Introduction: Screening German Perpetration Ludin ’ s film the music, particularly the near comedic sounds of brass instruments that accompany the images of his father, Hanns Ludin, underline the awkwardness of his memories and the embarrassment that goes along with excavating his family ’ s shame. Finally, in Lutz Hachmeister ’ s documentary about Josef Goebbels, Kenneth Branagh ’ s voice-over - enacting or embodying the voice of Goebbels - humanizes a figure otherwise viewed as an inhumane monster, by ostensibly offering viewers (listeners) unmediated access to his interiority. 2. The uses of color in opposition to those of black and white. The terms of this discussion could be called a Schindler ’ s List (1994) problem. In that film Spielberg not only used grayscale cinematography, either to meet, partway, the expectations of audiences that have come to know the Holocaust through black and white images, or because color would have perhaps brought Holocaust images too close, too proximate, made them too real. He also famously inserted color, where the young girl with the red jacket appears, perhaps solely with the intention of manipulating the emotions, with the aim of making her victimhood more visceral. Lanzmann, who has scornfully commented on Spielberg ’ s approach, rejects archival footage, a rejection that can, in this way, also be seen as a rebuke against black and white. It may be, for him, associated with a mode of nostalgia - a deliberate and even pleasurable distancing. It is, in the terms of that argument, the opposite of making things present. But perhaps for this reason, owing to the stylization and the artifice, Haneke chose - as Jennifer M. Kapczynski points out in her article - to refer viewers to black and white photographs by August Sander; his film, in some ways, reproduces our aesthetic absorption with images of that past. 3. The question of performance. A mainstay of Holocaust filmmaking is the witness seated before the camera, who provides testimony directly to the lens. To what extent can one describe such testimonies as performance? Initially it seems inappropriate to label witnesses ’ accounts in this way, but under what circumstance does one naturally speak to a camera? Holocaust documentaries are never strictly observational; the circumstances under which they are made are always special, artificial, and often stylized. In the essays that follow, this question is taken up with particular interest where Michael D. Richardson examines Das Himmler-Projekt (2000). Why does the film and television actor Manfred Zapatka not attempt to embody Heinrich Himmler in a convincing or authentic way? Why did he and director Romuald Karmakar not have him wear a Nazi uniform? And to what extent does this selfconscious foregrounding of the performative moment of the film, the reading of Himmler ’ s speech, reduce rather than increase spectatorial distance? The question arises again in viewing 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß, 150 Brad Prager, Michael D. Richardson especially at the point when we hear Malte Ludin reading his father ’ s letter. The director stages his disquiet, and in particular his awareness that, as the son, he unwillingly embodies his father; he needs to find a way to establish distance where there is mainly uncomfortable proximity. And, finally, there is Claude Lanzmann, who pretends to keep the fact of the interview under wraps and keeps his camera hidden, occasionally, as McGlothlin points out, pretending - that is, performing - his imperfect German language skills. His performance is geared toward deceiving the perpetrators in the image, with the aim of eliciting some other truth, but it deceives the viewers as well. We may not always know, under such conditions, how to separate the genuine from the false. And that is, in some ways, the problem. Representing the perpetrator involves depicting both that which is most evil and that which is least explicable. The fact that these two attributes are in this case inseparable makes film a uniquely apt medium for this subject; film is defined by the tension between projected surface and imagined depths. Even today, in an age in which designations such as good and evil are often circumscribed by moral relativism, that is, they are used not as absolute moral judgments but as judgments within a particular moral system, there is a reflexiveness in designating Nazi perpetrators as evil, particularly when they are portrayed in film. But the follow-up question - «How did they get this way? » - comes just as instinctively. The contributions to this volume make no claim to providing an answer to that question, but rather explore the interplay between these two critical, intellectual moments as it is enacted in a number of films about German perpetrators. In doing so, the essays investigate how cinema can enable its audience to reflect on their own investment in this dynamic, as well as how this specific array of films directly engages with the limits of cinematic representation. Notes 1 On the Bilderverbot see Ball 162 - 64. The depiction of Nazi perpetrators in cinema has been taken up most recently by Frölich, Schneider and Visarius as well as by Hake. 2 See esp. von Moltke 40 - 43. Works Cited Ball, Karyn. «For and against the Bilderverbot: The Rhetoric of ‹ Unrepresentability › and Remediated ‹ Authenticity › in the German Reception of Steven Spielberg ’ s 151 Introduction: Screening German Perpetration Schindler ’ s List.» Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. Ed. David Bathrick, Brad Prager and Michael D. Richardson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. 162 - 84. Frölich, Margrit, Christian Schneider and Karsten Visarius, eds. Das Böse im Blick: Die Gegenwart des Nationalsozialismus im Film. Munich: Edition text + kritik, 2010. Hake, Sabine. Screen Nazis; Cinema, History and Democracy. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2012. Lanzmann, Claude. The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir. Trans. Frank Wynne. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Sereny, Gitta. Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. von Moltke, Johannes. «Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion.» New German Critique 102 (Fall 2007): 17 - 43. 152 Brad Prager, Michael D. Richardson