Directed by Marc Rothemund
Zeitgeist Films, 2006 

    In the immediate postwar period until the early 1960s, general attitudes in Germany toward Nazism involved silence, denial and an exaggerated emphasis on wartime resistance.  With the maturation of the first postwar generation and the reincorporation of Germany into the world political-economic system, however, the bitterness of many gave way to self-reflecting criticism, culminating in the 1970s with the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and, after its 1959 publication, the cinematic adaptation of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. Now, with the recent nomination of Sophie Scholl  for the Oscar for best foreign film, a movie renewing the fixation on anti-Nazi resisters as the 'authentic' Germany, German society can be seen, replacing silence and guilt with pride, as coming full circle.

    The postwar notion of collective German guilt for the horrors of Nazism is of course just as baseless as the notion of collective heroism.  In terms of failing to elucidate the origins and development of the war in particular and imperialism in general, in fact, they are two sides of the same coin.  In the immediate postwar era, ravaged by famine, disease, the loss of 11 per cent of its total population, and foreign occupation, surviving Germans were too preoccupied with survival to address and “atone” for Nazism’s crimes, initially defined by the Allies in terms of German national guilt.  While the Allies feared a resurgence of German militarism, the combination of purges in the GDR and enormous economic growth, along with the adoption of a consumer society in the West, reshaped postwar Germany.  Reduced to a junior player during the Cold War, defanged and relatively prosperous (West) Germany underwent democratization and liberalization.  By 1979, the year of the widely viewed Holocaust miniseries, the Federal Republic had begun treating its wartime atrocities with an honesty and maturity unsurpassed by its vanquished allies or other nations.

    The pinnacle of postwar German self-criticism might be seen in the 1979 film The Tin Drum.  Based on a Gunter Grass novel, the film follows Oskar Matzerath from the turn of the century to the mid-1950s, focusing on the Nazis’ twelve-year reign.  Evoking the writings of Wilhelm Reich and Klaus Theweleit, the film vividly portrays the ideological contours of Nazi militarism, examining its visceral repulsion of women’s sexuality, communism, pacifism and -- the historical event perceived as existentially threatening the German 'nation' -- Soviet ‘Judeo-Bolshevism.’  While Grass’s intentions are much disputed, Oskar, a narrator who willfully stops himself from growing as a three year-old, is a striking metaphor for interpreting German history as a model of asymmetrical development.  The Sonderweg Thesis argues that German history, culminating in Nazism, is partially attributable to the fact that, as historian AJP Taylor writes, Germany came to its turning point in history and “failed to turn.”

    That is, as opposed to England and France, Germany did not undergo the political and social reforms attributable to successful revolution.  Advanced German industrialization and economic development, divorced from comparable social advances, led Germany, as Arno Mayer puts it, to become the “ideal seedbed of fascism.”  Oskar’s rebellion against Nazi hyper-conformity is paralleled by the Nazis’ rebellion against the European status quo; both employed violence to thwart external forces attempting to suppress their drumming and Lebensraum, respectively.  

    Whereas any linear interpretation of German history risks essentialism and is necessarily problematic insofar as it tends to downplay the importance of the first World War I, Versailles, hyperinflation, the world depression and, not least of all, the Soviet Revolution, as well as for its reliance on an English and French developmental “norm,” it is still instructive to examine national particularities, if for no other reason than to highlight larger commonalities. Whether or not The Tin Drum even attempts this, the film remains a wonderfully broad and imaginative examination of psychology, sociology and history.

    The recent German film Sophie Scholl, by contrast, is a didactic, melodramatic, and narrow depiction of German anti-Nazi heroism.  The two films are separated by the 'Historians’ Quarrels' of the 1980s, in which scholars attempted to re-historicize the Holocaust by comparing Nazism to Stalinism, sparking bitter debates dividing the nationalist right and the left.  Responding to the ostensibly guilt-inspired 'immorality' displayed by Fassbinder, German conservatives argued on behalf of the necessity and justification for renewed German pride. Since then, German historiography has been shaped by, among other things, the end of the Cold War, the ‘Goldhagen Debate' and its renewal of 'national guilt' claims and, more recently, the increasing de-legitimization of the US democratic model. Culminating in the US war on Iraq, contemporary US war crimes are increasingly compared to Nazism, both lessening German war-guilt while bolstering Germany’s artificial identity as a pacifist state inexplicably existing apart from imperialist power relations.  That US military aggression is nothing new and that Germany opposed attacking Iraq (versus its operations in the former Yugoslavia) expresses heightened conflicts of interest between the standing imperialist power and a reconstituting one.

    Sophie Scholl covers a six day period in 1943.  It begins with Scholl and other White Rose members printing and distributing anti-Nazi literature and follows their arrest, interrogation, trial and execution. The film is conventionally directed, employing actors in the hero roles who could pass for models, with their attractiveness correlating to their heroism.  Similarly, heavy-handed music generates suspense and drives a plot that largely recycles the sexist motif of the heroically crucified woman.  Like the reactionary Dancer in the Dark and the even more abominable My Life Without Me, the film (in this case literally) juxtaposes Scholl to the crucified Christ, idealizing suffering via the stoic and perfect-looking protagonist.  Sophie Scholl  both implicitly and frequently compares the Nazis to today’s US leadership.  Its protagonists, resembling today's anti-Bush liberals (though with a gun to their heads), throw arguments imploring conformity to the rule of law and humanist ethics at the lawless and haughty Nazi gangsters.  The resisters oppose the war, they tell their judge, because, among other things, it is a lost cause that is badly hurting the German people.  Furthermore, the judge’s pro-war stance is undercut by the fact that he, as opposed to Scholl’s accused brother, has not served on the front.  Though the film’s dialogue is based on transcripts, the timeliness of the “chickenhawk” comparison to today’s US war planners is impossible to miss.  Since the Nazis evoke Bush's US, Sophie Scholl's resisters appear to represent today’s liberalism in general and Germany specifically, ignoring both the role of liberalism in Bush’s imperialism and the fact that it was the Soviet Union that largely defeated the Nazis.

    It is further striking how few “bad” Nazis there are in the film.  Other than the maniacal judge (who is a former Soviet commissar, thus needing to defend his reputation), the only other foul character is the chief interrogator’s Hitler-look-alike underling.  Mohr, his superior, is the personification of paternal concern, admiring Scholl and imploring her to renounce her beliefs in order to save her life.  It even comes back to Scholl that he has told others of how Germany needs more people like her, and that she only needs some reeducating; if she were only his little girl, he virtually pines.  He even attends her execution, looking as if he is on the verge of tears as this embodiment of Germany and womanly perfection is put to early death.  Scholl’s communist cellmate and family similarly give her unconditional support, as she likewise receives maternal sympathetic glances from Mohr’s secretary.  Her prison guard even, announcing that she is breaking the rules, gives Scholl a final cigarette before her execution.  As Scholl proclaims to the silenced judge and embarrassed head hanging of the Nazi-filled courtroom, she speaks for the many who are otherwise cowed by fear.  Scholl, the stoically executed liberal religious resister, is the true German.

    One does not have to ignore the relative propinquity of German archival openings concerning the White Rose to note that the film’s implications, both resuscitating a good German nationalism while incriminating George W.  Bush’s US as fascistic, fulfill contemporary political requirments.  While it is difficult to disagree with the latter project, when it is achieved largely through the former it suggests that the filmmakers missed the point.  There is no “good” nationalism apart from the imperialism that allows the nation-state to exist in the first place.  And while the US might currently be “the worst” in the system, this is no guarantee that Germany will never resume that role. On the contrary, continuing to identify with the nation-state and its accompanying systems precludes an ending of tyranny, bounding us, either from one country, another, or many, to more of the same.