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The New York Times, Friday, 02.18.05
"The Last Days of Hitler: Raving and Ravioli," A.O. Scott
The most disturbing aspect of "Downfall" - and the reason it has been attacked in Germany - is the way it allows the audience's sympathy to gravitate toward some of these characters. Next to the Goebbelses, and to Hitler, many of the others don't look too bad. In part, this is a result of the conventions of film narrative, which more often than not invite us to identify with someone on screen, even if nobody is especially admirable.
Thus, General Monke (André Hennicke) starts to look like a crusty, straight-talking old officer out of an American World War II picture, while the open, earnest features of Prof. Ernst-Günther Schenck (Christian Berkel) bespeak an uneasy conscience and a good heart, in spite of the SS lightning bolts on his collar. And Traudl Junge, who Ms. Lara plays with a winning combination of pluck and vulnerability, comes to resemble a Hollywood career girl in a 1940's melodrama.
"Downfall," which was based partly on a memoir Junge wrote with Melissa Müller (and also on the work of the German historian Joachim Fest), seems to accept her image of herself as a naïve young woman drawn to working for Hitler more by "curiosity" than by ideological zeal. As "Blind Spot," an unnerving documentary about Junge (who lived until 2002) makes plain, this curiosity did not extend to what her boss was actually doing. But while "Blind Spot," true to its title, allows you to intuit the layers of denial and selective memory that allowed Junge to live with herself, "Downfall" implicitly affirms her innocence, and extends it to the German people at large. When Goebbels and Hitler refuse to express compassion for their own civilians, and declare that the Germans have brought their fate upon themselves, the movie is sending its domestic audience the soothing message that ordinary Germans were above all the victims of Nazism.
Which is true up to a point, but some distinctions should be preserved. A note at the end reminds us of the 50 million dead in the war and the 6 million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis, and then notes the long lives enjoyed by some of the figures in the film, including Junge and Professor Schenck, whom the movie treats as a hero for becoming disillusioned with Hitler just before the Red Army showed up.
Democracy Now!, Friday, 02.18.05
"The Justice of Roosting Chickens: Ward Churchill Speaks"
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Professor Ward Churchill, joining us from Boulder, Colorado. Welcome to Democracy Now!
WARD CHURCHILL: Hi, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Good to have you with us. Well, can you respond to this firestorm now? But I'd like you to start off by you explaining your comments that have become well known now around the issue of the technocrats at the World Trade Center being like little Eichmanns.
WARD CHURCHILL: Well it goes to Hannah Arendt's notion of Eichmann, the thesis that he embodied the banality of evil. That she had gone to the Eichmann trial to confront the epitome of evil in her mind and expected to encounter something monstrous, and what she encountered instead was this nondescript little man, a bureaucrat, a technocrat, a guy who arranged train schedules, who, as it turned out, ultimately didn't even agree with the policy that he was implementing, but performed the technical functions that made the holocaust possible, at least in the efficient manner that it occurred, in a totally amoral and soulless way, purely on the basis of excelling at the function and getting ahead within the system that he found himself. He was a good family man, in his way. He was loved by his children, participated in civic activities, was in essence the good German. And she [Arendt] said, therein lies the evil. It wasn't that Eichmann was a Nazi or a high official within Nazidom, although he was in fact a Nazi and a relatively highly placed official, but it was exactly the reverse: that given his actual nomenclature, the actuality of Eichmann was that anyone in this sort of mindless, faceless, bureaucratic capacity could be the Nazi. That he was every man, and that was what was truly horrifying to her in the end. That was a controversial thesis because there's always this effort to distinguish anyone and everyone irrespective of what they're doing from this polarity of evil that is signified in Nazidom, and she had breached the wall and brought the lessons of how Nazism actually functioned, the modernity of it, home and visited it upon everyone, calling for, then, personal accountability, responsibility, to the taking of responsibility for the outcome of the performance of one's functions. That's exactly what it is that is shirked here, and makes it possible for people to, from a safe remove, perform technical functions that result in (and at some level, they know this, they understand it) in carnage, emiseration, the death of millions ultimately. That's the Eichmann aspect. But notice I said little Eichmanns, not the big Eichmann. Not the real Eichmann. The real Eichmann ultimately is symbolic, even in his own context. He symbolized the people that worked under him. He symbolized the people who actually were on the trains. They were hauling the Jews. He symbolized the technicians who were making the gas for I.G. Farben. He symbolized all of these people who didn't directly kill anybody, but performed functions and performed those functions with a certain degree of enthusiasm and certainly with a great degree of efficiency, that had the outcome of the mass murder of the people targeted for elimination or accepted as collateral damage. That's the term of the art put forth by the Pentagon.
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