"it would have been possible to find things out"

I am getting smug comments from someone who's bragging about going to see Trumbo yesterday, the current alleged bio-flick about the screen-writer-Communist- HUAC martyr, Dalton Trumbo. Apparently I'm supposed to feel diminished by the cineaste's great accomplishment.  As if sitting in a movie theater with a bunch of other paying customers is some kind of achievement imparting merit. I doubt I'll watch it.   Trumbo was one of those who I used to dutifully revere but, then, I learned more about him and the more I learned the more of a sleeveen he turned out to be.   I could go look to see what he was still saying about his hero, Stalin, as Stalin was mounting his pogrom against Jews right before his just in the nick of time death.  Like all white-collar, American Communists, the mass murders, purges, slave labor system, abolition of the right to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to so much as anything Stalin's apparatus decided to kill you over. was no skin off of his nose.   Compared to the conditions under Stalin's regime, we are to weap and tear our garments over Trumbo having to go uncredited for the movie scripts he still wrote.  Such is the make-believe of the psudo-left which burdens the real left, still.

Apparently it has not occurred to a lot of desk set lefties that no one has to choose either HUAC or the American Communist Party, you can reject them both, and for a lot of the same reasons.   And I do.

Anyway, this gives me a chance to go back to a post I started writing quite a few weeks ago about watching a far different kind of bio-flick with entirely different motives but which, nonetheless, raised some of the same issues about the cinematic, theatrical and novelistic use of real history and real figures in it.   The movie is the wrenching Der Untergang about the last 10 days of the Nazi regime, presenting life in Hitler's underground bunker and in Berlin as the Russians were about to take the city.   I will begin by saying the acting was nothing short of great.  Bruno Ganz did a spectacular job of presenting Hitler in what you have to believe was all of his original ego-maniacle, self-absorbed, childish and willful repulsiveness.   He did that while, at the same time, showing how he could invoke a fear and affection in even those closest to him that you imagine was the secret to his success.   The scene, so often used to produce parody "Hitler finds out Barack Obama has won" style Youtubes, in the original, is brilliantly acted.  The scenes in which he has tantrums in front of his Generals blaming the failure of HIS reich on the German army and the German people, the scenes in which he screams and sputters that they'll pay for failing him with their blood is as short a summary of the thinking behind Nazism as you could get through drama.

It was another of those revealing scenes that was the beginning of my uneasiness, the scene in which Eva Braun [Juliane Köhler] begs Hitler for the life of her brother in law,  Hermann Fegelein.   Hitler ordered his summary execution in the wake of his discovery that Fegelein's boss, Himmler, was secretly trying to negotiate a surrender with the Allies and Fegelein, no doubt sensing the danger, left his post in the bunker.   When Hitler's explanation of why he's having him killed was that "It is my will", the change of expressin on Braun's face is some of the best acting you'll ever see.   It's like she, perhaps for the first time, perhaps finally, sees just what "her man" is and what she's a part of.

Why that was so troubling is that it might have made anyone unaware of who Hermann Fegelein was might have been led by what was in the movie to sympathize with him.   A movie is limited in what even a writer and director who takes great pains to be faithful to history can show.  They had to leave it to the previous knowledge of the viewers to understand that he was one of the most putrid, cold blooded, opportunistic and amoral of the Nazi murders, a man who commanded and carried out the murders of tens of thousands of Polish women and children, first trying to drown them by driving them into swamps, then, when the water was too shallow to do that, to shoot them.  And that's only one instance of his real life evil.   And he was only one of the cast of some of the most evil men who have ever lived.   In the movie the only thing that approximates forcing us to face the total evil of the Nazi high command is when, with the help of an SS doctor,  Magda Goebbels [Corinna Harfouch] drugs and cold bloodedly murders her own children so they won't live in a world free of the evil she so obviously and piously loves.   The scene when she forces the drug down her daughter's throat has to stand in for so much other evil that it's almost unbearable to watch.

After watching it I had to remind myself that none of those amazing actors were Hitler or Goebbels [Ulrich Matthes] or Traudl Junge [Alexandra Maria Lara] ,  Hitler's young secretary who the dramatic action surrounds.   What we were seeing, what was presented with such convincing power was not any member of the Nazi inner circle, it was a writer's, a director's and an actor's presentation of a constructed, theatrical role.  The extent to which that told us anything about the reality of what happened in Hitler's bunker and in Berlin in April of 1945 is only the extent to which all of those who made that movie could imagine it, either based in actual evidence of what those who were there said about it, or made up out of something else.

The only real voice in the movie was the elderly Traudl Junge who commented on her memories of what happened.   It was a brilliant choice for the director to make because it presented the fact that the actor who played her was not her in the movie was playing a role and that the movie was not what the ultimate meaning of the moral catastrophe the Nazi regime was.

The most affecting of all the scenes in the movie was the very end of it when the real Traudl Junge talked about how after she learned of the Holocaust, all of the other murders of so many millions, she comforted herself that she was only 22 when she went to work for Hitler and she was kept from that information, that she didn't know at the time what she was a part of.    In the end she says how she had to face that that was a self-serving lie.

Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.

In a very minor and very mild form, that is what I had to face when the fact of what I'd made excuses for was no longer deniable.  What I did in excusing the murders of even more people committed by those who were held up as heroes for the left was not different in kind than what she described.  I chose to believe the old line Stalinists who sold the line that Harry Truman did during the war, that Stalin was a bastard but he was "our bastard" well after the war and well after Truman initiated the anti-Communist scares which had Dalton Trumbo hauled before HUAC.  After all, look who persecuted those champions and fans and, yes, agents of foreign despots, racists and capitalists who weren't far removed from fascists.  People who, for heavens sake, ripped up the Bill of Rights and were truly as unamerican as anyone they were persecuting.

And after Stalin couldn't be sustained as a hero, there was the still very much alive Mao, you still find people who romantically present American Maoists such as those in the Progressive Labor party, I read those aging members of that generation and younger people who weren't born yet writing that kind of drivel in magazines I still buy and in books I still read.  They are still recapitulating the promotion of those championing a communist dictator even as he was in the process of murdering tens of millions of people.   I will add that I think the fact that Mao was murdering Asians instead of white Europeans had a huge role in his respectability in the American and European left.  I think it had a large role in why Stalin's mass murders were so palatable to the American left before there was no choice but to have him join the effort to defeat Hitler.

There were liberal anti-communists, even some like Reinhold Niebuhr who navigated the narrow road that allowed him to be both anti-communist and an opponent of the disaster of the American war in Vietnam.   But for the rest of us, we, not facing any danger of that or of our government really going after us produced no Sophie Scholl or her fellow martyrs of the White Rose who told the truth and paid for it with their lives.   We risked nothing but being dissed by the Maoists as being traitors.

This is a confession.