THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE
Review and Commentary by Manavendra K. Thakur
Copyright 1988 by Manavendra K. Thakur and The Tech.
Reproduced with permission.
1984 85 mins. FRG/Austria German with English Subtitles Unrated Mono Color 16 & 35mm/1.33
Cast: Robert Artzorn, Friedrich Beckhaus, Gerd Bockmann, Jochen Busse, Hans W. Bussinger, Harald Dietl, Peter Fitz, Reinhard Glemnitz, Dieter Groest, Martin Luttge, Anita Mally, Dietrich Mattausch, Gerd Rigauer, Franz Rudnick, Gunter Sporrle, Rainer Steffen.
Credits: Directed by Heinz Schirk. Produced by Manfred Korytowski. Executive Producer: Siegfried B. Gloker. Screenplay by Paul Mommertz. Director of Photography: Horst Schier. Historical Advisor: Shlomo Aronson, University of Jerusalem. Editor: Ursula Mollinger. Sound Engineer: Sigbert Stark. Art Direction by Robert Hofer-Ach & Barbara Siebner. Costumes: Diemut Remy. Production Manager: Jochen Riedel.
Studio: Infa Film GmbH (Munich) / Austrian Television - O.R.F. /
Bavarian Broadcasting Corp.
Distributor(North America): Films Incorporated
35 South West Street
Mt. Vernon, New York 10550
(914) 667-0800
Just about everyone knows how terrible the Holocaust was. But it's not something that most people think about other than in casual terms. The sheer numbers of those killed and the barbarity of Auschwitz numb the mind. These horrors are so immense that they loom large and become monolithically unfathomable.
But it is important to remember that those who set this brutally efficient extermination of machine in motion were not robots or animals, but humans. It is simple and comforting to dismiss those Nazis who established and maintained the concentration camps as sub-human beasts. But they were not. They were alive, and they were human, with flesh and blood that differs little from you or me.
That's a scary thought. It's scary because we like to think that we are above such things, that we could never jump into the same trap they did. Even our broadest and most forgiving concept of humanity has to be stretched to the limit when it comes to fitting in the Nazis.
It's concerns like these that often inspire artists to give expression and meaning to the immense human despair and sacrifice they have witnessed. The amount that has been written about the Holocaust over the last forty years is staggering, and the number of films, poems, and memorials seem to keep growing. Who has not seen at some point in their life photographs of the ovens and bone-thin survivors and the plaques that boldly proclaim "NEVER AGAIN"?
Sadly, these kinds of polemics are not enough. All too often, their moralizing and didactic tone distance the viewer or reader from the true importance of what is being said. And that makes it all too easy for adults to dismiss these images as trite because "it couldn't happen again." The recent emergence of those who would revise history by denying that the Holocaust happened at all is at least partially attributable to our growing collective amnesia brought on by an ongoing disregard for increasingly perfunctory warnings.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote on the "banality of evil" and its manifestations. There is at least one film that understands how to apply this concept to the Nazis. It is THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE, a film made for German television in 1984. It is only now being shown in the United States.
On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking members of the Nazi government attended a meeting in the upper-class Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Until that meeting, the extermination of the Jewish population was done primarily on an ad-hoc basis. The officials who gathered that day at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee adopted the final solution as a formal, official policy. Detailed minutes of the meeting, including descriptions of the food and drink served and records of informal conversations, were taken by a secretary who is still alive and living in Germany. (She refused to be interviewed by the filmmakers.)
In 1961, Israeli-born producer Manfred Korytowski (best known in West Germany for producing PUMUCKL, a television show for children that enjoys a "Sesame Street" level of popularity) traveled to Israel to film a documentary about the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann (a conference participant). While there, he came across references to the Wannsee conference and soon discovered the secretary's notes at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Archives in Jerusalem. His interest aroused, he quickly concluded that the conference demanded a definitive cinematic treatment. After six years of intensive research, he managed to accumulate letters about the conference from Heinrich Himmler and Herman Goering as well as documents from the Nuremburg trials and Eichmann's trial. From these records, writer Paul Mommertz fashioned a dense screenplay from which the film was made. The film directly recreates the conference and runs 85 minutes -- exactly the length of the actual meeting itself.
The film's approach is opposite that taken by most films on the Nazis. It simply presents the Nazis as accurately as the records allow, without commentary or narration. As the conference gets under way, the men crack jokes, flirt with the secretary, and drink cognac that the waiters bring out. And all during the meeting, the discussion centers on how to best consolidate the mechanisms for mass extermination under one command.
Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Nazi Security Police and Secret Service, who convened the meeting, becomes particularly pleased when the conference participants readily agree to support his plans for implementing the final solution. Not only does it bolster his own political ambitions (he was designated as Hitler's successor), but it masks the responsibility for the decision behind a collective committee decision.
Director Heinz Schirk makes no attempt to soften or highlight any of this. He lets the meeting and the participants speak for themselves. The most telling comment of his own that he makes during the film is through his camera work. After showing the exterior of the house and a few other establishing shots, the camera enters the conference room and does not emerge from the house again until the end of the meeting and the film. This is the primary element responsible for attuning the audience to the supersensitized sense of reality that pervades the film.
While inside the room, the camera almost seems to adopt the emotional characteristic of a Greek chorus, witnessing the events unflinchingly while being unable to influence the seemingly inevitable outcome. Near the beginning of the film, the camera executes a complete rotation about the long rectangular table at which the participants are seated. The camera pans just slowly enough to catch the flavor of the conversations it encounters, creating an eerie sense of observing the events through a solid glass wall. At one point, two men in the foreground laugh at a joke about defiling a Jewish woman's vagina while the secretary in the background winces and averts her eyes. Most of the film is presented matter-of-factly through this sort of mise-en-scene and detailed shot composition. And all of it is presented in real time.
The actors were chosen for their physical resemblance to their characters, but their acting skills are uniformly excellent as well. While all the actors work together to create a remarkable ensemble performance, Dietrich Mattausch is particularly effective in portraying Reinhard Heydrich and his actions in accessible terms. He is disarmingly -- and disturbingly -- human while reassuring the others who admit to having fainted or being uneasy about the final solution. The unification of actor and character is so complete that one wonders how the actors kept themselves from being scarred emotionally while trying to divorce themselves from their roles after the shoot.
The filmmakers' demand for complete precision -- even the pens and watches are accurate -- results in a copious use of Nazi jargon. Nevertheless, one need not know that "Reichsfuhrer S.S." refers to Heinrich Himmler to understand the essence of what is being discussed. The facial expressions, voice cadences, and bodily mannerisms all have a universal value that can easily be grasped. Furthermore, the English subtitles have been culled from the best of three separate translations (one original transcript, one by a poet, and one rigorously accurate).
Ultimately, however, what is most striking about the film and the events it portrays is how casually it all happens. One man came to the conference from a shopping trip. Another man leaves the conference to see why his dog is barking outside, while the others inside continue to sip cognac and brandy. And when a railway official complains that seat repair costs have been rising, it all seems no different from any corporate board meeting -- until you realize that the official is annoyed because the frozen bodies of Jews stuck to their train seats in the cold cannot be removed without damaging the seats.
It seems odd that a film as muted in style as this one could evoke strong reactions. As I left the theater, I wanted to scream in anger and disbelief. How could these men, these people, these *humans* possibly talk about Jewish people as though they were tools to be used for maximizing efficiency ratings? How could they sit through such a morbid discussion? Didn't even one person have doubts or glimmer of conscience? I just couldn't believe that the most controversial issue they discussed was whether to kill half-Jews or merely to sterilize them.
But that exactly is the point. This film disarmed me and prevented me from raising any defense mechanisms. The starkly human Nazis just stared at me in the face, and I was transfixed, unable to look away. This wasn't nine hours of victims talking or pointing to Nazi horrors or mountains of facts and figures, like Claude Lanzmann's SHOAH. This was 85 minutes of pure unadulterated scenes of the Nazis going about their business. What could be more damning than watching the Nazis from the inside? Even Louis Malle's recent heartfelt film AU REVOIR LES ENFANTES showed the Gestapo from the outside, as monolithic entities.
I was stunned as I left the theater. All of the thoughts I wrote about above came crashing down on me to the point that I couldn't think about anything else for the rest of the day. I was not able to get the final freeze frame of a Nazi playing with his dog out of my mind. A German shepherd lunges for a stick in the man's raised hand while a sharply pungent piano chord -- in the only use of music in the film -- accompanies the image. Six months after having seen the film at the Boston Film Festival, I still can't forget. I know I never will.
Manavendra K. Thakur
{rutgers,decvax!genrad,ihnp4}!mit-eddie!thakur
thakur@eddie.mit.edu
thakur@athena.mit.edu
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