Anti-Nazi Classics

This interesting historical artifact is candy for Nazi nuts like myself. A friend once described my Netflix queue as "Jane Austen adaptations and Nazi documentaries."

Guilty as charged. I admit to a fascination with the Nazis. It's the old can't-turn-away-from-a-train-wreck, only writ as large as human history itself. Simply as the modern embodiment of pure evil, the Nazis exert a powerful pull on the imagination. How did the nation of Beethoven, Goethe and Kant become the nation of Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler? So goes the question so many have asked.

These movies don't attempt to provide an answer. Instead, they are dramatic representations of the dark years during World War II. The most interesting stylistically is "The Murderers Among Us," which harks back to the salad days of the mid-'20s, when Expressionism briefly made Berlin the artistic film center in the world (similar, say, to London in the mid-1960s or New York in the late '70s).

The most important film here is "Naked Among Wolves," for the simple reason that it was the first fictional film in either Germany to tackle the most difficult subject of all: The Final Solution and the camps, here represented by Buchenwald and personified by a teen-age survivor.

My favorite, however, is 1961's "The Gleiwitz Case," which exposes one of the weirder incidents in the Third Reich, which, heaven knows, has given us enough truly weird incidents. Just before the blitzkrieg of Poland that began World War II, a group of Polish-speaking German commandos attacked a radio station to transmit anti-Nazi propaganda.

This all-too-typical example of Nazi cynicism is given a full cinematic treatment. At times, it's as difficult to watch as "Schindler's List," since it, too, takes off from real life. Truth is not only stranger than fiction; it's less pleasant.

"I Was Nineteen" is a glossed-over version of the Soviet advance into Germany, which understandably ignores the barbarity on the Russian side. It is most interesting as a model for the intensely interesting films of the 1980s that examined the larger role of identity during the Third Reich such as the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Agnieszka Holland's masterpiece, "Europa Europa."

The biggest problem --�and it's a doozy -- is the missing link. Not "Jacob the Liar," although that's a biggie; rather, "Rotation," a 1949 film that was and remains East Germany's most profound indictment of the Nazis. It's a tiny film with an unsung cast but its depiction of a typical blue-collar family lost to the whirlwind is the one must-see.

Even so, if you are at all interested in how the Germans themselves have dealt
with --�are still dealing with -- history's most repressive legacy, these films are an excellent starting point.