February 18, 1943 – The members of the “White Rose” anti-Nazi group, centered in the University of Munich, were apprehended and arrested by the Gestapo.Since 1942, as the speed of atrocities had quickened and Germany had gotten bogged down in Stalingrad, these nonviolent activists, consisting mostly of medical students, had surreptitiously printed and distributed pamphlets calling for an end to Hitler’s regime, and even scrawled large graffiti all over Munich: “Down with Hitler! . . . Hitler the Mass Murderer!” and “Freiheit! . . . Freiheit! . . . Freedom! . . . Freedom!”
Yet for months, despite the most strenuous efforts, the Gestapo couldn’t locate the source of this insurrectionary activity, even though it correctly guessed that the group had access to a duplicating machine as well as large quantities of paper, envelopes and postage.
On this date, however, two members of the group, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl—two former members of the Hitler Youth—were discovered. Four days later, the siblings, along with best friend Christoph Probst, were executed after a farce of a trial. Later, three other group members met the same fate.
Today, a square in the University of Munich is named after Hans and Sophie Scholl. A documentary on the group was released in the 1980s, and more recently the film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days earned a much-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. (The interrogation scenes were based on actual Gestapo records that became available only after reunification.) The group has taken its place of honor among those who set the face against Nazism, including the Jesuit Alfred Delp, the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the leader in the plot to kill Hitler, Count Claus von Stauffenberg (the subject of the upcoming Tom Cruise film that has caused such controversy).
Two of the finest foreign language films—two of the finest films, period—of recent years dealt with Germany’s experiences with 20th-century totalitarian regimes and the resistance formed against it: Sophie Scholl and The Lives of Others, last year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, on East Germany under Communism.
Why aren’t more such thoughtful, serious movies made? More to the point, why aren’t they made in Hollywood? Part of the problem might stem from the attitudes of Hollywood’s finest stars.
In a New Yorker profile last year, Julie Christie remarked, “I’m not sure I can bear to see a film they gave the Oscar to, that tells you what awful people Communists are.”
Having just watched her Oscar-winning performance in the 1965 film Darling, I know how superb an actress Christie is, and I’m waiting patiently to see how, four decades later, she has transformed herself into an Alzheimer’s patient in Away From Her.
But comments like these are simply fatuous—particularly from one such as Christie, who chose to appear in tripe like the Brad Pitt film Troy but somehow thinks it beneath her to watch a film that might say something essential about her times.
You have to wonder why she said this. Is it because there are already too many films on this subject? But by the same reasoning, why have another film about Alzheimer’s after the similarly themed Judi Dench film Iris?
This leads logically to the conclusion that the actress might be suffering from either an intellectual or moral deficit. But none of the interviews that Christie has given over the years, nor her longtime anti-nuclear and peace activism, can lead one to believe that she is anything but intelligent.
That leaves us with a moral deficit. How sad that a woman who came to personify all the allure of London in the 1960s possesses such a terrible blind spot. Clearly, she wasn’t paying attention to the part of the script in Doctor Zhivago where her character Lara's friend Pasha (Tom Courtenay), an idealistic revolutionary turned remorseless Communist functionary, says: “History has no room for personal feelings.”
But Christie is hardly unusual in the filmmaking community in her moral failure. Oliver Stone made an admiring documentary about Fidel Castro, Commandante, and has stated that he admires him “because he’s a fighter.” A few years ago, The Motorcycle Diaries related the evolution of Che Guevara’s political thought while on a journey, with no attention, except for a caption at the end, about his career with Castro. (This is a little bit like making a film about Josef Goebbels at the University of Heidelberg and his activities as poet, playwright and novelist without getting into that unfortunate association with Adolf Hitler.) The Robert Redford movie Havana also presented a highly romanticized, Casablanca-influenced version of the commandante’s rise to power.
In fact, the first film I can recall that took Castro to task was Before Night Falls, in which the Cuban dictator was criticized for his cruel anti-gay regime. Yet even before that, Castro had appropriated private property, interfered with religious institutions, refused to allow free and open elections, as well as jailed and, when the need arose, executed political opponents.
Why has the film community so rarely, if ever, covered this? It can’t have anything to do with lack of witnesses – my own elementary and second schools were filled with the children of refugees from his tyranny, and I’m sure there are hundreds of similar schools across the country.
The fact is that nearly 20 years after the end of the Iron Curtain (and more than 60 years after the so-called “Thousand-Year Reich” met its inglorious Gotterdammerung), the world needs to know all the history it can about totalitarian regimes of all kinds.
In his great elegy, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden urged his fellow poets, “In the prison of his days,/Teach the free man how to praise.” That same responsibility – to tell the truth about totalitarianism, no matter what the cost, as the White Rose group did —falls to artists of all kinds, including Ms. Christie—and especially so in this land where today, we celebrate the two men who gave us a new republic and “a new birth of freedom.”
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