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As our economy struggles to keep its head above water, recriminations abound. Some blame the avarice of media-controlled consumers living beyond their means; others indict mortgage lenders who exploited consumer dreams; many focus on the capitalist greed of Wall Street moguls who padded their life jackets with millions before allowing their companies to bob in barrels at the top of financial falls. All, of course, are complicit, having collectively floated through calm waters without taking heed of the Niagra-like devastation ahead. Americans at all economic levels and in both political parties have been counterfeiting financial stability for over a decade.
Complicity and counterfeiting inform a recent film about a government plan to intentionally drown the American economy. Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, The Counterfeiters tells a fictional story based on the memoir of Adolf Burger, a Slovak Jew placed in a special ward of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942. Along with other Jews who had paper-making, engraving, banking, or printing-press skills, Burger was compelled to manufacture British pounds and American dollars that the Germans planned to pour into Allied countries in order to devastate their economies.
Granted special favors—ample food, comfortable beds, hot showers, fresh toiletries—these Jews aided an enemy decimating their race. Counterfeiting in more ways than one, they illustrate what Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi called "the grey zone of collaboration." In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi says of his Holocaust experience, "the enemy was all around but also inside[;] the 'we' lost its limits."
The Counterfeiters, then, is about the complexity of defining the "we." Focusing on tensions among the counterfeiting Jews themselves, it dissolves easy distinctions between victims and perpetrators of evil. Doing so, the film distinguishes itself from many cinematic portrayals of Nazi atrocities, which manifest what Levi calls a "Manichaean tendency" to make clear-cut distinctions between good and evil:
Popular history, and also the history taught in schools, is influenced by this Manichaean tendency, which shuns half-tints and complexities: it is prone to reduce the river of human occurrences to conflicts, and the conflicts to duels—we and they, … winners and losers, … the good guys and the bad guys, respectively, because the good must prevail, otherwise the world would be subverted.
In contrast, The Counterfeiters gives us half-tints as subtle as those the Jewish prisoners seek to capture on forged American bills.
The film opens with a scene shot in half-tints. In the muted tones of twilight, a man dressed in black sits on dark gray stone, watching a gray-blue sea beneath a light gray sky. Picking up a black briefcase and walking by newspaper debris announcing the end of the war, the man enters a Monte Carlo casino, where bright lights and garish colors contrast dramatically with the preceding subdued tones. Donning a tuxedo bought with money pulled from the briefcase, the man proceeds to the gaming tables, where he gambles and wins. The next morning, after bedding a gorgeous woman in an opulent hotel room, he sits on a luxurious patio, where he is served a bottle of champagne in a silver bucket.
The shot dissolves into a graphic match: in the exact same spot on the screen a champagne bucket is placed on a different table in a different location during an earlier time: 1936 Berlin. The same black-clad man apparently manages this tawdry bar, endearingly joking with his sleazy customers, but also roughing up thugs who fail to deliver what they owe him. Just as we decide this man, called "Sally," warrants little respect, we are given a new scene. In a room above the bar, Sally counterfeits passports to help Jews escape Germany. Our opinion does another about face when Sally hesitates to make a passport for a beautiful woman until she offers to sleep with him. Sally, a Russian Jew originally named Salomon Sorowitsch, obviously cares only for himself, counterfeiting not out of compassion but for the money. He replies to gratitude for his services with "Our people? I'm me and the others are others." When a German officer bursts into the room and sends Sally off to prison, it almost seems like a bit of poetic justice.
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