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Awash in the sublime sights of Bavaria, I relished not only natural beauty but also the tidiness of quaint German towns. During my three-week visit, I never once saw junk in yards or litter on roads. It all seemed so wonderfully CLEAN! Even the public restrooms had toilet brushes with placards reminding users to clean up after themselves. In one such facility, my husband observed a young man bearing all the signs of cultural defiance: purple mohawk, piercings, black leather and chains. Upon exiting from the stall, however, the leather-clad lad suddenly stopped and turned, re-entering in order to clean the toilet with the state-provided brush.
When I mentioned this incident to an American running a German bed-and-breakfast, she grumbled about government restrictions and cultural pressures that dictated the color of paint on her house, the neatness of her yard, and even uniform log lengths in her woodpile. Lowering her voice she concluded, "Nazis still run things around here," as though to say "ethnic cleansing" was merely an extension of an obsession with tidiness. Though her remark did not fit my experience of the generously gracious Germans, I find it interesting that Germany has made it illegal to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, emphasizing, as it were, the need to come clean about its past.
Film has become part of that cleansing process, testifying to Holocaust horrors and heroes. Two films, Amen. (2002) and Valkyrie (2008), build upon historical records of the German Resistance, focusing on military officers who tried to cleanse Germany of the leader to whom they had sworn allegiance: Adolf Hitler.
Amen. makes explicit the ambiguities of cleansing. Its real-life protagonist, an ss Officer named Kurt Gerstein, served the Nazi cause by developing a chemical that could purify even the most fetid water, making it potable for soldiers on the battlefield. A scene in which Gerstein drinks treated ditch water before the amazed eyes of German compatriots comments ironically upon his own amazement when he discovers that his mentally disabled niece has been executed in a state-enforced "euthanasia" program. While Gerstein was decontaminating water, Hitler was decontaminating society. The irony intensifies as Nazis adulate Gerstein for his amazing chemical cleanser. Driving him to a special compound, they invite him to look through a peephole in the wall. The camera never shows us what Gerstein sees, keeping the shot on his body tensing up against the wall. For he peers inside an Auschwitz death chamber, watching as his chemical is now used for ethnic cleansing.
The rest of the film shows Gerstein's attempts to expose the cleansing without exposing himself. He buttonholes a Swedish diplomat on a train, asking him to let word out through the Swedish embassy. He talks to leaders in his Confessing Church who had denounced Hitler's euthanasia program. He barges in on the Papal Nuncio in Berlin, hoping that Pope Pius XII might be persuaded to publicly denounce Nazi atrocities. But no one believes him (except for a fictional priest inserted into the plot). As the Papal Nuncio remarks to an aide, "it's just a Gestapo provocation. Imagine an ss officer defending the Jews!" We can't help but wonder why Gerstein, an earnest Christian, joined the ss in the first place. Rather than getting answers or witnessing positive results, we only see Gerstein's desperate frustration, as though the wall at Auschwitz were the symbol of his plight: witnessing evil cleansing, he cannot break through to cleanse it.
The film, in fact, generates its power through what we do not see. Rather than immersing us in concentration camp degradations, director/co-writer Costa-Gavras offers absence. Several times he inserts long shots of trains clacking across the horizon, cattle car doors open on both sides so that through them we see the sky. Their haunting emptiness fills our minds with despair when we later view similar shots: trains clacking across the horizon in the opposite direction, this time with doors all shut. The absence of visual evidence overwhelms with a chilling presence.
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