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After the Truth is the imaginary tale of Dr. Josef Mengele's return to a newly-united nation which resents having their post-Cold War celebration spoiled by a Nazi Party pooper.

Mengele was the "Angel of Death of Auschwitz," the furthest extreme in Nazi betrayal of sacred trust in the medical profession and Western ethics. His horrific medical experiments on concentration camp inmates afterward represented the lowest a human being—humanity itself—can sink.

The real Mengele escaped to South America, where he dodged responsibility until drowning in 1979 at age 68. Since Mengele died without answering to human judge, this film drafts on the story of another fugitive Nazi, Adolf Eichmann. The accountant for the Final Solution was kidnapped by Israeli agents in 1960 and brought to Jerusalem to be tried, convicted and hanged. Eichmann sat in the bullet-proof glass box that Mengele occupies here. The doctor comes home willingly, to resolve things—to tell, he says, "the truth"—his truth: that he's not such a bad guy, that he's been made to take the rap for a nation, if not a species.

Other truths are in play. The truth of the nation, at pains to distance itself from that Germany. The truth of Mengele's attorney, Peter Rohm, who can't finish his biography of the doctor. The historical truth of Auschwitz isn't much in question: "what really happened" is freely admitted by Mengele, to the outrage of neo and old Nazis. Nor does the film puzzle over legal truth, the legitimacy of war crimes trials, controversial even at Nuremberg, dismissed by some as "victor's justice." That would have been an obvious entré e into conversation about truth itself, a concept lately as quaint as certain provisions of the Geneva Convention: but no, old fashioned common-sense notions of truth go without saying.

The film's German title is Nichts als die Wahrheit, The Truth and Nothing But. The English title is more provocatively layered: After the Truth can refer to the pursuit of truth, and to living in the wake of some truth. Much ink has been spilled mapping quadrants of human reality "After Auschwitz"—that truth for which subsequent ethics, philosophy, art, theology, psychology, sociology, even epistemology struggles to be more than footnotes.  Nevertheless, it's hard to accept that there may be no absolute truth in the face of something that demands absolute juustice.

The film pulls us into thorny questions about collective versus individual guilt, wherein sliding to one end of the scale lessens responsibility at the other. If everybody's guilty for Auschwitz, nobody's guilty. If somebody's guilty, everybody else seems to get off the hook. Dr. Mengele offers traditional Nazi defenses: he was a cog in a machine, just following orders, a product of his circumstances. The jury, onscreen and off, must decide whether these arguments represent the voice of Satan, laying the axe to morality—or the voice of Reason, asking questions none of us (on screen and off) care to face.

Mengele stands trial

This association of Mengele with the Devil is hardly rhetorical: the film feels like a magical realist fantasy where an angel (or angel of death) falls from the sky and poses less questions about the miraculous than a monumental inconvenience.

Myth and fact are two more truths in contest. The film tries to have it both ways, and pulls it off—though not without a certain hair-raising metaphysical vertigo. To understand this problem, imagine Adolf Eichmann as a movie Nazi facing, say, Indiana Jones. Eichmann, remember, was the inspiration for the phrase "the banality of evil." He embodied not Evil but Mediocrity Incarnate.

In After the Truth, veteran German actor Götz George plays Mengele less banal than diabolically cunning—a bald, brooding brilliance between Hannibal Lecter and Colonel Kurtz. Thus, against a general demythologizing thrust, myth doesn't quite become fact. This Mengele still towers over history.

We never hear a word about the historical Mengele's real-life family. Notably absent is Mengele's son Rolf, for whom his Argentinean relative was "Uncle Fritz." Rolf later confronts the man he was mortified to acknowledge as his father with questions that provoked rationalizations mouthed here. Whether the characterization has much to do with the real-life Mengele matters little: poetic license justifies metaphorical heightening, and the film would have been less effective without so compelling a central figure. Even a fully demythologized Mengele remains more than just flesh and blood, as surely as the signifier "Auschwitz" will forever signify infinitely more than just a small town in Poland.

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