Harold Marcuse reviews the historical accuracy and main points of the film, Rosenstrasse
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Harold Marcuse reviews the historical accuracy and main points of the film, Rosentrassee.
Wow. In commenting on the 4 reviews of von Trotta's film _Rosenstrasse_
I have to start by praising the H-German editors and consultants for
their selection of initial reviewers. This spectrum of opinions and
approaches gives us internet eavesdroppers the basis for a truly
insightful discussion.
Beate Meyer summarizes the case made by the critics of the film's
historical accuracy, namely that it overemphasizes the efficacy of the
Christian wives' non-violent disobedience, exaggerates their heroism,
and accords too much weight to the role of aristocrats. Antonia Leugers
presents detailed evidence that the Rosenstrasse protest was indeed
crucial in prompting the release of the arrested husbands.
Konrad Weiss and Frank Noack also address the question of historical
accuracy at length. Both argue that the benefits of introducing an event
into broader public consciousness, and of provoking debate about that
event, outweigh any false conceptions the film may implant. While Weiss
argues this issue more generally, Noack closely examines several
purported inaccuracies to demonstrate that the film is more accurate
than some critics claim.
These reviews underscored two main points for me. First, a feature film
is not a history book, and should not be held to the same standard of
accuracy and nuance. Second, historical accuracy is a moving target.
History is neither solely the story told by "official" documents, nor is
there ever only one "way that it actually was." Rather, there are
competing versions of reality perceived by the various actors and
observers as the events unfolded, as well as by later historians. Ask
any three historians why the Holocaust happened, or ask any three
friends why the US invaded Iraq, and you'll see what I mean.
The first point about the nature of the medium is probably the main one
I would have made in this review of reviews if Konrad Weiss hadn't made
it so competently and eloquently. As a historian and filmmaker, Weiss
knows firsthand that feature films operate under very different
constraints than historical portrayals. They rely on blunt visual
symbols to convey quickly absorbed information about complex people and
events. They must engage viewers on an emotional level, drawing on
emotionally laden preconceptions and maintaining our attention with a
narrative structure. As tools for teaching history they at best lay the
groundwork with a few facts and a general emotional valency, opening the
door to deeper historical learning and understanding. At worst they
create or reinforce incorrect preconceptions that are hard to
counteract. That brings us to the second point: how do we determine when
conceptions are incorrect?
I started my reading with Beate Meyer's review, which summarizes
critiques of historical accuracy that she, Wolf Gruner and Wolfgang Benz
have previously published. I had no reason to suspect their scholarship,
especially since I know them and respect the high quality of their work.
I merely felt their criticisms were rather beside the point, just as I
had when reading about historical inaccuracies in the TV miniseries
_Holocaust_, or in _Schindler's List_. Noack's review contributes a
wonderful anecdote about the relevance of accuracy from _Saving Private
Ryan_, where grain is shown ripe in mid-June. Clearly some inaccuracies
matter more than others. The question is, where should we draw the line?
Or, as Noack asks in part III of his review, "who decides which
inaccuracies matter and which don't?"
In the final analysis, this is a question of values. Noack offers us
rich detail about several presumptive inaccuracies, which we can use to
judge the issue of accuracy vs. artistic license. After arguing that
several alleged inaccuracies are actually accurate, Noack turns to the
fictitious sexual encounter between Lena and Goebbels. He argues that it
is not only historically inaccurate and unconvincing, but also that it
distracts viewers from thinking about more important questions. Still,
one could argue that the stereotype of powerful Nazis extracting sexual
favors rings true often enough, and few of us would dispute that many
popularly successful novels and films have an obligatory but irrelevant
sex scene.
Meyer argues that von Trotta's _Rosenstrasse_ implants three
anachronistic distortions of the event: 1) that non-violent civil
disobedience in the face of lethal threat was effective, 2) that
intermarried Christian wives were more stalwart than intermarried
Christian husbands, and 3) that aristocratic morality predisposed the
female lead to oppose the predations of the Nazi regime.
On the issue of noble lineage I tend to agree with Meyer that inasmuch
as the historical evidence suggests that working- and middle-class women
(and men) were more likely disobey the regime, then artistic license
probably doesn't justify choosing an aristocrat as the lead. I have long
been disturbed by the pervasive focus on the "von's" in the 20th July
plot. Von (sic) Trotta may have a personal bias in this regard, but one
could argue that she may also be boosting her film's appeal by drawing
on an existing popular preference for elite leadership. Still, my values
say this preconception should rather be debunked than reinforced.
I'd say Meyer's second issue, von Trotta's presumptive feminist bias
towards women's activism, is also a question of perspective. Gosh, how
much will it change our moral assessment of the group if we know that
not 7-10%, but as many as 20-25% of Christian wives divorced their
Jewish husbands? Doesn't the vastly unequal distribution of power
according to gender go a long way to explain why Christian wives were 4
to 9 times more likely than Christian husbands to divorce their Jewish
partner? How can we quibble about how fractionally or nominally Jewish
someone had to be before Gestapo interpretations of the law subjected
them to deportation, when we have ample evidence that local officials
often ignored such distinctions at will? Does it matter whether
non-Jewish spouses actually were deported if they refused to divorce,
when they had good reason to expect that they would be? Can we condemn
spouses for divorcing when that act meant certain deportation of their
partner, if they had little reason to think that remaining married would
change that outcome?
While rational people can disagree on such value judgments, Meyer's
first point about the efficacy of civil disobedience is a more
straightforward question of causality: Why were the deported men brought
back from Auschwitz, and why were the imprisoned men released?
Meyer claims, based on an RSHA telegram, that some of the deported
Jewish husbands were brought back from Auschwitz _because_ (her
emphasis) the RSHA was correcting the Berlin Gestapo's overeager
deportation of a legally still-protected subset of intermarried Jews. I
made the marginal note: "Trust of documents? What other reason
would/could they have given?" I think most scholars would agree that
such trans-legal overeagerness, "working towards the Fuehrer" as Ian
Kershaw has promoted the term (see _Hitler, 1889-1936_, 1998, xxix), was
a key element in the mechanics of mass murder in Nazi Germany. Why
should Meyer privilege the RSHA, notorious for its contempt of codified
law, in this case?
In Antonia Leugers' review I found a persuasive case made for the
opposite point of view. Leugers quotes from a report of an interrogation
of two men about information they had received from Catholic pro-Jewish
activist Gertrud Luckner. The interrogator noted that Luckner was
"precisely informed" about the Gestapo's "internal" plan to proceed
against previously excepted Jews, _if_ they had a criminal record. The
language in the Stapo summary report to the RSHA on Luckner implies that
the Gestapo had an "innerdienstliche" intention to "trotzdem" go beyond
that internal plan and "take measures" against even those ostensibly
protected intermarried Jews without criminal records. The "trotzdem" in
that quote is about as close to a smoking gun as one might wish for.
In order to understand why scholars of the caliber of Meyer, Gruner and
Benz are so adamant that the women's public protest had neither affected
nor effected the Gestapo's release and recall of the intermarried
Berliners, I followed the link on the H-German Rosenstrasse page to the
H-Soz-u-Kult report about the April 2004 Berlin conference. There I read
details of Gruner's argument, and Graml's explanation why Goebbels'
remarks in his diary aren't necessarily definitive proof. I also found
that Nathan Stoltzfus expressed the same skepticism of RSHA documents as
I do (and had already done so in his October 2003 _Die Zeit_ rebuttal of
Benz' critique).
Most notably, however, I found that Monica Kingreen thought that her
research on the deportations in Frankfurt supported the notion that the
RSHA, not protest from the populace, had forced the local Gestapo to
adhere to (internal) policy and stop arresting still "protected"
intermarried Jews. Indeed, she cites a May 21, 1943 RSHA directive
telling the Frankfurt Gestapo to leave non-criminal intermarried Jews
alone. Does that prove that the RSHA protected those Jewish men? The
real question is why the RSHA felt it necessary to curb Frankfurt's
activism. In this case the RSHA explained its directive by noting that
it had received "inquiries" about the Frankfurt arrests. Touché! For me
that is direct evidence that the RSHA was responsive to the (minimal)
pressure of a few spouses (or Church officials) willing to write
letters--at least _after_ the solidarity shown by intermarried women at
the Rosenstrasse.
Now we really need to ask why German historians so utterly beyond
reproach would stubbornly minimize the impact of public protest,
especially with the self-contradictory argument that the RSHA was
limiting anti-Jewish activities to "measures" that had not previously
aroused noteworthy protest.
Noack addresses this question. In part VI of his review he suggests that
verbal promoters of humanism feel threatened by apolitical practitioners
of humanistic deeds, especially when those practitioners were "normal,"
not extraordinarily situated people. He hypothesizes a desire to
categorize everyone neatly as perpetrators or victims, or as impotent
bystander-émigrés or unemulatable resistors. Such categorization avoids
the discomfort raised by "normal" bystanders who took action. I can't
say I find this explanation convincing, although I would grant that the
spontaneous group action in the Rosenstrasse apparently causes more
discomfort than the individual heroism of the White Rose or Schindler.
Instead, I would suggest that what I call a legacy of the "myth of
resistance" may be at work here. I define the myth of resistance as the
postwar claim by many Germans that, inasmuch as they knew about Nazi
crimes, and within the limits of acceptable risk, they had attempted to
resist the regime. The first legacy of this myth, which emerges in the
1960s among a generation Germans who came of age after about 1953, is
the vigorous and categorical rejection of all claims that there had been
meaningful popular resistance during the Nazi period. Even as research
since the 1970s has revealed many stunning examples of group and
individual opposition and resistance, there remains in Germany a
stubborn suspicion of any claims that there was effective resistance to
the Nazi regime. Postwar generations of Germans want to ensure that
their countryfolk do not complacently identify with feel-good resistance
against Nazism. While this is in general admirable, in this case I'd say
that their efforts are counterproductive. I see nothing wrong with
today's Germans realizing that bureaucracies require civic oversight, or
identifying with a tradition of non-violent civil disobedience,
especially when it involved reaching out to a powerless minority group.
And now I'm interested in hearing our film-critical German colleagues'
thoughts about why they seem so willing to stretch the evidence towards
minimizing the historical role of the women, and why they think that
purported inaccuracy will reinforce counterproductive stereotypes among
viewers.