GERMAN INTERMARRIAGE 
TESTIMONIALS

1. 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.