A DVD/ film review by a World Can’t Wait organizer
Amen, 2002 film by Costa Gavras
The summer of 2004 a friend loaned me a copy of Amen. It was the summer of the Republican National Convention in NYC just before George W. Bush was elected. Even though he”d been in office for 4 years, re-election was going to mean a mandate for much worse. There was a palpable and societal sense of dread about this that summer. A lot of people were throwing themselves into the election, traveling to the red states to get out the vote in what many were seeing as the most important election of their life.
Over a half million people spilled into into the streets of NYC that
summer. There has not been that kind of mass mobilization of dissent
to the whole Bush program since. After a pouring of hearts and
energies into the 2004 elections, a paralysis descended that has yet to
really be lifted. As thousands are urgently working to move the
populace into the kind of political resistance it’s going to take to
stop Bush and the perilous direction this society is headed, this is a
DVD I found myself returning to. I think it’s worth viewing with your
friends.
I”ve stopped counting the number of people who have said to me in the
last year “I never could understand what happened in Germany, and now I
do.” At a recent event at the 92nd street Y, Eve Ensler, speaking on
the subject of art and political protest uttered the same refrain. As
she spoke to the very dangerous moment we are in and how much time we
may have before the window to do something about it closes, she asked,
“Why aren’t people moving to do something about it?” Maybe, she
postulated, it’s due to people being “both terrified and comfortable.”
Why, when your government openly and legally sanctions torture and
annuls the fundamental right of habeas corpus, passing over a kind of
threshold, the reaction from organizations, from public & religious
leaders is so glaringly and shamefully absent?
People know, and they don’t know. There is urgent work to put the
package and the direction before people. But there is also a need to
speak frankly to what’s needed to stop this and why this movement has
united around the mission of driving out the Bush Regime. Some of the
people who considered and rejected or hung back from the October 5
demonstrations called for by World Can’t Wait have expressed
reservations like “do we have to speak so harshly or negatively of what
YOUR government is doing?” And isn’t the language of “drive out” too
strong or too negative?
Given how enormous the problem and stakes are, it’s not surprising that
people are looking for recourse from within the halls of power,
thinking that somehow the Democrats will do something to change this.
But everyday it is becoming more clear that they will not. The actual
logic and record of accommodation by the Democrats has been well
documented on WCW’s website and so I won’t belabor that point. To
contribute to the discussion, I would like to draw some lessons from
the experience of Germany that are thought-provokingly presented in
Costa Gravas’s film Amen.
Amen is the story of Kurt Gerstein, an engineer who joined the SS* in
1941 and rose to become head of the “Technical Disinfection Services”.
The movie is based on play called the “Deputy” staged in 1963 which
examined the consequences of complicity in a fictional story based on
the life and death of Kurt Gerstein. Gerstein was a compatriot of
Pastor Neimoller, active in the confessing church, a Christian
resistance movement to the Nazis. After his sister-in-law was
euthanized while under the care of a mental hospital, Gerstein joined
the SS to investigate information he was given by the Bishop of
Stuttgart that the mentally impaired were being killed in several
medical institutions . Once assigned to the Waffen SS, Gerstein found
himself participating in the genocide of Jews interned at the
concentration camps in Treblinka, Sobibor and Bezlac. Understanding
that he was witnessing an unimaginable atrocity that must be brought to
the world’s attention, he desperately tried to get the word out to the
world. But his efforts were either ignored or dismissed as too bizarre
to be credible. After being captured by the French at the end of the
war, Gerstein documented everything he witnessed in the first official
account of the holocaust which was later used as evidence at
Nuremberg. Shortly after Gerstein completed writing his report he was
found hanged in his cell.
In Germany, Gerstein is a complex and ambiguous historical figure. In
1950 his case was reviewed by a denazification court and remained
listed among the “tainted”. The first historical novel to examine the
Holocaust “Le Vicarie” did not appear until the late 50’s. In 1963 a
6-hour play called the Deputy was staged by Rolf Hochhuth which
criticized the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust. (The movie
Amen is based on the Hochhuth’s controversial play.) In 1965 Gerstein
was cleared of all charges. As dramatized in the movie Amen, Kurt
Geristein is a chemist and engineer who joins the SS. As a patriot he
works to serve his country and support the German troops by improving
the conditions of soldiers who are suffering from dysentery on the
battle field. He is sent to the Eastern Front to supply water
purification and while there is assigned to a “special project” to
eradicate an infestation of rats, lice and disease. He works with other
chemists and engineers to develop Zyklon B which he soon discovers is
not being used on vermin but instead to gas whole families to death in
the concentration camps. After verifying this suspicion with his own
eyes, in an emotionally horrific moment of truth in the movie, he
frantically works to get the word out to the rest of the world that a
great crime against humanity is taking place. He takes risks to contact
Germany’s pre-eminent religious figures and foreign diplomats, and he
teams up with a young priest who has family connections to the Vatican
where they appeal to Pope Pius XII and the American Ambassador. The
movie is a searing exposure of the Vatican and the Americans who had
full knowledge of what was occurring, but were more concerned with
defeating communism and abetting the German invasion of the Soviet
Union than interceding on behalf of the Jewish people.
The repeated image of a train roaring across the Polish countryside,
returning from the camps with its doors open and its human cargo empty,
symbolizes the race against time as Gerstein attempts to prove to the
authorities that 3 million people have already been gassed, their
valuables sorted and their remains fed into ovens. As you watch and
share Gersteins anguished and fevered attempts to convince people to
listen and to do something to save people, you can’t help but see
dreadful similarities. You watch this and think of Bush and how the
people in this country are now learning to accept torture and
indefinite detention. Jean Claude Grumberg, the screen writer along
with Costa Gavras, explains that the movie shows the holocaust in its
infancy. It shows the Protestant Church stepping in to publically
protest and stop the euthanizing of the Germans who were mentally ill
and “unproductive”. The film shows you the protests of the Catholic
Church and a sermon given by the Bishop of Berlin asking what will
become of the elderly or the German soldiers who return as amputees and
“unproductive?” But when it came to the Jews, there was no protest. A
crime of this magnitude, Grumberg offers, took more than cooperation.
It took massive indifference and neglect.
It’s an odd, ugly and dark moment for people the world over who are
looking to the people of this country to see if they are going to go
along or resist. If they are going to be complicit in the sanctioning
of disappearing people into secret torture chambers strung across the
world, of detaining people indefinitely with no right to even hear the
charges against them. Because a president who has been caught in a lie
of historic proportions has been given the legal power by Congress to
declare anyone he wants an enemy combatant. A “trust me” category that
has now as a result of the “compromise” Military Commissions Act of
1006 been expanded to include anyone who might be remotely connected to
those alleged to be enemy combatants. The very international laws that
were established after the Holocaust are now being openly declared as
not applying to the USA. Those who sit at the highest levels of power
are now immune from being charged, tried or convicted of the war crimes
they are already committing.
This of course is only the half of it. When you consider that under
this regime and a supine Congress, police spying has been legislated,
the Patriot act–twice–has been legislated; the military budget for
the war has been passed and there is no opposition to a war with
Iran. Congress has agreed to build a wall 2000 miles long on the US
Mexican border and do nothing to prevent the crumbling of the wall
between church and state. Representative Foley’s story has been spun to
blame homosexuals, and abortion is seriously in peril. To those who
find the World Can’t Wait Call too strongly worded, or the message
strident or negative, the question needs to be asked “What about it is
not reasoned and accurate?”. And, “if what is being said is true, then
what is more negative than people not confronting the scale and scope
of this and moving to do something to stop it?” And what could be more
positive than people taking responsibility to do something to reverse
this now, before you get to the extremes of the situation depicted in
Amen, where the options are only ones of individual conscience rather
than mass and collective resistance to change course while this is
still possible?
Amen is a depiction of a man of conscience doing what he can as an
agent of Hitler’s machine in a situation where he could not transform
it from within. The film and play are an examination of this dilemma.
As Gerstein desperately tries to get the truth out, he goes to those in
authority, the people he assumes can do something to prevent what is
taking place. He goes to the heads of the Catholic church and to
foreign diplomats. He counts on these people to let the public know
what was being done in the camps, believing that if the people of
Germany knew, they would rise up against Hitler and international
opinion would come to the aid of the Jews. That belief was well
founded, but the avenue to the people was thwarted at every turn by
those in authority who chose not to upset their positions or global
ambitions of coming out as the international victor as so chillingly
depicted in the films encounter with the U.S. Ambassador.
There is an historical lesson in this. The current trajectory of
endless war that has already claimed 650,000 lives in Iraq and
threatens to widen catastrophically to Iran – and that is rapidly
remaking the US society in a fascist way – is not being stopped in the
halls of power. And it won’t if there is not massive mobilization of
the populace to create a situation where Bush is forced to step down.
Accommodation becomes untenable, and the whole direction of war and
repression is repudiated – no matter who replaces him. Whether the
mechanism that finally proves to end this is impeachment, indictment,
or resignation in the face of scandal, or debacle in the prosecution of
the war, none of these will occur without people in their millions
manifesting themselves as an indpendent political force. We need to act
as a political force independent of and not entrapped in the internal
logic and language of national security and safety that is responsible
for condoning and sanctifying torture and endless war and the rest of
the Bush’s agenda.
If the people of this country have the basis to know about, but refuse
to recognize or acknowledge, the terrible acts ” your government” under
the Bush regime, is committing, in the Middle East and other places in
the world, as well as here at home; if people can recognize and
acknowledge the great harm their government is doing, but do not act,
in a meaningful way, to oppose this…then, yes, people are complicit
in these crimes. This is the way the rest of the world sees us and
history will be even less sparing.
To those unwilling to confront the consequences of this, because they
are refusing to believe that something as evil as what happened in
Germany could come to be in a position of power in this country and be
consolidated here, this may appear strident. Some have asked World
Can’t Wait if a statement so strong and scary won’t further immobilize
people. We can only offer that it doesn’t help to say you”ve got a
rash if what you have is a life threatening disease. After the shock
you”ve got to marshal all your strengths and energies to affirm and
fight for life, one worth living for the people of the whole planet.
In a world beset with fanatical Islamic fundamentalism and an empire
led by a President who believes he is on a mission from God, people the
world over need to see the people of this country (citizens and not)
standing up to put a halt to this whole direction. That is what is
profoundly and positively being expressed in the World Can’t Wait and a
growing and hopeful community and ethos of resistance.
—
*The Schutzstaffel (German for “Protective Squadron”), abbreviated
SS (Latin), was a large security and military organization of Germany’s
Nazi party