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The Week in Germany: Culture November 3, 2006 The Unknown Soldier Stripped Bare
Michael Verhoeven has never been one to shy away from confronting German history. His latest foray into filmmaking is a disturbing documentary about brutal crimes committed by "ordinary" German Wehrmacht soldiers during World War II. "It's not a film that is easy to take. It's worse for my own country of course because it's about our own history," the acclaimed director said at the Kino!2006 German filmfest in New York before the U.S. premiere of "The Unknown Soldier: What Did You Do in the War, Dad?" (Der unbekannte Soldat). Verhoeven took his cue for the film from a multimedia exhibition he visited in 1997 that toured Germany for several years and touched off a firestorm of debate. All German school children are taught about Germany's past at the center of unprecedented destruction. But the controversial "Wehrmacht exhibition", as it came to be known, elicited extreme responses both positive and negative, underscoring that some Germans are still coming to terms with their collective past. Made for Germans For this reason, Verhoeven told The Week in Germany that he has primarily made "The Unknown Soldier" for Germans, and people all over the world of German origin. "It was not my intention to show this film abroad. The important work was to show this film in my country," he said, dressed in a black suit, black shirt and shiny cherry-red tie for the New York premiere. "Before this exhibition I did not know the SS was under control of the Wehrmacht - at the end of the war, the SS was conveniently blamed for everything," said Verhoeven. "People just said 'These were the good people, they were the SS and they were the bad people,'" he said in summing up the commonly held public view that Wehrmacht soldiers had little - if anything - to do with the mass murder of Jews and death marches of Russians after they headed eastwards in 1941. "It was necessary to go to these countries where it happened. The Wehrmacht had this plan not only to fight army against army, but to extinguish the Jewish population. I'm showing now what I found out in these years (of filming)," he said. Moving beyond denial There was a lot of "denial" when he was growing up, although this did change for the next generation including his two sons born in the 1970s, he moreover recalled, pushing his hands away from his chest to indicate how his teachers remained tight-lipped about what happened during those dark years. "I never heard of this in school," said Verhoeven, who was born in 1938 in Berlin. "There are many witnesses to history (Zeitzeugen), but few eyewitnesses (Augenzeugen). One of my responses in my film is not to stop, to go on," said Verhoeven, adding that "The Unknown Soldier" has been shown in German schools and will be available internationally on DVD soon. "Schools come to me and ask - can we show this film?" Mistakes must be discussed Verhoeven marshals a disparate group of experts for the film, interviewing several German historians, as well as eyewitnesses and victims in countries as far afield as Belarus and Ukraine. Amongst the shocking period footage is a sequence, shot covertly from a distance, of a soldier separating what is clearly a mother and her child. One expert wonders "what was the average German at that time capable of, what was he ready and willing to do"? "Mistakes are mistakes and they must be discussed," Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the exhibition's co-founder and a Hamburg-based multimillionaire who championed the Wehrmacht exhibition, states in the film. Insights are also provided by Peter Black, chief historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He notes that not all German soldiers would have participated in acts of violence and that some actively refused to follow orders to do so without receiving serious punishment. Another historian moreover points out that the focus of Holocaust studies has been on Auschwitz since the 1960's, but that up to 40% of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust were murdered without setting foot in any camp.
The agony of cutting scenes "The Unknown Soldier" is Verhoeven's first film in five years. It continues an internationally prominent career that has featured the Oscar-nominated "The Nasty Girl" (1989), "The White Rose" (1982) and, a decade ago, "My Mother's Courage". Verhoeven, who trained as a doctor, is married to popular Austrian-born actress Senta Berger. Together they established the Sentana film and television production company, which produced "The Unknown Soldier". Berger is moreover president of the fledgling Berlin-based German Film Academy. "They've really been building that up over the past three years," said Verhoeven. "It's going very well." On a more strained note, he spoke moreover of the difficulty in editing 200 hours of footage he amassed during nearly eight years of working on the "The Unknown Soldier". "Out of 200 not even two hours remained in the end," he said. "It is hard to let go of scenes. You develop empathy for all these scenes." Mounted by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, there were two
Wehrmacht exhibitions - the first was cancelled amid accusations of historical
inaccuracies. Viewed by some 800,000 people, "War of Destruction:
Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941-1944" opened in March 1995 in Hamburg
and was shown in 33 cities in Germany and Austria before closing in the
fall of 1999. "Crimes of the German Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War
of Annihilation, 1941-1944", was shown in 11 cities in Germany, in
Vienna and in Luxembourg between November 2001 and March 2004 and drew
more than 420,000 visitors. Links:
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