German Resistance: Truth and Myth

Recently I wrote a post about the Hollywood movie Valkyrie, which is enjoying surprising box office success in the US in spite of lukewarm reviews. Whatever one may think about the movie, the fact that it has renewed interest in the July 20 conspiracy can only be viewed as a positive development.  Valkyrie also has revived the debate on the scope and efficacy of the resistance against Hitler in Germany during the Third Reich.

The New York Times, in a piece last week on the recent spate of Holocaust films, mentions Hannah Arendt's disdain for any concept of real German resistance:

"Finally, she (Arendt) poured cold water on the notion that the German resistance to Hitler had amounted to anything substantial."

And adds this commentary on the movie Valkyrie:

If one wanted to select a film that would provide a fresh window on the Third Reich, then, “Valkyrie,” which stars Tom Cruise as the central figure of the July plot, should be it. But “Valkyrie,” too, represents a missed opportunity. It fails to explore the motives of the conspirators, who were treated with hostility by the right and left in Germany. The right saw them as traitors. And the 1960s antiwar student Left viewed the officers and generals as unreconstructed Prussian nationalists. This was a half-truth; officers like Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg (played by Cruise) and Philippe von Boeselager represented in part a moral revulsion against the Nazi regime, rooted in Protestant or Catholic moral convictions.

John Rosenthal, on the right-wing Pajamas Media Web site, rejects the notion that Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg was any kind of hero.  Rather, Rosenthal sees him as little more than an opportunisitc Nazi, trying to save his own skin:

“We have to show the world that not all of us were like him,” Cruise/Stauffenberg can be heard solemnly intoning toward the end of the film, presumably referring by “us” to Germans and by “him” to Hitler. When all is said and done, this seems indeed to be the whole point of the movie — which undoubtedly helps to explain why it received millions of dollars in financial support from the German government.

Well, of course not all of “them” were like “him.” But Stauffenberg and his inner circle of co-conspirators were in many respects more like “him” than he was. Their geo-political “vision” was essentially indistinguishable from that of leading Nazi theorists like Carl Schmitt. Stauffenberg advisor Adam von Trott zu Solz wrote, for instance, “Germany — and all of Europe — is threatened by alien powers from the East and from the West, by the Soviets and by the Americans.” Stauffenberg and his brother Berthold were devoted followers of the esoteric poet and prophet of the “New Reich,” Stefan George. It is no wonder, then, that they were thrilled when Hitler’s “Third Reich” seemed to fulfill the master’s prophecy.

So, for Rosenberg, Hollywood is an unwitting partner with the German government in a massive whitewash effort to cover up the German past. But conservative columnist George Will, writing in Newsweek, sees the German resistance as "neither negligible nor contemptible".

By July 1944, decapitation of the Nazi regime probably would not have prevented a crescendo of carnage: In the first 59 months of war, 2.8 million German soldiers and civilians died; in the last nine months, 4.8 million died. Still, Stauffenberg and many others understood the need for a gesture of national purification to refute the narrative—promulgated by Hitler and embraced by the Allies as a politically useful simplification—that the German Resistance was negligible and contemptible. It was neither.

As George Will points out, there were 15 attempts on Hitler's life.  A thriller could be made about the courageous wood-worker Georg Elser, who nearly killed Hitler in 1939. But, of course, Elser was not a photogenic aristocrat like Stauffenberg.  And we have our own American heroine of the German resistance - Mildred Harnack - the only American woman executed by the Nazis.  But she was affiliated with the communist-leaning Rote Kapelle, and so is unaccceptable to George Will and the writers at Pajamas Media.

Comments

[hattie]

As the events of WW II vanish down the memory hole and come to symbolize various political points of view, we get Tom Cruise playing a "good German."
David: Did you see "Other People's Lives?" What did you think of it? How polemical was it, do you think?
I can't square this film with what I read and heard about East Germany at the time it was still in existence. The idea that no one had any fun but just suffered oppression is pretty odd. I do know artists were being spied on, Krista Wolf, for instance. She was quite critical of many aspects of East German life but did not therefore think life in the west was superior.
There are too many gaps in my knowledge, I confess. I'm sure you know way more than I do. But many people mourned the loss of their socialist state and their gripe was really about being treated as a colony of the Soviet Union, and the way so many well educated and useful people defected to the West because they thought it was a better deal.
Or am I totally wrong here?

[David]

@Hattie,

I am a huge fan of "Das Leben der anderen" and I don't think it was polemical at all. Don't forget, the film deals exclusively with the fate of artists and intellectuals, so their experience was different from the average citizen.

A writer from the fomer GDR happens to live close by to me at Bowdoin College. One night he showed me his Stasi file: it contains pages and pages of commentary and observations from people he considered his friends, even his very "best friend".

As for people having fun, I'm sure they did. Hopefully erphschwester will comment here, since she grew up in the GDR.

[hattie]

I see I misspelled Christa Wolf's name, and you are kind enough not to correct me.
Yes, the artists and intellectuals had a lot of privileges that others did not.

[microgod]

If Stauffenberg had been successful, Germany would have been nuked, too, unless it surrendered unconditionally. The conspirators wanted to save Germany's, especially its armies' dignity and honor. In order to maintain power and stability they had to bring the general staff behind them, and I think it would have all ended up in a pre-emptive pardon for all except the real high nazi ranks. Before the background of Germany's guilt this would have been completely unacceptable for the allies. Maybe the question of war had become a question of honor then in Germany's general staff, which it had not been otherwise. Maybe the war would have taken longer then, Germans saying: "Look! Our enemies don't want peace! They dismiss our most honest proposals!"

[Scott]

I think it's clear that the "opposition" around Gordeler, Stauffenberg, Von Treschow etc did not constitute an actual movement but rather a small-scale conspiracy.

Nonetheless the courage demonstrated by these figures cannot be written off--they did try to do something however late in the game. Valkyrie may write off the aristocratic/conservative viewpoints of the conspirators, but it also depicts honorable and courageous actions.