Emotionally satisfying revenge for the Holocaust

Rating: 9/10 (28 August 2009)

Tarantino's Holocaust film is to be welcomed. It is intelligent, entertaining, witty, stylish and, above all, well-written. I felt as though I had just watched a European film and not just because most of it is in subtitles.
The film raises several interesting issues:
1. Adorno posed the question, "Can there be culture after Auschwitz?" The answer is clearly 'Yes'. For some Holocaust survivors with 'survivor guilt' the answer to this question was an emphatic 'No': they killed themselves. But theirs is a different narrative to ours sitting in our comfortable cinema seats. Time moves on and the generation with first-hand Holocaust experience is dying out. In fact, during the last 60 years their perspective has remained largely incomprehensible to the rest of us. The Holocaust has become part of the warp and weft of Western civilisation and pops up all over the place. It has become integral to our culture as well as our history. It is a subject for cultural projects, just like baroque composers raiding ancient history for their operas. Making art out of human suffering is, it appears, part of the human condition. Sensuous music is written about the Passion of Christ.
2. Demonising the Nazis may be emotionally satisfying but has never made much sense in terms of understanding their history. The Christoph Waltz SS character dominates this film: attractive, multilingual, cultivated, urbane, efficient, well-mannered – but still capable of strangling a female traitor with his bare hands. He deserves an Oscar. This sympathetic portrayal of individual SS men is nothing new: witness the Muntze character in 'Black Book' (2006). Likewise, Branagh's Heydrich in 'Conspiracy' (2001) is no beast. The Romans thought themselves civilised. So did the Southern planter aristocracy. So did the owners of British country houses built on the profits of the Slave Trade. Intelligence, culture and refinement can go hand in hand with brutality. The multi-lingual talents of Daniel Bruhl are used for the same effect.
3. Tarantino refers to the success of the Nazi film industry. High art could flourish under the Nazis, which is why so many intellectuals and artists continued to work under the Nazis in both Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. 'The Triumph of the Will' won gold medals in Venice and Paris.
For all their sentimental peddling of folkish, 'back to the soil' nostalgia to the masses, the Nazi elite were really into high culture. Essentially lower-middle class social climbers, they organised galas around theatre, film, opera and classical music where they could rub shoulders with Germany's old elite whom they intended to absorb and supplant. Brutality went hand in hand with culture. Living in the confiscated villas of wealthy Berlin Jews, stealing works of art from all over Europe, the Nazi elite were, quite literally, on the make socially and on the take materially! Tarantino's film conveys a flavour of this Nazi beau monde in which the SS were a new chivalric order, a knightly class based on blood purity, loyalty and self-sacrifice.
4. The 'Basterds' are the thugs of the film rather than the Nazis and are responsible for most of the gory violence. The idea of scalping dead Nazis was a brilliant leitmotif. Famously Hitler thought there was no difference between his project of extermination and settlement in Eastern Europe and what was still going on in the American West at the time of his birth. Indians scalping Whites who were wiping them out. Jews scalping Nazis who were wiping them out. Makes perfect sense!
However, here we have an American director engaged in self-parody. Hitler thought of Americans as decadent mongrels emasculated by a Jewish-Negro culture. The Brad Pitt character is a parody of this concept: monosyllabic, monolingual and almost one-dimensional. Not really as appealing as the Waltz character. Yet these dumb (unsophisticated) Americans did win the war and the Pitt character prevails to inscribe (literally) his own (sophisticated?) brand of justice at the end.
5. Post-1945 history and culture are littered with references to Nazis in hiding and others who raked over their Nazi past. UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, West German President Lubke, The Odessa File, The Quiller Memorandum - fact and fiction, the list is endless. As late as the 1970's many people believed that Hitler had faked his death and was living in South America. George Steiner even wrote a novella about his capture. The world was full of closet Nazis and their collaborators!
Tarantino's other brilliant leitmotif is carving swastikas into the foreheads of Nazis he allows to live. Historically such branding was used for social ostracism and many would agree that too many Nazis escaped their past too easily.
6. Ultimate vengeance is wreaked on the Nazis by a young Jewish female and her Black lover. This is both banal and emotionally satisfying. The film has recruited women, Blacks and Germans into the anti-Nazi camp as well as Jews and Allies. Nazis in occupied Paris were appalled by the number of Blacks they saw. The fact that Hitler did not die in the summer of 1944 does not exclude the possibility that he could have: 'Valkyrie' (2009) explains this. Tarantino dispatches Hitler and his cronies with his own contrived fiery holocaust. This is emotionally satisfying and a clever play on the Nazi concept of Twilight of the Gods as well as a reference to the millions of Jews turned into ash.
History and the cultural representations of history are fast becoming an indistinguishable melange. This was always the case in literature and film is accelerating the process. I fear a growing number of people are unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Yet another reason to support the teaching of history in our schools.