The effects of evil

Rating: 7/10 (30 September 2008)

In the decades immediately following the Second World War there were many films about the war itself, but relatively few about its most infamous episode, the Holocaust, which seemed to daunt film-makers by its very enormity. Alan Pakula's "Sophie's Choice" was one of the first films to broach the subject, and since then there have been several more, of which Spielberg's "Schindler's List" and Polanski's "The Pianist" are perhaps the best.
"The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" takes a fresh look at the Holocaust by presenting it through the eyes of an uncomprehending child- not Jewish, but German. The child in question is Bruno, the eight-year-old son of a senior German officer. Bruno's life changes when his father is appointed Commandant of Auschwitz, but the boy himself is quite ignorant of the nature of his father's work; all he knows is that he had to leave his comfortable Berlin home and all his friends and move to a remote location in the countryside, where there are no other boys to play with. He can just about see the camp from his bedroom, but assumes it is a farm. He is, however, puzzled by the fact that all the farmers wear striped pyjamas. Bored, and in search of playmates, Bruno wanders over to the camp, where he meets a Jewish boy named Shmuel sitting listlessly by the wire. Assuming that Shmuel is the farmer's son, Bruno strikes up a conversation with him, and the two became friends.
I will not detail the plot any further, as I do not want to give away the final, shocking twist. I will, however, say that there are two main strands to the story, one dealing with the growing friendship between Bruno and Shmuel, the other with the relationship between Bruno and his family. Although the two boys played their parts well, I must say that I did not find the first of these two subplots altogether satisfactory. Security at concentration camps was extremely tight, and the guards would never have allowed one of the inmates to sit, on a regular basis, so close to the perimeter fence that he could hold a conversation with an outsider. Particularly unconvincing was the scene where Bruno manages to crawl under the wire to join Shmuel inside the camp. If security at the camp was so lax, why had the inmates not all escaped? The Bruno/Shmuel storyline was clearly developed for maximum emotional impact, but for me this impact was blunted by the realisation that such a thing could never have happened in real life.
One thing about the film which has aroused controversy was the use of accents; all characters in the film, whether German or Jewish, speak English with British accents, normally educated, cultivated ones. To my way of thinking this was the correct decision. The best way of making English-language films about foreign countries is to represent foreigners' use of their own languages by the use of native British or American accents rather than foreign accents. In the case of this film there is, moreover, a special reason why German accents would have been inappropriate. Ever since 1939, German accents in war films have been used to stress the "otherness" of the German characters, to emphasise their villainy and to set them apart from the heroic British or American ones. The stereotypical German in these films (and in the war comics which were so popular in my youth) was an ugly thug, generally distinguished by jackboots, cropped hair and a harsh, guttural accent. Even when his English was otherwise fluent he could be recognised by his complete inability to pronounce the "w" and "th" sounds correctly.
It seemed to me that "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" was trying to get away both from this stereotype and from the idea of the Germans as being "other" from ourselves. The film's thesis is that the Holocaust was perpetrated by people who were not only very like ourselves but also quite convinced of the moral rightness of what they are doing. There is a very good performance from David Thewlis as the Commandant, part mass murderer, part devoted husband and father, all the more frightening precisely because he cannot see the contradiction between these two sides of his character. He is not the typical cartoon Nazi of the war comics, or even a power-crazed monster like Goetz in "Schindler's List". He is rather a man whose soul has been so warped by ideological zeal that he has come to regard the murder of millions of people as noble work, carried out to build a better future for the rest of mankind.
This will be a controversial viewpoint. We find it easier to see the Nazis as devils in human form than as perverted idealists, although we have no problems with accepting the idealism of Stalinist or Maoist Communists who were just as willing to commit mass murder in what they saw as the greater interests of humanity. By refusing to play the Commandant as a stereotyped villain, Thewlis forces us to confront our preconceptions about the Nazi period.
The film also shows us the way in which the war affects the other members of the family. Bruno's elder sister Gretel, who believes implicitly everything she is told by her father and her tutor Herr Liszt, becomes an enthusiastic Nazi. Bruno himself, perhaps because he is too young to understand what is going on around him, perhaps because of a greater innate scepticism, does not; unlike Gretel he still sees the Jews as fully human. Their mother, when she realises the full implications of her husband's work, goes half-mad with horror. Unlike the scenes between Bruno and Shmuel, the scenes involving the family were all too believable as a study of the effects of evil. 7/10