The Moral Neutrality of Music-Survival Through Music

Rating: 10/10 (28 December 2002)

Roman Polanski has created an extraordinary pastiche of one of the darkest chapters of Western history and the nadir of Polish communal life. "The Pianist" follows, achingly and closely, the struggle to live of Warsaw piano virtuoso Wladislaw Szpilman. The pianist is played by Adrien Brody who seems to have inhabited his character's body and soul. An incredible, indelible performance.
Before Germany sent its legions into Poland on 1 September 1939 Szpilman and his family lived a comfortable bourgeois life in a Warsaw in which an endemic, genteel anti-Semitism rarely intruded into the safe world of the Jewish intelligentsia. Szpilman enjoyed success both as a concert hall and radio performer. Indeed the very bombs of a Luftwaffe raid forced him to flee the studio as Warsaw was reduced to submission.
Rampant anti-Semitism emerged with the occupying German forces finding little need to whip Poles into paroxysms of previously barely sublimated hatred. Decrees forbade Szpilman and all Jews from even the simple pleasure of sitting on a park bench. Of course such restrictions were as nothing when all the Jews were ordered into a newly created ghetto, an area of Warsaw that could not possible accommodate the influx of uprooted families with any degree of acceptable sanitation or simple decency.

Even worse was to come as Polanski unflinchingly shows both planned and random acts of German homicidal depravity, aided and abetted by Jewish police armed only with truncheons and the ephemeral and decidedly temporary power allowed by the Germans. The violence depicted is sickening, realistic and necessary to the story.
Szpilman is saved from transport to a death camp right at the Umschlagplatz (the rail departure point) by a supervising Jewish police accomplice of the Germans. His family, shoved into a cattle car, departs, never to be seen by him again. All were murdered - father, mother, brother, two sisters.
Szpilman's solo odyssey begins when he knows that he must escape the ghetto where plans for an uprising are slowly jelling. To Polanski's credit Szpilman's desire to escape and live rather than fight the enemy to the death is presented non-judgmentally. Szpilman in the film and in his book upon which it is closely based waxes with occasional fits of ambiguous feelings but, overall, his will to live, perhaps fueled by his single-minded desire to play the piano again, controls. Who has the right to judge him?
One desperate situation after another leaves an emaciated and fever-racked Szpilman, kept alive by Poles who detest not only Hitler's brutes but the obscenity of murderous anti-Semitism.
Nearly at the end of his rope he is discovered by a German Wehrmacht (Army) captain who asks his occupation. The officer motions him to a beat up and out-of-tune piano to prove his skill. Upon doing so, Hauptmann Hossenfeld, somewhat blandly played by Thomas Kretschmann, succors the weak pianist with food and clothing. Hosenfeld purportedly aided other Jews but in the film it seems that if Szpilman didn't turn out to be a pianist, the officer at the least would not have helped him.
Szpilman survives for the liberation of Warsaw by the Red Army and he resumes a brilliant career as a pianist, composer (of pop songs too) and member of a chamber music ensemble that tours Europe and the U.S. He died at age 88 two years ago.
There is no false sentimentality in this film. The violence of the Germans is in the viewers face and gasps from the audience were heard today more than once.
Szpilman as a fine artist had no greater right to survive than any other Jew. But his success, visibility, ability to write and commitment to tell his story made his escape from the death-dealers of the Third Reich well-known. Supposedly, over a million Poles have seen this movie to date. That is good for while the Polish nation was marked down as inferior by Hitler and while much death and privation was visited on Poland the sad reality is that very many more Poles accommodated the occupiers than hid and fed the desperate Jews. And too many in Poland today deny the extent of both the Holocaust and the willing assistance of Poles in its execution.
Some have suggested that the music of Chopin, Bach and Beethoven which is part of the film is really simply a leitmotif to the story of an individual's will to live. I don't agree. For Szpilman, music was a counterpoint to Nazi brutality, a living heritage that he could not allow to be silenced by the conquerors.
Music is, of course, morally neutral by itself. Szpilman's deep love of music is easily matched by the knowledge and devotion to Bach and Beethoven by one of the greatest monsters of the Nazi regime, Heydrich. What is important, as Polanski proudly and powerfully shows, is that those who are decent and who love music must win out if culture is to have meaning and relevance.
I was bothered by one aspect of the film and I'm curious if any others were too. A roiling debate over the past four or so years in Germany and to a lesser degree amongst American historians is the issue of the role played by the Wehrmacht, the Army, in actually committing crimes against humanity. For decades many Germans have argued that the soldiers more or less were at worst bystanders rather than initiators and principal perpetrators. That role was assigned to the black-uniformed SS.
In this film, virtually every murderer and abuser wears the "feldgrau" army uniform BUT in the end credits all are identified as SS personnel, save one: Hauptmann Hosenfeld. This is curious.
The mounting evidence is that the army committed very many atrocities in Eastern Europe against Jews and subjugated peoples.
Roman Polanski's stunning vision of his native Warsaw is a haunting classic that will inform future generations of sober and stunned viewers. Polanski has performed a deed of epic moral hygiene in bringing Szpilman's saga to the screen.
10/10.