Sulphorous and Diabolical

Rating: 10/10 (15 February 2009)

That film is essential to plainly understand that history is never dead because it is always a movement coming from the contradictions of the world and the world will never be empty of contradictions. The film disturbs some good fragile European minds because it says that the Germans knew about the concentration camps and the Shoah because they just could not ignore it. It was public history. The Night of Crystal did not go unseen, and the concentration camp of Ravensbrûck was just across from the eponymous village on the other side of the small eponymous lake. And could the inhabitants of Weimar be that blind and not see the convoys going up to the camp of Buchenwald and running at the foot of the statue of Goethe and Schiller? Yes we have to reexamine some truths that are no longer valid enough. It disturbs many European minds to say that there were opponents in Germany and that they were not all dead, as long as they did not become dangerous, and that these opponents served Hitler because Hitler had managed to drape himself in the toga of Germany. It is disturbing to say that history dictates its own way and that no one can stop it and that it will never stop and that it will never end. Some can hijack it or slow it down. But any event is produced by the contradictions of the time and not by the will of anyone, not even the masses if these masses do not push in the direction where history wants to go, where the inner contradictions of the society itself dictate that it should go. It is pure vanity to pretend that you, singular, plural or collective, make history. When for a reason of any type history can be forced in a direction which is not its own, sooner or later that hijacking will create new contradictions that will bring the forces of freedom back on the table and history will go on along its own way, and yet that hijacking will have been the product of the very society in which it occurred. If Hitler lasted so long it is because he was produced by a certain situation and managed to get an authority that became hypnotic to the people, but he forced history and he created a violent contradiction that led to his own end. If Stalin lasted so long it was for exactly the same two reasons, even if his hijacking was not in the same direction as Hitler's and if the end came from the absolute exhaustion of all economic dynamism in the Soviet society. But Mao did the very same mistakes and his regime was saved when the economic dynamism was released in China itself, and Fidel Castro after him and after him Cuba will have to choose the same solution as the Chinese, the Vietnamese and many other countries have chosen, including in Europe of course. At times history comes back with extreme violence, at times with some velvet revolution, but it always comes back against those who try to force it, even if they are called Cromwell or Napoleon. And that disturbs our good old European friends because they want to solve historical problems by passing an act, publishing a statute or an edict or a law. Pure European vanity. It is thus a good thing that some exterior minds come into the picture and start telling these Europeans that they should try to think better and stop legally censoring life and history, and both life and history don't give the slightest damn about it anyway. The flaw of this film is that it is superficial and it does not really give the deep contradictory motivations of both the rebels and the Nazis, as Guenther Grass did recently by peeling the onion of his memory. But that dryness is probably the Scientologist touch of Tom Cruise because Scientology as well as Dianetics are trying to make life too clear to be deeply loaded with emotions and contradictions.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID