Nuremberg v. Hans Landa
By: Daniel Fonseca Yarochewsky
Tags: Film, History, Culture, Philosophy

Taking a piece of art as means to study history is somewhat bound to slight “displaced bias”, that is, shaping the work for one’s own understanding of history. That is true given the uncountable liberties and ambiguities, which purposefully or not can arise from first, second, and in truth all cardinals’ interpretations one drives in order to make a point, violating thus original intentions and tastefully bound oddments. Proceeded carefully though, such analyses reveal not only those first intentions but the very ambiguities that are product of the biased human reasoning that created them, if that is important to the thesis. In this case it turns out to be, as meditations about some of the issues we’re interested in here, intentionally or not are transferred to one of the characters of this particular work, which gives philosophical and cultural significance to it. And so, accompanied with my own pulse’s signed warrant, I enter the realm of the Hollywood-acclaimed Quentin Tarantino, whose style and thought process in the piece Inglorious Basterds excited ones and enraged others, to discuss the delicacy of historical memory, and a human-fallible character’s construction as of major significance to the former.

Needless to say that in using the artwork extensively here, I assume the reader is comfortable with the plot, and go on to explore the iconic Colonel Hans Landa in this process, dealing with the aforementioned upset towards the end.

Insofar as the character has at most four, although extensive and pivotal takes on the film, one would assume ‘mere’ supporting role from Christoph Waltz, yet Tarantino himself refers to the made-up as “the best I’ve ever written”, which already reveals some degree of complexity to his personality. In a 10,000 foot view, Hans is a genius detective to which the Nazi uniform and the swastika on the arm bear no meaning or derogatory value to his personality and morality. As much as his brilliance has awarded him notorious success in the pictorial Reich (the character is intimate to Goebbels), Hans Landa rather enjoys the investigation on the moral limits of his interviewees and their own vicious schemes which they employ to achieve their goals. Arguably, this transitions the actor from a supporting to a leading role in the rather unique envision of a “Jewish vengeance”.

However, it is also here that he distinguishes himself from the other two concurrent ploys to unmount the Reich; all his opponents were in some way or the other tied to the Jewish cause, and therefore their goals standing closer to what we would generalize as a human cause than Landa’s. Yet in the Colonel’s mind these practicalities fade away, and he distinguishes himself as a seeker and persecutor not of Jews, not of Nazis, but of liars. In criticizing German soldiers in the first chapter for instance, in extending his, joyful for him but torturing for his interlocutors, interviews with his rivals, in differentiating his comparison of Jews and rats from the Reich’s, Hans Landa shows he’s thought further, and emphatically transfers this message in an almost light-hearted way throughout the plot; in between jokes and laughter, smiles and sarcasm, the officer’s job is to convince those people of not only his mastery in discoveries but also of their presumptuous foolishness now in doubting his intelligence, now in believing their goals have fundamental primacy over his.

That moral intuition is what establishes the character as one who detains yet another type of evil and what gives the character its delightful cynicism. The evil pertaining to Landa is parallel but different to that of Eichmann as defined by Hannah Arendt; it is so in the sense it is transparent to something else. It is, in his case, a duty of his, yes, consciously, yes, but in service and thus far behind his inclinations to uncovering lies. It is not justifiable so, but coincidental.

Nevertheless, the supposition that Colonel Hans Landa was conceived specifically to be Adolf Eichmann is presumptuous, but an analysis that Tarantino might have blinked at Arendt when writing the Nazi detective’s morale is revealing, not in the widespread superficial sense — a theory that Hans Landa is “just doing his job”, and is therefore senseless and indifferent, just like Eichmann alleged to be. The real parallel between the two, then, is that one is a parody of the other; when Hans Landa is constructed as a genius character who finds Jews, which made “the Fuhrer take me from my Alpes to rural France”, his aspirations differ from Eichmann’s in quality; they are mere coincidental. That is, while Eichmann was up to expedite the deportation of Jews as means to achieve a better status and early aimed at being a successful engineer, Hans actually achieves this sort of pinnacle by performing “Jew hunting”, yet making sure to state the coincidence that prominence had come at cost of — persecuting Jews in Nazi-occupied France. This is precisely what allows us to argue on a parody here, that the idea of a coincidental success between Nazi jobs and talent is exaggerated in Landa, and thus that the relationship between his career success and the reprehensible nature of his job is belittled by the character.

However much we resist, Hans Landa is enjoyable for his personality and cynicism alone. And on top of that, his final act as a “double agent” who defined the end of the war and gave a settling flavor to the Tarantino alternative ending to WWII wraps him up as a well-humored hero in the plot despite being a proved-villain throughout it, thus playing with our morality and sense of justice insofar as we consider Landa worth of pardon, or not guilty at all. How could it be that in less than one and a half hour, a high-command SS officer could be pardoned and enjoyable, defying our preconceived and automatic reproach for such figures?

Quite remarkably, Landa’s motivations are not without changing courses up to the end of the movie. By requesting that the U.S. purchase land in Nantucket, he might have disappointed the seemingly integral and principled hero, but it is with this pitfall that the movie triggers the argument that he is not a paragon, and that there are no plain heroes. More importantly is the corollary; that there is no absolute evil, and Hans Landa is neither a hero nor a villain, but a talent and moral-motivated individual whose beliefs are just as plastic as of convenience, and whose talents and morality challenge each other, sit one on top of the other, change places, and acquire heroism and villainy at different times.

…

As promised, I consider the argument of the movie’s allegedly controversial goal as a moral reflection piece, its apparent message of a vengeance and on-pair-with-Nazi Jewish aggression, and its role in the field of “Education After Auschwitz”. As important as it is to say that such works of art are shielded by creative freedoms and fictitious deliberations, and that not considering the director’s own stylistic choices in portraying violence which are evidently non-negligible in this particularity would be gullible, it is to state that the plot can in fact arise turmoil just because of its subject matter. Now, if I were dismissive here I would have extended the above developed line of thought from Landa to the plot, and be done by arguing that such aggressions were equated with the Nazi’s (with some level of creativity and Jewish combina of burning nitro tapes as a way to kill) as a Freudian thesis of non-exclusive traces of evil and aggression, and I would go just as further as to specify the duality and the non-free aggressions throughout the movie; the fact that Shoshanna died just like Zoller, that the Dreyfus family was exterminated just like the Reich high command, and that most of the medium-rank infiltrates of Operation Kino died just like most of the medium-rank German soldiers in the tavern. That is, even though lives don’t pay for themselves, that no “justice” was carried out freely and solely.

This should be as alarming as not sufficient, since it is precisely this latter notion which could potentially shape the movie as problematic. But then it is here that Hans Landa makes himself important. The fact that the decision to end the war and the burden of history fell into his laps hints at an assumption that decisions that are taken by the most powerful are more subtle than what we tend or desire to believe when trying to rest with the past. That in most moments, it seems unescapable that how things read is a prerogative of only a few hands. In this work specifically, Tarantino chooses for history to, per say, be written by Austrian hands but recounted by American Jews. This irony and nonsensical juxtaposition composes a broader argument of exceptionality to true historical fatalism; from Landa’s mouth: “in the pages of history, every once in a while, faith breaches out and extends its hand; what shall the history books read?” . Moreover, it is him who ends the war, not “eye for an eye” postures by the Jewish squad, nor Nazi prerogative (when he negotiates the deal, there was no sign of a German defeat, in fact, it is in the night of a movie show, not coincidentally named Stolz der Nation). However, he still does so in a ridiculous way, and this time, leading us to a belief not only of the non-existence of such opportunities in history, but also of chained violence that in effect settles no conflicts.

On a note about style and genre, Inglorius Basterds as a of-moral-value dugmá of the ideal war ending and what Holocaust-concerned art should be is as compelling and as extensive as Adorno’s “rough draft” of how education after Auschwitz should be. That is, nonexistent and provably impossible. It is when we are at this crossroad that we recognize “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”, or that no “poetry could be made of it” yet we still choose to produce emotional and dramatical work, without any luck in succeeding to understand it further. These are the unsettling dichotomies that haunt post-war historical reflections, those of allowing or forbidding, of depicting cruelty or prohibiting Nazi imagery, of discussing Main Keimpf or banning it, dismantling camps or visiting them, writing poems or biographies, drawing rats or humans, portraying Jews being killed or Nazis. And any such individual attempt to understand this past and reflect upon these memories is as successful and as failing as its pair. Yet among those, the ones in which the Jews are rats, a coat-red is the only color, and a Nazi official is the hero, controversial and disturbing or not do make a point of the non-linear human thought, the multidirectional motivations placed in their context, and the non-Manichean trait that history, and specially these dark times entail.

However, the arguably lack of a unidirectional solution for the cause of the Holocaust, the origins of evil, and a catastrophe-preventive education is no reason to not still try to reach one, for historical memory and human relations surpass the completeness of a set of axioms, and therefore see themselves free to supersede previous argumentative quasi-truths. Quite contrarily, these questions are noticeably portable, and go on to span other areas of not only then history, but contemporary moments, assuming colors that mix up in new shades, with not their generation’s but our problems, posing to us, altogether, different dichotomies. Whether those take the form of justifying the need for a home for the Jewish people or debating its compliance with standard governments, of demanding reparations or arguing for reeducation, these issues will continue to require our attention, and will presumably demand reopening their former non-answerable origins. That is, at one point or the other, the answers to some contemporary dilemmas will converge to the very same doubts we never settled: the origins of violence and evil, its peculiar intimacy in its victims’ legacy and stories, or both.

Perhaps there is a just answer to settle us forever and rescue us “up the rabbit hole”; one that conforms not in essence to our modern thinkers in the extent to what they believe or doubt are the reasons for such wars and the motives behind evil, or at least that there is a feasible approach to finding out what they are. Rather, one figure who is historically parallel, but whose reflections dissent from a sane answer about human’s inclinations and motives on the issues here. Reflections that are particularly elucidating in the field of historical memory and what we make of ‘dark times’;

Fatalism in history is inevitable for the explanation of senseless phenomena (that is, those whose sense we do not understand). The more we try to explain sensibly the phenomena of history, the more senseless and incomprehensible they become for us Tolstoy, War and Peace

Take the reader the above advice dearly, and in investigating the non-axiomatizable human character, rest ceaselessly, as we should.