New Movie Tells Story Of Anti-Nazi Catholics

National Catholic Register

June 5-11, 2005

PAGE ONE STORY
by STEVEN D. GREYDANUS
Register Film Critic

NEW YORK— German playwright Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play The Deputy helped kick off a smear campaign against Pope Pius XII that has lasted some 40 years. Movies and books have regularly ignored evidence that Pius' "silence" about the Nazi extermination of the Jews is a myth.

Now, another dramatic presentation by a German offers a welcome larger perspective, pointing out the cost in human lives from Nazi reprisals to Church protests.

Director Volker Schlöndorff’s award-winning film The Ninth Day was inspired by a real-life incident from the prison diary of Abbé Jean Bernard, a survivor of the infamous “priest block” at the Dachau concentration camp. The film opened in limited release in the United States May 27 and is expanding to other markets in coming weeks.

In an unusual move, the Nazis briefly released Father Bernard, allowing him to see his family and talk to his bishop. According to the director, the priest alludes in his diary to resisting the influence of a Nazi officer who tried to pressure him in some way, but doesn’t reveal what the interviews were about. The film speculates that the Nazis may have wanted the priest to persuade his bishop to collaborate.

The movie also depicts the bishop reading the 1937 anti-Nazi encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge and observing darkly that all the Pope’s predictions regarding Nazism have come true.

In a striking exchange regarding the Pope’s “silence,” the bishop cites the case of the bishops of the Netherlands, where a letter of protest over Nazi persecution of the Jews resulted in the additional arrests of 40,000 Jewish converts to Catholicism. What would the cost be, the bishop asks, of a papal protest? 300,000? 400,000?

Commenting on the incident in the Netherlands, director Schlöndorff said, “What happened there is that the Nazis first arrested and deported the Jews of, how I should say, Mosaic faith. The [Dutch bishops] protested that, upon which the Nazis also arrested and deported the Jews who had converted [to Catholicism]. … So that is one of the arguments that is always brought forward why [Pius XII] didn’t interfere more forcefully.”

At the same time, Schlöndorff stressed that The Ninth Day is primarily concerned with the priest’s dilemma, not the matter of Pius XII, which he calls “a footnote” in the film.

“Rightly or wrongly, there’s been so much criticism about the attitude of the Church,” Schlöndorff said. “And one shouldn’t forget that there were thousands of [Catholic] individuals who behaved in the most decent way one could wish for. And I literally wanted to build a monument to those unknown and unsung heroes.”

Footnote or not, the film’s inclusion of a positive perspective on the Church’s role in the war years has some critics crying foul.

“A dry exercise in historical doublespeak and rationalization” is how Michael Atkinson of the Village Voice characterized the film.

But critic Lawrence Toppman of the Charlotte Observer said, “It amazes me that anyone would think that a film set in World War II has to be anti-clerical in order to be honest.”

For Toppman, the film presents its protagonist “as a low-ranking version of Pius XII,” faced with a “crisis of conscience over how to try to do as much good as he can” without triggering Nazi retaliation and “causing harm to other people.” (For the Register’s take on the film, see this week’s Arts & Culture column.)

Schlöndorff, a non-Catholic, is cautious about discussing his own religious views, but acknowledges that Catholicism has had a profound effect on his life and even his decision to become a filmmaker.

“I was lucky. I was sent — as a Protestant, by the way — for two months to France to a Jesuit boarding school to learn French. And I liked it so much that I stayed for three years, and finished my schooling there. One of the attractions was the film club. The second was that these Jesuits told me that you don’t have to become a lawyer or a doctor or an architect or whatever your middle-class background seems to tell you. Now this was in the ’50s, mind you, and filmmaking was not exactly considered a very valuable activity — but they said, ‘It’s fabulous. If you care so much for movies, why don’t you become a filmmaker?’ So that’s one part of the training, and why I was grateful.”

Schlöndorff also cites the intellectual rigor of his Jesuit schooling as a positive factor.

“I really liked the clarity of argument with them, and the unassuming way of … always trying to find out the truth. They totally changed my life to the better. I discovered that education can be a wonderful thing.”

Laughing, he added, “I still have this educational streak in me in making movies … movies that lose money.”

How does Schlöndorff view the Catholic Church?

“This is very personal. … I had my daughter baptized Catholic, I promised to give her a Catholic education. … I didn’t personally convert. … I believe in spirituality, and I think that in our Western world the Catholic faith seems to make more sense than the Protestant. But that would be a long, long argument.”

Asked about the appeal for him of the story of this priest, Schlöndorff commented in much the same terms as playwright–screenwriter Robert Bolt described Thomas More in his A Man for All Seasons.

“What really hooked me,” Schlöndorff remarked, “was the moment when they tell him, you’re on leave … because he has now himself a decision to make about his life and his death. So far it had been the people in the camp to decide about whether he lives or dies, and all of a sudden, this decision was in his own hands. And I’ve always been fascinated with — I have a hard time making any decision whatsoever. How come certain people have such strong convictions, that they don’t seem to ever hesitate about doing what has to be done?

“I first experienced that at age 17, I guess, at the Jesuit boarding school [film club], where I saw the first silent movie I’d ever seen, The Passion of Joan of Arc. … All she had to do was say one word, and she could walk free. And instead of that she preferred instead to burn at the stake. And I wondered then, how can anyone have such a strong conviction about what he should do? And 50 years later, in reading this screenplay, I remembered that question when I still didn’t have the answer.”

Another goal of the film, Schlöndorff added, was to “celebrate the beauty of … I guess you call it faith or belief which is nothing that is fanatic. These are not people who want to be martyrs. This priest is totally unassuming. So this is way beyond the concentration camps, way beyond politics, beyond Vatican and National Socialists and so on — this is a basic human question.”

 

Steven D. Greydanus is based in Bloomfield, New Jersey.