Friday, May 16, 2008
Of Truth and Pain: The Unknown Soldier
The past few years have underscored the fact that in times of war, horrid awful things will occur. Abu Gahrib first comes to mind. It seems obvious that you can't be in the most horrid of circumstances without getting some on you. This will be particularly true of times and racist fueled militarism motivated and clouded the actions of an army at war. Michael Verhoeven's The Unknown Soldier challenges the viewer and forces them to come away with a perspective of WWII not contained to the story of Auschwitz and other similar concentration camps.
In the film, Historian Dirk Ruponow discusses how the holocaust has been focused along the lines of atrocities at Auschwitz but that there was so much more that occurred by less systematic means such as mass firing squad executions of civilians. A point that is then underscored by images, footage and testimonies of survivors in the Ukrainian city of Dubno and the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev. These are crimes on a scale that could not be carried out on their own by the SS. And this is a point that Verhoeven's historical experts and holocaust experts bring forward several times during the film.
The Unknown Soldier is also the story of an entire nation trying to come to terms with atrocity and their past. Much of Germany commonly held the belief that the the regular army or Wehrmacht were involved in war crimes and genocidal atrocity. This belief was challenged by two German exhibitions in the late nineties and turn of the century. There are images of abuse executions of both citizens and soldier prisoners on the Eastern front. The exhibit shows how thousands of Russian prisoners were killed in the POW camps to systematically deplete their numbers. Verhoevn's film shows neo-nazis, former soldiers and their families denying the charges and alleging the validity of the documentation including the claim that photographs were doctored.
This is not an easy film to digest. It covers a huge amount of ground both in the areas of cultural conflict and historical fact. It also attempts to spend some time dealing with how soldiers coped with this environment and their actions. Unknown Soldier shows how their actions could be better defused with the motivations against a partisan threat than one motivated by direct anti-semitic belief. The film implies that this was the reality they hung onto to justify their actions. There are not scores of former soldiers talking about their experiences into the camera like, say, the WWII vets of Ken Burn's The War. But Verhoeven does conclude his film with one veteran who feels and expresses remorse: Rudolf Mossner, a former soldier now in his eighties concludes the film by saying "I am ashamed of how the German soldier behaved towards the enemy. That makes me ashamed of myself."
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:02 PM
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