TV Note: "Judgment at Nuremberg" (3/10)
David Shasha
"Judgment at Nuremberg" will be screened on HD Net Movies Friday, March 10th at 2:40 PM
Classic Movie Review: "Judgment at Nuremberg" (Directed by Stanley Kramer, Written by Abby Mann, 1961)
Let us search and examine our ways,
And turn back to the Lord.
Let us lift up our hearts with our hands
To God in heaven:
We have transgressed and rebelled,
And You have not forgiven.
Lamentations 3:40-42
Before there was Elie Wiesel, before there was Simon Wiesenthal, before there was Abe Foxman, before there was Steven Spielberg, before there was Israel Singer, before there was what we now know as the Holocaust Industry, a fully-charged uber-machine that utilizes the tragedy of the Holocaust to bolster the ideological program of the institutionalized Jewish community and provide it with political capital and financial muscle, there was "Judgment at Nuremberg" which will forever stand as the most important Hollywood treatment of the Nazi period, a brilliant work of universal morality and humanistic compassion.
"Judgment at Nuremberg" is a film that I had not seen until very recently. And after watching it, I understand why it is that the film has been off the radar for so many years. It does not share the ideological program that lies at the heart of the contemporary American Jewish community. It does not, like the Eichmann trial that took place the same year as its original release, have a Zionist angle - the very idea that the Holocaust could be discussed without some reference to the state of Israel would now be seen as something of an impossibility. In addition, the very core of "Judgment at Nuremberg" is ethical rather than political - it does not look at the Holocaust along the same lines as Elie Wiesel and his partisans: In "Judgment at Nuremberg" the writer Abby Mann elects to examine the Holocaust as a moral issue and not a theological one, a human issue and not a mystical one. The film is not concerned with retribution; it is a profound assessment of universal justice without prejudice, an attempt not to demonize but to understand and enlighten.
And while we might rightly see Mann's approach as being completely in tune with the quest for a rational understanding of the Holocaust, the years since the film's release have shown his genius to have been wasted: Today the Holocaust has become an empty signifier that has almost nothing to do with the realities that we face as human beings. In other words, the Holocaust that Mann wrote about was one that posed a universal problem that struck at the very heart of human experience: What is the nature of justice and how do we establish guilt in human actions?
The three hour film, which contains what at the time was the cream of the Hollywood elite - Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery Clift, Maximilian Schell and even a very young William Shatner - who all pack the screen with plenty of star power, is a profound and deeply moving meditation on the nature of justice in our world. Rather than try to examine the nature of evil in isolation - an impossible task which recalls the failure of movies like "Schindler's List" to successfully find a way to represent the reality of the Concentration Camps - "Judgment at Nuremberg" is a courtroom drama that is heightened by its use of documentary footage as well as by the ethical musings and dialogic peregrinations of Spencer Tracy who as the lead judge in the case is shown grappling with the legal and ethical questions that emerge from an examination of the actions of the Nazis.
Tracy conducts a trial without prejudice; a trial that searches for the truth of what happened rather than for some vague metaphysical idea.
“Judgment at Nuremberg” is not an actual reconstruction of a specific trial, but is a fictional composite of a number of different cases. The case in the film involves the prosecution of four Nazi judges. At the very center of the trial is the figure of the eminent German jurist Ernst Janning played by Burt Lancaster in a tour-de-force quite worthy of his legendary reputation. Janning is presented as one of Germany's greatest legal minds, one of the most brilliant representatives of German liberal humanism, who sought to work within the Nazi system rather than fighting it. Janning is a deeply complex character who thought that he could do more on the inside than on the outside.
His deeply deluded perspective raises the specter of the defense mounted by Attorney Hans Rolfe - another bravura performance in a film loaded with them, this time from Maximilian Schell - who mounts his case from the "I was only following the law" argument. Rolfe is an extremely intelligent and capable lawyer. It is in his soliloquies that the true moral complexities of the film emerge: If these men are guilty then all of Germany is guilty, he insists. And not only that, if all of Germany is guilty then so are the American industrialists who provided resources for Hitler's regime, so was the Russian government who signed a non-belligerency pact with Hitler and so was Churchill who prior to Britain's entry into the war praised Hitler's leadership.
Rolfe brilliantly recontextualizes the Nazi horrors as the necessary steps that were taken by a duly elected government to restore its country's honor and dignity. Indeed, what Rolfe does is to pick away at the scab of national pride and patriotism and does this by quoting the sainted Oliver Wendell Holmes in his acceptance of various crimes against American citizens – similar to Nazi legislation – in order to assure American pre-eminence and superiority.
In addition, Rolfe raises touchy issues that play against the backdrop of the emerging showdown between America and the Soviet Union over the issue of Berlin. It was at this time in 1948 that the Berlin Wall was to divide East from West and usher in the Cold War.
The Cold War played into the old Nazi propaganda that Rolfe uses so skillfully in defending his clients. As a bulwark against Bolshevism and fifth column irredentism by Jews and other minorities, Rolfe argues that Hitler, though misguided, was essentially trying to do just what the Americans were doing in their own Cold War against the Soviets. Germany was simply trying to reinforce its own cultural traditions while repelling the march of the Communists; something that makes a certain amount of sense in this context.
The parallels become quite striking when we see that Tracy's Judge Haywood, a homespun Northeasterner who has a penchant for plain speaking and a disdain for legal casuistry, is being pressured, as is Widmark's Colonel Lawson, to be easy on the defendants. There is an American military presence in Germany that wishes to keep on the right side of the Germans whose help will be essential in turning the Soviets away.
"Judgment at Nuremberg" thus throws into relief the issues of expediency and patriotism as they relate to the actions of ordinary Germans during the war. Does not each individual living in other societies face many similar issues - perhaps not of comparative scale, but issues involving right and wrong, justice and injustice, that are often skirted in favor of what is called national "security" or the interests of a particular nation as defined by its government. Rarely do people fight the consensus in their own societies.
At what point are we expected to resist and defy the laws and social conventions of our own countries?
And rather than simplify the question, "Judgment at Nuremberg" through the filtering lens of Tracy's character takes it very seriously. It thus serves to demystify the Holocaust; rather than magnifying the Holocaust as an event that exists outside the bounds of history and civilization, it restores the Holocaust to the realm of the rational and the political. Such a move was perfectly coherent at a time before the Holocaust Industry, but it seems almost counter-intuitive now. And this is why the film is not much mentioned anymore.
But this is a lamentable thing in many ways.
"Judgment at Nuremberg" shows how Hollywood was not afraid to take on big issues in ways that expressed intelligence, compassion and a great deal of insight. The film's dialogue and the moral questions that it explores are, sad to say, way beyond the ken of most Americans today - moviegoers who cannot absorb such thematic complexity and whose views of humanity are often one-dimensional and monochromatic. The brilliantly written speeches of Judy Garland's Irene Huffman, who takes the stand in defiance of her neighbors who will most certainly break the windows of her store after she raises the specter of a case she was involved with, a case that accused her of having sexual relations with an elderly Jewish man when she was only 16, achieve a level of intelligence and sophistication that we would be hard-pressed to find in the contemporary cinema. Her impassioned defense of her friendship with the Jewish man - which led to his execution according to the Nuremberg laws duly enforced by the German court led by Janning - is articulated in language that is both emotive as well as deeply intelligent.
The film takes on the subject of Nazism from the context of the great brilliance of German humanism and its illustrious tradition. The question of how this could happen in a country that produced some of the greatest thinkers and scientists in the world is one that separates the truth from genius. While a person may be smart, their knowledge does not ensure that they will follow the dictates of morality. Often morality is counter-intuitive. The sacrifices that human beings make in the face of evil and immorality is one that often does not conform with our rational sense which seeks to ensure self-protection and well-being regardless of principle.
Courage is often the provenance of the person who does not rationally look after their own personal interests.
And this is the most brilliant idea that Abby Mann was able to put forth in the film's script: The Nazis were merely acting, as most of us do, in a way that conformed with the everyday dictates of their society. They did not seek to question or be critical of the legal standards and mores created by their leaders. What is so brilliant about this insight is that it is not limited to the Nazis. In each and every nation the vast majority of people simply conform to the models that they are given. Rarely if ever do we see people fighting for justice and morality in the face of a social construct that asserts that only it has legitimacy. The Germans who followed Hitler were doing what many people do on a regular basis – simply following the status quo.
The insights of "Judgment at Nuremberg" would have it that following the status quo is often immoral and can lead to evil. It is not that people start off as evil – it is that they find themselves trapped in a system where it is simply not logically feasible for them to resist. The Germans were not unique in this regard. Each nation has its own protocols and people frequently see themselves as powerless in the face of the powers-that-be.
The revolutionary aspect of "Judgment at Nuremberg" is that simply wrapping yourself up in the flag is not permitted to be a satisfactory defense. The film shows that each decision that we make harbors the elements of our own morality and confirms our responsibility to uphold the principles of justice. The movie is not a feel-good party like "Schindler's List" or "Life is Beautiful" - two films that spin the Holocaust into an Oprah-style mish-mash where the real moral questions are left unasked and unanswered. It is a brutally honest and forthright film that does not permit the viewer to dodge the ultimate questions of life - our integrity is put into question throughout each and every frame of the movie.
"Judgment at Nuremberg" is the perfect film about the Holocaust because it is a film that sees the Nazis through the filter of humanism and moral integrity rather than through the theological essentialism that lifts the Holocaust out of the stream of history and civilization. The questions that the film raises have to do with the ways in which human beings make decisions and how those decisions create realities for others. Every person on the planet makes decisions each day, and it is through those decisions that we exist as a human community with the power to hurt and to heal, to establish our goodness or to allow injustice to reign, to affirm life or to destroy it.
It is by asking these moral questions that the film finds itself so out of touch with contemporary society and its impoverished values. Rather than making the hard and unpopular decisions that Spencer Tracy does out of a sense of fairness and equity, decisions that put into jeopardy his popularity and his ability to be accepted and respected in his society, we live in a time when the very evils that the film decries, expediency and blind conformity, today rule our lives.
The main theme of the film, the idea that our standards of justice must conform to a moral sense that transcends petty notions of retribution, teaches us that what separates us from our Nazi enemy is that we do not react to him the way he would react to us. The culture of vengeance that we are currently living in was rejected in the post-War years; the values of retribution were then subordinated to the absolute values of truth and justice. Such were the values of the Nuremberg tribunals.
We must applaud the timeless relevance of "Judgment at Nuremberg," a film that reaches the very heights of Hollywood's commitment to making movies with intelligence and integrity which was at that time at its very zenith. Mann would work again the following year with Lancaster and Garland to make "A Child is Waiting," directed by the late John Cassavetes, a deeply moving portrait of a school for mentally challenged children which once again raises the specter of our personal morality and the commitment that we place on affirming the dignity of humanity.
It is in such Hollywood films that we see the world in a way that is deeply critical of the weaknesses of mankind and the ways in which our apathy and uncaring often leads to tragedy. These films mark a different time in our culture; a time when moral values were not merely empty slogans and fodder for personal aggrandizement and profiteering, but stood for something that carefully marked what we stand for as human beings.
David Shasha
From SHU 174, September 14, 2005