Climbing Mt. Impossible: Das Boot and the Sympathetic German Soldier

In 1981, less than forty years after then end of the second world war, the idea of making a film sympathetic to the Germans must have seemed impossible. Those familiar with the commentary track to Das Boot will recall the report that there was concern at the earliest screenings when audiences cheered the title card that announced that about 75% of U-Boat crews died. This was supposed to be a sobering statistic, but the audience apparently saw this as a moment to crow about sticking to the Nazis.

That the film pulled off this feat should be appreciated. The formula was to

1. Mark a distinction between good German soldiers and true Nazis. The sailors on the boat were desperate to save the motherland and it is only the S.S. officer who buys into the ideals of the party. This is pattern we would see replicated in The Hunt for Red October with the crew not being particularly political, and annoyed by the political KBG-type officer on board. Who ever said communists and fascists don't have anything in common? Our captain rails against the losses of the war, but also notes the Allies are winning, noting that Churchill is getting the better of them. He also prefers British sailing tunes (It's a long way to see that Jurgen Prochnow is not a Nazi, but we can take a short-cut by way of Tipperary). This is the oldest rhetorical trick in the book--mark a distinction and stand on the preferable side of it.

2. Emphasize the youth of the "good" Germans. Most of the sailors on the boat are just kids. A point which is highly emphasized. These are not arch killers, but children off the farm who were thrust into a situation they didn't really understand.

3. Highlight the desperation of the U-Boat crews. We're shown people being pushed out to sea to cover gaps. We have discussions of losses--the mathematics of defeat. It's hard not to root for the underdog.

4. Show the grotesqueness of the crew. And boy do they: urinating on the captain's(!) car while he is in it, sexually harassing singers at the officer's club, bullying each other on the boat, poor hygiene aboard ship. All of this adds sympathy in that we see that the sailors are tortured souls acting out in a lost cause. This mirrors looming questions which could put us back on the offensive, "How could one be so grotesque as to fight for Hitler?" and "Will this film deny that the German war effort was anything less than grotesque?" -- Because our sailors are grotesque, we can relax a bit--we're not being asked to imagine that they're simply "the goodies." The film, in effect, pleads "Yes, they were grotesque, but they were also in an impossible situation!" In effect, the grotesqueness invites the audience to have sympathy for the devil, rather than the bridge too far of asking us to imagine that they were simply "angels in a bad circumstance."

Of the 4 methods, the 4th is the most interesting, I think. The first three are rather obvious. And indeed, there is an aspect of the grotesque which has permeated German culture ever since (architecture, music, porn) -- it is as if the culture is still doing penance by insisting, "Yes, yes we're dirty" (e.g., Angela Merkel experiencing obvious discomfort in that clip of her seeing people wave around German flags on a dais). Losing does considerable damage to the psyche. Dave Chappelle once joked that the Japanese have been drawing "Hello Kitty" ever since being nuked, and I think there's a grain of truth in that. The partial genocide of Native Americans appears to have done considerable damage considering the conditions on reservations which arguably could be semi-sovereign utopias. The price of losing isn't just unfavorable terms at the peace table, but also a loss of dignity and self-respect. Das Boot is effective, I think, because it apologizes for the war and the war crimes of Germany by sacrificing the image of the prim and proper soldier/sailor/pilot heroically striding into battle.Looking back on the film, I think 1-4 are a bit overdone/obvious/overplayed, but in 1981 I don't think that they could have climbed Mt. Impossible any other way.

It's been a while since I saw that one, but when I did, it triggered some similar questions, along with some reading. Some of the factors in this are - Sub duty was awful, terrible living conditions even when you were not under attack. Your chances of coming back were worse than front line soldiers since most German subs were lost with all crew members. While you were there, the air was awful and living was completely claustrophobic, quarters extremely confined and there was no way to pop out for a bit of a walk in fresh air.

Like a lot of young German men, sub crews and soldiers in general, most of them were not ideological, but just hoped to survive either the war or the regime. That's part of why the post war times in Germany went fairly peacefully, since hardly anybody wanted to go back to the way things were. They mainly hoped to survive and go on with some sort of life.

The whole "Good German" thing is a quandary I've never been able to untangle. I don't know what that would even mean since were was little in the way of actual opposition to Hitler. Pre-Hitler, post-WW I was awful in Germany. Then Hitler promised great things, put people back to work and provided lots of entertainment, at least if your idea of entertainment is torchlight parades. As long as you were not one of the despised minorities, life got better if you kept your head down and mouth shut. As a guy who had some of those despised minorities in my ancestral family, I recall that when I was a kid, some of the really old folks just wanted to fly under the radar, even in the US, hoping that it would not happen here and being glad they got out of Germany when they did, before things got bad. They never got over that and never spoke of the pre-immigration, pre-nazi days.

My impression in Das Boot was, like many people in the German military, they spent a lot of time, hoping to get out of the war alive and pretending that all of the other horrors just got past them. We all do some of that, but for Germans in that time, it was really extreme.

To be honest, I am quite nervous about the whole "Good American" thing--so many bombs have been dropped, so many bullets have been fired, and so many countries "liberated" (allegedly) representing my interests, that I don't know that I deserve a lot of sympathy. I've never publicly protested anything. Sure, I have complained among friends and railed (privately and appropriately) and listened to anti-establishment music played loudly in my car, but where was (really) my opposition to foreign adventures in places most people cannot pronounce or find on a map? Collectively, we have cared so little that we generally don't even know where the countries we have invaded are located on the globe. If America is ever conquered, I am not sure how much sympathy we can really expect.

I am the person, I am afraid, who talks a good game (places like this), but keeps his head down (for all practical purposes) in public life.

I have, in effect, already failed the banal version of the Milgram Experiment.

I am not saying we're the Germans or even the baddies, and yet I cannot help but feel accused (by my own conscience) in your comments.

I think most of us would fail the Milgram Experiment.

I think you can't be too wrong by being cynical. There's always some country that's the top of the geopolitical heap. The question is not whether that country is evil (after all, it DID make it to the top of the heap), but just HOW evil. As a top-dog country, I'd rank the US as low on the evil scale. It reminds me of how, once the Roman Empire was gone from the European world, people tried to figure out how to make a new Rome for like 1000 years.

It's also reflected in the Oppenheimer movie. Someone was going to figure out how to make a bomb. If not in 1945, then in '46 or '49, but sooner or later it was going to happen. Lots of physicists understood it conceptually. One of the minor characters in the movie, Leo Szilard, was the guy who understood the concept and he'd told lots of other scientists. In the scheme of things, in a world where somebody was going to get nukes, it's probably less awful that it was the US.