Watching War Films in Germany

Here’s the thing about Germans in war films: They always lose. Americans are used to heroes who stand up under withering fire and bring a measure of freedom to the world, while Germans have grown wearily accustomed to watching Americans charge in to kick some morally-compromised Fascist butt.

Valkyrie is an American war film, and Tom Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg as an American war hero, meaning a fresh-faced, plucky and stoic man who sees something wrong and works to set it right. Cruise has never been a convincing soldier, and he’s utterly hopeless as a Nazi. (“Think of ‘Valkyrie’ as a reasonably entertaining drama about the time Tom Cruise tried to kill Hitler,” wrote Mick LaSalle.) The film could have been much worse — it’s thrilling and suspenseful and when Operation Valkyrie comes together you think Hitler might really die this time after all.

So why hasn’t von Stauffenberg been the subject of a big Hollywood film until now? Why did it take a man of Tom Cruise’s penetrating vision to bring him to the silver screen? People have said the real von Stauffenberg was not an “action hero,” but I’m not sure about that: Any one-armed veteran of a desert war who carries a bomb into Hitler’s presence three times (only twice in the film) qualifies as a man of action and guts. Other critics have said von Stauffenberg ignored the Holocaust: No he didn’t, and he doesn’t in the film. He was no protester on behalf of the Jews, but he did object to their extermination.

The problem is that he had so little else going for him, morally. Count von Stauffenberg was a Bavarian nobleman and a rigid German officer who resented what Hitler had done to his beloved military tradition. He believed the drive to the east was a war for liberty from Stalin’s oppression, and he was disappointed by the SS and the concentration camps because they had murdered and mistreated the very people Nazi soldiers had set out to save. Stauffenberg was no democrat. He was a German nationalist who believed Hitler had betrayed his own cause. The movie hints at Stauffenberg’s attitude but never dares to show the depth of it. He wanted to save the German Reich (which at the time included France) not just from Hitler, but also from what it would become — a tamed, narrowed, functioning democratic state.

It may seem harmless in America, after all this time, to see von Stauffenberg played as an American war hero, but remember Valkyrie is one of the most popular films in Germany now, too. Whitewashing him as a freedom-loving soldier who stood up against morally compromised Fascists is a form of Nazi kitsch. It gives a thrill of Hollywood heroism (for once!) to a German, but only by diluting the patriotic manias that drove the Nazis to war.

     posted 3 February 2009 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. Thank you. This is what I’ve been hollering about lately. Not that nuance is Hollywood’s strong suit, but in all the glossing over here people might have forgotten that, yes, Stauffenberg wanted to off Hitler—BUT he was still a Nazi. He didn’t want to destroy the Reich; he wanted to improve it. The irony is that leadership under Stauffenberg could have conceivably given the Reich its desired world domination, or at least avoided the ire of the Allies.

    — Ben    Feb 4, 04:27 pm    #

  2. Richtig. Though I think he stayed out of the party itself for as long as he could. He was part of the aristocrat class that held its collective nose and let those grubby Nazis do their work.

    — Mike    Feb 4, 08:36 pm    #

  3. Stauffenberg doesn´t need “to be whitewashed as a freedom loving soldier who stood up against morally compromised Fascists”. He really wanted to stop the war, because he knew, that the last months of the war would cost more lives ( german, russian, french, english, american, jewish and also: german lives,)
    than the 5 years before July 20, 1944.
    Stauffenberg stood up ( any doubts? ) against morally compromised Fascists ( any doubts? ) . Why is this truth Nazi kitsch ?
    They never wanted France! In 1943 they only wanted Elsass out of what is France today. And yes they
    wanted Germany and Austria ( among other territories) inside the borders before the declaration of war. Is there something wrong with that? 1944 after D day they knew the only option was negotiated unconditional surrender and they said it. But surrender in July 1944 and not in May 1945. This time Hollywood got the facts right. Where is the Kitsch?
    -Ping Feb 4, 09:02 pm

    — Ping    Feb 4, 10:02 pm    #

  4. The Hollywood lie is aesthetic—Cruise plays Stauffenberg as a rebel who feels no different about Hitler than your average fresh-faced American kid. You feel a swell of hope when his rebellion almost succeeds. It’s kitsch because the German Reich would not then have become a free country. Anyone who looked at the Nazi war on the eastern front as a war of “liberation” was morally compromised. He was not a freedom-loving man.

    — Mike    Feb 5, 08:27 pm    #

  5. Mike, I think you are getting a bit carried away. The revolutionary, then imperial armies of 1790’s France and today’s american armies both claimed to be working for the cause of freedom (ever listened to your own Battle Hymn of the Republic?) and look at the carnage they caused. So I don’t really care that von Stauffenberg was not a “freedom-loving” man: in a military man, that’s a very suspect thing.

    Having said that, if one wishes to romanticize a high-ranking Third Reich official, Admiral Canaris would make a better candidate.

    — Olivier    Feb 5, 08:39 pm    #

  6. Olivier: I never said Americans were immune from the same rhetoric! That’s the problem with kitsch.

    — Mike    Feb 5, 09:06 pm    #

  7. But that’s precisely the point: if all talk of “liberating” other people is kitsch, why berate von Stauffenberg for not being a “freedom-loving” man? Let’s be consistent.

    — Olivier    Feb 6, 02:40 am    #

  8. Well, the question of “freedom loving” came up again with Mr. Ping. The problem under debate isn’t von Stauffenberg’s lack of democratic instincts but the way Tom Cruise plays him.

    — Mike    Feb 6, 10:52 am    #

  9. This reminds me of a simple description I once read of Baron Georg Ludwig von Trapp: “He was a brutally efficient British killng machine with kids who could sing.” That’s the Hollywood paradox created by a movie like “The Sound of Music.”

    — E    Feb 7, 11:48 am    #