Napola, a searing tale about Nazi military schools, was renamed Before
the Fall for U.S. distribution. Intentionally or not, this title resonates
with Downfall, another recent German film that focused on Hitlers last
days. Both films are driven by a need to understand how Nazism arose and
how it fell. As is the case in other films such Das Boot and
Stalingrad, Nazism is accepted as a given. There is little of the lurid
melodrama and central casting Nazi villains found in films such as
Schindlers List or Seven Beauties. Ordinary Germans operating within
the parameters of the system find ways to challenge it, even if they accept
many of its precepts. At least for this critic, this is a much more
effective way of understanding history as well as creating drama based on
complex characters.
Friedrich Weimer (Max Riemelt) is the teenaged son of a factory worker and
a gifted boxer. After being spotted in the ring by a boxing instructor on
the lookout for promising talent, he is invited to apply for membership at
mountaintop school and converted castle. This is one of a number of
Napolas, short for Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt (Institute for
Political Education) that Hitler has mandated for the training of Nazi
political and military cadre.
Friedrich is a simple youth whose main goal in life is to have hot showers
on a regular basis, the chance to compete in the ring and escape from
factory life. In his tenement apartment, bath water is shared on Saturday
nights successively by each family member until it is his turn to dip into
the by then mucky water. When he broaches the subject of going to a Napola
with his father, the presumably class conscious worker forbids it. After
Friedrich runs away from home to enroll at the school, his father smashes
his bicycle in a blind rage.
He soon discovers that the school is not what he bargained for. Although it
does offer an escape from blue-collar misery, it carries all sorts of
penalties from humiliation by drill instructors to rigid discipline of the
sort that is found in military schools universally. Since Friedrich is
physically superior to the other students and endowed with Aryan
features, he manages to integrate himself into the daily grind and even
flourish. He appears positively rapturous when soaring in a glider as part
of his military training. In other ways he is a typical teenager,
accompanying another youth to peep through the window at an undressed
kitchen maid.
If Friedrich has any understanding of, let alone sympathy with, Nazi
ideology, he certainly keeps it to himself. In the classroom, students are
asked to identify the author of some anti-Semitic screed (it was Martin
Luther) or use algebra to calculate how much fuel it would require to go on
a bombing expedition over Bolshevik Russia. Except for such peculiarities
unique to the Nazi system, the Napola seems pretty much like the typical
military schoolexcept with a higher level of blind obedience, cruelty and
irrationality that became perfected under Nazi rule.
When one student, despite his best efforts, habitually wets his bed, he is
forced to stand in the courtyard in full view of the other students with
his soiled mattress on his head. After weeks of humiliation, he discovers
the best relief from his personal hell. When a panicked student drops a
live hand grenade in the midst of other students, he smothers it with his
body. At his funeral, the head master extols Nazi virtues and points to his
example. He lived a heros life.
Friedrich eventually bonds with Albrecht Stein, the slight and cerebral son
of the local Nazi military governor who is the movies only real villain.
When Friedrich and Albrecht go to the family estate for a weekend of fun
and relaxation, the boys father drags them into the basement and orders
them to put on boxing gloves and fight with each other for his own drunken
amusement and those of his henchmen. When Friedrich pulls his punches,
Albrecht screams at him to fight. The Nazi ethos will not permit mercy.
After Friedrich beats his good friend into submission, he begins to
question Nazi values for the first time.
The climax of the film involves an armed detachment of Napola students sent
into the forest to track down and shoot runaway Russian prisoners who have
commandeered weapons. When they ultimately discover that they have gunned
down unarmed Jewish children no older then themselves, Albrecht makes a
decisive break with his father and with the system. Although Friedrich was
never a committed Nazi and never articulates any sort of thought-out
political justification for his own turn against the system, he joins
Albrecht but on his own terms as a star athlete.
Director Dennis Gansel began looking into the Napolas after learning that
his grandfather was a teacher at one in 1940. He inquisitiveness deepened
when he discovered that Alfred Herrhausen, the former director of Deutsche
Bank, had been a student at the Reichsscule Feldafing. Guido Knopps
Hitlers Children, which provided the historical background for Gansel
and co-writer Maggie Peren, reveals discloses the far-reaching influence of
the Napola and the even more prestigious Hitler Youth schools:
The list of names of those with a background of Nazi elite schooling, who
subsequently achieved something in democratic Germany, is a long one: the
banker Alfred Herrhausen (Feldafing), Count Maynhardt Nayhauss, the Bild
newspaper columnist (Napola, Spandau) the film actor Hardy Kruger (Adolf
Hitler student), the former East German politician Werner Lambertz (Adolf
Hitler student), the former ambassador and spokesman for Willi Brandt,
Rudiger von Wechmar (Napola, Spandau), the former Austrian Minister of
Justice, Harald Ofner (Napola, Traiskirchen), the journalist Hellmuth
Karasek (Napola, Annaberg), the artist and designer Horst Janssen (Napola,
Haselunne) and the former editor of Die Zeit, Adolf Hitler student Theo
Sommer. All of them had learned to be tough - tough on themselves and, if
need be, on their fellow-pupils as well.
One might legitimately ask whether it is likely that the son of a Nazi
governor would break with his own father and with the Nazi system out of
revulsion over the slaughter of Jewish children. We are so used to seeing
wartime Germans as the embodiment of absolute evil that it might stretch
credulity to see them as capable of acting humanely, especially if we
accept the Goldhagen thesis as good coin. There are counter-indicators, of
course:
Twice, early in his political career, [Ernest] Mandel came close to his
demise. Both times he escaped incarceration by the Nazis. The first time he
was arrested for distributing anti-fascist leaflets to the occupying German
soldiers. As a revolutionary and a Jew, Mandel was sent to a transit camp
for prisoners en route to Auschwitz. Ernest was a strong believer in his
own capacity to convince anyone of the merits of socialism. On this basis
he started talking to his jailers. The other Belgian and French prisoners
regarded their captors as hopelessly reactionary, even sub-human. But
Ernest talked to them, soon discovering that some of them had been members
of now-banned Social Democratic and Communist parties. He impressed them so
much that they helped him to escape. This experience also deepened Mandels
internationalism. He refused to write off a whole nationality because of
the crimes of its leaders.
In reality, the resistance of an Albrecht Stein was atypical. What is far
more typical was a kind of passive resistance to mass murder as described
by Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and
the Final Solution in Poland. Ordered to round up and kill Jews, these
cops found all sorts of excuses to avoid dutynot because of socialist
beliefs but because they were would feel degraded by taking part in the
murder of defenseless souls. Most often, the shirked their duties rather
than standing up to authority. But there some like Adolf Bittner who stuck
their neck out, as cited by Browning:
I must emphasize that from the first days I left no doubt among my
comrades that I disapproved of these measures and never volunteered for
them. Thus, on one of the first searches for Jews, one of my comrades
clubbed a Jewish woman in my presence, and I hit him in the face. A report
was made, and in that way my attitude became known to my superiors. I was
never officially punished. But anyone who knows how the system works knows
that outside official punishment there is the possibility for chicanery
that more than makes up for punishment. Thus I was assigned Sunday duties
and special watches.
Although Before the Fall is very much focused on a particular time and
place, it does invite us to think more generally about the nature of
fascism, especially as decisive sectors of the United States ruling class
continue their headlong march into religious backwardness and authoritarian
patterns of rule.
While watching Gansers film, I was struck about how connected Nazism was
to militarism. One might even consider Hitlers system as a universalizing
of military values. Blending merciless competition, blind obedience to
superiors, mystification of flags, banners and martial music, a willingness
to die for the nation and other features found in armies everywhere in the
world, Hitlers insight was that the entire society could be restructured
according barracks discipline and receive its marching orders to make war
on inferior peoples everywhere. One finds this characteristic in
contemporary Israel, apartheid South Africa and the United States under
Republican Party rule. Unfortunately and seeming to obey certain historical
laws that were manifested during Hitlers rise to power, Americas liberals
seem all too accommodating to our own rightward moving elements.
(Before the Fall opens in NYC and Chicago theaters on October 7th and in
Los Angeles on November 18th. It is highly recommended.)