Kolberg

Your eyes can't quite adjust to Harlan Veit's sinister and monumental Kolberg (1945).  There's an inversion to the film that makes the movie hard to see:  most war films posit peace as the fundamental norm -- violent conflict upsets peace and distracts people from their ordinary business of making a living, procreating, raising families.  War films that register the impact of conflict on civilians, generally, suggest that armed conflict is an anomaly in human affairs, a catastrophe that must be survived and endured, but not the ordinary state of affairs.  This perspective originates, perhaps, most fundamentally in Tolstoy's War and Peace -- Tolstoy says that war is the exception to rules of morality that normally govern human affairs:  there is a sharp distinction between soldiers, who are trade-professionals, and the civilian victims of war.  Tolstoy's distinction between war and peace, as well as soldier and civilian, is intrinsic to most modern film representations of war -- for instance, Gone with the
Wind (which, in turn, derives from Griffith's Birth of a Nation), David Lean's Dr. Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter, and, even, Warren Beatty's Reds.  War separates lovers, interrupts relationships, and imposes artificial hardships on people.  But these films all assume as their baseline peace and that, once the soldiers have departed, people will return to marrying and giving in marriage, adultery and petty swindling, raising children, tending to the sick and elderly, and farming or business.  After the samurai are victorious in The Seven Samurai, the peasants have no interest in military affairs and return to planting their rice; for a few minutes in the film, the peasants fought alongside the samurai, an alliance that Kurosawa regards with a kind of ecstatic horror -- this is not the way that the world should be:  soldiers fight wars and the civilians tend to their families and the economy. 

Kolberg was the last production of Germany's UFA studios when it was under Nazi control and it arises from a completely different ideology as to armed conflict.  Kolberg begins with the spectacle of citizens, men, women, and children, marching with locked arms through a picturesque medieval-looking city and along photogenic canals -- the civilian population has proclaimed itself as mobilized, as part of the war-fighting force.  And, indeed, Kolberg's political thesis is that, during circumstances of total war, there is no valid distinction between civilian and soldier -- every civilian is conscripted to the war effort; to the last man, woman, and child, every German is a member of the Wehrmacht.  (This notion arises from Goebbels 1943 speech at the Berlin Sportspalast in which the propaganda minister declared that "the most total war is the shortest war", denying the distinction between professional soldiers and citizenry.  Goebbels intent was to make meaningful the suffering that German civilians experienced due to Allied bombings -- a woman or old man or baby killed in such a bombing was a "hero" of the Reich, that is, a home-front soldier dead on the battlefield.  We have come perilously close to this ideology -- also the ideology of perpetual war -- in our so-called War against  Terrorism, in which the stockbrokers and secretaries killed in the Twin Towers are regarded as "heroes" or "martyrs" to a cause -- of course, a cause that didn't exist until they were killed.)  Kolberg, a huge epic film that celebrates the tenacity of citizens of the town under bombardment by Napoleon's cannons, is an instrument in an ideology that proclaims several concepts foreign to our usual representations of armed conflict:  first, everyone is a soldier; second, soldier's aren't allowed to surrender; and, third, the state of war is what is perpetual in the world -- war gives meaning to existence; by contrast, peace is weak, pallid, existentially vacuous.  Watching Kolberg, the American viewer wants to focus on the relationships between the people, a foreground love-affair, conflicts between characters, that is, recognizable human interpersonal relationships -- but these factors are wholly secondary to the film which has as its motive dramatization of the actions of a collective -- and, so, at least my eyes can't quite find the focus.  It's as if Gone with the Wind were remade with the love affairs as perfunctory ornamentation to a story that is entirely focused on the Burning of Atlanta.  In a standard war film like GWTW, the Burning of Atlanta is background to Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler's love affair.  By contrast, in Kolberg, the love affair between "little Maria" played by the Reich's favorite actress, Kristina Soederbaum, and her dashing cavalry boyfriend, is distinctly subordinate to the dramatization of war as a conflict, not between opposing armies, but between opposing Volk or populations.  The curious thing about Kolberg is its peculiar, daunting honesty -- these themes aren't concealed or sugar-coated, they are portrayed front and center with unmistakable ideological intent.  Kolberg is as single-minded and intellectually honest as Potemkin or Earth --  no effort is made to conceal a loathsome ideology.  In some ways, it's more truthful to the reality of war than films like Dr. Zhivago or Gone with the Wind.

Kolberg is certainly spectacular enough and its battle scenes are vivid and realistic.  The film was shot in Agfacolor and the tinting is unstable -- in some sequences characters oscillate between a waxen marmoral pallor and warm golden flesh tones.  But it's a handsome film on which no expense was spared.  (Harlan Veit claimed he had 187,000 extras at his command -- an outrageous lie, but, certainly, there are scenes in the film with lines of soldiers stretching to the horizon, probably as many as 3000 active duty soldiers conscripted to appear in the battle sequences.)  Paul Wegener, the German actor whose peculiarly Asiatic-appearance, had him cast as the Golem, not once but three times, plays the part of the feckless Loucadou -- he is the commander at Kolberg who counsels surrender.  His opposite is the burly and immovable Nettelbeck, a local brewer and the mayor of the town, played by the formidable Heinrich George, a huge square block of a man with a huge square head.  Kristina Soderbaum plays the heroine -- in the course of the movie, she has to mourn her father, both of her brothers, and her lover, Schill, a dashing cavalryman.  In the film's final scenes, Nettelbeck congratulates her on her sacrifices:  "You have offered everything you had.  Death is overcome by Victory."  Soderbaum first flits around like one D. W. Griffith's heroines in Birth of a Nation; she's as fragile as Lillian Gish.  But, this is an Aryan heroine and later we see her manhandling a big loom on which she is weaving, wading through chest-deep water when the defenders flood their own city, and standing outside in a hail of bombs, vainly spraying water on a burning building.  Her eyes are always welling up with tears.  She has a big nose and wide face and is, perhaps, not conventionally attractive -- but her presence is solid and she's one of the few actors with sufficient gravitas to stand up against the huge boulder-like Heinrich George.

In the frame to the narrative of the siege, a general named Gneisenau proclaims that the Germans can defeat Napoleon if all of them, both civilian and soldier join together in the war effort.  This sequence is lavish with huge crowd scenes of marching citizens -- there are so many of them that some of them have to march on barges in the river.  The film flashes back to confrontations between Nettelbeck and Loucanou -- Nettelbeck demands that the city be defended, Loucanou wants to abandon Kolberg and has failed to maintain its artillery (the cannons are all rusty).  This conflict hardens to the point that Nettelbeck is imprisoned and threatened with execution by firing squad.  Nettelbeck gives a message to the King in Koenigsberg to "little Maria" and asks her to hand-deliver the missive.  This requires an immensely adventurous journey by Maria, including running blockades and (she implies) using feminine wiles to penetrate road-blocks.  Bizarrely, Veit doesn't show us anything of Maria's adventure -- he seems to have no idea what an audience wants to see (or, perhaps, Goebbels who cut the film to 107 minutes has the blinkered vision).  Instead, Veit stages an utterly bizarre, almost surreal scene where Maria encounters the Queen of Prussia -- an inhumanly beautiful, serene, and waxen woman -- and is tongue-tied.  (I have no idea as to the politics of this scene -- it's deeply memorable, disturbing, and seems to regard the Queen in the light of the Divine Right of Kings, a system of thought that seems inapposite to National Socialism).  The Queen apparently (off-stage) talks to the King and the dashing and aggressive Gneisenau is sent to defend the town.  (Loucanou just vanishes).  The first thing that Gneisenau does is to burn down Maria's farm because it's on the outskirts of Kolberg and would provide cover to the advancing French.  This drives Maria's father mad and he throws himself into the exuberantly burning farm buildings. There are some battles.  Then, Nettelbeck supervises the populace in digging an immense trench so that the half of the town can be flooded -- this is a bravura episode, reminiscent, however, in some ways to King Vidor's Our Daily Bread in which an irrigation channels is dug to save languishing crops -- there is the same Soviet style montage albeit on a much larger scale.  There are more battles. Maria's brother, a musician, dies trying to save his beloved violin from destruction.  Maria's boyfriend, the dashing Schill, goes somewhere for some reason -- the narrative in the film is not very clear -- and gets killed.  Then, her last surviving brother is carried back to town dead on a bier.  A tremendous bombardment of the city ensues and the place is reduced to smoking ruins.  This bombardment leads to long harangues by Nettelbeck and Gneisenau intended to inspire the populace.  This is another reason that the film doesn't ever quite come into focus.  Although Veit stages grandiose battle scenes -- for instance thousands of French infrantry wading across the flooded part of the city under heavy artillery fire -- these sequences are secondary to the rants and harangues.  The battle scenes exist to illustrate the film's true climaxes which are, in fact, Nettelbeck and Gneisenau's speeches.  Nettelbeck says, for instance, "In this universal time of darkness for Germany, in the black night only one star still shine, Kolberg... they'll have to hack off our hands and beat us to death one by one; rather than surrender, we will be buried in the rubble."  The defenders know they are doomed and steel themselves for the final assault.  But, far away, a the Peace of Tilsit has been negotiated and, at the last minute, there is a cease fire.  The fanatical Gneisenau recalls these events six years later, in 1813 at Breslau.  His eyes flash and he shrieks into the camera:  "Der Sturm bricht los!"  That is, "the storm is now upon us."  This is a citation of Goebbels total war speech and presages the last bloody months of the War -- Hitler's Volksturm, in  which old men, women, and teenage boys were armed to resist oncoming Soviet tanks.

Goebbels didn't like Veit's cut of Kolberg and substantially reworked it -- this results, I think, in the choppy editing that seems to cut from one scene to another before the first scene is fully complete.  (Goebbels also removed the more demoralizing images of civilians crushed in the rubble of their bombed city.)  The movie was released on January 30, 1945 -- but there were then no movie theaters left in which the grandiose epic could be shown.  Almost no Germans saw the picture.  At the time, the movie was released Kolberg was besieged by the Russians.  The garrison pleaded for support but was, instead, sent a print of the film -- shortly, thereafter, they surrendered.  This is a huge production and everyone who was important in Nazi Germany's film industry is in the picture -- the score is by Norbert Schultze, the man who wrote "Lili Marlene."  It's an impressive picture in its own right and deserves close study -- both Stanley Kubrick (who was married to Veit's niece) and Frank Oz have suggested that a great film could be made about the making of the epic.  But no one has yet ventured this.