PARTISAN REVIEW
383
empathizes with the violators. Let me develop that idea with the help
of an "extreme" case.
As
Resnais'
Nuit et Brouillard
so powerfully reminded us, one
of the most disturbing aspects of the Nazi horrors
is
that their appal–
lingness diminishes with time; and the more that artistically mediocre
accounts of them multiply, the more this happens. I would like to
suggest that an important reason for this diminishment may be the
paucity of distinguished works that present Nazis and the Nazi
Weltanschauung
empathetically and thereby bring things out of the
realm of nightmarish quasi-natural disasters and into a daylight where
one's full intelligence can function - function as it does with, say,
figures like Edmund and Cornwall in
Lear.
More than a simple
recoil from certain kinds of confrontation is involved, too. Such a
recoil is eminently understandable, and one can well understand why
Godard, trying presumably to get beyond it, once wanted, according
to Richard Roud, "to make a film about the concentration camps,
but one which would be seen from the side of the torturers, as it
were. It would be concerned with their practical, everyday prob–
lems: how to incinerate twenty bodies for the price of ten - cutting
down on gas, etc. We would see typists carefully making their inven–
tories of hair, teeth, etc. What would have been unbearable about
such scenes, said Godard, was not the horror of them, but on the
contrary, their completely normal and everyday aspect." Yet I think
that in the mind's recoil, something else may be lurking, something
more disquieting still. There
is
surely something equivocal, something
unresolved
in the feelings aroused by Nazism- an unacknowledged
and unconfronted measure of sympathy with energy, power, freedom
from certain inhibitions, and (for a substantial period, which
is
what
matters when one
is
talking about consciousnesses) success and the
unperturbed enjoyment of total power. "Sarban's" fantasy novel
The
Sound of His Horn,
set in a Europe that has had a hundred years
of the New Order, catches an aspect of this. So, of course, does
Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's brilliant
It Happened Here,
with its bringing home to one of some of the very tangible everyday
benefits of being in the Party. And I rather wonder how many of
the viewers of Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will
have not felt
their pulses stirring disconcertingly during the final exhilarated sing–
ing of the Horst Wessel song and caught that tune lingering in their
