Today I want to talk about a film that reflects on World War II, and it is ridiculous that most of the excellent works on the subject of World War II were made in Germany, and this one is the same.
Auschwitz "became almost synonymous with nazi misdeeds in World War II in our time. At the mention of it, everyone remembers the chapter on the Holocaust in history textbooks, one of the most "inhuman" chapters in human history. Because of its notoriety, it is hard to imagine that Auschwitz was forgotten for more than a decade after the war. The Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 touched only the most important war criminals in the eyes of the Allies, and the Polish trials at Auschwitz dealt with only a few dozen, compared with more than 7,000 SS officers and men in the concentration camps. More importantly, these trials were either political performances under Allied control or liquidations of foreign authorities (such as Poland) that did not create any ripples in the hearts of the Germans, without revelation or reflection. The SS members who committed countless evil deeds at Auschwitz quietly hid in the crowd after the war, doing the profession of ordinary people and living a peaceful life. It was not until the Frankfurt Trials, led by Fritz Bauer, the hessian attorney general and former Jewish fugitive, in the early sixties, that War II war criminals were punished by German law for the first time, that the history of concentration camps began to torture the souls of Germans, and that Auschwitz entered the annals of history and became a scar that will forever be painful in the memory of Germany and all mankind.
The film "Labyrinth of Silence" tells the history of this "scarring". In Frankfurt in 1958, Auschwitz survivor Simon Korsh (Johannes Korsh) stumbles upon the concentration camp guards who tortured him and teaches at a school. With the help of journalist Thomas Genilca, he appealed to the state Justice Department for help, but no one wanted to take on such a thankless case. Out of curiosity, the new young prosecutor, John Radman (Alexander Fellin), takes Korsh's lead and sets out to investigate. Unexpectedly, the investigation process faced layers of resistance, from the incomprehension of colleagues in the Ministry of Justice to the non-cooperation of the police. The executioners of yesteryear now live in peace, their materials quietly piled up in the center of the U.S. military archives, and all one sees is the postwar economic boom, the song and dance of life—a labyrinth of indifference to history that traps those who seek the truth.
To interject here, in fact, the German people after World War II have been denying themselves and their own nation for a considerable period of time, and it was mentioned in Long Yingtai's "Dear Andre" that an American football team will cheer "Long live the United States" after victory, which is a very natural thing, but when it happens to a German team, it is different, they dare not cheer, because after cheering, people from other countries will look at them with strange frightened eyes.
Italian-German director RicciagLeli did not make "Labyrinth of Silence" a biopic by Fritz Bauer, and the content about the Israeli Mossad was only a background. The film is not entirely faithful to history, fictionalizing a slightly romantic character, John Radman, and placing this handsome blonde at the center of the narrative is not only a need for dramatization, but also a fine-tuning of the perspective of a historical perspective. Mainstream narratives tend to focus on bauer's collaboration with the Mossad to capture the "Nazi executioner" Adolf Eichmann, while the protagonist of the film hunts down another war criminal, "Angel of Death," Joseph Mengele, whose medical "research" at Auschwitz uses the bodies of Jewish prisoners as an experimental object, which is the most terrifying page in the history of the Holocaust. Radman did not succeed, and he had to focus on other sub-war criminals. The subtitle at the end of the film tells us that the historical Mengele was never punished by the law, but spent the rest of his life in South America, dying in an accident. Justice is not always done as we would like, and sin can sometimes go unpunished. In a sense, the historical view of "Labyrinth of Silence" is actually more cruel, realistic and calm, and the artistic technique may be romantic and dramatic, but the message conveyed is chilling.
Riccialelli reveals that the greatest significance of the Frankfurt trials was not a revenge reckoning, but a wake-up call to a German society that was intoxicated with postwar prosperity. Every mid-level SS officer implicated in the investigation is a chilling history, and to make it public is to torture the conscience of the Germans with a loud, clear, unquestionable voice, and to get the whole nation out of the labyrinth of silence.
As a competition film at last year's Toronto Film Festival, "Labyrinth of Silence" was released in European countries outside Germany in May this year, undoubtedly stepping on the seventieth anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender. This is not a film that reflects directly on war and massacres, but on reflection. It shows us that memories of violence and crime are constantly being modified and reshaped, and that the discursive struggle for these memories is also a sinister battlefield, and the enemy's weapons are lies, delays, and hiding. Everyone who strives to find the truth and preserve their memories is a hero in this battle, and the greatest difficulty faced by these heroes is not the cunning war criminals, but our silence and oblivion.
Perhaps coincidentally, an old work by the actor Alexander Felling eight years ago is perhaps the best footnote to The Labyrinth of Silence: "Passerby" plays a contemporary German youth who meets a concentration camp survivor while performing public service at Auschwitz. Today's Auschwitz, as the one-sided original text of the film says, after the war, tourists are weaving, and history seems to have turned a page decisively and never looked back. Fortunately, these literary and artistic works, including films, have also engraved that history in Germany's memory one by one, torturing every soul in every reflection. So, history is no longer silent, we are no longer forgotten.
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