Costa-Gavras's new film, Amen, with its damning portrayal of the Vatican and its actions during the Holocaust, has opened old wounds, writes Derek Scally
Controversy was guaranteed the minute posters for Amen appeared. Posters hanging in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, adjacent to the site of Hitler's bunker, show a red swastika with the bottom leg as a straight extended line. It takes only seconds to realise that it is a swastika/crucifix hybrid. The shocking logo has had the desired effect and Amen, an examination of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, is the talk of the Berlin Film Festival.
The film shows two men struggling to tell the world about the Holocaust, but finding themselves trapped. One, an SS officer, is overwhelmed by the seemingly unstoppable force of Nazism as it marches across Europe. The other, a Jesuit, is faced with the immovable object that is the Vatican.
The film is based on the controversial 1963 play, Der Stellvertreter (The Representative) by German playwright Rolf Hochhuth. In the play, as in the film, Pope Pius XII is put on trial, accused of failing to intervene despite knowing that the Nazis were deporting Europe's Jews to concentration camps.
The story, most recently examined in the book Hitler's Pope, is familiar ground for Greek director Constantin Costa-Gavras, who made his name with the 1969 political thriller, Z. With Amen he returns to a familiar theme - the futile struggle of the individual against the machinery of politics.
The film charts the life of Kurt Gerstein, the son of a respectable German family, who, like millions of other Germans, joined the Nazi Party in 1933 after Hitler's rise to power. He was expelled from the party only two years later because of conflicts between party ideology and his own strong Lutheran beliefs. Despite a term in a concentration camp and the execution of his mentally handicapped sister-in-law during the Nazi euthanasia programme, Gerstein joined the SS in 1940.
He explained his dramatic career change to friends by saying he wanted to take a deeper look within the "core of evil" to know what was happening inside. He was posted to the wartime Hygiene Department, where he began work tackling typhus outbreaks among troops. But soon his engineering and medical background saw him assigned to develop the Zyklon B poison for use in concentration camp gas chambers.
In August, 1942, he had his first glimpse of the core of evil he sought, through the peephole in the door of a Treblinka gas chamber. Deeply disturbed by what he saw, he met the Papal Nuncio in Berlin, but, being a high-ranking Nazi officer, his stories were dismissed.
At this point the film parts company with reality, introducing the character of Ricardo, a fictional Jesuit, conceived as a composite of all the Catholic priests who reported the mass-extermination to the Vatican and who fought against the apparent apathy of their superiors.
Ricardo returns to Rome with Gerstein's story, but his pleas for action meet the soothing but empty language common to all Vatican pronouncements of the time. "In the present situation we cannot dispatch any efficient assistance other than our prayers," wrote Pope Pius XII to Monsignor Orsemigo, the Papal Nuncio in Berlin, in May, 1943.
The film interweaves fact with fiction as the two men fight losing battles against two intolerant regimes: Gerstein does all he can to slow down deliveries of Zyklon B to the camps and gives Ricardo as much evidence of the mass-murder as he can. Meanwhile, the Jesuit is faced with a choice between ethics and self- preservation.
"Pius XII was informed about the Polish death camps by Polish priests, 3,000 of whom were killed by Hitler," said playwright Rolf Hochhuth in Berlin this week. "He had detailed knowledge - the Catholic Church has the best civil service network in the world - and he didn't lift a finger. He never even mentioned the word Jew."
Hochhuth's play was hailed and condemned when it opened in 1963, with the strongest criticism coming, unsurprisingly, from Rome. The newspaper Osservatore Romano dismissed Der Stellvertreter as an "absurd play attacking Pius XII's work for peace" and a "cynical attempt" to find a scapegoat.
"If some words were not spoken [by the Pope], it was not out of fear. It was because the true situation was known, as were the dangers of tragically worsening the plight of the persecuted," the newspaper wrote. Opinions of Amen after Wednesday's press screening in Berlin were as passionate as those after the play's première 30 years ago. Minutes after arriving at the press conference, the director and cast were fending off verbal assaults from journalists. One German journalist called it a "mediocre costume drama", another dismissed it as "a second betrayal of the Jewish victims".
A Vatican Radio journalist accused Costa-Gavras of presenting "a particular reading of history" that ignores reality. The director dismissed the accusation, saying it is a history that continues to repeat itself.
"We find ourselves in the same position in dramatic situations all around the world - silence," he said. "During the massacres in Rwanda a lot of priests knew what was going on, some even took part. But I don't remember the Catholic Church condemning that."
Hochhuth praised French producer Claude Berri and Greek-born Costa-Gavras for making the film and attacked the German journalists. "The film rights have been lying around for 38 years. A German, one of us, should have made the film but no one had the courage to do it," he said. "We are lucky that Schindler's List didn't have Germans in charge of it or it'd never have been made."
The screenplay, by Costa-Gavras and Jean-Claude Grumberg, reapportions some of the blame on to the Allies and at the same time jettisons much of the central political discourse of the play. In its place are images - the splendid isolation of the Vatican and the haunting isolation of train carriages rattling across the deserted Polish countryside, some empty and open, others full and sealed.
"While the leaders are wondering if all this is really possible, while Roosevelt is getting re-elected and the Pope is afraid of communism, well, the trains keep on passing. We wanted to show the machine without the machine," said co-writer Grumberg.
But the train motif soon becomes repetitive and interrupts the film's dramatic flow. Meanwhile, scenes with US diplomats, intended to convey how world leaders passed the buck until it was too late, instead give the impression that nothing could be done to intervene. Nevertheless, the film's understated tone is its trump card, aided by a strong, unsentimental score from French composer Armand Amar and subtle performances from the two lead actors. Mathieu Kasovitz, the French director best known for Le Haine, gives a sensitive performance as the Jesuit Ricardo. German actor Ulrich Tukur meets the challenge of playing Kurt Gerstein, a man who got entangled in the evils he meant to fight.
"Gerstein was someone who took responsibility where anyone else would have evaded it. He was a contradictory, paradoxical man . . . who was penetrated by deep respect for the dignity of life," said Tukur.
Gerstein's biographer, Saul Friedlander, calls the SS officer "the ambiguity of good". "To resist [the [Nazis] he had to work from the inside and sometimes go as far as carrying out orders," he said. "The true tragedy of Gerstein was the loneliness of his actions."
At the end of the war Gerstein was captured by the French army. From prison he wrote a report detailing his role in the SS and his fruitless attempts to warn the Catholic Church and the Allies of the Nazi killing machine. His report remains one of the cetnral pieces of Holocaust testimony.
He was foudn hanging in his prison cell on July 25th, 1945, an apparent suicide. Shortly before he died, he wrote: "How could a German in such distress have found help, when it had already been impossible to find such help with His Holiness, the representative of God on Earth!"
One of the most damning scenes in Amen shows a group of Cardinals adn US diplomats having lunch on a sunny terrace in the Vatican with St Peter's in the background. "Time always proves that the Church is always right," says one elderly Cardinal, justifying the Pope's do-nothing attitude.
With understated ferocity, Costa-Gavras makes a convincing case that the Church was, and still is, wrong.