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The relationship between the Vatican and the Third Reich has been a very hot topic recently, as unique documents and scholarly works have served to ignite a massive debate. Could the church have done more, did they back the Nazi’s covertly, was Pope Pius XII a coward in the face of Hitler? These are all relevant questions that deserved to be answered. Into the debate steps Amen, an effective drama directed by Costa Gavras, which, while looking at the actions of the church hierarchy during the war, concentrates more on the obscene level relationship, which I reflect mighty more absorbing. The movie is an gripping gaze at morality and responsibility in the most troubling of times.
The movie’s protagonist, interestingly enough, is SS officer Kurt Gerstein, played by the subdued Ulrich Tukur. Gerstein is a chemist by trade, and is promoted because of his ability to produce extremely effective “anti-vermin” pesticides, such as forms of Zycklon-B. Gerstein is unnerved to survey, as he stares into a gas chamber, that his formula’s are being ancient for far more than animal extermination. The realization changes his life, and Gerstein, a devout Catholic, gives the information and more to a well-connected Italian priest, Father Riccardo. Riccardo’s family is finish to the Pope, and the two unlikely allies feel they can effectively disappear the church against the Nazi regime. They have a precedent, considering that a Catholic uproar ended the SS sponsored extermination of the mentally handicapped. However, the two soon acquire that the church is hesitant to challenge Germany, for numerous reasons, including their hatred for Stalin’s Russia, their anti-Semitic attitudes, and their horror of decreased power in Nazi dominated Europe. It’s a wait and inspect attitude that is getting millions killed. Both men are locked in their good duty, even as those they trusted fail them, time and time again.
Amen is a stylish film that uses the rich history of Europe to lend a foreboding atmosphere to the entire dwelling. The Vatican shots are fabulous, as are the Berlin and, horrifyingly, the camp scenes. The acting is top-notch all around especially Tukur’s portrayal of the tortured SS officer, unsure of where to turn. While it may beget some leaps of faith that are factually baseless, it does shed an absorbing light on those times. It’s ending is a haunting one, as was history’s verdict. A worthy film.
Based on a good anecdote, *Amen* is an famous, and heretofore unexamined, angle in cinema’s ongoing grappling with the Holocaust: the complicity of the Catholic Church with the Third Reich’s “Final Solution”. Necessary BECAUSE the subject hasn’t been examined in film. Right, too; the movie is concerned with the cancel of the Jews in particular. Early in *Amen*, we discover the German Catholic Church place a finish to the euthanizing of what the Nazi Party calls “unproductive citizens”, e.g., people with Down’s Syndrome and, indeed, any who suffer from mental illness. The local archbishop threatens the Nazi bureaucrats with exposure to world belief, and thunders furious, logical arguments from the pulpit (”‘Unproductive!’ And what of injured soldiers returning from the front? Are they ‘unproductive’, too? ” etc.) . But the thing is, these mentally ill were baptized as Christians. The JEWS, on the other hand. . . . Director Costa-Gavras gives them an unlikely champion: an SS officer and chemist Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur) whose creation of a cleansing agent, designed to filter evil drinking water for the troops at the front, becomes a essential tool in the mass-murder campaign by the German government. The chemist, a devout Protestant, is vexed when he discovers to what uses his invention is being attach. He is eventually brought to a concentration camp, and is more or less forced to idea a gassing through a peep-hole on a gas-chamber door. Thankfully, WE’RE spared the recognize. Indeed, we “gape” almost no atrocities: Costa-Gavras assumes we’re smart and good enough to already know that genocide is unsuitable. (Obviously a harmful assumption, considering that this movie received almost zero attention from audiences and critics. We clearly need piles of bodies displayed with Barber’s *Adagio for Strings* swelling in the background, and a Schindler-like hero played by a robust and good-looking Irishman.) Instead, he shows us the evil paperwork, the incessant criss-crossing of the cattle-cars (empty one map, beefy the other intention) . . . the whole damnable mechanical PROCESS of the Holocaust. Gerstein decides to be the “eyes and ears” of this process, and even tries to lifeless it down in his fumbling device by hysterically claiming that THIS batch of chemicals is leaking from their canisters and must be destroyed, THAT batch won’t be ready for months, and so on. Meanwhile, having learned that the Church managed to halt the murdering of the mentally ill, Gerstein appeals to the local diocese. Upon informing the local big-wig prelate that the Nazis are systematically wiping out the Jews, the prelate muses suspiciously, “Are you even Catholic? ” But he DOES obtain the attention of a fictional young Jesuit, Father Riccardo (played with agonizing understatement by Mathieu Kassovitz) . Riccardo becomes obvious that Pope Pius XII should learn of the atrocities . . . and is fiercely checked by the Church bureaucracy and finally by the Pope Himself. *Amen* savagely attacks the Church in general and the Pope in particular: it’s rather telling that Costa-Gavras could accumulate no single figure to putrid Riccardo upon, but had to manufacture an amalgam from various (and doubtless outmoded) voices in the Church hierarchy at that time. Some may complain that Riccardo is merely a symbol of Generous, and that another character in the film, known only with chilling anonymity as “The Doctor”, is unprejudiced Obnoxious personified. But I believe enough ambiguity is provided by Gerstein himself: we like him, we identify with him, we sympathize with his disgust, we aid his attempts to alert the world, but we also feel uneasy that he remains in his plot as SS Lieutenant. What IS the truth about Gerstein? We’ll never truly know what was in his heart; we only know what he documented about the process of the gassings, after he was incarcerated after the war. Was he trying to condemn his murderous colleagues, or merely hoping to absolve his acquire continued participation? Or both? Perhaps Riccardo and the Doctor, both fictional, describe his enjoy divided soul.