Amen.
There’s no easy way to talk about a movie like “Amen” for the simple reason that there’s no way to be impartial. The general feeling of the brainwashed public about the events of the second World War is that of unequivocal sympathy towards the Jewish and Gypsy population exterminated by the nazis and of general hatred toward everything labelled as nazi.
This has lead to a series of movies that present a one-sided story of the war. What does make “Amen” special then? Well, it’s the fact that it presents a one-sided story from a different perspective. Oh please don’t jump like crazy, it’s not a perspective that justifies the nazi war crimes, it’s simply one that slaps hard the hypocrisy of some institutions like the Church (Holy See) or the US diplomatic service, who did nothing to publicly condemn the Holocaust at the time in which it took place … not because they didn’t know but because they chose to ignore any information in that regard in the hopes of driving the German war-machine into an armistice or even peace treaty.
In this world there are no absolutes … this is a lesson which I’m still learning. No absolute undying love, no absolute undying hate. All is relative and everything may build could crumble on the slightest wrong step … that is the risk any idealist like myself faces when put in the situation of realizing that the world he has struggled to build around is less than the ideal he’s aiming for.
The same lesson was learned by Kur Gerstein, an idealist memeber of the SS in a time when being an idealist carried along a deadly risk. When his ideals crumbled he fought to save whatever he could, making no compromises until the end, when despair took over and in turn he chose to take his own life. Not of guilt, but as a protest against injustice and the apathy of an institution preoccupied more with politics than with people.
Despite this fictionalized version of a true story, there’s more to be considered here. There are many points of view about Kurt Gerstein … one of the men behind Zyklon-B. One could say that if he was so preoccupied with the jews, he should have saved as many as he could or die trying, like Schindler. Another might say his whole purpose was of stopping everything. Yet another might question his preoccupation with his family who would have undoubtedly become hostages of the Reich. There’s no easy answer here, the story is complex and set in even more complex times … but aside everything, we all know that things are never as they appear.
Masterminded by the brillian Costa Gavras, “Amen” is a movie to be watched with an open mind and soul while saving some room to answer a question: “What would you have done?”.