The Meaning of Recognition (5 page)

Exporting the culturally adventurous and importing them on the plane back, Australia is now joined to the world in the best possible way, by what it admires and by what is admired about it
– a reciprocal contact that makes isolation a thing of the rapidly retreating past. With Australian Wagnerians visiting Bayreuth and German Wagnerians visiting Adelaide, there is no longer
any cultural border worth bothering about. Which doesn’t mean that a political border is without importance. On the contrary: the more the nation prospers, the more rancour it is likely to
arouse, even within itself. Rancour from within, by a familiar process, is too often ready to excuse rancour from without. Australian intellectuals, taken as a class, have a tendency to blame their
own country for being targeted for destruction by every disaffected person in the world who suspects that his own compatriots might like to live there. But on the whole the Australian population
would prefer to elect the kind of government that will ask transients to unpack any luggage that presents a suspect silhouette to the airport scanning machine. On the way back to England, my
cabin-baggage holdall did. Informed that I was carrying an unidentifiable oval metal object, I didn’t know what the security officer was talking about. Had somebody planted a bomb on me? When
I unpacked the bag, the mysterious article lay revealed. It was the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal.

Roman Polanski’s new film
The Pianist
is a work of genius on every level, except, alas, for the press-pack promotional slogan attributed to the director himself.
‘
The Pianist
is a testimony to the power of music, the will to live, and the courage to stand against evil.’ If he actually said it, he flew in the face of his own masterpiece,
which is a testimony to none of those things. In the Warsaw ghetto, the power of music, the will to live and the courage to stand against evil added up to very little, and
The Pianist
has
the wherewithal to respect that sad fact and make sense of it. In the Warsaw ghetto, what counted was luck, and the luck had to be very good. The odds were almost impossible to beat. For the Nazis,
that was the whole idea. To sum up his story in a sound bite, Polanski would have done better to borrow the two words everyone remembers from one of his previous triumphs: ‘It’s
Chinatown.’

In
Chinatown
the bad guys did what they wanted, and so they do in
The Pianist
. The central story is about a survivor, the famous young musician Wladyslaw Szpilman. At a
critical moment, his talent saves him. If this had been the only message, the film would not even have had the merits of
Schindler’s List
. Steven Spielberg did his best to stave off
the uplift, but inevitably he was stuck with a denial of what Primo Levi said was the real story of the Holocaust, which was not about anybody’s survival, even his: the real story was about
the drowned, not the saved. If Polanski had compounded the same fault by suggesting that a gift for playing Chopin could get you a free pass, he would have been in the same case as Spielberg only
worse. But in fact he does an even better job than Spielberg of making sure that in watching the lifeboat we don’t forget the ocean of annihilation it is trying to cross. At the end of
The Pianist
you would need to be very dense to think that Szpilman, who lived to play the piano again, had managed to do so by any mechanism except blind chance.

Spielberg offset his story of the saved by two main devices: the symbolic device of the little girl in the red coat – the only splash of colour in a black and white film – and the
purely realistic device, employed with unprecedented verisimilitude, of showing the scope of the crime through violent incident. In Spielberg’s camp, a Jewish woman tells the guards that they
are mismanaging the construction of a new building. The Nazis agree with her suggestions but shoot her anyway, for having spoken. The incident stands out for its poisoned richness of implication.
In Polanski’s ghetto, such incidents arrive one after the other. They are each as powerful, and what is more they join up seamlessly, in a continuity of horror that would keep your hands over
your eyes if your hands could move from the armrests of your seat. In
Schindler’s List
we have to imagine how the little girl in the red coat goes to her doom; which leaves the
possibility that we might not imagine it. In
The Pianist
, the little boy trying to wriggle back through a hole in the ghetto wall after a foraging expedition on the outside perishes right
in front of your eyes. Szpilman is trying to pull the boy through the hole to safety. On the other side of the wall, the guards are kicking the boy to pulp from behind.

By the time Szpilman pulls him through, the boy is dead. Szpilman’s sensitive face (in actuality, which he might have trouble getting back to after this, it belongs to Adrien Brody)
registers the shock of an offence that goes beyond injustice. Throughout the film his face is an instrument for registering shock: first the shock of incredulity, and then, gradually but steadily,
its decline into shock as a steady state, where not even the worst outrage is beyond belief. The screenplay is at its subtle best when the trapped victims are tricked by their civilized past into
giving irrelevant responses to the unimaginably barbaric present. People keep saying ‘It’s disgraceful.’ The words are comically inadequate, and that’s their point.

Levi described the paralysed reaction – the stunned absence of reaction – of people bred to gentility being hit in the face for the first time in their lives. In
The
Pianist
, Szpilman’s father is hit in the face for walking on the same footpath as the SS. He still doesn’t get it, and has to be instructed to walk in the gutter. Frank Finlay does
a typically solid job of impersonating a decent man who, had he been capable of slyness, might have figured out the advisability of walking in the gutter before they told him to. But Polanski soon
proves that no amount of cleverness can outfox the wolves. In the ghetto, the only smart thing left to do was join the Jewish police. Polanski is brilliant at not shirking this crucial issue. You
can see how it happened, and are easily persuaded that you might have made the same choice. (A decent impulse might even have helped you make it, by convincing you that you could be useful at the
right moment – and indeed it was a Jewish policeman who saved Szpilman at the very doorway of the boxcar that would have taken him to the gas chamber.) It is a pity that we are not shown the
Jewish police being loaded on to the last train out, by which time most of them had realized that their complicity had bought them only a postponement. But Szpilman is in hiding on the outside by
then, and his viewpoint rules the movie, so he does not see the dupes being shipped off.

Duping them had been one of the Nazis’ chief pleasures, because dreaming up new moral dilemmas was a Nazi sport. The idea was to create a world in which nothing a Jew could do was right.
It had been so since the Nazis came to power, when among the first things they did was to concoct regulations that would face the Jews with impossible choices. Victor Klemperer’s diaries give
us a comprehensive survey of these. Punished for staying and punished for trying to leave, punished for not arriving at work and punished for boarding the tram to get there, they were reduced to
neurosis. Klemperer walked more and more often to the funerals of people who had committed suicide. Speculations about when the Final Solution began are essentially a waste of breath. The massacre
started in 1933. The only reason nobody noticed was that the first victims died by their own hand.

As a mechanism for duplicating hell on this side of the tomb, the Warsaw ghetto was a construction of diabolical ingenuity. Polanski is ingenious enough to match it, and show it for what it was:
a torture garden whose inhabitants would become fully acquainted with a fate worse than death before they were taken away to vanish in the comparative mercy of the
Vernichtungslager
. From
the viewpoint of the truly dedicated Jew-baiter, the drawback of the
Aktion Reinhard
extermination camps was that too many people died too quickly. Treblinka was particularly reprehensible
in that regard. Auschwitz is more famous now because the gas chambers and crematoria had holding camps attached and a few people lived to tell the tale. Treblinka was a fast-track from the arrival
platform to the chimney: nobody came out. For the sort of fanatic who thought that the Jews needed an education in despair, it was some compensation to know that the ghetto’s atmosphere, a
cocktail of fear and hope, could not be breathed for a single hour without a month of torment. Polanski breathed it in Krakow when he was a boy. We can see now that what it did to his heart and
brain affected all his films on the way to this one.

But not even
Death and the Maiden
has the awful force of this one. In its masterly command of detail, weak points are hard to find. A possible one is the casting for physical
appearance. Szpilman and his cultivated family might possibly have looked like film stars, but there was no need, even in filmic terms, for the SS to be such a bunch of porcine plug-uglies. They
were certainly swine in real life, if you can call their life that: but here they look as if they have been raised for their bacon. The facts were otherwise. In the early days, before it started to
run out of home-grown all-Aryan manpower, the SS would recruit nobody who had even one filled tooth. They were villains, but they didn’t necessarily look it. Here, the SS rank and file have
fat necks to fit their behaviour, which rather misses the deeper point. Against this, however, it should be said that one of the most blood-curdling acts of arbitrary violence in the movie is the
casual work of a young man who looks like the offspring of Leni Riefenstahl and an Arno Breker male model after a torrid night in the pine forest. Appearing out of the blue, he selects half a dozen
victims from a work detail, makes them lie face down on the pavement, and shoots them one after the other with his pistol, calmly reloading to shoot the last one. He looks magnificent doing so. You
can quite see why he believes himself racially superior to anybody on earth.

The excessive good looks of another German might be less appropriate, or too appropriate: the Good German who hears Szpilman play the piano and spares his life. As Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, Thomas
Kretschmann is better-looking than Klaus Maria Brandauer when young, and has the warm, deep voice of Chancellor Schroeder in boudoir mode. But it might have been true, and Hosenfeld almost
certainly looked heaven-sent to Szpilman, by then only an inch from death. What we miss from the compassionate Captain, however – and we can’t have it, because he would have had to
supply it himself, thus straining credibility beyond measure – is an outline of the miraculous run of luck by which it happened to be him who walked in on the huddled fugitive. Hosenfeld is a
Wehrmacht
officer, not SS, but an absence of lightning flashes on the collar was no guarantee of an absence of icy splinters in the heart. Although some of its generals later on saved
their skins by pretending differently, the regular army was always well aware of what the murder squads were getting up to in the back areas. Very few
Wehrmacht
officers would have failed
to turn Szpilman in, no matter how well he played Chopin. (And at his life-or-death audition, incidentally, and on a piano strangely in tune after months in the dust, he plays with the mighty force
of Sviatoslav Richter: a rather unlikely show of strength for someone weak from hunger.) Hosenfeld just happened to be one of the very few. Filmically, there was no way to show this fact except
with a subtitle:
THE ODDS AGAINST THIS WERE A ZILLION TO ONE
. It was a fact, but the fact remains an unfathomable mystery, although there are very good reasons, after the
unfortunate success of Daniel Goldhagen’s book
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
, to reassert the ragged truth against a neat myth, and insist, by any legitimate means possible,
that eliminationist anti-Semitism was far from universal among the German population when Hitler came to power. At the last election that gave him the whip hand, 56 per cent of the electorate
failed to vote for him. It would be a bad case of wishful thinking, however, to believe that all those people afterwards went on being anti-Nazi to the point that they would break the law. The law
against harbouring Jews was the biggest law you could break, with death as the penalty. Hosenfeld really did break it, but the film finds no means of telling us that an even more unlikely event
than Szpilman surviving to meet Hosenfeld was Hosenfeld arriving to meet Szpilman. It was something that could only happen in the movies: the reason why the movie was eventually made. A more
typical Polish story was that of Bruno Schulz, the greatly talented writer and painter who was protected by SS officers in the Drohobycz ghetto while he painted murals: protected, that is, until
one of them shot him. No movie there. Less filmable still was the story of Arthur Rubinstein, who was born in Lodz but didn’t clap eyes on its ghetto until the war was over. He had been
practising his art elsewhere: the only guarantee that the power of music and the will to live might prevail.

Another weak point was probably unavoidable as long as Szpilman’s eyeline defined the scope. Quite apart from Szpilman, who got to play the piano only in a restaurant for the
ghetto’s black-market plutocracy – another embarrassment that the film doesn’t shirk – the ghetto was rich in musicians who played for all comers. Chamber music groups kept
on giving concerts right up until their trains left. Modern Germany’s greatest literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki tells the story in his autobiography. Many times he crossed the same bridge
that dominates the film, the bridge between the main ghetto and its smaller annexe. People would cross that bridge just to hear music. Since the bridge could not be crossed without risk of a
beating, the consolation they sought must have been magnetic in its attraction. It would have been good to see some of that, if only to offset our irrepressible trust that Szpilman’s music
might have had powers to soothe the savage breast. The chamber music in the Warsaw ghetto would undoubtedly have delighted Mengele and Heydrich, both of them serious music lovers. But it would not
have changed their minds. That was the power of music: spiritually great but practically zero. Like the musicians in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, the musicians in the Warsaw ghetto went to the
ovens. Had we seen them go, we would have had yet more evidence of how remarkable it was that Szpilman did not, and that Hosenfeld made sure he did not. But films can’t show us the whole of
history. They can only hope not to distort it, and this one tries commendably hard not to.