[Marxism] With apologies to Paul Verhoeven

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Earlier this year I attended a press screening for Paul Verhoeven’s 
“Black Book,” a film about the Dutch resistance during WWII. The main 
character is a beautiful young Dutch-Jewish singer named Rachel Stein 
(Carice van Houten) who decides to fight the Nazis after they kill her 
parents. She hates the Nazis so much that she is willing to risk her 
life by becoming a spy and infiltrating their headquarters. But she 
almost decides to refuse the assignment after learning that it involves 
seducing the German commandant so as to learn crucial information about 
the enemy’s plans. Nothing would be more difficult than pretending to 
love somebody as evil as a Nazi officer.

It turns out that the officer is not the typical goon out of central 
casting. SS-hauptsturmführer Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch) does 
everything he can in his power to make life bearable to people living 
under occupation. Furthermore, he repeatedly intercedes on behalf of 
captured resistance fighters to make sure that they are not tortured or 
executed. After Rachel Stein, who has adopted the Dutch name of Ellis de 
Vries, gets a job as a singer inside Nazi headquarters, she wastes no 
time getting Müntze into bed and extracting information out of him. In 
the process, they fall in love with each other. It is harder for her to 
give into her feelings after what she has gone through, but decides that 
Müntze is different.

Eventually the Nazis learn that she is a spy and prepare to execute her. 
If Müntze was only lukewarm about Nazism to begin with, whatever 
residual loyalty he had to the regime goes down the tubes when he learns 
that the woman he loves is about to be murdered. He decides to desert 
from the German army and blend in with the civilian population alongside 
Rachel Klein, who has also put the resistance behind her. He calculates 
that his risks are minimal since the allies have begun to take control 
of the Netherlands and the Nazi army is on its last legs.

At this point in the film, something takes place that seemed so 
far-fetched that I decided not to review the film. As many people must 
be aware, with films such as “Total Recall” and “Robocop” to his credit, 
Verhoeven does have a knack for going over the top. I don’t mind 
verisimilitude going out the window when it comes to science fiction, 
but WWII deserved better.

Verhoeven portrays the Nazi army as remaining in uniform and in arms 
under allied occupation, something that seemed far-fetched to me to 
begin with. But I slapped my head and say “Unbelievable” under my breath 
after what happened next. Müntze is recognized by a Nazi officer and 
arrested. After a Nazi court martial finds him guilty of desertion, he 
is shot by a firing squad. While I was aware of ex-Nazi officers being 
used against the USSR after the war ended, I had never heard about such 
an unlikely scenario. After nearly 5 years of brutal fighting, why would 
the allies allow the Nazis to retain such power?

It turns out that Verhoeven was right. This did happen.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/with-apologies-to-paul-verhoeven/

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