a world
where anything is possible
by Douglas Messerli
Luchino Visconti, Enrico Medioli, and Nicola Badalucco
(screenplay), Luchino Visconti (director)
La caduta degli dei (Die Verdammten)
(The Damned) / 1969
It may be tempting to read Luchino
Visconti’s important 1969 film The Damned
as an historical take on the German, Essen-based Krupp family and their
collaboration with the Nazi’s, and, to a certain extent, one can track the fall
of that family—from the historical events of the burning of the Reichstag,
through the rise of the German SA, The Night of the Long Knives in which may
young gay soldiers were murdered by the SS, and other nightmarish Third Reich
events—but in the end, these and other situations are presented from such an
operatic perspective in Visconti’s film that their veracity must be called into
question. Visconti has always been a master of melodrama, often working with
large, operatic gestures (his Senso,
in fact begins with an opera), and The
Damned, with its numerous early singspiels and cabaret performances
(particularly the memorable drag number of actor Helmut Berger [as Martin
Essenbeck] impersonating Marlene Dietrich) are often outrageously theatrical.
Seen through the lens of realism, in fact, The
Damned might seem quite laughable, but as a slightly camp family drama set
against the truly ludicrous world of war time Germany, where, as both the Nazi
SS cousin of the Essenbeck and Sophie Essenbeck declare “anything can happen,”
the work ultimately succeeds in making us realize that, in the most terrifying
way, “everything goes.”
As the family of steel industrialist Baron Joachim Von Essenbeck gathers
to celebrate his birthday, the Reichstag is set on fire, an event to which
various members of the family react differently: Herbert Thalmann, the firm’s
vice president, a virulent anti-Nazi, sees it as a ploy to destroy any of
Hitler’s opponents, particularly those of the left. Others, such as the Nazi
Ashenbach (Helmut Griem), perceive it as a signal that the left must be
crushed. The Baron, although detesting Hitler, argues that in order to save the
firm he must make closer ties with the Nazis, passing the company on to the
control of the totally unscrupulous SA officer Konstantin. Meanwhile Friedrich
Bruckmann, the company foreman (Dirk Bogarde) has fallen in love with Sophie
Von Essenbeck (Ingrid Thulin), the widow of the Baron’s only son, who died in
World War I. In a pact with Sophie to himself gain control of the company, he
kills the Baron, blaming the murder on Herbert, who escapes the Gestapo forces
responding to the family’s calls.
In that very first scene we also encounter Sophie’s beloved son, Martin,
as he performs the Dietrich piece in drag, and the serious cello playing Günter
(Renaud Verley), Konstantin’s university-educated son. All of them, except
perhaps Herbert, are born killers, each agreeing to manipulate and torture one
another in order to gain power and allow their personal perversions.
For Sophie, perversions include her passion for Bruckmann and her
oedipal love for Martin—and like her father, desperately desiring power itself.
Although we might suspect Martin as having a gay relationship, in fact, his
tawdry affair is with a kind of model (she describes her job as posing), and,
more horribly, he has pedophile obsessions for the Thalmann’s young daughter
and an even younger Jewish girl who lives in the apartment next to his
girlfriend. His relationship with the child ends in her suicide by hanging.
Thalmann, perhaps the only truly moral figure of the film, escapes, his
wife Elizabeth and her two children are left behind, as she tries to get
permission to leave the country. Sophie finally relents, allowing her to leave,
after a dramatic aria-like speech which demonstrates her delusional vision:
Don’t fool yourself,
however, Elizabeth. Don’t dream of coming back
one day to find a Germany
which was so dear to your heart. It’s finished,
that Germany, forever. There
will be no other Germany but this one,
and you will not be able to
escape it, for it will spread before you
know it all over Europe and
everywhere!
Although Sophie pretends to arrange
for Elizabeth’s escape, the latter is stopped mid-voyage and she and her
children sent to Dachau concentration camp, where Elizabeth is killed.
Sophie’s lover, Bruckmann, meanwhile, is manipulated by her and the SS
officer Aschenbach to murder Konstantin and take over the company. In a long
and languorously, filmed scene, Visconti plays out a day of the young SA boys
near a lovely lake as they frolic, first in canoes and boats, swimming like
healthy young scouts, activities which gradually, as the beer and German
dancing is served up, turn darker and darker, until finally the seeming “good
day in the sun” degenerates into a drunkenly lazy homosexual orgy, the boys
singing and performing in drag before bedding down with each other and their
elderly charges. While some critics such as The New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby have complained of the disproportionate length of this series of
events, I would argue that it is central as a mythological explanation of the
whole fall and decline of the German empire which Visconti is attempting to
encapsulate. The horrible massacre of the Sturmabteilung (SA) Brownshirts in a
gangster-style murder ends in dozens of bloody bodies of the young men by the
Schutzstaffel (the SS, German defense corps) with whom Bruckmann has joined in
order to destroy Konstantin, is emblematic of the notion expressed in the early
scenes, that in Germany “anything is possible.” Perhaps never before or since,
have more beautiful virile male bodies been sprawled as corpses across the
screen!*
Of all the destroyers in this work, only
Bruckmann—a family outsider—has any conscience about his acts:
I accepted a ruthless logic,
and I can never get away from it!
Somewhat like Pasolini’s horrific meditation on Italian Fascism, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom,
Visconti’s film functions in terms of circles, moving vertically closer and
closer to the family’s final hell. After dismissing Bruckmann as a weak Nazi
supporter, Aschenbach makes a bargain with Martin to give him control of the
industrial giant. But when Martin confronts Sophie, he cannot overcome her
sexual domination of him, and in retaliation he rapes his own mother, which
results in her becoming psychologically unhinged, remaining an almost catatonic
being for the rest of her brief life.
Defeated by his wife’s death and his daughter’s incarceration, Herbert
Thalmann now returns home to turn himself over the Gestapo in order save his
two children. At the ruthless tableside, over which Visconti’s camera has time
and again panned across the faces of these brutal beasts, Günther—previously
the quiet and introspective one—suddenly spits out his hatred of the whole
bunch, a hate so overwhelming that Aschenbach immediately takes him under his
wing as an ally to destroy the last remnants of the Von Essenbeck estate.
Now a member of the SS, Martin sadistically gathers together a group of
fellow deviants to celebrate Friedrich Bruckmann’s marriage to his mother.
Finally, becoming a Von Essenbeck, Bruckmann with Sophie retires to their room
where her son has handed them poison so that they might commit suicide. The
final image of the film is a gruesome picture of the two, dead upon their
wedding couch. Only the most sexually twisted and hateful of the family members
remain, beings so totally perverted that they have lost all control. The State
can take over the once proud family-controlled plants.
Thalmann previously expressed to Günther what has become obvious: the
family is not simply a symbol of Germany, but is Germany itself:
It’s all over, Günther.
It was everyone’s fault, even mine. It does
no good to raise one’s
voice when it’s too late, not even to save
your soul. The fear of a
proletariat revolution, which would’ve
thrown the entire country
to the left…was too great, and now we
can’t defend it any
longer! Nazism, Günther, is our creation. It
was born in our
factories, nourished with our money!
A world where anything is possible
is an impossible place, an unendurable hell.
*In
actuality, the attack of the SS and Gestapo upon SA brownshirts was a far more
complex issue, arising from the increasing power of Hitler’s early supporters,
basically street thugs and unemployed individuals who were willing to help him
to his rise. As Hitler became more and more ensconced in German political
systems, however, the SA supporters, challenging both the traditional German Reichswehr, the German military, and the
SS, the rising “Protection Squad,” on which Hitler had increasingly become
dependent for support. Along with the Gestapo, these forces increasingly pushed
Hitler to do something about the unruly and growing force, headed by the
homosexual and quite rebellious Ernst Röhm. As Hitler grew in power, more and
more of his conservative allies—including his ally Mussolini—railed against the
moral behavior of Röhm and his soldiers.
Finally, on the morning of June 30, 1934 Hitler and his associates flew
to Munich the night after another Brownshirt gathering in the streets.
Employing SS soldiers and others, Hitler attacked Hotel Bad Wiessee, where Röhm
and numerous of his followers were spending the night. There they found SA
leader Edmund Heines in bed with an eighteen-year-old SA senior troop leader,
shooting them both on the spot. Röhm was arrested, and later killed. But the
raids of the SA followers also allowed Hitler and others to destroy a great
many of their critics and others for whom they no longer had any need. In
short, “The Night of the Long Knives” was not confined to a single event or
even a single enemy but included a large slaughter of seemingly dispensable
supporters and former critics.
Los Angeles, April 22, 2015
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2015).
