Claus von Stauffenberg was a
Nazi army officer who attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s
Lair on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg was shot the next day as a result. The
Nazis did not surrender until May 7, 1945, a few months shy of a year later, so
Stauffenberg’s intent to end the war would have made a substantial difference in
terms of the number of dead and wounded from World War II in Europe. The 2008
film, Valkyrie, chronicles
the story in the genre of historical fiction, even though Tom Cruise, Bill
Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson play Nazi figures (without even German
accents), although Tom Hollander does play a suspicious Nazi quite convincingly.
Viewers could still be excused for approaching the film as a “Wagner meets
Shakespeare in the Park” production. The film gets its title from the Valkyrie
in Wagner’s opus: handmaidens of the gods. The sparce religious nomenclature in
a few scenes of the film is easy to miss, and, I submit, the interlarding of
religion is ill-suited to the political drama.
Lest it be concluded that God
is against political dictatorship itself, and thus divine favor rests instead with
democracy, efforts to apply religion to politics evaluatively come rife with
pitfalls because the two domains are distinct; I would even say that the
religious domain is unique, given the nature of distinctly religious
transcendence. In reference to democracies, lest they be supposed to represent
the Kingdom of God on Earth, it is notable that the U.S. dropped the first two
atomic bombs on inhabited cities, and Israel committed a genocide against the
Palestinian people in Gaza, and in 2026 its sitting prime minister even
announced that he would run for re-election! The human condition is indeed far
removed from the gods and their Valkyrie.
In the scene
in which Stauffenberg presents his revised Valkyrie plan to Hitler for his
signature at Hitler’s mountain retreat, Hitler asks him, “You know your Wagner,
Colonel? The Valkyrie. Handmaidens of the gods, choosing who will live and who
will die, sparing the most heroic from an agonizing death. One cannot understand
National Socialism without knowing Wagner.” Perhaps the implication is that the
Valkyrie save Nazi heroes on the battlefield from agonizing deaths, and,
moreover, that the Nazi Party is geared to esteeming heroes as they were known
to the ancient Greeks and Romans as strong, courageous conquerors, and, perhaps
also by implication, riding society of the weak, whose very existence brings
down the strong, if the statements by Joseph Goebbels and Hitler at the dinner
table in the bunker in the film, Downfall (2004),
accurately reflect Nazi ideology concerning strength and weakness: most notably,
the eradication of the weak is necessary for the strong to be strong. Although
seemingly drawing on Nietzsche, his philosophy merely counsels that a pathos of
distance be maintained between the self-confident strong and the resentful weak
who seek to beguile the strong. Nietzsche does not advocate that the weak be
eradicated. Furthermore, unlike Hitler in Valkyrie, Nietzsche does not
posit divine help via handmaidens for the strong; neither does Nietzsche claim
that divine wrath is directed against the resentful weak who seek nonetheless
to dominate even the strong. As for Hitler’s reference to heroes, it is not
clear that Wagner’s Valkyrie would help Nazi “heroes” escape agonizing
deaths because such a claim assumes that those heroes really were heroes rather
than villains. The appropriation of religion is thus fraught with difficulties,
given self-interest, ideology, and the limits of our ability to know the wills
of the gods, especially as pertaining to political events. It is best to leave
the gods out of our human internecine conflicts rather than conveniently assume
that the Valkyrie favor one side or the other.
Given the horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis, the Christian motif of redemption is more difficult to avoid even in the political context. Speaking in a bathroom to General Erich Fellgiebel to enlist his help in the plot, Staffenberg reminds his compatriot, “You were involved in a crime against your country long before you met me. There may still be time to redeem yourself. Only God can judge us now.” Redemption would come by helping rid Germany of Hitler’s rule. Although redemption by killing Hitler seems obvious enough, is religious redemption—and the ensuing sentence regarding God as judge means that the redemption being referred to here is indeed religious in nature—really fitting with respect to a person having been unpatriotic? What about the unpatriotic protests in America when the U.S. was bombing Cambodia in the Vietnam conflict in the late 1960s through 1974? Because that conflict was premised on a lie involving the Gulf of Tonkin, unblinking patriotism may have been cause for redemption. In actuality, God may think little or nothing either way of our notions of patriotism and our political protests. Again, God may be quite distant from our notions of political good and bad, even if the Nazi and Israeli atrocities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, seem pretty cut and dry as state-sponsored evil against people conveniently deemed “subhuman.” Perhaps from God’s perspective, we are all subhuman, or, in Nietzsche’s phraseology, human, all too human. Hence the political domain can be distanced from that of religion, in that the former reeks of human pride and thus presumptuousness, whereas the latter goes beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion and is thus not centered on us.
