The medium of film is capable
of bringing nuances of power to audiences, even when the story-world is steeped
in autocracy and totalitarianism. The Exception (2016) is
such a film, for in terms of power the film shows the relationship between the
Nazi government of Germany and (retired) Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Netherlands,
which has just been occupied by Germany. The Nazi officials represent the
state, whereas Wilhelm’s “soft” power stems from royalty. As Wilhelm’s attendant,
Col. Sigurd von Ilsemann, observes, no one is safe from Nazi reprisals, not
even Wilhelm and his high-brow wife. So he is not the exception alluded to in
the title in the sense of being exempt from raw Nazi power; the night of the
long knives demonstrated that no one is safe, even though the former king still
means a lot to the German people. The exception refers instead to Capt. Stefan
Brandt, and in particular to his moral scruples concerning the Nazi mass
murders in eastern Europe. As the story unfolds with a visit by Himmler,
Wilhelm becomes an exception in this sense too. Even in a totalitarian
autocracy, a surprising amount of soft power can exist in opposition. Taking a moral stand can manifest "soft" power even though an ethic is semi-permeable by power-aggrandizement.
The captain has been sent by
General Falkenberg to Wilhelm’s country house in Holland to guard the former
Kaiser. Stefan and Mieke, a Dutch Jew who is a maid in the house and is secretly
funneling intel to the British via a clergyman in town, fall in love. Mieke discovers
that Stefan too has reservations about the Nazis’ brutality, and he goes so far
as to keep her outlawed ethnicity a secret and then to help her escape. Even
Wilhelm helps her by feigning a heart attack and thus a rationale to be driven
seemingly to a hospital. As the story unfolds, Stefan and Wilhelm both turn vehemently
though of course secretly against the Nazis, having learned of their utter
moral depravity by listening to Himmler at a dinner for him at the house.
That visit highlights the real
power dynamics between the Nazi state and the former king. Wilhelm and his wife
appease Himmler outwardly because the Nazis have all of the official power;
they give the household a financial allowance and allow the former king and his
wife to continue living. In exchange, the couple put up a public display of
loyalty to the state. Yet even in this regard, the pedigree “soft” power of being
royalty allows the couple to refuse to say, “Heil Hitler” back to Himmler in
his arrival. Even though Himmler could order the couple to be shot, he does not
use his power to force the royals to speak the two words. The film thus
illustrates that oppositional “soft” power can exist even in a totalitarian
dictatorship; power dynamics are complex rather than linear.
Before sitting down to the
dinner, Himmler holds what he calls “a private audience” with Wilhelm to offer
the former king the choice of whether to return to Berlin to once again
wear his ceremonial crown. Of course Hitler would never tolerate even a ceremonially-based
potential rival or threat to his authority as the Leader (Fuhrer),
and Himmler reveals to Stefen and Dietrich that the offer is really a ploy to
uncover pro-monarchists in order to have them killed. Even though Stefen uses
his soft power to inform Col. Ilsemann of the trick, Wilhelm choses not to return
to Berlin to take up his crown again before being informed that the offer
is a plot. Instead, Wilhelm acts on moral principle to use the soft power in
Himmler having given Wilhelm the choice. Taking advantage of being given
a choice is another example of soft power even in the context of a totalitarian
regime.
Wilhelm makes his decision based on what he learns about Himmler and the Nazis from Himmler himself at the dinner table. To be sure, both men are in perfect agreement on the dangers posed by international Jewry. In 2026, after years of the Israeli holocaustic genocide in Gaza and Israeli blatant theft and outright, unprovoked violence in the West Bank against lawful Palestinian homeowners, someone in the U.S. casually informed me, “more people are going back to Hitler’s writings.” This information at first shocked me, as I would never have believed such a statement in the twentieth century, but then I understood why people—especially young people—would do so. In the film, that Himmer and Wilhelm, a Christian who would exercise restraint on the Nazi state were he to re-assume his crown in Berlin, agree on the dangers poised in terms of power (and money, as, for example, AIPAC represents in the U.S.) lends credibility to the stand. Himmler’s observation that the danger posed only became widely known in the 1920s harkens back to the refusal of rich German Jews to extend their charity to other Germans (as if they constituted another people) during the years when Germany had to pay harsh post-World War I war reparations.
The two men deviate, however, when Himmler pivots
to discuss the need to remove people in eastern Europe to make room for Germans—“other
means” would be needed if removal is not sufficient—and to kill retarded
and crippled children on a scale beyond the capabilities of injecting poison
into the heart because not enough of them would be killed fast enough that way.
If allowed to reach adulthood, those people would only continue to be a drain
on the resources of state. The revelation of Himmler’s thinking and values leaves
Wilhelm and his wife, as well as Capt. Stefan and Col. Ilsemann speechless in
dombfoundness; none of them had keine Anung of just how sordid the Nazis
are. Mieke too, being Jewish, looks on in a harsh facial demeanor; she knew,
for her parents were killed by Himmler’s SS. At the end of the dinner, as Stefan
walks past her, she sternly tells him, “They are the rule; you are the
exception.” She knows of what his reaction to Himmler’s statements must have
been. She would hardly have fallen in love with him had he been “the rule,”
though it is admittedly possible to fall in love with someone with dreadful,
mendacious values.
Even when Wilhelm and Stefan
know that Mieke is an enemy agent, the two men help her to escape. The
willingness of both men to help can be interpreted not only as indicative of
their admiration for her, but also of their utter rejection of the Nazi party
and its horrendous tactics. At the University of Wisconsin in the 2000s, I sat
in on a course on Nazi Cinema (in contrast to Stalin’s blatantly patriotic
Soviet cinema). The eighty-year-old German professor, who flew to Wisconsin
every autumn to teach, had been forced to go to a Hitler youth camp, and he had
seen Hitler in person. Even though the professor told me that Hitler was not
behaving like the angry, sullen man typically pictured in the footage selected
by the Allies to air over decades, that the Nazis murdered 19 million Slavs in eastern
Europe—in a myriad of non-combative villages and towns rather than in battle—is
a relatively unknown fact that best attests to the Nazi mentality.
In the film, Wilhelm leaves
the dinner is silence to chop wood so he can reconsider whether to accept Hitler’s
“offer” of resumed kingship, now that Wilhelm knows how horrendously different
the Nazis are. Even though Stefan has informed Col. Ilsemann that the offer
is a ploy—a “deception” in Himmler’s own words—word has not yet reached Wilhelm
by the time he decides to stay at his country house with his wife for the rest
of his life rather than be in any way associated with the government. Because Wilhelm
wants nothing more than to resume his kingship, his decision illustrates just
how much sway ethical principles can have against other motives. To be sure,
such principles are semi-permeable, in that they can be broken through in the
quest for power or money, for instance, but that they have this quality renders
Wilhelm’s stance all the more worthy of human nature. Just as
power-aggrandizing and economizing (e.g., greed) can break through ecologizing
(semi-permeable) constraints (e.g. the equilibrium state of an ecosystem in
nature), so too power-seeking and greed can act as rockets shooting through the
higher net of ethical values.
As Al Pacino says at the Devil
in The Devil’s Advocate (1997),
“Free-will, it’s a bitch!” In The Exception, Stefan uses his free-will
to risk asking Col. Ilsemann whether a solder can have a loyalty higher than to
one’s country; Ilsemann points out that Germany may not be their country any
longer, as it belongs to the Nazis with whom both men reject, albeit in the
silence of their own hearts. Wilhelm is able to use the “soft” power of royalty
to reject Himmler’s offer, as Wilhelm is given a choice, even though Himmler
then having Wilhelm killed is easily imaginable.
Finally, Mieke uses her free-will to marry Stefan, if he survives the war; she is, after all, pregnant with his child. She has been willing to open herself up to his seed in part because he is the exception rather than the rule in Nazi Germany. Being the exception is all about values and free-will. To be willing to fully open up to, and take hold of romantic love without too much emotional harm, a person must sense congruent values and therefore trust in another’s free-will so as not to be constantly looking over one’s shoulder for the roof to suddenly fall in from a searing, heedless, and utterly selfish betrayal. It comes as no surprise in the film to see Himmler in a bedroom in the country house with a half-naked woman, who, as Wilhelm’s wife coyly observes in greeting Himmler when he arrives, is not Himmler’s wife; Himmler just looks on, wholly unperturbed in his visage, and then says he is tired from the journey and wants to go to the bedroom that has been prepared for him. The ecologizing, semi-permeable quality of ethical stances—whether the ethical is to be valued or not—is a matter of character mixed with free-will. It is a fool’s errand in college (e.g., in vocational business schools) to suppose that ethical conduct can be imposed through teaching.
