The Bride and the Curfew

Our species is capable of horrific cruelty that defies any claim of having a conscience, and yet we can be willing to override our otherwise intractable instinctual urge for self-preservation for an ethical principle; that is to say, a person can choose to lay down one’s life for another person. Our biological nature—how we are hardwired—includes both vicious aggressiveness resembling that of chimps and yet the ability to “act on principle” in selfless love. In the Albanian film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), these two facets of human nature are on display, in direct contact as it were, such that the sheer breadth in human nature is made transparent. The two poles are personified by the Nazi military commander and Shpresa, the young Albanian woman living who assassinates a Nazi solder in her Nazi-occupied village.

From the very start of the film, it is clear that the Nazis place no value on human life per se. Hitler’s second priority in coming to power was to clear Eastern Europe of the Slavs to make room for Germans to spread out from Germany. It follows that the lives of the Albanian inhabitants have no value to the Nazi commander in the film. That Nazi soldiers are shooting down the street at whomever is using chalk to draw a partisan resistance symbol—a star—on buildings makes the point clear enough that human life means nothing. The stress daily on the villagers must be tremendous. The filmmaker’s use of lighting to build tension and sound to magnify the hard claps of shoes on cement provide the audience with the sense that life under such a totalitarian German occupation is indeed harsh. The literal translation of the film, “The Bride and the State Siege,” alludes to the severity of the onslaught.

The combination of a totalitarian regime and a wholesale disvaluing of human life by the oppressors is indeed a toxic cocktail. That the Nazi’s extermination of 20 million Slavs in Eastern Europe (not counting those killed on the battlefield) and the 6 million Jews in the Holocaust—not exactly Kantian facts of reason—came after the European Enlightenment (of reason) does not bode well for human civilization. Moreover, that the twentieth century included two world wars does not bode well for Hegel’s theory of a trajectory through history of an increasing spirit of freedom. Two world wars seem like more than a momentary regression, and the regimes of Hitler and Stalin should not be left out in making the claim that the sordid twentieth century was not just a regression. Perhaps it is not God that is dead, as Nietzsche has been interpreted as claiming, but, rather, Hegel’s optimistic theory, given the statis of human nature even given the gradual process of natural selection.  

The Enlightenment should not have been taken as a panacea. Reason, even cleverness, can be employed in evil designs. Hannah Arendt, who wrote from her experience as an observer of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, claimed that the Nazi bureaucrat simply didn’t think; he was simply working out train routes and schedules so as to maximize a commodity that had to be transported. Yet Eichmann did think for himself when he violated Himmler’s order not to make the Jews in Hungary march to a death-camp in Poland, and this is what got him convicted by the Israeli judges. The thought that many of the Jews would very efficiently die of attrition en route appealed to the value that he put on business-like efficiency. Given the goal of exterminating Judaism in Europe, it was reasonable to violate an order so a more efficient option could be taken. So it is not the benching of reason that accounts for the mass murder; quite the opposite. Bureaucracy, it should be pointed out, is based on reason rendered as structure and procedure, and it is not contrary to reason to suspend a procedure in order to put in place a more efficient remedy.

Lest it be concluded that Nazi Germany was the fulfilment of the Enlightenment, the passions were also involved. Eichmann hated Jews, and his strong emotion was backed up by the Nazi social reality in which Jews were portrayed as sub-human, even akin to rodents. This message was clear in the Nazi propaganda films in which Jews are likened to the rats that spread the plague over Europe in the fourteenth century from China. Both Hume and Adam Smith posited the imagination as playing a role in the social realities we come up with to order the world. “Confronted with the vast and seemingly chaotic complexity of the world in which we live,” one scholar on Adams explains, “we feel an instinctive need to impose some sense of order on our perceptions, and it is our imagination that enables us to do so.”[1] The social reality evinced in a leader’s vision and propagated through speeches and film can satisfy what for Victor Frankl is our innate need for meaning. Although he showed at even the victims in the concentration camps had that need even as they were starving, it is no less true that the Germans, and indeed, any human being, seeks the order that a social reality can provide. The role of the imagination in the crafting of a social reality means that subjectivity is salient. Hence Eichmann was not a mere, unthinking bureaucrat; he was a warm-blooded human being whose subjective emotions were nestled in the Nazi social reality in which Jews were vermin. This likeness is made explicit in the film, Inglorious Basterds, when the SS officer explains how he approaches hunting Jews by thinking like a rat does.

In The Bride and the Curfew, the Nazi commander applies his hunting skills to snuffing out the resistance. Although he does not view Shpresa as a rodent, it is clear that he puts no value on the lives of any of the villagers, including hers. In complete contrast, Shpresa provides a light on the human condition. Her message is the following: My life isn’t mine anymore; it no longer belongs to me; it serves the ideal of freedom, which includes a free Albania. Even though she is living in constant danger, she embraces an ideal even to her own detriment. Whereas the Nazis are acting in line with their primitive instinctual urge of aggression, the young woman is willing to override her urge of self-preservation—an instinct that Hobbes claims in Leviathan is primary. Whereas the Nazis can draw on a collective social reality to base their subjectivity, Shpresa is virtually alone in making her decision to place freedom above even her own life.

She has but her own subjectivity on which to base her choice, hence, as Sartre points out, the gravity of her choice is weighty. She does not appeal to God or even to authority or tradition, although there is a hint of the later in her mention of free Albania. Conforming to the Nazis would obviously be more convenient, though she would not thereby make use of their social reality. She embraces the hard responsibility that lies in making a choice that goes against the grain. The story-world of the film, the Nazi-occupied Albanian village, is the antithesis of freedom, and so she stands out in belonging to the ideal. Villagers do come to her aid, specifically in getting her out of town as if she were a bride, but the decision is hers alone, and must ultimately rest on her subjectivity. The film thus evinces the existentialist philosophy.

Perhaps the main question in the film is whether human beings are willing to assume the responsibility of making difficult choices when they have nothing to fall back on but our own individual subjective experience, without even the order-conferring comfort of a societal social reality. In their dependence on a social reality provided by Hitler, the Nazi subjectivity is hardly such a feat. Although it is easy to beat up on the Nazis, the implication that relying on the vision of a leader evinces weakness may not be so convenient. Heidegger, after all, advocates an authentic life over one lived out in conformity. Nietzsche tells his readers not to be Nietzscheans; rather, have your own ideas. These are difficult words for people living in an age in which we are such organizational creatures and we pay such attention to the politics of our leaders.

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[1] Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2021), p. 66.

Conscience

Volodymyr Denyssenko’s film, Conscience (1968), is set in a small Ukrainian village under Nazi occupation during World War II. Vasyl, a Ukrainian man, kills a German soldier, and the chief German stationed there gives the villagers an ultimatum: Turn in the culprit or the entire village will be liquidated; all of the villagers will be executed. The film is all about this ethical dilemma. According to Jeremy Bentham’s ethic of utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number should prevail; any villager would be ethically justified in bringing Vasyl to the Germans to be executed so that the villagers can be spared. The ongoing pleasure of 100 people outweighs the ongoing pleasure of one person. But the film doesn’t follow this logic, and can thus be looked at as a critique of Bentham’s ethical theory. This is not to say that deontology, operating as an ethical constraint on utilitarianism, is entirely without risk. If I have just lost you, my dear liebe reader, consider this: Going beyond ethical constraints on an otherwise ethical theory, what if, as in the film, a political (or religious) cause is allowed to upend ethical considerations altogether, or at least to eclipse them?  I contend that the villagers do this in the film, for they sacrifice themselves as a matter of conscience to protect a murderer because they value his political cause, which is resistance to the Nazi occupation. At what cost? If in relegating the ethical level our species opens the floodgates to committing atrocities by good intentions, what might people like the Nazi occupiers in the film do without a conscience and external ethical constraints?

In the film, the villagers maintain their silence, but it is clear that they do not view Vasyl as a culprit, and thus as a murderer whom should be turned in. As a partisan fighting the Nazis, the violence that he commits is justified because the totalitarian control by the Nazi chief is so oppressive in the daily lives of the villagers. In a similar film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), which is an Albanian film about a partisan woman whom the Nazis attempt to find because she has killed an Albanian collaborator and drawn chalk figures of resistance on buildings, the villagers do not view the protagonist as a murderer, for she has dedicated her life to a higher cause. At one point, she says that her life no longer belongs to her, for it serves the ideal of freedom, as in freeing Albania from the Nazi occupation. Several Albanians help her to escape, which she does. Unsatisfied with the original ending of the woman in a horse carriage being chased by a Nazi in a car, an Albanian Communist Party official had the ending changed so the Albanians in the carriage gun down the Nazis in the car, mob-style. It is not enough that the woman is being chased because she committed a murder; we the audience must see her as victorious. Beyond the need for closure, the Albanian official at least needed to see the immediate victory of the political cause.

In Conscience, Vasyl is not so lucky, though the villagers do more than the Albanian villagers do in The Bride and the Curfew for the Ukrainian villagers know that their own lives are on the line. Although there’s no reason to suppose that they have studied the 18^th century Bentham or his theory, the notion of the benefit of the villagers as a whole surviving outweighs that of one of them is clear to them. At one point, a woman tells Vasyl that a hundred souls will be lost because of his refusal to turn himself in, but she will not turn him in even though she is saying that a hundred lives are worth more than one. She, and the rest of the villagers, support the partisan cause against the Germans.

Finally, Vasyl does turn himself in, but the Nazi commander thinks Vasyl is lying and repeatedly slaps him. The commander has the villagers rounded up and shot and then he himself shoots Vasyl and the compliant Ukrainian woman who has been acting as his translator. So Vasyl can be read as finally concurring with Bentham’s ethical theory in being willing to sacrifice his life to save those of so many more. Is it the case, however, that Bentham’s calculus should have the final say when heroism is entered into the equation? The villagers are willing to keep silent. They go to their mass grave without having turned in the partisan murderer, but like Abraham in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, where a divine decree to sacrifice Isaac trumps the immorality of murder, the villagers put the partisan (i.e., resistance) cause above Vasyl being a murderer and thus a criminal to be legitimately turned in. The villagers feel an ethical duty to protect him even if doing so costs them their own lives.

In terms of philosophy, the villagers are deontologists because they recognize a constraint on Bentham’s “greatest pleasure for the greatest number” ethic. In terms of Kierkegaard, the villagers recognize a value about the ethic against murder. Whereas for Abraham, God trumps the realm of morality, the villagers recognize a political cause as suspending the ethical realm such that it is ethical to let a murderer get away with his crime, and, moreover, to violate Bentham’s ethical theory of utilitarianism. A political cause and a religious cause can each, if valued sufficiently, relativize or even vacate the ethical level. Such a cause can be valued so much that a man in one story is willing to sacrifice (murder) his son and an entire village in another story is willing to be sacrificed. Sacrifice, after all, is a noble virtue, but it should not be lost on us mere mortals that there are dangers to allowing the ethical dimension to be eclipsed.

If we are angels, then we must surely be killer angels even with good intentions. Doesn’t relativizing or even violating ethical strictures open the spigot to all kinds of ways to justify unethical conduct? Can our species afford even those lofty causes that we can value so much that the ethical domain takes a back seat or is lost altogether? One need only consider how sociopathic the Nazi commander is, utterly without a conscience in Conscience as he himself shoots his translator in the back of her head. Is not the hegemony of ethics, including Bentham’s insistence that maintaining or providing for the pleasure of the greatest number of people, something we should maintain, given our species’ horrific aggressive instinct? Our biological nature, hardly refined through Darwin’s natural selection, ought not be forgotten as we reach for the sky toward our great religious and political ideals.

The Nazi commander takes advantage of the villagers’ suspension of the ethical for a political cause by committing genocide rather than honoring such a people for acting on principle even at great personal sacrifice, and therefore ironically shows how dangerous it is not only for the villagers, but also then for people like the Nazis to suspend the ethical. The villagers are sufficiently civilized that they can afford to suspend the ethical for a cause without thereby opening the floodgates to all sorts of unethical behavior by them, but the atrocious and heinous conduct of the Nazis that results demonstrates just how much our species needs the ethical constraint. In other words, even though the villagers can bypass the ethical for a higher cause without then acting unethically in general because the ethical dimension no longer matters (even though they are acting unethically in letting the murderer escape), the Nazis’ resulting unethical conduct (without any superlative political cause) demonstrates the need our species has of ethical constraints that cannot be suspended or upended. Notice that having a good religious or political cause does not really make the ethical go away. Abraham is still guilty of attempted murder and the villagers refuse to turn in a man who has murdered another person. Even so, I submit that this is not enough, given our species’ aggressive nature. In the end, the entire village, except for one boy, is wiped out by men of entirely no conscience whatsoever.