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