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Memory, guilt and the futility of war

The Oscars are not routinely a venue to ponder moral questions about war and morality and the weight of painful memories. It is perhaps a befitting reflection of our war torn times that such dilemmas of guilt and absolution are the subject of two films nominated for awards this year. The first; a cinematic adaptation of Bernard Schlink’s 1995 novel The Reader starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes revolves around the issue of Nazi guilt over atroc ities committed during the Holocaust. The second; Waltz with Bashir is nominated for Best Foreign Film category and is an animated documentary which tells the story of a former IDF soldier as he struggles with issues of Israeli complicity in the massacre of Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

The Reader, set in the late fifties in Germany, begins ironically with an act of random kindness. Kate Winslet playing a stern faced tram attendant comes to the aid of a teenage boy who is horribly ill and throwing up on the street. Months later, he returns with a bouquet of flowers to thank her and so begins a passionate summer affair between the 15- year-old Michael and the much older Hannah. Fifteen years his senior, Hannah schools the eager schoolboy in the art of lovemaking and insists on calling him “kid.” Central to their liaison is the fact that the Michael reads to her from books he is reading for school. The passage of the summer is marked by readings of Homer, Twain, D.H Lawrence and Chekhov. And then, just as mysteriously as she had appeared in his life, Hannah disappears leaving Michael heartbroken.

The story resumes with Michael as a youth in law school where as part of a seminar he is to attend a trial of former members of the Nazi SS. Among the accused is his beloved Hannah, now a woman in her forties. Through the trial the untold story of Hannah’s past is revealed, we learn that Hannah has been a guard in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. She among others was responsible for selecting the women who would be executed every week to make room for others. In a chilling disclosure from a camp survivor we learn that Hannah liked young girls to read to her, just as she did Michael. Moments later her most egregious crime is revealed; during an air raid Hannah along with the other guards refused to release prisoners from a burning Church and let them all burn to their deaths.

The Reader thus is not simply a tale of individual guilt but also the moral paralysis of discovering that someone dearly cherished is in fact cruel. Hannah, herself even at the culmination of her trial does not seem to realise what she has done wrong. Confronted by the accusation that she simply watched while hundreds of women and children burnt to their deaths she responds by saying “what else were we supposed to do… we were guards… it was our responsibility.” It is not through Hannah’s lens but Michael’s that we see the event. He represents the post-Holocaust generation; one that is forced to reckon with the difficult questions left in its ghastly detritus. What is the culpability of Hannah’s actions if they were legal when she committed them? Is she the tangible scapegoat for the guilt of a generation one randomly chosen person to bear the brunt of hundreds of thousands of SS who continue to roam free? Furthermore what is the moral status of someone who loves a person who has sent hundreds to their deaths?

Similar conundrums also emerge from Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir whose protagonist is search for fellow Israeli Defence Forces soldiers who can help him make sense of a haunting nightmare regarding his service in the IDF during the war in Beirut. With each story he collects, we get a painstaking piece of a similar catastrophe of guilt and complicity. The final pieces come together when it is revealed that the protagonist along with hundreds of other Israeli soldiers watched while hundreds and hundreds of innocent Palestinian men, women and children were brutally killed by Christian Phalangist militias in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The meaning of the nightmare is revealed as is the meaningless depravity of war. Its persistence and the need for the soldier’s desire to find the truth about what happened at Sabra and Shatila portray poignantly how the vacuous absolution provided by concepts of military duty during wartime do not insulate against the wracking guilt of complicity in mass murder.

The inescapable paradox of placing these two films in dialogue is not difficult to glean. Only the inherent irony of history would make the victims of one massacre the silent perpetrators of another: and yet that is precisely the case in the few decades between the Holocaust and Beirut in 1982. This transformation of victim into perpetrator, the weight of collective guilt and the complicity of inaction before the evil all emerge as pressing dilemmas. Both movies pose crucial questions regarding the momentary justifications offered to justify meaningless killing during war and the debilitating and dehumanising cost it imposes on future generations who are no longer insulated by the rationalisations of yore.

In the subcontinent we have not yet reached the point of reckoning where we can evaluate war in moral categories beyond nationalist pride and duty toward nation. As we stand in the shadow of yet another near war, perhaps the grisly moral weight of the questions posed in these movies can lead us to consider how much of our humanity we should be willing to sacrifice in the face of national pride. Does being Indian or Pakistani automatically absolve us from supporting the destruction of another? If we do, are we different from Hannah who was just fulfilling her duties? As the Post-Partition generation are we able to confront our complicity in massacres past? Ultimately both movies present an ominous moral warning to humanity: the failure acknowledge the value of life beyond the momentary justifications for killing offered by war sets us on a path where the only certainty is more massacres.

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