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TAKING
SIDES ASKS WHETHER FINE MUSIC COULD REALLY
BE SEPARATED FROM NAZI POLITICS
Taking Sides, directed by István
Szabó, provides an intense prosecution of a man outside
of a court, punctuated by scenes of Nazis, their followers,
and the obscene carnage that they produced, along with the
tragic opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Although
many lesser Nazis were turned over to civilian courts for
trials, eleven Nürnberg War Crimes Trials took place
from 1946 to 1949. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
depicts the third trial, involving members of Ministry of
Justice. Nuremberg (2000) is about
the last trial, which convicted Reich Ministers and members
of the Nazi Party hierarchy. There was a possibility that
a twelfth trial might involve Nazi Party members and collaborators
in the arts. Accordingly, Major Steve Arnold (played by Harvey
Keitel) is assigned by the Denazification Committee the task
of organizing a case for trial of Dr. Wilhelm Fürtwängler
(played by Stellan Skarsgard), the world-renowned conductor
of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra from 1934 to 1945. At
first, members of the orchestra are interviewed, all repeating
the same boring rehearsed defenses of themselves and of their
esteemed conductor, possibly the world's greatest maestro
of all time. By the time Arnold summons Fürtwängler
to an interrogation, there is little evidence against him,
so Arnold uses the sort of bullying tactics that any nasty
prosecutor would use before Miranda protections applied.
Fürtwängler defends himself by saying that he was
not a Nazi Party member or sympathizer, he helped some eighty
Jews to escape, he knew nothing about the Holocaust, he avoided
concerts at political events, he escaped to Switzerland before
the Gestapo was about to arrest him, and he felt that art
was superior to politics and should be kept separate. However,
when a Nazi archive of dossiers of 250,000 artists emerges,
Arnold finds what he believes is the smoking gun against
Fürtwängler, whom he summons for a final stressful
interrogation. The case that Arnold develops is as follows:
He knew that Hitler, Göbbels, and Göring considered
him the poster boy for German culture. He was sent on concert
tours in the Nazi-occupied lands to perform as nonverbal
propaganda for the party's view that inferior cultures should
accept German rule as bringing the most superior culture
to pacify the world.
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He
was given monetary privileges, high honors, and a woman
to screw before each concert. He arranged
through connections to send an uncomplimentary music critic
to the Russian front. He performed at Hitler's 1942 birthday
party and gave him a Sieg Heil salute with his baton. Although
he naively professed that music and politics should be separated,
his music scored political points for a despicable regime
and garnered personal favors that were so tempting that he
did not follow into exile such fellow conductors as Otto
Klemperer and Bruno Walter not only because they were Jewish
and he was not but also because his hated younger rival,
Herbert von Karajan, would then lead what he doubtless felt
was the greatest orchestra in the world (rather than the
New York Philharmonic, which offered him the job in the 1930s).
He even made anti-Semitic remarks to impress his pals Hitler,
Göbbels, and Göring. Arnold presents his case directly
to Fürtwängler during the final interview, complete
with obscenities in order to humiliate the man and force
him to confront what he did to legitimate absolute evil for
more than a decade. Meanwhile, there are pressures on Arnold
not to pursue his case. Russian Colonel Dymshitz (played
by Oleg Tabakov) wants Fürtwängler to perform for
an East German orchestra. Arnold's assistants Lieutenant
David Wills (played by Moritz Bleibreu) and Emmi Straube
(played by Birgit Minichmayr) feel that the verbal humiliation
of the great conductor is more than they can bear and say
so. Wills even tries to present favorable documentary evidence
of Fürtwängler's character, supplied by Allied
friends who were unaware of the depth of the conductor's
unseemly collaboration, during the final interview. However,
in the end the evidence against Fürtwängler is
thin. In a final voiceover, Arnold admits that he turned
the dossier against Fürtwängler over to a civilian
court, which later acquitted the conductor. Fürtwängler
then reassumed his position as conductor of the West Berlin
Philharmonic Orchestra until his death in 1954 at the age
of sixty-eight. The passionate film, nevertheless, leaves
a puzzle. Why did Arnold not pose the most self-incriminating
query of all to Fürtwängler: If he indeed helped
Jews to escape, then he knew damn well what was happening
to them despite his unconvincing denial of any such knowledge.
Perhaps that point is made in the stage play from which Taking
Sides is an adaptation. In any case, the Political
Film Society has nominated Taking Sides as
best film exposé of 2003. MH
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