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 Furtwängler (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. 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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