Some scattered and possibly not very useful notes on "The Memory of Justice"

When I was in col­lege, I had a bunch of English pro­fess­ors who were really tops, and a couple of who were really indul­gent of my sloth­ful ways. There were five, pre­cisely, who I recall vividly; of them, three were polit­ic­ally left-leaning and two were voci­fer­ously con­ser­vat­ive. One of the con­ser­vat­ives Richard Jaarsma, had a column in my col­lege paper, The Beacon, in which he reg­u­larly traded barbs with a stu­dent colum­nist named Joel Lewis, who titled his column “Congliptious” (Roscoe Mitchell people will get the ref­er­ence; pos­sibly need­less to say, William Paterson College in the late ‘70s wasn’t exactly teem­ing with Roscoe Mitchell people, and I sure needed it explained to me at the time) and wore a Maoist cap in his author’s photo. Dr. Jaarsma, who by 1978–9 had what I ima­gine must have been volu­min­ous exper­i­ence in deal­ing with snotty under­grad self-styled left­ists, once tried to explain con­ser­vativ­ism to a classroom full of them. Liberalism and or pro­gress­ive thought, he con­ten­ded, was all about mak­ing things com­plic­ated, need­lessly com­plic­ated, while con­ser­vat­ives thought things were simple. (Dr. Jaarsma was also a Calvinist, so…) And that things, by which I sup­pose I mean issues and eth­ic­al quandar­ies and ques­tions about gov­ern­ments and their actions, when con­sidered simply, could be handled/solved by mere applic­a­tion of good old com­mon sense.

            I’m not doing his, um, argu­ment justice, but he sure made it sound swell. At the time how­ever, I thought my ver­sion of lib­er­al­ism, or pro­gress­ive thought, or whatever barely formed thing it was, was pretty simple myself. When I read the Gospels of the New Testament as a child and a tween, the things that stuck with me were this: Jesus was a little tetchy, talk­ing back to his moth­er and killing a fig tree just because, and this was odd; Jesus con­demned those who made loud pub­lic pro­fes­sions of reli­gious fer­vor; Jesus was into what seemed like a “com­mun­al” life­style that con­tained cer­tain vestiges of what we now call social­ism (my inter­pret­a­tion of the life­style might have been colored by my own counter-culture inflec­ted uto­pi­an ideals at the time I was read­ing, in the late 1960s/early 1970s); and Jesus said, “That which you have done unto the least of my broth­ers, thou hast done to me.” These impres­sions, then, flowed into my incho­ate lib­er­al­ism, the main ten­et of which was and when I remind myself to go by it still is “Don’t be shitty to people, and, maybe, try to help out people who are in less for­tu­nate cir­cum­stances than you.” Nowadays I read whiny pom­pous art­icles by the likes of Mike Deresiewicz, where, rhet­or­ic­ally assail­ing the “reli­gion” of “polit­ic­al cor­rect­ness,” he sneer in an aside that “lib­er­al stu­dents (and lib­er­als in gen­er­al) are […] bad at defend­ing their own pos­i­tions. They nev­er have to, so they nev­er learn to.” Oh, teach me Mike Deresiewicz. Teach me to defend my pos­i­tion, when you have a minute not being oppressed by those damn kids. (To be entirely hon­est I have my moments of feel­ing oppressed by those damn kids myself, but these moments are not really worth the trouble of talk­ing about and any­way once I talk myself down I under­stand I’m not oppressed at all.)

            For some reas­on thoughts such as these buzzed around in a peri­pher­al por­tion of my con­scious­ness as I watched, a couple of weeks ago in a nice cozy screen­ing room that I only very rarely registered as being fif­teen stor­ies above the ground, the 1970s-made Marcel Ophuls film The Memory of Justice, which will have a new première of sorts on HBO 2 on April 24. I say “1970s-made” because it’s argu­ably instruct­ive to keep in the back of one’s mind the fact that the film was ini­ti­ated in 1973, as U.S. involve­ment in the Vietnam War was draw­ing to a close. The ini­tial touch­stone for the film was to be a book by Telford Taylor, who had been a pro­sec­utor at the Nuremberg Trials and who sub­sequently invest­ig­ated American war crimes in the Vietnam War. Ophuls’ film ran into a road­b­lock with back­ers who felt he was spend­ing too much time on Nuremberg. Rescue came in the form of entre­pren­eur and act­iv­ist Hamilton Fish V, and Paramount Pictures, whose days of dis­trib­ut­ing 278-minute doc­u­ment­ar­ies are long past. (Seeing the Paramount logo kick­ing off the film, which first saw release in 1976 and is screen­ing on HBO2 in a res­tor­a­tion backed by The Film Foundation, is a bit of a shock, honestly.)

            The struc­ture of Ophuls’ film is dis­curs­ive, loose, almost cas­u­al. I didn’t take notes because I was see­ing the movie for my own edi­fic­a­tion, but if I recall cor­rectly part one is titled “Nuremberg” and Part Two is called “Nuremberg and Other Places.” The pic­ture begins with a text explain­ing the title; it does not refer to justice as it was dis­pensed in a time past, but rather to a Platonic ideal of “justice” which, accord­ing to the text’s explic­a­tion, exists only in a kind of col­lect­ive human memory. As opposed, one is left to infer, in lived real­ity. The movie then shows a bit of an inter­view with the musi­cian Yehudi Menuhin, who states his belief that all human beings are some­how guilty. And then to a French air­port, and an inter­view with a French man who had been a para­troop­er in the Algerian war. And so on. There are even scenes that resemble home movies of a sort, of a birth­day party for Ophuls, with his German wife and chil­dren, at which he dis­cusses with his fam­ily the sort of movie they think he ought to be mak­ing as opposed to this one. They seem to come down pretty heav­ily on the side of Banana Peel, the 1963 fic­tion­al com­edy that was his fea­ture debut. And not just because Ophuls’ wife, who was a teen in Hitler’s Germany, will be inter­viewed later on.

            The archiv­al foot­age of the Nuremberg tri­als is aston­ish­ing, and the inter­view foot­age of Telford, who was a young Brigadier General when he was a pro­sec­utor there, is also absorb­ing. There is a very gen­er­ous amount of inter­view foot­age with Albert Speer. You can’t take your eyes off of him, ever. Refined urbane, alert, guilty of what he’s guilty of in his mind, seem­ingly unfail­ingly frank in his answers to Ophuls’ gently prob­ing questions…the very fact of his exist­ence on film in this format com­pelled me to hold my breath every time he appeared. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, whose archiv­al testi­mony provides one of the film’s most truly gal­van­ic moments, doesn’t say much of Speer when Ophuls brings him up to her; the Auschwitz sur­viv­or deems him barely worthy of acknow­ledge­ment and holds that he is a liar. As the movie con­tin­ues, an ter­ri­fy­ing web is drawn with respect to guilt, to inno­cence, to the know­ab­il­ity of the degree of inno­cence, to what pun­ish­ment fits which crime. Speer does not com­plain of his twenty years in Spandau Prison and why should he. His clear-eyed intel­li­gence makes him an inform­a­tion­al asset to be sure, and also to be sure, no con­fes­sion, espe­cially a pub­lic one, is not some­how self-serving. And yet a part of one thinks: how is it that a right-hand man to Hitler got to stay alive long enough to be inter­viewed? And he’s not the only one about whom one thinks this. Ophuls always takes into account the human­ity of his inter­viewees; his meth­od here is very dif­fer­ent than the dry iron­ic­al tone he brought to bear when inter­rog­at­ing Jacques Vergès in 1988’s great Hotel Terminus. There are snip­pets of him dis­cuss­ing fam­ily mat­ters with Speer. Taylor takes a break from chat­ting to play on the piano some marches he’s com­posed. At one point Ophuls stops at a German spa and inter­views a cadre of unin­hib­ited nude men and women about the cur­rent stand­ard of liv­ing they enjoy. Ophuls also dis­cussed his own fath­er, the divine Max, and oth­er German artists driv­en far from home.

            As an American, one is able to feel grat­i­fied about the con­duct of “Our Side” in the Nuremberg Trials. The idea of “the vic­tor try­ing the van­quished” is men­tioned sev­er­al times, but not in a tone of out­rage, but almost as if it’s the nat­ur­al order of things. Then Taylor, quite cas­u­ally, won­ders aloud wheth­er the U.S. had the right to pro­sec­ute any­body or any­thing giv­en, you know, Hiroshima. At which point the film takes off into anoth­er dimen­sion. And as if in a head­long rush after this, Ophuls inter­views wid­ows of fallen Vietnam sol­diers, act­iv­ist draft dodgers, act­iv­ists. The title of the Telford Taylor book that spurred Ophuls’ movie is Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy.

            As the movie con­tin­ued, I thought that per­haps one side effect of the abil­ity to pro­cess com­plex­ity is hope­less­ness. Is hope­less­ness des­pair? Possibly not, as Camus has argued. (As it hap­pens, the movie even­tu­ally returns to Menuhin to end on a note of muted optim­ism for cer­tain fea­tures of human­ity.) One thing The Memory of Justice left me cer­tain of is that the refus­al to see complexity—the insist­ence on think­ing in terms of “win­ning” or “we don’t win”—always leads to bar­bar­ism. I live in a non-violent envir­on­ment, far away from war, one in which the hier­arch­ies of cruelty are largely rhet­or­ic­al. (I was recently read­ing a pro­file of the hate­mon­ger Mike Cernovich, and I was struck—well, appalled—by the way he liked to drop the phrase “basic bitch” with such reg­u­lar­ity, and I thought of the evol­u­tion of that col­lo­qui­al­ism, which ini­tially seemed “salty” but essen­tially harm­less, and I thought about the petty cal­lous­ness of every­day dis­course and how it seems to delight in dan­cing on the line of genu­ine tox­icity.) In such an envir­on­ment I can only intel­lec­tu­al­ize, or extra­pol­ate, on the truth of Hemingway’s words: “Never think that war, no mat­ter how neces­sary, nor how jus­ti­fied, is not a crime.”

            If you are able, I believe you ought to watch The Memory of Justice soon­er than later, is what I’m try­ing to say. It is a great film.