The Goebbels
Experiment
by Lutz
Hachmeister and Michael Kloft, Directors
First Run / Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY,
2004
VHS, 107 mins., color and b&w
Sales Video: $398.00; rental video: $125.00
Distributor’s website: http://www.frif.com.
Reviewed by Artur Golczewski
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa 50614-0362 USA
artur.gloczewski@uni.edu
One of the most interesting aspects of
this documentary is the manner in which
it "makes history" through the
collage-like (re)construction of the life
of Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), Hitler’s
minister for propaganda. Using cinematic
montage, the film is made of footage from
WWII-era newsreels, home movies, German
feature films, and other archival materials
from the 1930s and 40s. These are the
visual parallels to the film’s narrative,
which consists entirely of brief passages
from Goebbels’ diary (which he conscientiously
maintained in the years 1924 to 1945),
as read by the actor Kenneth Branagh.
There is no other narration. At first,
this may seem like a promising way to
approach such an ambitious undertaking.
However, as we follow the (trans)formations
of Goebbels’ political identity,
as he re-orients his role, one begins
to hope that there will emerge an account
of the circumstances that both compelled
and enabled this curious man to re-fashion
Germany’s (and his own) cultural
identity into the dreadful ideology of
the Nazis. Unfortunately, this never happens.
While the film does address now and then
Goebbels’ conception of and use of
propaganda, too often it returns instead
to his personal life for insight into
his political strategy. To put it in plastic
terms, the result is an expressionistic
portrait of Goebbels in which the ethical-moral
self is emphasized, thus bypassing more
or less the opportunity to look at the
re-constitution of his identity in terms
of ideas and rationales (however twisted
they might be), not solely in terms of
feelings. As a result, we learn much more
about how Goebbels felt about himself
and the people around him than we do about
tools and ideas that he used in such a
forceful way as the mastermind of Nazi
propaganda. To present Nazism as bad (or
any historical event, for that matter)
because it was the ideology of bad people
is, it seems to me, to trivialize the
matter. Nor does it better prepare us
to deal with similar possible threats.
It would be far more helpful to identify
the socio-political conditions in which
totalitarianism could be rationalized.
As it is, the film appears to suggest
that the widespread support for the Nazis
was the result of Goebbels’ masterful
propaganda: a work of a brilliant, if
evil, political demagogue. By implication,
to secure our own future, we should always
be on guard for evil geniuses and be ready
to point them out and denounce them. But
who will (and does) identify these evil
people and by what rationale? In whose
interests do the identifiers act? And
is not that kind of vigilance the very
essence of totalitarianism, as opposed
to freedom that we seem so dearly to cherish
so? Would it be not more humane (albeit
less expressionistic) to foster a cultural
setting in which the ethics of empowerment
are always paramount (especially in relation
to access to media), thereby enabling
a public debate about ideologies in terms
of their effects on the realities of our
existence? Instead, we are all too willing
to give up the democratic principle of
participation in favor of the idealistic
mystification of good or evil, a practice
that, only occasionally, is unmasked for
what it really is: a totalitarian imperative
that is unable to tolerate a critique
based on alternative rationales of value.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Volume 21 Number
1, Autumn 2005.)
