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 (1961) 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 of 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 again 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