Stalingrad

"We'll get the Iron Cross for this. It'll look great in my coffin".

Sometimes it's a big ask to sit down and watch a film like Stalingrad. If, like me, you have the faintest whiff of knowledge about this rather decisive and infamous point in WWII, you'll know that any film about it will about as joyful as a Mormon lingerie party. Interestingly, this film about the battle and siege of Stalingrad is made from a German perspective, which also filled me with some degree of dread. I imagined it would be filled with anchronistic revisionism, guilty self-analysis, and a dirge-like willingness to draw the film out for as long as possible.

Haha, I know. I tend to make a lot of assumptions sometimes... I'm my own worst enemy. I'm not going to say that this film is free of any of the above criticisms, but I will say that it actually turned out to be an illuminating and decidedly humanistic homemade effort from the Germans. Stalingrad takes great care to portray its grunts with all the camaraderie and gallows humour that modern audiences come to expect from war films. There's a scene quite early on where a soldier accidentally shoots and kills his own friend, and he's beside himself with grief. Another soldier interrupts his hysterics and casually says, "I did the same once. It's normal in close combat", and that's that. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I just thought it was a good scene because it subverts certain cliches of war whilst remaining realistic. This film strikes this interesting tone right through to the end.

Stalingrad follows a German company of stormtroopers who've just returned from a successful campaign in El Alamein. These men are tired and battered, but they're also optimistic about moving on to the eastern front after their recent victory. This is the 'normal' soldier's experience during a war; the idea that a successful campaign can only reinforce a soldier's resilience, and it serves as a contrast to the harrowing time the men are yet to face in Russia. This film suggests that the battle of Stalingrad, and it's protracted aftermath, is something else entirely when compared to regular combat in WWII. The soldiers are portrayed as a group of regular guys (there's even the requisite scene where each character talks about his job back in the 'real' world) who are more than unprepared for the Russian winter and the hell they're about to enter.

So what should you expect from this film if you should settle yourself in for the duration? A horribly realistic (and unique) view of what the Germans put themselves through in Hitler's doomed campaign to conquer Russia. The cautious M.A.S.H.-like mockery of war is fun at first, but soon this degenerates into bitterness and contempt... the madness, chaos and senselessness of the Battle of Stalingrad provides the perfect framework to explore all that goes wrong for the losing side in a war like this. There's misery, disenfranchisement, demoralisation, mutiny, and a clash of philosophies over 'contact' with the enemy.

I have to admit that I'm a little sceptical when it comes to German films about WWII. There's a lot of cultural pressure put on losing parties like Germany when it comes to depictions of their own experiences in war (and arguably, the general experiences of the 'honest' German citizen is going to be a lot worse than anyone on the 'winning' team). If a film is made about WWII from the German perspective then international audiences expect certain concessions to be made. It isn't enough that they lost the war, there's a certain degree of ritual humiliation where said losing side is encouraged (or bullied) into writing up a version of history that justifies their defeat. As a result Stalingrad features disturbing scenes of the Nazis shooting their own wounded for being traitors, and German soldiers deserting while talking critically about Nazism and the social forces that allowed it to happen. Historical hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I'm not saying that any of this anti-Nazi stuff is false, but I am saying that it feels disingenuous for Stalingrad to glorify its low-ranking protagonists by morally seperating them from the tragedies being committed. It feels inaccurate to claim that these characters had the same historical awareness as the contemporary audience watching the film. It's a rare thing to see a German-made WWII film that just portrays the events of the war as they happened, with ordinary people getting ground up by the war machine just like any other war. I guess I'm just saying that I think that politics can sometimes get in the way of truth when it comes to making a film like this.

Anyway, Stalingrad is an interesting take on WWII. There's a pall of doom that falls over the soldiers around the halfway mark where it becomes clear that whatever path they choose - whether it's following orders or refusing to follow orders - it will inevitably lead to an untimely death. It's a sad situation, and Stalingrad makes it painfully real through its cast of regular soldiers and detailed recreation of the stages this brutal battle shuddered its death throes upon.

DIRECTOR: Joseph Vilsmaier
WRITER/SOURCE: Joseph Vilsmaier, Jurgen Buscher and Johannes Heide.
KEY ACTORS: Thomas Kretschmann, Dominique Horwitz, Jochen Nickel, Dana Vavrova, Martin Benrath

RELATED TEXTS:
- Other films made about the war on the eastern front... Dogs Do You Want to Live Forever?, Stalingrad (a two part film made in 1989), Enemy at the Gate and Cross of Iron.
- There was also a television series made in 2003, also called Stalingrad.
- Also made the same year as this film was Steven Spielberg's first WWII opus, Schindler's List.
- Two other German films about WWII worth checking out - Downfall, Das Boot and The Tin Drum.