A Hidden Life: A Film for Our Time

 This film is even more relevant now.

Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is not a typical World War II drama

The latest from the director of The Tree of Life deconstructs religion and nationalism by looking at someone who refused to fight.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/5/20/18631526/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malick

Everyone wants to imagine themselves the hero in a movie about heroes. Not everyone wants to consider what it would take to do what’s right when nobody may ever know — when their actions will be hidden.

A Hidden Life is not a hero’s story.

Instead of battlefield valor or underground daring, the latest film from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, Badlands, Days of Heaven) is a tale of something much more difficult to emulate: goodness and courage, without recognition. It’s about doing what’s right, even if it seems the results hurt more than they bring good to the world.

Vox Rating:

4.5 out of 5

It’s set during World War II, but our Austrian protagonist Franz Jägerstätter, based on a real-life conscientious objector, does not save Jews from Nazis or give rousing speeches. In the end, what he’s done counts for what seems like very little.

A Hidden Life is Malick’s most overtly political film and one of his most religious, urgent and sometimes even uncomfortable because of what it says — to everyone, but specifically to Christians in places where they’re the majority — about the warp and weft of courage. It’s a film that seems particularly designed to lodge barbs in a comfortable audience during an era of rising white nationalism. Jägerstätter could have lived a peaceful life if he’d simply ignored what was happening in his homeland and been willing to bow the knee to the fatherland and its fascist leader, whose aim is to establish the supremacy of Franz’s own people.

But though it will bring hardship to his family and the harshest of punishments to himself, he simply cannot join the cause. The question A Hidden Life then forces us to contemplate is an uncomfortable one: Does his life, and his death, even matter?

A Hidden Life tells a story that might never have mattered

If you haven’t heard of Jägerstätter (played by August Diehl), well, that’s sort of the point. He was not, by most measures, a remarkable man. An Austrian farmer in a small village, with a beloved wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner), several small, towheaded children, and aspirations for a quiet life, Franz wrote no books, made no films, led no movements. He was, in a word, ordinary.

Jägerstätter did eventually become better recognized for his part in the war. In 1964, the American sociologist Gordon Zahn wrote his biography, titled In Solitary Witness. Thomas Merton included a chapter about him in his 1968 book Faith and Violence. An Austrian TV series told his story in 1971, and in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI declared him a martyr. He was beatified on October 26 of that year.

But he is no household name for most people, and his life was profoundly unspectacular, save for the way he swam against the current. His pastoral life at home is interrupted by the rise of the Third Reich. Franz does his military service at a base, away from the war, without seeing combat, and soon is sent home to his happy family. But Hitler adulation is rising, and it creeps into their small village. Soon, people are greeting one another with “Heil Hitler.”

Franz has heard what is happening in war — the exterminations, the persecution and slaughter of innocents — and he becomes certain that his faith will not permit him to participate if called to active military service again.

His conscience might have permitted him to serve in a hospital, but for one thing: All Austrian soldiers are required to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler. And he refuses.

It’s a true story, and a simple one, but couched in Malick’s signature style, it becomes something more lyrical and pastoral. The home that the Jägerstätters share is in a place that looks, quite literally, like paradise, all green and gray and sunshine. Even their hard labor on the farm takes on significance: This is good land, and what it produces is good, too. The life they live has importance, as part of the larger creation.

When Franz realizes he cannot yield, though, he and his family become pariahs, spat upon and shunned by most of their neighbors. Love of their country means love of Hitler, and everyone around them, even Franz’s mother, is willing to accept this. Hitler, they say, only wants to help his country and his people, who were in degenerate shambles before he came to restore order. “He did what he had to do,” an old man from the village proclaims in the town square. “He was not content to watch his nation in a state of collapse,” he says, deriding the “foreigners” who turned their homeland into “Babylon.” How could anyone object to that who truly loved his home?

Much of the film’s nearly three-hour runtime is devoted to the couple’s wrestling with Franz’s conviction. You can see why. From the distance of history, it’s easy to imagine that we all would do what he did, that we would see evil for what it is and resist it. At the time, though, people accuse him of being conceited, of sticking to principle because he feels he’s above everyone else, of harming his family and his village needlessly. “Don’t you think you ought to consider the consequence of your actions for them?” someone asks him. Even the ministers agree. Yet Jägerstätter stands firm.

A Hidden Life is not, primarily, a valorization of the life of Franz Jägerstätter, who lived in private and died in obscurity when the Reich executed him in 1943. It is, instead, a surprisingly pointed indictment of the audience by Malick, who has no punches to pull.

I happen to know this film has been in the works for many years. I had conversations about the project five or six years ago, when I worked at Christianity Today; that’s only worth saying because A Hidden Life feels as if it could have been written last year, a movie created in direct critique of our age, in which radical right-wing nationalist sentiment and white supremacy too often cloaks itself in the disguise of Christianity.

In this film, swearing allegiance to Hitler — and, more importantly, to his nationalist ideals — is frequently compared to bending the knee to the Antichrist. That’s not a small matter, but Malick (not normally known for his left hook) seems to have come out swinging. Franz’s faith is not showy, but he is horrified when he consults his village priest and he stops short of condemning the Third Reich. The bishop, too, glosses over the issue when Franz comes seeking counsel. “The priests call them heroes, even saints,” Franz says of the way the clergy speak of those who engage in the Third Reich’s military atrocities.

There’s no way this is an accident. A Hidden Life may have been in the works for years, and it tells a story from nearly eight decades ago, but it is the work of an American filmmaker who is watching the state of the world. When Franz resists his neighbors’ pleas to make nice with the government, there’s a purpose. When he says Christ’s example will not let him swear fealty with his mouth and believe something else in his mind and heart, he is doing something that would seem daring today in the churches of America or Europe, in those places where to be Christian is construed to mean supporting a xenophobia Christ never would have stood for.

As a longtime observer of Malick’s work (though I’ve found his post-Tree of Life films lacking), I was startled to see just how biting A Hidden Life is, particularly toward any Christians, or others, who might prefer their entertainment to be sentimental and comfortable. In one scene I can’t get out of my mind, an artist painting images in the nearby church tells Franz, “I paint their comfortable Christ, with a halo on his head … Someday I’ll paint the true Christ.”

The implication is painfully clear — that religious art prefers a Jesus who doesn’t accost one’s sensibilities, the figures who make us feel good about ourselves. We want, as the painter puts it, to look up at the pictures on the church’s ceiling and “imagine that if they lived in Christ’s time, they wouldn’t have done what the others did” — in other words, if we had been around when Jesus was, we’d have known better than to execute him.

When, of course, most of us most likely would have just gone along with the crowd.

It’s an especially interesting story for Malick to tell. The filmmaker is strongly influenced by his Christianity, but also by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. In 1969, Malick published the authoritative translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons, just as he was abandoning a doctorate at Harvard on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. His films often hew closely to and examine — in both narrative and form — ideas about the essence of humanity and phenomenology advanced by Heidegger. (You can detect as much Heidegger as the Bible in The Tree of Life.)

But Heidegger, whose philosophy often feels unusually gentle and empathetic to the human condition, also famously joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, shortly after being elected rector of the University of Freiburg (and about a decade before Jägerstätter’s execution), and he remained part of the party until the end of the war.

For most people of goodwill who find Heidegger’s work valuable (and I include myself here), his apparently willing association with the Nazi Party is confounding and infuriating. How could a man who wrote those ideas apparently ignore what was happening around him? Or, worse, condone it?

There are few answers, though people have been wrestling with them for decades. It is at least one lens through which to read Malick’s imagined scene between Jägerstätter and a Nazi Party official, in which Franz tells the official that he does not condemn anyone, assuming that some swore their allegiance to Hitler and find themselves in a position from which they cannot back away. It’s a troubling scene, one that indicates Malick’s main interest is in Jägerstätter and not in parsing out the ethics of everyone in the entire Nazi apparatus — but it does read as the filmmaker’s own wrestling with the thinker’s legacy.

Which is why Jägerstätter strikes me as in some ways a necessary corrective to our valorization, and particularly American Christians’ valorization, of figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom. Both of them are rightly admired, praised, and lauded for their attempts to take down Hitler (in Bonhoeffer’s case) and save Jews from being sent to concentration camps (in ten Boom’s). Bonhoeffer died for his efforts; ten Boom lost her sister Betsy in a concentration camp and narrowly escaped death herself.

But it is in our human nature to love the story of a person who did great things: saved lives, wrote books, stood against the dictator who wiped out millions of lives. It is less common for us to celebrate a man who threw away a comfortable life and simply refused to do what he knew he could not, and paid with his life.

Instead, A Hidden Life dares us to imagine that the latter is at least as important as the former — and maybe more so.

A Hidden Life is everything Malick’s devotees could want from a movie: beautiful, poetic, hewing closely (particularly at the end) to films like Days of Heaven and Tree of Life. His camera observes his characters from all angles, sometimes straight on, sometimes from below, sometimes distorted in a wide-angle lens shot close to the face, creating the intimate feeling that we’re experiencing their interior lives rather than just watching passively.

Its end, in which Franziska anticipates meeting Franz again — in narration that closely recalls the end of Tree of Life in particular — is a note of hope. Malick concludes, by way of a thesis, with lines from George Eliot’s Middlemarch:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Jägerstätter’s refusal to bow the knee looked pointless in his time, but in its own way, it was a kind of heroic act, though not the kind that ordinarily merits the Hollywood treatment. The things that are not so ill with us are because people we’ll never hear about did what they had to do for people they’d never know, and who’d never know them. A hidden life is worth living, and giving up, so that others may live.