The désarrois of Captain Jünger
Friday, March 23 at 8: 30 p.m., French viewers will have the opportunity to see something unusual in their position: the Germans in uniform of the army of occupation to be ridiculous Dummies or a bloodthirsty bully, but officers and soldiers in the troubled States of soul. This will happen on Arte, naturally should be clear, so this corresponds to the vocation of the Franco-German channel. This film by filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff entitled The sea at dawn already faced the public one evening in January in Biarritz in the 25th Edition of the IFAP (international Festival of audiovisual programs). The emotion was such the generic of late that the public remained a few moments without voice before the welcome by some applause. At the exit, some concealed their disorder tinged with emotion; other reported upset; but there were also to be outraged by “an attempt of historical revisionism”. What is it? We are in Nantes on 23 October 1941. Two young Communist resistant murdered a German officer. In retaliation, on order of the Fuehrer, dozens of hostages will be shot, including political detainees in the camp of Choisel including young Guy Môquet, the Jean-Pierre Timbaud unionist and member of Parliament Charles Michels. Story time is part of the thirty-three hours separating the attack of executions. Schlöndorff, sole author of his film, interspersed the expectation, doubt, anxiety of hostages, to cases of conscience of those responsible to enforce said “political hostages” whether they are French (the young deputy who refuses to compile lists, the gendarmes) or German (officers of the military high-command). Two primarily among them: General Otto von Stülpnagel, head of the forces of German occupation in France, refuses to play the role of “butcher” and Captain Ernst Jünger between two luncheons in plum with Sacha Guitry: “I’d you keep record of these events hour by hour.” All what happened, everything that has been said. Not something military but of more literary. – As the report did Napoleon campaign Stendhal? -I prefer Hölderlin but I want, it’s historiography. “In a copy only”. While honouring his uniform, as befits an officer, Jünger is seen in the role of a witness of history in motion, and not in that of an actor called to change the course. An observation post that is a problem. Volker Schlöndorff agrees: “its position is terribly ambiguous”.That deal with the SS, Jünger said feel like white Captain controlled by his black slaves in Benito Cereno (1855), the news of Hermann Melville.
“When asked, the film critics consider the characters all too “nice”, the image of this French chaplain who launches the officer leading the hostages to the pole :” don’t be a slave to your orders, listen to your conscience instead. “You are a Christian but your policy of the hostages is not”. It is true that except an official of the Prefecture, who unscrupulously denounces his former communist comrades to send to the post, and the German commander of the platoon who executes orders with a jubilation in obedience, both the French that the Germans are deeply troubled to participate in this story. All arise the question of disobedience. But were it not inevitable as the bias in this powerful work devoid of any Manicheism was to show the complexity of the time, his grey? “I have a lyric film and not a history lesson” defending the Director. He was born of a sequence of discoveries: first the Châteaubriant hostages case; some time after, at the end of a Conference, the meeting of an unknown (the journalist Pierre-Louis bass) who offered him the book he has just devoted Guy Môquet and its reading unexpectedly two months later; then the publication of Zur Geiselfrage of Ernst Jünger recently in Klett-Cotta in Stuttgart, which contains the letters of the twenty-seven hostages he had then him-same transposed into French, and her report “prepared in the style of the chanceries, therefore without literary ambition” said Julien Hervier, his France translator; then the Das Verhältnisressouvenir, a new of Henrich Böll inspired by its passage in the Wehrmacht on the Atlantic wall ; and finally the war diaries of Ernst Jünger. All the words that the character speaks in the film are from the pen of the writer. After The Désarrois of student Törless by Robert Musil, lost honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll, The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, A love of Swann on Marcel Proust, death of a traveller clerk by Arthur Miller, The King of Alder by Michel Tournier, this is who does not arrange the reputation of literary filmmaker suing Volker Schlöndorff, although not sought to the deny if one remembers much of what he said in his memoirs (drum) flying, Flammarion, 2009). “I did a work of collage, says Volker Schlöndorff.” I have the feeling of having produced a literary film, an adaptation, what I have always done, which is an original screenplay. “I wanted the ironic fall.” The film ends with a tinted superimposed on the sea. Discovering what became the protagonists: acquitted for the release, excluded from the party, posted in Africa, décoré… “Ernst Jünger published in la Pléiade”.The film ends on those words, which, in its German version (Das Meer am Morgen), become: “Ernst Jünger has a huge prestige in Paris…. ». It is true that it is today most read and best known as the author of the poem to which the film borrows its title (“there is no other that you will see the aube… sea”) (»), Robert Desnos, deported to Buchenwald resistance facts and death at Theresienstadt in 1945.
(Filming of the sea at dawn.) Stage with von Stulpnagel and Jünger at the Hotel Majestic. Volker Schlöndorff officer Leo Paul Salmain in the role of Guy Môquet. (Photos Philippe Delacroix)
