In the Telluride catalog, Slavoj Zizek calls The Great Sacrifice, “the supreme achievement of the Nazi melodrama.” Before the film’s screening at the festival Sunday morning, in Zizek’s inimitable way, he put the work of director Veit Harlan into context. “[Harlan was] one of the Big 3 of Nazi cinema. Number 1 was Leni Reifenstahl, number 2 was Douglas Sirk. These two, I think, they can be redeemed. [With] Leni, the impotence of the analysis starts with, you think she’s a bad girl…but it doesn’t work. Douglas Sirk, I have greater suspicions there. But Harlan, he is the ultimate, he can not be redeemed. But he is a breathtaking visual talent.” For perspective: later Zizek noted that when he “despises” someone or something, he uses words like “brilliant” or “breathtaking”; when he actually respects them, he says “they are not completely an idiot.”
Its maker and its message may have been despicable (and Zizek’s post film lecture, summarized below, left no doubt that Harlan made the film with Nazi ideals in mind), but there’s no question that The Great Sacrifice is a breathtakingly visual film.
It’s the story of Albrecht, a modern-day explorer who returns to Hamburg and, with his male cousin’s counsel, becomes engaged to their female cousin (incest is, after all, a pretty sure way of keeping the bloodline pure). Octavia is a beautiful Aryan specimen, but she likes to hang out in her father’s dreary parlor on Sundays, playing piano and listening to her father read aloud from Nietzsche. Albrecht has “the wind, the sun and the surf” in his blood, and he brushes off Froben’s prophetic, almost horror-esque recitations about how “a cold wind is coming…[bringing] a sweet and secret promise of death.” In the first of many mind-blowing allowances that Octavia makes towards her future-husband’s less-than upstanding character, she encourages to go out boating while she finishes up with the bores. The next thing he knows, a naked nymph has grabbed on to his row boat.
It turns out to be Octavia’s neighbor Als, a seductive but morally suspicious non-German (coincidence? Probably not) who lives on an estate full of wild dogs. Als has been told by her doctor that she has just one year to live, but she keeps this to herself for as long as possible. She and Albrecht fall in love, but he has no desire to leave Octavia, who learns of the affair and, not wanting to deprive her great love of his great happiness, lets it continue. At the film’s climax, both Albrecht and Als are dying in their (separate) beds of typhoid, and Octavia picks up Albrecht’s tradition of riding his horse by Als’ window and waving to raise her spirits. Albrecht and Als have a hallucinogenic, possibly psychokinetic break-up talk, after which Als dies but Albrecht survives, his bond with Octavia cemented by her sacrifice for love and Als’ sacrifice in death.
Though Zizek himself thinks Albrecht ended up with the right girl (”My male chauvinist reaction––and I’m sorry––but I prefer the Hitchcock blonde. Who needs the mistress?”), he notes that the film’s ending is radically different from the end of the novel on which it’s based. Harlan wanted to film the original ending, which has Albrecht dying but the two women surviving, with Octavia continuing the ride-by ritual in tribute to her dead, philandering hubby. But Joseph Goebbels, who vetted the film through its production in 1942-1943, objected. According to Zizek, he said, “That’s not a good story, with wife and mistress celebrating and the guy dies. It’s not good for our soldiers at the front.”
The altered plot, Zizek says, fits in perfectly with “the preferred Nazi topic: everyone sacrifices for each other.” Of course, there are different types of sacrifice. “The zero level sacrifice is to get more––virgins, cows, whatever, you sacrifice to get something from the higher power.” Then, there’s a greater level of sacrifice, which “is to maintain the notion that there is something to sacrifice to.” The final, ultimate level of sacrifice is about convincing The Other that you don’t have what you already have. It’s the deeper levels of sacrifice that animate Great, the former involving the wife and latter from the mistress.
For Zizek, it’s that final, psychedelic, psychological ball of worms in which the film’s Nazi ideology is most epically intertwined with both cinematic beauty and heart string tugging melancholy. Like the structuring mythology of Naziism, it revolves around a dual hallucination: just as Albrecht is hallucinating what he perceives is Als’ hallucination about him (or maybe vice versa), the Nazis hallucinated what they imagined were the Jews’ (hostile, threatening) hallucinations about them. And that hall of mirrors serves as a correction to our own ideas about evil. “It’s easy to have a caricature image of the Nazis,” Zizek said. “But it’s much more difficult to accept that the people who did the horrible things, that this is what they would have liked. The authenticity of your inner life is no guarantee against your ability to do terrible things.”
“Maybe this is the reason why I, in an almost neo-conservative way, think that we should stick to the Judeo-Christian way,” Zizek continued. “It’s because it’s like the X Files––the truth is outside. It’s not in the inner life.” In other words, extraordinarily horrible actions that are visible to all are more “truthful” than the ordinary, sympathetic tortures that tear at the hearts and guts of all of us.
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