If possible, anonymous allies, and preferably dead ones. And so the Marxist scholar calls on the solidarity of the proletariat, while the Jewish professor invokes the victims of the Holocaust. This leaves him alone with his righteous anger, and gives him and his friends exclusive rights to the territory. Best of all, he need not share his expertise in “emotional adequacy” with those who contradict his views. The Memory of Justice contradicts the views of Harold Rosenberg. That is good news to me. Communication, these days, is tenuous.
It reassures me to know that, in spite of the intellectual shortcomings of documentary filmmaking, in spite of the muddleheadedness of moviemakers, in spite of the trivialities of mere showmanship, I have put my message across. To provoke the anger of all the Harold Rosenbergs was one of my intentions.
To know one’s enemy is merely prudent. To choose one’s enemy can be fun! A man with your awesome responsibilities must have trouble, every once in a while, to sink into restful slumber. Why don’t you try counting something? No, don’t count sheep, that would be beneath your dignity, Herr Reichskanzler.
Why don’t you count, instead, the treaties you broke? Why don’t you count the countries you attacked? The cities you destroyed?
The homes you burned, the families you wrecked, the men and women you tortured, the children you killed? Good night, Herr Reichskanzler!
It was my father’s voice: Every weekend, my father, who served in the French army knowing full well that France would lose the war, would come up to Paris from his basic training camp near Clermont- Ferrand to deliver a message to the German people. My father’s voice was a courageous one. One day the official speaker of the German Ministry for Propaganda replied in the name of the German people. Goebbels’s microphone, not at all softly, he declared. Jew Oppenheimer, we know who you are, and where you are.
Watch The Memory Of Justice movie trailer and get the latest cast info, photos, movie review and more on TVGuide.com. The Memory of Justice is a 1976 documentary film directed by Marcel Oph. It explores the subject of atrocities committed in wartime and features Joan Baez, Karl. Read the The Memory of Justice movie synopsis, view the movie trailer, get cast and crew information, see movie photos, and more on Movies.com. Like his earlier The Sorrow and the Pity, which examined the behavior of the French during the Nazi occupation, Marcel Ophuls’s The Memory of Justice expands the.
Directed by Marcel Oph. With Joan Baez, Karl D. Explores the subject of atrocities during wartime, especially during. The Memory of Justice Kickass Release Date: 1976-10-04 Status: Released Run time: 278 min / 4:38 Production Studio : British Broadcasting Corporation. This exceptional, disturbing and thought-provoking documentary compares the atrocities committed by the Nazis as revealed during the Nuremberg trials to those.
When our victorious armies will have conquered the country where you and your family are hiding, we will pick you up and then we will make you eat your words. As a twelve- year- old child, I lived constantly and consciously in the shadow of that threat, in the shadow of the furies. I knew all about Dachau, and I knew what was happening to the Jews in Germany.
Three of my uncles died in the camps, and my father’s favorite screen- writer and closest friend, Curt Alexandre, was deported to Auschwitz. Alexandre, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, who used to take me to the Bois and feed me ice cream at the Caf. But the Jew Oppenheimer was able to save his family and himself by fleeing across the Spanish border and finding refuge in the United States, a few months before Pearl Harbor. The name of the man who had made the threat was Hans Fritzsche. He was the official speaker of the Nazi government. He was also one of the defendants in the Nuremberg courtroom.
And he was acquitted. I think the judges of the International Tribunal did well to acquit Hans Fritzsche. Undoubtedly, he was a despicable man, and a fanatical Nazi. But, quite obviously, the tribunal felt that Hans Fritzsche had been arbitrarily selected for prosecution, as a sort of stand- in for Joseph Goebbels, because Goebbels had committed suicide and could not be brought to justice. According to the traditions of criminal law in civilized societies, you don’t hang people for being symbols, you don’t hang them for their words or their ideology, you don’t hang them for their intentions, or for their share in some abstract calculation of “collective guilt.” Above all, you don’t hang them whenever some fanatic bigot feels like it. You hang them if you can prove they have committed a capital crime, and you punish them for their deeds as individuals. So I don’t need Mr.
Rosenberg to tell me that Justice, as a Platonic Ideal, is unattainable. That doesn’t make me into a nihilist, and it doesn’t transform The Memory of Justice into some murky apologia for Nazi genocide. The connection established in the film between the crimes condemned at Nuremberg and subsequent atrocities committed in Vietnam, Stalinist terror, and torture in Algeria and in Chile is not to be found in some dimwitted analogies which Mr. Rosenberg attributes to the filmmaker. The connection has been established, unavoidably, by the Nuremberg principle itself, which the professor rejects, while in the very next breath accusing me of attempting to discredit the trials.
This is pure sophistry of the most vicious and selfserving kind, and I refuse to stand still while some eminent but narrow- minded pundit denounces my work by sticking inaccurate labels on it. I will not let myself be banished into the seedy neighborhood of Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien or Lina Wertm. I don’t recall, when I was a child in France, ever feeling the urge to dance in a hotel occupied by the Gestapo, like the Jewish girl in the Malle film, and I don’t believe in survival as an alternative value to a system of ethics. Nor do I see the necessity of making a choice between Ideal Justice and arbitrary executions, as Harold Rosenberg does. Anglo- Saxon common law is good enough for me, at least until something better comes along. This is made abundantly clear in my picture.
I am convinced, on balance, and on the basis of my research, that the Nuremberg trials were fair, enlightened, and humane. And this is made abundantly clear in my picture.
I don’t believe, as Mr. Rosenberg does, that they were show trials in the Moscow manner, and I see no reason to doubt the testimony of Lord Shawcross in the film (who was the Labour government’s attorney general at the time of Potsdam), when he states that it was Stalin alone who advocated wholesale executions of the Nazi brass. One can understand Harold Rosenberg’s reluctance to find himself stranded in such disreputable company. Hence his disingenuous and tortuous attempts to bring Roosevelt and Churchill around to the Rosenberg solution. But then, Professor Rosenberg does not hesitate to generalize about the “emotional inadequacy” of the Nuremberg prosecutors. He is a man who thinks boldly, and in broad strokes.
The one Nuremberg prosecutor I have come to know well has never struck me as emotionally inadequate. Telford Taylor, during the past few years, has repeatedly journeyed to Soviet Russia, seeking to make use of his Nuremberg acquaintance with the chief prosecutor of the USSR in order to save Jewish dissidents from arbitrary arrest, from show trials in Russian courtrooms, and from internment in psychiatric hospitals.
What has Harold Rosenberg done, lately, along such lines? Marie- Claude Vaillant- Couturier, who testified in Nuremberg about what she had seen as an inmate at Auschwitz (Rosenberg calls her a mere “prisoner,” as if she had been interned in some stalag. Because she isn’t Jewish?), is also a person I admire greatly. Harold Rosenberg manages to suggest that she, too, is emotionally inadequate, or that like the rest of us she is being soft on the Germans. To demonstrate this, he needs no further proof than her own account of the discovery, when she left the witness stand in Nuremberg, that the defendants in the dock suddenly looked like ordinary men to her. He forgets to mention that in the preceding sentence she calls them monsters, and that in the following one she compares them to an SS man she had known in Auschwitz, who fed barley sugar to a gypsy child whose parents he had gassed the day before. Rosenberg want the lady to remember?
That the defendants looked like baboons? Why? Yehudi Menuhin is another very brave person I met while making The Memory of Justice. I think Menuhin, like Ellsberg deciding to publish the Pentagon Papers, knew exactly what he was doing when he went to Germany in 1. Wilhelm Furtw. Alfred Kazin, in my presence, called Furtw.
My mother, a former actress, knew Furtw. Before the war, every time the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra came to Paris, which was once a year, my parents would visit the worldfamous conductor at his suite in the Chateau de Madrid, and he would never leave without taking with him a list of names of Jewish friends and other anti- Nazis to rescue out of Germany. But Kazin and Rosenberg can never forgive Menuhin! Well, perhaps my parents and Yehudi Menuhin knew something more about that particular Nazi than Professor Rosenberg and Professor Kazin do. Perhaps my own knowledge of such details is more personal than Harold Rosenberg’s abstractions. Bruno Bettelheim once wrote a book about his experiences in Dachau. He called it The Informed Heart.
What a beautiful title! When Menuhin points out that his own family was not destroyed by the Nazi tyranny, I think he’s being scrupulous and modest. He wants to explain that he understands the feelings of those deportees who boycotted his concerts during his German tour. Those who fail to catch his meaning are those who decided thirty years ago what they thought of him, and still condemn him before he even opens his mouth. The same people often drive Volkswagens and go to Karajan concerts. If they are writers, they do not mind receiving royalties from the German translations of their work.
As for Harold Rosenberg, he calls Yehudi Menuhin fatuous! I don’t quite agree with John Simon’s assessment of Menuhin’s last statement in the film. It’s a little bit too Gandhiesque for my taste. But I know why the lone wolf of New York film critics admires it: Simon quotes Menuhin for the same reason Menuhin made the statement, I guess, and for the same reason I placed it toward the end of my film: to denounce the views of Harold Rosenberg. But the film doesn’t end there, and since Rosenberg thinks images are so much more powerful than words, perhaps he should have noticed that the film ends on the world- famous photograph of a child in the Warsaw ghetto, raising his hands in front of a German machine gun.