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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

1994 Toronto International Film Festival

Amos Gitai's The Neo-Fascist Trilogy: A murder in Germany

By David Walsh
24 October 1994

The first segment of Amos Gitai's The Neo-Fascist Trilogy, which is entitled In the Valley of the Wupper, examines the circumstances surrounding a killing that took place in the western German city of Wuppertal.

The facts are these: On November 12, 1992 a man got into a conversation with two neo-Nazi youth in a bar. At one point the barman called out to the two skinheads that their drinking companion was a Jew. The man replied, jokingly, I'm not a Jew, I'm just half a Jew. (In fact, he wasn't Jewish at all.)

Some time later one of the neo-Nazis knocked the man to the floor and the two proceeded to stomp him to death. They then poured schnapps on the corpse and lit it. Later they transported the body to Holland and dumped it in the woods.

Any serious work about the resurgence of fascism in Germany raises historical parallels. Without making any specific references to history, the film demonstrates how the present is saturated by the past.

To give one example--railway trains and stations figure prominently. What does the German railway network bring to mind? Images of the millions of European Jews transported in cattle-cars. In one Wuppertal station the camera observes what appears to be a small monument to those shipped to various concentration camps. The police arrive and demand to see proof that the filming is authorized.

Gitai, born in Haifa, Israel in 1950, has made numerous short and full-length documentary and fictional films over the past 20 years, including House (1980), Bangkok-Bahrain (1984) and Berlin-Jerusalem (1989).

To its credit, In the Valley of the Wupper unsettles an audience, both by its content and its form. Images and details are repeated. The repetition is suggestive: Something terrible has happened and it is not over yet.

The public prosecutor explains in detail the facts of the case and makes no secret of the political views of the killers and the fact that they believed the victim to be a Jew. But he justifies the decision not to charge the skinheads with murder on the grounds that it is impossible to prove they were motivated by anti-Semitism.

One of the most disturbing scenes is an interview with a group of right-wing youth in a shopping mall. We're just defending ourselves against the "foreigners," they claim. Some of the youth are politically-motivated fascists, others are simply ignorant and backward.

The filmmakers also interview Turkish workers at an open-air market, some of whom have been in the country for 20 or more years. In a hostel, asylum seekers express their incredulity over the racism they face.

Inevitably there are complexities that the film does not, perhaps cannot, adequately approach. The brief interviews it presents with Wuppertal residents are not terribly helpful. To grasp the present paralysis of the German working class in the face of the fascist attacks requires an understanding of the terrible betrayals it has suffered over the past three-quarters of a century, something which is clearly outside of the scope of such a film.

The second part of the trilogy, In the Name of the Duce, made during Alessandra Mussolini's mayoral campaign in Naples in 1993, is not as strong. First of all, it is less wide-ranging in its examination of events. The filmmakers interview Italian Jews who recount their suffering under Mussolini's dictatorship, but the central sequence takes place inside the neo-fascist party headquarters in Naples.

There is no way to explain the right wing's success without taking up the rotten role of the Communist Party as a pillar of postwar Italian capitalism. Otherwise, the election results are incomprehensible. This is the main problem with the Italian sequence.

The third part of the film, set in a Paris suburb, was not available for screening.

In the Valley of the Wupper ends with the camera tracking through the Dutch countryside at night in the rain, while the voices of the prosecutor and one of the lawyers calmly describe the events of November 12, 1992. No other film in the Toronto festival contained a more powerful or haunting image.