June
13, 2003, 10:20 a.m. Surviving
Goodness
makes it past the Nazis.
ow
much do you give up when you give up what others consider to be your very
self? This is among the many questions prompted by the fascinating new
documentary The Nazi Officer's Wife, which opens Friday in New
York. The film, directed by Liz Garbus, tells the story of Edith Hahn,
a young Jewish woman living in Vienna at the time of Austria's 1938 Anschluss
by Germany.
Edith Hahn was used
by the Nazis as a slave laborer, but went underground when she was about
to be sent to the death camps. For a Jewish person to live under an assumed
identity in the heart of Nazi Germany was no easy matter — and she
wouldn't have survived but for the heroism of individual Germans who risked
their own lives to hide her true identity. You couldn't live in Germany
without papers, so a Christian friend of Edith's agreed to pretend she
had lost her I.D. papers in a boating accident. The Nazi police accepted
the friend's story, and gave her a new I.D.; Edith used the original papers
to travel to Munich and get a job. In Munich, one amazing turn of events
followed another. Edith met a true-believer Nazi-party member named Werner
Vetter, who fell in love with her and asked her to marry him. Edith confessed
to him the truth about her identity. He agreed not to reveal her secret,
and they got married and had a daughter. Drafted and made a Nazi officer,
Werner kept the secret.
Knowing what we do about the bestiality of the Nazi regime, and of the
reprisals in which it regularly engaged, the bravery of Edith's friend
in Vienna and, later, that of her Nazi husband beggar the imagination.
In this film, there is no suspense as to Edith's survival; she appears
on camera and comments on the narrative. What there is, rather, is a growing
sense of the psychological cost of the lies she had to tell, and of the
daily mortal fear in which she had to live. For survival, she paid a great
price — denying everything about herself in order to conform to a
brutal society.
After the war, she had to face the tough question: Who is Edith
Hahn now? In prewar Austria, she had studied law; so she now agreed to
be appointed a judge by the Soviets, who ruled her part of Germany. Her
Nazi husband subsequently returned from a Soviet POW camp and wanted her
to go back to being a housewife; she said no, and he divorced her. Edith
Hahn wanted to integrate the truth about herself: She wanted to be both
the prewar legal intellectual and Werner's wife. It didn't work.
Some of the emotional cost is visible on the taut face of her daughter
Angela, who also appears in the film; she seems to be consumed by hostility
toward her father.
Edith also wanted to reintegrate herself with the Jewish community, but
she had a troubling encounter with death-camp survivors at a transit camp.
She says they were hostile to her, and made her feel she had gotten off
too easy. She is vague on the details of this encounter, which may be
a projection of the phenomenon later known as "survivor guilt."
Her family had not been religious before the war, but she was to raise
Angela as a Jew.
The Edith Hahn of 1945 was not the Edith Hahn of 1938. She would not have
been in any case; but it is part of the special barbarity of a totalitarian
regime that it becomes a coercer of lies, forcing people to give up their
very identities to save life and limb. Such a government is engaged in
profoundly evil activity, the soulcraft of an artificially engineered
crucible of character. It is good to be reminded, as we are by this impressive
documentary, that goodness can survive even deep within such a monstrous
system.
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ow
much do you give up when you give up what others consider to be your very
self? This is among the many questions prompted by the fascinating new
documentary The Nazi Officer's Wife, which opens Friday in New
York. The film, directed by Liz Garbus, tells the story of Edith Hahn,
a young Jewish woman living in Vienna at the time of Austria's 1938 Anschluss
by Germany.
