Das Boot - How Necessary is Good Government?

A number of years ago, I visited a favorite Aunt and Uncle in Houston while I was on vacation.  My aunt and I took a trip to NASA’s Mission Control.  At the end of the tour, I noticed that there were some local news guys interviewing people on the grounds and convinced my aunt to go talk to them with me.  The President (I think it was Ronald Reagan) had announced that day that a teacher would be sent into space on the space shuttle and they were interviewing people who had come to tour the center about how they would use their profession in space.  My aunt, much to my surprise, was up to talking with them and talked quite eloquently about how what duties she would perform – I was convinced she should go.  She was erudite and clear and had interesting ideas about performing domestic functions especially on a long space flight.  When they turned to the camera to me, I had nothing so deep or profound to say – I simply stated that there was no way they could get me into space inside a tin can.  Well, guess whose answer they chose?  Yup, the mouthy one – not the thoughtful one - was on the six and the eleven O’clock news.

The school teacher who would ultimately be chosen to take the trip was Christa McAuliffe and my words had a prophetic quality that I never intended.  I think they also spoke to the reverence that we have for heroes who, despite the risks, decide to engage in potentially deadly activities that will make the world a better place – “I wouldn’t do that necessary activity no matter what you offered me, but I’m glad that someone is willing to do it.”  Das Boot, a movie about heroes of the German Navy who sailed on U-boats became interesting to me again after reading the book Shadow Divers about the discovery and exploration of a U-boat wrecked off the New Jersey shore.  I had wanted to see it when it first came out in theaters many years ago, but it came and went and I was never driven enough to pursue my continuing interest.  It is a very long film – but the director’s cut that we watched on Friday sustained our interest – indeed the reluctant wife found herself drawn into it in spite of herself (she was humoring me by watching it) and, at the two hour mark as it became clear we were only half way there she enthusiastically stated that she wanted to keep at it.

So, what is entertaining about watching a film in German with English subtitles about men cooped up in a submarine?  On a surface level (as it were), the movie is tautly and consistently thrilling.  In a war where the U-boats have been the hunters, they are now turning into the hunted, and the sense that they could be destroyed at any moment kept us near the edges of our seats.  Of course, it helped a lot that we liked the guys.  We were introduced to them at the beginning of the film as they prepare to leave on their voyage.  They are celebrating in an orgy of wine, women and song at a nightclub or a bordello.  The captain stands out as the sober one – and the one who appreciates the need for this exuberant expression before they go – while not participating in it.  He is also respectful of the captains who have gone before him no matter how much they have been dissipated by their duty.  We are drawn to him as a charismatic, but very self-contained leader of a group of very young and green boys who will serve under his command.

While the sailors capture and hold our attention, Das Boot itself – the boat of the title – is at center stage.  It is a technological wonder.  Powered by a diesel engine that by today’s standards would be considered clunky, it is hard to believe that this vessel has been produced only 50 or so years after the first self-propelled cars – and less than a hundred years after the first iron clad ship was launched.   It is modern – sleek – and deadly.  Thank god there is no smell-o-rama.  Not only is there only one bathroom for the crew, but they are stuck together, with that smelly diesel, underwater for extended periods of time. 

The boat is both a hunter and the hunted.  The first ship they see is a destroyer and, against the wishes of some of the crew, the captain thinks they might take it.  Before he can act on that, they spot his periscope and we are suddenly aware of how vulnerable we are as depth charges resound around us and we head to the limits of the depths the submarine can reach in an effort to hide – and we fear that having escaped one terror another awaits as the sea threatens to crush the ship around us – the bolts are literally beginning to blow out.

Having survived an attack, it is odd to take pleasure in the opportunity that then occurs to take out another ship.  The crew imagines the damage that their torpedoes cause to the supply ships that they hit with glee.  Later, when they surface to finish off one of the ships, they are horrified to discover that there are still crew members aboard who jump into the sea and they, with one of them openly weeping, back away from the dying men; unable to take them aboard, they leave them to their fate, cursing the other ships that should have come by then to rescue their fellow crew members.

With a change in plans, they head to Gibraltar to make a run for an Italian target that seems to all aboard to be a suicide mission.  After getting supplies in nominally neutral Spain, where German officers hail them as heroes, while they, disheveled and pale and harrowed by the surviving storms and being hunted and having killed, eat at a weird buffet of haute cuisine that seems to belong to completely different world.  The starched officer's requests for tales of heroism seem absurd - they have no sense of what is involved in true heroism - and don't recognize it when they see it.

At this, the two hour mark, with the reluctant wife fully on board, we plunge back into the sea and the suicide mission.  To save some suspense if you haven’t seen it, there is plenty of harrowing stuff still ahead.  Suffice it to say that this tin can, the captain who is commanding it and the men who are serving on it will be tested.  OK, one piece that is just so harrowing – sonar gets invented and they are staying as silent as they can so that the ship hunting them at the moment can’t find them, but they hear the pings of the sonar bouncing off of them – ouch!  They are marked men.

So this film is delicious on multiple levels.  At the top, it is clear to me that this is a movie about the guilt of the Germans for their role in the Second World War and the atrocities that they inflicted. Unlike the movie Cache, which I also recently saw, the guilt here is hard to expiate not so much because it is apparent to the objective viewer, but because there is subjective pride in the accomplishments of the U-boats, the captains and their men.  This movie says, “We did many incredible things in this war.  We didn’t all agree with our leaders (the dissolute captain of the other boat in the scene at the beginning denounces both Churchill and Hitler and our own captain has no love for this administration), but we are proud of the engineering feats we have created, the strategies we employed, and the strength of character exhibited by our men (and women – there are women who love these men and wait for them to return).” 

This film is both a testament to the men and machines, but also a morality play in that they get their just deserts.  Despite the truly heroic activities – which, by the way, are much grittier than the comic books would ever have us imagine – gritty, smelly, and depleting – not energizing – despite the heroic performances of both the men and the boat – we know throughout the movie that they are damned.  The war will be lost – and the German people will be, rightly, vilified – though there are heroes among them.  How do we retain pride when we have done wrong?

The boat, then, becomes a metaphor for – what?  Well for many things.  First it is a metaphor for an individual fighting to survive in life – something that is hard enough in peacetime and infinitely more difficult in war.  In war we are besieged.  The most life giving entities – water itself – the very stuff that is sustaining and supporting us is also threatening to us; as are people and their machines – peril is literally all around.  And we have to rely on our captain to steer us through these perilous waters – and our captain – the part of ourselves that steers us – is capricious.  It gets caught up in the fun of running us full steam and doesn’t think, in that moment, of how we are using up resources or exposing ourselves to the eyes of the enemy and we cringe while we push forward - while he enjoys flying at full speed through dangerous waters.  And, even more centrally, even our finest moments can cost us dearly.  In doing what we intend to do – sinking cargo ships – we also kill people – we put them into the positions that we most fear – we expose them to the elements that will, surely, kill them – bring the kind of death to them that we most fear for ourselves – and we feel badly about it, and we do it – and endanger ourselves to do it.

The boat is also a metaphor for the state.  We are led by a person who directs our actions.  He or she may or may not be open to information from others about how best to do that.  He or she may put us into very dangerous waters.  Hopefully we have a crew, and a vessel – the state, whatever that is – that can withstand the ways in which that leader will test us.  It is hard not to think, as we prepare to inaugurate a president who is totally untried in governmental and military affairs, and who seems to be intent on driving us in directions that we have worked hard to avoid – someone who scoffs at the very idea of governing – as if freedom means that he can do what he wants to without having to think through the consequences (at least that is how it appears to this observer in the peanut gallery), will the boat be able to survive its captain?  Are the waters as treacherous as we imagine them?  What do we need from a captain and his closest advisors?  How long before, under the strain of pushing us outside of who we imagine ourselves to be, we implode under the weight of pressures that we weren’t built to survive?

Fortunately, on all of these levels, there are checks and balances that are put in place to prevent even a sober minded captain from pushing us too far.  At one point in the movie, we have to rely on divine providence.  And certainly I have benefited from that time and time again – whether when my attention was diverted at an important moment in driving and someone else was, fortunately, paying attention, or at moments when I wanted to go off half-cocked and those around me encouraged me to be more temperate.  While Trump is neither surrounding himself with people who will bridle him nor does he appear to be particularly open to listening, I do think that we have mechanisms that can contain some of what he may attempt – though I fear that we may end having to deal with collective guilt for the pain that we may cause the many who are dependent on us – both within our borders and throughout the world.

The weird thing is – I think this election has given me an ability to get some empathy for those who have voted for Trump.  As I find myself attending to things that I never attend to – who the president elect is nominating for cabinet positions – I wonder how closely they may have watched when people they disagreed with – people they feared as much as I fear Trump – took office.  While I simply trusted them to nominate people who would wisely govern, they may have felt that these individuals would steal from them or throttle them in ways that would be problematic.  They may have seen each assignment as evidence that the governor was putting us in harm’s way.  This vote for Trump has more the feeling of a mutiny than of a change in direction.  Even if we disagree with the captain of the U-boat’s command, which we question at times in this movie, if we remove him we need to install another captain.  Government is necessary – even if we believe it to be evil.  Nowhere is that more evident than when we are stuck in a tin can.

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