Synopsis:
During the Second World War, U-96, a German submarine, ships out from its French home port on a dangerous mission to sink shipping in the Atlantic. Commanded by a still young but highly experienced captain (Prochnow), the ship also carries a journalist (Grönemeyer), sent to write a propaganda piece on the heroic crew. Over the following weeks, the ship and its young crew barely survive numerous close calls as Allied destroyers and aircraft depth-charge the vessel. A clandestine visit to a Spanish port brings only brief respite: the ship is refuelled and restocked, but sent on an even more perilous mission through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean. After further undersea tests of endurance, the submarine makes it back to port. But as it docks, an Allied air raid sinks the boat, killing captain and crew.
Analysis:
Das Boot’s gripping, claustrophobic depiction of the terrors and pleasures of war under water has made it a key example of the subgenre of the submarine combat film. A German war film, telling a German war story, made with German money, it was a surprise international hit on its theatrical release in 1981. Its reputation and reach increased when it was recast as a five-part TV mini-series in 1985, and then rereleased in a much longer director’s cut in 1997. Over time, it has become arguably the bestknown German film overseas since Metropolis (1927), or perhaps Triumph of the Will (1935). Das Boot raised questions regarding the appropriate and adequate representation of German history and of the Second World War, questions that go far beyond cinema, and continue to be discussed today. But the film – and this perhaps goes some way to explaining its global success – is as much about masculinity as it is about history, as much about love as it is about the Battle of the Atlantic. It celebrates the love of sailors for their boat and the love of soldiers for each other and their unit. But above all, Das Boot stages and eulogises the love of authority, and the strong social ties that beloved leadership guarantees.
Although there had never been any shortage of films about the Second World War, the late 1970s saw an intensification of the international traffic in stories and images focusing on Germany’s Nazi past. In 1978, the television mini-series Holocaust garnered huge audiences worldwide with its populist treatment of historical trauma, simplifying complex historical events into clear narrative lines and identificatory structures. In Germany the broadcast was a national event; it is often seen as a watershed in the treatment of the Holocaust in public life. Around the same time, for many of the auteurs of New German Cinema, the treatment of historical themes offered a way of combining a broadly critical stance with the possibility of larger audiences at home and abroad. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum (1979) and Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Germany Pale Mother (1980) all succeeded at the domestic box office – always a great weak point of the New German Cinema – but also on the international art-cinema circuit. In doing so, they helped to consolidate a key element – still very much alive today – in modern German cinema’s international brand: as channeller and interpreter of Germany’s ‘difficult and painful history’.
The team behind Das Boot – perhaps above all its producer Günter Rohrbach, newly arrived at the Bavaria studios, looking for a big project to consolidate his position – aimed to mine this rich seam of interest in historical themes, but on a larger scale and for a much bigger, mainstream market. The adaptation of Lothar-Günter Buchheim’s autobiographical novel was planned as a big-budget contemporary entertainment film, dealing with the German past, but made in a Hollywood style and on a Hollywood scale. Moreover, the film would emulate Hollywood’s latest, powerfully populist model: Das Boot would be a locally made blockbuster, its direct narration and strong identification augmented with immersive sound, corporeally involving action sequences and aggressive cross-media marketing. At the time, the film was the most expensive ever made in Germany. Deciding against Hollywood co-production, eschewing the state subsidy favoured by German art cinema, the studio gambled on lavish domestic production, raising unprecedented funds from TV stations and taxavoiding investors.1 Wolfgang Petersen, a shrewd populist, was engaged as director and screenwriter; top German specialists were entrusted with a project larger than any they had worked on before. The film’s look and feel owes much to their work: its immersive qualities depend on outstanding production and sound design, as well as Klaus Doldinger’s music.2 Jost Vacano’s camera lent particular viscerality and intimacy: thanks to his self-built gyroscopic attachment, the camera, smaller than a Steadicam, could move exhilaratingly through the small spaces of the submarine, racing down the length of the boat, and registering the many jolts and impacts that make the film a judderingly somatic experience.
Telling a German story about the war posed questions about whose stories could be told and whose suffering and whose loss might be represented. Das Boot shifted the political goalposts of German cinema, implicitly discarding the critical standpoint of the New German Cinema, which, for all its complex relation to state funding, understood itself as a critical counter-cinema. Instead, Das Boot tapped into national myths and local identification structures in a broadly affirmative way. Questions of politics and historical responsibility were laid aside in favour of a loose notion of powerlessness. For a domestic audience, the ‘us’ here is not only ‘we Germans’, but also ‘we without historical agency’: the film offered the possibility of identifying with the suffering and stoicism of the ordinary German serviceman, flotsam on the blind tides of history, victim of a criminal regime and a callous high command. But there were further, more contemporary layers of national spectatorship. Given the film’s relation to the blockbuster aesthetic (alluded to in direct references to Spielberg’s Jaws (1975)), German audiences were offered not only the pathos of fatalism and victimhood, but also the complex satisfaction of seeing a local production successfully inhabiting a newly hegemonic international style.
The producers’ gamble was a stunning success: the film did unexpectedly well overseas, particularly in the American mainstream market. This set up new dynamics of reception, with the interplay of the national and international giving rise to ironies and paradoxes. Overseas, a key selling point of Das Boot as a war film – its novelty value – was its highly atypical point of view, located firmly on the German side. To say the least, international audiences were unaccustomed to seeing German protagonists, usually simply The Enemy, as beloved figures who live, suffer and die before their eyes. Director Petersen enjoyed telling an anecdote – possibly true – which allegorises this aspect of the film’s international reception. The audience at one Los Angeles test screening, he claimed, cheered the opening title telling that 75 percent of German submariners died at sea, but the film wrenched their sympathies around, and its ending was greeted by tears and applause (Petersen and Greiwe 1997: 174). Paradoxically, this effectiveness meant that in the United States the film was to a degree denationalised, losing enough of its foreign marking to qualify as a culturally neutral, almost an American film. The triumphant proof came in six Oscar nominations, all of them for mainstream, ‘domestic’ awards, a different order of achievement to the vaguely condescending category of ‘best foreignlanguage feature’.
At home, initial critical response was quite negative, largely because of the film’s historical stance. The film, of course, distanced itself from the ideology of National Socialism, ridiculed in the figure of the First Officer, with his absurd self-sacrifice and his abstract musings on leadership. For critics, the problem lay rather in the film’s almost total lack of historical context. In the desert of the deep, there are no civilians and few consequences, barely a glimpse of the enemy. This allowed the viewer to forget that at every moment we are asked to sympathise with the forces of the National Socialist state. Foregrounding the crew’s courage and endurance occluded the boat’s real function: to starve Allied populations, defeat their armies and ensure Nazi hegemony. Even the crew’s hostility towards the high command and the national leadership, and their sympathy for enemy counterparts, was seen as subtly reinforcing an old, pernicious myth: that the armed forces simply did their duty, soldiering on in an insane hell, and that the real guilt lay with ‘mad’ leadership and with ‘fanatical’ units like the SS.3
The loyalty of the crew – and the film’s invitation to audience sympathies – does not focus on the regime or the nation but on the unit and the captain. Like most combat films, Das Boot celebrates the profound homosocial bonding of a small group of men placed in an extreme situation.4 In the Spielbergian phrase, the crew of U-96 is a ‘band of brothers’; women appear only in the opening scene, as singers and prostitutes, or as extras waving the boat in and out of port. But thanks to the setting, the depiction of this group is subtly different from the one in the infantry film, which, although it often uses soldiers’ regional and ethnic diversity to suggest a microcosm of the nation, tends to emphasise the fate of individuals within the unit and celebrate the loyalty of the soldier to the man in the next foxhole. The focus of Das Boot’s representation is more abstract. The crew is a collective, and the submarine – the machine whose functioning is essential to their survival – is an enclosed lifeworld, a micro-society, a home. Throughout the film, in spite of the horrors and terrors, the boat is a utopian space: a world in which everyone knows his place and his job, where work is inherently and urgently meaningful, where privacy is secondary to common property and a common goal, where social bonds are unbreakable, and where authority is effective, respected and merciful.
The film is a paean to this authority, embodied in the figure of the ‘Kaleun’ (the ‘KapitänLeutnant’), the submarine’s captain. The captain – his aura of Good Fatherhood is unsullied by the banal specificity of a personal name – is a model of moderate masculinity, self-contained and always in control. His paternal authority does not rest on fear or coercion, but on omnicompetence and a profound understanding of his men. Several times, he describes them explicitly as ‘children’; their mission is a ‘childrens’ crusade’. While on one level, the plot brings the ship across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean, on another, the film stages the crew’s passage to manhood – a passage indexed by beards and increasingly haggard faces – through a series of evermore profound tests of courage, in the endurance of bombardment and the prospect of inundation.5
The captain’s authority remains unquestioned throughout. The crew responds to his leadership with trust and love, depicted as more beautiful and effective bonding agents than the abstractions of ideology, satirised in the First Officer’s dogmatism. The film’s incessant reiteration of good authority is above all staged visually, in the orchestration of gazes between captain and crew, and in close-ups on Prochnow’s saintly face, melancholy with the weight of responsibility.6 A key instance occurs just as the voyage begins. After the excesses of the last night on shore, the captain’s benevolent regime is rewarded with professionalism: hangovers notwithstanding, the boat is ready and the crew lined up on the dockside. Standing at relaxed attention, the men gaze on the captain, their faces beaming, visibly suppressing smiles of happiness, suggesting a deep affection which sustains but overspills military protocol, necessary but inadequate in itself. No speeches required: the captain simply smiles and asks quietly, ‘Na, Männer, alles klar?’ [‘So men, are we all set?’] As the vessel ships out, the look of love is multiplied: Thomsen, the other ‘good captain’, drunkard and noble cynic, comes to wave them off. In a long-lens framing, we see the U-96 crew arranged around the conning tower, waving back towards the viewer. Cut to a close-up of Thomsen, his old alcoholic eyes filling with tears as he gazes after the departing ship.
Only once does a crack emerge, allowing the reality of power relations to appear. During yet another depth-charging, Johann the engineer breaks under pressure, abandons his station and tries to open the sea-door to escape. Faced with this one-man mutiny, the captain rushes for his revolver; but the gun is barely visible in the frame, as if, for the film, it would be obscene to depict the captain actually wielding the violent technology of ultimate authority. Minutes later, organic bonds of social order are restored. Again, this is staged through the look: a repentant Johann comes to beg for mercy, asking that he not be court-martialled. Huge eyes bulging in his gaunt face, he beseeches the captain, soliciting his look. At first, the captain’s gaze is withheld, but eventually he turns towards the engineer. His face softens with eye contact; the desertion is quietly forgiven.
The film’s largest deviation from its source material comes at the end. The real-life captain and crew of U-96 survived the war. In fact, the real crew’s first ever reunion took place during a visit to the location shoot in La Rochelle, France. But Das Boot turns the voyage into a tragedy. Having survived the trials of the deep, the ship is sunk in a bombing raid just as it reaches the illusory safety of the port. Crew and captain are left dead or dying on the dockside. Only the journalist, our central figure of narrative orientation, is left alive. Ultimately, he will tell the story. Before that, he – and the audience – experiences a last exchange of looks with the dying captain. In this way, the film, in its final moments, quite deliberately presents its audience with an invitation to mourn. But to mourn what? The answer might give us pause for thought: Das Boot ultimately asks the viewer to lament a lost utopian, fraternal social space, to mourn a beloved leader, and to feel, palpably, the absence of a face onto which all hopes have been projected and towards which all fears were directed.
Brían Hanrahan
Notes
1. Early adaptation attempts were problematic: screenplays were written and discarded, discussions with Hollywood figures (Robert Redford mooted as a star, Don Siegel as possible director) went nowhere, elaborate scale models were built, and then mothballed.
2. Sound design is crucial for the war film in general and the submarine film in particular. The repeated sonar ‘ping’ which plays a key role in the film is in fact a processed composite of nine separate ‘pings’, heavily processed to create a single rich and evocative sound (Koldau 2011: 73).
3. For an example of the critique, see Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘Das Boot ist leer: Einspruch gegen ein politisch fragwürdiges Heldenepos’, in Heptner and Reichmann 2006: 132–4.
4. This homosociality is usually heavily policed for suggestions of homosexuality. Among his many objections, Buchheim, the ebullient and cantankerous author, protested any hint of homoeroticism in the adaptation, as in the invented scene of cross-dressing as on-board entertainment (Buchheim 1981: 181).
5. Brad Prager, in a convincing psychoanalytic reading, sees this process as an education in continence: under constant threat of inundation, the crew must learn to be neither too dry, like the First Officer, nor too wet, like Thomsen, but just right, like the Captain (Prager 2003: 249–53).
6. The gaze towards the captain contrasts with the other main look in the film: the wide-eyed stare into a non-existent distance, a look without a visual object, a look of waiting and of listening, listening for sonic traces of the enemy, for the impact of a depth charge and to the ominous creaking of the hull.
Cast and Crew:
[Country: West Germany (Das Boot), Germany, USA (Das Boot: The Director’s Cut). Production Company: Bavaria (Das Boot), Bavaria, Columbia Pictures (Das Boot: The Director’s Cut). Director: Wolfgang Petersen. Producer: Günter Rohrbach. Screenwriter: Wolfgang Petersen (based on the book by Lothar-Günther Buchheim). Cinematographer: Jost Vacano. Music: Klaus Doldinger. Editor: Johannes Nikel. Production Designer: Rolf Zehetbauer. Cast: Jürgen Prochnow (The CapitanLieutenant), Herbert Grönemeyer (Lieutenant Werner), Klaus Wennemann (Chief Engineer), 110 Das Boot (1981); Das Boot: The Director’s Cut (1997) Hubertus Bengsch (First Officer), Martin Semmelrogge (Second Officer), Erwin Leder (Johann the Engineer).]
Further Reading:
Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Der Film Das Boot: ein Journal, Munich, Goldmann, 1981.
Lothar-Günther Buchheim, The Boat, New York, Knopf, 1975.
Thomas Elsaesser, ‘German Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood: Looking into a Two-Way Mirror’, in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2005, pp. 299–320.
Christine Haase, ‘Wolfgang Petersen: Blockbuster Auteur?’ in When Heimat Meets Hollywood: German Filmmakers and America, 1985–2005, Rochester, Camden House, 2007, pp. 63–100.
Tim Heptner and Hans-Peter Reichmann, Das Boot: auf der Suche nach der Crew der U-96, Frankfurt am Main, Deutsches Filmmuseum, 2006.
Linda Maria Koldau, ‘Why submarines? Interdisciplinary approaches to a cultural myth of war’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2011, pp. 65–78.
Wolfgang Petersen and Ulrich Greiwe, Ich liebe die grossen Geschichten: Vom Tatort bis nach Hollywood, Cologne, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1997, pp. 151–84.
Brad Prager, ‘Beleaguered under the Sea: Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot as a German Hollywood Film’, in Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy (eds), Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2003, pp. 237–58.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.