The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive. Book review.

 

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive
 
A book asks, can Nazis love? And why did the powerful aid their escape?

 

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive was published by Knopf on February 2, 2021. It is 417 pages long, inclusive of endnotes and a bibliography. Black-and-white photos illustrate the text.

 

Ratline recounts the encounter between author Philippe Sands, a Jewish-British lawyer and law professor and descendant of Holocaust victims, and Horst von Wachter, the son of a Nazi war criminal. Baron Otto Gustav von Wachter (1901 – 1949) was Austrian born. He was an early and enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, joining the Nazi Sturmabteilung or Storm Troopers in 1923. He eventually rose to SS-Gruppenfuhrer, or major general rank. He served under Governor General Hans Frank, the notorious "Butcher of Poland," in Krakow and Galicia in Nazi-occupied Polish and Ukrainian territory. Wachter sent Jews, non-Jewish Poles, and other victims of Nazism to their deaths. After the war, Wachter hid out in the Austrian Alps. He eventually made his way to Italy, hoping to travel, via ratlines, that is, escape routes for Nazis, to safety in South America. Instead, he sickened and died in Italy.

 

Otto von Wachter married Charlotte Bleckmann in 1932. They had six children. Charlotte was an active diarist and letter-writer. Horst, their son, shared his extensive trove of documents with author Sands.

 

The Ratline has received rave reviews from both readers and professional reviewers. The book did not work for me, for reasons I'll outline, below, after a discussion of the book's reception and a summary of its contents. 

Presence 2024 Movie Review. A Small Film Succeeds Where Bigger Films Failed

 

Presence 2024
A small film succeeds where bigger films failed

 

"For English, press one."

 

"Please listen carefully. Our menu options have changed."

 

"Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received."

 

"All our representatives are helping others. We will return your call at a time convenient to us, after you have fallen to the floor and are sobbing uncontrollably."

 

Some of us have lost some genetic lottery. Cancer haunts our families. We hear these phrases when, struggling to sound calm, we inquire about our loved ones, when we schedule ourselves, and when we request our prognosis.

 

Which is worse, a cancer diagnosis or navigating the health care steeple chase? A twenty-something girl treats you like a slab of meat while shoving you into a big machine. God didn't gift cancer cells with awareness. When those cells attack your body it doesn't say anything about human nature. When a fellow human is mean to you for no good reason as you shiver from cold, fear, and shame in your hospital gown, it gets to you.

 

In November, 2024, I coped with my latest perch on the limin between life and death as I usually do. I wasn't taking drugs. I was cleaning, writing, hiking, bopping to great music, soaking in hot baths, shopping for groceries, and going to the movies. These activities are my therapy, my miracle drugs, and my best friends.

 

Friends? "Cancer ghosting" is a thing. The people around you recoil from you. At first, I felt marooned. But then I realized that their ghosting me was just nature taking its course. I was updating my will, giving away belongings, and wondering whether I'd soon be reunited with departed loved ones. The folks who retreated from me were, simply, living in, and involved with, a different dispensation. They were moving through the colorful, physical, concrete world of life, with all its promises of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. My friends were doing that necessary work that we all do – investing in life while alive, and avoiding death. Cancer ghosting can leave you feeling very alone, but as Nietzsche said, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. At least the abyss was willing to hang out with me.

 

In January, 2025, I was going for a walk and listening to NPR over my headphones. When I tune in I usually hear a story about how blacks are suffering in white supremacist America, or how gays are suffering in homophobic America. I wait out the propaganda and listen for the quality programming that sneaks in.

 

A man was speaking. He was a white guy, older, even-tempered, quietly and intelligently witty, at home in the world and with himself.  Ghost stories, the man was saying, are "essentially hopeful … the very premise means that there's an afterlife. Something comes beyond" death, he said. I am intimidated by scary movies but this guy was giving me a new way to look at them.

 

The man continued in a voice, that, unlike so much I hear on NPR, was not shrill, or griping, or demanding, or haranguing. In this same tone of voice, this man might be ordering a car part or telling a child a bedtime story. This mature man knew that sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, and he recognized that it all comes out in the wash.

 

"In my own life," he said, "during periods that I would describe as traumatic, I felt more open to people around me, and maybe had a little easier time perceiving their own difficulties or their own pain. I wondered, if a person goes through trauma, does that open you up to sense other things that you couldn't sense before?" He mentioned a girl named Chloe. Chloe, he said, is "an open wound. She's been through this horrific experience, and so she is open to the universe." It is kind, this man was saying, to make eye contact with someone in pain and to say, "I'm sorry that you suffer."

 

This man didn't have an ax to grind. He was speaking in the most universal terms about trauma and death. He wasn't talking about how hard it is to be black and to have a ghost in your house, or to be trans and to go through trauma, or to be gay and to get a scary diagnosis. He was talking about universal stuff: life, death, the space between. His speech was not excluding, dividing, singling out for blame, or for settling scores. His speech was inviting and truly inclusive. Such speech is rare on NPR. He sounded the way you'd imagine a small town doctor in a Norman Rockwell painting would sound. His words were the most soothing words I had heard in my latest dance with death.

 

That man is screenwriter David Koepp. Let's see if you've heard of the films for which he wrote the script: Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Spider Man, War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Carlito's Way, Stir of Echoes, Ghost Town, Panic Room, and other films. His output has earned billions of dollars worldwide. Koepp has written the script for the 2024 film Presence, a ghost story. Well, I'll be darned. I had sought comfort from friends, who "ghosted" me, and from a Catholic priest, who did not have time for me. Once again, Hollywood was coming to the rescue.

The Brutalist 2024 Movie Review: Bloated, Overrated Agitprop

 

The Brutalist is a Must-See Masterpiece

 

Or is it self-indulgent, exploitative, Hollywood agitprop?

 

I have never witnessed the avalanche of acclaim for a new release such as I've seen for the 2024 film The Brutalist. The Brutalist is the biopic of a fictional character. Adrien Brody plays Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who is commissioned to build a Doylestown, Pennsylvania community center in the Brutalist architectural style. A man of intense artistic dedication and integrity, he overcomes roadblocks, and realizes his dream.

 

Why is a movie about a Hungarian immigrant in Doylestown, PA advancing like a tornado through a wheat field, toppling critics into adoring prostration? Filmmaker Brady Corbet doesn't understand. "If something is really radical, people initially don't like it … people are connecting with The Brutalist … I'm completely confused."

 

Below, a review of reaction to the film, a summary of the film, and then my own take on The Brutalist.

Queer 2024 Daniel Craig Movie Review

 

Queer 2024 Starring Daniel "Bond, James Bond" Craig
Beat ideas literally killed people

The 2024 film Queer is inspired by a novella by Beat Movement co-founder William S. Burroughs. Burroughs wrote Queer in 1952, but it was not published till 1985. Queer is directed by award-winning, 53-year-old Italian director Luca Guadagnino. Guadagnino has won praise for his films Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All, and Challengers. Between 2006 and 2021, star Daniel Craig played James Bond. After retiring as Bond, Craig took on the role of detective Benoit Blanc in the "Knives Out" franchise. Co-star Drew Starkey is a newcomer. He has made an impression playing a troubled teen on the Netflix drama Outer Banks.

Queer's thin plot: an American, William Lee (Daniel Craig) is pursuing a life of casual hook-ups and drug use in Mexico in the 1950s. There, Lee encounters the much younger Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a former sailor. Craig is 56; Starkey is 31. Starkey appears to be in his early twenties in Queer. Lee lusts after Allerton, but Allerton keeps his emotional and physical distance from Lee, even while they are having sex.

Many read the film as a treatment of unrequited love. Wikipedia classifies Queer as a "period romantic drama." For director Luca Guadagnino, Queer is "about connection. When you meet someone with whom you  know you have a connection, no matter what complications arise, no matter what the cultural or emotional interruptions … the strength of it is eternal." Guadagnino says Queer is "a story of unsynchronized love." Daniel Craig insists that "Allerton is as in love with Lee as Lee is in love with Allerton … Allerton just can't show it." Queer, Craig says "deals with many universal themes about love, desire, loneliness and the need to connect."

Queer the book is based on Burroughs' own life. Eugene Allerton is based on a real former serviceman, Adelbert Lewis Marker, who was fifteen years younger than Burroughs. Professor and author Tim Gilmore writes, "Reading the novel alongside Burroughs’ letters and diaries shows that he made up almost nothing in Queer except for names." Marker died in 1998, leaving behind a wife and two sons.

Wicked 2024 Movie Review: Overrated Didn't like Wicked

 

Wicked 2024
Wicked is very popular but it hasn't enchanted everyone

 

She's twenty-four years old and she weighs a hundred pounds. She's pretty but conventionally so. Plainly human, like the rest of us, she will eventually wither and die. But right now she's twenty-four and a bare-backed gown of hip-hugging satin and ostrich feathers billows about her.

 

She resists his seduction. He sings to her – "Cheek to Cheek." They dance beside a pool of water. He is charming and she is charmed. The music, and the scene, begin as conventional patter and rise to passionate intensity. Her dance expresses that which elevates the human above the animal; her movements defy that which reduces mortals to dirt. She, freed of human limitation, wafts like the wind; she flows like water. She has joined the eternal elements; she is black and white, the elemental colors of clouds and constellations.

 

Near the conclusion, though, three times, he lifts her, spins her, and she spreads her legs. He then dips her almost to a full recline, almost to the ground, and her body goes limp. The feathers cover her face modestly like a fan – her hidden expression no doubt communicates feelings too intimate to share. The music quiets. He, a satisfied smile on his face, tenderly guides her to a stone wall, where she leans back, open-mouthed. We recognize that this old movie is telling us, in old movie language, that she has just had that precious human experience that one can have only in a human body, a climax.

 

Audiences who went to see the 1935 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Top Hat might have, earlier that same day, been on a bread line. That year my parents were foraging for food in the forest. That feather dress transported audiences away from the Great Depression and into pure beauty.

 

Ninety years later, when I am crushed by the burdens of this world, I sometimes rewatch that dance. Its escape from, return to, and celebration of the human condition gives me what I need to go on.

 

Music analyst Robert Kapilow salutes the scene's "meticulous craft." "Cheek to Cheek" sounds familiar, simple, even corny. But it demonstrates the talent that Irving Berlin exercised in writing 1,500 songs in a sixty-year career. Berlin also wrote "God Bless America;" his "White Christmas" is said to be the best-selling single of all time. One-hundred-thirty-six years after Berlin's birth, during the month of December, one can hear "White Christmas" on any radio station or in any shopping mall.

 

"Cheek to Cheek" is "mock-mundane." Any amateur might hear the song and think, "Hey, I could have written that." Berlin's sophistication is disguised. "Every note in the vocal line" Kapilow points out, is on the beat, but with the lyrics, "When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek," "Every single note is off the beat … it's so subtle, you almost don't even notice it." Kapilow says that Berlin "brilliantly elides the" song's sudden, intense passion "in a minor key" and resolves that operatic intensity by concluding with a return to the casual flirtatiousness of the song's opening. "These are not just tunes … These songs are three-act dramas in two minutes."

A Real Pain 2024 Movie Review

 

A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg explores American Jewish identity eighty years after the Holocaust

A Real Pain is a comedy-drama Holocaust-themed film. A Real Pain was written, directed, and co-produced by Jesse Eisenberg. The film depicts the journey of two cousins, David and Benji Kaplan, who travel with a tour group to Poland. The cousins' late grandmother, Dory, was a survivor. The cousins' journey is an effort to honor her and better understand their heritage.

Eisenberg, 41, plays David; Kieran Culkin, 42, plays Benji. A Real Pain also features Will Sharpe as James, the tour guide, and other tour members Jennifer Grey as Marcia; Kurt Egyiawan as Eloge; and Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes as Diane and Mark.

David is a happily married husband and father. He lives in an attractive brownstone and makes a good living selling ads. He suffers from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as does Eisenberg himself. David takes prescription medication to suppress his symptoms.

Benji is a "real pain" – as in, "a pain in the ass." He is disruptive and socially inappropriate. Benji lives in his mother's house and smokes a lot of marijuana. He has no committed relationships or steady work. He uses the F-word in every sentence.

David's pain and Benji's pain are set against the overwhelming pain of the Holocaust. The tour group members are flummoxed in their attempts to assimilate historical reality. They juxtapose their comfortable American lives with what Holocaust victims endured. They cannot craft a coherent narrative about the world or their own lives that encompasses that dichotomy.

Conclave 2024 Movie Review

 

Conclave 2024 Starring Ralph Fiennes

A New Movie on Papal Selection Stirs Controversy

Conclave is a 2024 film depicting, in almost docudrama fashion, the fictional death of a beloved pope followed by a conclave conducted by the College of Cardinals. The film concludes with the conclave's election of a new pope, selected from among several intriguing but of course imperfect candidates. Conclave was released on October 25, 2024. It is two hours long. Conclave has an all-star, international cast. Conclave is based on the 2016 novel by the British writer Robert Harris. Harris is the prodigiously talented, multiple-award-winning author of fifteen bestsellers. He often writes historical fiction, including novels set during World War II and the Roman Empire.