Lars-Martin Sørensen
A total of approximately 8000 Danes were killed during the second world war, little less than 3000 of those were killed in Denmark, this includes the 400 informers assassinated by Danish resistance fighters. 113 freedom fighters were executed, 7000 Danes imprisoned by the Germans. 12.000 Danes volunteered for the Danish SS Brigade. 6.000 eventually enlisted, an estimated 50 % of those were Nazi-party members, the remainder presumably right wing anti-communists, 2000 were killed in action, 3.300 convicted for treason after the war even though the Danish SS brigade had been established with the blessing of the government.
The numbers are all taken from authoritative sources, and they tell an entirely different story than the collective memory version of Denmark during the occupation.
Joshua Oppenheimer
What really surprised me was that 3.300 people were convicted for treason, even though the Danish SS-brigade was established with the blessing of the government. So through the process of putting Danish Nazis on trial, the narrative is thus rewritten after the war…Our actions (during the war( are thus justified. In Indonesia what 'The Act of Killing' deals with is somehow how we always use storytelling to justify our actions.
A Danish national conscience
Joshua Oppenheimer
As a newcomer to Denmark, and a Jew and a hearing the official story of the ’occupation under protest’.. was that what it was called?
Lars-Martin Sørensen
Yes, peaceful occupation under protest.
Joshua Oppenheimer
It is the strategy of someone who hopes to survive! For me, a crucial question is, what are the effects on the national conscience in Denmark to tell a story, in which we justify collaborating with the Nazis, and skip over Danish participation in the atrocities with the blessing of the government.
Lars-Martin Sørensen
I think what it has done to Danish self understanding is that it somehow gave the Danes a giant inferiority complex, and so there is a tendency to celebrate the parts of history that are worth celebrating, for instance the rescue of the Danish Jews. The first time I heard that there were shady sides to that narrative too, for instance that some Danish fishermen demanded high prices to transport Jews out of Denmark in October 43, it came as a shock to me, because I had always thought it was some kind of untainted moment of glory in Danish history, which of course it was not.
Joshua Oppenheimer
It also makes me curious about the nature of consensus in Denmark. Does that pre-date the war, or is it something that has been built post-war? And was it partly built as a way of dealing with this traumatic history?
Lars-Martin Sørensen
I think that the consensus that you experience as a newcomer to Denmark is something that has been built up in the post-war period. In the 1930’s this was a country with a political conflict between the Reds and Nazis or young conservatives. Even within the resistance movement you had very strong conflicts between right-wing nationalist freedom fighters and communist freedom fighters. Post-war-historians telling the story about this brave little country that cleverly stood up against the Germans, on the one hand collaborating in order not to have too much harm inflicted upon the Danish citizens and at the same time fighting the Germans, and that these two forces were not opposing forces. This ’the shield’ and the ’sword’-legend, collaboration being the shield and the sword being the resistance movement, it is a lie, and certainly not what the resistance fighters during the occupation experienced, with Danish police trying to hunt them down, and Danish politicians condemning them.
Joshua Oppenheimer
And also the arrest and sending to concentration camps of the communists. Members of parliament, some of them, right?
Lars-Martin Sørensen
..which was a blatant violation of the Danish constitution. Moreover the Danish police rounded up a hell of a lot more than were on the wanted lists, provided to them by the Germans.
A rhetorical intervention
Joshua Oppenheimer
Denmark is a relatively open society. There is debate, there is a project like yours where the official story can be challenged without a there first having to be a change of regime. Maybe time needs to pass. More painful aspects of the story are now coming to light in history books. 'The Act of Killing' has triggered a whole wave of investigative reporting in Indonesia about the genocide. The Indonesian media is now reporting the genocide as a genocide, whether the government will, in time, scrap its official history and rewrite the Indonesian curriculum I don’t know. Time will tell. As a result of 'The Act of Killing', the extermination of the communists is no longer talked about as something heroic. Perpetrators no longer boast about what they have done. It is talked about as a mass extermination, and something perpetrated by the army and the civilian paramilitaries under army command. So the narrative is changing. And the most gratifying aspect of making 'The Act of Killing' is to see that a work of art can actually participate in changing narratives ,without there being a change of regime.
Lars-Martin Sørensen
In my world of research among Danish historians you can experience quite a widespread sense of frustration. The research results which have surfaced over the last 2 decades depict a much more nuanced picture of the role of the Danish collaborationist government, of Danes joining forces with the Germans, of economical collaboration, and so forth. But this somehow doesn’t trickle down into the popular understanding of the period. Obviously popular opinion about something that happened more than 60 years ago is a very amorphous thing to try and judge but there is this general sense that even if researchers know, the general public doesn’t really want to know! That is an entirely different experience from yours, I guess.
Joshua Oppenheimer
I think there are a few reasons for that. I think 'The Act of Killing' is more than a reclaiming of history, it is also somehow a rhetorical intervention, an effort to move people, to see something that everybody in a way already knows but have been too afraid to say openly. It raises a fundamental question of what we do when we do history. Is our main job to tell stories where there are recognizable good guys and bad guys, so that we can shore up the moral compass of our present moment, or are we actually interested in finding out what really happened in all its’ inevitable complexity and nastiness? I notice this in myself. Whenever I read about an atrocity anywhere in the world I immediately start instinctively to determine with which side should I sympathize.
Lars-Martin Sørensen
I think that is a very human reaction. There is almost an instinctive urge to categorize the world around us quickly, and preferably in black and white, because that is easy to deal with, whereas complexity is much harder to deal with.
Joshua Oppenheimer
But it is also a very dangerous reaction because when we deal with political violence and political history, and we impose from without a Star wars morality, that is a morality in which you divide the world into the “good guys” and the “bad guys”, it becomes very easy to become one of the “bad guys”. For example, with genocide, let’s say we assume the perpetrators are “monsters”, then if you are to prevent genocide you have to lock up all the perpetrators, and you quickly become a bad guy yourself. So in so far as every time we tell stories in which we divide the world up into “good guys” and “bad guys”, protagonists and antagonists, we risk sowing the seeds of repetition. Moreover, we fail to recognize that “good guys” and “bad guys” only exist in the stories we tell, that all acts of evil in our history have been perpetrated by human beings like us. And therefore we prevent an understanding of what happened - an understanding that could, in fact, help us prevent these things from happening again.
Lars-Martin Sørensen
One of the things 'The Act of Killing' shows very powerfully is that humans cannot live with having committed atrocities. So somehow deep within us we know when things are wrong.
Joshua Oppenheimer
Yes, the film is an argument for a universal ethics. And for the fact that there are evil acts but there are no evil people.
Suppressing the past
Joshua Oppenheimer
I think you definitely need truth before you can have reconciliation, so I am curious about the consequences for Danish society of having decades pass with neither truth nor reconciliation? I have come to feel that there is something essentially de-humanizing about suppressing the past, both on an individual and societal level (which can only artificially be distinguished).
Lars-Martin Sørensen
I think that is true at an individual level. It would be a harder thesis to carry through at a collective or societal level.
Joshua Oppenheimer
But isn’t that really why you do the work, you do?
Lars-Martin Sørensen
You are talking in what I would call moral terms, that we owe it to the past to reconcile ourselves with it, and when I think of the work I do, surely there is a moral indignation that drives my work. If I didn’t have that in me, I wouldn’t be reading these thousands of pages of Nazi files. But when it comes to my presentation of the events of the past, I try to present the facts in an account which is as balanced as I possibly can.
Joshua Oppenheimer
I am tempted to say, that in both our work it becomes essential not to whitewash over complexity, and over wrong on both sides. It seems like the post-war narrative was an attempt to hide the extent of the collaboration with the Nazis, and at the same time put the whole trauma behind us by hiding the executions of the collaborators, but it seems like we are looking that complexity squarely in the face. I think that our social fabric can be de-humanized, somehow, if we don’t.
Film and history writing
Lars-Martin Sørensen
I think by moving people emotionally, which the medium of film is so very good at, you may achieve more radical results than I may well achieve by presenting the facts and trying to detail the history.
Joshua Oppenheimer
I think that film can move people, but so can a beautifully written piece of history. Film can reach a broader audience, perhaps, but history is the foundation for me as a filmmaker. I am reading the historians’ work to figure out how I need to intervene as a filmmaker. I am standing on the shoulders of historians who worked hard to break the silence, and they risk their access to break the silence. Writers like Benedict Anderson lost their access to Indonesia for decades.
Lars-Martin Sørensen
I am just saying that the instantaneous impact you get from putting real people up on a screen is entirely different. It connects to other ways of coming to terms with traumatic experiences than does history writing. I am well aware that much film production stands on shoulders of history writing, but there is instantaneous communication when you see someone like Anwar and his facial expressions of emotions, for instance, and that grips a viewer in an entirely different manner than if you try to put down the very same thing in written or spoken words.
Joshua Oppenheimer
Maybe so, but it is also because the filmmaking method I employ is itself a kind of research. It is an excavation of how the past somehow is alive in these human beings.
Lars-Martin Sørensen
What you get from especially facial expressions as I see them is this duplicity. He says one thing but you can tell by the look on his face that it is a hollow statement. That he doesn’t believe…or the combination of the comments he makes in speech and the look at his face doubles up and becomes a redundant signal, and that works extremely well in 'The Act of Killing'.
Joshua Oppenheimer
That is something we really struggled for. Film is not a great medium for words, but it is an excellent medium for subtext, for dealing with what people say but don’t really believe, and they betray that in their face. The story is really told through Anwar’s subtext, through the doubt that he is letting slip through.
Fragments
Joshua Oppenheimer
In Indonesia, I am constantly making the point that the goal of this is not just to punish everybody who has done something wrong. The aim of justice is not retribution. Justice must primarily be a collective mechanism for returning atrocity to the realm of the forbidden.
Joshua Oppenheimer
In 'The Act of Killing' the characters justification of what they have done appears at first to be a symptom of lack of remorse, but on the contrary I think it is the opposite, it is a symptom of their humanity. If you don’t believe your own self-justification, the justification easily turns into celebration. So when we see killers celebrating mass-murder in Indonesia, we at first assume they feel no guilt; but on the contrary, I would argue, the celebration is symptom of their conscience. They are desperate to justify to themselves what they have done.