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Kafka, The Wannsee Conference, And Shadows and Fog
Kafka's protagonist of "The Metamorphosis," Gregor Samsa, perfectly embodies the totalitarian mindset in the sense that he is colonized by the desires of his employer, his family, and even the room in which he lives to the point that he can hardly think for himself. The room in which Samsa dwells is so small; the man becomes a virtual prisoner of its confines. Samsa turns into an insect seemingly as a result of the limiting pressures of his physical space and cramped social and emotional life. In fact, his life is so confining, he can only think of returning to the office, even after becoming transformed into a huge and hideous insect.
Over the course of the short story by Kafka, Gregor's own family rejects him after his physical alteration, despite the fact that Gregor has long been giving up his own life's pleasures and health to support his parents in their old age and to support his sister's musical and marriage prospects...
Gregor dwells in a kind of totalitarian urban landscape, where all he can think about is the daily grind of his life, and the only ideology that matters is routine -- an insect like existence that eventually utterly subsumes and captures his humanity as well as his form on a literal and metaphorical level.
The limiting nature of confining physical space and dialogue that renders the human mind and body into a totalitarian framework, however, is hardly limited to the totalitarian climate of Kafka's fictional works of literature. The 1984 film, "The Wannsee Conference," takes place in a similarly confined, though more pleasant and ambient space, where events take place over a highly concentrated time frame. The 'groupthink' mentality creates, over the course of the film, propelling mutual direction of common thought and action amongst the Nazi officers at the conference. This dangerous collective totalitarian climate changes not just one man's life and family,…
The film shows the discussions that caused the Nazi officers to arrive at the exact particulars of settling the 'final solution' of the so-called Jewish question or problem of living space in Europe, as well as of Jewish culture. At the conference depicted in the film, which actually took place, the 'hothouse' nature of the discussion of the officers, according to the apparent theory of the director of the film regarding totalitarianism, created the necessary 'freedom' for the Nazi officials at the conference to discuss the removal of Jews from every sphere of life of the German people and the expulsion of the Jews from the supposed righful European living space of the Ayran German people. Because everyone at the conference agreed, in totalitarian lockstep and mind that Jews were inferior, this horrifying decision became feasible to the Nazi's mindset.
Over the course of the film, the ability to be the most restrictive in terms of Jewish life becomes a kind of competition for the Nazi officers, as they compare who enacted legislation to prohibit Jews from owning canaries, with those who engage in the most bloody anti-Semitic rherotic. Before the viewers' eyes, with beautiful scenery in the background, the totalitarian mindset takes hold, and measures about the concept of the deportation, labor use, and extermination of the Jews.
The much earlier 1955 film "Night and Fog" enacts as a similar depiction of the totalitarian mindset after the fact. The film is a documentary of the Holocaust crafted by Alain Resnais. Less than a decade after the end of the war, it interposes archival clips from the concentration camps with denials of the camps' existence. Under totalitarianism, it suggests, even as obvious a truth as the Final Solution can be ignored, as Gregor Samsa ignored his limited life, and as the Nazi officials as a collective denied their individual humanity.
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