Sam (00:14)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we’re talking about the film A Hidden Life, which came out in 2019. It was written and directed by Terrence Malick. It’s the true story of conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer who was executed for refusing to fight for the Nazis during World War Two.

There was some additional reading. This was the book to which Terrence Malick acquired the rights to write this movie, and so I read it. It’s called Franz Jägerstätter: Letters and Writings from Prison, edited by Erna Putz and translated by Robert A. Krieg, which came out in 2009. I believe it was originally published in German in 1987, so it’s nice to have the opportunity to read it in English. The title from the film comes from the novel Middlemarch by George Eliot, and the quote is:

“For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

This is also the end card for the film. And it’s available on Disney Plus if you’d like to check it out. What did you think of this movie?

Maartje (01:17)
Boy, I had trouble making up my mind about this movie and what I thought of it. The first thing I’m gonna say: it’s very long. It’s three hours long. It’s very cinematic, which I like, except…

I don’t know what it is about this film. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t think I would necessarily watch it again. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, but it’s an interesting film. Franz Jägerstätter was a very religious man and I’m very unreligious, so some of the themes maybe didn’t appeal as much to me as they might to other people. And it’s just a kind of…

Almost the magic of the movie is in how little happens in it and the simple life that these people led, I guess. And yeah, I thought it was good-ish in a weird way. I have no idea what I’m going to rate it later. But we’ll see. How about you?

Sam (02:17)
One of the actors in the film, I believe the one who played Franz’s prison buddy, said that Terrence Malick doesn’t create scenes, he creates spaces. And that really resonated with me. It sounds pretty accurate — we’ve seen a couple of Terrence Malick movies now. The last one was The Thin Red Line, the newer one of course. And if you like his style of movie making, you will love this.

Nothing is rushed. There are tons of beautiful shots. And I’m not just talking about his decision to include a lot of nature in the movie, which he also did in The Thin Red Line, but also there are just some shots, like Franz is considering this momentous decision that he’s making, and then he leaves the doorway and the camera lingers on the doorway for a little bit. Like there are some really great shots in this movie. I was like, wow, this is really beautifully put together. And it took Terrence Malick quite some time to edit it, so I’m not surprised. He’s definitely someone who considers movie making to be an art. And I think that he did a good job of — though Franz was very religious and that was a huge component of why he resisted the Nazis — I don’t think this movie hits it too hard. I don’t think it’ll make you super uncomfortable if you’re not religious. And I think he really drew out the major themes of Franz’s life really well. In particular,

Franz and his wife had an extremely happy marriage. I think you see that depicted really well in the film, even in the scenes where they’re not speaking very much, just the way they are together — these silences are really effective. So I enjoyed the movie. I too found it a bit long. I got to around the two-hour mark and I checked how much time was left and I was like, Jesus Christ, Terrence. But it is a really lovely movie. It’s just a little on the long side for me, I think.

Maartje (03:54)
You said something that kind of prompted me to also want to say something about it. Well, two things actually. The first one being silence. I feel this movie is ruled by it, both in a literal sense and in the symbolic sense, where a lot of people don’t speak up for Franz, even though some of them probably would want to, but people are all very scared of being prosecuted in some way. And another thing you said is obviously the way the shots are filmed — it is very beautiful, and I noticed when I was watching it that the camera moves very little in this film. It’s all very static shots and the only thing that’s moving are the people and the nature and everything else, but not the camera. So there are no arching camera movements. And I wanna say one of the only moments where the camera moves is once Franz is imprisoned. And when he leaves his wife on the train, we follow her as she follows him to the end of the platform.

And I didn’t know there was barely any camera movement, and I don’t know if I’ve seen that this clearly before, so it’s very interesting the way he did it.

Sam (05:14)
Yeah, definitely. I agree. It’s definitely one of those movies that’s a bit ponderous. It takes its time. And I do like, as we’ve said before, I like when a World War Two movie takes a bit of a swing, goes out of its way to incorporate artistic elements. You know, we’ve seen a lot of war movies where it’s like, here is specifically a blow by blow of what happened in history, and there’s not a lot that the director adds to the story, like they don’t give it a lot more depth, and I feel like Terrence Malick is really good at that.

Maartje (05:42)
Yeah. And maybe like the James Jones books that you read where you just have to kind of surrender to the fact that not a lot is going on. And once you do, you start to appreciate the fact that not a lot is going on. And everything that happens to Franz is so gradual that it’s almost painful to watch it because you can see where it’s going, but he’s still holding out hope that he’s gonna be okay and that they are gonna be okay. And a lot of that is also, I guess, their unwavering faith in both God and each other, and I greatly admire having that kind of faith. But I also don’t understand it at all. I could never be that resolute in my convictions either. So it’s a good exercise for me to try and empathize and try and wonder what it’s like to feel that way.

Sam (06:37)
Yeah, definitely. Shall we get into the plot?

Maartje (06:40)
Let’s get into the plot.

The film opens with a black screen and we hear a bunch of sounds of nature for a while as we see the studio names and all the names of the people who worked on it. And then we hear our main character, Franz Jägerstätter, played by August Diehl, as he narrates: “I thought that we would build our nest high up in the trees, fly away like birds to the mountains.”

And after that kind of beautiful, visual way of speaking, we get to see some real footage of Hitler in a parade and we see his armies and we see people saluting him in the streets. And that is followed by a card that says: “The following story is based on true events. During World War Two, every Austrian soldier called up for duty was required to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler.”

Sam (07:41)
Yeah, very minimal opening, which I thought was nice. Sometimes we watch movies and there’s a whole bunch of opening cards and a whole bunch of closing cards, and this movie didn’t really need it. We just got the exact amount of information that we needed to have context.

Maartje (07:53)
Yes, and I don’t know if you listened to the credits, but the same nature sounds — at first in the credits you get score, and then afterwards it’s a good five minutes of birds whistling and trees rustling and all that. So the same nature sounds bookend the film, which I thought was nice.

Sam (08:11)
Yeah.

We find ourselves in Sankt Radegund in Austria in 1939. We get this long idyllic scene of farm life in the Austrian mountains where Franz lives with his wife Franziska, nicknamed Fanny, played by Valerie Pachner, and their three daughters. They’re part of this little religious, tight-knit community. You can tell not a lot happens there. Their days are devoted to prayer and to farm work and to family.

Maartje (08:36)
I loved the hide and seek thing that they do. That was such a cute little scene where you could just see the kind of man that he is and the family man that he is, and the type of family that they are with all three girls. And I wonder if Sankt Radegund in this film was also meant to be this kind of almost heaven, in a way. It’s very beautiful, it’s very quiet, everybody’s smiling and happy and friendly with each other and there’s not a care in the world, so it’s quite a long scene as well. You think, where’s this going if you don’t know anything about it? And you’re like, wait, isn’t there supposed to be a war on?

Sam (09:18)
Yeah, exactly. Big contrast to what Franz goes through later for sure.

I have some biographical information on Franz, which came from the compilation of letters that I read. There was a quite nice introduction that had a lot of information about him and about the Catholic Church at the time. So he was born in 1907 in the very same village where most of the film takes place, on the northwestern edge of Austria, which makes him thirty-two when the events of this film kick off. He was a bit of a troublemaker in his youth. He actually had a child out of wedlock in 1933, which, you know, was a little scandalous in their remote village at that time. He became a changed man when he married Franziska in 1936. And everyone said that about him, that he became a much more devout Catholic, he became a family man, they had three daughters together, and they frequently went to mass, they were very devout, and by all accounts they had a very happy marriage. Notably, Franz voted no in the Anschluss referendum in 1938. So when there was the big referendum about whether or not Austria would become a part of Germany, he voted no. He was the only one in his village to do so. And ultimately, when they sent in the tally of votes, his vote was not recorded because the other villagers feared retribution.

And in January of 1938, he had this dream about a train that is featured in this movie, which deepened his aversion to Nazism. And essentially the dream was: this big dark train comes around the corner and there’s all these kids running towards it. And then he hears this voice that tells him, “This train is going to hell.” And he viewed that as his conscience, that was God speaking to him. And he was already anti-Nazi before this, but he became even more convinced in his beliefs that this was going nowhere good.

Maartje (10:59)
When you see it in a movie later, I also immediately thought, wait, is this meant to be the train that goes to the concentration camps? And obviously when it’s in a dream I don’t believe in premonitions or anything, but in the movie they make it very clear that that’s what it’s meant to be.

Sam (11:18)
Yeah, he definitely viewed it as Nazism is this force that is pulling people away from their faith, that is pulling them away from being Austrian Catholics, from doing the right thing.

Maartje (11:31)
Yeah.

It seems like nothing can touch this almost dreamlike existence that he has. As I said before, you’re like, where’s the war exactly? But then the war does creep in. Because we see Fanny looking up as she hears planes fly overhead, and soon Franz is sent to basic training in Enns in 1940. And I thought it was really effective to only let us hear the planes and not let us see them. Obviously it would have also been cheaper to film, but I like that we cannot see them but we can hear them. You know exactly what it is and I like that.

Sam (12:08)
Yeah, exactly. It’s far away but right on their doorstep at the same time.

Maartje (12:12)
Yes.

Sam (12:12)
We get a bunch of Franz’s experiences while he’s away in basic training, and as well through Fanny’s experiences through the letters that they write to each other. And the letters in the book are really lovely. You can just tell how much they care about each other. She’s always asking him if she can send him food and asking him if he’ll be able to get a leave soon if he can come home, and he’s always saying that he misses her and asking about the kids. It’s really sweet. And while Franz is away at his training, he tells Fanny about his new friend that he met there called Waldland, played by Franz Rogowski. And we’ll see him again later. He’s this guy who’s always smiling. And Franz, however, he doesn’t look too pleased to be training how to kill. You can tell that when they’re doing bayonet training and that kind of thing, he’s kind of like, I don’t know about this. And they see a film reel of German victory and destruction, and Franz wonders:

“What’s happened to our country?”

Maartje (13:05)
I do like this way of narrating, by the way, where it’s just excerpts from the letters and it’s really effective with the images that we’re seeing and it’s really well done. Waldland is an interesting character to me because he almost seems kind of detached from reality in a way. Like he’s super smiley and dancing and singing and laughing and I’m like… my boy, there’s nothing to be smiling about.

Sam (13:33)
Yeah. And another thing too that you don’t get, I think, as much of a sense of in the movie, but in real life, Franz’s father had died in World War One. And Franz himself was not a pacifist. Like he would have been happy, I think, to take up arms to defend his homeland of Austria, for example, but he didn’t like the idea of going into other countries. He thought, you know, it’d be okay if we were defending ourselves, but that’s clearly not what’s happening here.

Maartje (13:58)
I mean, the only other story about a conscientious objector we’ve covered is Desmond Doss’s, and that’s a very different kind of feel to it. Because you feel in this movie, at least for me, it feels like he specifically objects to swearing loyalty to Hitler, who’s evil, and they do say so in this movie. And it doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s the killing so much that is what’s making him feel this way, it’s more like the wrongdoing.

Sam (14:29)
Yeah, and Franz articulated very clearly what his views were. At the back of the compilation of letters that I read were a whole bunch of essays that he wrote when he was in prison. And he very clearly delineated his thought process. You can tell that he really thought about this. And it’s especially impressive because he was not a very educated man. He went to school for, you know, the modern-day equivalent of elementary school, and then he left. He worked at a factory for a little bit and then he came back to work on the farm. So it’s pretty impressive that this is a man who obviously thinks things through really deeply, and he had the courage of his convictions because he had really taken the time to consider what he should do and what would be the consequences to him and his eternal soul if he didn’t.

Maartje (15:19)
While Franz is away, Fanny’s sister Resi, played by Maria Simon, helps her on the farm, and the two of them learn that Franz has capitulated and that some farmers are being sent home from training because they are needed to produce food for everyone. And Fanny hopes that Franz will return. We see her tough it out through the winter in the frickin’ snow. And then Franz does eventually return and it’s a sweet reunion. And I just really like the character of Resi because she is in such different circumstances than Fanny, but she’s so calm and supportive of her sister. And I don’t think we see a lot of sisters in movies, so I like this relationship quite a bit.

Sam (16:08)
Yeah. And in the letters that I read, I didn’t get the impression that her sister was actually around too much in real life, but I enjoyed the decision to include another female character. And as we will see later, she’s just there to support her sister, so she becomes very upset when she perceives that Franz is making her sister upset. And yeah, I enjoyed that relationship, as you said. It was something we don’t get to see that much in these war movies that we watch.

Maartje (16:34)
No.

By the way, the Franz and Fanny relationship in this movie to me is both — there’s so much yearning, but at the same time it’s so sweet and innocent. And I really liked how that was portrayed.

Sam (16:49)
Yeah, me too.

The war is not over as quickly as they all hoped, and people are getting sent to war more and more often, and soldiers are seen populating the pub in their village. After France capitulates, I think Franz was really hoping that he would not end up being called up, and so they’re in this era where there’s a span of a couple of years where he’s working on the farm and just hoping and praying that the war will be over and that he won’t have to make any permanent decisions. The mayor, Karl Mayrhofer, defends Hitler and spouts hateful and antisemitic nonsense in the town square, and Müller, played by Johannes Krisch, who’s a friend of Franz, warns Franz of what’s coming.

Maartje (17:29)
I like that we get to see sort of peripheral characters in this movie quite a bit and some of them have really small roles, like this friend that kind of fears for his family. I’m not sure if that means he’s Jewish, but I think so. And that’s another thing I like about this movie — not everything is over-explained like some more mainstream movies are. You kind of have to read between the lines sometimes. And I like that about this movie.

Sam (18:00)
Yeah, me too.

Maartje (18:01)
Notably also the German is not translated, nor is the Italian that we get to hear a little bit later. And that was, I think, a purposeful choice by Malick to not leave us in the dark, but the acting and the physicality of these people speaking in German and Italian later is so obviously telling the story that you don’t need to hear what they are saying exactly. And I think it’s a really smart choice. Obviously Franz and Fanny would have been speaking German, except for the movie they speak in English. It works really well.

Sam (18:38)
Yes. And it’s funny — you watched the movie before me and you had messaged me, “they don’t subtitle the German,” and I was like, is the whole movie in German? That’s gonna be a struggle. But no, the characters who are foregrounded speak in English, but everyone around them speaks in German.

Maartje (18:48)
Mm-hmm.

And even some of them that are foregrounded in some scenes will still be speaking German in other scenes. So I like that we get — it’s pick and choose to see what serves the story, and I think it’s a masterclass in storytelling, this movie.

Sam (19:11)
It really keeps us tightly focused on the story components that matter.

Maartje (19:15)
Yes. It’s funny because when I was watching it, I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but now that it’s behind me I get to appreciate the storytelling of it and the making of it more than maybe the story itself almost.

Franz obviously sees the danger ahead and he goes to talk to his priest, Ferdinand Fürthauer, played by Tobias Moretti. And he tells him that he can’t take up arms if he’s called up. He’s like, I can’t do it, I can’t do it. And this is when we learn that he’s a conscientious objector. And this priest, you can see him being very uncomfortable. And he asks Franz to consider what danger he would put his family in, and he’s also telling him, look, you doing this won’t serve anybody. And then he does say, but I will talk to the bishop later because he’s a wiser man than I. And not much later in the film we see Franz visit this bishop. The name of the bishop is Josef Fleischer, played by Michael Nyqvist, and who tells him very plainly that he has a duty to the fatherland. And we learn that the church doesn’t hold very much influence, and we also get a sense that the church is kind of afraid to go against the grain with the Germans.

Sam (20:39)
Yeah, Franz said at the time that he believed that the bishop was afraid that he was a spy, hence his toeing the party line. And the Nazis had passed anti-Catholic legislation that led them to terminate Catholic newspapers and Catholic education, and they jailed a number of priests. Even high-ranking church officials like bishops were replaced if they spoke out against the party. The Cardinal of Austria had officially endorsed the Anschluss and ordered Austrian churches to fly the Nazi flag and to pray for Hitler,

Maartje (20:45)
Yeah.

Sam (21:06)
hoping to protect Catholic institutions. And so where the Catholic Church opposed Nazism in World War Two was lukewarm at best, where they did it at all. And this was something that the church had to reckon with after the war.

Maartje (21:19)
I feel like we don’t get a lot of stories focused on the Catholic faith and the anti-Catholic legislation. And that’s probably because what happened to the Jews was so much worse. But I don’t know if I knew about it that there was anti-Catholic legislation happening. Did you?

Sam (21:38)
Yeah, and it was especially — I mean, obviously there were Catholics in Germany, but Austria was a heavily Catholic country at the time, so it was definitely more felt in that country than it was in Germany. And there were quite a lot of people who resented the Nazi sentiment towards the church, but as you mentioned at the beginning, a lot of them were afraid to say anything about it.

Maartje (21:59)
Despite the rather disappointing visit with the bishop, Franz begins to resist the war more and more. And we see that as he refuses to donate to the Nazi party, and then the mayor shows up and is like, well, I heard you, you won’t donate, and also you won’t accept any state benefits that you could have had. And this is just the start of the villagers turning on him and his family, and it’s very gradual, but it’s like the writing’s on the wall. You can see it happening even before this. It’s not very good. And not much later the mayor in a heated conversation with him labels Franz a traitor and he says, “They are the enemy. You are worse. You are a traitor.”

Sam (22:47)
Yeah. And I think before the actual outbreak of war there were a lot more Austrians who were perhaps ambivalent about Nazism, but once the war started there was this sense that if you resisted, if you worked in a factory and you made bad weaponry on purpose, or if you refused to go to war when you were called, then you were putting other German-speaking Austrian people at risk. And so people kind of got alongside because they started to feel like, well, we’re sending our guys and so now we have to support this.

Maartje (23:21)
Yeah. Like they had no choice. And there’s always a choice, but it was a difficult one, for sure, in World War Two.

Sam (23:27)
I like how the next note simply says “imagery of Hitler’s summer vacation TM.”

Maartje (23:33)
It’s imagery of Hitler. I’m sure most people have seen it. It’s at his summer retreat. And we are briefly reminded that Hitler had a place in the mountains as well, and he was human — and you see him like talking to kids and playing with kids and doing a little dance and being silly, and we are kind of reminded that he is human too.

Sam (23:53)
Yeah, it’s an interesting contrast to Franz and his family, because we know that Franz is a good person and Hitler is very much not. But obviously the way that Hitler presents himself to the people in his immediate circle, he is viewed in a certain way.

Maartje (24:10)
I’m sure that people whom we deem evil never think they are evil themselves.

Sam (24:15)
Well… yeah, that’s the thing.

Franz gets the letter that he dreads. He is called to go to war. He gets conscripted. Initially his wife suggests that he goes to hide in the woods, but he doesn’t. He feels very strongly that he needs to make his refusal known. So he goes to where he’s supposed to enlist. He immediately gets himself arrested for refusing to pledge his loyalty and refusing to serve. And from then on, everyone tries to convince him that his protests are not going to help anyone. If you don’t go, someone else will go. No one will ever hear about them. These are the people that are his jailers, right? Like they’re trying to get him to change his mind because they’re like, there’s no point in you resisting. It’s not gonna do anything, you’re just one guy.

Maartje (24:59)
Yes. And the captain that’s trying to convince him to change his mind also questions his innocence because he’s like, you’re in here and you’re shining all these officers’ shoes. Are you not also still contributing? Are you not also guilty? So it’s an interesting exercise of thought for Franz I guess, but he cannot be persuaded to change his mind.

Sam (25:22)
Yeah. And there was a thing in Catholicism at the time where it was like if you don’t follow your secular leaders, then that’s a sin. And so people were trying to tell him, well, you know, the church wants you to do your duty to the fatherland, so why are you going against what the church has to say? But obviously his faith went much deeper than that.

Maartje (25:43)
On 4 May 1943, Franz arrives at the Tegel prison in Berlin where conditions are much harsher. And he has one particular guard who’s making his life very difficult, like there’s a chair in his little cell and he’s been told to go sit on it and then the guard will move the chair as he’s sitting down so he’s falling over, and then later on he gets abused even worse. And also getting a little harsher are the villagers back home to Fanny, because she’s being basically shunned and ostracized. And after a while she’s not even welcome in her own church anymore, and the children are also being bullied and stuff is being thrown at them. And it gets so bad that no one wants to work on their land anymore. Her sister still helps, thankfully. And a former friend steals from her land like he owns it, and it’s all very horrible. Yet small acts of kindness are also happening in the film, like some people are still helping her, but no one is speaking up for her, which is another bit of silence that we get — even the ones that are still trying to help her do so in silence.

Sam (27:00)
Yeah, and one of the things I found sort of lovely about their letters to each other is that neither Franz nor Fanny mentioned their difficulties when they were writing to each other. He wasn’t telling her that he was being routinely beaten, even though other people who were imprisoned in that jail said the treatment was quite harsh. She in turn was not telling him the extent of the social stigma that she was facing. And it seems like they were trying to protect each other. She didn’t want him to feel guilty.

Maartje (27:27)
That is very sweet, although I do wonder if you have to carry all of that by yourself, that’s gonna make your life so hard.

Sam (27:35)
Fanny and her father go to Salzburg to try to find out more about Franz’s circumstances. Obviously she would like to visit him, but they fail to get any further information. And her father says to her something that I thought was the epitome of everything that Franz is and believes, which is: “Better to suffer injustice than to do it.”

Maartje (27:56)
Yes, I love this quote. I thought it was such a humble thing to say. To imagine Franz and his convictions and being like, well, I’m not gonna save myself because I believe so firmly that this is wrong, so I’m gonna stand my ground. And I just — I would never be strong enough to keep doing that.

Sam (28:21)
It’s quite nice in the letter collection too because when she would write to Franz, his mother and her father would write little postscripts. So you kind of got a sense of what they were like too. And her father was always coming by the farm to help out with stuff in Franz’s absence. So they did have this small but really important support network.

Maartje (28:41)
I do love her father.

Franz’s court-appointed attorney, a man named Feldmann, played by Alexander Fehling, tries to convince him that he should just accept to work in a hospital as an orderly instead of fighting in an army, but he still refuses, as even medical staff must swear an oath to Hitler and he doesn’t want to do it. He’s treated worse and worse. This prison is terrible, and there’s even another prisoner who’s kind of taunting him, saying, is this your God? Is this what your God does? And almost makes fun of him for his faith. And Fanny is starting to question God in the narration. She’s like, why have you created us? Are you still here? Where are you? So I wonder if she thinks that God has abandoned them at this point.

Sam (29:33)
In real life, Franz was not offered the opportunity to serve in the medical corps, per Fanny’s recollections. She believed that the Nazis were too proud to allow him the opportunity to defy them and live.

Maartje (29:44)
Yeah, I wonder why they changed that, because that was the first thing I read, that he was never given a choice to do nonviolent work. And I wonder why the movie changed that.

Sam (29:57)
Yeah, I guess he probably wouldn’t have changed his mind anyway. You know, as they depicted in the movie, he would still have to swear an oath to Hitler, and he was very much against doing that. But I do think it’s an interesting contrast to Desmond Doss, who we covered when we talked about Hacksaw Ridge, wherein first of all, Desmond volunteered for the army, whereas Franz was conscripted, and then Desmond was allowed to become a medic. Of course he still also faced significant stigma, but just a little bit of a different situation here.

Maartje (30:28)
Yeah, and Desmond really did want to help. Not all is bad in the Tegel prison. It’s hard to imagine, but there’s a little light in there because Waldland is also in the prison and he’s kind of still his chipper self.

He tells Franz about the executioner that they all have kind of heard of. He’s this man in the top hat. And in the next few shots as he’s telling him about it, we see this executioner in the courtyard of the prison following Franz around a bit and just walking there, and I’m like, is this Franz imagining this man there, or was he really there? Like I don’t think we’ll ever find out.

But they also have a weird conversation about what will happen once they’re being decapitated, and Waldland has some ideas about that, and they almost lost me here in this part of the movie. I was like, really? Do we need this?

Waldland also imagines what it would be like if he had a wife, and we see Fanny and the children perhaps in happier times or in real time. We don’t really know, it doesn’t get told, but they’re like in an orchard and it’s all beautiful still. I like that they keep reminding us of this heaven that is their little hometown. That’s like the ultimate good place to go back to.

Sam (31:49)
Yeah, and it could even be Franz hoping that they’re happy without him, you know.

Maartje (31:56)
Mm-hmm.

Sam (31:57)
This part of the movie did make me think of the fact that Terrence Malick made a bunch of movies where he didn’t use a script, and then he thought about doing it in this movie and it didn’t really work. And I laughed because when I was reading his explanation of it about why you need a script, I was like, Terrence, obviously you need a script. You don’t have to explain why you need a script. You should explain why you thought you didn’t need a script. But anyway, this part of the movie really made me be like, hmm, is this improv? Did they go off the rails here? I don’t know.

Maartje (32:24)
It did feel like it. It’s like this man just dreaming up what it’s like to be decapitated. Like, okay.

Sam (32:33)
Yeah. Franz is taken to the Reich military tribunal in July of 1943. He is convicted and sentenced to death. And in the letters that he wrote home, he doesn’t actually say that this is his final sentence because technically on the day of his execution they have to confirm the sentence, but it’s obviously confirmed, you know. But he kind of presents it to his wife as like, well, it’s not the final decision, they have to confirm it, that kind of thing. And just the way that he tries to protect her is, man, it gets you. But yeah, so the judge takes him aside and asks him once again why he’s doing what he’s doing and tells him that it won’t make a difference. And then it’s almost like some of these people were fine with their own actions until they saw someone else doing the right thing. And then they get resentful because that makes them have to do some introspection. And so the judge asks Franz if he judges him, which Franz denies. And then back in prison awaiting his execution, he has another chance to sign the oath, saying that he will serve, but he decides that he’s not going to do that.

Maartje (33:41)
I almost wonder — they tried to convince him about seven or eight times to change his mind. I’m trying to figure out why they would want him to change his mind so badly.

Sam (33:54)
I think they might view it as: he defied us, and if we can make him serve in the army we can show everyone that you don’t defy us, that we always win in the end and there’s no point. Yeah. There’s a line in the movie which comes directly from Franz’s letters when he was writing to his wife, and he says something like, “Though I am writing with my hands chained, it is far better than if my will was chained.” And I quite liked that.

Maartje (34:04)
Yeah, we win, yeah.

There’s also a conversation he has with his, I think it’s his solicitor, where the man says, “Look, just change your mind, I’m sure it’ll overturn the sentencing,” and he says, “And then you’ll be free,” and then Franz says, “But I’m already free.” So that’s another mention I guess to being not physically free, but at least free to stand by your convictions and to defy what you think is evil. And yeah. It’s really quite moving, this whole thing.

Sam (34:54)
Yeah.

And now that he’s made his decision, his conscience is clear. He’s not wrestling with it anymore. He’s doing the right thing and come what may, kind of thing. The essays that he wrote while he was in prison really tell you a lot about his conviction that if you suffer and struggle here on earth, then you will correspondingly get even more joy in the afterlife.

Maartje (35:00)
Yes.

Sam (35:19)
And so in his mind he’s like, I’m gonna struggle for a little while, but then I will live forever in heaven. And that is a huge core component of his belief.

Maartje (35:25)
Mm.

In the movie, and I doubt in real life, he never has a crisis of faith at all, I don’t think. Does he in the letters? Does he ever express any…

Sam (35:37)
No.

Maartje (35:37)
Wow. Immense.

Fanny hears that he’s being sentenced to death and she goes to the prison and she’s joined by the priest, their local priest, and they try to persuade Franz to sign the oath. Not really that convincingly — at least Fanny doesn’t put a whole lot of effort into it. And it becomes clear why, because she ultimately just supports him through whatever his choice is, and she says that she loves him and that she will support him. And she encourages him to do what he thinks is right, and a surprise to no one is that he doesn’t sign the oath.

Sam (36:18)
Yeah. And man, so tough on real-life Fanny, because she doesn’t want this for him. And she writes in one of her letters that she wishes he would change his decision. And she also asks his forgiveness for wishing that. She’s like, I’m sorry, I’m not strong enough to not wish that. But at the same time, she knew what kind of man he was and she wanted him to do what was right and what he felt was right.

Maartje (36:46)
I think they even have a conversation before he leaves for war where she asks him, “Well, to work in a hospital wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” And then he’s just quiet, he doesn’t reply to that specifically. And that’s again the silence that’s so strong. Because I also feel like he doesn’t want to hurt her, and I think he knows what it’ll do to her if he stands by his word. And so his silence is just his way of not hurting her.

Sam (37:17)
Yeah.

And I believe in real life, after he gets arrested, Fanny gets to visit him once, a few weeks before the execution, and they only get to visit for twenty minutes.

Maartje (37:28)
Man, this poor woman. It’s so sad.

Sam (37:30)
Yeah.

And his kids are pretty young, right? Like they’re all under the age of six at this point. And so they don’t really understand what’s going on. And she’s telling him, the kids asked me to leave the door unlocked at night so that when you come home you’re able to get in, and that kind of stuff. And man, that’s just gotta be tough. You have three young kids and there’s no way you can explain to them the situation of this complexity, right?

On 9 August 1943, Franz is executed. They have this super long drawn-out scene in the movie where he’s sitting on a bench outside with two other guys who are also going to be executed, and they take them in one after the other. But you don’t get any gory violence or anything like that. But you know that he’s being taken to the guillotine. And back in Sankt Radegund, life and his family go on. You know, you’re left with: was everyone right? Is the world no different because of what he did?

Maartje (38:32)
Yeah, and I have no answer to that. I just — the scene before his execution on the bench, like you said, he’s with Waldland, the smiling prisoner who’s sitting next to him and they like kiss each other on the cheek and it’s a goodbye and it’s so sad. Right before they get executed, they get another chance to sign the oath and to say, “Look, I apologize, I wanna not die today.” Which is just such a — it’s almost cruel of the Germans to keep offering them that.

Sam (39:05)
Yeah, because if he agreed to sign the oath at the last minute, that would just be something that he would probably regret for the rest of his life. It would just cause his faith to crumble, you know, he would totally turn his back on everything that he believed in.

Maartje (39:19)
Yeah, they would effectively kill the man that he was. It’s just another, less literal way of killing someone, I guess.

Sam (39:27)
Yeah. So Franz Jägerstätter’s story came back to light in the 1960s when an American sociologist named Gordon Zahn, who was researching a book about German Catholics during World War Two, came across Franz’s story in his research. He ultimately wrote a book called In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter.

This drew the attention of the Catholic Church, and in particular Archbishop Thomas Roberts, who brought up Franz’s story at Vatican II, which took place between 1962 and 1965. And as Jim Forrest describes it in the foreword to the compilation of Franz’s letters that I read: “How is it possible that a ‘man of no importance’ could have possessed a moral clarity absent from those who were supposed to provide spiritual leadership to Austrian and German Catholics? Had any bishops expressed the view that Hitler’s wars were unjust? Answer: not one.”

And so this became a massive topic of conversation at Vatican II, and one of the sweeping changes that the church made in that period was to declare that every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and humanity which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation. And they also called on states to make provision for conscientious objectors in the future.

And Franz himself was beatified, which is a step on the path to canonization, in 2007 at a ceremony that his wife and children attended, and Fanny passed away at the age of a hundred in 2013.

Maartje (40:50)
Wow, she lived a long life. Hmm. Must be all that mountain air in Austria. Can you explain to me what is Vatican II, and also what does it mean to be beatified and to be canonized? I don’t know what any of this means.

Sam (41:04)
So Vatican II was like a big council that the Catholic Church held in order to renew and update a lot of the tenets of Catholicism. So they made a bunch of changes to what had historically been the church’s various tenets at the time. So it was a big shakeup.

Maartje (41:24)
Alright, how about beatification and canonization?

Sam (41:28)
So canonization is when you make someone a saint. In order to be made a saint, the Catholic Church declared him a martyr and then they beatified him, and then the next step is that he will ultimately become a saint at some point.

Maartje (41:31)
[laughs] Okay. Well maybe I’ll leave it in, just edit this a bit, and then people who are filthy heathens like me will know what it means.

Sam (41:54)
Perfect.

Maartje (41:55)
I’m kidding! I respect you all very much. I just don’t know anything.

And that’s the end of the movie. But you did have some extra notes. So please tell me.

Sam (42:14)
So let’s talk about Austria. When the war started in Austria, most people viewed opposition to the Nazi regime as traitorous. 1.2 million Austrian men were conscripted into the German army. And those who did resist, though there weren’t tons of them, they were out there — they were often those with specific beliefs, like communists and Catholics. And this includes a group of communists working against the Germans from within the Wehrmacht. And ultimately this plot was uncovered and thirteen of them were executed.

Maartje (42:43)
I was gonna quickly mention that the Anschluss and the referendum — we talked about that in our episode about the White Stallions, I believe. The referendum. It was very difficult to vote no to the referendum, and even the referendum card was made to be misleading, and the option to vote yes was much more prominent on the card than the option to vote no. So this whole thing about people being against it — I wonder how many were secretly against the Nazi regime? I wonder how many silently sat there and were like resentful that the Anschluss happened. I guess like Captain Von Trapp, there were a few people, but we don’t know a lot about them.

Sam (43:34)
Yeah. It was very different from the other countries that the Germans occupied, right? Like if you’re from Czechoslovakia or Poland or those places, you didn’t feel any cultural or linguistic connection to Germany the way that people in Austria did.

Maartje (43:48)
True. And they also spoke the same language. At least a version of it.

Sam (43:53)
Yeah. And there was, of course, heroic Jewish resistance in Austria, which we should mention first and foremost. There’s an example that I read of a man named Aron Menczer who stayed in Vienna long after it was safe for Jewish people to be in Vienna to organize safe passage for Jewish children to Palestine. He ended up being deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942. He was one of only two people who was allowed to go into the isolation unit where children were being kept because they were trying to prevent the spread of disease. And the children’s mothers weren’t allowed to go in. None of the women were allowed to go in. And so when these 1,200 children were sent to Auschwitz in October of 1943, he was worried that they would be frightened because no one that they knew was going with them. And so he elected to go to Auschwitz with them and ultimately went with them to the gas chamber.

Maartje (44:48)
I feel like I’ve heard this story before because it’s such a horrible, horrible example of what the Germans did to Jewish children too.

Sam (44:58)
Maria Stromberger was another Austrian resister who became known as the Angel of Auschwitz. She was a nurse who had heard rumours about what was going on in the occupied territories in the concentration camps. So she had herself transferred to an infectious diseases station in occupied Poland. And there she began to help prisoners. So she helped the resistance inside the camp because she would smuggle in information and even explosives and weaponry from the Polish resistance on the outside. She would also pass on information and evidence of what was happening in the camp to the Polish resistance on the outside. And Maria survived the war, but she later wrote, “What I did was human duty and sadly only a drop in the ocean.”

Maartje (45:41)
Man, people like that — I just, they are so brave. And yet all they see is that they had to do it. Like it’s only right that they do it.

Sam (45:53)
Yeah.

And some Austrian officers in the Wehrmacht at war’s end disobeyed illegal orders that came down at the last minute, things that would have resulted in greater loss of life that they viewed as pointless. And they attempted to surrender cities without a fight to the Allies, including Vienna. I believe specifically with regards to Vienna, the plot to surrender the city was uncovered by the Nazis super late in the war, like April 1945. The Nazis found out that these Austrian officers were trying to secretly negotiate with the Allies, and so some of these officers were executed. Even though they did not resist participating in the war, they did ultimately at the end try to cut down on unnecessary loss of life.

Maartje (46:38)
Expedite its end. Is that the word? I love that word.

Sam (46:40)
Yes. It’s a good one.

Maartje (46:43)
Thank you for telling me a little bit more about Austria.

Sam (46:47)
I think it’s important that we say these people’s names. You know, we remember Adolf Hitler and we remember Göring and Goebbels and Himmler and all these people, but there were also people who decided to do the right thing at great personal risk.

Maartje (47:00)
Exactly. And not all of them get a movie made about their lives.

Sam (47:04)
Yeah.

Maartje (47:05)
So we need to rate this movie. But before we do, I would like to remind you that you can follow us wherever you get your podcast and rate us, or you can send this episode to a friend.

Sam (47:17)
Oof.

Maartje (47:18)
I know. This is a tough one.

So if you send this to a friend you get to visit Sankt Radegund and live happily ever after in the mountains.

Sam (47:28)
Yeah.

Maartje (47:28)
I guess that brings us to the actual rating.

Okay, we’re gonna rate this movie however many “use a damn script, Terrence” out of tens we would give it. So Sam, you can go first because I’m nervous.

Sam (47:42)
I will rate this movie 7.3 “use a damn script, Terences” out of 10. There’s so much beautiful cinematography in it. It’s so carefully constructed. As we mentioned at the beginning, you really have to let it happen to you. And I fully acknowledge that I can be an impatient movie watcher, so to me, it started to drag a little bit at the end. I did feel like it was too long.

But that said, I am not a filmmaker, so maybe it needed to be that long to tell the story that needed to be told. I thought the music was really lovely, kind of understated, but it really fit in with these beautiful surroundings that we’re seeing. I love the contrast of Franz’s life in the camp — and even when he’s imprisoned, he’s still making note of the grass. We can hear the birds singing, the sun shining down. This is so important to him, this connection that he has with nature and with the land.

And the two main actors absolutely killed it. I mean, I think that Franz and Fanny would probably be happy with their depictions in this movie. And I had read that the person who edited the compilation of letters actually knew Franziska later in life, and she also thought that the two main actors really depicted their relationship in a way that was familiar to her and did a really good job. So yeah, what about you?

Maartje (48:55)
I will rate this movie… probably 7 “use a damn script, Terences” out of 10. I liked it once I surrendered to it. Like you said, you do have to kind of accept that it’s gonna be a quiet movie and a slow one.

Sam (49:04)
Yeah.

Maartje (49:16)
And that not a lot is going to happen. But it’s a great movie about the human condition, I think, in a way we don’t get very many of. And I was excited to watch it when I learned it was a Terrence Malick movie. I don’t think it’s as good as The Thin Red Line, which is a little bit more effective than this one. But it’s an important story to learn and I’d never heard of it before, so that’s good.

Another new one. And there’s a lot of beautiful imagery in it and also symbolic imagery, like we see a lot of windows with lights shining through, which reminded me vaguely of Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. At the very end you also get to see a window as she’s walking out to be executed and she sees the sunshine, or she talks about the sun, something like that. And it felt vaguely reminiscent of that to me.

Sam (50:06)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Maartje (50:21)
I don’t know, the acting was great. We’ve seen August Diehl in other stuff as an evil Nazi — like he’s in Inglourious Basterds, he’s in a bunch of stuff. So it’s nice to see him on the other side of things for once. And I just kind of enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to once I surrendered to it. So I would recommend it to people but I don’t think I’ll be watching it again anytime soon.

Sam (50:50)
Yeah, he really has one of those faces. But I guess if you’re a German actor, it’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because you get a lot of work because a lot of people make World War Two movies. But the bad thing is that usually you will be playing a Nazi.

Maartje (51:04)
He’s in a lot of other ones that we could watch. There’s at least two more I found that we haven’t seen with him in it about World War II. So if we need some more August Diehl, we can definitely watch it.

Sam (51:17)
And we should say: in a world full of resentful bishops and nihilistic Nazis, be a Franz Jägerstätter.

Maartje (51:24)
Exactly. That’s something you should do for sure. I wish I had some of that conviction. I don’t think I would fare very well if I was in a war type of situation, but I try to do what’s right and what I believe in. So hopefully that comes across.

Anyway, are you reading anything?

Sam (51:47)
Yep, I’m reading American Prometheus, which is the book upon which the Oppenheimer movie is based. It’s by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It’s super long, so I’m 340 pages in but I’m not anywhere close to the end. So we persist.

Maartje (52:03)
Are you enjoying it? Or is it more like, god, why is it so long?

Sam (52:08)
No, it is interesting. And I found when I read the Alan Turing biography it was quite mathy — the guy who wrote that biography was a math professor, so that makes sense. And this one is not going out of its way to try and make me learn physics, which I appreciate.

Maartje (52:23)
Ha ha ha.

Talk to me about heavy water, Sam.

Sam (52:27)
No idea, couldn’t tell ya.

Maartje (52:28)
So yeah, that should also give you an idea of what we’ll be eventually covering on this podcast.

Sam (52:34)
Yes. Are you reading anything?

Maartje (52:35)
Not anything new. I realised that I talked about the same book twice in two different episodes. So I have a bunch of books in my Kindle and a whole bunch of books just lying around, but none of them are currently being read. I just have not got the brain space to read.

Sam (52:54)
It’s fine.

It’s hot.

Maartje (52:55)
I know, it’s been like three weeks of sweltering heat. I would like to thank you for listening to yet another episode of Rosie the Reviewer. You can follow us wherever you get your podcast and rate us five stars. You can send this episode to a friend. You can follow us on Instagram at @rosiethereviewerpodcast. Or you can visit our website, rosiethereviewer.com, and rate this movie alongside with us. And we’ll see you next week. Bye bye.

Sam (53:22)
Bye.