God Grant Me Respite From This Stupid Election

Respite, that is, in the form of two lengthy, European "streaming" serials -- "Babylon Berlin" and "Un Village Francais."

The first gives us a picture of Berlin during the Weimar years leading up to Hitler's ascension to chancellor.  We see chaos unfolding, and life-threatening struggles among many factions -- Hitler's Nazis, of course, but also brownshirts bitterly opposed to him, communists loyal to Stalin, communists loyal to Trotsky, militarists who want a revival of imperial Deutschland under the Kaiser, and the minions of vicious gangland figures.  And at the core, a beautiful, slow-unfolding romance between a police detective, scarred by his experiences in the trenches of WWI, who has been imported from Cologne to Berlin, and a young woman who splits her professional time between the Berlin Police Headquarters and a brothel that sits, not very discreetly, beneath the city's most popular and elegant dancehall/cabaret.

The second follows an ensemble of inhabitants of a French village that lies about halfway between Geneva and Marseilles -- Villeneuve -- from the day in 1940 that the Wehrmacht rolls in and from thence through the entire war.  Our focus is on a doctor who rather reluctantly becomes major of the town and his beautiful but faithless wife, the mayor's brother, a communist who takes up arms against the Germans, the brother's young son Gustave, the manager of a sawmill/concrete plant, his wife and his young mistress, who migrates into the Resistance, a sinister German functionary with an addiction to morphine, a police inspector of a certain age who falls in love with a Jewess who has been expelled from her position as headmistress of the town's elementary school, the endearing middle-aged man who is assigned to replace the headmistress, and a beautiful young teacher at the school who falls in love with a tall and handsome German sergeant.

The first production is German; the second is French; the creators/producers had nothing to do with one another.  And yet we can see the two stories as one story, separated in time by about ten years and in distance by less than 900 miles.  It is about a cataclysm in Germany that spread to become a cataclysm in France and, of course, further to the East, to the gates of Moscow, and how ordinary people were tested and ground up by that cataclysm.

This combined narrative disabuses us of the notion that we ourselves would have made the correct moral choices had we been Germans when Hitler was on the rise, or French people under occupation who had some choice to collaborate or not, to protect their Jewish friends and acquaintances or not.  Indeed in both countries, after the liberation and the defeat of Germany, there was a convenient re-writing of history on a scale that was massive and local at the same time, to exonerate ex post facto both the oppressors and those who chose to collaborate with them.

It might be a good moral exercise to blend the two character ensembles outlined above, all of the protagonists in the combined narrative that is, and imagine them standing at St. Peter's Gate.  Our charge would be to sort and rank them by the measures of courage and guilt, two sides of a coin.  We would find very few clear, un-nuanced cases, and we would walk away from the exercise feeling much more humble about our own standing in the world.