Moving from the role of the victimizer to the role of the victim, one can trace a similar pattern. The victim in the Nazisploitation films of the 1970s motivated others to action focusing on a character whose mistreatment spurred rebellion, escape and even murderous retribution. This character is often a female prisoner who has been tortured through both sex and science, leaving her broken, scarred and slowly dying. For those slow to defend themselves, the victim offers a cautionary tale, an example of the fate that awaits them should they fail to act. An interesting example of the victim character in the cycle of films in the 1970s is Lucia Atheron (Charlotte Rampling) in The Night Porter.23 Lucia is a concentration camp survivor who, thirteen years after the war has ended, encounters her former Nazi tormentor,
‘Max’ (Dirk Bogarde). Max hides in Vienna where he makes his living as an unassuming night porter at a hotel where Lucia and her American husband are staying. As Max and Lucia encounter one another, they replay their previous relationship. While in the camp, Max was Lucia’s protector and tormenter, her lover and her rapist.
He dominated her sadistically yet could not suppress her control over him, creating a relationship of dominance and control that functioned from both perspectives. When the two meet in Vienna, they fall into the same sadomasochistic pattern, with the critical exception that this time Lucia enters into this relationship willingly. The relationship had both repulsed her and attracted her to Max, and is tightly bound up with her survival of the war. In many ways she echoes some of the other prisoner characters who worked in Nazi brothels to survive.
The key difference between them and Lucia, however, is that Max exercises total physical, sexual and psychological control over her in their camp relationship. In their post-camp relationship, participation is equalized, and indeed, in later moments in the film part of Max’s fear of being trapped in his apartment is the fear that Lucia will end her role in their game and leave him.
An interesting dynamic in their post-camp relationship is their ability to make the transition back into their old patterns, regardless of the changes of the intervening thirteen years. Once they re-establish their relationship, it is clear that these individuals cannot forget the past, and indeed the past so conditions their everyday lives that they cannot move into the future. As Teresa de Lauretis notes, ‘In their obsessive repetition of past acts, which once defined their total worlds and now reflects their self-image, they live out a fantasy which is the only relationship they know, the only one their brutal world ever made possible for them to know.’24 As if to intensify this fantasy, Max attempts to re-enact the closed-world boundaries of the camp. He seals Lucia and himself into his small apartment, again defining the physical world of their relationship by impenetrable walls.
Lucia’s role as victim in the film is twofold: she was Max’s victim during their camp relationship, and in the post-camp era, Max’s Nazi contemporaries use her to force him into their twisted version of atonement for his war crimes. Lucia is first introduced as Max’s victim via a prisoner inspection scene, an established Nazisploitation trope.
Max weaves in and out of the naked prisoners with a film camera that captures the entire experience. It is here that he and the audience first see the camp version of Lucia, introduced with a double mediation between two cameras: Max’s and Cavani’s. Shortly thereafter their relationship begins, and Lucia’s role as victim reinforces Max’s power to the other prisoners and guards — an interesting inversion on the function of the trope. For example, Max manipulates Lucia into
performing cabaret for his fellow guards, and she appears to entertain her captors willingly. This scene produces arguably the most famous visual from the film, Lucia dressed in Nazi officer pants, black leather gloves, an officer’s hat, and suspenders laid against her bare chest.
It not only testifies to Max’s total control over her, but it also links Cavani’s film to other Nazisploitation films of the time. Although Lucia appears to participate willingly in this performance, the expression on her face when Max presents her with a severed head as a gift reveals her true repulsion towards both her captors and her participation in their world.
If during their camp relationship Lucia’s victim role was inverted from the original trope, their post-camp relationship re-establishes the victim’s original function as a motivator of action. While in hiding, Max has joined a group of former Nazi officers. They will not turn themselves in but they believe that the only way for them live freely with a clean conscience is to undergo their own version of a war crimes trial. As such, each member of the group is presented with the atrocities he committed during the war, emerging from the process cleansed of their crimes. Max refuses to participate in this trial process, and by doing so invalidates the cleansing process of his fellow group members. To maintain some semblance of atonement, the men attempt to use Lucia’s reappearance in Max’s life to force him through the trial. What underpins this entire process is the group’s inability truly to abandon Nazism. Several of them openly admit that if given the choice again to join the Nazis or to abstain, they would join with no regrets. Their commitment to Nazi tenets combined with the treatment of Lucia while in the camp presents a historically realistic portrayal of war and post-war Nazi life. Therefore, although The Night Porter is not as graphic in terms of torture and imprisonment as the other Nazisploitation films of the 1970s, it is perhaps the best example of the most disturbing trend in the films: the devotion to the concep-tualization, real or imagined, of Nazism at all costs.
As with Ilsa and Elsa, we can find a contemporary version of the Lucia/victim character in Paul Verhoeven’s 2006 Black Book. In the film Carice van Houten plays Rachel Stein, a Jewish woman who joins the Dutch resistance and takes on the pseudonym Ellis de Vries. Nazis have killed Ellis’s family and she joins the resistance to seek revenge.
Her assignment is to infiltrate Gestapo headquarters, which she does by acquiring a position as first the lover, and then the secretary, of SS
head Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch). Through the course of her assignment Ellis begins to see the duplicitous nature of her comrades in the resistance. They engage in secret dealings with the Nazis for personal gain, exhibit anti-Semitism, and willingly sacrifice their own men to ensure their own personal safety. At the same time Ellis and Müntze fall in love, and as a result Müntze ceases to be defined by his Nazi associations and becomes a sympathetic character, transformed by his love for Ellis.
Ellis echoes Lucia in several key ways. Ellis was a cabaret singer before the war and, like Lucia, she entertains high-ranking Nazi officials with her songs. Both women are forced to undergo the obligatory inspection scene. Both women are fetishized by their lovers for their Jewish ethnicity and, most importantly, both women are used as pawns between powerful opposing sides. Ellis, like Lucia, serves multiple functions in her role as victim in multiple games: in one between the Dutch resistance and the Gestapo, in machinations between Müntze and fellow SS General Franken (Waldemar Kobus), and in the post-war struggle between those Dutch who cooperated with the Nazis and those who resisted. Like Lucia, her role highlights the depravity of many of the Nazis who surround her, as well as the compromised morality of members of the Dutch resistance. However, unlike Lucia and in a position closer to the whitewashing of the Nazi sympathies of Elsa in Indiana Jones, Ellis’s role as a victim also humanizes and sanitizes representations of Nazism as displayed in the character of Müntze.
Müntze is a high-ranking officer in the Nazi army and the leader of the SS in the Netherlands. One can reasonably assume that, to achieve this position, Müntze espoused an adherence to the Nazi party and carried out orders beneficial to it. These actions, however, are never shown and only briefly alluded to. The members of the Dutch resistance in the film speak in generalities when referring to his crimes in the service of the Reich. The lack of specificity regarding his military actions, combined with his portrayal through the eyes of Ellis, establishes Müntze as a sympathetic character: loving, trusting and non-judgmental of Ellis’s Jewishness. Although Müntze did not murder Ellis’s family, in his role as head of the Gestapo the viewer can assume he has ordered the murder of many Jews, and can be seen as a type of executioner. He is, however, rehabilitated through his relationship with Ellis. As Marcus Stiglegger posits, ‘The relationship between
executioner and victim is transfigured sadomasochism shifted to the level of sexual passion. The result is a de-politicization and de-historici-zation of the phenomenon of National Socialism.’25 Removing Müntze from politics and history constructs his character as level-headed, fair and open-minded. This is as distant from the Nazism represented by Ilsa and Max as possible; he is the kind-hearted Gestapo.
Indeed, when Müntze is executed, the viewer feels as if the hero has died rather than the villain. Even so, Müntze is never regretful of his actions; he does not apologize for his role in the war.
Indeed, his only motivation for working towards a truce between the Gestapo and the resistance is the futility of continued hostility in the face of a quickly failing war. As with Elsa, Müntze could be any member of any army during any war; there is no direct association between him and the historical Gestapo. If the power in the Nazisploitation films of the 1970s lay in the ability to remind the viewers of one of the most atrocious and inhumane periods in contemporary history, then characters like Elsa and Müntze demon-strate mainstream cinema’s ability to negate that power through the construction of ethically ambiguous, morally uncompromised and heroic Nazis.