This week, the new German-made feature film on the wartime exploits of World War One’s leading air ace, Manfred von Richthofen (a.k.a. the Red Baron), began its run in German theaters. The movie, entitled The Red Baron, presents a portrait of a blond pretty boy who scores victories both in the skies and in love. Few historians nowadays would raise objections to the inclusion (no matter how awkwardly) of a romantic subplot in an historical drama -- the employment of such dramatic tools having long become commonplace in cinematic storytelling. What might well raise the historian’s ire, however, is the use of such subplots as a means of initiating a revisionist misrepresentation of historical fact, as is the case here. To quote from the synopsis included in the film’s website:

… von Richthofen soon realizes that his status as a hero is misleading. His love for nurse Kaete opens his eyes to the brutality and barbarity of war – a war that not only leaves no room for honorable chivalry, but also takes friends away from him who risk their lives in audacious air battles.

In a following paragraph (which appears in the German-language but not the English-language version of the site), it goes on to say:

When he realizes that he is being misused for propaganda purposes by the military government, resulting in the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who see in him their role model, von Richthofen makes the fateful decision to break with the cult of heroism surrounding him – a decision that transforms him into a legend ….

This transformation of von Richthofen from chivalrous aerial dualist into a heroic symbol of anti-war resistance is highly problematic and again raises questions about current trends in German historical memory. There is, in fact, no evidence to suggest that von Richthofen ever harbored any anti-war sentiments. He was, by all accounts, a cold-eyed and skillful trophy hunter engaged in eager pursuit of his 81st kill when he was himself shot down over the Somme in 1918.

The Red Baron is not a product of tinsel town – though made in a style commonly associated with Hollywood productions. The move was made by a German director using a German cast and script, all underwritten exclusively by German patrons. It is the past “Made (or, one might better say, manufactured) in Germany.” True, it isn’t serious history. It’s just entertainment. But even entertainment can tell us something about the way that people think about and view the past (or the present). Taking the sort of liberties with a historical figure as this film does points to a tendentious urge in the current German Zeitgeist to subsume their wartime experiences – whether those were, as here, during the First World War or, as in many other instances, in the Second World War – into a grander anti-war epic, without regard to historical accuracy in either the micro or the macro sense of the term. This wholesale conversion of the stuff of the past in service to a postwar ethos reveals just how much the ghosts of that past still haunt the German mind – and how easily that stuff can be reshaped to fit current fashion.

http://www.redbaron-themovie.com