Das Boot (1981) - Despair in the Deep
In a dark, wet submarine, forty-two men stand in silence. They crowd into the control room, nervously awaiting their fate. Will they survive yet another skirmish? Or will the ship above them finally breach their hull with depth charges? “Deeper,” the captain (Jürgen Prochnow) commands. If they are to survive this battle, he knows that both his crew and the compressive strength of the boat’s hull will have to be pushed to its limit – perhaps even past it.
It is 1941. The Battle of the Atlantic has raged on for two years. While German naval capabilities were vastly superior at the beginning of the war, it appears as though the tide has begun to turn: Nazi Germany is losing on land, in the air, and now in the sea, as well. As their captain, who they playfully refer to as Der Alte (Old Man), leads the men on their first naval mission, he leaves port with a heavy heart; when will it all come to an end?
Das Boot (1981) conveys the realities of battle and the despair of wartime like few other movies. Through palpable claustrophobia and the disillusionment of young, patriotic soldiers, director Wolfgang Petersen’s classic thriller captures the sensation of an empire’s collapse as he strips our heroes of hope. In doing so, he creates a film which comments on the fruitless nature of war, in which all human death and suffering is a tragedy – regardless of the uniform.
Unlike a lot of WWII films, our protagonists are Nazis. The forty-two new recruits that practically bounce aboard the U-Boat have never seen combat, nor their own bearded reflection: they are naïve and baby-faced. The captain laments his lack of battle-hardened men: “Green and eager… They’ll calm down soon enough.” All of these poor, young boys have been fed an enormous lie, one that will cost them their lives – or, at the very least, the youthful gleam in their eyes. Soon, they will know what it means to be close to death, to stand on the threshold of hell.
But they’re not there quite yet – unlike the seasoned veterans they admire. Thomsen (Otto Sander) has become a desperate alcoholic, a shell-shocked and world-weary war hero. Johann (Erwin Leder), the chief mechanic, is so frightened during an assault that he abandons his post – a capital offence in the U-Boat. On his ninth mission, his nerves are so shattered he would rather walk towards a firing squad than remain at his station. And the captain, while revered by the new recruits for his stoicism and authority, is perennially cynical as a result of a life spent under constant stress. As he fights a conflict at sea, he must also fight an internal battle to rescue his soul from becoming forever disenchanted.
Such are the consequences of war. The claustrophobic setting undoubtedly doesn’t help. The cramped, squalid conditions become tangible as a result of Jost Vacano’s cinematography. The camerawork imparts the sensation of an existence spent in almost incessant urgency. The panicked, febrile racings of men up and down the hallway is documented in long, shaky tracking shots; you can practically feel the anxiety, as though you were right on the U-Boat with them. Here, in the Atlantic Ocean, everyone exists on the brink of annihilation.
When they’re not faced with the terrifying prospect of imminent destruction, they must contend with mind-numbing tedium. Some write love letters. Most fantasise of beautiful women they have never met, dreaming of experiencing a human touch and loving caress. Memories of snow transport them faraway. Photographs become a conduit to ethereal places, a gateway for imagining a more tranquil time. Perhaps it is just around the corner? Maybe, just maybe, if they can pass Gibraltar undetected, they could return to the lives they led before they were trapped inside this enormous tin can. While the submarine contains the boys underneath the Atlantic Ocean’s surface, it cannot contain their dreams of a time before this terrible, terrible war.
In such desperate moments, the human capacity for hope is a transcendent experience. Unfortunately, they must face the fact that they are living in the final stages of an empire, a kingdom which is crumbling all around them. Indeed, the opening sequence truly feels like the last days of Rome: as men in uniform imbibe lager until they are blind drunk, they all implicitly seem to understand that their time in the sun is swiftly coming to an end. There will be no golden age of civilisation. There will only be smouldering rubble.
As a result, cheers for victory sound increasingly hollow. Endsieg, one of the most prominent ideas in Nazi propaganda, which promised that a final, decisive victory was both inevitable and imminent, is shown to be an empty promise. Every success the men experience in the U-Boat is marred by further difficulty and hardship. In this, the submarine acts as a metaphor for Nazi Germany. The U-Boat serves as a microcosm for the German people, who have realised their country is plunging into disaster with little to stop it. In the final shot of the film, the captain watches his vessel sink after an unexpected air raid. It is an ending which conveys how all hope burns to ash in the flames of war.
Yet there is no villain in the film. There is no face of the “other”. Similarly, our heroes never fire a pistol, draw a sword, or notch an arrow into their bow. Theirs is a war of immense, mechanical weaponry; all of the men seem so small when compared against the torpedoes of their vessel or the destroyer determined to sink them. As the soldiers on the U-Boat lose sweat, blood, and tears in their efforts, they turn cogs, fix engines, and prepare missiles for launch. They look through periscopes and listen to hydrophones, their senses augmented by their underwater apparatus. Though made of flesh, they have become part machine, a mere component of a colossal engine. They are cyborgs of a war they don’t comprehend and never will. They separate themselves from nature and are robbed of their humanity. And by whom?
These substantial machines of war are themselves made small when juxtaposed against the vast nature that surrounds them: when it is not the powerful depth charges threatening to breach their hull, it is the crushing weight of the Atlantic Ocean, squeezing the men’s U-Boat for all it is worth. One infer that this comments on the men’s true role in war: infinitesimal bystanders, engaging in monumental, yet momentary folly to convince ourselves of our grandiose importance within the great expanse of the cosmos. As the souls of these men become indelibly marked, the ocean continues its ceaseless ablution of the shores; for all they have lost, nothing has changed in the world. We are rendered tiny and our efforts come to naught.
Peterson was nervous when presenting his film at the Los Angeles Film Festival, understanding that the wounds of WWII were still fresh in everyone’s mind. However, the movie received a standing ovation. It is because the film conveys with such grim, visceral honesty that one nation’s victory is only another’s crushing defeat. The ending in Das Boot would be typical of a triumphant Hollywood finale, yet here, it is a merciless epilogue. Throughout the film, the surface becomes emblematic of the men’s salvation. But as the captain’s U-Boat sinks to the bottom of the sea for the final time, all hope sinks with it. It is an unapologetic reminder of how aspirations for a better future fall apart under the strains of war, vanishing beneath the surface and swallowed into a watery deep.
