The Purpose and Power of ‘A Hidden Life’
We first see nothing but darkness, hear nothing but silence. Then a voice breaks through, speaking about building a life of peace, high in the mountains; a nest, a refuge in which to raise ones family until they are strong enough to leave on their own to build their own. Then, the first images come to life on the screen. Cities, people—thousands of people—all gathering to show their love and their adoration of Adolph Hitler, who we also see, proud and strong, waving to his adoring public. It is shocking, this sight. It is always shocking to see the extent to which the nation rallied around this man, his ideals. Maybe some of those people were there just to fit in, but how many, and were they not swayed by what they saw? Would they have felt comfortable, or safe, staying home when they saw the crowds? Might it not be worth it to fake enthusiasm just to fit in, even though their self-interested insincerity would be outwardly no different than that joy of the true believers?
Now we are in a field and a man, tall and strong, is cutting the grass with a scythe. Cutting swaths alone in a field until his wife sharpens her own blade and begins to hew at the side of her husband. This is Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) and his wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner), Austrian farmers who live in the mountain village of Sankt Radegund, a close community in fellowship and faith. They are, in essence, unremarkable. They work in the fields with other villagers, they sit in the beer hall with friends, they play with their children, they love one another. Franz helps at the church, sweeping the floors and ringing the bells. They are isolated, in the way that the whole community is isolated, dependent on one another and their faith for security and comfort.
August Diehl and Valerie Pachner as Franz and Franziska Jägerstätter.
The first time that we see Franz alone, dejected and alienated, he is seated among his fellow soldiers in basic training, having been drafted into the Wehrmacht as World War II rolls onward. There is hope that as France surrenders there will be peace, but we know this is not to a fantasy. The superiors at the Enns training grounds have decided to screen a film to let these draftees know what they are fighting for, and the reaction is as rapturous as though Hitler himself in those first scenes had entered the courtyard. Only Franz watches with horror, confusion. Is this what this war, of which he has only been tangentially aware, is about? Is this the objective his countrymen are fighting toward? Broken cities and wounded families? Death and horror?
Back at home, in the nest he has made with his wife in the mountains, he struggles with the truth of what his country is doing. He speaks to his wife, to a priest, to the people in the village who feel fear and sadness over what is happening. He finds people who sympathize with him, but no one who will support the idea of him saying no Even the bishop coaches him that he must fight for the fatherland, support his country. As the bells ring, the bishop laments that those bells will soon be melted down for bullets. Most of his village isn’t sympathetic though lacking in support, but rather actively opposed to his principled stand. While he is commiserated with in private by some, in public he is shouted down by many. The mayor (Karl Markovics) venerates the way that Hitler has brought pride and glory back to a the people. He asks Franz what his father, who died in World War I, would think about his son’s decision not to fight. Everyone else in the village is supporting the war; does Franz think he is better than them? Smarter? More righteous? What is his angle in this?
There is a term that, like almost all terms related to primarily online discourse, serves to denote a valid idea but has come to be seen as a pointless or backward insult; Virtue Signalling. At its root, the idea behind this concept is that someone will announce a position or thought as a means of showing off their goodness or idealism, knowing full well that the position puts them in no danger and that they will have to do nothing of any substance to back up their position. It is raising your hand to say that you think the death penalty is wrong, but making no real movements toward fixing it. Of course bad actors have hijacked the term as a means of trying to argue against an position they disagree with or find to be too “woke,” but the term, when applied honestly, still defines a very real idea that comes down to “a safe offer of martyrdom on a public stage for personal gain.”
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and all the other social media networks—which I am too old to operate in or even hear about—nurture and reward this level of public invitation to flagellation. It is a two-fold act, at once showing off for your friends and like-minded strangers while inviting the scorn of people with whom you already do not agree with or respect as a means of, perhaps, gaining even more adulation from that first group of allies. People can flatter themselves that weathering the vicious words of a minority of respondents counts as braving something, but the truth is that the chorus of agreement is sure to insulate them from any lasting harm, of which physical harm is hardly ever a true concern.
Lately, Nazi Germany has been invoked a lot to explain the current political climate in America. Saying on Twitter that you don’t want to see undocumented families split up and in cages is seen as being tantamount to standing atop the Reichstag and decrying the Holocaust. While this may be true to the extent that both situations involve speaking out publicly about immoral and dehumanizing acts by the government, the climate of public response to both acts should be noted as the primary line that divides the two. The person on Twitter risks nothing, and stands to gain the respect or support of people who agree, who feel empowered to speak that agreement aloud. Franz Jägerstätter, meanwhile, risks everything, and gains only alienation and accusations of cowardice from everyone he knows, and torment directed at the family he left behind. Truly he has no angle, and that makes him all the more inscrutable and frightening to those who oppose his stance.
When Franz is called back to active military service, he refuses to swear a loyalty oath to Hitler and he is immediately taken into custody as a traitor. He knew this would happen, and yet he didn’t run into the forests, like the man we see on the edges of the film from time to time. He is, over the course of his imprisonment, offered the chance to swear the oath but perhaps serve in a hospital, or some other noncombat function, but that is not the point. Loyalty to Hitler is loyalty to his ideals, and as a Catholic Christian this is not something that Franz can do. Even though the priest said he could sign the pledge and stay loyal in his heart, he refused. The mayor said he would be worse than the enemies of the Reich, because he would be a traitor, but Franz maintained his stand.
At home his wife is scorned and his children are made pariahs. While Nazi officials tell Franz repeatedly that no one will know of his stance, no one will hear his story, that even high-level officials are ignorant to his choice, that is not entirely true. The town of Sankt Radegund knows of his choice, and they revile him for it. They see what he is doing as cowardice and a lack of gratitude; callous indifference.
From time to time someone will ask Franz why he is doing what he is doing. Even his wife seems to coach against his choice to remain opposed to the immovable forces that buffet him. “You cannot change the world,” she tells him, “the world is stronger.” His size in comparison with that of the world, the Wehrmacht, even the town is of constant note. People expect that he must be doing this because he thinks that it will make a difference, cause a change, but the truth is much simpler than that.
Franz is not trying to be a role model, a hero, or a voice of conscience to those around him. When asked by a Nazi judge (Bruno Ganz) if Franz sees himself as better than those who accuse him at trial, Franz responds that he does not. He can’t even say whether he is right, or Hitler is wicked. All he knows, he says, is that perhaps sometimes people who are good do wrong, and perhaps enough of that wrong will take them to a place where they can no longer get back to good, and given that possibility he would rather not hazard that first step. His martyrdom, as he must see it by now, is not a referendum on the world at large, but rather an attempt to hold on to his own goodness. Were the the rest of the world as concerned over their own mortal souls, perhaps most of the ills in the world would be avoided by the millions of people who would reflect before acting, asking merely “if I do this, will I remain a good person?”
When he is killed, a member of his community, a villager of Sankt Radegund, goes to the church to ring the bell, as Franz himself so often did. This is the first moment where we see that, maybe, Franz’s seemingly fruitless stand on principle might mean something greater that the nothing he seemed promised. People in the fields stop working, look up to the sky and toward the bell. A man who they had forgotten but for the times they remembered to hate him, is now dead. Was he a coward? What coward seeking to avoid war and possible death would rather choose the certainty of execution as a traitor? What kind of man would allow himself to be scorned and savaged and murdered rather than join the loud, the joyous, the unstoppable crowd? Only a man who conceives of a person as having a soul, and a soul having a life after the bodily death. A man driven not by the earthly rewards of support and acclaim and admiration, but the ethereal reward of knowing that one has lived a good life. A virtuous and noble existence.
Even the Church was unable to follow the lead of Christ’s most faithful adherent. While bishops and priests compromised and prevaricated to keep the Church alive, Franz took his annihilation as the cost of remaining on the righteous path. The moment that best sums up this contradiction comes when Franz, having spoken to many agents of the Church, speaks instead to a man who is the artist responsible for the frescoes and murals on the church walls.
“We make admirers,” the man says, “not followers.” This man knows that, by and large, the words of the priest will not linger as long in the minds of those who enter the church as the images he makes. He laments not having suffered enough to truly paint suffering; that he cannot draw Christ as he truly imagines him to be. Artists are beholden to certain aesthetic ideas and audience expectations, not to mention the expectations of their patrons. Their power is limited, and their own experience limits them further. It is, in fact, much easier to create admirers than followers.
The triumph of A Hidden Life, the film of which I have been speaking but which I have yet to name or address in any way beyond its story, is how it makes us an admirer of Franz Jägerstätter, but also drives one toward wanting to be a follower of his. In seeing the ways in which he responds to his own fear, the anger of those around him, the questions of those who face him, we find ourselves wishing that we could do the same. Unlike movies in which our heroes make grand speeches or endure great physical torments, though, A Hidden Life shows how manageable a principled stand can truly be. Do not do evil; meet hatred with compassion and calm; admit your own fallibility. This is not a movie that one leaves thinking, “I could never do that.” In fact, one feels almost shamed for knowing all the times in which they could have acted in such a way but did not.
Writer/director Terrence Malick and cinematographer Jörg Widmer have wedded the kinetic style of shooting that has typified Malick’s 2010s work with the innate spirituality of his entire oeuvre in a way that feels new and exciting. Wide angle lenses give a sense of depth and expansiveness to every mountain vista and every small room. One can almost sense the multitudinous ways in which Franz is able to draw spiritual and moral strength from his surroundings. As the yellow sun was to Superman, so is the gentle calm of God’s creation and the unwavering love of Franziska to Franz. The swiftly moving camera lingers timidly at the edges of the personal space of Franz and his family and those he interacts with, while the width of the frame allows for a view of the world around them. Intrinsically we feel these people ever tied to the world around them.
James Newton Howard’s score is likewise alive with a spiritual and universal power, simply and classically evoking the sprightly energy of love and life while maintaining an undercurrent of the melancholy. The knowledge that all things must end or at some point come to grief underlying the foundations of the otherwise joyful melody. As the music supplies the primary soundtrack to most scenes, overcoming even dialogue or diegetic sound, it acts as an counter to the instincts of most movie scores. We never feel the stirring rush of a heroic overture of the menace of a villain’s march. We instead feel the ambivalent and sometimes chaotic rush of present tense action.
The movie aesthetically repels easy representations of the holy and the profane, the right and the wrong. The light that pours through the windows of the churches pours with equal strength and incandescence through the walls of a Nazi prison. We of course can see the evil in this world—the uniforms and iconography of the Nazi party will never again stand for anything but the worst of human nature—and so the movie finds no need to underline it. After all, the civilians and soldiers of this time and place couldn’t feel that pull toward evil; or, if they did, saw the benefit for them in ignoring it. So it often is in our own lives that those who break the moral tenants we hold dear and who would coach us toward the unholy or bad path appear in mundane ways.
Another movie about a good man doing his quiet best in a world that often does not reward or valorize goodness, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, had Fred Rogers’s wife shoo away the idea that her husband is a saint. She claimed that in canonizing him, even just metaphorically, it would let others off the hook for not acting similarly. That being said, Fred Rogers had a TV show, and the unwavering love of millions, and so even with his earnest humility, some might find themselves easily self-excused from not following his path for lacking his resources and support.
Franz Jägerstätter, as he lived and as he is shown in A Hidden Life, is a much more attainable and yet much more terrifying example to those of us who want to know what to do with ourselves in a world defined with nearly daily regularity by the awfulness we see. If we barely have the money to feed and clothe ourselves, if we barely have the time to hold our own child before we sleep at night, if we barely have the strength to fold the laundry, how can we fight the fight we know must be won?
Do your work, love your family, and maintain your house, Malick and Jägerstätter tell us, for there is nobility and purpose in these actions, and they are your foundation and your power. But be aware of the actions you take, and think through your motivations and your consequences, and in every instant of your life make sure you are still striving toward the good. Your life and your purpose may well stay hidden, but that does not make it any less meaningful.
Jägerstätter was killed in 1943, and his story was relatively unknown until Gordan Zahn published the biography In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter in 1964. The emergence of this story led to perhaps countless acts of conscientious action around the world, as witnessed by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton in his May 2010 homily on the feast day of the since-beatified Jägerstätter:
One of the most significant things that happened was when a very important member of our defense department, after careful searching of his conscience and his heart, decided to reveal secret documents from within the defense department that destroyed the credibility of the U.S. government and what it had been telling the people in the United States about the war in Vietnam. That man, Daniel Ellsberg, published these documents contrary to the law. He not only destroyed his career, which had been very promising within the government, but he risked jail and because it could even be called an act of treason, risked death.
But at one point, he told me, among the many influences in his life was becoming aware of Franz Jägerstätter and his witness against his government during World War II. That had a tremendous effect in the United States, the revelation of these documents. It helped to change the public attitude very quickly. Another place where I had personal experience of how Franz's influence was so important was within the Conference of the Catholic Bishops of the United States. For the first time in the history of our country, and something very, very unusual, perhaps unique in the world, the Catholic bishops, as a body, publicly condemned a war in which our own country was engaged.
It is poetic that, after the Church failed him in World War II, Franz Jägerstätter was able to galvanize the Church during Vietnam.
If Jägerstätter had never been discovered, would his sacrifice have meant any less? No. If he was one of a thousand people who took similar stands, does it mean that he didn’t have to do the same? No. Because let us assume that at least a thousand people did do the same thing that he did; have you heard of them? But because this one man did, the course of history may have been changed for the better. The more good that is done in the world, the more good enters the world, and the more opportunity for that good to spread.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this idea is found in the Bible. In Matthew 13, the Parable of the Sower, Jesus speaks of a farmer casting seeds out recklessly, and how many of those seeds will, for one reason or another, not bear fruit. But a single seed on good soil will make up for all of those that do not.
But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.
I cannot say with utter certainty why Malick made A Hidden Life. Clearly part of him wanted more people to know about Jägerstätter and what he did, but to what end? I believe that Malick found himself in agreement with the artist in the church who tired of creating “admirers” but no “followers.” So, using his skills as a filmmaker, Malick set to scattering seeds, pushing the story of one man’s witness to as wide an audience as possible, knowing that his movie would land upon the path, the stones, the thorns, but hopeful that there might also be some good soil to be found.
I view myself as that good soil, and pray that should the moment come I will prove myself to be a follower, rather than an admirer. My hope is that maybe, in some small way, this essay will have served as a seed itself, or else simply help to prime other such soil. There may be no way to know until twenty-one years after I am gone, but though I won’t be here to see it, my daughter will be. And that is reason enough to try. Such consideration is the gift of this beautiful movie, and this powerful story.