James Leggio
Certain highly ambitious films, even if they turn out to be noble failures, often prove instructive as cautionary tales. Such is the case with Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie (2008), starring Tom Cruise as the heroic Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, would-be assassin of Adolf Hitler in the famous coup attempt of July 20, 1944, which disguised itself under the code name Operation Valkyrie.
In films about World War II, the anti-Nazi conspiracy of July 1944 makes for a grand and heartbreaking story of near-success snatched away. Indeed, the events are so inspiring that they have been made into films a number of times. At least nine different theatrical films, TV movies, or feature-length documentaries have been made about the Stauffenberg plot since 1955, some in English, some in German. To a greater extent than any of the other films, however, Singer’s Valkyrie concentrates on the sheer procedural mechanics of the conspiracy, the day-by-day and eventually hour-by-hour inner workings of the elaborately choreographed plot as it unfolds in multiple locations, with many players and many moving parts. This meticulous re-creation amounts to a major accomplishment. Many of the other retellings fail to register just how far-flung and elaborately interconnected this minutely planned operation really was, and few are as lucid. In the hands of Singer and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander, the project becomes an intricately plotted Hollywood military-versus-politicians thriller, comparable in genre to John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May (1964), wherein a cabal led by an American general (Burt Lancaster) seeks to overthrow the President of the United States.
With its exceedingly crowded sequence of events, though, Singer’s 121-minute film has precious little time left over to pursue other aspects of the Stauffenberg conspiracy. The plot to put down one of history’s most horrifying monsters grew out of the “other war” — the one between different factions in the military — over Hitler’s ongoing crimes against humanity, among the conspirators’ gravest concerns, as Valkyrie quite rightly shows.
However, the plotters were also attempting to put an end to Hitler’s degradation of Germany as a civilized nation, a theme left underdeveloped by Singer’s team. In contrast, most of the other retellings spend a good deal more time framing Operation Valkyrie as an effort — led by a charismatic young aristocrat who loved poetry and music — to begin restoring German society and artistic culture to their former glory, before they were taken over by Nazi thugs.
Which is to say that what’s at stake here is the elusive but absolutely essential “German-ness” at the heart of a remarkable historical figure, now regarded as a national hero.
Yet in Valkyrie, the principal cast members are Anglo-American, making it awkward to address values intrinsically German. Moreover, the oddly chosen cast went before the cameras with no convincing strategy in place for how the actors playing these history-making German-speaking officers would talk — inflect their lines and pronounce their words — as spokesmen for Germanic cultural values.
As the cast list on IMDb shows, it’s a motley crew. Portraying the members of the German High Command and their subordinates we find mostly British actors, speaking with no attempt to disguise their plummy West End tones; a few Continental — and some British and American — actors speaking with more or less marked German accents; and to top it all off, a high-recognition movie star from the United States talking plain American in the leading role, sounding pretty much as he does in big-budget thrillers like the Mission: Impossible franchise or Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi epic War of the Worlds (2005). Try as Cruise may to give a serious, disciplined portrayal of a compelling historical personage, his speech patterns sometimes, sadly, betray him into the faintly ridiculous. Never has a less Teutonic-sounding voice cried out at the moment of execution, “Long live sacred Germany!”
Reception
When Singer’s Valkyrie was released, in 2008, it deservedly received very high marks for its painstaking historical accuracy. Where the reception became less enthusiastic was in the uneasy mixture of different national accents evident in this cast of supposedly all-German characters. Flipping through the reviews gathered on Metacritic, one sees the question come up again and again.
Peter Rainer writes in The Christian Science Monitor:
[Cruise] doesn’t trouble to affect a German accent, or even a British one. He sounds like a clean-cut American dude. This is a bit jarring, since the cast is rounded out by a gaggle of Brits playing Germans with British accents. I realize this is an old theatrical convention, and probably things would sound a lot worse if everyone was trying to sound like Werner Klemperer. Still, the realism of the enterprise is consistently undercut by the duelling US versus English intonations (which, at times, seems to be what the war is really all about). One by one, von Stauffenberg’s enablers parade before us as enacted by Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Tom Wilkinson, Eddie Izzard, and Kenneth Branagh…. Hitler, on the skids and played with suitably creepy understatement by David Bamber, does without the Britishisms. Such are the privileges of the damned.
It’s the way Cruise seems to be of a different nation from the other conspirators that bothered some. As Michael Phillips writes in the Chicago Tribune:
The aristocratic intellectual Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the assassination plot’s crucial player, is played by Cruise, and honestly, he isn’t bad in the role. Singer keeps him in check. Cruise, however, betrays some nervousness about being upstaged by so many sterling British character men. His counterstrategy: keep the voice low, keep the American dialect as neutral as possible and keep the bearing ramrod-straight. All the same, Cruise cannot suggest the aristocratic hauteur or the steely authority needed in this role. Watching “Valkyrie” … you wonder why the German officer we’re rooting for is an American, while most of the other Germans are British….
(This clip gives a small sample of what the conspirators’ conversations sound like.)
Anthony Lane, in The New Yorker, seems uneasy that the Nazi generals display so many typically British eccentricities:
Character acting is, of course, one of the four things that the British still do supremely well, the others being soldiering, tailoring, and getting drunk in public, but you can have too much of a good thing, and there were points in “Valkyrie” when I felt that I was watching a slightly outré installment of the Harry Potter series. General Friedrich Olbricht was one of the prime movers in the conspiracy, but Bill Nighy, playing him in clear-rimmed spectacles, is his usual self — funny, quivering, and borderline fey. I found it hard to picture him receiving the Iron Cross. And how about Terence Stamp as General Beck? Or the ever-perplexed Tom Wilkinson as General Friedrich Fromm, a human hog? These men are meant to be battle-toughened Nazi officers, but what we get is an array of discreetly amusing studies in mild neurosis.
With anomalous accents and mild British idiosyncrasies in mind, some of the reviewers’ intended praise in effect further exposes the underlying language problem. William Arnold writes in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that “Cruise the producer-mogul … has been careful to keep Cruise the star in line and balanced by a flawless ensemble of British actors: Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp.” To some, however, when supposedly German characters are immediately betrayed by their accents as coming from Britain, America, and elsewhere, this is precisely not the definition of “flawless ensemble.”
Similarly, Lisa Schwarzbaum, in Entertainment Weekly, in praising the film pinpoints its central weakness:
Singer has assembled a top-notch international cast — with Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp, and Eddie Izzard among the British invasion — and given them leave to speak their lines with the accents they brought from home. And in the middle, standing straight as a Top Gun ace, is Tom Cruise, that quintessentially self-constructed American movie star, speaking in quintessential American tones as he declares, “We have to kill Hitler.” Cue the trumpets.
Why, indeed, were they “given leave” to speak their lines with whatever random accents they happened to bring along as part of their baggage? Here is Cruise’s defense, from an online interview: “You know, we spent a lot of time going back and forth over that. All of a sudden you’re listening to people trying to put on accents and Bryan finally said, ‘No, no, no.’ Just tell the story. We don’t want to do an accent movie, just try and find something neutral that won’t distract from the story and the characters.” Just tell the story? Yet the German language — as the articulation of German values and culture — is a vital, intrinsic part of the story.
The characters portrayed were native speakers of German, conversing with each other in their shared language. Of course it’s understood that not everyone would sound exactly the same. There’s a wide range of regional accents within the German-speaking world. And if reflected in the film’s dialogue, the various accents and dialects could have proven uniquely dramatic, showing how the officers differed from each other in their precise and local identities as Germans — whether from Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria, Berlin, and so on — as well as their differences in social class. But that logic is not at all at work in the vocal delivery here, as seen, for instance, in the odd fact that the two prominent female roles in the film both somehow wound up being played by recognizably Dutch actors (Carice van Houten as Nina von Stauffenberg and Halina Reijn as Margarethe von Oven), to what end is hard to discover. The casual cacophony of accents undermines credibility at every turn.
At the same time, though, the unfortunately random accents encourage us to look more closely at the larger question of how actors imbue their lines with speech-traces of a fuller identity. In his preface to Pygmalion (1914), George Bernard Shaw wrote that because of differences in local accent, dialect, and class usage, “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.” In attending to those differences, Professor Henry Higgins, the estimable phonetician, can claim that after a few moments of listening to them, he can figure out where anyone comes from: “I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.” We give our identities away the moment we speak.
And so do actors. Therefore, as apprentices in their craft, in acting school they learn how to manage a variety of useful accents, to help them in the vocal impersonations required by the many different roles they’ll undertake. Think of Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis, for example, and the sheer range of their vocal accomplishments in many demanding dialect parts. Valkyrie’s credits do list a “dialect coach,” though that job’s permitted scope of responsibility is unstated.
You are how you talk.
Hitler’s Voice
In Valkyrie, the unique, unmistakable sound of Hitler’s own voice — heard, after the assassination attempt, over the phone by worried generals and on the radio by the public — confirms beyond doubt his survival and thereby dooms the conspirators to failure. In a way, while Colonel Stauffenberg is the protagonist, it is the Führer’s speaking voice, as much as his physical person, that plays the antagonist.
Hitler was of course Austrian, but in his public orations he downplayed his Austrian accent and attempted to follow Bühnendeutsch (stage German), a set of pronunciation rules established in the nineteenth century for literary language on the German stage, and based on Standard German as spoken in Northern Germany. Some commentators assert that his Austrian background nonetheless came out when he used words like allerdings, würden, or Möglichkeit.
Virtually the only Valkyrie scene in which Hitler (played by David Bamber) speaks at any conversational length takes place in the Berghof, his private residence, when Stauffenberg brings the revised Operation Valkyrie documents for his signature. As the two of them look at the papers together, Hitler says in this clip, in his most insinuating manner:
You know your Wagner, Colonel. The Valkyrie, handmaidens of the gods. Choosing who will live and who will die. Sparing the most heroic from an agonizing death. One cannot understand National Socialism if one does not understand Wagner.
True, Hitler would have spoken a little differently from many others in the room, with his residual accent, but here he and Stauffenberg/Cruise seem to be from two different worlds, so startlingly different are their speech patterns. Cruise stumbles a bit; even though in the same scene Tom Wilkinson says “mein Führer” three times, Cruise somehow falls into “my Führer,” despite his careful, rote pronunciation. As Hitler, Bamber is most effective, going beyond the merely creepy: it is horrible yet fascinating that his lugubrious, preoccupied delivery becomes a kind of mockery of German Romantic introspection, his lingering, pseudo-literary diction trailing off into the delusional. Bamber was born in Manchester, England; not all of the British actors in the film eschew any trace of the foreign. Still, his evasion of the “r” in the name Wagner does sneak in evidence of a British pronunciation style, sounding like “Vahgnuh” (rather than “Vahgnehr”).
In considering Hitler’s accent, it’s instructive to look at the way the great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz played him in the German-language film Downfall (2004). Ganz’s explosive rant in the Berlin bunker has become an internet institution and the butt of endless parody. Perhaps more illuminating is Ganz’s success at portraying Hitler’s voice in quiet, conversational moments.
There is only one known recording of Hitler speaking in his private, everyday voice. When Ganz prepared for Downfall, he carefully studied this tape. As he recalled:
[The producer] sent me a little tape, seven minutes recorded secretly in I think 1942, maybe in Helsinki. He’s talking to a Finnish diplomat. And he did not know that he was [being] recorded. So he is very calm…. I liked it because [his voice] was deeper, lower, than his screaming, shouting voice … that you hear during his speeches. And it was completely relaxed…. I liked it…. I can hear very clearly that he came from Austria. That he is not German. It’s a mixture between this Austrian German and a very military German that he learned afterwards.
It is the unstable mixture of Standard German, Austrian German, military German, and stage German that I wish David Bamber had been given more screen time to explore. But amid the jumble of garbled speech behaviors in the film, no “normal” German is established against which Hitler’s mixed accent and suppressed dialect background can be defined, since virtually everybody sounds odd and out of place.
Significantly, however, as seen in Hitler’s allegiance to Standard German in his public speeches, the Third Reich officially declared itself against the use of dialects in radio broadcasts and theaters, and in favor of the “normal” standard. Note this decree from Joseph Goebbels, dated April 13, 1942 (translated as document 299 in The Third Reich Sourcebook, 2013):
In conjunction with the More Manners [Mehr Höflichkeit] program, recent radio broadcasts have included scenes written in dialect. The Reich minister of propaganda has reiterated that the Führer does not under any circumstances wish to foster dialect. If it hadn’t been for the war, even the theaters performing in dialect would have already been closed. But because of the war, we have had to put this task off until after the war. Just as Luther’s Bible translation established clear guidelines for a standard German orthography and just as the concept of the Reich has established itself, the broadcasters of Greater Germany must accept the task of speaking a more or less classical German.
The struggle between an enforced totalitarian “norm” and the free play of individual speech-identities provides a subtext to the film’s political rebellion. Greater attention to voice coaching might have helped bring this out.
Speaking in Tongues
Amid the glossolalia that troubles Valkyrie, we may want to ask: What did the historical Claus von Stauffenberg sound like? Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was born in 1907 in the centuries-old Stauffenberg castle in Jettingen, in eastern Swabia. He did indeed carry the noble title of Graf (Count). And he would presumably have retained traces of the Swabian dialect (as suggested in the 2004 German-language film Stauffenberg).
But neither the Count’s distinctive regional background, nor his properly aristocratic mode of address, nor his imperious hauteur can be found in the way Cruise speaks. Instead, the actor’s plain vanilla American makes Count von Stauffenberg seem, paradoxically, like the social inferior of those officers with British accents. That American-versus-British distinction is a deeply rooted convention for depicting class differences in movies, reflected in, for instance, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), where the imperial Romans are mostly British actors, while the slaves and gladiators are mostly Americans.
Throughout Valkyrie, a number of the lesser supporting British actors do try to adopt German accents, some convincing and some not, even though the stars don’t bother. In addition, and unlike Cruise, some of the Americans in the cast, too, do make an attempt to sound somewhat like Germans. Harvey Friedman, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, plays Joseph Goebbels. Friedman deploys a light, subtle German accent, but sounds like a German who learned English from a British, rather than an American, tutor, as when he says in one scene (rendered phonetically): “Ah you a dedicated National Socialist, Mayjah?”
How to sound like a National Socialist while speaking English is a problem that has always plagued those making movies in America and Britain about the Third Reich. One solution is simply to ignore it. When James Mason played Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in The Desert Fox (1951), the actor’s West Yorkshire accent remained firmly in place. But it was perhaps less disturbing, since the cast was made up entirely of native speakers of English, among them Cedric Hardwicke, Jessica Tandy, Luther Adler, Everett Sloan, and George Macready. Not a German accent to be heard to break his cover.
And so it goes, too, in Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), with an unlikely Alec Guinness playing the Führer in cultivated stage English, at first speaking in dulcet tones, more in sorrow than in anger, as he dresses down his failing generals or chides Eva Braun — before losing his temper and cutting loose with a scary, guttural howl. Derek Jacobi, with Inside the Third Reich (1982), does risk a few improbable moments of wry, self-deprecating humor about the bloated vocabulary of his public addresses; but he cites only English words, notably the word “unshakeable,” which he half-smilingly admits to overusing.
In The Bunker (1981), Anthony Hopkins rants as brutally as other performers do in this role, but also strangely softens on occasion, exploring Hitler’s incongruously sentimental side. Hopkins, often praised for his lyrical line readings and finely modulated phrasing, makes good use of these talents in a scene in which the Führer reads bedtime stories to the Goebbels children. Still, as one reviewer on IMDb noted of Hopkins’s delivery, “Is it really so hard for a Brit or an American to manage a German accent? Do all civilized Germans sound as if they had been raised in Coventry? Ach du Lieber!”
Elsewhere in the Anglo-American film world, with less cagey actors than Guinness, Jacobi, or Hopkins, there lurks a danger that a British or American Führer might come to sound like a hopeful participant in an overacting contest, rivaling the ham-worthy roles Richard III and Long John Silver, something to be avoided at all costs.
And this is understandable. Without a doubt, too much “accent casting” can easily sound silly. In the World War II era, stereotyped Nazis in American movies were often portrayed by German refugees and immigrants, such as Berlin-born Conrad Veidt in Casablanca (1942) and All Through the Night (1942), and they were expected to display the typecast vocal mannerisms. The anti-Nazi comedy To Be or Not to Be (also 1942) took this language marker to a hilarious extreme, as Hamburg-born Sig Ruman (Colonel Ehrhardt), with his outrageously exaggerated “Cherman” accent, became a figure of fun.
That may be fine for comedy. But at a time when thoughtlessly appropriating the cultural identities of other ethnic groups has become a flashpoint in the performing arts, perhaps soul-searching re-creations of a troubled national past might best be undertaken by the filmmakers and actors of the nation in question.
Demonstrating the liability of doing otherwise, in the American-made Valkyrie it’s somewhat unsettling that the most outspoken and overt German accent belongs to the insulting judge who presides over the People’s Court show trials at which some of the lesser conspirators, and many other individuals, are condemned: Dr. Roland Freisler (played by Helmut Stauss, who was born in Cologne). There is extant sound footage of the historical trials, and it must have been tempting to, in essence, reshoot it in color while keeping much else the same, including the judge’s hectoring tirades. It reads as intentional that the most vitriolic person in the movie is undisguisedly a native speaker of German, unlike so many others in the babel of voices. In the auditory universe of Valkyrie, it almost seems as if the worse you are, the more German your words sound.
In contrast to this tumult of voices, when Ganz played Hitler in Downfall the film was made in Germany with a German-speaking cast, and thereby earned an appropriate sense of moral gravitas. The immediate precedent for Valkyrie, the German-made TV movie Stauffenberg (2004), shares that sense of authority. Although Stauffenberg is in many ways a lesser film, lacking Singer’s production values and sheer virtuoso technique, the German film has an awareness of inner cultural dynamics that renders it sometimes more effective. In it, for example, career officers on both sides of the mutiny divide continue to treat each other, for a while, at least, with a modicum of their former professional respect, and are appalled by the exchange of gunfire as the conspirators are captured in their headquarters. When the film was dubbed into English and released in the American market with the alternative title Operation Valkyrie, a sense of continuity with the original was maintained by having the German actor who played Stauffenberg, Sebastian Koch, rerecord his own lines in translation. (And note in passing that in Stauffenberg and other German-language films on the subject, the Colonel’s name is pronounced with the “sh” sound at the beginning, and not with the “s” sound heard in Valkyrie.)
Nonetheless, despite the odds, a surprisingly effective variation, The Plot to Kill Hitler (1990), does show that a version originated in English can overcome many of the inherent obstacles. In this case, the cast of mostly English-language speakers, led by Brad Davis, uses lightly suggested Germanic accents, maintaining a basic sense of internal consistency without becoming blatantly artificial. Spending possibly too much time on Stauffenberg’s home life, it may lack the political bite of some other retellings, but its language flows relatively naturally. (And here, too, Stauffenberg’s name is pronounced with the “sh” sound at the beginning, though not without a few slips.)
Making It Sound More “German”
With Valkyrie’s own dialogue unfortunately compromised, its soundtrack must resort to other means to make the movie sound more “German.”
One way is with German-language voiceover. In the opening moments, German credits appear, in each case dissolving into an English translation. Then Stauffenberg is writing a letter: we see his pen forming German letters and words, and as he writes we hear Cruise, in uncomfortable, carefully tutored German, reciting the letter he’s composing. Then the German fades out, to be replaced by Cruise’s native English, picking up the letter at the same point. You can only do so much of that sort of language switching, however, before it starts to look like a bit of a trick, and it does not happen again in the film.
Playing a much more important role, it is music that is deployed as a more effective sound-marker of national identity. Richard Wagner is given the prime role. In his comments about Operation Valkyrie in the Berghof encounter, Hitler refers to the task of the mythical Valkyries, as exemplified by Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre, who warns Siegmund of his impending fate in the next day’s fight and offers to take him off to Valhalla, sparing him an “agonizing death.” Moreover, Wagner’s opera is shown to infiltrate even the Stauffenberg family household, as the children playfully march to “The Ride of the Valkyries” (heard on their 78-RPM record machine) just before an air raid. As the bombs fall, the camera zeroes in on the spinning record label, which indicates the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch (an astute choice, since this renowned conductor refused to join the National Socialist party and is known to have helped persecuted musicians during the Nazi era).
Yet it is a different kind of music that offers the film’s emotional payoff. It turns out to be a Brahmsian choral piece by film score composer John Ottman and Lior Rosner. It features one of the finest lyrical poems in German literature: Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied II” (Wanderer’s Night Song II), which has been set as a solo song by such composers as Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt. Appropriately, given the poem’s cultural status, Peter Porter included it in his volume of translations knowingly titled Echt Deutsch.
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated it this way:
O’er all the hilltops
Is quiet now,
In all the treetops
Hearest thou
Hardly a breath;
The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait, soon like these
Thou too shalt rest.
In the film score, Ottman supports the word Ruh with an especially affecting, Brahms-like chord. What a pity, then, that the choral piece is played only over the closing credits crawl, where subtitles rarely venture; few filmgoers will be aware of what the poem is saying, as it announces approaching death and the comfort of rest. The credits piece, titled “They’ll Remember You,” is performed by the Rundfunkchor Berlin.
The credits crawl is a truly unorthodox place for a film’s grandest statement, but its effect is undeniable nonetheless. The babel of Anglo-American, pseudo-German, and actual German accents has finally subsided, replaced by the heightened language of the German Romantics — and by the musical lineage of the humanistic Brahms rather than the apocalyptic Wagner.
By this unexpected route does Valkyrie finally come to speak echt Deutsch.
(November 2018)