"The Bubble" Post Script

Though I guess I gave Eytan Fox's The Bubble a lukewarm review, I became a bit obsessed with it. I've now watched it maybe two or three times (I know, there is something wrong with me.) It clearly struck some kind of chord in me, even though I still think it was somewhat lacking in a few aspects. I just now saw another film Bent, that is referenced in The Bubble and it somewhat changed my perspective on the latter.

There's a scene in The Bubble where Noam, the Israeli main character, takes Ashraf, his Palestinian lover, to see a play. The play is Bent, a 1979 play by Martin Sherman, about two gay men in a concetration camp in 1930s Germany. One of them wears the customary pink triangle, the other has "made a deal" with the guards to get a yellow star instead, as he thinks he will get treated better as a Jew. In the scene we see in The Bubble Ashraf and Noam watch the main characters in Bent make love through words — without touching — while on a three minute break from penetential labour with a Nazi guard watching over them. Afterwards one of them says to the other "We did it, we made love, fucking guards, fucking camp, we did it, we are human, we exist." That of course is more or less the main point of the impossible love story in The Bubble.
Bent was adapted into a movie in 1997. I'd never heard of the play or the movie before I saw The Bubble but it had me curious as there were a quite few intertextual references to Bent in the movie. I promptly added Bent to my Netflix list and watched it. It turned out to be an extremely depressing and pretty graphic and brutal film, but also — as Noam says in The Bubble one that gives food for thought.The story poses questions about agency and the morality of sacrificing oneself or a loved one one can not help, when faced with such a conundrum.

(A warning to anyone who intends to see either film or play, there are major plot spoliers ahead:)
In its essence Bent is about men trapped in circumstances that brutalize them. The choices, cruelties and dirty deals they have made to survive weighs on their conscience. In the end they chose to exercise the only form of agency they have, first to fall in love have (virtual) sex and forge a human connection, and then, ultimately refuse to participate in the brutality around them through the only means they still have at hand: committing suicide rather than being killed.
There are some obvious parallels to The Bubble and seeing Bent emphasized some aspects of The Bubble that were less clear to me before. Specifically it changed the way I see the ending, where Ashraf blows himself up in an empty Tel Aviv street after his sister has been killed by Israeli soldiers.
Before pushing the detonator, Ashraf looks at Noam and makes the same sign the men in Bent use to signify their love for each other, also the same sign one of the uses before committing suicide by rushing an armed guard rather than be forced at gunpoint to electrocute himself on a fence. Ashraf runs away from Noam into an empty street, but Noam runs to him and they both die together.
Againts the backdrop of Bent the ending looks more like an act of protest againts being trapped in brutalizing circumstances than offensive stereotyping. Of course, it is still not unproblematic, but it certainly changed my perception of what Eytan Fox is trying to say in The Bubble. As always with obscure references, one can ask onself if the film has succeeded when it is necessary to dig out an obscure play in order to fully understand it, but that is another matter.

Gunter Grass and his German Guilt Complex

The New Yorker ran Günter Grass's confession that he had been in the Waffen SS, as a teenager during the waning years of World War II. It was a good piece of writing.

Though it fed my paranoid fixation on how all (or most) older Germans were Nazis by either force, choice or momentum, I couldn't help thinking about my own grandfather who was of a similar age — eighteen — fighting around the same time as Grass. As fate and history would have it, my grandfather, a Dutch Jewish refugee fighting in a Dutch brigade in the British Army was wearing a very different uniform than Grass. I only know fragments of my grandfather's life at that time, it is not something he liked to talk about. But the basic narrative, being a young man caught up in history, scared shitless running through a bombed-out Europe, peeing your pants and shooting at whomever you happened to run into is no doubt similar for Jews, Nazis, Allies and Soviets alike.
Of course while my grandfather was advancing across northern France and the Netherlands, Günter Grass was retreating from the advancing Red Army in Central Europe. Are those superficial similarities or are they deep similarities? I generally have a very low tolerance for mitläufer or fellow travelers, all the little passive people who enable dictatorships and genocides across the world, but I'm not sure what to think.



Grass's profound sense of guilt at having been part of not just the German army but of the Waffen SS (and an eager volunteer to boot) comes across loud and clear in the piece. At the same time his very declaration of guilt seems to me like a request for absolution. For each reason he righteously gives the reader why he shouldn't be pardoned, he seems to be asking the reader to say, "Well, you couldn't help it, you were young and everyone was drafted." I'm not interested in condemning Günter Grass but I am also not interested in giving him absolution.

I am fascinated by Germany in general and with Berlin in particular and go there is often as I can. I have good friends there and have to face the fact that I am culturally very Central European. Still when I am there I feel I can never get away from the looming sense of history, from my neurosis regarding my Jewiness in comparison to their Germaness and from the German neuroses, which complement mine all too well and tend to involve hang-ups on German guilt and Jewishness in general.
Perhaps that is part of the attraction.

Günter Grass eloquent but almost compulsive parsing and retelling of traumatic events sixty years in the past remind me all too well of my own upbringing among holocaust survivors of various stripes, only he lives with the burden of guilt, rather than with the other side of that coin.
Grass's obsessive-compulsive confession of guilt reminds me of a German friend of mine, who is my own age and has absolutely no rational reason to feel guilty, but seems to do so nonetheless. My reaction to Grass's essay, reminds me of the way I react when talking to Germans my own age about World War II (because when they find out I am Jewish they will start talking about it sooner or later) I feel their pain, but I am not interested in aiding their psychotherapy — or am I?

Germans and European Jews, it's like we are tied together by this trauma and destined to hobble along together for the forseeable future. Bloody miserable prospect.

On a related note, of course, I always prefer a confession of guilt to pretense of innocence. Kurt Waldheim who passed on to some other place last week, neither admitted to or made penance for the war crimes he very possibly committed, may he be remembered as an a*#hole by all. (Sorry G-d, I know I'm not supposed to rejoice at anyone's death but I can't help myself.)