Director Kirill Serebrennikov is a leading figure in contemporary Russian theater and film, and a man of great talent and courage. His most recent films are both author films and biographies of complex and very different personalities. The composer Tchaikovsky was a great artist and a victim of the society in which he lived. Joseph Mengele was an executioner disguised as a doctor and scientist in the service of a sick ideology and of a criminal system. For the film ‘The Disappearance of Josef Mengele‘ (original German title ‘Das Verschwinden des Josef Mengele‘) the director chose to adapt the novel by French writer Olivier Guez which deals with what happened to Mengele after Auschwitz – the years of his running from justice and his descent into decrepitude. The book was already based on rigorous documentation and is considered truthful by historians, denying previous theories about Mengele’s fate (some taken up and propagated on screens, in other films) and presenting what he probably was: a cruel, paranoid, fanatical man, who never renounced the ideology he served and felt no remorse for his actions.
I have not read the novel that inspired the film, but I suspect that Serebrennikov rewrote in his personal style the story of the 34 years that Mengele lived as a fugitive after the end of World War II. The order of the narrative is not chronological, but one that allows us to understand the character, the way he relates to his own past, his evolution from the arrogant Nazi who still hoped for revenge in the early years to the fallen old man who drowns in his own hatred. The episode titles take the false names that Mengele assumed during his escape. For a while he did not hide much, because Argentina, where he took refuge immediately after the war, was a hive of Nazis tolerated by the dictator Peron, and the Federal Republic of Germany, where he returned briefly (under a false identity) in 1956, was trying to rebuild itself through collective amnesia. Only after the capture, trial, conviction and execution of Adolf Eichmann did Mengele begin to be truly sought after and had to completely camouflage his identity in Paraguay and Brazil, where he ended his days. He never gave up his racist prejudices and Nazi ideas, not even when life brought him close to strangers like those he considered to belong to the ‘inferior races’. Not even the visit and confrontation with his estranged son, towards the end of his life, led him to re-evaluate his own actions.
From a cinematic point of view, Kirill Serebrennikov does a few very interesting things. He shoots in black and white and uses long takes, so that many scenes look like sequences from documentary films. A single episode, in the middle of the film, is in color. It illustrates the ‘Auschwitz period’ of Mengele’s biography, in the style of filming with an amateur camera. From the character’s perspective, that was the ‘good period’. For the audience, this sequence – difficult to watch – removes any illusion about the character. The confrontation with his son provides the best dialogue in the film. The Nazi criminal clings to his ideology, there is no trace of humanity in his behavior, his justifications seem painfully relevant even in a contemporary context, perhaps even more relevant than when the words were spoken, 50 years ago. August Diehl (Woland in Michael Lockshin’s 2023 ‘Master and Margarita’) is exceptional in the role of Mengele – a mixture of fanaticism and cynicism, a character devoid of any human empathy, whose dementia increases as he ages. Through this portrayal, Kirill Serebrennikov warns his viewers about the dangers of fanaticism and the lack of human solidarity, valid anywhere and in any era.