Page - 71 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

Intercultural Perspectives | 71www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 63–77 that above all they exhibit self-pity, as they constantly complain that they were assigned to this battalion. They had tough luck. They would have preferred to have been assigned to a battalion that was not ordered to kill Jews. Apparently Lifton is right. The soldiers express this sentiment loudly and clearly. Nonethe- less we may wonder whether there is not also something else happening. One of the soldiers says to his fellow soldiers – I follow here the German text – that it is impossible to shoot so many Jews. His words are: “Der Anblick der Toten darunter die Frauen und Kinder ist auch nicht um aufzumuntern” (The sight of the dead, among them those women and children, does not pep up). This is the unemotional tough talk of men, but even here we hear that seeing the dead bodies of women and children causes great mental confusion. While this re- sponse might be termed self-pity, in my opinion it is rather horror, an intense feeling of shock accompanied by an indomitable will to run away from this ex- perience. For Lifton self-pity means that these soldiers think it dreadful that they be- long to this battalion while not thinking of what they did to their victims. It may also be, however, that these words express that they did not want to carry out this killing and that they will not want to do so in future as well. Later in the film one of soldiers says that he is afraid that he will never forget, which makes it impossible for him to return to a normal life. In other words, these memories will always be with him and will constantly haunt him. The idea of being haunted by the souls of the dead is entirely absent from Das radikal Böse. What haunts the soldiers is what they have seen and expe- rienced. In The Act of Killing, by contrast, people repeatedly talk about being haunted by the spirits of the dead. I will return later to the important distinction that this contrast highlights. THE PARALLEL Before I turn my attention to this difference, I wish to point to a remarkable parallel. However great the distance between Eastern Europe and Indonesia, however different the situations – the massacre of Jews who are deemed not to belong to the killers’ people and the killing of compatriots – and however far apart in time the events, the films deal with processes that are also closely akin to each other. Both movies deal with a “purification” that has some form of government backing, a purification of elements that are supposedly no longer at home in the country where they live. This purification was part of the vision of the gov- ernment for the future of the country. This vision determined who might be deemed pure or impure, who was good and who was bad, who had the right to continue to live and build a future in the country and who had to be removed.