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Das Boot

By Clark Nida

Treated myself to the original uncut edition of Das Boot and sat and watched it far into the night, all 4 h 42 m of it. Seen it before, more than once, but never bored for a moment.

I’m still amazed at how convincing the special effects were, especially the British raid on the submarine pens at La Rochelle at the end of the film.

The cynicism of the captain was a little hard to credit, particularly in 1941, before the USA had entered the war against Germany and when Hitler had just invaded his erstwhile ally the Soviet Union. Things were still going well for Germany. It was not until the Battle of El Alamein (July 1942) that the tide began to turn in the allies’ favour, and Churchill could later write: “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.”

The morale-damaging incident where the captain refuses to rescue enemy sailors is made out to be his own decision, which he justifies on pragmatic grounds (“How many would you take on board? One? Ten? A hundred?”). As it happens, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz had issued two draconian orders to take no prisoners from torpedoed vessels: the captain would have had no choice but to abandon the drowning sailors – and the crew would have known it.

However, none of the captain’s anachronistic discouragement, or the others’ unlikely “humanitarian asininity” (Humanitätsdüselei) as the Nazis called it, harms the relentlessly tense atmosphere.

The scenes to stick in the memory are subtle ones. The boyish Ullmann, with a pregnant French fiancee called François, spending his off-duty hours learning French, when he isn’t adding to his pile of unsent love-letters. The photograph of Admiral Dönitz, with a fly crawling into his eye. The captain referring disgustedly to his youthful crew as a “Children’s Crusade”. The convincingly drunken speech and subsequent collapse of Captain Thomsen, a member of the Old Guard who has been wrecked by his experiences (it seems the actor really was in his cups). And the frantic, clumsy retrieval of a man who falls overboard from the conning tower (quite unscripted, and the actor really was injured).

The film has to be watched in German, with subtitles if necessary. The English-dubbed version comes across a bit like “Allo-allo”, which may have contributed to the cool reception some of my friends gave the film. I learned some colloquial German, though little of use in polite company. “Nachmittagsfik” has got to be a cliched expression, going by how the crew chants it in unison.