Das Boot: The Director's Cut

History is written by the winners.

This axiom is so old and has been attributed to so many persons over the centuries - Pliny the Elder said something like this, and so have such historical figures as Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill - that it seems as though it's become ingrained in history buffs' DNA.

Whether you accept the idea that history, indeed, is often written in such a way that it favors the viewpoint of the winning side of a conflict at the expense of the losers' or not, if you carefully watch war movies about World War II - especially those made before the late 1960s - there's no doubt that films made by the former Allied powers (China, France, Great Britain, the Union of Soviet Social Republics, the United States and their allies) tend to prove that the axiom is more or less true.

For instance, if you are an average American movie watcher (not necessarily a war film buff), chances are that when you think about World War II movies you'll name such titles as The Longest Day, The Great Escape, A Walk in the Sun, Go For Broke!, Battleground or Saving Private Ryan.

Granted, quite a few American producers and/or directors have made movies which are more nuanced and don't show soldiers and officers from the Axis powers as one-dimensional villains: Dick Powell's The Enemy Belowgave viewers a sympathetic portrayal of a non-Nazi U-boat commander as early as 1957, while later movies (The Longest Day, The Young Lions, The Great Escape and A Bridge Too Far) tried to be fair and balanced about German soldiers, especially once West Germany became a NATO ally in 1955.

Still, if you want to get the whole story of World War II - at least in for-entertainment movies - you need to watch movies made by filmmakers from our former enemies.

A particularly good candidate for watching a movie that tells the German viewpoint of World War II without whitewashing the Third Reich's brutal rule or overly emphasizing the "Good German Myth" is 1981's Das Boot.

Das Boot - The Director's Cut - 

Before Wolfgang Peterson started making movies for American film studios (In the Line of Fire, Air Force One), he was already a renowned director of both feature and made-for-TV movies in his native Germany.

Of his made-in-Germany feature films, perhaps the best-known is 1981's Das Boot (The Boat), a movie which follows the captain (Jurgen Prochnow) and crew of a German U-boat (submarine) during a single war patrol in 1941.

Das Boot, which at one point was the most expensive movie made in Germany, has been released in three different versions: a two-hour and 20 minute long theatrical release (1982), a 1985 German TV miniseries which runs for a total of five hours, and the 216-minute-long Director's Cut edition.

The film begins with a simple title card that is as dispassionate (and revealing) as the rest of Das Boot: it tells the audience that of the 40,000 German submarine crewmembers who fought in the Battle of the Atlantic, 30,000 were killed. (That's a 75% casualty rate, one of the highest suffered by any branch of any of the combatants in World War II.)

Das Boot is based on a novel by Lothar G. Buckheim, who - like Lt. Werner (Herbert Gronemeyer) - was a war correspondent for the German propaganda ministry assigned to cover U-boats and their exploits during the early years of the Battle of the Atlantic (1939-1945).

Assigned to accompany U-96 on a war patrol from its base in La Rochelle, France in late 1941, Lt. Werner serves as the audience's eyes and ears aboard the very cramped quarters of a German submarine.

Through Werner, therefore, the viewer experiences the danger, the boredom, the excitement of the hunt for Allied shipping, the differences in attitudes between the apolitical captain and the "true believers" who still follow Nazi principles, the war-weariness of disillusioned German Navy veterans and the horrors of being stuck in a sea-going coffin as British warships and planes hunt their U-boat.

My Take: Though at first it's hard to identify with German submariners - that's the whole "history is written by the winners" bias kicking in - I found myself totally immersed in the claustrophobic world of U-96 and her crew.

Even though I knew that U-96 was hunting Allied shipping in the Atlantic at the behest of Hitler's regime, Petersen's refusal to make the Germans look like Nazi patsies and the camera's unblinking focus on the cramped quarters and the sailors' gutsy effort to survive the worst Nature and the Allies throw at them made me bond with them anyway.

This last point is vital if you're going to watch this film: While Das Boot does allow the audience to feel some sense of empathy for the German crewmembers of U-96, it doesn't romanticize or cast them as saintly Good Germans. (One wonders if a Hollywood movie about U.S. subs in the Pacific could be as brutally honest as Das Boot....)

Instead, by showing us the conditions in which the German sub crews lived, worked, fought and died (the only thing that's left out of the movie is the awful smell of the sub's interior), Das Boot gets the viewer to see the sailors in a realistic and human fashion. 

Most of the Kriegsmarine (German navy) men aboard , after all, are not Nazi Party members and are simply doing their duty to their country in a time of war.

Clocking in at over three hours, Das Boot: The Director's Cut comes in one of those double-sided DVD discs that require careful handling. It has the original German soundtrack (with subtitles) and an English-language dubbed track. 

I usually avoid English dubbed-overs, but because most of Das Boot's cast also speaks English, the majority of the actors were available for the English-language audio track.

(Film Trivia: The full-scale mockup of U-96, which was docked at one of the old World War II U-boat pens in France for on-location shooting, was also used as the German submarine seen in Steven Spielberg's 1981 movieRaiders of the Lost Ark, which also used the U-boat pen to portray the Nazis' secret outpost in the Mediterranean Sea.)

Recommended: Yes