from Alt-Everything

A section of Alt-Everything looks at a few of my favorite films. This essay compares and contrasts Kanal, a story of the Warsaw Uprising, and Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot.


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The Spatial/Psychological in Kanal and Das Boot


The war stories told in Kanal (1957) and Das Boot (1981) tell of valiant leadership, desperation, and fear. The commanding officers in both films trudge through unbearable hardships as they search for ways to protect their partisans from ultimate catastrophe.

The U-boat commander is a cynical realist in Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot. His men are kids whom he knows haven’t a clue about what is in store for them as they prepare to skulk vigilantly around the channel waters and the North Sea. Most innocent is the journalist, aboard the boat to record, for a curious public, life in wartime and the role of underwater navigation in the Reich’s quest. The romantic belief he has in technology is soon replaced by a new awareness of the peril he is in as he seeks to put a human face on the sailors’ fear and bravery.

Das Boot is a story of survival. It hasn’t much to say regarding German ideology, except the captain and one of his lieutenants seem to represent polar views of the Nazis. The expediency of what the men do to survive overrides their concerns for the homeland’s political policies. Pro-war and anti-war viewpoints then are not central themes in the narrative, but rather a natural extension of the diversity of the crew, which is stuck in an increasingly treacherous adventure.

Petersen seems to be speaking to the folly of war by telling a particular kind of war story, which focuses on the claustrophobic elements of World War II U-boats. When men are together in such close proximity they behave and interact in ways that bring about the best and worst in human nature. War is folly in this context because men need more separation than close quarters are capable of providing. War is unnatural in this regard because it creates an environment in which men are unable to act naturally and must be repeatedly reminded of the extraordinary situation they are in. One might liken the feel of this film to another ambiguously anti-war film, Platoon, by Oliver Stone. Stone too chose a story that forced a micro examination of the spatial/psychological implications of men working in close proximity to one another. Not surprisingly, both films are anti-heroic in this regard, and are rather more focused on showing how the environments the men are forced to endure causes madness and instability in some characters.

Like Platoon, a story about a small group of men who will suffer the consequences of poor political choices, Das Boot takes for granted the historical narrative of its war. The audience knows who is going to win the Big Event in an historical context. The real story is in the minutia of ordinary men living their lives in extraordinary circumstances.

Andrzej Wadja’s Kanal, made over twenty-years prior to Das Boot, created a similar claustrophobic intensity to highlight the alternating madness and exuberance, and ultimate defeat, of its characters’ will to survive war’s crucible. The spatial/psychological conditions the characters are forced to endure in these films are similar, involving isolation and exaggerated proximity. A suffocating closeness impeded the Polish fighters in the final days of the Warsaw Uprising. But with the introduction of women into Kanal the viewer is asked to consider another extraordinary circumstance of war. What happens between men and women in close proximity under those circumstances?

Kanal is a love story told under the most threatening conditions imaginable. Whereas viewers learn to sympathize with the crew of the U-boat, the sympathy for the lovers in Kanal takes precedence within the story. Again, in the historical context, one would hope that the sewer system really might lead the resistance fighters to safety, but what one wants finally for Daisy and her lover is complete freedom, a triumph of love and hope. Ultimately one wants love to defeat hate.

A crucial difference between Kanal and Das Boot can be found in their endings. Hope is returned for Daisy and her lover at the end of Kanal, as it might be for others if the commander who shoots his lieutenant and returns underground to search for stragglers finds them and brings them out alive. The ambiguity of the ending keeps hope, and thus the possibility of love, alive amid conditions of utter hopelessness.

The differences between films such as Kanal and Das Boot, both made well after the end of the war’s hostilities, is the difference between the lurid aspects of in-war propaganda and historical perspective, which, as we’ll see in another essay, became a major concern of the New German cinema, and the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in The Marriage of Maria Braun.

TS