If anything, though, the new Broadway production of “Judgment at Nuremberg” demonstrates that the more experiences we have, the less adept we become. Revised for the stage by Abby Mann, the Oscar-winning author of the original screenplay, this fictionalized account of the 1948 trial of four German judges accused of condemning innocent people to death or sterilization is nearly as powerful as its screen predecessor. It still packs immense star power: Maximilian Schell, who played the German defense lawyer in the movie, is now Ernst Janning, the only conscience-stricken defendant; young Michael Hayden offers a brilliant performance in Schell’s old role; and George Grizzard, Robert Foxworth and Swiss actress Marthe Keller confidently emerge from the shadows of Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark and Marlene Dietrich. But with only a few changes to the script, Mann has injected a heightened feeling of self-doubt that reflects the current Zeitgeist.
Two of Mann’s changes are particularly telling. A U.S. Army captain, who was white in the movie, is now black. When the chief American judge says that it’s hard for him to imagine what happened in Nuremberg under Hitler, the black captain responds: “Not for me. I grew up in Texas. I’ve known these people before… They’re just like people in my hometown.” In another new scene, when an American general pushes the prosecutor to ease up on the defendants, he warns that zealousness can spin out of control. “If you look at it that way, why not put Truman on trial for dropping the bomb?” The prosecutor fires back: “Maybe we should.”
An old-fashioned American liberal, Mann claims he’s only raising questions about such comparisons, not offering any answers. And he insists the Texas reference has nothing to do with the current occupant of the White House. “I didn’t do it to take a cheap shot at Bush,” he says. “But in Texas, my God, the executions are incredible.” He also happens to share his prosecutor’s feelings about Truman–that maybe he should have been put on trial. Get Mann going, and he adds a comparison to the Vietnam War, which he calls “tantamount to a massacre.”
The problem with making such dubious comparisons is that it undercuts the central premise of “Judgment at Nuremberg”: that evildoers should be brought to justice. If no one is clean, then why should these defendants be singled out? If everyone is guilty, then no one is really guilty, and accountability evaporates. This is the main argument of the defense attorney in the play. If the defendants are found guilty, he declares, others must be found guilty, too, inside and outside Germany. He offers a ringing indictment of the Kremlin for signing the pact with Hitler that allowed him to make war; of the Vatican, which signed a concordat with Hitler in 1933, giving him respectability; of “those American industrialists” who helped Hitler rebuild and rearm Germany. If his main defendant is found guilty, he concludes, his guilt “is the world’s guilt–no more and no less.” After all the revelations in recent years about varying degrees of collaboration outside Germany, this defense resonates even more strongly than in the movie.
Mann understands the dangers of this argument: after all, he put those words in the defense lawyer’s mouth. His script amounts to a passionate appeal for making specific people pay for specific crimes. He doesn’t want the perpetrators to get off easy by using an everybody-does-it defense. In the gripping final scene, an already convicted Janning asks the American judge to understand that he never knew his early actions would lead to the deaths of millions. “It came to that the first time you sentenced to death a man you knew to be innocent,” the American replies. It’s a devastating rejoinder, and the culmination of a magnificent re-enactment of the seminal trials of the modern era. But if moviegoers left the theaters four decades ago with a feeling of cathartic rectitude, audiences leave the updated production feeling much less emotionally satisfied. That’s not Mann’s fault; it’s history’s.
