The Culture of Death and the Civilization of Love

In 1945 Evelyn Waugh was putting the finishing touches to his classic post-war novel Brideshead Revisited. Elsewhere in the shattered remains of Europe another artist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini was conceiving what would become the Italian Neo-Realist classic, Rome Open City (Roma città aperta). That film emerged from the smashed debris of what was left of the Eternal City as the German armies retreated and the Allies slowly limped towards Rome.

Watching the film today it has lost none of its original emotional punch, not least because of the movie’s almost documentary feel. The use of hand-held cameras, to say nothing of the evocation of the city itself as a character, all make for a work that, in many ways, hardly seems dated at all. That said, shot at the start of 1945, it was very much of its time: the crew and actors were only too aware that it was a mere six months since the Nazis had left Rome.

The plot involves a number of parties all caught up in the then ongoing Nazi occupation of Rome and resistance to that. The film skillfully weaves these lives together with two central characters who stand apart until the very end: the SS commandant, Major Bergmann (Harry Feist), and a local priest, Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi). These men are the poles around which the other characters’ lives and philosophies move and with whom they ultimately collide.

Bergmann: effete and haughty, imperious and ruthless, is a cold Nazi ideologue - to be feared by comrade and enemy alike. His face is a permanent scowl that seems to say that cruelty is the only sentiment worth knowing; his inhumanity is as stiff as the immaculate uniform he wears. Tellingly, his office has two exits: one to a bordello for drunken, depressed SS Officers and another to a torture chamber. Spiritually, as he oscillates between these points, it is permanently night.

In contrast, Don Pietro is first seen in the heat of a Roman street trying to referee a soccer match for children. The scene presents good-natured chaos with the priest in his battered cassock in the middle of it. The contrast with the fussy and somber order of the SS commandant could not be more pronounced.  It is not just dress that sets the two men apart, however. The priest is pious, humble, wise and compassionate. Whether discussing Confession with a pregnant woman about to be married, the fate of an orphan, or even existential questions around suffering—he is there for all, first and foremost as a pastor. Throughout the film, we see him tirelessly on the move, hurrying through the battered city streets and passing alongside the equally bruised lives of those around him, his calm disposition a visible counterbalance to the agitation and fear that everywhere predominate.

And yet, this is no convenient “priest” type-character - the one beloved of so many older directors, Hollywood’s portrait of men who are essentially secular social workers in thin religious disguise. No, this is a man of real faith, something witnessed from the start. Called away from the soccer match by a young messenger, the priest passes with his guide through the nave of the parish church and Don Pietro stops to make a full genuflection, as does his young companion, before solemnly leaving the church together. Later in the movie, this action is repeated with the unmarried mother. Later again, we see him intoning the Litany of Loreto on his knees before the Blessed Sacrament after yet another brutal slaying by the Nazis. The juxtaposition of this scene is interesting for it is followed by a sequence that presents the hollow, if materially comfortable, lot of a female Italian collaborator who has sold herself for the pleasures of this world, and now, like her SS masters, never smiles. Two scenes: one displaying a human being forlorn and listless encompassed by material luxury; the other showing one with no worldly comforts to speak of, yet filled with a peace that is not lost in the very teeth of adversity. The message is clear.

With Don Pietro’s concern for the poor and abandoned, with his piety and ready recourse to prayer in all situations, with his reaching out even to those who oppress and harm, his depiction is most definitely that of a priest, nothing less, even if his shoes are covered in the dust of the streets.

Eventually, the climax comes when the two protagonists meet.

One is captor, the other captive. There are others arrested when the priest is arrested, who form part of the Italian Resistance. One of these kills himself unable to control his fear of the torture he is about to undergo at the hands of the SS. We watch as yet another Resistance fighter is taken for interrogation. As this occurs, through the door, we glimpse the instruments of torture being prepared—enough to make one shudder. When we witness them being used, however, it becomes almost unbearable.

Don Pietro is forced to watch this sadism. He is commanded by his captors to counsel the man to betray others in the Resistance. Instead, the priest chooses to pray for all those concerned. Incomprehensible to his captors, here is a man who not only rejects the Nazi ideology but also appears unafraid to do so. Bergmann, the SS Major, is beside himself, all too aware that, without the weapon of fear, his meticulously constructed ‘Empire of the Night’ shatters. In the end, the torture kills its victim, and Bergmann is left with nothing but this Pyrrhic victory accompanied by the watching of the priest’s recitation of the Prayers for the Dead.

This encounter between Bergmann and Don Pietro is stripped of any melodrama. It is simply a confrontation between good and evil. Nevertheless, it is of especial interest for contemporary audiences given that this battle for hearts and minds, and thus ultimately of souls, is one played out between a poor city priest and a neo-pagan hierarchy decked out in all its macabre tinsel. The priest’s peaceful face is all the more memorable because it counterpoises the haunted look of the Nazi, whose dead eyes like gaping holes reveal nothing but the emptiness of Hell itself.

Here we have two ideologies at war: a Culture of Death and a Civilization of Love. One with all the trappings of worldly power believes that might is always right and that some are born to be nothing more than a “slave race”; the other totally rejects this and sees through the veil of earthly reality to the supernatural truth that transcends it. One despises humanity and “kills and kills and kills”—as one despairing SS Officer laments; the other continues to welcome life.  And yet history is witness to the victor in what was an altogether real battle between the Church and mid-twentieth century neo-barbarianism. As the latest round of persecutions—some subtle, others less so—begins to get underway all over Europe, underscored by the funereal score that ever accompanies the Culture of Death, it is worth remembering this.

Consequently, the film’s resonance is remarkably timely, unsettling for reasons that have nothing to do with the last century’s wars but on account of the ongoing invisible battle still being fought today.