Malick's 'A Hidden Life' Revisited

nobody understands martyrdom

Previously published in Ethika Politika

A number of the reviews of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life applaud the main character, Franz Jagerstatter, for his courageous resistance against the Hitler’s Nazi regime. As much as this man’s (whose character is based on the real life Austrian who was killed for refusing to swear an oath of fidelity to Hitler) decision had radical political implications, it would be reductive to boil his motives down to politics and congratulate him for his heroic efforts. 

New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott seemed to grasp, or rather allowed himself to be confounded by, the mystery behind Jagerstatter’s motives. 

“The film is an affirmation of its hero’s holiness, a chronicle of goodness and suffering that is both moving and mysterious. The mystery — and the possible lesson for the present — dwells in the question of Franz’s motive. Why, of all the people in St. Radegund, was he alone willing to defy fascism, to see through its appeal to the core of its immorality?...Franz is not an activist; he isn’t connected to any organized resistance to Hitler, and he expresses his opposition in the most general moral terms. And this, I suppose, is my own argument with this earnest, gorgeous, at times frustrating film. Or perhaps a confession of my intellectual biases, which at least sometimes give priority to historical and political insight over matters of art and spirit. Franz Jägerstätter’s defiance of evil is moving and inspiring, and I wish I understood it better.”

His resistance is indeed rooted in a sort of moral conviction, and yet cannot be fully explained by moral heroism. His own lack of certainty, confusion, and fragility seem to suggest that this moral dilemma was less a matter of standing by what’s righteous, but rather a matter of journeying toward a more full discovery of it.