What we remember is as important as how we remember. What we do with our memories is something else entirely.
Courtesy Nouvelles Éditions de Films S.A., Paris
In 1988 The Berlin Wall had very little time left to stand as a divisive barrier separating stiff political ideologies. The following year Berliners would tear it apart, essentially rupturing the keystone of a dam holding back one of many pent up political transformations about to remake world. It’s arguable that the end of The Wall marked the unofficial end of the twentieth century, insofar as it sounded the final chimes of an age filled with global wars, hot and cold.
The funny thing about history, of course, is that nobody ever knows the relevance of events while they’re happening. Everyone knew the collapse of the Berlin Wall was a big deal when it happened in 1989, of course. But one year before it came down, The Wall stood firm. People talked about removing it, but nobody seriously thought it was going anywhere. History, much like the measure of our own private lives, has everything to do with context, and it’s challenging to make an accurate appraisal of context without some distance from events.
Film director Louis Malle lived most of his years through the decades that came before the world changed in the late ’80s. As a boy growing up during World War Two he attended a Catholic boarding school in France. There he witnessed the arrests and deportations of three Jewish students and a teacher by Nazi secret police, The Gestapo. After school he grew up in post-war Europe, a prolific filmmaker and an intellectual with an interest in telling challenging human stories, often in realistic, almost naturalistic styles. Nonetheless, it would take most of his professional life to contextualize the relevance of those profound moments of fear and loss when he was a boy in school, and crystalize them into the remarkable movie “Au Revoir Les Enfants (Goodbye Children”), released in 1988.
Inasmuch as the story is a farewell to the main character, it’s also a farewell to the childhoods of all the students in the story, including the ones who remain, the ones whom the Nazis ignore. The title is as much its own metaphor as it is a smart summary of the movie’s main plot.
But I believe Malle implies something deeper. Through the quiet, shared experiences of his film’s young, lightly fictionalized characters, Malle speaks to the audience, presenting a farewell to the allegorical childhood of the emerging modern world that World War Two ushered. Humanity has never been very good to itself, either individually or taken as tribal groups. We like to pretend in an inherent human goodness, but tragically our actions, small and large, suggest otherwise. Century after century, history shows moments of golden hope to be comparatively rare things scattered amid moraine fields of hardscrabble violence, depravity, or even just simple selfishness. Until the two world wars broke lose—arguably one gigantic war that simply took a pause through the ‘20s and ‘30s— the great and awesome and seemingly intractable malevolence of humanity tucked artificial gestures of civility between frequent bouts of bloodletting. We curtseyed and bowed and rationalized exculpations for our endless hostilities large and small.
Then we stepped on the gas. As 20th century modernity got its motor running, including zippy new communications, industrial technologies, and logistical strategies for killing other people en masse, human malevolence was primed and ready to become mechanized, wholesale, and ubiquitous. The world wars and their endless subsequent proxies (Korea, Vietnam, Angola, El Salvador, The Middle East, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and countless more) proved definitively that talk of higher virtues is cheap, and beating the tar out of each other seems to be endemic. By saying “goodbye children”, Malle was telling us that we cannot pretend to ever embody the innocence we once claimed. Even just saying “goodbye children” as a descriptive phrase proves how willfully self-deceptive we are for pretending to be civilized at all. If societies can allow children to be escorted away from a school by secret police, taken to concentration camps and scheduled for execution, societies can never claim a moral license to hide in the skirts of our leaders with bashful ignorance, pretending that wise grownups are responsibly in charge.
It’s always in retrospect when we discover the moments in our lives that matter. Life experienced in real time doesn’t easily enable us to contextualize our feelings or the relevance of experience. Only memory and its academic sibling history grant lasting gravitas to events, or sentimentality, or sadness, or joy.
Au Revoir Les Enfants clearly traffics in weighty recollections. Like all heavy memories, they could only exist if there had been meaningful aspects of joy and satisfaction to lose in the first place, otherwise they would be little more than weightless wisps of recollection. That’s why this movie matters so much today in the adolescent 21st century where you’re reading this, surrounded by technology and global markets and entirely different social and political structures. Separated by decades, we can finally see clearly what the churning turmoil of the twentieth century has wrought. For all of the promise that the fall of The Wall augured and symbolized, we’ve hardly learned anything at all. Since The Wall came down, so-called civilization has largely reverted to our worst behavior rather than seized on the bright hopes of a moral, mutually supportive world.
That’s the great gift of Au Revoir Les Enfants, released one year before The Wall fell. It contextualizes memory and reminds us about what’s real. As a masterpiece of narrative cinema, it captures the intimacy we all know from our own lives, reminding us of our shared humanity and great positive potentials. But it also recalls the vital, even imperative truths about how, so often, we are our own worst monsters, snatching childhood from each other as if that were a legitimate, rational option. We steal kids from parents; we ignore science; we keep secrets to amass power against others who are trying to do the same; we pledge not to let it happen again.
Now in this 21st century era of political upheaval, economic chaos, and lethal global pandemic, Malle’s film asks us to look back at the lives we’ve lived and asks us to take stock. He asks us to remember the past honestly. He reminds us that while it may be more comfortable to recall our histories with a resigned sense of nostalgia, or a cavalier sense of self-congratulation for getting through dark times, we must not forget the lessons that clear-eyed memory can offer.
But what he’s really saying is that we can no longer collectively claim any pretense to live in an evolved, moral world of our own design if we simply accept these events as ordinary. Small scale goodness becomes effectively irrelevant in the face of endless large scale turpitude, and history shows us endless turpitude, despite the bright, rare moments that suggest constructive alternatives.
Look around. As much as we like to think we can collaborate and live together and work together, we seem to be little more than inches from each other’s throats, locally, nationally, and internationally.
Goodbye children, indeed.