Ingmar Bergman's Nazi past

I was reminded by a reader over the weekend that of the hundreds of Ingmar Bergman obituaries published last week -- including my own -- none mentioned the great filmmaker's youthful infatuation with Nazism and Adolf Hitler. Which is odd, because the director had often admitted as much and in 1999 provided further details in an interview reported by the BBC.

Bergman's father was ultra-right wing, and both the future filmmaker and his brother were Nazi sympathizers. Bergman saw Hitler speak in Germany in 1936 and recalled the dictator as "incredibly charismatic." But he maintains he never went as far as his brother and friends, who painted swastikas on Jewish-owned buildings. On the other hand, neither did he stop them. It seems young Ingmar just went with the crowd until the very end of WWII -- not so hard, since officially neutral Sweden had a vocal pro-Nazi influence -- when the revelations of the death camps opened his eyes. "In a brutal and violent way I was suddenly ripped of my innocence," he said in 1999.

He never formally apologized -- nor was he asked to -- and there was no PR firestorm as there was over Gunter Grass last year. Was Bergman "given a free pass"?

The answer's complex. Without question, his WWII political beliefs should have been mentioned in any comprehensive obituary, my own included. (In my lame defense, I was working on a sudden and tight deadline, and blipped over the one oblique mention that turned up.)

But should he have apologized? I think he did -- with his movies. Only one of Bergman's films deals explicitly with the Nazi era, and it's not one of the good ones. But the filmography in total is wracked with moral pain, forever insisting on the abiding foolishness of man. He called one of his movies "Shame" -- tellingly, it's about life during wartime and what it does to people -- and the title extends to the whole race. The 1960s work especially is a cinema bereft of hope, "ripped of innocence," and the source seems to spring from behind the camera. The worst behavior and the most unforgivable sins in Bergman films are wholly personal, as if the director were using the lens as a mirror. He never apologized because I doubt he ever forgave himself -- his childish belief in those beautiful young Aryan men proved how deluded he and the rest of humanity could be.

Bergman consequently never set himself up as a moral arbiter, as Grass did in his writings. (Nor had he actively served in the Waffen-SS during WWII, as Grass had done.) How was he going to tell you what was right when he'd been so wrong? Better to start from scratch, his films say: Assume the worst of the human race, assume that God has left the building, and sift the ashes for the few coals of grace still burning. Bergman's career consisted of wondering how they could possibly be fanned into flame.