Truth & Treason arrives in local theaters on the heels of Raoul Peck’s smashing documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5. That’s two anti-authoritarian films in a row at a time when most of us need a wake-up call.
Helmuth Hübener, the 16-year-old protagonist of Matthew Whitaker’s historical political drama, Truth & Treason, isn’t very big for his age. He and his friends in Hamburg go swimming, horse around with each other and shyly make eye contact with girls their age. But otherwise the slender, bookish Helmuth (played by British actor Ewan Horrocks), son of an army officer and a quiet hausfrau, is seemingly an ordinary adolescent onlooker as Germany wages war in 1941.
He’s more interested in his job at the city hall bureau of records and his new acquisition, a contraband shortwave radio, which is strictly forbidden by the Third Reich and for which possession of one is punishable by death.
Director Matt Whitaker—who made the American GI war movie Saints and Soldiers as well as a separate documentary on the Hübener story, Truth & Conviction—and his co-scenarist, Ethan Vincent, handle Helmuth’s threatening predicament straightforwardly, without stylish digressions. Nazi Germany is an unforgiving environment for an idealistic kid. One day a boy could get beat up by aggressive Hitler Youths, the next he could discover that the popular novels of Thomas Mann have been banned.
Helmuth and his family belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The pastor informs his congregation that “Jesus was a revolutionary,” but it’s shown that ordinary Germans don’t know much about Mormons or their beliefs—other than that they don’t really belong. Helmuth’s Jewish friend, Salomon (Nye Occomore), also gets singled out for the hate treatment. That’s already enough to warn a young man that anyone might be challenged by police just for walking home alone at night. Helmuth increasingly relies on clandestine BBC broadcasts for information, trusting his comrades and his own increasingly daring instincts.
Quite naturally the idea of active resistance dawns on him, particularly the tactic of fashioning homemade red leaflets criticizing the Führer and the war, then posting them on city streets after hours. Meanwhile, the teenager’s pamphleteering efforts attract the notice of a doggedly efficient Gestapo officer named Mussener (Rupert Evans). Mussener won’t let go of the case. In typical war-movie terms it’s only a matter of minutes before Helmuth gets picked up, forced into a confession, convicted of treason and sent to the guillotine.
Truth & Treason is not a detective procedural, it’s the intimate personal history of a conscientious resistor, neither cunning nor bloodthirsty, who can no longer silence his inner voice, at the risk of his life. In the audience we cringe, constantly dreading the time when the door is kicked in and the foolhardy objector is hustled off to a secret police torture chamber. Anyone who has heard the story of Pastor Martin Niemöller, or perhaps seen A Hidden Life, The White Rose, or any of the numerous anti-Nazi dramas from Hollywood in the 1940s, should know what to expect.
The real-life case of Helmuth Hübener parallels that of his contemporary Sophie Scholl, a university student from Munich whose similar anti-fascist beliefs—she and her brother Hans founded the White Rose Society after questioning the Third Reich’s philosophy—also led them to distributing leaflets as an act of nonviolent resistance.
Scholl, her brother and a third leaflet dropper ultimately suffered the same fate as Hübener, in 1943. But Scholl’s writings, smuggled out of Germany and published after her death, went on to inspire global admiration and several TV and movie treatments of her story.
The spark of Scholl’s resistance informs filmmaker Whitaker’s equally nervewracking dramatic account of the “crimes” of Helmuth Hübener. As a cautionary tale for our time, Truth & Treason succeeds on its realistic performances and its urgent energy. Whether it turns out to be a dire forecast of the future remains to be seen.
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In theaters
