Preface

A miracle story from the Middle Ages known as "The Painter and the Devil" and collected in the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso the Wise depicts the anger of the devil against a painter for always portraying him as ugly while portraying the Virgin as beautiful. In retribution against the painter, the devil causes a fierce blast of wind to knock the painter's scaffold out from under him as he is painting an image of the Virgin on an inner wall of a church. The painter calls upon the Virgin to help him, and when the villagers hear the noise of the collapsing scaffold and rush into the church they find the painter suspended safely in midair supported only by the tip of his brush in contact with the beautiful image he was painting on the wall. A wall painting in Westminster Cathedral's Lady Chapel illustrates the miraculous comedy of the scene.¹

What better way to show beauty and love defying satanic coercion and force? The heart of the comic vision in the story is the apparent disproportionality of means: a simple artist's brush engaged in the expression of beauty and divine love is presented as sufficient to defeat the destructive force of resentment and anger.

The miraculous power of the seemingly powerless is of course a topic of constant reflection in Christianity. The comic mode of "The Painter and the Devil" is buoyant with faith, and in that presentation the destructive force of evil readily and harmlessly recedes—in the story the villagers glimpse the devil fleeing from the church when his destructive blow is thwarted. In a modern age that has prided itself on the cultivation of power to be put in the service of either good or evil we are more likely to encounter presentations of the grim and horrifying force of evil in reflections on this topic.

A recent film (2004) by Volker Schlöndorff, The Ninth Day, offers a compelling example of a modern depiction of the power of the powerless in which we are asked to recognize the dark and terrifying suffering that ensues when the Nazi regime deploys its organization of massive power in support of an ideology of racial supremacy. The film focuses on the confrontation of the Nazis with a priest from Luxembourg who had published an essay opposing the race theory of the Nazis and had been engaged in resistance activities. The film is a free adaptation of the published diary of Jean Bernard, a priest who survived imprisonment by the Nazis in Dachau and later became bishop of Luxembourg. But, as Schlöndorff observes in an interview, the script departs from the diary in a number of ways, and the film does not have documentary intentions, focusing instead on the deep moral issues at the heart of the story.

The title of the film is perhaps intended to remind us that the suffering of the priest at the center of this story takes place in the much larger context of the unimaginable suffering inflicted upon the Jews by the Nazis in the Holocaust: the title calls to mind the Jewish fast day, Tisha B'Av, The Fast of the Ninth of Av, commemorating catastrophes that had befallen the Jewish people such as the destruction of the first and second Temples, with the suggestion that the Holocaust takes its place in this long history of the suffering of the Jews.

The more direct reference of the title points to the narrative structure of the film as it follows the day–by-day actions of the priest, named Henri Kremer, who had been arrested and imprisoned for having written an essay denouncing the racial ideology of the Nazis and for engaging in resistance activities. Kremer finds himself inexplicably released from the Nazi prison camp in Dachau but then learns upon returning home that he is on furlough from the concentration camp and will be given a mission by the Nazis. He is told that if he tries to flee all the priests from Luxembourg in his prison block in Dachau will be executed. Over the nine...