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The Ogre Asuperficial viewing of Volker Schlöndorff’s The Ogre (1996) cannot fail to produce in the mind of the spectator familiar with Schlöndorff’s earlier work a whole network of references and parallels to the director’s other films. The opening scenes in a boys’ boarding school rework elements of Young Törless. A naive hero who has a boy’s psyche in a mature man’s body can be seen as an inverse of The Tin Drum’s Oskar, who had a mature psyche in a boy’s body. The Ogre’s spectacle of collective Nazi rituals recalls comparable assemblies in The Handmaid’s Tale. And the director’s fascination with the war-torn areas of the Baltic region and East Prussia, established in Coup de Grâce and The Tin Drum, returns here in yet another inverted variant on the Heimatfilm. At the same time, The Ogre explores new ground for Schlöndorff. In it, the filmmaker treats the themes of innocence and guilt, suggesting that guilt about the Third Reich should include guilt not just about the Holocaust but also about the lives of thousands of young German men who were sacrificed. Schlöndorff’s treatment of this era differs from that of others in his use of a central character who is a kind of mythic, ahistoric archetype, resulting in a collision between specific historical details and a poetic figure whose narrative function is to provide a point of view about these details. In addition, The Ogre employs an overarching metaphor that disturbingly compares the seductive qualities of fascism to pedophilia. The result is a narrative that encourages and then discourages—in repeated alternation—identification with the hero, that piles on ideological contradictions, and that ultimately confused and offended critics and audiences. Schlöndorff’s source material is the novel by Michel Tournier called Le roi des aulnes (1970) and retitled The Ogre in its English translation (1972). The original title is a direct reference to Goethe’s poem “Der Erlkönig,” a romantic ballad celebrating childhood, imagination, and the magic of nature. Erlkönig is also the title of Tournier’s book in German, although Schlöndorff deliberately used the more generic title Der Unhold, to avoid an excessively charged reference to 25 289 Goethe (Schlöndorff, “Nachwort” 188). Tournier has been a controversial figure in European letters, in part because some critics saw Le roi des aulnes as a novel as much entranced by the mystique of fascism as it was critical of it (Douin). In preunification West Germany, Jean Améry, formerly exiled during the Third Reich, attacked “Tournier’s Aestheticism of Barbarism” (73). For this reason, Schlöndorff himself described the project as risky (Jenny 199) and has admitted that his interest in it emerged from his own naive, juvenile fascination with the glamour of Nazi artifacts and ideology (“Nachwort” 175–77). Although it incorporated extensive factual research, Tournier’s novel is an elaborately written, fanciful work that combines fictional diaries with third-person narrative—the kind of nonrealistic book that would traditionally be thought impossible to render on the screen. The book is divided into six main sections. Part 1 focuses on the main character , Abel Tiffauges, owner of a middle-class Parisian car repair shop in the late 1930s, as he remembers his youth in a boarding school and as he pursues a hobby of photographing school children. Tiffauges befriends a schoolgirl who later falsely accuses him of raping her. Because France is preparing to enter World War II at the beginning of September 1939, the judge allows Tiffauges, in lieu of standing trial, to enlist in the army. Part 2 describes Tiffauges’s work with homing pigeons that he collects and trains to deliver messages for the French army. In part 3, Tiffauges, captured by the Germans, works in an East Prussian prison camp, where he enjoys closeness to nature. He finds he can even slip off to a deserted woodland cabin where he feeds a blind elk, whose lack of connection to the herd clearly parallels Tiffauges’s own loner status. He also meets the head forester, who recommends him for a position at the hunting lodge of Field Marshall Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second in command. In part 4, Tiffauges works as a factotum at the lodge and observes Göring in hunting, partying, and boasting, until the fall of Stalingrad disperses the hunters. In part 5, Tiffauges is sent to a “Napola...

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