Finding Light in the Modern: Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life

You may not have noticed, but the 92nd Academy Awards came and went this past February (how long ago that seems). But if you were paying attention, you might have noticed a noteworthy absence in the nominations, A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick’s moving biopic about Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter. Though it may not have been recognized at the Oscars, the film is worthy of recognition for its remarkably unflinching portrayal of the banality of evil in the modern world. And still more remarkable yet is Malick’s moving depiction of God’s grace acting in the midst of this evil.

For those who are not familiar with Jägerstätter’s story, here it is in a nutshell. Franz was a farmer who lived in St. Radegund, in upper Austria in the foothills of the Alps, with his wife and three children. After Austria was annexed by the Nazis in 1938, Franz was drafted into the Austrian army, trained for seven months, and then received a deferment. Over the next several years, Franz received additional deferments and was not required to serve actively in the Nazi military. But then, in February 1943, Franz was again called up and reported to army officials in Enns, Germany. After refusing to take the oath of loyalty to Hitler, Franz was imprisoned and eventually sentenced to death. He was beheaded in August 1943, and he was later declared a martyr by the Catholic Church and beatified in October 2007.

One of the major problems with the modern age that Malick highlights in the film is the sense of dread one has at the apparent inevitability of life’s circumstances. It is ironic that individualism and radical autonomy are often identified as hallmarks of the modern condition, when the modern experience so often seems one of impotence. One thinks of that most modern of protagonists, Jake Barnes, in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The modern man senses that the powers-that-be simply cannot be withstood. In the film, this sense is heightened by the fact that if ever there were a place on earth immune from Nazi totalitarianism it should be St. Radegund, far removed from the industrial city and the eyes of the State. Yet even there, Nazi planes fly overhead and Nazi foot soldiers roam the streets. What can the individual do against the all-consuming will of the State? Against this backdrop, many people close to Franz, including the town’s mayor, his local priest, and his sister-in-law, attempt to convince him that he is foolish. He will change nothing. The world will go on. The war will go on. What is inevitable will come to pass. No one will be changed by his choices. No one will even know his actions; they will be hidden behind Nazi walls and forever forgotten. So why persist in madness that will make no difference in the world?

Malick’s answer to this existential and ethical interrogation can be found in the passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch that serves as the film’s postscript:

For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

In Eliot’s reading, existence is not absurd. The end is not inevitable. The individual is not impotent. Through Franz’s quiet resistance, Malick offers us a theology of sanctity. The individual can make a difference, most often not in glorious, history-defining moments but in simply trying to live a life of truth. Of honesty. Of integrity. Of fidelity to conscience.

As Gervase Crouchback reminds his son in Evelyn Waugh’s WWII trilogy, Sword of Honour, “quantitative judgments don’t apply.” It is never about how many lives a person can impact or what the utilitarian outcome of an action will be. Rather, truth and goodness must be followed in their own right. Truth is itself the end; goodness its own justification.

This leads us to another of Malick’s revelations about the modern age—namely, the loss of transcendent truth. In his pre-WWII masterpiece, The Romantic, Austrian-born novelist Hermann Broch writes:

Once upon a time it was the Church alone that was exalted as judge over mankind, and every layman knew that he was a sinner. Nowadays it is the layman who has to judge his fellow-sinner if all values are not to fall into anarchy, and instead of weeping with him, brother must say to brother: “You have done wrong.” And as once it was only the garments of the priest that marked a man off from his fellows as something higher, . . . so, when the great intolerance of faith was lost, the secular robe of office had to supplant the sacred one, and society had to separate itself into secular hierarchies with secular uniforms and invest these with the absolute authority of a creed. . . . [F]or it is the uniform’s true function to manifest and ordain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and flux of life, just as it conceals whatever in the body is soft and flowing, covering up the soldier’s underclothes and skin, and decreeing that sentries on guard should wear white gloves.

When transcendent truth is lost, at best man is left with an empty uniform, the exterior form of order and hierarchy. And for a time, perhaps, man can live as if that uniform itself has meaning and blindly submit to the mirage of authority that it presents. But ultimately the uniform will become inhabited by the ruthless, value-less, will-to-power. Malick reveals this in historical footage of Adolf Hitler, always in uniform, and in the many scenes of Nazi soldiers in pristine regalia, their uniforms the outward symbol of law, order, and authority that has no correspondence to transcendent reality. If there is no reality beyond the physical, no truth of a spiritual or eternal nature, are we not left with the purely material world embodied by the uniform? And though the Hitlers of the world may be withstood for a time, will they not always return more bloodthirsty and with greater power than before?

Malick’s surprising answer to the ever-growing demands of materialism and loss of transcendence? Beauty and grace. Perhaps the most moving aspect of the film is the portrayal of Franz’s relationship with his wife, Franziska, and three daughters. I cannot remember a film that so movingly depicts the joys of marriage and family life. The juxtaposition between the warm, affectionate moments that Franz shares with his wife and daughters on their farm picking apples, snuggling in bed, gathering firewood, or playing games provides a stark contrast with the sterility and coldness of the Nazis. The Jägerstätters’ “unhistoric acts” stand as a sharp witness against the looming hostility of the Nazi soldiers, whose power lies only in the destruction of life. In our fractured, frenzied, and hyper-technical modern lives, where the value and goodness of marriage and family life is daily threatened, Malick reminds us of the inherent beauty of the family. Of the beauty of the love between a husband and a wife. Of the joy that this unity can foster. A joy strong enough to withstand the Nazis? Perhaps so.

Another beauty is that of the natural world, which is juxtaposed against the pusillanimity of human evil. This theme is typical of Malick’s films. One thinks of Malick’s other World War II film, The Thin Red Line, which contrasts Edenic images of South Pacific island vegetation, animal life, and the native islanders’ peaceful existence with the brutality and horror of the Battle of Guadalcanal. Or, in Malick’s first feature-length film, Badlands, a killing spree is set in the gorgeous South Dakota badlands. Malick’s work in A Hidden Life is certainly made easier by his setting, St. Radegund, a stunningly beautiful village in the north Austrian Alps. The breathtaking mountain clips and pastoral farm scenes seem to beg for a response from the heart: Surely you are more than your flesh and bones! Breathe, just breathe. Breathe in the mountain air and you shall know. You are better than you think you are. You were made for something more! Is it naïve to believe that beauty can save the world? Perhaps. But with truth and goodness increasingly relativized and divorced from any transcendent source, perhaps this last of the transcendentals can re-orient our hearts and begin again to form our minds.

But not without grace, which is often signified by images of water. Malick sets several scenes near a large river that is shown flowing full and fast. At one point, Franziska and her sister playfully toss buckets of water at each other. Toward the end of the film, when Franz is in jail and his wife forced to care for the farm with only the help of her mother and sister, their well goes dry. She is seen climbing to the bottom of the well and scooping out mud. Has grace run out? Hope obsolete? Then the final scene: Franz is led behind a large curtain toward a guillotine. Buckets of water sit near the guillotine. The floor has been washed of the blood from the men who were killed immediately before Franz, but remnants of blood and water remain on the floor. The actual beheading of Franz is not seen. Instead, Malick immediately flashes again to the large, flowing river. The river of grace does not run dry.

So beauty triumphs? Grace saves the day? The simple, hidden, heroic life of Franz Jägerstätter defeats Hitler, brings down Nazism, and puts an end to totalitarian evil once and for all? Not so fast, you think. Why does it seem that this script ever repeats itself? Why, even now, in the year 2020, does there seem to be an increasing existential dread, a sense of hopelessness in the midst of a global pandemic, deep civic unrest in American cities, and both soft and hard totalitarianism on the rise? Perhaps Franz’s life was in vain after all. Admittedly, no purely rational argument can utterly convince us that truth, beauty, and goodness ultimately destroy the halls of evil. But where the rational mind can go no further, hope and faith arrive to take our hands and lead us into the darkness. And one of the final scenes in the film gives us an image of what this faith and hope look like. Franz is in his small jail cell. A priest visits him, so that Franz may make his final confession. Franz kneels before the priest. It is nighttime and the cell is utterly dark save for one luminous candle. This is the light that shines in the darkness. And the darkness cannot overcome it.

Jeffrey Wald writes from the Twin Cities.