The Mortal Storm

Is History Repeating? What a 1940 Film Can Teach Us

All persecution is a sign of fear; for if we did not fear the power of an opinion different from our own, we should not mind others holding it. ~Phyllis Bottome, The Mortal Storm

I watched a conversation recently between Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay. Peterson’s intensely controversial, a brilliant savant who sometimes comes across like one of those wild-eyed street prophets one sees, waving a bible and wearing a sandwich board that reads, “THE END IS NIGH!” Lindsay has made exposing the dangers of the Woke a crusade, following his collaboration with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, “The Grievance Studies Affair,” in which they submitted fake academic papers for publication, revealing the corruption of the universities by exponents of critical theory. All three scholars found themselves cancelled. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that this interview I watched was a dark warning of where these two thinkers believe we’re headed: to the dismantling of Western civilization, leading inexorably to totalitarianism and genocide. End of Days.

There are weapons that are simply thoughts. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicions can destroy. ~Rod Serling

There’s no doubt that polarization and the culture wars are careening out of control, but I’m constantly reminding myself and others that a Presidential Election looms, and temperatures will get hotter and hotter; the tactics of both extremes, Right and Left, will get more and more intense. Still, I think it’s wise to look at what’s happening in our culture: the “newspeak,” the censorship, cancellation, ostracism; the violent ideological war of words, and clashes over basic concepts of identity and biological and empirical truth—and compare it to the existential crises of the past that led to, yep—totalitarianism and genocide.

Orwell is invoked a lot these days, but we shouldn’t forget Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I’m a lifelong cinephile and a classic movie geek. My parents always let us stay up late if there was a good old flick on the midnight Million Dollar Movie. Turner Classic Movies is my happy place, and I was quite surprised, a few years ago, when a 1940 MGM movie came on that I had never seen before. The Mortal Storm stars James Stewart and his frequent co-star Margaret Sullavan, along with Frank Morgan (in my opinion, giving his finest dramatic performance), Robert Young, Bonita Granville, the great Maria Ouspenskaya—and a young Robert Stack, in one of his first screen appearances. I mean, this was a prestige production at a major Hollywood studio. It’s also a hard-hitting piece of anti-Nazi propaganda released a year before the U.S. entered World War II.

The Mortal Storm is based on the novel by Phyllis Bottome, who witnessed the rise of Nazism first hand, when an ex-pat Brit living in Austria and Germany in the 1930s. The film adaptation was written by British novelist Claudine West, and George Froeschel, an Austrian Jewish refugee. Both would go on to win Oscars for another powerful anti-fascist war propaganda film, Mrs. Miniver. The Mortal Storm was an impassioned plea for America to get involved and stop the Nazi takeover in Europe—from people who’d witnessed it first hand. A warning of the storm to come.

The film, in fact, opens with the image of a cloud-filled sky that darkens, accompanied by the sound of distant thunder, as we hear the following voiceover:

When man was new upon the earth, he was frightened by the dangers of the elements. He cried out: ‘The gods of the lightning are angry, and I must kill my fellow man to appease them.’ As man grew older, he created shelters against the wind and the rain, and made harmless the force of the lightning. But within man himself were elements strong as the wind and terrible as the lightning. And he denied the existence of these elements because he dared not face them. The tale we are about to tell is of the mortal storm in which man finds himself today. Again he is crying, ‘I must kill my fellow man!’ Our story asks, how soon will man find wisdom in his heart, and build a lasting shelter against his ignorant fears?

The camera turns toward earth, and closes in on a model: a picturesque alpine village out of a Christmas storybook. It’s 1933, and in this small university town, the students have arranged a surprise birthday celebration for their favorite professor, Viktor Roth (Morgan). Roth is “non-Aryan”—the euphemism the film uses for Jewish (this and the complete absence of the word “Nazi” despite the wearing of swastikas, one suspects, were carefully chosen by the studio to avoid triggering certain members of the audience). His family consists of his wife Amelie, his daughter Freya, his young son Rudi, and his adult stepsons Erich and Otto von Rohn.

The story beginning in the university—where, as Hitler takes control, the students are indoctrinated and radicalized—has chilling resonance for me, since it’s on college campuses that today’s radical ideologies have taken root. Like the cancellation crusades waged against “problematic” teachers in our time, our fictional Professor Roth, so lionized by all at the start of the film, soon finds himself and his classes boycotted after his refusal to abide by, and teach, the doctrines of racial purity. Student gangs rebel and begin burning books.

As The Mortal Storm unfolds, Roth’s family is torn apart. His stepsons join the Hitler Youth movement. His daughter Freya (Sullavan) and her pacifist boyfriend (Stewart) run more and more afoul of the fascist gang, made up of their former friends and schoolmates, and are eventually forced to flee. There’s a stunning scene in an inn, where the youth are having a Nazi singalong. An elderly gentleman (also one of the non-Aryan university professors) chooses not to join in, inciting the intimidation and violence of the gang. The scene, for me, feels eerily familiar—you can view it here.

Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan encounter Nazi youth culture in The Mortal Storm

For the record: I am not equating any group, movement, or ideology with Nazism or fascism in general. What I’m pointing out are some of the red flags of totalitarianism that all of us should take notice of: control and regulation of public and private life, language and behavior; censorship and mass surveillance; erosion of democratic ideals; political repression.

The Mortal Storm presents us with vignettes and narratives that I find sickeningly familiar: the dissemination and enforcement of controlling and censorious ideological beliefs; the radicalization of students, and campus revolt against established intellectuals and educators; the fracturing of families from the polarizing clash of political ideology; the bullying and violent suppression of dissent and opposing views—particularly by gangs of angry youth, aided and abetted by the state and law enforcement. Let’s not be blind to these parallels in our culture today, simply because today’s mob cloaks itself in liberal progressivism and social justice, and sports blue hair, BLM t-shirts and rainbow flags, instead of brown shirts and swastikas. Victor Klemperer, in his book The Language of the Third Reich, writes:

Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed upon them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously...

Language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it... Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic; they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.

In our time, when the right to free speech, guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, is being challenged by liberal progressives, who characterize it as a right wing value—we’d better sit up and take notice, and start considering just how important our freedoms are to us in this country. The writers of The Mortal Storm were bringing a dark warning from Europe in a dark time. Voices like those of Peterson and Lindsay may be dismissed by some as crackpot or alarmist, or rejected on partisan grounds, but if we don’t heed some of their warnings…if we don’t at least educate ourselves, and become aware of the entrenchment of certain totalitarian ideas and practices right under our noses…we do so at our peril.

Ralph Webster, a second generation Holocaust survivor, in his brilliant book, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other, chronicles the story of his father’s German family, which resembles in many significant ways the fictional Roth family in The Mortal Storm, and his father’s escape and survival. I will leave you to ponder this quote from the book which contains the most potent warning of all—a warning against complacency:

I can’t recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can’t explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.