8/17/2023 0 Comments Franz jaggerstater![]() ![]() “I’ll certainly quarrel with them if I’m allowed to come home.” “Greet the village authorities most warmly for me,” he quipped in another letter to his wife. Franz sometimes apologised for his obstinacy in argument, and sometimes revelled in it. As the parish sacristan, meanwhile, he imposed a strict ban on talking in church: chat to your neighbour, and you would be asked to leave. During his first period of military training – before his fateful decision – he wrote home saying it was a good thing there were severe penalties for getting into fistfights with other soldiers, “or I might sometimes fail to keep command of myself”. Until his late 20s, he was one of Sankt Radegund’s more laddish characters: the first villager to own a motorbike, he fathered a child in a liaison with a farm girl and once served a brief jail sentence for brawling with a Home Guard soldier.Īfter Franz got married and started taking his faith more seriously, he was still recognisably the same man: decisive, plain-speaking, erring on the side of rashness rather than reserve. But the real Franz, well portrayed in Erna Putz’s biography, was rather different. Yet his actual thoughts remain mostly mysterious.Ĭuriously enough, this Franz resembles the protagonists of Malick’s previous films: troubled, introspective, ill-at-ease in a world which provides no answers to the questions that burden him. We contemplate his haunted face and see in it, perhaps, the suffering Christ. After being conscripted and refusing to serve, he faces a series of interrogations in which he never quite explains his position. ![]() Asked to make a small donation to the war effort, he blurts out that he won’t, then walks away looking anguished. When the Nazis arrive in his village of Sankt Radegund, Franz grows increasingly pensive. While we see Franz as a loving husband and father, and a faithful friend, he is also a reserved man, easily reduced to silence. His Franz is, no doubt, what Malick wanted to portray: a quiet hero, with the emphasis on “quiet”. That’s not to demean August Diehl’s performance. It is, as Malick’s films tend to be, inventively told and achingly beautiful. For the Eastern Orthodox writer Rod Dreher, it is “the best evocation of the Gospel ever committed to film”. Jägerstätter’s martyrdom – he was declared Blessed by Pope Benedict XVI – has always resonated with religious believers, and Terrence Malick’s new biopic, A Hidden Life, has been most warmly received by Jägerstätter’s fellow Christians. ![]() Franz Jägerstätter’s life and death raise one question above all: why did he do it? Why did this Austrian farmer refuse to fight in Hitler’s army, and why did he stick doggedly to that decision even when told he would face the death penalty for doing so? ![]()
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