Quote:
Originally Posted by frau kaleun
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I do find the ending melodramatic. But this is what plagues all German movies about WWII. A gloomy atmosphere and a bad ending is mandatory. It is the only politically correct treatment of WWII there.
Here's part of a review I wrote where I tried to justify the ending:
Das Boot is an allegory for Germany during the second world war. The captain knew that the superiors were wrong and that the mission cannot be accomplished but he followed the orders anyway because he was a good soldier. The scene when the u-boat is trapped at the bottom of the sea after Gibraltar said it all: the chief engineer told Werner that the whole business is madness and that he knew it all along. In the military a soldier cannot do wrong as long as he followed orders. In defeat the blame goes to the commander. Soldiers are only punished for disobedience. However, in the end we see that obedience to a wrong decision is punished anyway. The most common, and futile, argument by the defendants during the Nuremberg Trials was that they were simply following orders. The aftermath of WWII is deeply ingrained in the German psyche and this movie shows it.
The captain isn't entirely innocent, too. He cheered the victories and was zealous in carrying out orders. How can we blame him? I am sure every audience cheered along with the crew at some point in this movie. In any language, the word for "the good guys" is always "us". The perspective of the movie places us right there among the u-boat crew. The captain clearly violated his own conscience and the laws of man when he refused to rescue the sailors. Das Boot put us there and show us that human beings like us, and not some Biblical monsters, are fully capable of carrying out the worst atrocities, if they are put inside a system that shifts responsibility upwards.