We had a fairly uneventful weekend; on Saturday we walked across to Morrison’s for a late breakfast (very late; it was 12.30 by the time we arrived) but the place was so busy and short-staffed we had to wait about 45 minutes for our food. Then only one breakfast came and I had to go and ask for mine – and then there weren’t any knives so we had to eat sausages and hash browns with a spoon and fork. This is not so hard with veggie sausages as it would be with meat ones, and I enjoyed it all the more for having to wait. We didn’t complain because the staff were so nice and were clearly rushed off their feet; and besides the customers there are always friendly so it wasn’t the tense experience it might have been in Waitrose (LOL). I spent the afternoon finishing off the strimming in the freezing cold wind (it’s warmer today, thank god) and the garden now looks reasonably tidy.
As far as the house goes I have given up on the private buyers for now and spent much of Friday contacting estate agents and arranging visits. I don’t know how they’re going to take photos of our front room as it’s full of boxes but we can discuss all that when they come. Today we have a visit from Pickford’s to discuss removal costs – a little premature I know but we just want to get a few quotes so we know what we’re dealing with.
Yesterday I watched a film recommended by Beetleypete called A Hidden Life.
I wouldn’t have bothered were it not for the recommendation as I hadn’t heard of it and it’s extremely long at nearly 3 hours. The film’s obscurity is perhaps appropriate as it celebrates the ‘hidden life’ of Franz Jagerstatter (I don’t now how to do umlauts on here but there should be some) a Nazi refusenik who when called up from his farming occupation, refuses to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler. The film begins with a lengthy, Heidi-like picture of their idyllic life on a farm in the Tyrol where they plant wheat, raise pigs and keep a cow for milking. The work is hard and goes from dawn to dusk but the landscape is beautiful and their three children scamper about like goats on the steep hillside. The hard work is mitigated by the mutual support and love not only between husband and wife but among the whole community, without whose help no family could survive. Into this idyll marches a detachment of soldiers with call-up papers. Franz is sent back to his farm at first as this is a reserved occupation, but as the war progresses he is called on again and attends a training camp. Here he refuses to take the oath and is imprisoned. He spends the rest of his life in prison, being by turns beaten and cajoled to take the oath. ‘What do you think you’re achieving? Do you think you’ll change the course of the war? Think of your wife and family?’ and so on: exactly the sort of things I can imagine people saying in those circumstances. In the end he is sentenced to death; his wife is allowed a visit but they are not permitted an embrace and her conversation is interrupted by constant badgering of him to take the oath. In the end he is guillotined and his wife goes home to continue managing the farm with her sister, although this time the community which ostracised her pitches in and helps.
I’m not sure I would have the courage to do as he did: I suspect in the end I’d take the oath with fingers crossed behind my back. Then again, as a yoga teacher of mine once said, in each moral dilemma you have to ask yourself, ‘is this the hill I want to die on?’ But he acted in accordance with his conscience, and that is the pith of the story.
A Hidden Life is a hypnotic film; the lush beauty of the Tyrolese landscape is frequently contrasted with the dull sunless prison environment (I thought of Oscar Wilde’s ‘little tent of blue’)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45495/the-ballad-of-reading-gaol
and the laughing freedom of the children as the adults work. One interesting feature was that while the main characters spoke in English, the Nazis spoke German. I found it frustrating that the German wasn’t subtitled but I guess it brought home the idea that the Nazis did not represent the whole of Germany but are in a sense a race apart. There is also some chilling (actual) footage of Hitler. As far as the local village goes, every shade of collusion, collaboration, dissent and conformity is represented; the mayor struts around declaiming like a tin-pot Hitler while the priest and bishop hedge their bets, afraid to go against the state. Some of their neighbours are judgmental, others quietly supportive. At one point an artist in a church working on a sculpture of the crucifixion says ‘the people look up and imagine they would behave differently from the crowd.’ But would they? Ultimately the film is like the sculpture because it asks the same question of all of us: would we behave differently? What would we do? And the answer is silence.
A Hidden Life is available now on All4.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5827916/
Kirk out
PS Speaking of moral dilemmas, as we were leaving Morrison’s on Saturday we passed a cashpoint that was beeping because a card had been left in it. I was about to take it and hand it in but there was a couple behind us and the man snatched it from the slot. I could swear the woman said something like ‘take it home’ but she could have said ‘take it in,’ I guess. As we moved off I said sotto-voce to OH: ‘I wonder if they’re going to hand that in?’ I had a horrible feeling they weren’t, but I could be wrong…
Sarada Gray 
Although I haven’t had one for some time now, generally, I’ve found supermarket breakfasts to be tolerably good, and reasonably priced; it’s just a shame that all the corporate employers think it’s acceptable to operate with minimal staff but expect first class results, so it’s no wonder the poor restaurant staff are run ragged. As for all the “self-service” tills which are being introduced, I wish people could see the inevitable consequences, and stop using them.
Pete’s film recommendation reminds me of a German TV series which was available here some years ago; it was in German, with subtitles, and it was called Heimat: it had a longer timescale than the film, but inevitably, it took in the war years. “Heimat is a series of films written and directed by Edgar Reitz about life in Germany from the 1840s to 2000 through the eyes of a family from the Hunsrück area of the Rhineland-Palatinate. The family’s personal and domestic life is set against the backdrop of wider social and political events. The combined length of the 5 films — broken into 32 episodes — is 59 hours and 32 minutes, making it one of the longest series of feature-length films in cinema history.” I didn’t manage to watch all of it, but it was useful for me to sharpen up my German.
PS: on a Mac keyboard, the umlaut is accessed by pressing option[alt]-U, then the vowel; so ü is option-U, then U again. Can’t remember if this works on Windows keyboards, but worth a try? Cheers, Jon.
It is a lot like Heimat, which is also completely wonderful!
Many thanks for watching the film on my recommendation, Sarada. I am pleased that you think it was worth your time.
Best wishes, Pete.
It was. I never watched Heimat as I was a bit put off by the length