Armitage as researcher, or: believing in belief

It bears repeating: RichardArmitageNet.com, I love you!

Goooo. Another photo from Project Magazine, August 2011. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

So, I want to admit that after my crazy shallow reaction — meanwhile, I fear, I’ve become like one of Pavlov’s dogs (Pavlov also used visual stimuli) — I did notice something else about the interview.

(Aside from the fact that as in the Total Film interview (h/t RichardArmitageOnline.com), there’s no mention in the introduction of North & South. I wonder if this omission occurs because these reporters are from a group of people not interested in period drama? Because people are too lazy to read behind the first lines of a chronologically ordered CV? Or are they just recycling pieces of a larger text / press release? Or maybe the same reporter sold the same or similar copy to two places?)

OK, sorry for the long detour. As I was saying, I noticed something. I fear this is going to sound critical, and it’s not meant that way. It’s an observation about how two people with different standpoints use the same information very differently. (Read as counterpoint on “Armitage epistemology” that involves Mr. Armitage and me reading the same sources, as opposed to me reading him as source.)

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So, right away at the beginning, Mr. Armitage says, in response to the question of whether it was hard to play a Nazi:

“I was very anal when I was researching the role. I wanted to play someone who completely believed in what they were doing. So I found this biography of a guy called Erich Gimpel, a German spy who’d been sent in to sabotage the Manhattan project. It’s a fascinating book, and it helped me to not just think ‘destroy, destroy, destroy.’ I had to try and conceive of my side being the right side, when it was so clearly wrong.”

I thought this was an intelligent comment, but almost every sentence reminded me again about my difference in perspective. I’m not British, I’m not an actor, and as a professionally trained historical researcher, I wouldn’t call the behavior described above “anal.”

What the difference in perspective tells us is: information is always for something. People are constantly engaged in the creation of meaning as they perceive, read, and speak, and sorting out these issues can be really tricky.

[At left: Erich Gimpel]

The Gimpel story is really interesting, and it’s also easily accessible (if you type in “Nazi spies” into amazon, Gimpel’s memoir is the third search result) as his memoir was published in the late fifties and appeared in English before it did in German. I read it at some point when I was a teenager, and as a reader favorite, it’s widely found in U.S. public libraries. Gimpel didn’t do very well with his task: he lasted a few weeks before his bumbling partner betrayed him, but it seems unlikely that someone with his background (he was a radio engineer) would ever have gotten very close to the Manhattan Project specs, as much of recruitment was done by networks of professional connections. Of course, the Manhattan Project was heavily infiltrated by Soviet spies, but they were (with one big exception) mostly spies of opportunity rather than trained moles directed at the project. Klaus Fuchs is probably the most well-known of the opportunist spies, but though he was a German, he was brought into the project through a British connection, and was in Britain in the first place because the NSDAP seizure of power in 1933 made communists even more obviously personae non grata than they had been before. Fuchs was emphatically not a committed Nazi. Incidentally, most atomic spies that we know about so far were Americans. Information on this activity is still emerging, and is likely to confound us for sometime: Having learned in school that the Rosenbergs were probably innocent and victims of U.S. red scare hysteria, I was stunned when declassified documents revealed about fifteen years ago that they actually were spies, or at least Julius was. Indications are that these people did spy out of convictions of various kinds: about the truth of various pieces of the communist message, or over fears of what would happen if the U.S. emerged as the only world power with an atomic weapon.

Heinz Kruger (Richard Armitage) doing it out of conviction. Publicity still for Captain America. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

In the Marvel Comics world, at least, Heinz Kruger is a Gestapo agent. The popular image (on what historians have concluded, see below) of Gestapo workers is that they were highly committed to the cause. So what must be obvious to you now is what hit me when I read this quote:  the problem with the Gimpel story as background for “someone who completely believed in what they were doing” is that Gimpel’s memoir reads pretty much as if he was a man without convictions. He liked the adventure, the spy lifestyle, and, as a man on the make, he was always in it for profit. He was pretty emphatically not moral even in the sense of Nazism as an anti-morality; indeed, the work opens with his refusal of any sort of moral, ethical, or religious consolation on the eve of his projected execution. Much of his account may involve bravado, of course. Memoirs are notoriously problematic as sources (which is part of what makes them so much fun to read and such great fodder for historical analysis). Context is important, for instance. It would not have been fashionable in 1957 to confess to an audience of English-language readers that one had been a convinced National Socialist. The 1950s were also the age of the Ian Fleming novels, the devil-may-care, love ’em and leave ’em, always just a little bit gin-infused spy. Fleming, who stood on the line between spy and novelist, and was said to have been involved in Operation Mincemeat, created a thirst in the reading public for all kinds of spy stories with the success of the James Bond novels, and what kind of story is better than a real one? All these factors play into influencing the content of the story that Gimpel relates a decade-and-a-half and more after the events it describes. Even so, even just reading literally, it’s hard to get from Gimpel’s story to convinced patriot, interpretively. Fuchs would have been a better choice if you were looking for someone who acted out of belief, but after his punishment for espionage in Great Britain, he was stripped of the British citizenship he’d been granted during the war, emigrated to East Germany, became a leader in atomic science in the GDR, and died without (as far as I know) writing a memoir.

Heinz Kruger (Richard Armitage) in his remote control operated submarine. Publicity still for Captain America. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

The main things that Gimpel seems to have in common with Kruger are that (a) Gimpel put an emphasis on being well-dressed in his preparation to spy, and (b) that Gimpel came over (to a deserted main coast) in a submarine. It took him five weeks. On the way pieces of the submarine’s equipment malfunctioned and had to be repaired above surface. Gimpel and his companion, another (American) man-on-the-make, were given $60,000 in cash plus diamonds in order to equip them for two years of anything. Gimpel’s English was broken and accented. Their clothing was of European cut, and the paper trail on the two suggests that it’s surprising they lasted as long as they did. Thus, the entire Gimpel story — like many stories about spying in general and World War II-era spying in particular — is fantastical.

Indeed, I submit that that’s a more plausible explanation of why it would make good reading as preparation for this role than the idea that Gimpel could tell us something about Nazi idealism.

I write all this not to indict Armitage as a researcher or even as an explainer of his own thought processes, but to point out that the most important piece of a story is a different one to every reader. From my perspective as reader, this data point obscures more than it tells us about Armitage prepared to play Kruger. BUT: If the point is to use an account to dream yourself into a world that doesn’t quite exist but has to have some interfaces with reality, you need to pick the pieces that are going to be most convincing for you. I increasingly have the impression that for many actors the point is not the accuracy of the whole historical picture with all of its data points, but rather the stunning image, that key sense memory or picture in your brain that you can resonate to, and that pulls you into a cognitive or emotional situation where you can play a role.

Heinz Kruger (Richard Armitage) believing it. Screencap from Captain American trailer. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

The question of how you can play a role that’s inherently unsympathetic brings up another interesting moment in this quote, Armitage’s remark that he “had to try and conceive of [his] side being the right side, when it was so clearly wrong.” On the conventional level there’s nothing to question about that statement — despite what my parents and several employers have called a disturbing willingness to argue for the sake of arguing, I’m not going to make some kind of devil’s advocate argument here in favor of the virtues of National Socialism — and this is a comic book character, so it’s not like Armitage was needing to research how to play Amon Göth, to name just one task of historical research performed by another actor that must have been viciously challenging to execute on screen. But, I think, if you’re coming at the period from the perspective of “sides,” and you assume the Allied side was the right one — and the intensity of this perception must be particularly strong in England, which was heavily damaged by German bombing and at serious risk of invasion and occupation, and where the memory of wartime sacrifice is still alive and well — then if you want to make a Nazi sympathetic, at least in your own head, so you can do your own task in a way you can get behind, one practical way is to create him as the firm adherent of a belief that has turned out to be wrong. I think that this characterization choice makes even more sense because of the comic book background, where Captain America et al seem to be represented primarily as the symbolic representatives of truth and justice. The point here, then, is much more the conflict of good and evil, and the fact of Heinz Kruger’s Germanness is more a historical particularity or a stumbling block than any real context other than one supported by an amazing art department that seems to far to be getting things really right. I’m not saying that that won’t sting for the German or German-identified viewer. For Armitage, though, it seems, it’s Kruger’s capacity to believe in something that makes the role playable.

Now, I have to say, speaking with the historian’s hat: adherence to National Socialism, even among Gestapo agents, was far more complex than simply the actualization of a blind faith in an idea which turned out to be terribly wrong, or a hypernationalism that disguised itself as the sort of patriotism a more or less human guy could put himself behind by thinking about his own capacity to believe in and love his country. But believing in belief — the mood that seems to stand behind this quotation — it seems to go past romantic (which it is) and endearing (which it also is) and move into the area of ethical speculation. All this for a comic book role.

And I wonder why I admire this actor so much.

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[p.s. If you are interested in what historians have concluded about Nazi sympathies in Germany more broadly, a book I highly recommend as an introduction to this subject is Peter Fritzsche’s Germans into Nazis. If you are interested in the convictions of members of the Gestapo, you should look at Robert Gellately’s The Gestapo and German Society. If you need further reading tips on this period, please don’t hesitate to ask — I just finished teaching it and it was one of the comprehensive exam fields for my doctorate.]

~ by Servetus on July 15, 2011.