Sang impur

Casablanca

(1942)

A year ago, during my annual on-or-about-Bastille Day screening of my all-time favorite film, I vowed that in the coming year I'd learn La Marseillaise (the first verse, mind you; no sense in my knowing more of the French national anthem than of the American one). Naturally, I printed out the text from the Internet, studied a bit early in the year, gave it some thought once every month or two, then crammed during the last week. If tested, I'd probably get a B, maybe a B-.

Now, I was aware that the anthem was not exactly a gentle ode to liberté, egalité, and the campus Greek system, but not until trying to memorize it--and peeking at the English translation to confirm that that was really what it was saying--did I appreciate the irony of my favorite film's favorite scene. Major Strasser and his nasty Nazis have commandeered Sam's piano to sing Die Wacht am Rhein, a stirring World War I march. Enraged, the resistance hero Viktor Laszlo demands that the club's band play the French anthem; the bandleader looks to Rick, Rick nods, and the Germans' musical patriotism is outgunned--a précis for what will happen in the rest of the film: hills of beans, fateful/fatal phone calls, Vichy water, start of a beautiful friendship, and so on.

While it's true that the details of the Final Solution were obscure in 1942, the Reich's attitude toward Untermenschen was hardly a secret, and the screenwriting Rosenberg brothers could hardly have been ignorant of who the unter-est of those Untermenschen were. So was it simply ideological homeopathy to fight the Nazis' racism with images that seem culled from the medieval texts of anti-Semitism, invoking enemies determined to come among us and slit the throats of our wives and children? And is it possible to pray for impure blood to water our fields without contemplating the hell that doctrines of sanguinary purity were fueling?

OK, so what? Would I prefer that they sing Edwin Starr's "War (What Is It Good For?)" or War's (!) "Why Can't We Be Friends?" I dunno--give me another year to think about that one. Could be worse, I suppose: they could sing "Hail to the Victors," which is, essentially, the Marseillaise of college fight songs--impossibly inspiring, but ultimately in the service of wickedness.