Munich The Edge of War: women in historical films are too often unrealistic
The Conversations :
In September 1938, Britain, Germany, Italy and France met in Munich as a new European war loomed. Hitler was demanding to annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia so in a bid to avoid war the Four Powers Agreement was signed and Czechoslovakia would surrender its border regions and defences. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had Hitler sign a separate Anglo-German agreement and triumphantly called it “peace for our time”. Known as the Munich crisis, this event was the climax of appeasement.
A new film, Munich — The Edge of War, is not a dramatisation of this pivotal event but a work of “what if” historical fiction, based on Robert Harris’s 2017 political thriller of the same name. The fictional male leads Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartmann are loosely based on the British AL Rowse and the German Adam von Trott, a good deal of poetic licence taken regarding their respective political insights, foresight and proximity to the centre stage of diplomatic events. The suspense of the story hinges on whether they together can change the course of events.
The film aims to be relatable by subtly framing the strategic and ethical quandaries faced by the appeasers and the would-be anti-Nazi resistors in ways that will resonate with audiences in our own age of crisis and rising extremism. Indeed, in the news now Russia is massing troops on the border of Ukraine to prevent it joining NATO, and some commentators are comparing this to the Munich Crisis of 1938.
The portrayal of Neville Chamberlain is nostalgic, highly sympathetic and (perhaps, too) attractive. Jeremy Irons’ Chamberlain is the saviour of peace, the epitome of respectability, good manners and tradition a striking foil for the current resident of 10 Downing Street, a prime minister who uses the same austere spaces for, we now know, far less serious business.The vast majority of ruminations about the historical plausibility of the film will focus on the characterisation of the leading great or guilty men. However, who are the “what if” women in the film? Are they plausible representations of the crisis women of Munich?
Fictional women
Munich The Edge of War features strong, intelligent, well-informed women characters whose actions have a direct bearing on events. The historical fictional genre allows for an attempt to right the wrongs of the very real male-exclusivity and unexamined sexism of interwar diplomacy.There are four key but still supporting women characters, serving important symbolic, romantic and dramatic functions.
There is Lenya, the German-Jewish friend of both Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartman. Pamela Legat is the protagonist’s wife, standing in for British mothers faced with the terrifying prospect of war from the air, making wrenching decisions about evacuating children, and looking at this new world through the dehumanising visor of newly acquired gas masks.Third, the film takes one of Chamberlain’s typists on a flight of fancy, so to speak. She is given the name Joan Menzies. While women typists did accompany Chamberlain by airplane to the Munich Conference, as far as we know none served overt or covert functions in the negotiations.Fourth, on the German side, there is Helen Winter, widow of a General, holding some kind of administrative ministerial post, and both von Hartmann’s love interest and co-conspirator the pretty face of German anti-Nazism.