The Cremator: Neat, Orderly, Fascist

What kind of person do you imagine became a Nazi? The manly, the droves of stomping Freikorps-Mitglieder staining the cobblestones with blood? The neopagan convert fired up at a chance for a revitalized Reich? A conscript in the Wehrmacht just following orders? Yes, yes, and, of course yes. But these are the easy questions. The harder version, at once banal and resistant to easy resolution, is one of calculation and differentiation. Are their types of insurance salesman who acquiesced? Did he have qualities distinct from those of his more resistant colleagues? If none of them did anything, does it matter how they felt?

Juraj Herz’ The Cremator (1969) attempts one such case study. It details the life and work of Karl Kopfrkringl (Rudolf Hrušínský), a pleasant, neat little man with a round face who decides to go into the funeral business. Karl lives in pre-war Czechoslovakia and takes great pride in supporting his family by symbolically reducing all beings to equality, to dust. He reads incessantly from a book about Tibetan Buddhism and has a habit of fussing over his own close-cropped hair with the same comb he uses to prepare cadavers. In between smiley tours of his ultra-modern crematorium, set below a funerary chapel, Karl dotes on his kindly wife Lakmé (Vlasta Chramostová) and their two children: his gangly son Mili (Miloš Vognič) and elder sister Zina (Jana Stehnová).

His only instincts express themselves in tidiness. Karl does not drink or smoke. He is “abstinent,” an apolitical animal.

And yet, everything is not as it seems. Herz, himself a concentration camp survivor, quickly cuts from a brothel Karl visits once a month to his home. Herr Kopfkringl tells the same stories to both his wife and a prostitute, unsure of what he’s told to whom before. At work, his hands find themselves grasping at a young female employee. He locks his claws around the back of her neck. Something is not quite right.

Into this situation enters a Nazi sympathetic friend, Walter Reinke (Ilja Prachař), who convinces Karl that he has German blood in him. Through conversations with Walter, the cremator signs up for the Party and begins to suspect his wife, who is half-Jewish, of raising an effeminate son. He decides to bring orderliness to his life itself, preaching the gospel of equity in annihilation. The Nazi’s victims are saved from themselves. No one is Jewish when they are dust.

Karl begins to imagine that he is the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, as the search was ongoing when the events of the film are set. His spiritual, professional, and political questions become one. But what unites them? His obsession with fastidiousness. He has no ideology, not really. Karl is nothing more than a small-minded commitment to tidiness dressed in an undertaker’s suit. To be the Dalai Lama for him means little more than to be the world’s most honored exterminator, the ultimate disciple of D.T. Suzuki.

Karl Kopfkringl’s story feels urgent. I have no desire to belabor some comparison between our moment and 1930s Germany. That’s been done to death and most often rather badly. I’ll only say that my day job involves thinking about the actions of everyday professionals during the Nazizeit.

Living now and with many conservative-leaning friends, it can be difficult to watch people excuse behavior clearly motivated by hate, power hungriness, and resentment. What’s worse, I often see people default to feigned ignorance or bad-faith patience: “we can’t know it means that. We’ll see!” Herr Kopfkringl is such a person, an apolitical creature reduced to madness without any real change in his character. He adapts by not changing. In him, I see too many of my fellow Americans; I see too much of Warren Zevon’s “model citizen”:

It’s the white man’s burden,
And it weighs a ton.
I’m a family man,
Model citizen.
Torment the mailman,
Terrorize the maid,
Try to teach ’em some manners.
Whip ’em into shape.