Letters | 5 September 2009

For evil to triumph

Sir: As screenwriter of the recent film Good, I was interested by the references to it in Kate Williams’s thought-provoking piece (‘We are forgetting great evils’, 22 August). For my part I think the recent spate of films about Nazi Germany has less to do with an ‘obsession with Hitler’ or a desire to ‘excuse those who committed the atrocities’, as Williams would have it, and more to do with events in America during the first decade of this century. While in no way wishing to compare the Bush regime to Hitler’s, it was striking how blithely so many Americans (and Britons) found themselves able to go along with a government that within a few years of its election had manufactured a pretext to invade another country, sanctioned torture and even built its own concentration camp. Had it been equally easy, we wondered, for German citizens to accommodate themselves to the rise of Nazism? These parallels are certainly what motivated the American star Viggo Mortensen to appear in our small British film.