Beckmann

The war is over, but Sergeant Beckmann can’t sleep.

One gives the order, one shoots, one dies – that is the logic of war, as simple as it is brutal. It is those at the bottom of the chain of command, armed and facing each other, who must carry it out and endure it.

Beckmann seeks out the Colonel, the superior officer who once ordered him to scout a forest with 20 men and take prisoners. Eleven men never came back. Beckmann doesn’t come to accuse him — he no longer has the strength for that; he comes to give back something he can no longer bear to carry: the responsibility for those very eleven men he had to leave behind in the snow.

BECKMANN distills this key scene from Wolfgang Borchert’s play about a soldier returning from war, The Man Outside (Draußen vor der Tür), into an inner, dreamlike liberation – posing the question every war leaves behind: What about responsibility?