Examining Courage in Terrence Malick’s Film 'A Hidden Life'

Franz Jägerstätter, a farmer, husband, and father of three young daughters living in the bucolic Austrian Alps, refused to swear loyalty to Adolph Hitler at the cost of his life. He was guillotined on August 9, 1943.

The movie begins by establishing his close marriage and family life and the warm, interdependent existence in this small mountain village where townspeople are helpful and share a disdain for the coming war. But when the German Luftwaffe fly above their remote village and newsreels reveal the Nazis’ violence, these relationships begin to fall apart.

Why is choice so frightening?

Franz’s open objection to the war makes town members uneasy, disturbing their fragile equanimity. The concept of choice can overwhelm, particularly in cultures that have authoritarian underpinnings, as Austria and Germany did. The Mayor is totally dismantled by Franz’s decision and becomes physically aggressive. The clergy argue that his sacrifice would benefit no one. Others say the duty to the Fatherland predominates.

“Are you better than us?” he is asked. Despite his fear, he persists in his position. Franz is taken away to Germany and imprisoned. His assigned lawyers and other members of the judiciary attempt to convince Franz to change his mind to save his life. They are unsuccessful.

Franz is a deliberate, careful thinker.

We know through experiencing this magnificent film, which is three hours long, that Franz’s decision is not impulsive. We watch carefully as we see him live with his decision, and we despair of its impact on his wife and mother and children. Franz’s decision will be thought out, and all things will be considered, and the viewer will feel this deliberation. This courageous man will resist the Nazis despite his fear of loss and death, fully aware of its impact on his family. Even in the last moments with his wife before they are brutally separated, he refuses to back down.

Why doesn’t Franz lie to save his life?

Why didn’t he just lie and swear loyalty to Hitler? He could have spared himself and all he loved such agony. Franz knew the Nazis could kill him, but they could never murder what he stood for. Courageously, he accepted death to abide by his convictions that the war was immoral. And that choice exists.

Franz would have understood the thinking of Ernest Becker’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death. Franz faces death through the courage of his convictions. He accepts its inevitability. He is certain to be killed but also certain that the values he holds dear to him will survive, that his symbolic self will be eternal and outlive his doomed physical body.

To lie would have meant he was someone who engaged in the misuse of language so common amongst the Nazis. It would have been a perversion of words to create a false narrative that would only further the Nazis’ violence. It is the timeless self that he wishes to preserve, not just to help him face death but to leave the legacy of choice and thinking independently. So Terrence Malick ends this provocative film with the following words of George Eliot from her masterpiece, Middlemarch:

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”