Rosenstrasse - the movie

Yes, yes, I took a lot longer than planned to get back. But there was little to say until I saw a wonderful movie on Friday: Margarethe von Trotte's "Rosenstrasse."
The beautiful-sounding Rosenstrasse, the street of the roses, is in the Mitte part of Berlin. I was there last year, and remember well the story associated with it.

Memorial to the women of Rosenstrasse, 1943

In 1943, a group of Christian women married to Jewish men staged a week-long vigil outside the building where their husbands had been taken and held, prior to deportation to the camps. The men - most of them, anyway - were eventually released to their waiting wives. (How long they escaped the clutches of the S.S. is another matter, which I should investigate. It is not mentioned in the movie, in order for the focus to remain on the women's efforts.) The movie is partially told in flashbacks from a surviving wife.
The acting, direction, script, and photography in "Rosenstrasse" are all excellent. It is an unusual movie because it presents the war from the German point of view. At the same time, it shows some of the many bureaucratic steps involved in the genocide of the European Jews. As horrible as the concept was, not to mention the way it was carried out, it often boiled down to mundane paper-pushing, signing endless documents, and making small decisions within that bigger plan. Those small decisions added up, and affected human lives by the thousands.
As Hannah Arendt said, it was the banality of evil that created the Holocaust. It very well be the reason things proceeded as long and as insididiously as they did: a huge wave of murder and destruction would have been socially disruptive, and the Nazis required social cohesion (the opposite, I suppose, of anarchy or chaos) for their plan to go well. As powerful as they were, they required infrastructure as much as anyone else.
It's important to see a movie like this, with its emphasis on human psychology instead of action, and think about how future acts of mass murder could be carried out from a series of simple desks, by people who look perfectly normal.