The Puzzle of Historical Criticism

Abstract

Works of fiction are often criticized for their historical inaccuracies. For instance, the film U‐571 (Jonathan Mostow, 2000) is set during the Battle of the Atlantic when the German U‐boat U‐571 is damaged during battle. An American naval crew disguised as a German rescue ship is sent to infiltrate the damaged U‐boat in order to steal the ship's Enigma machine and codebooks, which were needed in order for the Allies to break the German Navy's coded messages, thus making the success of this mission a major victory. While the broad details of the film follow historical events, the capture of the first Enigma machine was in fact carried out by the British Royal Navy in an operation that took place seven months before the United States entered the war. The film is loosely based on the events of “Operation Primrose,” during which the U‐110 was boarded and their Enigma machine and codebooks were captured. This event was an important British victory and a turning point in the war, yet the American filmmakers thought that U‐571 would not be commercially successful unless the events were “Americanized.”1 Many critics in the popular press have pointed out that the Enigma machine merely acts as a MacGuffin in the film. If the filmmakers simply wanted to make a film about the American Navy capturing something important from a German U‐boat, they could have substituted some other object, a secret weapon or an updated codebook, and thus would have avoided the controversy that the film raised. However, the filmmakers’ deliberate choice of the Enigma machine as the object that motivates their story's drama suggests that they at least partly wanted to tell the story of the Enigma machine, and it appears to be this that raises the expectation and the demand for historical accuracy.

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