In my opinion the richness of “reconcile” has been somewhat debased by the bean counters. They use it to mean the verification of financial accounts. But reconciliation has much more potential than simply ticking off the items on a credit card statement. I think that Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu had it right, in principle. What got me thinking about it was the first time that Jean Renoir and Carl Koch really met. Of course they didn’t know about that meeting until later. I will let Renoir tell the story himself.
Carl Koch had been a German army captain of artillery in the First War. In 1916 he was in command of an anti-aircraft battery in the Rheims sector. “It was a good sector,” he told me. “Nothing against it except the incessant attack of the French squadron opposite us.” As it happens, in 1916 I was flying in a reconnaissance squadron in the same sector, and we were the main target of a Germany battery which gave us a lot of trouble. Koch and I concluded that this was his battery: so we had made war together. These things form a bond. The fact that we were on opposite sides was the merest detail.
From: My Life and My Films by Jean Renoir 1974
We met both Carl and Jean long after they had died. Carl’s wife, Lotte Reiniger, introduced us to them both with delightful stories of their first meeting in Paris at the première of Lotte’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed. And their subsequent adventures in working together on the Renoir films. Glorious days in Meudon as well as dedicated work on such masterpieces as La Marseillaise and La Grande Illusion. Carl left first, and when he did Jean wrote to Lotte from his home, which was by that time in Hollywood.
“The best times in my life working in film were with Carl. It was through this connection that The Rules of the Game was such a success. Carl, from Heaven on high, must surely be laughing.”
True reconciliation.
