Physician-Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia, and Bioethics in Nazi and Contemporary Cinema

Abstract

AbstractToday, physician-assisted suicide and/or euthanasia are legal in several European countries, Canada, several jurisdictions in the United States and Australia, and may soon become legal in many more jurisdictions. While traditional Hippocratic and religious medical ethics have long opposed these practices, contemporary culture and politics have slowly weakened opposition to physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. Our chapter examines how assisted suicide and euthanasia have been presented in cinema, one of the most powerful influences on culture, by Nazi propagandists during the German Third Reich and by Western filmmakers since the end of World War II.Almost all contemporary films about assisted suicide and euthanasia, including six winners of Academy Awards, promote these practices as did Ich klage an (I Accuse) (1941), the best and archetypal Nazi feature film about euthanasia. The bioethical justifications of assisted suicide or euthanasia in both Ich klage an and contemporary films are strikingly similar: showing mercy; avoiding fear and/or disgust; equating loss of capability with loss of a reason to live; enabling self-determination and the right-to-die; conflating voluntary with involuntary and nonvoluntary euthanasia; and casting opposition as out-of-date traditionalism. Economics and eugenics, two powerful arguments for euthanasia during the Third Reich, are not highlighted in Ich klage an and are only obliquely mentioned in contemporary cinema. One dramatic difference in the cinema of the two periods is the prominence of medical professionals in Ich klage an and their conspicuous absence in contemporary films about assisted suicide and euthanasia. A discussion of the medical ethos of the two time periods reveals how cinema both reflects and influences the growing acceptance of assisted suicide and euthanasia.