Why be a traitor?


I don't think there are many films on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is one and it's a good one about an era that i dont' think many know much about. What gets me is did Redl have to betray his country after how he grew up in it and tried to make his way up the ladder? Question is as the film really is about "identity", who you are and who you identify with in your life, did he really know who he was at the time when the chickens came home to roost or was he as despairing and aimless as those who eventually helped start up WWI?

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This film has many layers. One of them is the "identity" issue. The Austro-Hungarian empire was not a modern nation but a reminiscence from another times.
As it's evident in the movie only the austrians and perhaps the hungarians felt true patriotism, the rest of the minorities couldn't care less about the Empire.

About Redl being a traitor... well he was betrayed first by the corrupt leaders of his "nation". After his homosexuality was exposed he knew they got him. The archduke was looking for an "ucranian" to serve as a scapegoat, Redl was the perfect choice: Ucranian, part Jewish and homosexual.

perhaps he betrayed the "empire" at the end but first the Empire (or better said the archduke Franz Ferdinand) betrayed him.

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Very good..I thought Brandauer played a very complex man in a tough period.
He goes up with the Empire and then goes down with it...always trying to be somebody. He did pretty good for himself coming from a peasant background, being loyal and rising to where he got in the military. Most fellows didn't get that far during that time. Ironically, as he killed himself that's when he got "free". Redl is a great film of a time that's no more but yet we see some of the breakup the Empire's fall has caused in modern-day Central Europe. Everybody still wants to be "somebody" over there and many are showing their "nationalistic" feelings.

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Wasn't there a film on those Czech regiments? I vaguely recall one made a few years ago. I'd love to see it.

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Director Istvan Szabo has stated that in preparing for this film, he took as much inspiration from Joseph Roth's THE RADETZKY MARCH (a novel about one family's tradition of service to the Emperor) as he did from the facts of the Alfred Redl case. In COLONEL REDL, the Archduke says he needs a scapegoat - specifically, someone who is Redl's "double" - and when Redl can't provide one, he makes himself available. That's what the loyal Austro-Hungarian subject did; he served the Empire, even if it meant putting himself in jeopardy.

In reality, Russian agents had uncovered Redl's homosexuality in the early 1900s & had been blackmailing him for close to a decade, learning Austria's plans for general mobilization and various military operations. It has been speculated that tens of thousands of Redl's compatriots died because of his treasonous acts.

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I was not aware of the Roth connection, though it makes sense. The credits claim Colonel Redl's based on John Osborne's play A Patriot for Me, but the two works have almost nothing in common.

Although I enjoy Colonel Redl I always wondered about its characterization of Redl. From reading biographies of the man he's hardly the principled fellow shown in the movie. Probably more victim than villain but still not far from a hero.

"The melancholy truth was that his glorious golden head had nothing in it."

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I agree with the previous poster. It seemed to me, too, that Redl didn't really want to give away military secrets, rather he just felt he had to present himself as the scapecoat that the empire was searching for.

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