“Sacrifice and Redemption: Fury (2014) and the Cultural Memory of the Second World War”

The film Fury (2014) tells the story of a tank unit driving deep into Nazi Germany at the end of the Second World War. Fury depicts the inevitable result of a morally bankrupt National Socialist ideology, a worldview inspired by aggressive militarism and fanatical racism. The aim of the article is to explore how the filmmakers tell the history of the Second World War through the perspective of the Fury’s crew to emphasize the religious and moral nature of their mission. The filmmakers show that the fruits of National Socialism are destruction, death, and the loss of meaning. The crew confronts nihilism in the fury of combat, yet their mission keeps them on a path of meaning, as they struggle against the evil of Nazism. The film hints of a vision for a better world in religious and symbolic language and the presentation of religious symbols. The tank unit drives through the devastation, holding steadily on to meaning, in completing its mission to save American soldiers caught in the crosshairs of the SS. This article explores the importance of the film in representing for cultural remembrance the sacrifices of soldiers of the Second World War.