 |
| Conrad Veidt as "Kurt" |
Take
Off That Monocle or Take Me to Your
Fearless Leader
It's always someone else's fault in
politics. Until now, in the European
Union, Greece and Germany had no quarrels. Then came the economic melt
down. Germany, which has been able to keep "head above water",
has been called in to help. Someone in Germany said a dirty word, "Austerity measures." Someone in Greece replied, "NAZIS!" Stathis Stavropoulis,
Greek political cartoonist, bemoans the daily grind of rendering German
politicians in Third Reich garb. I had to empathize with him.
The article below from Spiegel
goes on to say, 'Even the
New
York Times recently published one of his cartoons, which Stavropoulos
characterizes as "more tragic than funny."' So instead of being
grateful not all of Europe was lost, people in the media and government are
angry and turning to jingoism, stereotyping and hurtful hate speech, blaming
people they don't even know. Even Angela Merkel, a liberal politician,
has been put into "evil" uniforms. While politicians blame one
another, people suffer. The United States economy is running on the
policy of a blank check book and a charge account, which is never paid.
16 trillion dollars and we won't have Germany to bail us out!
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/when-in-doubt-call-them-nazis-ugly-stereotypes-of-germany-resurface-in-greece-a-817995.html
When boys are in third grade, war is a distant fiction full of glorious
explosions and gory violence. Girls in the third grade think this is
awful and lose respect for boys for at least 7 years or more. My class
was looking at a war cartoon drawn by the great British artist Joe Colquhoun
(pronounced Co-hoon). It was a page from "The Rat of the
Regiment", a Terry Thomas type doing everything a British soldier should
not. Wicked and cowardly, “the Rat” used his unconscious Sgt. as a human shield
in battle, picked the pockets of the dead, and enjoyed shooting down
“unarmed Krauts” who were waiving a white flag of truce. My boys, having
seen plenty of cable TV, saw nothing wrong in shooting someone waiving a white
flag.
"But that would be
evil," say I, "A white flag means you are surrendering."
"But they can shoot you," a boy
said.
"They are unarmed," I
replied. "What if you were in the trench and had no gun and the
enemy came?" I tried to reason. "Wouldn't you want the enemy to
show mercy? Maybe you could eventually go home?"
I told my father this story adding,
“..., as if they shot unarmed German soldiers,…”
“But they did shoot unarmed German
soldiers,” my father replied.
I was aghast. Dad told
me the story of his Uncle Harry, an American soldier in WWI. His
Commander used to say, "Take the prisoners to the stockade and be back in
five minutes." Uncle Harry said it was physically impossible
to walk to the stockade and return in 5 minutes. What he meant was to
take the German prisoners out and shoot them. Uncle Harry, being an Irish
Catholic, played dumb and really took the German prisoners to the
stockade. He didn’t shoot them. I
suppose he took the consequences when he got back. So some German
soldiers saw their families again.
Today, it may surprise young readers
to hear Germans demonized for simply being German. Not me. I grew
up in the sixties. Germans were the villains of choice in Hollywood since
the silent days. In the early fifties
there was a brief span of cold war stereotypes. If you see Wikipedia
under “American Anti Communist Films” you find only 6! By the sixties this went out of style.
Between the McCarthy Hearings and a swing towards secular humanism foundered on
a new luxurious American lifestyle, a desperate left sought to bury Stalin by
reviving Hitler. Hollywood literally
“….Saved Hitler's Brain”. Soon only ‘squares” feared “the
left”. If you see films made during and after the War like The
Stranger with Orson Welles, his monologue at dinner where he says
"Germans" desire not a Godly savior but a dictator. Note he says, “GERMANS” not Nazis.
Very interesting. There was a deal of talk in films and in articles about
the nature of the German people and their maniacal desire to rule the
world. American soldiers were shown "Your Job in Germany"
directed by Frank Capra and written by Theodore Geisel aka Dr. Seuss.
General Patton called this film, "bullshit". It is a wretched
film telling soldiers never to trust a German, as if racism and greed was built
into their DNA. This film is propaganda and propaganda is ugly no matter
the source and no matter the subject. Propaganda films say much more of the filmmakers
than of the people being demeaned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_Job_in_Germany
I learned the evils of propaganda at
an early age. As a little girl I saw many TV shows where the idea all
Germans are evil because of their blood scared me. Boys shot me with
imaginary machine guns in the schoolyard for being German. But I didn't
want to take over the world or hurt anyone. Jesus was my Savior.
Many Americans of German extraction like Gen. Eisenhower fought to free
Europe.
“I don't want you to think we are
all monsters,” Marlene Dietrich said to Spencer Tracy in Judgment at
Nuremburg. Marlene had a problem with a scene where her character denies
all the Germans knew about the Holocaust. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbOOpTkjGcE&feature=related Tracy's Judge tells her they did. It
made Marlene uncomfortable, she wanted the script changed but Spencer Tracy
told her "it is needed." It's a strange answer.
Needed? To condemn all Germans it was, collectively all Germans, not just
Nazis. No one of German descent could
ever hold his or her head up. In the
film clip Germans are drinking beer and Marlene has a demi tasse, which
contradicts reality. The Nuremberg
trials were held in 1946. Between 1945
and 1947 the Allies prohibited food imports and production to punish German
civilians. When the Vatican
attempted to transmit food supplies from Chile to starving German infants the
U.S. State Department forbade it.
Read
American food policy in occupied Germany on Wikipedia.
And there were German babies, the women of
Europe were gang raped by incoming troops, so common place, it was never
prosecuted.
Solzhenitsyn, who was haunted by the gang rape/murder of a little girl he witnessed in Germany, wrote a poem about it. Talk about a war on women.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_food_policy_in_occupied_Germany
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1382565/Red-Army-troops-raped-even-Russian-women-as-they-freed-them-from-camps.html
"We will never be forgiven for
the war," as the German motor mechanic said in a Leonard Wibberly short
story. We should never forget the Holocaust. My fear is that we have indeed
forgotten. Not by forgiving but by
forgetting the Holocaust came not only from anti Semitism but from a society
where God was “dead”, sexual liberation and the occult was celebrated, and
euthanasia was put into practice by doctors to rid the world of undesirable
people. Sound familiar? Not only Socialist Germany but
also the United States adopted laws which allowed the poor, minorities, the
disabled,alcoholics, and the mentally ill to be sterilized. I recommend this documentary Black
Holocaust http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBOk4I23x9c&feature=relmfu and this old film which must be seen to be
believed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EVdAOKjR-s This we have forgotten in America.
The
sheriff can’t take you by force to a hospital anymore, unless you live in
China, but just wait.
Now we have
“death panels”.
And they are
“needed”.
Funny how the government has
a blank check for every program under the sun but they’ve decided to begin
“austerity measures” with the frail elderly and the disabled.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/health-care-reform-beyond-obamacare.html?_r=2&
Stereotypes are everywhere in entertainment, as well as politics.
My young readers may not be familiar with
Jay Ward’s
Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JVlUHxf8iY&feature=endscreen&NR=1 The cornball double title was their
trademark, like the one above.
Two
silly cold war spies, Boris and Natasha worked oddly enough for Fearless
Leader, who had a German accent.
If you
go to “Fearless Leader” on Wikipedia the article claims he was styled after a
chilling propaganda poster of a German general (with a man hanging from a
lamppost reflected in his monocle).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearless_Leader The article goes wrong when it claims the
German in the poster was based upon Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser in
Casablanca. Major Strasser didn’t wear a monocle.
However, the man in the poster does resemble
Conrad Veidt playing General Kurt Von Kolb in the film
Escape.
Conrad Veidt got the kind of adulation women gave the Beatles decades
later.
Today, he has many fans and
aficionados.
Our own John Barrymore
brought him to Hollywood.
Only when the
talkies arrived, and he was offered the role of Dracula, did he return home to
Germany. The world changed. Veidt hated the Nazis. Plus, he
remarried, Lily, who was Jewish.
They
were fortunate enough to have the money to escape to England. Many others
did not. I knew a very elderly German lady who had a similar
journey. She used to show us the photo of, "dat vonderful
mann", her husband, the handsome pilot. You might wonder why a
decorated WWI flying ace would be driven from his country. Serving your
country cut no ice with the Reich.
He
was Jewish.
Veidt was arrested and interrogated when he returned to Germany to complete
a film.
He’d made British anti Nazi
films.
Thanks to his wife and powerful
friends in Britain he was released. Veidt became a British citizen.
While visiting New York on a promotional tour for the film
Contraband,
MGM asked him to appear in
Escape.
Released in 1940,
Escape was one of the first films to reveal the existence of concentration camps.
Veidt didn’t like playing Nazis
but he considered it “necessary” to help the war effort.
Laurence Oliver claimed no actor in Britain
gave more of his own salary to the British war effort.
Sadly, if Veidt had lived beyond the age of
fifty, he would have played an endless stream of Nazis in B movies and
TV.
He would have hated that. If
Escape were remade today the ending would have no mercy.
There is an ironic story here. Escape was a popular novel and executives
hired big stars, Nazimova, Norma Shearer, and Robert Taylor. They needed an actor with charisma to play
the smoldering, attractive villain. So
here was Mr. Veidt, making his comeback to the silver screen. Soft
lighting, good tailoring, sparkling monocle.
His charming accent, his soothing voice, he always spoke in a low
register above a whisper, which is a trick to make the audience listen. That walk, he floated into the house, coat
on his shoulders like Dr. Doom. Using his enormous hands to great effect,
holding a cigarette like no other or threatening the hero with his fist. Even when he is revealed as corrupt and
cruel he is still slick. Poor Robert Taylor, as one critic said, came off
like a garage mechanic in comparison. Jerry Allen (Conrad Veidt From
Caligari to Casablanca) claimed Veidt in Escape received almost as
many fan letters from women as Clark Gable for Gone With the Wind!
Astonishing publicity at MGM. Never again was Conrad Veidt allowed to
have sex appeal in a that uniform. No soft lighting for Major Strasser -
caterpillar mustache, shoe black eye brows and NO MONOCLE. It is ironic no matter how Hollywood paints
Germans as no good they give them a non-human invincibility. Germans, all Germans, are human just
like all the other humans on earth.
There is no evil or lowly race.
No supermen either. Only one
race, the human race. I wish people
would stop forgetting this.
As as they would say on Rocky and Bullwinkle, "Until our next episode, 'When Liberalism Isn't Liberal or The Party's Over.'"
Peace,
Citizeness Journalist
Pro life Germans under attack, it’s
not easy being pro life,… http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/human-rights-activist-sees-face-of-fascism-at-eu-human-rights-conference
Good article by Paul Kengor!
An
American high school marching band recently caused a commotion by saluting the
Bolshevik Revolution, “St. Petersburg 1917”. When the supervisor was asked to
explain, she saw nothing wrong. Apparently our scholars
make up history to justify their own worldview. What if the band had
performed “Berlin 1933”? The Supervisor would have lost her job and
rightly so.
http://www.visionandvalues.org/2012/09/communism-on-parade/
And now for some good news –
Child actor donates first paycheck to Missionaries of Charity
