Tuesday, February 10, 2009

To Rewrite History Cultists Must Learn To Read

"A deeply depressing indication of how,...film misreads the Holocaust can be found in a recent New York Times report on the state of the Oscar race. The paper gave disproportionate attention to The Reader by featuring a wistful-looking still of Kate Winslet above the headline 'Films About Personal Triumphs Resonate With Viewers During Awards Season.'

What, exactly, was the Kate Winslet character's 'personal triumph'? While in prison for participation in an act of mass murder that was particularly gruesome and personal, given the generally impersonal extermination process—as a death camp guard, she helped ensure 300 Jewish women locked in a burning church would die in the fire—she taught herself to read! What a heartwarming fable about the wonders of literacy and its ability to improve the life of an Auschwitz mass murderer!

True, she's unrepentant for the most part about allowing those women and children to burn to death. (Although we do see one scene in which it turns out she's saved some pennies in prison that she wants to be given to the children of the women she murdered—thanks!) But most of what we see of her prison experience is her excitement at her growing literacy skills. Get a load of those pages turning! Reading is fun!

It's been argued that no fictional film can do justice to the events of 1939-45, that only documentaries like Alan Resnais'
Night and Fog or Claude Lanzmann's nine-plus-hour-long Shoah can begin to convey the reality of the evil. And there certainly have been execrable failures (example: Life Is Beautiful). I've argued that most of the fictionalized efforts either exhibit a false redemptiveness or an offensive sexual exploitiveness—what some critics have called 'Nazi porn.' But in recent years, a new mode of misconstrual has prevailed—the desire to exculpate the German people of guilt for the crimes of the Hitler era. I spoke recently with Mark Weitzman, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's New York office, who went so far as to say that The Reader was a symptom of a kind of 'Holocaust revisionism,' which used to be the euphemistic term for Holocaust denial.

Weitzman mentioned three films in particular: In addition to
The Reader, there was Tom Cruise's Valkyrie, which gave the impression that the Wehrmacht, the German army, was full of good men and true (identifiable in the film by their British accents) who had always opposed that lout Hitler with his whole silly Jewish obsession, when in fact the more we learn about the Wehrmacht's role, the more disgracefully complicit it turns out to have been with the mass murderers of the SS. Yes, a few Wehrmacht officers did plot against Hitler, but they waited to take action until the successful Normandy invasion, when it seemed Hitler would lose the war.

'The Valkyrie conspiracy took place in 1944,' Weitzman told me. 'If it had been 1941, it might have made a difference.'

And then there was Cruise's character, Claus von Stauffenberg, very brave, it's true, in 1944. But back during the brutal war crime that was the 1939 invasion of Poland (the British magazine
History Today reminds us), he was describing the Polish civilians his army was slaughtering as 'an unbelievable rabble' made up of 'Jews and mongrels.' With friends like these ...

Moral: Don't go looking for heroes in the largely mythical 'German resistance' to Hitler. The German resistance was not much more real or effectual than the French Resistance—its legend outgrew its deeds after the war. (Although it is worth seeking out the two movies about the tiny, brave-but-doomed, Munich-based 'White Rose' resistance,
The White Rose and Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, which tell the story of a few students who didn't—like the Valkyrie conspirators—believe the goal was to help Germany win the war more efficiently than Hitler, but to bear moral witness against the exterminators. For which they were brutally guillotined in Munich in 1943.)

The third film Weitzman mentions as an example of this soft revisionism is
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, one I haven't been able to bring myself to see but that features a young German boy, son of Nazi parents, who lives near a concentration camp and befriends a young death camp 'boy in striped pajamas.' The tale is not dissimilar in saccharine sentiment to the recently revealed, Oprah-fied fraud about the girl who gave the death camp boy apples, although it avoids the happy ending of that treacly sham.

But at least they didn't give these two films Oscar nominations or awards,..."


-- Ron Rosenbaum, who seems to miss that Hollywood (a very NewAge place) has an interest in cleaning up the Nazi past - because they're cultists who believe a lot of what the Nazis did - even though he writes for Slate.

3 comments:

  1. Maybe Macho response must learn to read history books before making wrong statements on the historical facts behind Valkyrie . What did Macho get wrong? First: German resistance didn´t start in July 1944 some weeks after D-day. Tresckow and later Stauffenberg tried 5 times to kill Hitler in different ways. The first try made by Tresckow with a bomb in a Cognac bottle is presented in the flic of Valkyrie. This happened in March 1943. Then came 4 more frustrated trials ( not shown in Valkyrie and not to be executed by Stauffenberg). What you see again are Stauffenberg´s 2 trials in July 1944.
    Second: Tresckow and Stauffenberg never thought of continuing the war on their own but without Hitler. They always wanted to stop the war asap. They knew as high ranking carreer militarymen, that there was no way Germany could win this war.
    Third: What did they really want? they wanted to stop this war in order to avoid the death of the e.g. 9 million people who died between July 1944 and May 1945, almost double of the deaths caused in the 5 years of war before. This included Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals but also French, english, russian, american , german etc. soldiers, civilians and POW´s. They also would have tried avoid soviet occupation of Germany. This motivation is maybe not heroic, but it is normal for patriotic soldiers and far from the uninformed Macho explainations.
    Fourth: Yes, the german Wehrmacht since 1941 was increasingly involved in crimes. The career officers you see in Valkyrie wanted to cut that. How many were they? Between 1.000 and 1.500. Not too many.
    Fourth: Weisse Rose was admirable and heroic, but resistance of a different more personal category. They were a small number students handing out leaflets in the University of Munich acusing the government of crimes. They had no plans and no structure for a plot. It had no links to Valkyrie .

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  2. Profi,

    Jesus Christ - first you come off all condescending and shit, and now you sound like you're going to cry. Dude, you're missing the whole point (repeatedly): this post isn't about the historical rightness or wrongness of Valkyrie or Stauffenberg - it's about Hollywood, cultism, and cultural subversion. Didn't you notice there's a number of films mentioned there?

    Look, you can take your bat and ball and go home if you want, but don't make it like it was I who hurt your feelings and chased you away. I've done that to people before, but it's not what's happened here. Promise.

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  3. Ok, my Macho friend. I am German and I write you from Germany, so I am too far away to have antennas for Hollywood, cultism and cultural subversion. I got it all wrong because I am a historian. And seen from that angle you were quite off the track. I wasn´t hurt. Just felt for a moment to have arrived at the wrong Hotel. I sincerely apreciate your last comment, my friend.

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