An Interesting Perspective on Films of the Third Reich...
http://www.geniebusters.org/915/35_ministry.htm
These movies are a window into Nazi Germany as the Germans themselves experienced it. They gave me a rare opportunity to see beyond the stereotypes and get a look at life is it was lived at that time.
The Nazi Germany of our imagination has very little to do with the Nazi Germany that actually existed. I have been laboring under the same misconceptions as everybody else. If the Germans were who I thought they were, they wouldn't have watched movies like Request Concert or The Broken Jug, not to mention The Great Sacrifice.
The strangest thing about this is that some people like the postwar caricature of Nazism, and they call themselves "neo-Nazis"!!
The Germans who lived in the Reich, the ones who watched these movies, wouldn't have much use for today's neo-Nazis. What would Johann Suter think about John Metzger and the WAR paper? What would Paracelsus think about Satanists who burn churches and leave poisoned wine bottles lying around for winos to discover? What would the conductor in Closing Chord think if he found himself moshing in the pit at a RAHOWA concert?
Neo-Nazis wouldn't like the Reich that actually existed. They have little interest in it. There were only a few skinheads in attendance at these movies (Eric Davidson, his wife, and some of their friends -- and they only came because I invited them). Neo-Nazis are attracted to the dark side of Nazi Germany, the side that is not represented here, the side that most Germans were not even aware of, and didn't want to be aware of -- the side that is constantly rubbed in our faces now.
Most people in Nazi Germany weren't even aware of Klaus Barbie and Ilsa Koch, in the same way that most people in the United States are not aware of what goes on in American prisons, not to mention secret police in Latin America who are trained by the U.S. government to torture prisoners. Today, we think of Nazi Germany as a police state, but that wasn't the experience of most people at the time. They would be amazed and dismayed that we remember the Gestapo and the concentration camps, and forget everything else.
I don't want to overstate my case here. Obviously Nazi Germany was a police state, and many people did experience it that way. Even Werner Heisenberg, who believed in Nazism as much as any scientist possibly could, got called in for interrogation by the SS, and had nightmares about it for years afterward. It was a fluke that saved him: his mother happened to know Himmler's mother. Himmler told the SS to leave him alone. Without his intervention, who knows what would have happened to Heisenberg.
Some of my heroes, such as Kurt Gödel, had to leave Germany. Gödel wasn't Jewish, and he wasn't particularly interested in politics, but he was too weird for the Nazis. He found a safe haven in America. There were many others like him. I probably would have emigrated myself if I had been in Gödel's position.
The dark side of Nazi Germany certainly did exist. However, every country has a dark side. Alan Turing, a scientist of the same stature as Gödel, died (committed suicide) in a British prison. He wasn't given the option of emigrating. Even America is not necessarily a safe haven anymore. On more than one occasion, I myself narrowly escaped spending 20 years in prison. It was sheer dumb luck that saved me. I wouldn't have had the option of emigrating, either.
Fifty years from now, late 20th century America may be remembered, like Nazi Germany, as a police state, a country responsible for war crimes. There will be monuments to the six million innocent people who were sent to prison and had their homes confiscated for growing pot. Cool World will be as forgotten as Amphitryon, and 2001: A Space Odyssey as forgotten as Kaiser of California. Posterity will remember nothing about America except Darryl Gates.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones.
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the conclusion
is worth reading...
There is a fallacy that is widely believed: that in a conflict between races or cultures, the one with the best street fighters wins. That's not how it works. The one with the best storytellers wins. If you can get people to see their lives as part of your story, you've got them. That's one reason why the Bible is so powerful: we all see ourselves as part of the Biblical story. This applies to anti-semites and anti-christians as much as anyone. If you define yourself as anti somebody else, then you are living in their story.
There is very little illusion in these movies. The more I think about them, and review them in my mind, the more I am convinced that they give us a very clear window into the German imagination during the Nazi era. What they show us is a strange combination of lightheartedness, ambivalence, and gentle resignation.
What we have here is a tragic sense of life. There is nothing wrong with that, in itself. The tragic vision, the vision of the Iliad, is true, as far as it goes, and certainly profound. But if you adopt an attitude of lightheartedness in defeat, or dignity in defeat, or noble resignation to defeat... then you are going to be defeated. As the saying goes, "Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser."
In classical times The Iliad was balanced by The Odyssey, which ends in victory. Odysseus let his will get distracted for awhile, but then he got his thoughts collected, went back to Ithaca, and reclaimed his home and his wife. Then came The Aeneid, the story of Aeneas leading the Trojans to Italy and founding Rome, which also ends in victory. Then the Bible, with its vision of the final apocalyptic battle at the end of time, the dissolution of the universe, and the formation of the New Jerusalem (Revelation, chapter 21) -- a vast, jewel-like cubical structure, full of light, populated by spiritual beings who bask in the radiance of God, and never die.
Nazi Germany had nothing like this.
The Germans didn't need propaganda. They needed a grand vision of human destiny. If you have a Thousand Year Reich, what happens during those thousand years? Where is mankind going? What were they going to do in the Reich? They were going to clear some space for themselves, and build autobahns, and then what? I have searched in vain for an answer. I have read Mein Kampf all the way through, plus many of Hitler's speeches. He never gives us a vision of human destiny.
Nazi Germany ultimately failed because its storytellers, including Hitler and Goebbels, failed. Their myth of the Master Race didn't enter into the popular consciousness enough to be reflected in these movies; and in any case, that myth itself comes from the Bible. The Chosen People were (and are) the original Master Race. Hitler just tried to transpose the idea from Israel to Germany.
They also had Wagner's "Twilight of the Gods" myth, but obviously that leads nowhere.
Hitler wasn't just another politician. People talk about the "Thousand Year Reich," but if you listen closely to Hitler's speech to the 6th party congress, in which he introduced this idea, he didn't say "tausend," singular, he actually said "tausenden," plural. He intended the Reich to last into the indefinite future, thousands of years.
His ambition was to create a whole new civilization -- no less! To do that, you have to have a story, an idea, a myth, a philosophy, strong enough to support a new civilization. Specifically, you have to come up with a story as powerful as the Bible. This is not easy, but, alas, that's the level on which the game is played. I'm not saying it can't be done. But Hitler and Goebbels didn't do it, and nobody since then has done it either.
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Note added in 2005
This was written a decade ago. I am going to let it stand as written, but if I were doing it now I would change the emphasis and maybe omit the last section. The vast cubical structure (the "New Jerusalem") described in Revelation 21 is something most Christians are not even aware of. It may be true that the Nazis had no grand vision of human destiny, but neither did anybody else. That was not the problem. That's not why they lost the war.