Posts Tagged ‘Nazis’

In The Garden of Beasts — a Review

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

All who have read about, and certainly those who experienced, World War II and  Germany’s becoming  the vicious murderer of its own people, the invader of bordering countries and a threat to all of Europe, less than twenty years after its  defeat in WW I, have wondered: how did this happen, and could it have been stopped?   Similar questions have risen in recent years following the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq and the scarcely less happy one of Afghanistan, as Iran is seen by western nations to be be on the cusp of nuclear weapons capability:  should countries intervene in the affairs of others?  Ever?  If so, and if diplomatic and economic interventions fail, are military strikes ever the answer?

The question wanting to be answered is:  would power applied now bring less destruction and death than power applied later?  Does the case of Germany in the 1930s provide us with any wisdom regarding Iran, Serbia, Syria?

It is this question which led Erik Larson to William E. Dodd, U.S.  Ambassador to Germany from July 1933 to December 1937, and to his family, but particularly his 24-year-old daughter Martha.  What he found resulted in his 2011 book  In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.  Though Larson shies away from calling this a history, in favor of a narrative non-fiction, the genre of his other books, it is a welcome addition to the mountain of research and writing, history and otherwise, about Hitler, the Nazis, the build up to WW II and what on-lookers, even players, were seeing and doing.   With Martha Dodd and her many, and scandalous, love affairs forming a major thread of the book, it may attract readers who would not open a standard book of history.  And in the process they will learn much. In fact, Tom Hanks has reportedly seen enough, of popular interest, to have purchased the movie rights.

Larson does a good job, as he tells us in his preface he wants to,  of helping us see Berlin in the summer, fall and winter of 1933 after the Dodd’s arrival in mid July.  By this time Hitler had been Chancellor for 6 months and lots of people knew things were going seriously wrong in Germany. (more…)

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Posted in Books, Europe, War | Comments Off

Lesson Plan: The Story of The Third Wave – a Movie

Thursday, October 14th, 2010

How is it that Buddhist Cambodians turn into unapologetic mass murderers?  How could Christian Germans become fervent believers in, and followers of, Adolf Hitler marching millions to the gas chambers?  What allowed U.S. military personnel, trained and understanding the Geneva Conventions and the Military Code of Conduct to inflict torture unto death on bound and helpless captives?  Where do such people come from, because it’s certainly not us!  We could never do such things.

In 1967 a young high school teacher, Ron Jones, set up a one day experiential learning situation, much like those he and his class had done before.  To get the sophomore students in his class to understand South African apartheid  he designated certain bathrooms as out of bounds.  To teach capitalism he had students bring in goods to sell and process.  This Monday was going to be an experiential lesson in how ordinary people willingly follow authoritarian leaders; it was to be  another one day experience.  It didn’t turn out that way.

The first day was devoted to bringing the class into a new mode of experience signaled by the slogan: Strength Through Discipline.  They all joined in sitting erect, both feet on the floor, standing when answering, carrying paper and pencil at all times.  They did speed drills to get into the class and be seated in the proper fashion.  Jones strolled down the aisles correcting postures as a Yoga instructor might do today.

When Jones came into class on the second day he was surprised to see the class sitting as the day before, and wanting to go on.  He improvised the next steps and the experiment went on for 5 to 7 days, attracting students from outside the class, indeed from outside the high school.  The discipline got tighter.  Informers did their work.  Students were exiled to the library.  Students were shunned. Fist fights broke out.

The movie Lesson Plan: The Story of the Third Wave, which appeared last night at the Mill Valley Film Festival, is a documentary of some of the student participants recalling the details of the experiment, their own emotions and actions at the time and how they see it now.  They are all in their mid 50s.    Several were at the showing.  The film maker, Philip Neel, was himself one of the participants.

The movie progresses forward from day to day, intercutting stills and home movies taken that year with recent interviews of the participants.  The triple story of what happened, how participants reacted and how they look on it now became clear one day at a time, each day getting worse.

Jones was fired at the end of that year and was never able to teach in a California public school again. (more…)

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Posted in Art & Culture, Authoritarianism, General, Movies | 3 Comments »

Katyn: A Film

Friday, September 11th, 2009

I was just on the cusp of realizing that “foreign” films existed and were a real alternative to what 1950s Hollywood was serving up when Andrzej Wajda‘s first films began appearing.   Art houses were far and few between in Falls Church, Virginia. DVDs and streaming video weren’t yet conceptualized.  Tape was something we used for music, if at all.  For movies we went to theaters and we watched what the theater was showing.  War movies ran to The Sands of Iwo Jima [that would be John Wayne], or Run Silent, Run Deep [Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster] .  The heroes were inevitably templates for what was held to be the way American men comported themselves as soldiers –stoic, silent and brave, true to their loved ones and noble to those they rescued –in battles which, despite losses and setback, Americans always won.  If there were deaths the bodies twisted and fell in the middle distances allowing us to stay wrapped in the same safety we were in our own backyard games.  Not known, much less seen, were “A Generation,” [1955] “Kanal,” [1957] or “Ashes and Diamonds,” [1958]  Wajda’s famous war trilogy that announced him to Polish and serious European audiences, war films that had a different take on heroism and the glories of war.

Even as I began to appreciate the Italian neo-realists, French noir and then New Wave, Wajda’s name only floated in that distant sphere of film auteurs with unpronounceable names we must one day see — Russians, Japanese, Poles.  Somehow I never sat in the dark and absorbed his immense, dark vision. Too bad for me.  I’ve been able to begin making up the absence now that technology lets us locate and see films we have long wondered about, have heard or read mentioned of. We can see a short series by a particular director, or follow a theme that interests us, or watch an actor in various roles at various ages. Sitting in a dark room with a big screen in the company of others is still the best way to see a movie, but putting yourself to school in your living room is not a bad second choice.

Katyn is the 85 year old director’s latest film, released in Poland in 2007 and in the U.S in early 2009.  It’s available on DVD already.

katyn_swit_na_stacji_400Katyn for the Poles is a one-word tolling-bell of meaning, as 9/11 is for Americans.  Katyn is a place. It’s a town and a forest near Smolensk in Russia.  It is a massacre of Polish officers, intellectuals, priests and students by the Soviet NKVD.  It is a German propaganda campaign carried out against the Soviets.  It is a Soviet propaganda campaign carried out against the Nazis.  It is the exhumation of bodies, forensic analysis of bullet holes, pieces of cloth, hidden journals. It is the insistence of the truth of the massacre against denial, punishment, imprisonment and torture. It is, the revelation in secret papers between Stalin and Beria, of what was planned, when and who was to carry it out. And it is, finally, Poland the nation becoming Poland a country and able to stand for its own people and the truths they have had torn from their history. All these things are Katyn.
(more…)

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Posted in Essay, Movies, War | 1 Comment »