Kretschmann resurfaces. Mm. Too bad my Nikopol icon is long gone.

[bironic]

On the phone with my mother a while back, I mentioned how nice German sounds. She said she finds it too guttural. Since I used to think the same thing, I said maybe she associates it with all those brusque, crazed WWII speeches, and she just hasn't heard the right person speaking German. I was thinking specifically of Thomas Kretschmann, who has

Comments

[ignazwisdom]

I remember once seeing a post in fandom secrets (?) that was basically someone 'fessing up to having a Nazi fetish.

I think as long as you don't have a fetish for people in Nazi uniforms, you're in the clear.

And if you DO develop a fetish for people in Nazi uniforms, I think your Jewishness probably makes it okay.

If I develop a fetish for people in Nazi uniforms, there might be trouble. I'd probably have to make large donations to the JDL to make up for it.

[bironic]

Well, if that were ever the case, you would need to sit down and seriously think about whether there exists a difference in your head between "Nazis on screen in fiction" and "Nazis who existed in the '30s and '40s (and now)." And you'd probably find that there was.

[ignazwisdom]

Well, yeah. And I think that's what our mysterious friend who may or may not have been in F!S was saying, that she had a thing for fictional cinema Nazis (or rather anime Nazis, I think it was--apparently this is a thing in anime? IDK). But it's still potentially problematic? Maybe?

Fortunately all of my weird fetishes are just weird.

[roga]

I haven't seen Valkyrie yet, but I do agree that you in particular, in any case, are always very much aware of history. I had the same recoil/hesitancy towards German and Germany that you describe here, especially toward the language. The biggest things that got me to come around were (a) the film Walk on Water (link to the film, since I don't remember if you've seen it), which featured the first German and German-speaking characters I can remember sympathizing with, (b) having German/German-speaking LJ friends, and (c) the fact that my mom cannot stand the German language or the thought of travelling to Germany, which always struck me as extreme and made me go devil's advocate.

Also, hey, thanks for the links at the top! I hadn't known the actor, but he definitely brings sexiness into the language.

Actually, I felt exactly the same way about Arabic -- thought it was a pretty ugly and scary language, until I heard it spoken in The Band's Visit; throughout the whole movie, really, and in this scene in particular. Small town loser

[bironic]

Ha! Come talk to me about the sensuality of the pure aesthetics of listening to languages we don't understand sometime.

Thank you for the link, too -- I haven't seen that movie, although possibly you've told me about it? -- and for sharing your thoughts.

Not to make light of things, but maybe diplomacy could start to make use of attractive actors to heal rifts between cultures that have been taught to hate each other!

[bironic]

True fact!

I also found it funny that we both posted about our embarrassment over considering an RPS pairing. :)

[poorfrances]

Thomas Kretschmann also played the captain of the ship in the King Kong remake. I profess an ignorance of SGA, but if it's a time travel show you could make use that character (set in the 1930s). He wasn't a baddie in that movie.

[bironic]

True, and he had some nice scruff going there. Plus, ship captain, and Sheppard on SGA is a helicopter pilot. Alas, SGA is set in current time. But I will find a way. *is determined*

[no_detective]

Wow. That is one gorgeous man with a gorgeous voice. And the photo shoot is so brazenly sexualizing him! *applauds*

Re: second part of your post, I come from at once a similar and very different cultural background. My country was occupied by the Germans in WWII, my grandparents lived through it, and our studied history was always interwoven with very personal and physical reminders of the war all around us - from the family albums at home to the town monuments to the field trips to mass graves of WWII victims, many of whom were related to our families. (Of course, there was also quite a system of representational history in place, nation-wide, and with it came quite a bit of fetishization of this history; it's difficult not to with the sheer scope of suffering and destruction our nation endured in WWII - except when it grew into victimization fetish, and that's a whole other set of problems.) As is the way with the reality of surviving, we basically incorporated this living past into our understanding of life - and moved on.

[no_detective]

OK, so I've been thinking about this post (and my reply to it) this morning and realized the comment above might come across as offensive; I mean, of course you get the ambiguity. (Duh.) And also, beyond just our individual experiences, OF COURSE learning from representational history is meaningful (otherwise it would be a waste of time and we'd never learn from our own past), and this comment does not imply that you, or anyone else ambivalent about enjoying German media, lack(s) the personal connection to your/their history (that was a tangent caused by the recent news I've been getting from home). I think we have very similar backgrounds in that respect, actually, though I can't remember if we'd ever discussed it.

Eh, complex issues are complex. But I'm curious about all this; is it the sort of thing you'd care to talk about at some point? You know, when we get tired of debating the finer merits of gay porn and tentacles and such.