It's a little strange commenting on this from Konstanz University in Germany, or perhaps it only seems strange because the "z" and the "y" are in different places on the keyboard and the LJ page is asking if I want to "einloggen", and not for any deeper metaphysical reason
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So you saw it! *sheepishly* I thought this post would bore everybody.
It's so difficult for a film with THAT MUCH death - and deaths that so lend themselves to being poeticised ... - to keep from overdoing either the emotion or the darkness to the point where it doesn't penetrate anymoreYes, it is. But Germany is struggling so hard to come to terms with what they did, and what was done to them, and what they let happen, that the weight of responsibility and the proximity of the subject material in making a film about the war must make it very difficult to romanticize anything. The actor who played Prof./Dr. Schenck, as just one example, said that like Schenck his father had been a doctor imprisoned by the Soviets, and almost all of his mother's family had been killed in the camps
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While I was watching a swing-dancing exhibition tonight, I remembered that during one of the last, desperately madcap parties in the bunker in "Downfall", Eva asks for a swing record to be put on and starts dancing on the table. Granted, I get a lot of my history on this from "Swing Kids", but I remember swing being very, very verboten in Nazi Germany. I was wondering, does it happen the same way in the book, and do they offer any commentary on her choice of music? Or am I over-thinking this, considering that everyone at the party was probably a) soused and b) certain they were going to die?
As a matter of fact, one of the witnesses in the Bunker book explicitly mentioned that, contrary to popular opinion, swing was never expressly forbidden in Berlin during the reign of the Third Reich. He says this while relating an anecdote not about Eva Braun but about how "they" put on a swing record -- no, it was a radio station broadcasting swing music, I think -- in the final days down there. I remembered "Swing Kids" then, too.
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It's so difficult for a film with THAT MUCH death - and deaths that so lend themselves to being poeticised ... - to keep from overdoing either the emotion or the darkness to the point where it doesn't penetrate anymoreYes, it is. But Germany is struggling so hard to come to terms with what they did, and what was done to them, and what they let happen, that the weight of responsibility and the proximity of the subject material in making a film about the war must make it very difficult to romanticize anything. The actor who played Prof./Dr. Schenck, as just one example, said that like Schenck his father had been a doctor imprisoned by the Soviets, and almost all of his mother's family had been killed in the camps ( ... )
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While I was watching a swing-dancing exhibition tonight, I remembered that during one of the last, desperately madcap parties in the bunker in "Downfall", Eva asks for a swing record to be put on and starts dancing on the table. Granted, I get a lot of my history on this from "Swing Kids", but I remember swing being very, very verboten in Nazi Germany. I was wondering, does it happen the same way in the book, and do they offer any commentary on her choice of music? Or am I over-thinking this, considering that everyone at the party was probably a) soused and b) certain they were going to die?
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