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In the archives of the
New York Times, materials about Germany and the rise of the Nazis to power are vast. It would take days to read through it all. Though it would be an informative experience, I don't have the time to do so at the moment, but I was curious to see the general progression of news and opinion as it all happened.
Here are a few items that stuck out to me as I skimmed around:
19327 February
10 March
29 May
12 June
1933
8 February
9 February
29 February
5 March
7 March
11 March
12 March
13 March
16 March
19 March
22 March
I attended a screening of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1980 film
Lili Marleen at the
Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist series at Lincoln Center last weekend, and it was an extraordinary experience. This is one of Fassbinder's weirdest and in some ways most problematic films, a movie for which he had a relatively giant budget and got lots of publicity, but which has since become among the most hard-to-find Fassbinder films (which is really saying something!). Despite a lot of searching, I didn't come upon a reasonably-priced copy of it until I recently discovered an
Australian DVD (seemingly out of print now) that was a library discard.
The story of
Lili Marleen is relatively simple, and is very loosely based on the wartime experiences of
Lale Andersen, whose performance of the title
song was immensely popular, and whose book
Der Himmel hat viele Farben is credited in the film. A mildly talented Berlin cabaret singer named Willie (Hannah Schygulla) falls in love with a Jewish musician named Robert (Giancarlo Giannini), whose father (Mel Ferrer) is head of a powerful resistance organization based in Switzerland, and who does not approve of the love affair or Robert's proposal of marriage. A Nazi officer (Karl Heinz von Hassel) hears Willie perform one night, is captivated by her, and guides her into recording the song "Lili Marleen", which unexpectedly becomes a song beloved of all soldiers everywhere on Earth. Willie becomes a rich and famous star, summoned even by Hitler himself, while Robert continues to work for the resistance and ends up marrying someone else. By the end of the war, Robert is a great musician and conductor and Willie seems mostly forgotten, many of her friends dead or imprisoned, and Robert lost to her. She had no convictions aside from her love of Robert, but that love was not enough. (I should note here that there are interesting overlaps between the film and Kurt Vonnegut's great novel
Mother Night. But that's a topic for another day...)
I was surprised to find that Lincoln Center was using the German dub of the film rather than the English-language original (it was a multinational production, so English was the lingua franca, and, given the dominance of English-language film, presumably made it easier to market). It was interesting to see
Lili Marleen in German, but unfortunately the print did not come subtitled, and so Lincoln Center added subtitles by apparently having someone click on prepared blocks of text. The effect was bizarre: not only were the subtitles sometimes too light to read, but they were often off from what the actors were saying, and when the subtitler would get behind, they would simply click through whole paragraphs of text to catch up. My German's not great, but I was familiar with the film and can pick up enough German to know what was going on and where the subtitles belonged, but I missed plenty of details. The effect was to render the film more dreamlike and far less coherent in terms of plot and character relations than it actually is. Not a bad experience, though, as it heightened a lot of the effects Fassbinder seemed to be going for.
Afterward, I said to my companion, "That was like watching an anti-Nazi movie made in the style of Nazi movies." I'd vaguely had a similar feeling when I first watched the DVD, but it wasn't so vivid for me as when we watched the German version with terrible subtitling — my first experience of Nazi films was of unsubtitled 16mm prints and videotapes my WWII-obsessed father watched when I was a kid.
When I got home, I started looking through some of the critical writings on the film, and came across Laura J. Heins's contribution to
A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder: "Two Kinds of Excess: Fassbinder and Veit Harlan", which interestingly compares
Lili Marleen to the aesthetics of
one of the most prominent of Nazi filmmakers (and a relative-by-marriage of Stanley Kubrick).
Lili Marleen was controversial when it was released, not only because it is probably Fassbinder's most over-the-top melodrama, a film that defies both the expectations of good taste and of mainstream storytelling, but also because it arrived at a time when what Susan Sontag dubbed (in February 1975)
"fascinating fascism" was on the wane (
The Damned was 1969,
Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS was October 1975, as if to bring everything Sontag described to an absurd climax) while interest in earnest representations of the Nazis and the Holocaust was on the rise (
Holocaust 1978,
The Tin Drum 1979,
The Last Metro 1980,
Playing for Time 1980,
Mephisto 1981,
Sophie's Choice 1982,
The Winds of War 1983, etc.).
Lili Marleen is much closer to
The Damned (a film Fassbinder
loved) in its effect than to the films with similar subject matter released in the years around it, and so its contrast from the prevailing aesthetic regime was stark, leading to what seems to have been in some critics utter revulsion. It's notable that
Mephisto, a film with very similar themes* and a significantly different aesthetic, could win an Oscar, but though Germany submitted
Lili Marleen to the Academy, it was not nominated — and I'd bet few people were surprised it was not.
Even though it exudes the signs of a pop culture aesthetic,
Lili Marleen can't actually be assimilated into the popular culture it was released into, partly because the aesthetic it's drawing from is passé and partly because it is deliberately at odds with conventional expectations. In a chapter on
Lili Marleen in
Fassbinder's Germany, Thomas Elsaesser
writes that "coincidence and dramatic irony are presented as terrible anticlimaxes. With its asymmetries and non-equivalences, the film disturbs the formal closure of popular narrative, while still retaining all the elements of popular story-telling."
At the time of its release, there was much handwringing about the ability of works of art to create a desire or nostalgia for fascism in audiences, and
Lili Marleen became Exhibit A. Heins quotes Brigitte Peucker: "One wonders whether, in
Lili Marleen, Fassbinder’s parodistic style is not unrecognizable as parody to most spectators, and whether his central alienation effect, the song itself, does not instead run the danger of drawing us in." This is absurd. Fassbinder's style is parodistic, but it's also much more than that — it is multimodal in its excess — and I have about as much ability to imagine an audience member getting a good ol' nostalgic lump in the throat and tear in the eye while watching it as I have the ability to imagine someone watching
Inglourious Bastards and mistaking it for
Night and Fog.
Heins paraphrases Peucker as apparently thinking that "the often repeated title song may ultimately generate more sentimental affect than irritation". I can't believe that, either. For those of us who are not especially misty-eyed about the long lost days of the 1,000-year Reich, the song becomes as grating as it does for the character of Robert (Giancarlo Giannini), who gets locked in a cell with a couple lines of the song playing over and over and over again. What begins as sentimentality becomes, through repetition, torture.
The song is repeated so much that even if it doesn't irritate, it is stripped of meaning, and that's central to the point of the story, as Elsaesser
describes:
When Willie says, "I only sing", she is not as politically naive or powerless as she may appear. Just as her love survives because she withdraws it from all possible objects and objectifications, so her song, through its very circularity, becomes impervious to the powers and structures in which it is implicated. Love and song are both, by the end of the film, empty signs. This is their strength, their saving grace, their redemptive innocence, allowing Fassbinder to acknowledge the degree to which his own film is inscribed within a system (of production, distribution and reception) already in place, waiting to be filled by an individual, who lends the enterprise the appearance of intentionality, design and desire for self-expression.
One of the things I love about
Lili Marleen is that its mode is utter and obvious kitsch, undeniable kitsch. It highlights the kitschiness not only of the Nazi aesthetic (which plenty of people have done, not least, though unintentionally, the Nazis themselves), but to some extent also of many movies about the Nazis. (I kept thinking of the awful TV mini-series
Holocaust while watching it this time, and Elsaesser
makes that connection as well.) We love to use the Nazis and the Holocaust for sentimental purposes, and representations of the Nazis and Holocaust often unintentionally veer off into
poshlost. To intentionally do so is dangerous, even as critique, because it is too easy to fall into parody and render fascism as something absurd and ridiculous, but not insidious. The genius of
Lili Marleen is that the insidiousness remains. It's what nags at us afterward, what lingers beneath the occasional laughter at the excess. There is a discomfort to this film, and it's not just the discomfort of undeniable parody — it is the discomfort of realizing how easily we can be drawn in to the structures being parodied: the suspense, the action, the breathless and improbable love story, the twists and turns, the pageantry, the displays of wealth and power. Our desires are easily teased, our expectations set like booby traps, and again and again those desires and expectations are frustrated and mercilessly mocked.
It's worth thinking about the place of anti-Semitism in
Lili Marleen (and Fassbinder's work generally), because this was also part of the uproar over the film, an uproar that was really a continuity of the
complaints about Fassbinder's extremely
controversial play
Garbage, the City, and Death. While not as brazenly playing with anti-Semitic imagery and language,
Lili Marleen does give us a very powerful Jewish patriarch in Robert's father, played by Mel Ferrer, a character that can be seen in a variety of ways — certainly, he is an impediment to Robert and Willie's romance (clearly wanting his son to marry a nice Jewish girl), but I also think that Ferrer's performance gives him some warmth and grace that the Nazi characters lack. Nonetheless, while
Lili Marleen is very obviously an anti-Nazi film, it's not so obviously an anti-anti-Semitic film (though there is a quick shot of a concentration camp, and Willie redeems herself by sneaking evidence of the camps out of Poland). Heins writes:
It cannot, of course, be concluded that the Absent One of all of Fassbinder’s films is The Jew, or that the sense of danger created by an unseen presence is racialized or nationalized, as it is in Harlan’s film [Jud Süss]. The malevolent other of Fassbinder’s films is more properly patriarchy and the police state, acting in the service of a repressive bourgeois order. In the case of Lili Marleen, however, we must conclude that Fassbinder did fail to effectively counteract the Harlanesque paranoid delusion of total Jewish power, if only because The Jew in this film is described as capitalist patriarchy’s main representative.
That point is astute, though for me it highlight the (sometimes dangerous) complexity of
Lili Marleen: by employing certain features of Nazi storytelling, by putting clichés (aesthetic, narrative, political) at the center of his technique, and by seeking to wed this to the sort of anti-capitalist, anti-normative-family ideas common to his work from the beginning, Fassbinder ends up in a bind, one that forces him to trust that the various opposing forces render all the clichés hollow enough that performing and representing them does not give them new validity or justification — that the paranoia and delusion remain legible as paranoia and delusion. I think they do, but I feel less certain of that than the certainty I feel against the old accusations of glamourizing Nazism.
In addition to the title song,
Lili Marleen includes an ostentatiously schmaltzy score by Fassbinder's frequent collaborator Peer Raben. It's schmaltzy, but also very sly — as Roger Hillman points out on the Australian DVD commentary, Raben includes brief homages to composers and works that the Nazis would not have looked fondly on, such as Saint-Saëns'
Samson and Delilah. This technique is similar to the film's entire strategy: to booby-trap what on the surface is an overwrought deployment of old tropes.
Finally, a note on the acting: sticking with the concept of the film as a whole, the acting is generally a bit off: sometimes wooden, sometimes unconvincingly emotional. (It's acting a la Brecht via Sirk via Fassbinder.) The more I watch it, though, the more taken I am by Hannah Schygulla's performance. On the surface, it's an appropriately "bad" performance, one redolent of the acting style of melodramas in general and Nazi melodramas in particular. And yet Schygulla's great achievement is to find nuance within that — hers is not a parodic performance, though it easily could have veered into that. Instead, while abiding by the terms of melodramatic acting, it also gives us a transformation: Willie starts out awkward, not particularly talented, a sort of country bumpkin ... and she becomes a poised, distant, sculpted icon ... and then a refugee from all she has ever known and loved. There's still a sense of possibility at the end, though, and one Schygulla's performance is vital for: a sense that Willie may reinvent herself, may find, in this newly ruined world, a path toward new life.
Elsaesser
suggests that
Lili Marleen can be seen within the context of some of the other films Fassbinder made around it:
the three films of the BRD trilogy — shot out of sequence — are held together by the possibility that they form sequels. If we add the film that was made between Maria Braun and Lola, namely Lili Marleen which clearly has key themes in common with the trilogy, then Lili Marleen's status in the series might be that of a "prequel" chronologically: 1938-1946 Lili Marleen, 1945-1954 Maria Braun, 1956 Veronika Voss, 1957 Lola. Four women, four love stories, four ambiguous gestures of complicity and resistance.
It could be a tagline for so many of Fassbinder's films, not the least
Lili Marleen: Ambiguous gestures of complicity and resistance. For a world entering the era of Thatcher, Kohl, and (especially) Reagan,
Lili Marleen was a most appropriate foil.
-------------------
*In one scene of Fassbinder's film, Willie looks through a magazine and we quickly glance a picture of
Gustaf Gründgens as Mephistopheles.
Life is pretty comfortable for Gabriella Schramm, 13, called Gaby by friends and family. Living in 1932 Berlin, her upper middle class family is better off than most Germans at the time. Her father is a renowned scientist, teaching astronomy at the University, and is friends with Albert Einstein. Her mother, an former pianist who gives lessons at home now, hob nobs with Baba, a well-respected Jewish society columnist for the only newspaper in Berlin that isn't pro-Nazi. Gaby's older sister, Ulla, is scheduled to begin studying at a conservatory in Vienna next year. And Gaby, who loves to read anything she can get her hands on, including Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Mark Twain and my personal favorites Rainer Maria Remarque and Erich Kästner, is looking forward to reading Heinrich Heine's poetry in
Gymnasium after summer vacation.
But things are beginning to change, both within Gaby's family and all over Germany. First, Ulla insists on remaining in Berlin for the summer instead of going to the family's lakeside vacation home, claiming she has a bookkeeping job at the cabaret where her boyfriend Karl, an engineering student, works. But when Karl and Ulla come to visit, Gaby begins to suspect that Karl is a Nazi supporter. She had already suspected the same thing of the family housekeeper, Hertha and the man who maintains their Berlin apartment building. In fact, Gaby has noticed a significant increase in the number of Brown Shirts (SA) and Black Shirts (SS) all over Berlin despite the ban on them.
Back in school after vacation, Gaby and her best friend Rosa are overjoyed to begin studying literature with the very beautiful, kind, well-dressed Frau Hofstadt, who is picked up everyday by a mysterious limousine. But, at home, the talk is more and more about the political situation, which in 1932 is all over the place, though everyone is relieved when the Nazis loose seats in the Reichstag (Parliament), hoping that that will be an end to Hitler and his Nazi party.
But that's not what happens at all and through all kinds of twists and turns, Hitler is named Chancellor by President Hindenburg at the end of January 1933. And with amazing speed, Gaby watches her previously safe, happy world fall completely to pieces.
The period 1919-1933 was such a complicated time in German history and politics. The Nazis referred to it as the
Kampfzeit, the time of struggle to gain acceptance and power for their radical policies. Lasky covers only 1932-1933 in
Ashes and kudos to her for successfully tackling it in a novel for young readers. There is lots of talk about events that actually happened, and Lasky provides enough information to understand it without overwhelming or boring the reader.
Ashes is a well-written novel, and although it is a little slow in places, given the time and place of the action, it is indeed a worthwhile read. I particularly loved that each chapter begins with a quote from a book Gaby loves and which foreshadows what happens in that chapter. And since Gaby witnesses the Nazi book burning on May 10, 1933, it is all the more poignant a reminder of some of what was lost in that tragic event.
The novel is told from Gaby's point of view, which gives us her very subjective, but very astute observation, not only of what is happening around her, but how she thinks and feels about it all, A fine example of that is when she witnesses her former math teacher, Herr Berg, being removed from her school by the Nazis for being Jewish, and disappears. The reader feels her shock, disgust, sadness and despair all at the same time.
Some of the scenes may feel a little cliche and I am not the first person to realize that Karl resembles Lisle's Hitler Youth boyfriend from
The Sound of Music, and that there is a scene similar to one in
Cabaret, in which everyone in an outdoor
Biergarten joins a Hitler Youth in singing a Nazi song. But, these scenes also make a necessary point (and people have traditionally joined in singing in Biergartens in Germany, it wasn't just a Nazi thing to show support).
Ashes is a nice contribution to the body of Holocaust and World War II literature and on its own, a very interesting book about a very complex time made accessible by good research and skillful writing.
This book is recommended for readers age 11+
This book was purchased for my personal library
Have you ever imagined what the world would be like if the Axis powers, Germany, Japan and Italy, had won World War II. Well, author Caroline Tung Richmond has done just that in her debut novel
The Only Thing to Fear.
It's been 80 years since the Allied Forces lost the war and surrendered after being defeated by Hitler's genetically-engineered super soldiers. The United States has been divided into three territories, the Western American Territory ruled by Japan, the Italian Dakotas, and the Eastern American Territories ruled by the Nazis.
For Zara St. James, 16, living in the Shenandoah Valley in the Eastern American Territory, life has been hard.
She has lived with her
Kleinbauer (peasant) Uncle Red since her mother was killed by the Nazis in a Resistance mission when Zara was 8. Since then, Uncle Red has wanted nothing more to do with Resistance matters, but Zara can't wait to join Revolutionary Alliance, and with good reason.
English on her mother's side, Japanese on her father's, Zara is considered a
Mischling by the Germans and there has never been a place for mixed-race children in Nazi society. But Zara is also hiding a secret, one that would mean instant death - she is an Anomaly, able control the air around her. Anomalies are the result of genetic testing by the Nazis in their concentration camps in the 1930s and, as super soldiers, they helped them win the war. But only full-blooded Aryans can be Anomalies, everyone else is put to death instantly.
Into all this comes Bastian Eckhartt, son of the formidable Colonel Eckhart, commanding officer of Fort Goering. Bastian attends the elite military academy where Zara is assigned cleaning duties and lately she has noticed he has been looking her way more and more frequently. But what could the son of a powerful Nazi leader possibly want with a
Kleinbauer who garners no respect whatsoever? The answer may just surprise you.
I was really looking forward to reading
The Only Thing to Fear when I first heard of it. There aren't many alternative histories for teen readers about the allied Forces losing the war to the Axis powers and what that would have meant for the future. Unfortunately, this doesn't come across as an alternative history so much as it really just another dystopian novel. What seems to be missing is a strong sense of ideology - on both the Nazi and the peasant side. The Resistance was there to overthrow the cruel Nazis, but there is not sense of how or why they will make the world better if or when they succeed.
Richmond's world building was pretty spot on, though not terribly in-depth. I really like the idea of generically engineered Anomalies, which added an interesting touch.
Zara is quite headstrong and can be a bit whinny and annoyingly brave in that she takes chances without thinking through the consequences. Zara has a lot to learn, and a lot of growing up to do, even by the end of the novel (or maybe it is going to be a series and she can mature at a later date).
One of the things that always amazes me in books about people fighting for their lives is that there is always time for romance. Yes, Bastian is originally interested in Zara for reasons that have nothing to do with romance, yet even as things take a dangerous turn, they both find they are attracted to each other.
The Only Thing to Fear is definitely a flawed novel, but still it is one worth reading. As I said, it is Richmond's debut novel, and though you might find it a bit predictable, it is still a satisfying read.
The Only Thing to Fear will be available in bookstores on September 30, 2014.
This book is recommended for readers age 12+
This book was an E-ARC obtained from
NetGalley
Sophisticated readers might also want to take a look at Philip K. Dick's 1962 Hugo Award winning alternate history novel
The Man in the High Castle.
Ever since the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch in which her father sacrificed his life to save Adolf Hitler from the bullet meant to kill him, Gretchen Müller and her family have enjoyed a special place in Hitler's world. But now, in 1931, Gretchen, 17, has had the seeds of doubt about her father's sacrifice planted in her mind by none other than a Jewish reporter for the Munich Post, Daniel Cohen. Handsome and not much older that Gretchen, Daniel claims that Herr Müller's death was intentional and not only that, but was done by a fellow Nazi Party member.
And it looks like Daniel Cohen may be right - the powder burns and bullet hole on the back of her father's shirt certainly seem to support the idea that Herr Müller was shot in the back. But who and why would someone do such a thing to a man who was always so loyal to Hitler?
That's the mystery that Gretchen needs to solve and the only one who can help her is Daniel Cohen. Now Gretchen must overcome her ingrained aversion to Jews. She had always believed Hitler when he said that Jews were subhuman, but Daniel seems to be anything but.
Solving the mystery of her father's death won't be easy for Gretchen. First, there is her older brother Reinhard, a psychopath who has found an outlet for his sadistic behavior as one of Hitler's Brownshirts. Reinhard loves nothing more than going out "Jew hunting" and delights in torturing his sister. When Reinhard makes her pay for snooping in his room, Gretchen soon discovers that she has no one she can turn to. Her mother is terrified of Reinhard, yet lives in a state of denial about what he is. Then there are Gretchen's best friends, Eva Braun and Hitler's half niece Geli (Angela) Raubel, both appearing to be as loyal to Hitler as everyone else that surrounds him and neither willing to interfere on Gretchen's behalf. When even Uncle Dolf, as she has always called Hitler, also turns his back on her, Gretchen begins to question everything she has always believed.
As Gretchen comes to rely on and trust Daniel Cohen, and as Daniel begins to see the real young woman behind the Nazi facade that Gretchen must wear in public, they find themselves attracted more and more to each other. But Gretchen and Daniel also discover just how ruthless Hitler's quest for power is and why solving the mystery of Herr Müller's death may become a question of life or death for both of them.
I have been of two minds about
Prisoner of Night and Fog ever since I finished it. It is a tension filled novel, that at times had my heart pounding. The last days of the Weimar Republic were filled with hunger, inflation, unemployment, and political violence as communists and SA clashes increased. Anne Blankman spares not punches when it comes to describing this aspect of in the book. Reinhard and the other Brownshirts who appear in this story are probably the most true to life characters in term of their actions and Blankman even throws in the real-life figure of Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, and every bit as zealous in going after Hitler's enemies as Reinhard. But…
I found the plot to be weak and unfocused at times, and too often I felt like I was reading a history book instead of a novel. It was slow going a lot, followed by what should have been nail-biting tension if only I had cared more about Gretchen.
Gretchen has everything going for her as a character. She is a strong young woman, somewhat independent, or as much as one could be as part of Hitler's inner circle of admirers, and open to changing her ideas about things even if reluctantly at times, but somehow she just is cut it.
So, maybe I didn't care about her or anyone else in the book because I felt the characters didn't have much dimension. It was like I was told admirable or deplorable things about the characters, but I just never felt them to really be there. Even Hitler spoke more in slogans that dialogue. It was like a cardboard cutout was substituted for the real character. Even that fact that he also came across as lusting for Gretchen, Eva Braun and Geli Raubel didn't feel real. Maybe because most scholars believe he was asexual. Reinhard was a good picture of a Brownshirts, but also completely lacks depth and personality.
Blankman introduces us to something called Cell G, a kind of early Nazi death squad. I have never heard of Cell G before, but it was apparently the subject of an exposé that appeared in the real Munich Post in April 1932. In fact, she seems to have relied heavily on a book by Ron Rosenbaum called
Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil published in 1998, especially for information about Cell G. In her Author's Note, Blankman refers her readers to this book, and even includes a pretty good bibliography.
But the thing that really annoyed me was the term night and fog.' On pages 175-181, it seems to be equated with the idea of Jewish extermination. But the term has nothing to do with the fate of German Jews and I thought this too misleading to ignore. It came into use in 1941 with the passage of the Night and Fog Decree. Its purpose was the disappearance without a trace of any resisters or saboteurs in the occupied countries. Blankman is, however, correct in associating the term night and fog with the poem "Der Erlkönig" by Goethe.
Deapite all this, at the end of the day, I would still recommend this book to anyone who really likes historical fiction, if for no other reason than because there are not many books written about these last days of what was called the
Kampfzeit, or the Nazi time of struggle to gain power. You do get a sense of what it was like in 1931 and Blankman includes a number of figures like Rudolf Hess and Ernst Hanfstaengl who really were part of the Hitler entourage. Nazi headquarters really was in the
Braunes Haus, where Gretchen worked for Hanfstaengle.
 |
| Braunes Haus |
This book is recommended for readers age 14+
This book was borrowed from a friend
By: PennyF,
on 2/27/2014
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By Benjamin Carter Hett
It is well known that someone set fire to the Reichstag in Berlin on the evening of 27 February 1933 – eighty-one years ago. It is also well known that Hitler’s new government took this opportunity to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, gutting the Weimar constitution and effectively initiating a 12-year dictatorship. Many readers will know that ever since 1933 controversy has raged about who actually set fire to the Reichstag: was it the first step in a Communist coup, was it a Nazi conspiracy to supply a justification for their Decree, or was the rather confused young Dutch stonemason Marinus van der Lubbe telling the truth when he claimed he had set the fire himself?
Firemen work on the burning Reichstag, February 1933. Item from Record Group 208: Records of the Office of War Information, 1926 – 1951. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
One matter that is less well known, however, is just how much, and for how long, various intelligence services have taken an interest in these questions.
Spies were a part of the story from the beginning. In March 1933, a senior officer of Britain’s MI5 named Guy Liddell traveled to Germany to make contact with the newly reorganized German Secret Police (soon to be christened the Gestapo) and its leader, the brilliant but sinister Rudolf Diels. At the time, one of the main tasks facing Diels and his officers was the investigation of the Reichstag fire. Liddell wrote a long report on his experiences in Germany, noting among other things that the weakness of the police evidence against Marinus van der Lubbe led him to the view that “previous conclusions that this incident was a piece of Nazi provocation to provide a pretext for the wholesale suppression of the German Communist Party were amply confirmed.”
After the Second World War, Rudolf Diels and the small group of his former Gestapo subordinates who had investigated the fire in 1933 faced a difficult legal situation. To varying degrees they had been involved in Nazi crimes (including the thoroughly corrupt fire investigation itself) and they had to navigate the tricky waters of war crimes and “denazification” investigations and prosecutions. One of their real advantages, however, was their intelligence experience – coupled with their undeniable anti-Communism. This made them attractive to the Western Allies’ intelligence services. Rudolf Diels was, for many years, a key paid source on politics in Germany for the American CIC (military counter intelligence). His payment, as recorded in a written contract from 1948, was 12 cartons of cigarettes per month, supplemented now and then by ration cards and cans of Crisco – the real sources of value in Germany at the time. A few years later one of the leading figures in the West German Federal Criminal Police (BKA) complained to American intelligence officers that overly-zealous prosecutions of ex-Nazi police officers were a Cold War danger. They were weakening the BKA to the point that West Germany itself would become “a push-over for Eastern intelligence services” and thus “a weak link and danger point in the whole Western defense system.” The CIA officer who recorded these comments noted that they were “worth attention.”
One of the things that Diels and his former subordinates had to worry about was the testimony and the book of a man named Hans Bernd Gisevius, who accused them of covering up Nazi guilt for the Reichstag fire as well as involvement in a number of murders. Gisevius had himself been a Gestapo officer in 1933; from there he went on to serve in Germany’s military intelligence service, the Abwehr, during the war – and became active in the resistance that led to the famous Valkyrie plot. Diels and Gisevius hated each other. Around 1950 many well-informed people – no doubt including Diels and Gisevius – thought these men were both candidates to head the newly created West German domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. When Diels and Gisevius argued about who set the Reichstag fire – which they did both publicly and vitriolically – it is hard to overlook the fact that they were competing for jobs and influence in the emerging West German intelligence sector.
The Cold War also explained why the infamous East German Stasi spent many years and considerable effort doing its own discreet research into the Reichstag fire and the people who had been involved in it. Above all the Stasi hoped to find information that would discredit prominent East German dissidents, along with ex-Nazi police and intelligence officials in West Germany. The Stasi also tried to recruit at least one well-known western Reichstag fire researcher to be, in Stasi-speak, an “unofficial employee.”
But the most important link between intelligence services and the Reichstag fire came in the form of a man named Fritz Tobias, who from the 1950s to the 1970s was a senior official of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the West German federal state of Lower Saxony. Earlier, in the 1940s – by his own account at least – he had served as a “scout” for the British Secret Intelligence Service. This meant that, while working on a “denazification” tribunal, he was supposed to keep his eyes open for former Nazis who might be useful to the British.
In 1951 Tobias started devoting his spare time – by his account, only his spare time – to research on the Reichstag fire. By the late 1950s his work was already becoming known, and, to some German officials, somewhat troubling. Tobias could and did use the powers of his office to get information. He was able to get access to classified documents that were closed to the public, and on at least one occasion he brought a prosecutor along with him to question a retired judge who had evidence to give about the fire. Was this all really just a spare time project? In the early 1960s, when Tobias’s lengthy book on the Reichstag fire was published (lengthy in German anyway – the English translation cut it by about half), Tobias used agents from the Office for Constitutional Protection to threaten academic historians who disagreed with his arguments, and blackmailed the director of a prestigious institute with classified documents revealing that director’s Nazi past. There seems at least a possibility that Tobias’s work was really an official commission. When asked about this while testifying in court in 1961, Tobias declined to answer because of his duty to maintain official secrets.
Why would German security services in the 1960s care about who had burned the Reichstag? There are several possibilities, admittedly only speculative. Tobias’s book, like Rudolf Diels’s before him, was to a considerable extent an attack on Hans Bernd Gisevius. Gisevius had made himself very unpopular with the West German government through his advocacy of a policy of neutrality in the Cold War and his friendship with gadflies like Martin Niemöller. There are materials in the FBI’s file on Gisevius (and yes, the bureau had one) that seem likely to have come from a German security service. There is also the issue that all the state and the Federal West German governments were very much on the defensive in the early 1960s about the number of senior officials they employed who had bad records from the Nazi era. Tobias’s own state of Lower Saxony was one of the worst offenders in this regard. Tobias’s book was very much a defense, indeed a glorification, of those former Gestapo officers who had worked with Rudolf Diels – one of whom, Walter Zirpins, had an office just down the hall from Fritz Tobias at the Lower Saxon Interior Ministry.
These spies and their various schemes make up a fascinating, if murky, part of this murky historical mystery.
Benjamin Carter Hett, a former trial lawyer and professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, is the author of Burning the Reichstag, Death in the Tiergarten and Crossing Hitler, winner of the Fraenkel Prize.
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Defiance is the second book in the Resistance trilogy by writer Carla Jablonski and artist Leland Purvis. It begins in 1943, a year after Book 1 ends. Tensions are now higher and supplies are lower. To make matter worse, the Germans have formed a paramilitary group of Frenchmen called the Milice to do their dirty work, as well as instituting a policy of sending young French men and women to labor camps in Germany to help in their war effort. Paul Tessier, his older sister Sylvie and younger sister Marie are still working underground with the French Resistance.
Paul is still posting his anti-Nazi pictures around the village, but now he is also directing his skills towards the Milice. And he is getting impatient with the resistance movement using propaganda instead of weapons, on orders from Charles DeGaulle in London.
One day, after making a propaganda delivery, Paul finds the house empty, and his mother in their winery cellar demanding more wine to convert into fuel.and pouring heating oil into the ancient casks used to age the wine, and ruining them, infuriating Paul even more.
Paul’s older sister Sylvie is asked by her boyfriend Jacques to cozy up to the Germans to try to get information for the resistance. But Sylvie storms off because she feels she is being used. Jacques tells Paul about the Marquis, resistance workers who are hiding out in the woods, and that he wanted Sylvie to find out how much the Germans know about Marquis.
Jacques is sent to Germany for labor service, but when she finds out he escaped and
Resistance is the first graphic novel in a trilogy about young resistance workers in southern France during the Nazi occupation of their country. These graphic novels for young adults are a collaboration of Carla Jablonski, noted children’s author, and Leland Purvis, artist and writer of comic books.
At the beginning of the story, Jablonski has included an explanation about how France was divided between the occupied northern half and the so-called free southern half after it signed an armistice with Germany to stop the fighting in 1940 Now, it is 1942, and up this point, life wasn’t too terrible for those who are living in southern France, certainly better than those who living in the occupies areas.
Paul Tessier may live in the “free” part of occupied France, but his father is German prisoner of war and no one knows anything about him. And now, the Nazis everywhere, more brazen than even, always threatening the daily life of the French and helping themselves to whatever they want. . Angered by all this, Paul is no longer content to simply post his anti-Nazi posters about town.
Besides owning their own vineyard, Paul’s family has taken over the hotel owned by their friends, the Levy’s, who can no longer own it because they are Jews. But when the Nazis requisition the hotel for their own use, the Levy’s disappear. Afraid for them after hearing about the round ups and deportations of Jews in Paris, Paul worries about what will happen to the Levy’s, especially his best friend Henri Levy. But he finds Henri in the woods, hanging out by a pond, completely unaware of what has been happening to the Jews in town.
Paul and his younger sister Marie decide to hide Henri in
By: David Elzey,
on 10/27/2011
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written by Carla Jablonski
art by Leland Purvis
First Second 2010
This graphic novel set during the Occupation of France by the Nazis in World War II shows the work of the Resistance movement through the eyes of children who find themselves in the thick of things.
Teen Paul finds himself the man of the house when his father is taken away by the German Occupying forces. When they Germans
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Gerald Steinacher is the first person to uncover the full extent of the secret escape routes and hiding places 'ratlines' that smuggled Nazis out of Europe, through South Tyrol, across the Alps into Italy, and onward to Argentina and elsewhere. His ground-breaking research in the archives of the ICRC in Geneva brought to light the fact that the Red Cross supplied travel papers to war criminals - amongst them Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.
Hitler invaded Norway in April 1940 for two reasons. The first reason was because he needed the port of Narvik in Norway for transporting much needed iron ore from Sweden to help him wage a successful war. The second reason had nothing to do with war. Hitler believed that the Nordic people were, particularly the Norwegians, a perfect example of the Aryan race and he hoped that the Norwegians and Germans would intermarry. But the Norwegians did not exactly welcome the Germans with open arms, though some did and became traitors to their country, or quislings**, collaborating with the enemy.
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On the Edge of the Fjord, written in 1944, begins shortly after Norway is invaded. Petra Engeland, 14, is home alone when a group of Nazis come knocking at the door. Petra’s mother is helping a sick neighbor when this happens, and her 15 year old brother is away at school.
The Nazi leader, Captain Ebert, demands to speak with her father. Captain Engeland, who is on a fishing expedition, is the owner of one large boat and a small fleet of excellent fishing boats. The Nazis wish to commandeer these boats for their own purpose, along with Petra’s father. In addition to this demand, Ebert and three of his officers billet themselves in the Engelbert home.
Petra decides that she must warn her father not to come home to Valcos. Early in the morning, she sets out with her little boat and fishing gear and sails down the fjord to the quay where her father’s business office is. Surprised at finding him there, she tells him what has happened in the village and warns him not to come home.
A week later, Martin comes home for a visit, and when Petra tells him what is happening, they decide to try to get some of their father’s boats out of Norway to England, where many escaped Norwegians are now training to fight the Nazis in their country. Martin stealthily spreads the word among the men and boys in the village, carefully avoiding Nazis and quislings. That night, two boatloads silently sail away down the fjord, but not before deciding how to get messages through. Sigurd Holm suggests using the signal fire they had always used to invite Petra and Martin up to their mountain house during the summer. His sisters, Margot, Inga and Karen Holm, are up there for the summer tending to the family’s goats and cows.
Eventually that fire signal comes and Petra hikes up the dangerous mountain trail to see what message had been received. On her way, Petra sees three German men, including Kurt Nagler, an old family friend who, though German, had lived in Norway his whole life. She knows enough German to understand that they are talking about something hidden in caves in the mountain. The Holm sisters verify that they heard these men speaking about this when Petra finally reaches them.
That night, a plane lands in the Holm’s cow pasture. It is Sigurd with a British flyer called Ruggles. They also know the Nazis are up to something, but don’t know exactly what. They decide to come back in a week after Martin has had time to investigate. After the
By: Maryann Yin,
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Michael Chabon (pictured, via) and Ayelet Waldman will collaborate on an HBO drama called Hobgoblin.
Here’s more from Variety: “[It is] an offbeat drama project at HBO that revolves around a motley group of conmen and magicians who use their skills at deception to battle Hitler and his forces during WWII.”
The married couple will write the script and act as executive producers together. This endeavor marks the first time the two have worked together as professionals.
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
The holiday season has officially begun. And along with it is my first Holiday Readathon running from December 2nd to 5th and all I needed to do was make a pledge for charity. My pledge is 5¢ per page read to the Salvation Army and a can of food for each book read to a local food bank.
You too can sign up at Holiday Readathon
I am beginning the Readathon with books for Chanukah because last night was the first night of Chanukah and the world’s largest Menorah was lit at Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan (59th Street and Fifth Avenue.) Chanukah is a joyous festival of lights, hope and miracles. And last night we did have a bit of a miracle when the horrible rain and strong winds stopped just in time for the lighting. If you would like to know more about this holiday, including how to make and play with a Dreidel and why children receive Chanukah Gelt, be sure to visit Chanukah on the Net
The Power of Light: Eight Stories for Hanukkah by Isaac Bashevis Singer, illustrated by Irene Lieblich.
There is one story for each night of Chanukah in this book. The sixth story, called “The Power of Light,” is about two young teens, David, 14 and Rebecca, 13, hiding from the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto after it was bombed and burned. They had been hiding for a long time because Rebecca was afraid to leave even though remaining there was also dangerous. But their story is one of courage and strength discovered in the glow of a miraculously found candle on the first night of Chanukah. They decide to bank on the miracle and travel through the sewers of Warsaw seeking partisans who could help them escape to Israel. Singer is a master storyteller and the stories in this book are – well – masterful.
Menorah in the Night Sky: a Miracle of Chanukah by Jacques J.M. Shore, illustrated by S. Kim Glassman.
This is a story about two young boys, Zev, age 12 and David, age 11. The boys are best friends, separated from their families in Auschwitz and working in a factory separating shoes. Homesick and sad, David did not want to remember the Chanukah celebrations he had had with his family before the war. Zev wanted to help David with a miracle of hope, but all he could do was tell David to look up in the winter sky, light their found, but forbidden candle and pretend they were lighting a Menorah. That night a bright star appeared as if it were the first candle on the Menorah. But could such a thing happen again and again for 8 nights? Well, it is the season of light and miracles.
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Susan A. Brewer is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Her new book, Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq, is a fascinating history of how successive presidents have 
conducted what Donald Rumsfeld called “perception management”. In the original post below she looks at the top ten American propaganda messages of the last century.
Propaganda sells wars. Emotionally powerful and instantly recognizable, propaganda messages serve to simplify complex international crises for public consumption. A persuasive blend of fact and fiction, they resonate with what Americans want to believe about themselves. Here are the top ten messages used by the U.S. government over the past century to rally public support for war.
10. WE FIGHT TO STOP ANOTHER HITLER. There was only one Hitler, but he
lives on in wartime propaganda since World War II.
9. WE FIGHT OVER THERE SO WE DON’T HAVE TO FIGHT HERE. In this message, America typically is portrayed as a pastoral land of small towns, not as an urban, industrialized superpower.
8. WE FIGHT CLEAN WARS WITH SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGY. This message suggests that U.S. troops will not be in much danger, nor will innocent civilians be killed in what is projected to be a quick and decisive conflict.
7. WE FIGHT TO PROTECT WOMEN AND CHILDREN. A traditional theme of war propaganda since ancient times, it is accompanied by compelling visuals and heartrending stories.
6. WE FIGHT BRUTISH, FANATICAL ENEMIES. Another classic, it dehumanizes enemy fighters.
5. WE FIGHT TO UNITE THE NATION. Here war is shown to heal old wounds and unify the divisions caused by the Civil War, class conflict, racial and ethnic differences, or past failures such as the Vietnam War.
4. WE FIGHT FOR THE FLAG AND THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS. The trend has been to emphasize the flag over the republic. The more flags on display, the less likely the people’s elected representatives will debate foreign policy or exercise their power to declare war.
3. WE FIGHT TO LIBERATE THE OPPRESSED. When the oppressed resist U.S. help, they appear ungrateful and in need of American guidance especially if they have valuable resources.
2. WE FIGHT TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE. During the Philippine War, for example, this message advised that Uncle Sam knew what was best for the little brown brothers.
1. WE FIGHT TO PROTECT THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Although the American way of life stands for peace, it requires a lot of fighting.
Dick, Philip K. 1962. The Man in the High Castle. 272 pages.
For a week Mr. R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail.
What can I say about this one? Really. An alternative reality is created, a reality in which the Axis powers won World War II. The United States? Not so united. They've been divided--some being more occupied than others--between Germany and Japan. Life isn't all bad--well, unless you happen to be Jewish or black. For this reason, it is better to be on the Japanese side of the border. (Don't even ask what the Germans did to Africa.) This nightmarish reality is all too real for the handful of characters the reader meets. (Yes, a few of the characters are Jewish.)
Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. This book is all about choices--ethical and moral questions that these characters have to answer. It isn't easy to be the person you want to be, should be. Life is too complex to be simplified into wrong and right...or so it appears. Some decisions change your life forever. Some change who you are. Some hasten the inevitable...death itself. How much of yourself would you be willing to sacrifice to be "safe" in this nightmare-of-a-world?
One of the fascinating aspects of this one is how the novel revolves around a book or two. Specifically, the novel revolves around another novel and its author. A science-fiction novel that in itself is an alternate reality. A novel imagining what life would be like if the Allies had won the war. This novel is by Hawthorne Abendsen. It's called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. And this novel weaves its way into the stories of the many characters and narrators. As you can imagine, this novel isn't all that popular with the powers-that-be. It's outlawed on the German-occupied side of the country. But that doesn't stop people from reading it. Giving this novel power. If anything, it makes it all that more popular.
This one is definitely interesting! It's a bit more philosophical and ideas-oriented than action-packed. But I enjoyed reading it.
Plot summary (from the publisher?)
It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.
This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.
© Becky Laney of
Becky's Book ReviewsIf you're reading this post on another site, or another feed, the content has been stolen.
LeZotte, Ann Clare. 2008. T4.
T4 is a verse novel set in Nazi Germany. The novel focuses on the holocaust, it's true, but this time the focus is on the Nazi's attack on the mentally ill and/or the physically disabled. Our narrator is a young girl who is forced to go into hiding because she is deaf. Hitler and his party have determined that the deaf (among others) have nothing to live for...and would be better off "mercifully" killed.
This is a verse novel. And the poems are simple and straightforward. Here is an example of one of the poems:
In 1939
I was thirteen years old.
My family and our neighbors
Had learned to accept me.
I was the deaf girl with pigtails
In a red and yellow calico dress.
Father Josef taught me
To write the whole alphabet.
I could read a couple of books.
I carried a pad and pencil
To write down answers
To questions I was asked
Or to ask for a pound of
Sugar or butter at the store.
Many people in town had
Learned my word signs.
It was still difficult
For me to speak.
I moved my lips
when I prayed in church.
I could feel the organ
Playing through the floor.
It shook
My whole body and soull.
At home I helped
My mother cook, clean
And look after
Clara and Schatze.
It would seem
That my life was good.
But something terrible
Was about to happen.
Other reviews, The Well Read Child, Flamingnet, Deaf Characters in Adolescent Literature,
© Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning humans.
— German Poet Heinrich Heine, 1820
The TribStar of Terre Haute, Indiana features Bruce's History Lessons which is about the
Nazi book burnings. On May 10, 1933, the Nazi party in Germany held a nation-wide bonfire during which 25,000 books went up in flames. Anything considered "un-German in spirit" that did not line up with Germany's political and social goals was censored. The German Student Association developed an “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” campaign that saw student members of the Nazi Party participating in town by town book burnings. Censorship eventually began to be applied to more than books and included “un-German” music, paintings, photographs, plays, films, newspapers and magazines. were banned or censored, and then religious groups, cultural institutions and political parties.
As Bruce Kaufmann puts it so eloquently,
And finally, as Heinrich Heine predicted a century earlier, Jews and other “un-German” people (gypsies, Slavs, the mentally and physically handicapped) were themselves banned, censored, and — in the crematoriums at Auschwitz, Dachau and elsewhere — burned.
Although technically this is not the story of a challenge or banning of a book, it is the story of how resilient a writer's work can be, even in the face of a repressive regime.
Suite Francaise was begun by Irene Nemirovsky in 1941. Its name describes the intent of the author who had dreamed of writing a book which was contructed like a symphony. Suite Francaise was never finished since Nemirovsky lived in France while it was occupied by the Germans. Because of her Jewish background, she could no longer be published except under a pseudonym -- a dangerous undertaking.
On July 13, 1942, the French police arrested Nemirovsky and she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died on August 17, 1942. At that point, Suite Francaise may never have been published. Her daughters were saved by the governess who removed the Jewish star and helped them flee. Following the war, they returned to their grandmother's home to ask for help. Not recognizing them, she refused.
Denise, one of her daughters, had put the manuscript of Suite Francaise into her suitcase as they fled, as a memento of her mother. Denise and sister Elizabeth hid the suitcase in precarious places as they fled and didn't read it until many years later. Denise decided to type out the pages of the manuscript with its minuscule handwriting and found what she thought was a masterpiece of her mother's work.
Sixty-four years after the death of its author, Suite Francaise was finally published. It is sad, however, to think about how it is considered part one and two of a five-part symphony.
I had the opportunity to meet poet Betsy Franco this summer when she kindly participated in the Poetry Jam session I moderated at the ALA conference in Washington, D.C. in June. What a fun person! Petite, dynamic, and direct, with a quick sense of humor, she won the crowd with her personality AND her poetry. Today is her birthday, so I’d like to send a shout out to her and nudge you all to check out her work, which ranges widely from rhythmic and even math-related poetry for the very young to edited anthologies of the writing of teens. She is a former teacher and educational publisher with a studio art degree from Stanford and a master’s degree in education from Lesley College in Massachusetts. She is married, with three sons, and lives in Palo Alto, California. Her writing (numbering 40+ books) has been recognized on the American Library Association's list of Best Books for Young Adults and on the New York Public Library list of Books for the Teen Age.
A sampling of her poetry includes:
Mathematickles!
Counting Our Way to the 100th Day!
Counting Caterpillars and Other Math Poems
Edited anthologies of poetry written by teens:
You Hear Me?, Poems and Writing by Teenage Boys
Things I Have to Tell You, Poems and Writing by Teenage Girls
Night Is Gone, Day Is Still Coming, Stories and Poems by American Indian Teens and Young Adults
For just a taste, here’s a fun math-inspired poem by Betsy Franco (from Mathematickles):
thunder
+ lightning
+ wind
+ rain that’s warm
= summer storm
Look for more wonderful words from Betsy Franco (mother of actor, James Franco!)
Picture credit: www.rcowen.com
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0 Comments on Some Holiday Books - Chanukah as of 1/1/1900
Excellent review.
In many graphic novels there is text in the back explaining who some of the historical characters are (usually a paragraph or two). Another way is just a list of historical characters so folks can google them.
http://www.ManOfLabook.com
Thanks, Zohar. I am looking forward to the third part of this trilogy. I am beginning to really like graphic novels. They remind me of those old Illustrated Classic Comics of great literature.