I am sick and tired of certain cinematography. For one is being admonished not to “generalize”, not to show whole nations and other communities in a bad light, as it is not on to create works that would defame whole societies. However the entire post-war period has been a time when one has sinned profoundly against that rule when it comes to Germans.
In this year (in April, with a pre-view in February) a new movie of this kind is going to be released, a tale of Nazi invasion from space, “Iron Sky” (we are still waiting for their invasion from a sea-bottom, from the abyss of the Vesuvius, from a belly of a great fish or from Hell, as these have not yet been, have they?). There was already a search for the “lost Ark”, there were winds of war, various versions of the invasion of Normandy, exploits “where eagles dare”, brawls of the “dirty dozen” and a whole plethora of other actions.
There were very good movies, average movies and lemons. They differed in scenarios, sceneries and languages spoken but the main “division of roles” was, and is, invariably, and ad nauseam, the same: “the good Allies” (Brits, Yanks, Poles, Russians, Frenchies, Greeks or the Yugoslav heroes from the Sutyeska) and the “lousy Germans”. These anti-German revelries have already gone so far, that once I even expressed a desire to watch a comedy in which roles are reversed.
We in Poland get mad whenever someone abroad mentions the “Polish concentration camps” (that is: Nazi concentration camps in Poland…) or makes a movie in which Poles are shown as dolts. Newspapers and the radio then make a hubbub about anti-Polishness, petitions are being organized and protest-letters circulated on the net globally. There was such a petition recently, in regards to those “Polish concentration camps”. I know, for I signed it myself as well.
But it is exactly because I signed it, that I will not pass over the fact in silence that in all those 67 years there was hardly ever a year many anti-German movies were not made. Whether “based on facts” or – and this is a euphemism and increasingly also an oxymoron – “fiction based on reality” (read: a complete humbug, as long as it has requisites from the “era”). Those have been 67 years of depiction of our western neighbours as dolts, boors, rapists, thieves, murderers (preferably mass-murderers!), drunks, scoundrels, sadists, masochists, perverts, crazies and cowards… Not so long ago also as prey which could (and should!) be subjected to having swastikas cut onto their foreheads with knives or their skulls smashed with baseball-bats… (perhaps next time we will be entertained with their castrations and their “balls” eaten by heroic Allies of Jewish lineage?).
How many “protest-letters” and all sorts of petitions would we, Poles, have to sign every year if it was our own country shot at with such cinematography like with a machine-gun? And especially if we were forced to watch celebrations of premieres of that trash in our own capital-city.
No, contrary to all possible appearances, I am not playing any “absolution” of the Third Reich. That Reich indeed had a leadership which to a large extent (although not to 100%) deserved an infamy of a criminal kind – like the leaderships of a number of other powers responsible for the outbreak and course of WW2.
What I am saying here, is that since 1945 already several generations have grown up in Germany. And all that those people see about their country in cinemas is a dog’s vomit and a latrine…
I am not German myself, although I can understand Germans both because of my own familial relations and simple use of empirical thinking. But had I been German, I am not sure whether I would not become ultra-Nazi from this kind of “treat” with such a one-sided propaganda-gutter… For if war-propaganda exists during a war, then even if one is not particularly thrilled by it, it is nevertheless understandable as in war it becomes a weapon and namely not the most brutal one. But continuation of war-propaganda in which a country is being dragged into a gutter (“in die Gosse gezogen”) through indiscriminate “means of expression” 67 years after the close of a war, is itself a degeneracy.
A moral degeneracy of those who perpetrate it and a mental degeneracy (or at least mental bluntness) of those who enjoy it in cinemas or in front of “idiot-boxes” and who cannot wait for the next version of the anti-Nazi “Jud Süß” to watch it while devouring pop-corn or something more substantial.
As for me, the time of watching anti-German war-movies is definitely over, albeit I hope to live for some more decades.