In the article “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany” (1995), Robert G. Moeller, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, focuses on the topical question of a treatment of the past by Germans in the post-World War II Germany. The author argues that to find a single viewpoint as for the Third Reich period is difficult and the “binary opposition of perpetrator and victim” tends to impact the process of the national self-awareness and self-identification greatly (1048). This results in an uncertainty of an ethical assessment of the historical past and, what is more important, demonstration of a selective memory. The purpose of this paper is to provide interpretation of the 1979 film The Marriage of Maria Braun directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), a West German filmmaker and a representative of the New German Cinema movement of the 1960s-1980s, taking into consideration the ideas revealed in the article by Moeller. In this way, the main idea of the essay is that in his film, Fassbinder reflects Moeller’s concept of the selective memory by means of dehumanization of film characters while showing the historical post-war period of the German Economic Miracle.
The main character of The Marriage is a woman named Maria. At the beginning of the film, she marries a Wehrmacht officer Hermann Braun in the city of Berlin, which experiences an artillery shelling by the Red Army right at the process of the wedding.
Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most revolutionary and certainly most controversial filmmakers of the early twentieth century. The lasting influence of her innovative filmmaking techniques on twentieth century cinema is undisputed by scholars throughout history, but the exact nature of her work is surrounded by ongoing controversy. Riefenstahl’s production of the feature films “Triumph of the Will” (Source 3) and “Olympia” (Source 1) have left a lasting imprint on history; these films established Riefenstahl’s influential career as a film director under the years of the Nazi regime. Although these films are attributed by scholars and critics to be Riefenstahl’s greatest achievements they are also considered to be her greatest fault, for
East Germany, its demise relayed through the mass media of recent history, has in popular consciousness been posited as negative, a corrupt bulwark of the last dying days of Communism in Eastern Europe, barren and silent. The other Germany to its West, its citizens free, was striding confidently ahead into the millennium. Recent cinema has sought to examine re-unification, the Wolfgang Becker film Goodbye Lenin! (2003) a recent example of such an investigation into the past through cinema. In this essay I will look at the film and the narrative techniques it uses, probing whether it portrays the East German nation as positive or
German society is a topic of discussion for all historians who study the period of World War II. Many Germans at the time said that they were not associated with the Nazi party nor supporters of their ideologies. But throughout this analysis, Peter Fritzsche provides claims that the German people were greatly involved in the Nazi regime goals, which is a controversial subject for today.
Primo Levi’s concept, the “moral gray zone” helps us understand the morality and justification of the actions and roles of the prisoners within the concentration camps to be likely wrong, yet still defendable, and can also be applied to the accounts of regular Germans, showing that their intentional ignorance of the tragedy occurring may have also been more defensible than it initially seems. This essay will first define the moral grey zone, then analyze how this concept is reflected by the Canada in Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, and will end by evaluating whether or not the German citizens interviewed and befriended by Milton Mayer fall into the moral gray zone. First, it is essential to define what the moral gray zone is. In Primo Levi’s
As the most famous Holocaust theme author, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Elie Wiesel’s painful memoir novel, Night, records his personal nightmares as a young Jew during the World War II and impacts today’s world profoundly. The terrible living condition in the ghetto, the numb of the prisoned Jews to send the little body of Jewish children into the cremation chimney, the diminishing faith of Elie to God, the little hope of surviving and so on, too many such horrible scenes mingle in every reader’s mind and meanwhile arise a lot of questions. Aren’t those German soldier human beings? Why the SS and Gestapo have not any mercy to those normal elegant Jews, including those lovely young girls and cute children? Why most of the Aryan people just stand by during that time but not shelter the Jews? How can the people in a democratic German make their collective decisions to support the dictator Hitler? What’s wrong with that generation of people living in that land? Can we prevent such genocide happen again in today’s world?
The film ‘Schindler’s List’, directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the novel Schindler’s Ark, by Thomas Keneally, gives us an insight into the corruption and destructive capabilities of humans. This film portrays many themes, all of which are evoked due to the factual historical event of the Jewish Holocaust which occurred in Germany during WWII. The exploration of the themes of hope, use and misuse of power, the nature of evil and courage makes this film prominent over others. Spielberg’s purpose in making this film was to raise awareness of the
THESIS: The Good German achieves moral complexity by depicting everyday German experience, using the detective genre to show how brutal the Holocaust was for many German citizens, and by offering a view of German suffering that creates ethical dilemmas.
The tragedies of the holocaust forever altered history. One of the most detailed accounts of the horrific events from the Nazi regime comes from Elie Wiesel’s Night. He describes his traumatic experiences in German concentration camps, mainly Buchenwald, and engages his readers from a victim’s point of view. He bravely shares the grotesque visions that are permanently ingrained in his mind. His autobiography gives readers vivid, unforgettable, and shocking images of the past. It is beneficial that Wiesel published this, if he had not the world might not have known the extent of the Nazis reign. He exposes the cruelty of man, and the misuse of power. Through a lifetime of tragedy, Elie Wiesel struggled internally to resurrect his religious
The following is a critique of the article “Good Times, Bad Times: Memories of The Third Reich” by Ulrich Herbert. In this critique, I will explore the themes of the article, discuss the main arguments, and address the significance of the author’s insight to the world of Nazi Germany.
Rainer Wener Fassbinder uses Marias’s life to map the post-war and contemporary Germany in film The Marriage of Maria Braun, and link her marriage and death with Germany’s political and economic. The film begins with Maria and Hermann getting married in the fire at the city hall, they sign the paper in chaos when the bombs exploded near them. Her marriage and life are meant to be different, and her expectation to love pushes her into the history of tragedy, which is referred throughout this film. Through the changes of Maria’s personal circumstances, showing the poverty in the wartime, the broken mirror on the wall, her mother’s excitement of she brings the cigarette home. Moreover, She dresses simple during the war era to nice dresses and
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was arguably one of the greatest German directors after World War II. During his fifteen-year career, Fassbinder directed and produced among his other film works 40 full-length films. Fassbinder was born in a small Bavarian town, Bad Wörishofen, on May 31, 1945, and died presumably of a drug overdose at the young age of 37 on June 10, 1982. He was the most prominent German film director, actor and screenwriter in the New German Cinema. He continued the tradition of great German movies, and dealt with the German Nazi past, the average person’s involvement in the dictatorship and the tendency to suppress the memory of those years after World War II.
The Third Reich is one of the most notorious eras of German History. Hitler's reign is remembered as tumultuous times filled with violence, bigotry, and racism. A male-controlled society, the Third Reich relegated women to secondary roles, forcing them into lesser jobs and making them primarily focus on the home. Many traditional studies of the Third Reich ignore women or merely acknowledge them superficially. Once women began to receive a place in the histories, it was only as laborers and mothers. The study of women during the Third Reich took time to evolve. This study focuses on showing the evolution of the scholarship of women during the Third Reich; it utilizes eight texts (one with two parts): four journal articles and four monographs
Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday originally published in 1942 and translated into English in 2009 by Anthea Bell is a perceptive memoir that skillfully recounts the life of Zweig (a Jewish middle class male) beginning with his childhood in Vienna, Austria pre-World War I and ends right before Zweig’s suicide in 1942. During his account, Zweig provides critical commentary on various historical events that is invaluable when it comes to putting these events in the context of the everyday life of the individuals living through them. He also provides accounts of many societal structures as well as of interesting individuals that are not necessarily important in the grand scheme of things but help the reader build a more complete picture of the period. Throughout the book, Zweig maintains a cautionary as well as a didactic tone that attempts to caution the reader about how society can change so drastically and rapidly. Overall, Zweig’s book is an excellent memoir that helps put major historical events into context; however, the book also has some problems that undermine the delivery of the cautionary message of the book.
Women in Nazi Germany is based upon the Nazi regime’s attitudes, policies, and ideologies concerning the role of women in the public and private sphere. Stephenson argues that the women of Nazi Germany should be studied in depth, including the support they gave to the regime, the treatment they received, and the different roles they played. However, she argues they should not be studied separately from the other happenings at the time, but instead, they should be incorporated into the history just as the men are. This book reviews their roles, functions, and how they were controlled by the Nazi leadership, and also their lives in pre-Nazi Germany.
Their struggle towards constructing a collective memory of the Nazi era would visualize itself in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Although the site was commemorated in the early years of the 21st century, the arguments and political discord brought up by the planning of this memorial in the early years of unification reflected not just the conflicting attitudes towards the memorialization of Nazi crimes, but also the ways in which Eastern and Western German attitudes towards their collective past clashed in their unified state. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe reflects both the struggles Germany has had to face in recent years when attempting to reflect on its past and the ways in which their approach to national memory gives foresight into their future.