What else can you expect from the director of "Jud Süss"
At the end of World War II, during which he directed "Jud Süss" the vilest genocide-inciting anti-Semitic movie of all time, the mediocre director Veit Harlan escaped going to jail on a technicality: it could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Reich's propaganda minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels', office did not tamper with a few minutes' of film of Harlan's supposedly "well-meaning" movie.
Harlan soon staged his much-awaited comeback and started making movies in which the word Jew was taboo. Alas, all he was interested in making, were movies inciting hatred. So if you are no longer allowed to openly incite hatred of the Jews --- though soon even that may be allowed again in a unified Germany where the death of thirty thousand Aryans during the bombing of Dresden is nowadays widely viewed as comparable, if not worse, than the wanton genocidal murder of six million Jews--- there is always some other group to pick on.
Not aware that homosexuality was on its way to becoming legal in the land of Roehm, Harlan had decided he would make a gay-hating movie for a change. The story is so inane, that I will forgo any spoilers. What no one can miss though, is the fact that the way the "good Germans" in this movie talk to and about gay men, is a mutatis mutandis quotation of the way they used to talk in Harlan's wartime movies to and about the Jews shortly before murdering them. This does not stop at spoken language but extends to body language as well.
Though the word Jew is never uttered in "Anders als Du und Ich," the movie's openly gay bad guy goes by the certainly non-Aryan name of Dr. Boris Winkler, and his man-servant is known only by his, in Germany most Semitic of surnames, Maurice. I guess the Goebbels boys must have been at it yet again, even though like his child-murdering spouse, the cowardly propaganda minister had swallowed his cyanide more than a decade before the shooting of "Anders als Du und Ich.."
Maybe the most disgusting feature of this movie is the participation of the legendary stage actress Paula Wessely, who had acted in Nazi propaganda movies during the war and then asked to be forgiven for this "lapse". There is no denying that Wesssely was one of the most spellbinding stage actresses of all time. But to participate in a movie in which she is asked to act the role of a mother, who after having heard rumors that her son may be gay, learns all she ever wanted to know about homosexuality, by furtively looking up the one-paragraph entry "Third Sex" in a Hitler-era lexicon, indicates that a very limited intelligence informed Wessely's great acting talent.
Harlan soon staged his much-awaited comeback and started making movies in which the word Jew was taboo. Alas, all he was interested in making, were movies inciting hatred. So if you are no longer allowed to openly incite hatred of the Jews --- though soon even that may be allowed again in a unified Germany where the death of thirty thousand Aryans during the bombing of Dresden is nowadays widely viewed as comparable, if not worse, than the wanton genocidal murder of six million Jews--- there is always some other group to pick on.
Not aware that homosexuality was on its way to becoming legal in the land of Roehm, Harlan had decided he would make a gay-hating movie for a change. The story is so inane, that I will forgo any spoilers. What no one can miss though, is the fact that the way the "good Germans" in this movie talk to and about gay men, is a mutatis mutandis quotation of the way they used to talk in Harlan's wartime movies to and about the Jews shortly before murdering them. This does not stop at spoken language but extends to body language as well.
Though the word Jew is never uttered in "Anders als Du und Ich," the movie's openly gay bad guy goes by the certainly non-Aryan name of Dr. Boris Winkler, and his man-servant is known only by his, in Germany most Semitic of surnames, Maurice. I guess the Goebbels boys must have been at it yet again, even though like his child-murdering spouse, the cowardly propaganda minister had swallowed his cyanide more than a decade before the shooting of "Anders als Du und Ich.."
Maybe the most disgusting feature of this movie is the participation of the legendary stage actress Paula Wessely, who had acted in Nazi propaganda movies during the war and then asked to be forgiven for this "lapse". There is no denying that Wesssely was one of the most spellbinding stage actresses of all time. But to participate in a movie in which she is asked to act the role of a mother, who after having heard rumors that her son may be gay, learns all she ever wanted to know about homosexuality, by furtively looking up the one-paragraph entry "Third Sex" in a Hitler-era lexicon, indicates that a very limited intelligence informed Wessely's great acting talent.
- siegfriedhasse
- 2 oct 2005