Bismarck (1940)
Bismarck is a German fiction film by the director Wolfgang Liebeneiner from 1940. This biography by Otto von Bismarck is one of the Nazi propaganda films with The Discharge (1942) , which set Bismarck as a role model and alleged forerunner of Adolf Hitler .
content
Although he is unpopular with Queen Augusta and the state parliament , Otto von Bismarck is appointed to the cabinet of King Wilhelm I on the advice of his Minister of War Albrecht von Roon . There are domestic political attacks in the state parliament and on the part of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm . The Prussian MP and physician Rudolf Virchow in particular is his fiercest opponent. Bismarck dissolves the state parliament and undertakes the unconstitutional army reform . He allies himself with Austria against Denmark . A brief German-Danish war breaks out . Then it comes to war against Austria . After the victorious battle of Königgrätz , Bismarck initially fought in vain against a continuation of the war. The king, in a rush of victory, is obsessed with the goal of invading Vienna. With the help of the Crown Prince, who takes Bismarck's side for the first time, the peace plan can still be implemented.
Production and Propaganda
The idea for the film came from Tobis Production Manager Ewald von Demandowsky , who tried to comply with the wishes of Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels .
The film was made and premiered at the time of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact and the occupation of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union . Accordingly, Bismarck points out to the king that the military convention with Russia is keeping Prussia's back free; In response to the king's objection that the press was on the side of Poland, Bismarck replied: “Until the screamers decide to take action, we are armed. They sharpen their mouths and shoot with paper. We sharpen our sabers and will shoot with the needle gun . ”“ The newspapers are not the nation ”: With his contempt for the media, which served Nazi propaganda against democratic institutions, Bismarck tries to reassure the king.
Originally, Bismarck should contain various anti-Semitic scenes that would have had the fight of the Jews in England against Bismarck as the founder of the German Empire as the theme. This would have included Bismarck in other aggressive anti-Semitic films of 1940 ( The Rothschilds , Jud Suss , The Eternal Jew ). In the film that was actually shot, only one anti-Semitic episode remained: the unsuccessful assassination attempt by a Jew on Bismarck, although it is true that the Bismarck assassin, Ferdinand Cohen-Blind, was a Jew. However, he acted on his own and not, as indicated in the film, on behalf of the English.
The film stages Bismarck as the forerunner of Adolf Hitler and as an important man who asserts himself against the world with his will and genius as a leader in order to help his country to greatness. This motif reappears in Liebeneiner's The Discharge (1942), whose hero is again Bismarck; Frederick the Great played this role in other films, for example in Carl Froelich's Der Choral von Leuthen (1933), Hans Steinhoff's The Old and Young King (1935), Johannes Meyer's Fridericus (1936) and Veit Harlan's The Great King (1942) .
However, Moltke is also a self-confident "important man" in the film. He wins at Königgrätz as if it were a game of chess; not a single fighting soldier is shown in the film.
The film was shot from June 10, 1940 to September 1940 in Plau , Vienna , Bad Gastein , Berlin and Potsdam . In the district of Potsdam Babelsberg shooting took to scenes between Wilhelm I and Bismarck held that emerged in the actual location of the events, the terraces around the castle Babelsberg in Babelsberg .
The premiere of the film, which was then classified as adult, took place on December 6, 1940 in Berlin in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo . After the end of the war, the Allied military government banned the film from showing it . After the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany , Bismarck was not classified as a reserved film , but received an age rating of 18 and over from the FSK .
Awards
The film testing agency gave the film the ratings “politically and artistically particularly valuable” and “youthful value”.
Reviews
The lexicon of international film sees Bismarck as a "historical-biographical film about Otto von Bismarck's appointment as Prussian Prime Minister in 1862 until the preliminary peace of Nikolsburg in 1866", which aims to portray the " iron chancellor " and to attribute to him the sole merit of the founding of the empire in 1871. The lexicon recognizes the careful presentation as well as the attempt to construct “lines of development up to Hitler”.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted from Erwin Leiser : “Germany, awake!” Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, p. 37.
- ↑ Quoted from Erwin Leiser: “Germany, awake!” Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, p. 43.
- ↑ Erwin Leiser: "Germany, awake!" Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, p. 68.
- ↑ Erwin Leiser: "Germany, awake!" Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, p. 95.
- ↑ Erwin Leiser: "Germany, awake!" Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, p. 91.
- ^ Karl-Heinz Wegner: “Berlin in Feature Films” . State Film Archive of the GDR 1987, p. 32.
- ↑ Alexander Vogel, Marcel Piethe: "Film City Potsdam: Locations and Stories" . Bäßler Verlag, Berlin 2013, p. 79.
- ↑ Freiburg newspaper of December 11, 1940, p. 6 ( online )
- ↑ Bismarck. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 24, 2017 .
Web links
- Full length film ( memento of March 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) on Archive.org
- Bismarck in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Bismarck at filmportal.de
literature
- Rainer Rother : "Bismarck in the National Socialist Feature Film", in: Klaudia Knabel (Ed.): National Myths - Collective Symbols. Functions, constructions and media of memory . Pp. 245-265. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005. ISBN 3-525-35581-5 .