Eternal forest
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Eternal forest |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1936 |
| length | 88 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski , Hanns Springer |
| script |
Carl Maria Holzapfel Arnfried Heyne |
| production |
Albert Graf von Pestalozza for the NSKG |
| music | Wolfgang Zeller |
| camera |
Sepp Allgeier Werner Bohne Otto Ewald Wolf Hart Guido Seeber A. O. Weitzenberg Bernhard Wentzel |
| cut | Arnfried Heyne |
| occupation | |
Ewiger Wald is a documentary German propaganda film from 1936. Directed by Hanns Springer and Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski .
The film was premiered on June 16, 1936 on “Volkstum Day” at the fourth and last Reichstag of the NSKG in Munich , but received little response from the premiere audience. It then hit theaters where it flopped commercially. In 1937 the NSKG withdrew it from distribution and the film was taken over by the KDF .
content
The film tells the story of the German people as the history of the German Forest in the sense of the blood-and-soil ideology of the National Socialists .
The time told ranges from the Bronze Age to Germany's defeat in World War I and its resurrection under the sign of the swastika. In strong and emotionally charged images, supported by suggestive music, the film begins with long tracking shots through extensive deciduous forests. The colonnades of a Gothic cathedral gradually change into the "column forest" of a real forest. Whole forests are repeatedly cut down by the enemy, down to the stump, but the German farmer continues to sow his seeds undaunted.
The Hermannsschlacht , Vikings cutting down for boat building, the peasant wars , interpreted as the struggle of the peasant population against the rule of the Catholic clergy , the destruction of forests because of the wood deliveries to France as a result of the Versailles Treaty , are presented as examples. Reforestation is happening ... "accurate, like soldier to soldier", whereby the camera pans from the legs of young soldiers to a tree nursery and it sounds from the off : "Eternal forest, eternal people - the tree lives like you and me, he strives for space, like you and I [...] ”Regarding the Weimar Republic it says:“ Rotten, decayed, interspersed with a foreign race. How do you people, how do you carry the burden of the forest? ”The cleared forest is resurrected as the flag forest of the swastika banners, and the film ends with a maypole adorned with a swastika. "In the final version, the individual geographical regions in which the film was shot are melted together into a mythical overall vision of the German landscape," explains Rainer Gudin in his book Political Landscape .
The film itself is a mixture of documentary and feature film, in which long-lasting picture sequences of forest, meadows and clouds alternate with nationalistic poems recited with pathetic vibrato by Nazi functionary Carl Maria Holzapfel and illustrative feature film scenes. Faded in text quotations are written in Fraktur .
Historical background
Most of the film shot in 1935 was commissioned by the National Socialist Cultural Community (NSKG). The NSKG was financially completely dependent on the subsidies from Robert Ley's German Labor Front (DAF) and the emergency community of German science, which had been harmonized since 1934 . The motive of the client was to bring the anti-Catholic and racist ideology of Alfred Rosenberg closer to the German people , packaged in a film with aesthetic and artistic standards. The film should promote the creation of a national-ethnic identity.
production
The film was produced by Count Albert von Pestalozza, whose company mainly produced didactic films for school lessons. Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowsk was the director of the film Blood and Soil. Foundations of the New Reich from 1933, so already had experience in National Socialist film propaganda. For Hanns Springer, who only made a few films, it was the debut film.
The script was written by the then cultural functionary Carl Maria Holzapfel, who also wrote an introduction to the film. He received technical support from Arnfried Heyne , who edited the film and who later became part of Leni Riefenstahl's technical staff .
Filming took two years.
The camera team included Sepp Allgeier , who also shot for Leni Riefenstahl and was one of the most renowned German cameramen at the time. He was supported by five other cameramen, including Werner Bohne , also a member of Riefenstahl's staff. For camera veteran Guido Seeber , who was the only person involved who had worked for cinematography in the 19th century, this was the last full-length cinema production.
Günther Hadank , Heinz Herkommer, Paul Klinger , Lothar Körner and Kurt Wieschala spoke the commentary on pictures and the lyrical texts of Holzapfel, which were committed to National Socialist ideology .
Wolfgang Zeller's choir and solo movements, inspired by late Romanticism , strike - given by the hymn-like verses of Holzapfel - almost sacral sounds, sometimes reminiscent of Gregorian monk chants.
Film copies
Copies received vary between 54 and 88 minutes and circulate on the Internet in varying degrees of quality. Steven Spielberg's film archive contains a 23 minute long compilation in good image quality. In the Federal Archives there are a number of copies in various formats and lengths that are available for research.
reception
Scenes from the film were shown and discussed both in an episode of the BBC TV series The Road to War: Global War (1989) and in the BBC TV film Das Erbe der Nibelungen (2011). In his film installation My home is a dark and cloud-hung land, Julian Rosefeldt also refers to the eternal forest . Excerpts from the hymns Holzapfel were occasionally used as lyrics by groups close to the right spectrum, such as werewolf , Stahlgewitter or Andras .
literature
- Rainer Gudin: Political Landscapes. On the relationship between space and national identity. Transcript, Bielefeld, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8376-2818-0 .
- Thomas Meder: The Germans as a forest people. The cultural film Ewiger Wald (1936). In: Giuli Liebman Parrinello (ed.): Il bosco nella cultura europea tra realtà e immaginario. Rome 2002. pp. 105-129.
- Sebastian Thoma: Ewiger Wald (film by Hanns Springer (1936)). In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Literature, film, theater and art. Pp. 113-114.
- Ulrich Linse : The German forest as a battleground for political ideas. In: Revue d'Allemagne et des Pays de langue allemande. Vol. 22, 1990. No. 3, pp. 339-350.
- Johannes Zechner: Eternal forest and eternal people. The ideologization of the German forest under National Socialism. (= Contributions to the cultural history of nature, Volume 15). Freising 2006.
- Sabine Wilke: "Rotten, rotten, interspersed with a foreign race". The Colonial Trope as Subtext of the Nazi “Kulturfilm” Ewiger Wald (1936). In: German Studies Review , Vol. 24. 2001. pp. 353–376.
Web links
- Eternal Forest in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Eternal forest at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ^ Sebastian Thoma: Ewiger Wald (film by Hans Springer) s, in: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Literature, film, theater and art. Berlin: de Gruyter 2015. p. 115.
- ↑ quoted from Thoma 2015. p. 116.
- ^ Rainer Gudin: Political Landscapes. On the relationship between space and national identity . Bielefeld 2014.
- ↑ Lex-Film, Albert Graf von Pestalozza (Berlin) accessed on July 22, 2016.
- ↑ C. M. Holzapfel: Forest and People. Guiding principle for the film poem 'Ewiger Wald'. In: Licht-Bild-Bühne, June 8, 1934. pp. 203–204.
- ↑ Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive Nazi mythology, Film ID: 981, accessed July 22, 2016.
- ^ Federal Archives, catalog accessed on July 22, 2016.