March of Time: Inside Nazi Germany

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title March of Time: Inside Nazi Germany
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1938
length 16 minutes
Rod
Director Jack Glenn
script James L. Shute
production Louis de Rochemont , (Louis de Rochemont Associates, Inc.)
camera Julien Bryan
occupation
  • Jackson Beck: Narrator
First performance in New York in 1938

March of Time: Inside Nazi Germany is a semi-documentary film from 1938 that describes life in National Socialist Germany and the global threat posed by National Socialism .

background

The film begins with footage shot by documentary filmmaker Julien Bryan in Germany. It contains archive recordings of politicians, statements by the US Ambassador to Germany (1933 to 1937) William E. Dodd and recordings of the National Socialist American-German Confederation , which were filmed in New York and Hoboken (New Jersey) with the consent of its leader Fritz Julius Kuhn . In addition, official Nazi propaganda images have been provided with critical comments. Director Jack Glenn recreated numerous scenes showing, for example, abuse by SA men or an execution, the recordings of which were obviously made in the summer of 1937. It is not mentioned in the credits of the film who these sequences come from. The nuns seen in the film are said to have been cleaning women from the New York Time Warner building.

The film ends with the following sentences: “Nazi Germany faces her destiny with one of the great war machines in history. And the inevitable destiny of the great war machines of the past has been to destroy the peace of the world, its people, and the governments of their time. "

The film was rated differently. Warner Bros. refused to show it in their theaters because Jack L. Warner thought it was too friendly to the Nazis. David Selznick, on the other hand, described the work as "one of the greatest and most important film roles in film history".

The film was classified as Culturally Valuable by the Library of Congress and was placed on the list of the National Film Registry in 1993 as particularly worth preserving .

Publications, reviews, critiques

  • The work belongs to the The March of Time series and premiered on January 21, 1938 in New York at the Embassy Theater . The film has been dubbed "the first commercially released American anti-Nazi feature film" and had more than 25 million viewers in the United States .
  • In his review, The Apparently Beautiful Shine of Nazi Germany, Sven Felix Kellerhoff gives a detailed report on the background of the film. This also includes a criticism by Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff (ambassador to Washington at the time ) on February 2, 1938: “No doubt” a “purely inflammatory effect was intended”. The film is "a new attempt at inflammatory propaganda" that works with the "means of an apparently objectivity and objectivity". The viewer is "systematically" brought to the conclusion that the "apparently normal and happy life of the Germans is impaired by all kinds of coercive measures that do not correspond to the true character of the German people".
  • Michael Kloft covers the film in his own documentary Interior Views - Germany 1937, which was broadcast on Arte on August 14, 2012 . Kloft writes: “What is unique about them is that they are professional recordings that were not made by the Propaganda Ministry . They do not show a fundamentally different reality, but are made by a foreigner with a different, documentary perspective. "

literature

  • Raymond Fielding: The March of Time, 1935-1951. Oxford University Press, New York 1978, pp. 187-201, ISBN 0-195-02212-2 .
  • Detlev Peukert : Inside Nazi Germany: conformity, opposition, and racism in everyday life. Yale University Press, New Haven 1987, ISBN 0-300-03863-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Staged scenes of antisemitism. on resources.ushmm.org (Recreational scenes from "Inside Nazi Germany" (Outtakes) in the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive. )
  2. ↑ a b The apparently beautiful appearance of Nazi Germany ( memento from August 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on welt.de, accessed on August 19, 2013.
  3. ↑ a b Inside Nazi Germany ( Memento from May 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) on history.sandiego.edu
  4. ^ Raymond Fielding: The March of Time, 1935-1951. New York 1978, p. 199. and Michael E. Birdwell: Celluloid Soldiers. The Warner Bros. Campaign Against Nazism. New York, London 1999, p. 30, ISBN 0-814-71338-6 .
  5. ^ Films Selected to the Library of Congress National Film Registry 1989–2010 - March of Time: Inside Nazi Germany - 1938 on loc.gov, accessed on August 19, 2013.
  6. ^ Raymond Fielding: The March of Time, 1935-1951. New York 1978, p. 201.
  7. ^ David Welky: The Moguls and the Dictators. Hollywood and the Coming of World War II. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD 2008, p. 55, ISBN 978-0-801-89044-4 .
  8. ↑ US cameraman in Hitler Germany - Visiting enemies on einestages.spiegel.de, accessed on August 19, 2013.