Ohm Krüger (film)
Ohm Krüger is a German historical film by Hans Steinhoff from 1941. The Boer War and the life of the South African politician Paul Kruger are portrayed from a National Socialist perspective . The anti-British propaganda film was one of the most elaborate film productions in National Socialist Germany and was a great success with the public. The film was awarded the title "Film der Nation", leading actor Emil Jannings , who had also taken over the production of Ohm Krüger , received the "Ring of Honor of German Films" for his performance. After the end of the Second World War , Ohm Krüger was confiscated by the allied victorious powers.
Today it is a reserved film from the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation . It is part of the foundation's portfolio, has not been released for distribution and may only be shown with the consent and under the conditions of the foundation.
action
The British owned "South African Mining Company" discovered gigantic gold deposits in South Africa near Johannesburg . The fact that they are on Boer territory stands in the way of rapid exploitation of these mineral resources . In search of an excuse to win Colonial Minister Chamberlain for a war against the Boers, the head of the company, Cecil Rhodes , instructs the doctor Dr. Jameson to provoke riots in the border area. The maneuver is seen through by the leader of the Boers, Paul Krüger, and fails. For the time being, however, Kruger’s main concern is to maintain unity within his own ranks. The allied "natives" show a tendency to defection to the English, and some Boer compatriots do not see why they should not sell any land to the well-paid English. Krüger weighs heaviest of the dissent with his son Jan, who studied at Oxford and considers his father's anti-English policy to be wrong.
Queen Victoria , who, like Chamberlain, lets herself be taken against the Boers by Rhodes, invites Krüger to negotiate in London. Knowing that the other side wants to move it through an unacceptable possible draft treaty only to refuse his signature in order to have a pretext for war, he signed the contract surprising and gives the British the right to burischem on field gold mine . Afterwards, however, he levied high taxes on gold exports and obliged the English to buy overpriced materials from the Boers.
Despite the favorable outcome of the negotiations, resistance against Krüger is increasing among the Boers. When the People's Council in Pretoria called for an account of unoccupied expenses amounting to two million pounds, Kruger remained silent and finally announced his resignation. Rhodes tries again to persuade him to cooperate, initially enticing with promises, but then moving on to open threats. Krüger, who has used the unused millions for arms purchases, remains in office after all and calls for mobilization .
The war against the British is initially promising. When the English finally attack civilians, Kruger son Jan also realizes that his sympathy was for the wrong side. When the Boers' military situation worsened and even became hopeless, Jan convinced his father of the need to travel to Europe, where Queen Victoria was meanwhile dying, to gain support for the Boer people. He is only processed there with mere expressions of sympathy.
During his absence, his family is deported to an English concentration camp, where women in particular are exposed to inhuman treatment. Jan Krüger manages to sneak up to the camp and talk to his wife. When he learns of the death of his children, he promises her to prepare an attempt at rescue, but is discovered at the fence and arrested. He is then hanged for harassment reasons in the presence of the women and children , whereupon they storm the place of execution and are mercilessly shot.
The main narrative of the film is embedded in a framework plot, the setting of which is the Swiss hotel, in which Krüger - seriously ill and looked after and screened by a professor and a nurse - faces death. His last words are: “Great, powerful peoples will stand up against British tyranny. They will knock England to the ground. God will be with them. Then the way is free for a better world. "
Propaganda elements and motifs
Ohm Krüger and Carl Peters belong to the anti- English propaganda films of the time when Adolf Hitler's hope for a separate peace with the United Kingdom was not fulfilled; in them England is "characterized with extremely vulgar clichés".
In Ohm Krüger , the colonial power England appears as the "brutal enemy of all order and morality", to whom every means is right - and to which the English also resort, since otherwise they would not be able to survive the fight against the heroic Boer people under their patriarchal leader Paul Krüger . Paradigmatic for this is the scene in which English clergymen distribute weapons among black people at a church service. Various methods that are branded as English in the film ( concentration camps , total war ) correspond to those of National Socialist warfare; the English General Kitchener, defying all military principles ("which may be suitable for normal conditions, but are out of place in Africa") and "humane humility" corresponds to Hitler and his war of annihilation .
A scene in the English concentration camp, the commander of which is reminiscent of Winston Churchill , copied an episode from Eisenstein's battleship Potemkin ; Both focus on an uprising of the masses against the hated authority, triggered by the indignation over the food. The doctor of the British camp resembles down to the last detail (mustache, pince-nez) the ship's doctor Smirnow near Eisenstein, the "epitome of the poor character enforcer".
Paul Krüger, as a Germanic leader figure who made history and anticipated Hitler, is not interested in the “international legal concept”. His English counterparts in film all have no format; the Queen is portrayed as a "crafty old witch" who proclaims on her deathbed: "On the day the peoples stop hating each other, England is lost."
Production and reception
When drafting the script, Bratt and Heuser used motifs from Arnold Krieger's novel Mann ohne Volk (1934).
The shooting for the outdoor shots, which took place in the vicinity of Berlin , was on September 5, 1940; the interior shots began on October 21, 1940 in the Tobis studios in Berlin-Grunewald and in the EFA studio in Berlin's Cicerostraße. When it was submitted to the film inspection agency on April 2, 1941, the film was the first of five films made during the Nazi era to receive the highest rating "Film of the Nation" and "particularly valuable in terms of state politics and art", as well as the rating "culturally valuable", “Popularly valuable”, “popularly educating” and “youthful value”. It was released from the age of 14. Tobis- Degeto took over the rental and Tobis took over the world sales . The premiere took place on April 4, 1941 in Berlin's Ufa-Palast am Zoo .
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was enthusiastic about the result. He devoted himself to this major project several times in his diary. In an entry from August 31, 1940 it says: "He [Hitler] likes Jannings as 'Ohm Krüger' very much in the mask". On December 17, 1940, Goebbels recorded: “Interview with Jannings. He works obsessively on his Boer film. I see patterns of it. After that it will be a really big success. ”In his diary entry of March 16, 1941, he wrote:“ In the afternoon with Jannings and Demandowski watched the 'Ohm Krüger'. A very large, gorgeous work of art. Top performance of the whole war. This is a maddening movie. Jannings is very happy. "
In a message from the Reich of the SD on May 12, 1941 it said:
“All reports from the various areas of the empire confirm that the general impression of this film exceeded the extraordinary expectations in all sections of the population that were caused by the strong press propaganda. One sees in this film the top performance of the current film year and recognizes in particular that in it political tendencies, artistic creation and theatrical achievement have been brought into an outstanding degree to a unity. [...] The fact that the film was able to be completed during the war is seen as special proof of the efficiency of German film production.
Propagandistically, the film undoubtedly fulfills its task fully , especially for broader sections of the population . The war mood against England is significantly heightened and deepened because, despite major cinematic changes, the film constitutes a kind of historical document from a section of English colonial history for a broader audience. Younger visitors in particular were given a clear picture of the downfall of the Boers through the film [...] The effect is confirmed by the fact that there is an increased demand for literature about the Boers and their struggle for freedom. [...]. The depiction of the brutality of England had undoubtedly had a resounding effect, and the structure of the plot was psychologically extraordinarily cleverly coordinated with the present mood of the German people towards England. In addition, the film was not limited to negative propaganda, but rather expressed ethical and ethnic values in the Boer people's struggle for freedom - albeit in a very heroic form . The mass scenes with the shooting of the Boer women are described as a particularly impressive highlight. In its realistic representation, the film went to the limit of the bearable.
[...] Numerous visitors from all walks of life said again and again that the film had for the first time provided convincing evidence that the best film artistic means in particular strengthen the propaganda effect.
On the other hand, the critical voices are numerically lower, but according to reports from different areas of the Reich they repeatedly point out some fundamental questions with the same wording. Initially, individual scenes are sometimes described as being “too thickly applied” or too repulsive. B. the distribution of guns and prayer books by the English missionaries. There is a risk that such propagandistic exaggerations will weaken the credibility of the historical film plot. According to the reports available, historically informed visitors in particular, but also broader groups of visitors, have repeatedly asked whether the film's depiction, which in some cases is strongly propagandistic and tendentious, was even necessary, since the downfall of the Boers was one of the most horrific historically Chapter of English brutality acted. The question is whether an even stronger historical authenticity would have achieved the same, perhaps even more convincing, effect. After attending the film, it was very often found that one thought about individual tendentious scenes retrospectively, calling them historically inauthentic and then questioning larger parts of the film plot in their historical authenticity [...]. Knowledgeable visitors and those familiar with Africa also raised the question of whether it was advisable for the Boer people, which, in addition to their racially good constituents, also had very strong negative elements, and which were by no means always positive in character, economic and political terms, in this Way to heroize. The character of this mixed people is ambivalent and, with regard to the colonial tasks of Greater Germany after the final victory, cannot be emphasized as a Germanic ideal. "
Ohm Krüger was one of the most commercially successful films of the Nazi era , with grossing 5.5 million Reichsmarks . He also received the Coppa Mussolini for best foreign film at the Venice Film Festival in 1941 .
After the end of the Second World War , the high command of the victorious Allied powers confiscated all copies of the film and prohibited its further showing. In the Federal Republic of Germany , the film, which has no chance of being released, was never submitted to the FSK . The exploitation rights are now with the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation , which only releases this reserved film for special educational events.
With the burgeoning East-West conflict and because of his sharp anti- British and anti-capitalist accents, Ohm Krüger found his way into the Soviet cinema repertoire. The film was shown regularly in movie theaters in the Eastern Bloc from 1948 under the title Трансвааль в огне ( Fire over the Transvaal ).
In the 1960s Ohm Krüger was used in Greece for anti-British propaganda in the context of the Cyprus conflict .
See also
literature
- Klaus Kanzog : “Particularly valuable in terms of state policy”. A manual for 30 German feature films from 1934 to 1945 (= Diskurs Film 6). Diskurs -Film-Verlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-926372-05-2 .
- Christian W. Hallstein: Ohm Krüger: The Genesis of a Nazi Propaganda Film. In: Literature - Film Quarterly. 30, 2, 2002, ISSN 0090-4260 , pp. 133-138.
- Renata Helker: Art Committee: Emil Jannings as an actor and as a producer. In: Jan Distelmeyer (Red.): Tonfilmfrieden - Tonfilmkrieg. The story of Tobis from technology syndicate to state company. Edition Text & Critique, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-88377-749-8 , pp. 150–158.
- Manuel Köppen, Erhard Schütz : Art of Propaganda: Film in the Third Reich . Publishing house Peter Lang, Bern u. a., 2nd revised. 2008 edition, ISBN 978-3-03911-727-7 , pp. 261-263.
- Roel Vande Winkel: Ohm Krüger's Travels: a Case Study in the Export of Third-Reich Film Propaganda. In: Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques. 35, 2, 2009, ISSN 0315-7997 , pp. 108-124.
- Hans Strömsdörfer: Watching the Enemy: Propaganda Films in World War II . Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-8288-3169-8 .
Web links
- Ohm Krüger in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Ohm Krüger at filmportal.de
- Ohm Krüger at Murnau Foundation
- www.deutscher-tonfilm.de ( Memento from December 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ↑ So the verdict of Erwin Leiser in (ders.): "Germany, awake!" Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, p. 84.
- ↑ Erwin Leiser: "Germany, awake!" Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 1968, p. 84f.
- ↑ Erwin Leiser: "Germany, awake!" Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, p. 86.
- ^ Hans Strömsdörfer: Watching the Enemy: Propaganda Films in World War II . Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 2013, p. 93.
- ↑ Erwin Leiser: "Germany, awake!" Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, pp. 86f, 91.
- ↑ Quoted from Bundesarchiv Koblenz - R 58/160, pp. 14–15 by Erwin Leiser: “Germany, awake!” Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, pp. 140f.
- ↑ Erwin Leiser: "Germany, awake!" Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, p. 54.
- ↑ Richard Taylor and Derek Spring: "Stalinism and Soviet Cinema" . Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2013, p. 51.
- ↑ Erwin Leiser: "Germany, awake!" Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1968, p. 114.
- ↑ ABROAD: OHM KRÜGER. In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1964 ( online ).