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The One-Party State "The Democrats, despite having 51 seats in the Senate, well over the 40 required for a filibuster, have never used this power against any demand of the Pentagon or intelligence apparatus." Joe Kay, Congress Moves Toward Expanding Government Spying, With Immunity For Telecoms, WSWS 2/14/08. |
March 17, 2008
The German news weekly Spiegel has been publishing essays on German history with a strong visual emphasis for many years. This tradition is continued in its on-line version in a special section called Einestages [One Day], which can be accessed through the following link:
Einestages
On January 28, 2008, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Hitler's accession to the chancellorship, Einestages posted a 5½ minute clip from the Spiegel-TV video Hitler's Machtergreifung [Hitler's Seizure of Power]. They called this clip Der Sprung ins Dunkle [The Leap Into Darkness].
This clip is interesting on several levels:
As history, it is a visually rich but oversimplified version of how Hitler came to power.
As propaganda, it neglects to make explicit the very important fact that all the players in paving Hitler's path to the chancellorship were members of Germany's industrial, media, and military capitalist elite. That this critical piece of information is unmentioned may have something to do with the fact that the same class is in power in Germany today. The only difference is that now they accept America's global pre-eminence whereas then they challenged it.
This film clip also fails to mention which organized groups were opposed to the Nazis. They were the German Communist and Socialist parties. Their postwar history, in contrast to Hitler's supporters, is less simple. The Socialist party dropped the last vestige of its anti-capitalism and became an establishment party. The Communist party did not drop its anti-capitalism and was suppressed in postwar Germany just as in the Third Reich. To this day, while barely tolerated, it is under continuous police surveillance.
As language, the clip is a useful exercise for intermediate to advanced students of German. It is a good example of contemporary, literate German.
To watch the film with my English subtitles, click this link:
Leap Into Darkness[The file size is 13.85 megabytes.]
The English subtitles are derived from the English translation of the German narration. There are 43 sentences. Since the subtitles are on the screen only briefly, you can read them as documentation by clicking the following links:
The film suffers from the paucity of relevant historical film footage. Its creators had to make do with what was available. In some cases, the scenes are merely short clips of the personages involved, where the activity documented in the clip has no relevance to the narrative. In other cases, the producer used still photos of the persons in the narrative and there is no mention of the context of the still photo. And in one case, the opening scenes of the clip, the footage is taken from a reenactment of the original scene. The reenactment was professionally photographed on color film in the summer of 1933 for use in the National Socialist propaganda film Hans Westmar. The use of color film, especially in nighttime cinematography, at this early date is interesting in itself. The film was sponsored by Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry.
German Historical Museum
Placard for the 1933 Nazi film, Hans
Westmar.
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Spiegel
Jan. 30, 1933: Hitler and Goering looking at the
cheering crowds from the chancellery. Hitler looks considerably less charismatic from this angle. |
Toward the end of the clip the narrative and the film footage come together. This is the most interesting visual part of it. These scenes are contemporary newsreel footage of: