Latest news with #ThirdReich
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
From Hilde, with Love: A powerful, elegiac story of resistance to the Third Reich
From Hilde, With Love Director : Andreas Dresen Cert : None Genre : Biography, War Starring : Starring Liv Lisa Fries, Johannes Hegemann, Lisa Wagner, Alexander Scheer, Emma Bading, Sina Martens, Lisa Hrdina, Lena Urzendowsky, Hans-Christian Hegewald, Nico Ehrenteit, Jacob Keller Running Time : 2 hrs 6 mins Stories of German resistance to the Third Reich have variously featured Tom Cruise, Julia Jentsch and Cillian Murphy performing daredevil deeds. From the outset, Andreas Dresen's follow-up to Rabiye Kurnaz vs George W Bush offers a different, steely kind of heroism. Long before we hear the real-life narration of the historian Hans Coppi jnr, From Hilde, with Love has re-created his activist parents to powerful, elegiac effect. Coppi jnr was a baby when he was handed to his grandmother at the gates of Barnimstrasse women's prison following the execution of his Communist mother and father. A prison guard, Anneliese Kühn (Lisa Wagner), wrote a letter to allow his condemned mother to continue breastfeeding. But Adolf Hitler refused the request for clemency. The Coppis and their like-minded comrades in the Red Orchestra – a catch-all term the internal police used to denote any dissenters – were quiet idealists learning to tap Morse code and listening in to Voice of Russia for news of German POWs against the backdrop of the crumbling Reich. READ MORE Laila Stieler's screenplay characterises the couple as full-blooded, carnal, spirited people, given to neither grand pontification nor cinematic heroism. They giddily run away after posting pro-Soviet political slogans at night. They fall madly in love, their sexual encounters framed as domestic acts of defiance. It's an Austen-worthy coupling. Editor Jörg Hauschild's temporal jumps introduce Hilde as a Miss Lonelyhearts transformed by romance, defiance and carnality. Their summery encounters, gorgeously shot by the cinematographer Judith Kaufmann, are starkly counterpointed by their wretched capture and incarceration. Hilde tenderly cares for the baby she gives birth to in jail, devastated by the loss of her husband and knowing her stay can end only with death by guillotine. Hilde Coppi, played with fragile depth by Liv Lisa Fries, is a cinematic portrait for the ages. In cinemas from Friday, June 27th
Scroll.in
4 days ago
- Politics
- Scroll.in
Seven books by Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, father of NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani
Zohran Mamdani is all set to win the New York Democratic mayoral primary polls. The 33-year-old soared to popularity with his social media campaigns that were earnest and spoke directly to New Yorkers about what he intended to do if he were to be elected as the mayor. Mamdani has promised to control rents, make New York's buses free, carry out energy reforms, and increase taxes on the city's wealthiest persons. In addition to these, he has also been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause. How might being the son of filmmaker Mira Nair and Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani have shaped his views? Many of us are already familiar with Mira Nair's filmography. What about the mayoral candidate's father's works? Born on April 23, 1946, Mahmood Mamdani is an Ugandan academic and author. He specialises in the study of African and international politics, colonialism and post‐colonialism, and the politics of knowledge production. Here are seven books by the scholar that explore the intersection between politics and culture, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and the history and theory of human rights. (All information sourced from publishers.) Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities In this genealogy of political modernity, Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe – from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan – the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicisation of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallised as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe's nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg, the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritisation of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the 'criminal' solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors – victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries – based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda 'When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population.' So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Tutsis in Rwanda. Underlying his statement was the realisation that, though ordered by a minority of state functionaries, the slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, including judges, doctors, priests, and friends. Rejecting easy explanations of the Rwandan genocide as a mysterious evil force that was bizarrely unleashed, When Victims Become Killers situates the tragedy in its proper context. Mamdani coaxes to the surface the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutus to turn so brutally on their neighbors. In so doing, Mamdani usefully broadens understandings of citizenship and political identity in postcolonial Africa and provides a direction for preventing similar future tragedies. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism In analysing the obstacles to democratisation in post-independence Africa, Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy – a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organised local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either 'direct' (French) or 'indirect' (British), with a third variant – apartheid – as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a 'customary' mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralised despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. The result is a reassessment of colonial rule in Africa and its enduring aftereffects. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa. From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain Mamdani reflects on the lessons since the expulsion of Asians from Uganda. How come, he asks, over 90 per cent of residents of the country, brown or black, would not want to return to the days and years before the 1972 expulsion? The expulsion cannot just be understood as an event that occurred in 1972. He concludes, there is no one Asian legacy. There are several, and they are contradictory. Not all are legacies we would like to wipe out from our collective memories. Some we would like to build on; others we would like to reform. Uganda Asians are a poor fit as victims. In a land known for sporadic massacres, there were no massacres of Asians. When massacres happened, they were of 'indigenous' people. Mamdani begins to explore the theme of political identity – the colonial politicisation of racial identity and its reproduction after independence – which has been the concern of much of his subsequent work, notably in Citizen and Subject. This gripping story of the Asians' last days in Uganda interweaves the stories of Mamdani's friends and family with an examination of Uganda's colonial history and the subsequent evolution of post-independence politics. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen? Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a provocative book that examines our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today. Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror Saviours and Survivors is the first account of the Darfur crisis to consider recent events within the broad context of Sudan's history, and to examine the efficacy of the world's response to the ongoing violence. Illuminating the deeply rooted causes of the current conflict, Mamdani works from its colonial and Cold War origins to the war's intensification from the 1990s to the present day. Examining how the conflict has drawn in national, regional, and global forces, Mamdani deconstructs the powerful Western lobby's persistent calls for a military response dressed up as 'humanitarian intervention'. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late 19th-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate the difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference. A mid-19th-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice. Maine's theories were later translated into 'native administration' in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law's legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonisation by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania's first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism's political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.
Yahoo
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How to crush a nation's soul: The Nazi crusade against "degenerate" art
In July 1937, artist Marc Chagall discovered that his paintings were enjoying a star turn in a singularly unexpected venue — an exhibition organized by the Nazi Party in Munich, the birthplace of its political fortunes. Chagall's work often addressed explicitly Jewish themes: In one such painting, a bearded rabbi takes a pinch of snuff in ochre-yellow surroundings, his wry eyes looking in the direction of the viewer but not necessarily at them. How one is meant to interpret this painting, or the artist's intent, is not clear. Adolf Ziegler, the Nazi functionary charged with overseeing the exhibition, perceived no ambiguity. He provided the supposed answer for "The Rabbi" and every other artwork displayed alongside it. "Look around you at these monstrosities of insanity, insolence, incompetence and degeneration," he declared in his opening address. "I would need several freight trains to clear our galleries of this rubbish ... This will happen soon." But through the end of November that year, at least, this "rubbish," served as a useful prop for the Third Reich's campaign to excise society of its corrupting elements and usher in a new era in which art represented the superior virtues of the German nation, as the Nazis saw it. The 'Degenerate Art Exhibition,' as it was unsubtly named, drew an audience that eventually exceeded two million visitors. It featured 650 works confiscated from German museums and judged by a panel to represent "decadence," "weakness of character," "mental disease," "racial impurity" and other hallmarks of Weimar-era modernity. The exhibition included an entire room dedicated to the "Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul" and featured paintings by and about the ethnic and religious group whom the Nazis largely blamed for Germany's supposed moral and material decline. That room and others also included works whose subject matter offended reactionary Nazi sensibilities for other reasons, such as Otto Dix's "The Trench": a gruesome tangle of human remains, discarded weapons, leaking brain matter and faces, suspended in agony in the aftermath of an artillery bombardment, with a soldier's body propped up by a tripod of fixed bayonets high above the carnage. In another of Dix's works, the drypoint "War Cripples," disfigured veterans return home, many of them with limbs missing — a common sight across Germany after World War I. (Dix was himself a combat veteran.) Such depictions of war, the curators wrote in the exhibition catalogue, were tantamount to "military sabotage." "Here, the 'art' enters the service of Marxist propaganda for conscientious objection," the catalog essay continued, referring to the practice of resisting conscription on moral grounds, even under threat of punishment by the state. Dix's art was deemed an 'insult to the German heroes of the Great War.' Elsewhere in the exhibition, one could visit the "Insanity Room,' which displayed abstract paintings. The Nazis were not fans. 'In the paintings and drawings of this chamber of horrors, there is no telling what was in the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or the pencil,' the catalog explained. Once the point had been made, some of these artworks were burned. Others, however, fell into the hands of collectors, including a number of high-ranking party officials. The Nazi penchant for playing the role of art critics and connoisseurs, combined with the party's aim of attaining complete control over all aspects of German life, resulted in a far more heavy-handed effort to twist the form and spirit of art to political ends than the scattered bleating characteristic of today's culture wars. In this campaign, the Nazis styled themselves as saviors, rather than mere destroyers, of culture. 'You artists live in great and happy times. Above you the most powerful and understanding patron the Führer loves artists, because he is himself one. Under his blessed hand a Renaissance has begun," proclaimed propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Art, as the Nazis understood it, was to be the reference point by which the German master race recognized its own superiority, and must be used to serve its ends. 'True art is and remains eternal,' Hitler once said. "It does not follow the law of fashion. Its effect is that of a revelation arising from the depths of the essential character of a people.' Indeed, Nazi artists spared no effort in ferreting as much inspiration as they could from the pre-modern and mythic German past — the wars of the Nibelungen, the medieval Reich, the Teutonic crusades in the Baltic, the Protestant Reformation — and making extrapolations about the timelessness of German virtue. The Nazis even infringed on cultural prerogatives claimed by Benito Mussolini's fascist Italy, citing Germanophile philosopher Houston Steward Chamberlain's claim that the German people, by right of Aryan blood passed down from the Greeks and Romans, were destined to revive the 'lost ideal' of classical beauty. Revival was indeed the operative word. The Nazis held that German society had become diseased by the advent of modern art — meaning not just works that questioned or contradicted Nazi policy, but any kind of art bearing the hallmarks of modernity: visually distorted Expressionist paintings, atonal music unfettered by a central key, edifices of the Dada movement that defied aesthetic logic. As such, it was their mission to expunge such art from the public memory. Even before seizing national power in 1933, the Nazis implemented test cases on the state level. In 1930, the Nazi Party chief in Thuringia and state Minister of Education and the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, issued orders to remove 70 Expressionist paintings from the Schloss Weimar museum, fire the director of another museum for displaying modern art in its exhibitions, and ban all pacifist or antiwar books and films, including Erich Maria Remarque's legendary World War I novel 'All Quiet on the Western Front.' The sources of modern art, according to social critic Max Nordau, were decadent, corrupted societies whose artists, afflicted with 'degeneration' as a form of mental illness, could only produce work reflecting their degenerate selves. But what the Nazis seized upon most fervently – although they certainly didn't admit to inspiration from Nordau, who was both Jewish and a Zionist — was his claim that an individual's mental deformity lay in the presence of physical deformities like 'multiple and stunted growths in the first line of asymmetry, the unequal development of the two halves of the face and cranium… etc.,' and his prescribed solution: 'Characterization of the leading degenerates as mentally diseased: unmasking and stigmatizing of their imitators as enemies to society; cautioning the public against the lies of these parasites.' Here was the framework by which the Nazis attacked modernists not just as purveyors of low-quality creations, but also as perverted, dangerous and, whenever applicable, racially inferior. Artistic works that eschewed the so-called Nordic ideal of beauty, in subject or in style, were likewise condemned for undermining German high culture. Nazi architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg later pushed Nordau's theory of degeneration further down the slippery slope, arguing that it was not social conditioning that produced such despicable degenerates, but race, and in particular race-mixing. Only racially pure artists could produce art that embodied classical ideals, he argued, while their racially-mixed colleagues could create only disorder and monstrosity. Nazi leaders like racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg embraced Schultze-Naumburg's theory as a magnificent insight. Nordau, who had declared that composer Richard Wagner — perhaps the Nazis' most venerated cultural icon — possessed a 'greater abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together with whom we have hitherto become acquainted,' would no doubt have disagreed. While Nordau's distaste for Wagner – whose operas were embraced by Hitler with quasi-religious fervor – was not 'racial' in nature and may have been inflated by the composer's notorious antisemitism, questions over what qualified as degenerate art illustrated how nebulous the concept was. Goebbels and Rosenberg squabbled over whether some forms of modern art should have a place in the new Germany, with the former taking great pains to keep Expressionist artists such as avowed Nazi Emil Nolde in the political fold and dispel criticism that Nazi cultural policy was overly reactionary. "We National Socialists are not unmodern; we are the carrier of a new modernity, not only in politics and in social matters, but also in art and intellectual matters,' Goebbels argued. 'To be modern means to stand near the spirit of the present Zeitgeist. And for art, too, no other modernity is possible.' In the first year of Nazi rule in Germany, the Expressionists continued to enjoy Goebbels' patronage. And in the battle for practical control of the party's cultural policy, Goebbels, a far more consummate politician and organizer than the pedantic Rosenberg, appeared to seize the upper hand; in September 1933, Goebbels founded the Reich Chamber of Culture, which all working German artists were required to join, Aryan certificate in hand. (Its members, of course, were all artists whom Goebbels considered to be loyal Nazis and sufficiently 'Nordic' in ethnicity and character.) But the next year, Hitler himself declared that all forms of modern art were degenerate and had no place in his Germany, which would not 'be befuddled or intimidated' by modernist 'charlatans.' Rosenberg received an even harsher rebuke from Hitler, who preferred Greek and Roman classicism to Rosenberg's neo-Gothic aesthetic and denounced 'those backwards-lookers who imagine that they can impose upon the National Socialist revolution, as a binding heritage for the future, a 'Teutonic art' sprung from the fuzzy world of their own romantic conceptions.'With the party's cultural doctrine now clear, artists who previously enjoyed Nazi patronage suddenly found themselves stripped of official sanction and saw their art torn from museum walls. Ernst Ludwig Kirschner, an Expressionist painter who privately disdained the Nazi regime, sought to assure Nazi authorities that he was 'neither a Jew nor a Social Democrat,' but was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts anyway. The aforementioned Emil Nolde, who had condemned the paintings of 'half-breeds, bastards, and mulattoes' in his 1934 autobiography, could not stop government officials from removing 1,052 of his works from museums, the most of any artist in Germany. Some of his paintings, in fact, wound up in the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition, alongside Dix's antiwar compositions and Chagall's rabbi. The mass removals were codified in 1938 by the sweeping Degenerate Law Act, which declared that 'products of degenerate art that have been secured in museums or in collections open to the public before this law went into effect… can be appropriated by the Reich without compensation.' Nazi officials, on the other hand, were happy to be compensated for unloading undesirable works of art to foreign collectors. Those that couldn't be sold abroad or hidden within officials' palatial homes were consigned to the bonfires. In 1939 alone, 4,000 paintings met such a fate. Artists who complained too much about any of this, or who were suspected of defiance, soon faced worse fates. Shortly after his disgrace, Expressionist painter Max Pechstein received teaching offers from schools in Mexico and Turkey, but Nazi authorities refused to grant him an exit visa and left him to languish in rural Pomerania until the end of the war. In 1939, Dix was thrown in jail over an improbable accusation that he was involved in an assassination attempt against Hitler. Max Beckmann fled to the Netherlands in 1937, only to watch German tanks enter Amsterdam in 1940. In a desperate bid to preserve 'degenerate' art he had produced in exile, Beckmann hid his 'Departure' in the attic and wrote on the back of the canvas: 'Scenes from Shakespeare's 'Tempest.'" He came under police surveillance, but was not arrested. More conformist artists, on the other hand, enjoyed much more flattering official reviews. Just blocks away from the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition, Nazi officials staged a competing show, the 'Great German Art Exhibition,' whose centerpiece was an enormous canvas featuring Hitler on horseback and in immaculate plate armor, gazing toward the future and carrying a Nazi flag. For all of Hitler's obsession with aesthetics, art had become politics by other means. Degeneracy had not been replaced by morality, wrote artist Oskar Schlemmer, but by 'tried and true purveyors of kitsch.'
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
D-Day's Legacy: Aging Heroes Urge Freedom's Remembrance
On June 6, 1944, nearly 160,000 Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy in an assault that would be the beginning of the end for Nazi-occupied Western Europe. Operation Overlord, as the invasion was called, stands not only as a military triumph but also as a testament to courage, sacrifice, and the responsibility of remembrance—remembering those who lost their lives for our freedom. The human cost of that day and the weeks that followed was staggering. More than 4,400 Allied soldiers died on D-Day alone. Germany suffered approximately 320,000 total battle casualties during the campaign, with 30,000 killed, 80,000 wounded, and around 210,000 reported missing: over 70% of the missing were later confirmed as prisoners of war, according to German Military records. In contrast, the United States recorded around 135,000 casualties, with 29,000 killed and the rest either wounded or missing. The UK suffered around 65,000 battle casualties, with 11,000 killed and 54,000 wounded or missing. However, these sacrifices laid the groundwork for breaking the Nazi grip on Europe and expediting the collapse of the Third Reich. Today, on the beaches of Normandy, veterans and their families gathered to honor those who never came home. Parachute jumps, flyovers, and solemn parades paid tribute to a generation that reshaped the world. Among those honored was 101-year-old Harold Terens, a radio repairman who served with the Allied forces alongside centenarians Arlester Brown and Wally King, per AP News. As the years pass, the number of D-Day veterans able to attend these commemorations continues to dwindle. Only 23 veterans were present at this year's ceremony, down from 50 last year. With every passing year, the responsibility to carry forward their stories grows more and more important. Figures like 104-year-old nurse Betty Huffman-Rosevear and 'Papa Jake' Larson have turned to social media to share their experiences with younger generations of Americans, ensuring that the memory of D-Day lives on beyond the pages of history books and transitions to the screen-addicted era. Larson's YouTube channel, Story Time With Papa Jake, recently hit 16 thousand subscribers as of publication. D-Day was not just a gritty American victory; it was a shared triumph achieved by a collection of countries: Britain, Canada, Poland, Norway, and countless others, whose soldiers fought side by side to liberate Europe. With each passing year, that call to keep the memory of D-Day grows more pressing. Now, more than ever, we must honor D-Day not as a distant story but as a reminder of our responsibility to stand up for freedom – and never forget the price paid for it.
LeMonde
01-06-2025
- Politics
- LeMonde
The German army and its ghosts
When he attended the commemorations of the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 2024, Brigadier General Andreas Steinhaus felt "something special, as a German soldier, to be invited to that place." He has always considered himself part of the Allies. Born in 1968 in West Germany, he celebrated D-Day as a child with the feeling of being "on the right side." Then he joined the army at 19 to "defend freedom," before fighting in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Sudan alongside other Europeans and Americans. On June 5, 2024, however, he took the time to visit the grave of his great-uncle, who had served in the Wehrmacht, the Nazi Germany forces. He is buried a few kilometers from the coast in the German cemetery at La Cambe, alongside 21,000 soldiers of the Third Reich killed during the Battle of Normandy. "One day, I was at his grave, the next, I was with the American soldiers," he recounted from his office in Saarlouis, a town in Saarland, where his parachute brigade is stationed. "The notion of homeland is not geographical," he said, highlighting the complexity of the history he inherited. Stories like his are common in the Bundeswehr, the name of the army in Germany. There are those whose relatives served in the Wehrmacht – "the other army," as one of them called it. Others had parents in the East German army before being integrated overnight into the Bundeswehr when reunification took place in 1990 and the Nationale Volksarmee (East Germany's armed forces) was dissolved. Some of their ancestors successively wore the uniform under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich.
